1.2 The Interests in the Amazon Basin

We affirm that Nation-States are the ones that promote and foster the invasion and looting in the Amazon. Their interventions only guarantee the usurpation and depredation of our resources, impoverishing us even more. National and transnational firms are the beneficiaries of state policies, which every day reach further within our territories, and justify even the entrance of other actors such as anthropologists in the search of information for their theses or missionaries in search of souls to bide to their beliefs; all kinds of firms in the search of products and labor; the State in its search for contributors and NGOs in their search to justify their ideologies, projects and creation of work posts. Therefore, we are in summary, contributing not only to the destruction of our production and consumption systems but also to the decrease of our opportunities to survive in a healthy and sustainable environment, which is every day more de capitalized of resources.

These interest groups have brought the needs and all the values that we had only known before from myths and legends. The absence of an intercultural dialogue has transformed us from autonomous and independent peoples to dependent, impoverished and excluded. As part of the labor market, we are every day more involved in the networks of the market system and grow further away from our socio-economic and cultural systems. We have experienced this new way of social relations, in which youths, with the sole goal of earning a salary, leave the community life, to convert into workers at farms, forestry and mine firms and in fishing ships. Or they become “agents” of development in the projects of the NGOs. We can state that almost all of us in the Amazon produce goods for the market economy and negotiate directly with it, weakening the reciprocity system- production, distribution and consumption-, the use of natural resources, social mobility and specially the changes on eating patterns.

The ignorance and selfishness of colonizers, of current powerful economic and religious groups, has not allowed them to see how sustainable our social and economic systems were and still are. They were and are unable to understand that we are naked, when we take out our paintings and necklaces. They have never understood that our gods are everywhere, since our churches are found in waterfalls, mountains and in the jungle. We are not alone, thus, we share our lives with other beings of the universe and specially what we do or stop doing is guided by the spirits. Unable to read our own sacred books, they have imposed us their beliefs, education, economic system, diseases, political system and their laws. However, we are and we will keep on being alive, since our mission is not only fulfilled during our permanence in the Earth.

The governments of Latin America justify the introduction of market-inspired methods in social, political, economic areas and in our territories, with the argument that they are absolutely necessary to reach development and democracy. The structural changes resulting from this process concern us, since we can state that the sovereignty of States is weaker every day over our territories and economy. And especially when we observe the disappearance of values and spiritual and human principles, which have guaranteed the equilibrium and respect to nature and its processes for centuries.

We are against colonization as processes of occupation of the Amazon with the view to integrate it, to the respective national economies and to the World market. Through the slow discovery of the huge economic potential found in the biodiversity of the region, as well as other resources found in the soil, the Amazon has been placed into a perspective of greater occupation and exploitation. In this context, we are the ones that are assuming the overwhelmingly negative costs of the Amazon’s economic integration of the.