1.3 Our Response to Present Challenges
As indigenous organizations of the Amazon Basin, we project ourselves with a deep belief on our sustainability, our cultures, and our harmonic relationship with nature. In general, we want to avoid patterns of social injustice, environmental destruction and the market vision of our natural resources. As a real alternative for these changes, we are reaching our organizational purpose, looking at our responsibilities and defining our objectives, both at the organizational, social and rights levels.
At the political level, we act through our advocacy and impact at the different levels, to guarantee our rights, among them, the most fundamental concerned with the security of our territories, acting jointly between peoples and frontier organizations in the region. As historic communities, we have suffered the same problems, addictions and prejudice; situation that strengthens even more our organizational process. COICA, represents the summary of this effort, where our life plan is the Amazon Indigenous Agenda (AIA).
Our great evolutional “Maloca”, encounter space between the spiritual and the material, where human beings and spirits intertwine. It is the philosophy of the “Sacha Runa” (men of the jungle), which encloses the respect to diversity, the ethics, reciprocity and the acknowledgement of shared responsibility. These are great principles that guide us all towards a life led by spiritual strength, providing an access to material goods, to which, all human beings can reproduce themselves in a healthy and long-lasting way. However, to keep on being on this great Maloca, it is crucial that the territories and the resources existing in the Amazon region are under the control and management of ourselves, and in addition, they must be ruled by our own legal systems, which need to be duly recognized at National Constitutions and International Treaties.
It is our organizational strengthening, to which we are decided to keep on walking forward and be the seed on the earth, guarantying the horizontal participation of members and taking into consideration the demands of the communities as the first level, to then pass from federations as representative entities to central organizations, fostering income generation and organizational programs, to achieve self determination.
