Statement on the ongoing Human Rights violations against Indigenous Peoples in Peru

Approved by NAISA Council, March 2023

Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) is the largest scholarly organization that engages Indigenous issues and communities. We stand in solidarity with our brothers, sisters, and relatives in Peru, who are facing the colonial legacies of state violence, land dispossession, exploitation, and racism under the increasingly authoritarian—and unelected—coup regime of Peruvian President Dina Boluarte. The police and military forces murdered at least 70 civilians from December last year to this January. The victims have been mainly Indigenous Quechua and Aymara people. According to Peru’s Ombudsman Office, the government forces also injured, detained, and tortured hundreds in rural and urban centers. Indigenous protestors face the most racist and violent repression and harassment in Lima, Peru’s capital, and in the southern region, particularly around the cities of Cusco and Puno. These brutal and racist actions show the continuation of colonialism in which state violence, genocide, and repression against Indigenous peoples remain in the current colonial institutions using military force as a form to rule the country. Human rights violations, including the extrajudicial killings committed by state forces in Peru, should be investigated and perpetrators held accountable. 

We support the popular calls for justice and social change through the creation of a constitutional assembly with Indigenous consent and direct participation. The popular demand for a plurinational state and society that reflect the plurality and diversity of Indigenous peoples and communities should be considered to create a more equal and democratic society. This demand seeks democratic changes and reforms to the 1993 Peruvian constitution, which was created under the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori and allows neoliberal capitalism to extract resources from and dispossess Indigenous lands across the Andes and Amazon in Peru.

We also condemn those national and international communities and institutions who are complicit by being silent and indifferent toward the human rights violations of the Indigenous population in Peru yet who also maintain that democracy is fundamental to building a more just and equitable society.