By Braxton Fuller
The Maijuna tribe numbers a mere five hundred people situated in four villages a few hours boat ride outside of Iquitos, Peru, directly along the Sucusari, Yanayacu, and Algodon rivers. For four hundred years, they have defended their land from Spanish colonizers, international rubber barons, and the Peruvian government. They remain an especially bold and tenacious people committed to living responsibly in their delicate Amazonian homeland.
Now a greater threat looms: the Iquitos-El Estrecho Highway and, with it, an increased opportunity for loggers, poachers, and international petroleum companies to damage this ecosystem. Although the path ahead is perilous, if anything can be gleaned from Maijuna history, it is that they won’t give in easily.
Despite the creation of the 977,000-acre Maijuna-Kitchwa Regional Conservation Area in 2016, the Peruvian government is moving forward with plans to build the four lane Iquitos-El Estrecho Highway directly through ancestral Maijuna land. Not only is this some of the world’s most biodiverse forest but it’s also the sole lifeline of the Maijuna. If the highway is allowed to proceed without a sustainable development framework, the Maijuna people’s way of life, already on the edge of viability, will slip away completely. So too, will it perpetuate a cycle of economic exploitation that has continued uninterrupted since the tribe’s first contact with outsiders .
Following is a brief overview of Maijuna history, details of the current threat of the Iquitos-El Estrecho Highway, and plans the Maijuna are formulating to overcome these current challenges.
History
Outlining the history of an indigenous Amazonian tribe is a rather tricky matter, especially so for the Maijuna. Early historical sources written by Jesuit missionaries, Spanish soldiers, and European colonizers must be read carefully and with a jaundiced eye in order to extract any trustworthy information. These external narratives compete with Maijuna oral traditions in forming a cohesive picture of important events. The Maijuna name itself was often disputed. Other than Maijuna, the most common names mentioned in various sources are Koto or Orejon. Orejon, literally meaning “big ear” in Spanish, refers to the characteristic balsa wood circles that Maijuna men traditionally wore in their ears. Koto, Quechua for “howler monkey,” mirrors the unique red paint Maijuna men and women were known to apply to their bodies on special cultural occasions. Both names appear in early written sources thus creating potential confusion for research. With these cautionary words, what follows is possibly the fairest interpretation of their history.
The Maijuna people are members of a large collection of indigenous Amazonian ethnicities called the Tucanoans. The Tucanoans occupied a major area of the upper Amazonian river basin, with some historians estimating their homeland stretched all the way up to Colombia. The Maijuna are specifically an offshoot of a unified Tucanoan culture called the Payagua. After initial Spanish contact in 1682, the inevitable effects of European colonization – famine, war, and plague – decimated the population of “Provincia de Payahua” from an estimated 16,000 to fewer than 1,000 by the eighteenth century. By pitting some of the Payagua against the rest of the community, European colonizers both fed the slave market and weakened indigenous community resistance. This period of cultural upheaval created a split in the once unified Payagua culture and allowed for the emergence of various smaller descendant groups such as the Maijuna. Sources vary, but the Maijuna people claim descendance from those Payagua who resisted and fought the Spanish invaders.
As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme.” This story of indigenous resistance to exploitative, globalizing pressures repeats itself throughout Maijuna history. The early 19th century saw Simon Bolivar liberate the South American colonies (now Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, and Bolivia) from Spain, but the invasion of indigenous homelands continued. The Peruvian government in Lima promoted the migration of patrones of European descent into the Amazon. What was once a trickle of colonists became a flood in the 1880s with the Rubber Boom. Iquitos, originally a small river port built to supply a regional Spanish garrison and Jesuit mission, exploded in population. Maijuna land was illegally seized by large international economic interests and the tribe forced to the margins of the Amazonian economy. The patrones installed by the Peruvian government would control the Maijuna in a system of forced labor not so different from that of the Spanish colonial empire. Not until 1975, when the rights of indigenous groups were formally recognized at the federal level, did this practice end.
The Current Threat
Iquitos, Peru, is the largest city in the world without an external road connection. There are only two options to get there: the Amazon River or the airplane. Consequently, the cost of living in Iquitos is high and, from the perspective of the Peruvian government, limits the potential for economic growth. To that end, Lima created an infrastructure development plan, the Iquitos-El Estrecho Highway, to connect Iquitos with the El Estrecho region of Colombia. The environmental implications are huge; the highway would pave over some of the most ecologically sensitive areas in the Maijuna-Kitchwa Regional Conservation Area. Also included in the plan is the establishment of a 5km “development corridor” on either side of the highway. Both the highway and development corridor were approved and funded without the prior community consultation period clearly established by Peruvian law. In effect, it is a repetition of the illegal land grabs that the Maijuna and other indigenous people have faced over the last four centuries.
The fear is great that the development corridor will be used to establish environmentally irresponsible palm oil plantations and provide easy access to the heart of the Amazon for illegal loggers, drillers, and poachers. With the building of the highway, these fears may be realized. For the Maijuna people in particular, losing the Amazon rainforest is a direct threat to their very survival. Their day-to-day life depends on the biodiversity of the rainforest, the fertility of the soil behind their homes, the health of the Amazon river, and the abundance of plant and animal species that provide both medicine and food. If the rainforest is compromised by development, not only will the world lose a valuable ecological resource but the Maijuna’s entire way of life will cease to be viable.
Improvising, Adapting, and Hopefully Overcoming
The modern story of Maijuna resistance to international exploitation of their land and resources reflects their powerful past. Their resistance to the government takeover of their land resulted in an offer of membership in a large tribal confederation, the GTANW. The Maijuna declined for fear their culture would be further diluted. Instead, they founded their own confederation, FECONMAI, which advocates for Maijuna interests on a federal level. FECONMAI declares, “We Take Care of the Earth by Defending It” and notes that, globally, indigenous groups steward a quarter of the world’s surface and eighty percent of its biodiversity. This is typical of the bold stance the Maijuna people have taken in the face of adversity and their tenacious fight to ensure their cultural survival. Annual FECONMAI meetings rotate between the four Maijuna communities. Families trek across dense jungle and paddle up rivers for days, determined to keep their culture together.
The Maijuna people’s pharmacy, grocery store, and transportation network are all expressions of the rainforest environment in which they live. Attached to every Maijuna village are large fields of yucca, bananas, and black corn that are collected each morning. Village shamans cultivate a vast array of plant medicines to treat myriad ailments. The seasonal rise and fall of the river determine the speed and mode of any travel. As resilient and tough as these people are, they are especially subject to the ecological crises that globalization has brought to the Amazon. Deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices threaten the Maijuna’s access to medicinal plants. The Iquitos-Estrecho Highway will likely facilitate the arrival of illegal drillers and loggers to the valuable interior of the Maijuna-Kitchwa Conservation Area.
The Maijuna biological and cultural survival depends on their ability to protect their rainforest home. Despite the hazardous path ahead, they have acted with the characteristic boldness that has defined their culture for generations. To that end, the Maijuna have pioneered new economic models to sustainably profit from the immense bounty of the Amazon. Stingless bee honey has been consumed in that part of the Amazon for millennia. In 2016, the Maijuna people began harvesting this unique honey on a large scale for export to the international market. Partnerships with the TREE Foundation and Explorama Lodges on Maijuna land have fostered both scientific research and sustainable ecotourism opportunities for the Maijuna themselves. The building of the world’s largest canopy walkway by Explorama at the ACTS Field Station also serves to increase documentation of the enormous biodiversity within Maijuna land and to confirm the importance of indigenous stewardship of the Amazon’s natural resources.
Conclusion
Many NGOs and non-profits posit environmental degradation as primarily a threat to charismatic megafauna but it is also an immense human tragedy. Living as close to the land as they do, taking care of the earth is an act of survival and becomes equivalent to taking care of oneself. The Maijuna, and all indigenous people, are the true manifestation of who we are as a species. We are an essence of nature and still fit within the natural world that many have so carefully cultivated out of their lives. We only cease to fit when we seek to model the world after our own desires.
To conclude, the Iquitos-El Estrecho Highway is already under construction. But all may not be lost; it’s just a road after all. Plans for the highway may have ignored the native people who actually own the land and the plants and animals that also inhabit the area, but perhaps the road can be managed well as the Maijuna currently steward the rainforest. Hopefully, the Maijuna can protect their ecological heritage in cooperation with those who would monetize this rainforest. The Maijuna have shown the world that profits and sustainability can come from the Amazon rainforest without destroying it. The question remains whether those who don’t live there will see that and follow the example of the Maijuna people.
More About Braxton Fuller
Braxton Fuller is a dedicated conservationist in the Colorado community and is Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly speleological journal for the state, Rocky Mountain Caving. He’s currently pursuing an M.A. in International Humanitarian Aid at the University of Denver’s Korbel School. In addition, he works at the international affairs magazine, Mooreposts, as Editor-at-Large. Fuller was a summer intern with Dr Lowman in the Peruvian Amazon in 2025.
