This statement, authored by and posted on the website of the Expanded Committee of the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network (REPAM), has been translated for the wider dissemination of its message in advance of the close of COP 27. The original Spanish version can be found here. Read or download the message as PDF.

Nov. 16, 2022

THE VOICE OF THE AMAZON AND COP 27

A few days ago, at the opening of COP 27 in Egypt, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, launched a cry for help: “Humanity must choose: cooperate of die”.

In this corner of the city of Manaus, where the Expanded Committee of the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network (REPAM) is being held we will meet next November 10 to continue shouting, together with Pope Francis, for his dream of an Amazon that fights for its rights, the rights of the most forgotten (small farmers, indigenous peoples, riverside dwellers and Afro-descendants) so that their voices are heard and their dignity respected.

Humanity, as Francis tells us in “Querida Amazonia” (QA) can “overcome the various colonizing mentalities to build networks of solidarity and development. The challenge, in short, is to ensure a globalization in solidarity, a globalization without marginalization”. (QA17)

Roads like the COP, treaties like the Escazú Agreement, will not be “as a way of restoring to the dead the life taken from them, or even of compensating the survivors of that carnage, but at least today to be authentically human.”(QA 17)

The political consensus of our countries and governments cannot continue to remain a dead letter with total indolence and without any guarantee or justice.

ENOUGH!

We need a world that effectively promotes human rights, that includes cultures, spiritualities, ancestral justice and that does not uproot individuals and peoples, especially young people.

ENOUGH!

The urgent measures that the world needs in the face of climate change cannot be carried out by harming the human rights of the peoples of the Amazon and leaving thousands of people without livelihoods and without a future.

ENOUGH!

What the world is experiencing today needs to have as protagonists the true wise men and women of the water, the earth, the trees, the plants; men and women to whom we are debtors.

ENOUGH!

These situations should be called for what they are: injustice and crime.

(QA, 14). We ask, we shout to the governments gathered today at COP27, that the futures of hundreds of thousands of girls and boys who are the future, not only of the Amazon, but of humanity as a whole, are at stake.

ENOUGH !!

- the Human Rights and Advocacy Nucleus / Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network

Photo by Akshay Chauhan, Unsplash