THE VOICE OF THE AMAZON AND COP27

A few days ago, at the opening of COP 27 in Egypt, UN Secretary General António Guterres issued a cry for help: «Humanity must choose: cooperate or 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 on 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 (women, girls, men and children, peasants, indigenous, riparian and Afro-descendants) so that their voice is heard and their dignity is respected.

Our land, our rivers, our air are in an unbridled race to death. It requires radical and urgent changes, otherwise it will have catastrophic consequences for the entire planet. Without the Amazon, there is no life or humanity possible.

And humanity, as Francis tells us in «Dear Amazonia» (QA), always has the possibility of overcoming «the various mentalities of colonization in order to build networks of solidarity and development; the challenge is to ensure a globalization in solidarity, a globalization that leaves no one on the margins» (QA, 17).

Roads like the COP, treaties like Escazú, will not be «to give back to the dead the life they were denied, not even to compensate the survivors of those massacres, but at least to be truly human today» (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 NOW

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

ENOUGH NOW

The urgent measures that the world needs to address climate change cannot be carried out by damaging the human rights of the peoples of the Amazon and leaving thousands of people without a livelihood and without a future.

ENOUGH NOW

What the world is living today needs to have as protagonists the true wise men and women about water, land, trees and plants; men and women to whom we are indebted.

ENOUGH NOW

We must call it by its proper name: injustice and crime (QA, 14). And ask and shout to the governments gathered today at COP27 that the future of hundreds of thousands of children is at stake, the future not only of the Amazon, but of the whole of humanity.

ENOUGH ALREADY!

By Núcleo DD.HH. e Incidencia / REPAM