Indigenous Power Struggles in the Peruvian Amazon: A Spatio-cultural Analysis of Communication

It is well established that external national policies and internal ethnic politics contribute to indigenous power struggles that create a disharmonious indigenous voice. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate how such fissures intersect with internal, covert communication forces embedded in indigenous communities. Based on a case study of Peru's national indigenous Amazonian organization Asociacion Interetnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana (AIDESEP or the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest), the authors advance a geographical perspective of communication to interrogate the physical and social spaces that contribute to and fragment indigenous public spheres, drawing from a content analysis of interviews and news media reports. The aim is to analyse how powerinfluenced by the spatio-cultural effects on communicationdivided a national indigenous voice following Peru's 2009 Amazon conflict.