Son[i]a #461
Leonardo Tello
Born to an Achuar mother and a Kukama father, Leonardo Tello has been director of Radio Ucamara in the Peruvian Upper Amazon since 2010. This indigenous community station (based in Nauta, in the Loreto region) is dedicated to preserving and strengthening the Kukama language and its communities. Drawing on the embodied knowledge of the people of the Marañón River basin, Radio Ucamara is an exercise in listening, self-representation and collective learning. It is also a tool for political organisation and for defending the land. Through its sustained memory-building and listening practice, Radio Ucamara has helped to document and recover silenced accounts of one of the greatest tragedies in modern Latin American history: the rubber boom and genocides.
The strong global demand for rubber in the late 19th century and much of the 20th century gave rise to an extractive system based on slavery and the dispossession of indigenous peoples across vast regions of the Amazon. Underpinned by racism and the colonial legacy, the violence was perpetrated by the rubber barons and companies, but also by government agencies themselves.
Rubber was not, however, an isolated case. As Leonardo Tello puts it, “extractivism has not changed one iota.” It established a model that continues to this day, adapting to new forms and demands: oil, timber, gold, gas, and lithium. The resources and the actors may change, but the promise of growth and the dynamics of dispossession remain the same.
In this podcast, we talk to Leonardo Tello about the continuities between colonialism and extractivism in the Amazon, and about the forms of resistance that have helped to preserve the memory of that violence. A memory that lives on in stories, songs, and figures such as the black tiger, which are both an archive of the past and a tool for interpreting the present.
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