As the Covid-19 pandemic spread throughout Peru, one community was particularly hard hit by the disease, Indigenous peoples in the Amazon. Deborah Delgado Pugley and Dámaris Herrera Salazar, through their SSRC-funded research, examine how the Indigenous communities in Ucayali Region addressed the lack of government support. However, they argue to be wary of resiliency narratives that can be employed to justify state neglect and a slow response.
Deborah Delgado Pugley
Deborah Delgado Pugley is an associate professor and researcher at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru. She also is a visiting scholar at KU Leuven and Ghent University. Delgado-Pugley has researched environmental and climate policies at the international and territorial level. Her field experience centers around the Amazon regions of Bolivia and Peru, where she has led research teams on climate change, Indigenous movements, human rights, natural resource management, and gender. In her most recent book, En un ambiente tóxico. Ser madres después de un derrame de petróleo (with Vania Martínez; CLACSO, 2020), she documents the environmental suffering of Indigenous women in the Kukama community of Cuninico (Loreto), after an oil spill created a health and food crisis. Currently, she is conducting comparative research projects with the University of Melbourne, Rutgers University, and Michigan State University. During the last ten years, she has followed the UNFCCC process as a multiscaled agenda. Delgado-Pugley completed a PhD in international development (Catholic University of Louvain) and sociology (EHESS Paris School of Social Sciences Studies).