An Indigenous delegation from the Colombian Amazon, invited by their brothers and sisters of the Indigenous Conference of Brazil and the ICEERS organization, heads to Girona in September 2026 to defend the right of Indigenous peoples to define and protect their medicines. Their central message challenges the commercialization, medicalization, and extraction of traditional knowledge outside their territories.

In September 2026, a delegation from the Union of Yagecero Indigenous Doctors of the Colombian Amazon (UMIYAC), composed of seven representatives and two lawyers specializing in human rights, will participate in the World Ayahuasca Forum in Girona, Spain. The organization will arrive at the forum with a direct message: Traditional Amazonian medicines cannot be understood as isolated substances or practices. They are part of specific territories, communities, knowledge systems, and spiritual relationships that give them meaning. 

UMIYAC is composed of spiritual leaders from five different Indigenous nations in the Colombian and Ecuadorean Amazon, all of which utilize yagé (known as ayahuasca in Brazil and Peru) medicine in traditional spiritual contexts.

“For our organization, protecting yagé medicine necessarily involves defending Amazonian life and territories,” says Miguel Evanjuanoy, a spokesperson for UMIYAC. "Rivers, forests, mountains, animals, fish, trees, and the air are not elements external to the health of the peoples, but rather parts of a living, interdependent system.”

The UMIYAC delegation is going to the World Ayahuasca Forum with one main message: “You cannot talk about medicine without talking about territory.” For UMIYAC, yagé medicine and territory are inseparable.

UMIYAC maintains that the medicinal traditions of the Colombian Amazon are fundamental to the physical and cultural survival of Indigenous peoples. Sacred medicine enables communities to fulfill their mission of caring for life — a responsibility that is part of their Law of Origin and their spiritual principles.

“In our view, land stewardship is not merely a political demand,” says Ernesto Evanjuanoy, president of UMIYAC “It is a natural, organic, and spiritual mandate that guides the relationship of Amazonian peoples with Mother Earth.”

Grassroots Indigenous organizations therefore have a responsibility to protect both the ecosystems and the cultures that depend on them. Separating medicines from these contexts means altering their nature, their communal role, and their profound meaning.

For this reason, the UMIYAC delegation will seek to ensure that discussions at the World Ayahuasca Forum do not focus solely on the potential therapeutic uses of ayahuasca, its international expansion, or trendy arguments such as “the sensitivity of plants.” Its purpose will be to re-situate these medicines within the territories, peoples, and traditions from which they originate.

UMIYAC views with concern the growing globalization, commercialization, and medicalization of Amazonian medicines, particularly yagé. It also questions certain approaches associated with so-called “global health” that transfers knowledge, plants, and practices outside their contexts of origin without recognizing the authority of the peoples who have protected them for generations.

UMIYAC views these processes as part of a broader history of colonial extraction in the Amazon. It follows and parallels the exploitation of cinchona bark, rubber, gold, coca, and oil, and other forms of biopiracy of Indigenous medicinal knowledge.

“When a medicine is extracted from its territory, transformed into a product, subjected to commercialization processes, or reduced to its chemical components, a new form of dispossession can occur,” says Evajuanoy. “For this reason, three years ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the title of the UMIYAC panel I participated in was ‘Plants are Not Psychedelics.’”

According to UMIYAC, this process of displacing knowledge from the Amazon to the pharmaceutical laboratories impoverishes communities and Mother Earth, while also undermining the possibilities for reconciliation between humans and nature. The organization warns that the international expansion of these practices is not a neutral phenomenon. It can deepen Indigenous peoples’ loss of control over their cultural and spiritual heritage and, at the same time, undermine their struggles for the right to life and for the rights of Mother Earth.

In Girona, UMIYAC will assert the right of Indigenous peoples to define their medicines based on their own spiritual authorities, knowledge, traditions, and cultural systems. This implies recognizing that Indigenous medicine cannot be defined exclusively by a plant, a molecule, or a ceremony held at a spiritual retreat outside their ancestral territories. Its existence depends on a network of relationships that includes the land, the community, intergenerational transmission, spiritual authorities, cultural norms, and above all, Divine Law and the Higher Law that guides its use.

The delegation will also advocate for the creation of tools for cultural and legal protection. These would incorporate mechanisms comparable to protected designations of origin (PDO), as recognized by international property rights and trade bodies, as well as mechanisms inspired by restorative justice in countries such as Colombia.

These tools would seek to prevent third parties from defining, altering, or commercially exploiting Indigenous medicines at the expense of the peoples who have been their caretakers and guardians for thousands of years. They would also fortify Indigenous people's authority and voices when their medicines are being abused and appropriated.

UMIYAC is a proactive organization in the defense of territories and develops programs focused on women, youth, and the strengthening of medicine. Through these collective and interethnic processes, the organization works to strengthen autonomy and governance and to build peace and reconciliation in communities, including reconciliation between humans and nature and the defense of territory.

Yagé medicine plays a central role in this journey: through it, communities strengthen their unity and heal the wounds and traumas caused by armed conflict, of which rural populations have been the primary victims. UMIYAC appreciates that certain academic and philosophical currents are beginning to embrace concepts that have been present for centuries in Indigenous knowledge, such as interdependence with nature, the sentience of plants, and the understanding of territory as a living being.

However, UMIYAC believes that this interest must translate into more equitable relationships. Indigenous peoples assert their right to continue strengthening their own education without interference and to decide how, when, and with whom they share their knowledge.

For UMIYAC, reciprocity cannot be limited to transferring knowledge and plants from the Amazon to laboratories, universities, or international markets. Effective reciprocity must be expressed through concrete support for the communities defending their territories.  

“There are enough doctoral dissertations and academic articles,” Evanjuanoy says. “Everything Indigenous has been over-researched, studied, and scrutinized; now is the time to take action and truly defend the communities’ and the territory’s right to life.”

This means standing with them in their struggles against threats such as copper mining projects in the municipality of Mocoa, stopping the dredges that extract gold from the rivers of the lower Putumayo, addressing the consequences of the so-called “war on drugs” and glyphosate spraying, and finding solutions to the presence of armed groups in Indigenous territories that threaten environmental leaders and human rights defenders.

The discussion about the sensitive or spiritual nature of plants, UMIYAC argues, loses its meaning if it is not accompanied by actions to stop violence, deforestation, and the advance of backhoes, or the excavators and dredges of extraction, into Amazonian territories.

The UMIYAC delegation at the World Forum will insist that Indigenous peoples must play a central role in any conversation, public policy, research, or initiative related to their traditional medicines.

For UMIYAC, Amazonian spiritual authorities and spokespeople must have the effective capacity to define the terms of the conversation and make decisions regarding the protection, circulation, and use of their knowledge. These arguments are not solely academic. All five Indigenous nations involved with UMIYAC are at “risk of physical and cultural extermination” according to the Colombian Constitutional Court in Ruling 004 of 2009. From UMIYAC’s perspective, the appropriation and decontextualization of traditional medicines are part of the pressures threatening the cultural continuity and lives of Amazonian peoples.

The message that UMIYAC will bring to Girona is clear: Amazonian medicines cannot be separated from the peoples, their ancestral territories, and the spiritual relationships that give them life. It is up to the Indigenous peoples themselves to define, contextualize, and protect them against processes of appropriation, commercialization, and globalization.

According to UMIYAC, defending yagé medicine is a matter of defending the Amazon and the right of its indigenous peoples to continue to exist.

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