THE LAND WITHIN - INDIGENOUS TERRITORY AND PERCEPTION OF THE ENVIRONMENT 230 TERRITORY AS BODY AND TERRITORY AS NATURE: INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE? Juan Álvaro Echeverri Instituto Amazónico de Investigaciones (IMANI), Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Leticia I n the second half of the eighties the Colombian government recognised and titled large territorial extensions of the Colombian Amazon in favour of indig- enous groups. In 1988, and subsequent years, approximately twenty million acres constituting more than half of Colombia’s Amazon (UAESPNN 2001) were titled as indigenous Resguardos (preserves). 1 These Preserves stretch almost uninter- ruptedly all the way to Colombia’s southern and eastern border, an area still un- affected by peasant colonization crossing the Andean mountains. Various factors contributed to the hasty introduction of this large-scale cul- tural protection and territorial recognition policy which, in fact, also constitutes an environment protection policy, given that these large areas inhabited by indig- enous peoples are now segregated and protected from future occupation and ti- tling. Without getting into an analysis of the role played by external forces driven by a swing in environmental and defence of ethnic minorities’ rights policies on the part of international financial organizations, the fact is that the existing indig- enous organizations of the Colombian Amazon sprang from this collective land recognition and titling process. In the particular case of the Predio Putumayo Preserve, the largest one in the country, occupying nearly six million hectares, conflicts of interests arose within the Colombian State itself. What is now Pre- serve was previously titled in favour of a state-owned bank (Caja de Crédito Agrario, Industrial y Minero) which, back in the forties, had purchased its rights to the land from the heirs of the notorious Peruvian Amazon Company, also known as Casa Arana. The bank had already initiated an ambitious ‘develop- ment project’ for the whole region, which was aborted when the rights to the land were transferred to its initial owners – the same indigenous people who, at the turn of the twentieth century, survived the massacres and forced labour condi- tions under the hands of the very same rubber company. Echeverri, J. A. (2005). Territory as body and territory as nature: Intercultural dialogue? In A. Surrallés & P. García-Hierro (Eds.), The Land Within: Indigenous territory and the perception of environment (pp. 230–247). Copenhagen: IWGIA.