Systematic and persistent discrimination against Indigenous Peoples translates into differential health outcomes when analysed
through ethnicity and/or mother tongue. In Peru, morbidity and mortality rates among Indigenous Peoples for COVID-19 appear to
confirm this.2 The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the historical structural violence against Indigenous Peoples that currently takes a disproportionate toll in the Peruvian Amazon. This equally applies to Indigenous Andean Peoples and Afro Peruvians. Indigenous Peoples in voluntary isolation and those in initial contact are at highest health risk in this pandemic as they have no previous immunity against common infectious diseases, and lack access to public healthcare services. The Peruvian government introduced a state of emergency early on, but it did not work as theoretically expected because of the deeply rooted inequalities in Peru.

Montag, Doreen, Marco Barboza, Lizardo Cauper, Ivan Brehaut, Isaac Alva, Aoife Bennett, José Sanchez-Choy, Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti, Pilar Valenzuela, José Manuyama, Italo Garcia Murayari, Miguel Guimaraes Vásquez, Celso Aguirre Panduro, Angela Giattino, Edwin Julio Palomino Cadenas, Rodrigo Lazo, Carlos A. Delgado, Alfonso Nino, Elaine C. Flores, Maria Amalia Pesantes, Juan Pablo Murillo, Luisa Elvira Belaunde, Sergio Recuenco, Robert Chuquimbalqui, and Carol Zavaleta-Cortijo. Healthcare of Indigenous Amazonian Peoples in Response to COVID-19: Marginality, Discrimination and Revaluation of Ancestral Knowledge in Ucayali, Peru. BMJ Global Health 6, no. 1 (2021): e004479. https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/1/e004479

© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ.

Open access: This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made.

Maria Amalia Pesantes is a professor of Anthropology at Dickinson College.

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit BMJ Journal's Website. https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/1/e004479