On what’s working

The most effective organizations follow the community's lead, not their own agenda.

One of Hilton's most consistent refrains throughout the interview is a resistance to narratives that center individual or organizational heroism over collective process. He extends this critique to the broader culture of international development work: "Whenever it's this myth of the hero, he's always white and he's always male." For Hilton, the most effective organizations are those that subordinate their own agenda to the priorities of the communities they work with, measuring success not by what they can claim but by what indigenous-led processes are able to achieve.

On cross-border collaboration

Sustained cross-border work requires a collective.

CTI has nearly 20 years of alliance-building with Indigenous, environmental, and pro-Indigenous organizations on the Peruvian side of the Brazil-Peru border, sharing technical information, coordinating advocacy, and facilitating binational meetings. One of the most significant examples was CTI's support for the binational Matsés meetings — gatherings of the Matsés people, a community divided by the border between Brazil and Peru, who came together to resist oil exploration on their territories. Over several years, this sustained pressure contributed to the withdrawal of a Canadian oil company, Pacific Stratus, from the Alto Jaquirana region. Hilton is careful to note that CTI was never the protagonist. Rather, Peruvian Indigenous organizations collaborated with several actors.

On Barriers

Extractive industries are coordinated, well-resourced, and increasingly intertwined with organized crime.

A throughline in Hilton's account of the cross-border work is the scale and coordination of the forces working against indigenous territorial rights. On the Peruvian side, logging and oil interests maintain a powerful lobby that has for years blocked recognition of indigenous reserves, including the Yavarí-Mirim Indigenous Reserve, which remains unrecognized. But Hilton's concern extends beyond traditional extractive industries. He describes a troubling convergence between environmental crimes and organized crime more broadly, with illegal logging, mining, and drug trafficking increasingly operating as parts of the same transnational criminal economy. Organized crime is already transnational, he says, whereas civil society is not organized in that way. For Hilton, this asymmetry is an urgent and underappreciated challenge facing indigenous rights work: the opposition is organized, well-funded, and thinking strategically, while civil society remains fragmented and locally oriented.

The border is asymmetric.

The most immediate barrier to cross-border protection work is the profound differences between contexts on either side of the Brazil-Peru border. In Brazil, territories are largely demarcated, and Indigenous peoples have access to health services and social protections. In Peru, Indigenous communities are fighting for far more basic rights — land recognition, healthcare, education — and are far more vulnerable to economic pressure from extractive industries. This asymmetry makes it genuinely difficult to align agendas across the border, let alone build a shared long-term strategy.

On the intersection of climate and PIACI rights

Climate frameworks can open doors for PIACI rights, but must be approached carefully.

Hilton does not dismiss the potential of climate and carbon compensation frameworks to benefit indigenous territories. But he raises a concern: these frameworks also attract outside actors who are more interested in accessing resources than in the wellbeing of indigenous peoples. "It commercializes the situation and attracts companies that, most of the time, aren't interested in improving the lives of these people, and aren't prepared to deal with them,” he says.

He describes a pattern he has already witnessed in the border region: outside actors arriving with an assumption that they know what indigenous communities need, using climate language as cover for extractive interests. For Hilton, the risk is not the climate framing itself but the power dynamics it can enable. It’s essential that any climate-linked initiative is genuinely driven by indigenous priorities, not external agendas.

On the funding landscape

Funders need a long-term vision, not just a project cycle.

Hilton notes a strategic failure among funding institutions: an inability to think beyond individual project timelines toward a long-term vision for civil society in the region. "Is the action they take in the country geared towards and coinciding with the political strategy of civil society for the next 20 to 30 years of that country's future?" he asks. He argues that the far right is already thinking in those terms, planning for 2030 and beyond, while funders and civil society remain oriented around short project cycles. For Hilton, the lesson of the Bolsonaro years is that the entire ecosystem of civil society, Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations alike, needs to be strengthened together and supported for the long haul.