Luisa Rios currently serves as Coordinator of the Madre de Dios Regional Office of the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law since August 17, 2009.
Luisa Rios is a Forestry Engineer with a diploma in Forestry Business from the Universidad del Pacífico, a graduate of the Human Rights Defense Training Program from the International Service for Human Rights and a Diploma in Governance and Public Innovation from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She has experience in forest resource management with forest users, natural protected areas and management committees and in the defense of human rights defenders. She has previously worked at FONDEBOSQUE and the National Institute of Forest Resources.
As Coordinator of the Madre de Dios Regional Office, she currently leads the different work strategies for the implementation of projects and lines of work that the SPDA implements in Madre de Dios.
Luisa has managed the Madre de Dios office for 15 years, from where she has been able to strengthen the work around the ANP and its buffer zones, working hand in hand with the different actors involved, with the most outstanding experience being the successful Los Tambopatas campaign to facilitate funds for the Management Committee of the Tambopata National Reserve through the Board of Trustees created for this purpose. In addition, during his administration and in coordination with Biodiversity and Indigenous Peoples Program (PBPI), the Madre de Dios team launched the first SPDA collaborative work with an organization of indigenous peoples, which in the following ten years has allowed us to provide legal security in indigenous territories throughout the country. Between 2010 and 2020, she accompanied the design of defense strategies in the first free legal clinic of the SPDA, an experience that has been replicated in regions such as Loreto and Piura. Luisa, in coordination with PBPI and her team, has led the work with human rights defenders in Madre de Dios, generating advocacy and defense actions, as well as visibility of the situation of human rights defenders in different spaces at the regional, national and international levels. The latter has allowed an interesting approach to international cooperation and human rights institutions such as the United Nations.