Guillermo Arévalo

Guillermo Arévalo Valera (born 1952) is a Shipibo vegetalista and businessperson from the Maynas Province of Peru. His Shipibo name is Kestenbetsa.

In 1982, Arévalo co-founded Aplicación de Medicina Tradicional (AMETRA), an organization that sought to improve the sustainability of health care for the Shipibo-Conibo people by integrating traditional plant medicines. He is also the owner of Anaconda Cosmica, a retreat lodge in Peruvian Amazonia. The lodge is marketed to health tourists who are interested in ayahuasca and other traditional medicines of the Amazon.

Among his several children is James Arévalo (b. 1972), a vegetalista whose Shipibo name is Panshincopi.

Training and background Guillermo Arévalo Valera was born in 1952 in Yarinacocha, a Shipibo community near Lake Yarinaqucha, on the outskirts of Pucallpa.

Arévalo looked to Shipibo traditional medicine as an alternative, researching phytotherapy and local plant lore. By age 22 he was learning about the Amazonian shamanic discipline of vegetalismo, and eventually saw a need to undergo the customary training rites. His father was a vegetalista, He was about age 24 when he resigned from the hospital Over the next few years, AMETRA published several papers, and Arévalo and Hansson personally authored or contributed to some of these.

The practicality of an integrative medicine approach attracted the attention of two regional federations of indigenous peoples: FECONAU (Federacíon de Comunidades Nativas del Ucayali y Afluentes)

In May 1999, the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) met with Arévalo to discuss his perspective on the "intellectual property needs and expectations" of Amazonian peoples. Arévalo expressed the view that traditional medicine is of pivotal importance to Amazonian cultures, and that indigenous communities must be able to negotiate access to it in order to prevent exploitation and environmental harm. Arévalo was one of several people that WIPO representatives spoke with during a fact-finding mission to Peru and Bolivia. Arévalo spoke in his capacity as president of IDIMA, the Instituto de Difusion e Investigacion de la Medicina Amazonica. The center was called Espíritu de Anaconda ("Anaconda Spirit") until they renamed it to Anaconda Cosmica ("Cosmic Anaconda") in 2011. For a time, Arévalo also operated a second lodge, Baris Betsa.

Arévalo's son James began operating a retreat lodge called Luz Cosmica in 2010.

A central fixture at the retreat lodges is the administration of ayahuasca, a psychedelic tisane used and revered by ethnic groups throughout the Amazon Basin. In an interview with journalist Roger Rumrrill in 2005, Arévalo lamented the state of drug tourism in Peru.

Recorded media Arévalo was filmed for the ayahuasca documentary films D'autres mondes (2004) and Vine of the Soul: Encounters with Ayahuasca (2010). Jan Kounen, director of D'autres mondes, met Arévalo in the Peruvian Amazon while conducting research for his film Blueberry (2004). Kounen gave Arévalo a minor role in Blueberry, and participated in ayahuasca ceremonies with him over the course of a year. Two songs sung by Arévalo (credited to his Shipibo name, Kestenbetsa) appear on the Blueberry soundtrack. When another interviewer asked Arévalo what impact his appearances in Kounen's films have had, Arévalo said: "It meant that more and more people became aware of ayahuasca shamanism, and that's good. Professionally it's meant that more and more people are interested in Guillermo, and they want to know me." The other co-producers were French musicians Jean-Jacques Hertz and François Roy, who also composed Blueberrys score.