Twenty years ago, Lima’s 2,000 Shipibo-Konibo people lived, as they had done for generations, in the verdant forest along the broad Ucayali river, deep in the Peruvian Amazon.

Today, they live under the San Cristóbal hill that hunches over the capital, and on the rubbish-strewn banks of the Rímac river, which for most of the year is little more than a filthy stream.

Originally displaced in the 1990s by the Shining Path’s Maoist insurgency, the indigenous Amazonians are now facing another upheaval.

Lima’s leftist former mayor, Susana Villarán, had promised to move the 226 Shipibo-Konibo families from Cantagallo, a ramshackle collection of wooden shacks built on a former landfill site behind an outdoor iron-monger’s market, to a new riverside plot with pre-fabricated homes, electricity and running water.

But Villarán’s ambitious $74m (£49m) “rio verde” (green river) programme – of which the Shipibo-Konibo relocation was a part – has been scrapped by her successor, Luis Castañeda.

Villarán had envisaged the initiative as a way to bring a splash of green to the traffic-jammed, smoggy heart of Lima and refresh the capital’s neglected waterway. It was also intended to mitigate the impact of the building of the Vía Parque Rímac – a new trunk road connecting Lima to its nearby port, Callao.

Castañeda has reversed several of the policies brought in by his predecessor and arch-rival, abandoning her transport reforms and ordering the street art created during her administration to be painted over.

The Shipibo-Konibo fear their new homes will be the next casualty of Castañeda’s agenda.

“Our worry is that this mayor doesn’t consult the people, the residents, the indigenous people living in Lima,” said Ricardo Franco Ahuanari, a Shipibo-Konibo leader.

The community is also unsure if they will be allowed to stay on the land on which they currently live in Cantagallo. “We’re afraid that at any moment he could present us with an eviction letter and our people don’t have any where else to go,” said Ahuanari.

The city’s deputy mayor, Patricia Juárez, who engaged in brief but inconclusive dialogue with the Shipibo-Konibo delegation, insists the “doors of the town hall are open until we find a solution which satisfies everyone”.

But the community is far from satisfied with what it calls the municipality’s “delaying tactics” , and has accused the authorities of failing to provide them with the right information.

They fear the city won’t buy the $4.7m plot of land earmarked for their new home in nearby San Juan de Lurigancho because Castañeda has said he will instead use the money to build a bypass on a busy avenue in central Lima.

Villarán is equally incensed.

“I feel very angry and very sad because this was not a promise by Susana Villarán as a person, or as a mayor, but a commitment from the municipality of Lima,” she said.

“This unique indigenous community is affected by a major infrastructure project so they have the right to be compensated.”

The Shipibo-Konibo – whoare one of Peru’s largest Amazonian tribes, numbering 20,000 – have been living in Lima for three decades and the Cantagallo community was officially recognised by the government in 2000.

“My sisters came with six families in the 1990s faced by the threat of the Shining Path in the upper Ucayali,” said Franco Ahuanari.

“In 1998 the whole community uprooted and we arrived in Lima in 2000. Many more brothers came from different villages.”

A steady stream followed, settling in Cantagallo to produce and sell their distinctive textiles and paintings in the geometric style known as Kené, which represents their cosmovision seen through shamanic ayahuasca ceremonies.

The community’s bilingual school was recognised by Peru’s education ministry in 2012 and the community features on the country’s ethnolinguistic map. The Shipibo-Konibo people are also registered on Peru’s database of indigenous groups.

Activists, including representatives of the Shipibo-Konibo community of Cantagallo, form a human banner on Agua Dulce beach in Lima, with the words ‘Indigenous people+rights – living forests’. Photograph: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images

In an open letter, the country’s human rights ombudsman , Eduardo Vega, said the municipality was obliged to deliver the trust fund set aside for the purchase of the new land and also urged it to “confront with real urgency the relocation of a vulnerable indigenous community rather than create mistrust amid the affected population”.

Peru’s Legal Defence Institute (IDL) – a human rights NGO – has gone further, arguing that the breaking of the agreement is a violation of the indigenous group’s constitutional rights.

Isabel Urrutia, one of IDL’s lawyers, said the institute was prepared to take legal action against the municipality on behalf of the Shipibo-Konibo.

Although they no longer live in their native territory, some legal experts consider the community fulfils most of the requirements to be registered under the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 169, which was signed into law in Peru in 2011. The convention is designed to protect indigenous rights by granting them the right to be consulted about investment projects on their land.

“The only condition is to belong to a people which was here before the Spanish, maintain part of their institutions; their culture, their language, their education, their art, their social organisation and finally the question of identity, and one can see that they fully identify themselves as indigenous,” said Urrutia.

Shipibo-Konibo women – dressed in pastel colours and Kené-patterned skirts, and selling their jewellery and fabrics – are a common sight in downtown Lima, though many tourists do not realise the Amazonians live behind Lima’s grand Plaza de Armas, the main square that houses the government palace and the cathedral where the bones of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro lie.

Although the Shipibo-Konibo have clung on to their language and traditions in the sprawling city of 10 million inhabitants, they insist they are now part of the living fabric of Lima.

“We Amazon indigenous people enrich Lima’s living culture,” said Juan Agustín Fernández, one of the community’s activists.

“We’ve been here for more than 30 years and we deserve to be treated decently; we’re not passing through.”