In the Peruvian Amazon, actors working in oil extraction seize the participatory apparatus in order to pacify conflicts caused by their activities. Participatory devices serve as tools that fit the modes of protest. They go together with private companies’ techniques for establishing harmonious relationships with local populations. The ethnography of one of these institutional interstices of participation, in which public and private actors in the extractive sector forge relations of friendship with local elites shows how a government of protesters generates a technical indigenous leadership that agrees to oil extraction and takes part in it.