By Milagros Salazar
Thursday, 25 March 2010(IPS) - Peru is enthusiastically espousing free trade, and has signed six tariff-lowering agreements in the space of a year. But it has not matched them with the internal policies needed to reduce their impact on labour rights, the environment, and sensitive areas like agriculture, social organisations and experts say.
"Who benefits from these free trade agreements (FTA)? What policies have been put in place to ensure fairer redistribution of the profits from foreign trade? Over the last year, only a handful of people have benefited," Alejandra Alayza, coordinator of the Peruvian Network for Globalisation with Equity (RedGE), told IPS.
The United States-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement (PTPA) came into effect Feb. 1, 2009 and set the pattern for negotiating the terms and conditions of subsequent agreements, Alayza said. It was followed by FTAs with Chile, Mercosur (the Southern Common Market, made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay), Canada, Singapore and China.
This month saw the conclusion of negotiations on an FTA with the European Union, and Foreign Minister José Antonio García Belaúnde has already announced that the government of President Alan García is intent on closing similar deals with Japan and South Korea.
Peru is also entering into talks with Central America, the Dominican Republic and the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement, which includes Chile, New Zealand, Singapore, the United States and other countries.
"In the context of signing so many FTAs, it is essential to guarantee labour rights so that workers share in the benefits," Alayza emphasised.
Former deputy Labour Minister Julio Gamero, an expert on labour issues, told IPS that the PTPA with the United States has not improved employment conditions and workers' rights in the country. In fact, he said, in some ways they have worsened.
The number of collective bargaining agreements between organised workers and employers on wages and conditions was 434 in 2007, but declined sharply to 364 in 2008 and 233 in 2009.
Health and safety inspections of workplaces in the Lima metropolitan area also fell, from 742 in 2008 to 326 in 2009, while the proportion of workers belonging to trade unions dropped from 7.1 percent of those in formal jobs in 2007, to 4.5 percent in 2009.
The agricultural exports sector, which reaps the most benefits from the PTPA, has only five workers' unions among its 1,500 companies.
Aspects such as the right to form trade unions, wage conditions and compliance with the country's labour laws were incorporated as an annex on labour issues in the PTPA, only after pressure was exerted by social organisations.
However, "the authorities have only adopted short-term measures," said Gamero, who was in the administration of former president Alejandro Toledo, García's predecessor.
Gamero said that only when a U.S. delegation came to Lima in January to examine labour issues was it announced that a liaison office would be set up between the government and trade unions to deal with conflicts and workers' demands.
"A year has gone by, and only this one meagre step has been taken, while dismissals of union leaders and workers who join unions continue apace," he complained.
Neither have measures been taken to cushion the negative impacts on the most sensitive sectors, such as agriculture, experts say.
Only three percent of Peru's agricultural land is used for growing asparagus, mango, sweet peppers and other leading agricultural exports, the sector that is most favoured by the PTPA with the United States.
In contrast, 73 percent of agricultural land is used to cultivate potato, rice, maize, coffee, sugarcane and cotton, which are particularly sensitive products under the agreement, because of the subsidies paid to U.S. producers of these foods.
President García "promised he would renegotiate the PTPA in order to protect peasant farmers and institute compensatory prices and subsidies for three products (maize, cotton and wheat), but he has not done so," Alayza said.
Agricultural expert Miguel Macedo proposed an automatic tariff mechanism to correct price distortions in the case of subsidised products imported from industrialised countries. He also proposed carrying out a detailed census of agricultural producers, and improving the country's estimates for production quantities and the impact of the FTAs.
These proposals are among several initiatives for internal discussions that have been raised by various non-governmental organisations in the context of Peru's removal of its trade barriers.
With regard to environmental issues, a new forestry and wildlife law including the views of indigenous people and civil society is still pending approval by Congress.
While preparing the way for the PTPA with the United States, Peru's forestry laws were modified by a legislative decree, which was later repealed after mass protests by forest-dwelling indigenous peoples.
In August 2009, the Agriculture Ministry declared that revising and updating the law, by means of a participative, decentralised and nationwide process, was a priority. But a secretariat for this purpose was not set up until December.
After the June 2009 conflict in the jungle province of Bagua, in which 33 police and indigenous people were killed when the security forces cracked down on a protest by native demonstrators, the executive branch held meetings for dialogue, seeking views on the forestry laws. But Sandro Chávez, head of Foro Ecológico, a biodiversity conservation organisation, told IPS that the government's draft law does not reflect the contributions made by experts and indigenous peoples at those meetings.
Another aspect of the PTPA that has come under expert criticism is its protection of intellectual property rights over test data on new medicines. PTPA rules allow pharmaceutical companies to withhold information about any patented medicine for five years, thus securing a monopoly that excludes competitors and maintains high prices.
According to Javier Llamoza, of Health Action International Latin America (AISLAC), "protecting test data on medications is a way of creating a monopoly, which violates people's basic right to health." He said at least 12 applications for such protection have been made, by eight different companies, and two applications have already been approved.
Llamoza said that when generic versions of a drug become available on the market, prices typically fall by between 30 and 70 percent, while if a company has a monopoly on a drug, its price can increase up to 21-fold.
Recently, criticism has also been levelled at the FTA with China, in force since Mar. 1.
A study by economist Víctor Torres indicates that the sectors worst affected by this agreement, like the garment industry, leather production for footwear and the textile industry, have only been partially protected from China's low prices and allegedly unfair trade practices. As a result, lay-offs are likely to occur in these labour intensive sectors.
Micro and small businesses (MSEs) are the most likely to suffer from the FTA, as in the footwear industry, for example, where 98.5 percent of companies are MSEs.
The FTA with China lacks even a minimum framework for environmental standards and labour protection.
China introduced a broad definition of investors which includes companies from other foreign countries as long as they are controlled by Chinese capital. Under the FTA, however, Peru does not enjoy the same privilege.
In case of disputes, China cannot be sued in international courts without the case first going through an "internal administrative review process" in China. This safeguard is not applicable to Peru, however, which will therefore need to be on its guard, experts say.
Showing posts with label US Free Trade Agreement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US Free Trade Agreement. Show all posts
Friday, 26 March 2010
Saturday, 16 January 2010
Peru: A historical conflict that requires political solutions
By Miguel Palacín Quispe
The Alan García government has focused on the police in relation to the Bagua Massacre in order to evade political responsibility. It is necessary to form a truly independent Investigation Commission with international observers.
The conflict between indigenous peoples and the Peruvian state has deep historical roots. The Bagua Massacre on June 5 last year was the most visible point of an increasing process of indigenous political protagonism and the criminalization of rights by the state. The dominant neo-liberal capitalist civilisation is becoming more and more violent against the indigenous world view, against life, against equilibrium and harmony with Mother Earth.
A conflict of this nature is political, economic, social and cultural. And it requires those kinds of solutions and not, as the APRA government tries to promote, a simple focus on the police in the debate, especially after the presentation of the Bagua Commission Report and the dissemination of questioned images (photos and videos) of a disappeared policeman.
On 5th June 2009, at Devil's Curve, Bagua, Utcubamba and Station 6, 34 people died. Research to identify and punish the material perpetrators of these killings, all equally condemnable is the responsibility of public prosecutors and the judiciary. But that does not resolve the conflict and therefore will not avoid new conflicts: for this it is essential to identify the real problem, its causes and those politically responsible.
The most profound cause is the policy of cultural and physical extermination of indigenous peoples, begun more than five hundred years ago, that did not stop with the birth of the Republic and its uni-national and mono-cultural state. More recently, in Peru at the beginning of the last decade of the last century, the imposition of neoliberalism swept away our rights, especially our land rights (and it is in relation to our lands where our identity resides and from which emerges all of our rights), and made us move from resistance to alternative proposals, a process which strengthened and articulated our organizations. We moved from invisibility to political prominence.
The issuance of the legislative package to implement the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, whose repeal is the focus of the Amazon and Andean indigenous platform, is part of the neoliberal imposition, with its trade agreements and indiscriminate concessions without any controls on the extractive industries, with its attendant environmental, economic and cultural impacts.
But now they try to co-opt the social pressure to repeal the decrees - which since the Bagua massacre, has become a national demand with broad international backing - with discussions under the jurisdiction of law enforcement and the judiciary. It is not only to lay smokescreens to ultimately evade political responsibility. It is also another attack against indigenous peoples, against those which the Bagua Comission Report, using a racist Western vision, presented as violent, ignorant, and manipulated by NGOs, churches, the media and parliamentarians, incapable of governing ourselves, as we have been doing for thousands of years before the existence of the Peruvian State. We governed ourselves and lived in harmony with Mother Earth, without exploiting her, polluting her, pillaging her, guarding her to continue raising new generations.
Trying to create parallel organizations to the Interethnic Development Association of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP),[1] continuing judicial harassment of its leaders, seeking "to dissolve," it and speaking of "paramilitary groups" in the Bagua massacre, does nothing to resolve a historical dispute. On the contrary, it exacerbates it and is the practical application of the “Barnyard dog” doctrine of Alan García and his government. [2]
Politically responsibilities, which are not even mentioned in the Bagua Commission Report, begin with President Alan García and his then ministers, principally Mercedes Cabanillas Interior Minister and Mercedes Araoz Production Minister, now the Economy Minister, Yehude Simon, then president of the cabinet, and Javier Velásquez Quesquén, then President of Congress who provocatively again postponed a discussion of the repeal of legislative decrees of the FTA with the U.S. and now chairs the Council of Ministers.
The legislative decrees have not been repealed, the dialogue table with the government failed to resolve the platform of indigenous peoples. And the state continues to remain deaf to the observations and recommendations of United Nations agencies that have spoken on the subject. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), said officially:
"The Committee urges the State party to follow the recommendations of UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, Mr. James Anaya, following his visit to Peru and to proceed urgently to implement an Independent Commission with indigenous representation, for a thorough, objective and impartial investigation. It also recommends that the Commission's findings enrich the discussions that are occurring in Peru on the Law on Consultation and Participation of Indigenous Peoples in Environmental Matters and the regulations on the existent issue of mining and petroleum subsectors presented by the Ministry of Energy and Mines. The Committee waits to be informed of the negotiations, the constitution, the findings, conclusions and recommendations of said Commission (...) ".
We must remember that James Anaya, the Special Rapporteur recommended that this Independent Commission counts with [the participation of] international observers. And the [Bagua] Commission that late last year issued its questioned report was not independent because most of its members were former ministers of APRA or are linked to the government and it did not count with [the participation of] international observers.
The CERD has also recommended:
"To continue pushing urgently for the adoption of a framework law on indigenous peoples of Peru, encompassing all communities, trying to align and harmonize the terms to ensure adequate protection and promotion of the rights of all indigenous peoples.”
"That the State party implements a participatory and inclusive process in order to determine what is the vision of the nation that best represents the ethnic and cultural diversity of a country as rich as Peru, as a shared and inclusive vision can guide the course of the State party in its public policies and development projects.”
Other recommendations of the CERD that continue being ignored by the Alan García government are the enactment of a Law of Consultation and a Law of Preservation of Indigenous Languages.
In short, the conflict continues to fester because the historical causes remain, the demands of the Amazon mobilizations have not been met, the criminalization and stigmatization of indigenous peoples continues, the debate is focused on the police to avoid political responsibility and the Alan García government has not the slightest intention to undertake policy measures as recommended by CERD to solve it.
These are the pending tasks and indigenous organizations, all social movements and human rights organizations must continue to press for them to be carried out, without falling for distractive and cover-up manoeuvres [by the government].
Once again the Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations, CAOI, stresses that political conflicts require political solutions. If the CERD has recommended a framework law of Indigenous Peoples, we note that the solution is to give character to the Organic Law on the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of the UN. If it has recommended to "determine what is the vision of the nation that best represents the ethnic and cultural diversity" of Peru, we reiterate our call to build a pluri-national State. And we insist on the creation of an Investigation Commission that is truly independent and with international observers.
The projects of the Law of Consultation and of Free and Informed Prior Consent and of the preservation of indigenous languages, still awaiting debate in Congress must happen now. All this [must be done], without forgetting the immediate repeal of the still current legislative decrees of the FTA and an end to the criminalization of indigenous peoples and the social movements.
Due to the considerations raised and due to the lack of independence of the report issued, [the issue] should go to the UN, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and other agencies to enforce the recommendations of the CERD and establish an International Commission to clarify the facts and demand the punishment of those responsible.
Lima, January 12 2010.
Miguel Palacín Quispe is the General Coordinator of CAOI
Translated by Kiraz Janicke for Peru en Movimiento
Translators Notes:
[1] According to official government reports 34 people died in clashes between indigenous protesters and the police, including 23 police officers, on June 5, 2009, in what has become known as the Bagua Massacre. However, witness testimonies and human rights organisations say the real number is much higher and that hundreds of indigenous people have been disappeared. Witnesses report bodies of indigenous people being dumped from helicopters and incinerated at a nearby army barracks.
[2] AIDESEP is the largest organisation of Peruvian indigenous peoples, representing over 3000 indigenous communities. It has lead the resistance to the legislative decrees implemented by the García government to bring Peruvian law into line with the FTA signed with the U.S., and which open up vast swathes of indigenous peoples lands to exploitation by trans-national companies. In October 2009, Peru’s Public Prosecutor of the Ministry of Justice solicited the dissolution of AIDESEP, but withdrew the request after a nationwide outcry.
[3] In October 2007, García “penned an opinion piece titled "El syndrome del perro del hortelano," or the syndrome of the barnyard dog, for the Lima-based daily El Comercio. The title compares those advocating the protection of the Amazon's resources to a barnyard dog growling over food that it does not eat but will not let others have. Besides insinuating a racist comparison between indigenous peoples and dogs, García blamed his opponents—singling out indigenous—for standing in the way of Peru's development via foreign capital.” - Peru's Cold War against Indigenous People, Kristina Aiello July 19, 2009 (https://nacla.org/node/5995).
Republished from Agencia Latinoamericana de Información
The Alan García government has focused on the police in relation to the Bagua Massacre in order to evade political responsibility. It is necessary to form a truly independent Investigation Commission with international observers.
The conflict between indigenous peoples and the Peruvian state has deep historical roots. The Bagua Massacre on June 5 last year was the most visible point of an increasing process of indigenous political protagonism and the criminalization of rights by the state. The dominant neo-liberal capitalist civilisation is becoming more and more violent against the indigenous world view, against life, against equilibrium and harmony with Mother Earth.
A conflict of this nature is political, economic, social and cultural. And it requires those kinds of solutions and not, as the APRA government tries to promote, a simple focus on the police in the debate, especially after the presentation of the Bagua Commission Report and the dissemination of questioned images (photos and videos) of a disappeared policeman.
On 5th June 2009, at Devil's Curve, Bagua, Utcubamba and Station 6, 34 people died. Research to identify and punish the material perpetrators of these killings, all equally condemnable is the responsibility of public prosecutors and the judiciary. But that does not resolve the conflict and therefore will not avoid new conflicts: for this it is essential to identify the real problem, its causes and those politically responsible.
The most profound cause is the policy of cultural and physical extermination of indigenous peoples, begun more than five hundred years ago, that did not stop with the birth of the Republic and its uni-national and mono-cultural state. More recently, in Peru at the beginning of the last decade of the last century, the imposition of neoliberalism swept away our rights, especially our land rights (and it is in relation to our lands where our identity resides and from which emerges all of our rights), and made us move from resistance to alternative proposals, a process which strengthened and articulated our organizations. We moved from invisibility to political prominence.
The issuance of the legislative package to implement the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, whose repeal is the focus of the Amazon and Andean indigenous platform, is part of the neoliberal imposition, with its trade agreements and indiscriminate concessions without any controls on the extractive industries, with its attendant environmental, economic and cultural impacts.
But now they try to co-opt the social pressure to repeal the decrees - which since the Bagua massacre, has become a national demand with broad international backing - with discussions under the jurisdiction of law enforcement and the judiciary. It is not only to lay smokescreens to ultimately evade political responsibility. It is also another attack against indigenous peoples, against those which the Bagua Comission Report, using a racist Western vision, presented as violent, ignorant, and manipulated by NGOs, churches, the media and parliamentarians, incapable of governing ourselves, as we have been doing for thousands of years before the existence of the Peruvian State. We governed ourselves and lived in harmony with Mother Earth, without exploiting her, polluting her, pillaging her, guarding her to continue raising new generations.
Trying to create parallel organizations to the Interethnic Development Association of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP),[1] continuing judicial harassment of its leaders, seeking "to dissolve," it and speaking of "paramilitary groups" in the Bagua massacre, does nothing to resolve a historical dispute. On the contrary, it exacerbates it and is the practical application of the “Barnyard dog” doctrine of Alan García and his government. [2]
Politically responsibilities, which are not even mentioned in the Bagua Commission Report, begin with President Alan García and his then ministers, principally Mercedes Cabanillas Interior Minister and Mercedes Araoz Production Minister, now the Economy Minister, Yehude Simon, then president of the cabinet, and Javier Velásquez Quesquén, then President of Congress who provocatively again postponed a discussion of the repeal of legislative decrees of the FTA with the U.S. and now chairs the Council of Ministers.
The legislative decrees have not been repealed, the dialogue table with the government failed to resolve the platform of indigenous peoples. And the state continues to remain deaf to the observations and recommendations of United Nations agencies that have spoken on the subject. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), said officially:
"The Committee urges the State party to follow the recommendations of UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, Mr. James Anaya, following his visit to Peru and to proceed urgently to implement an Independent Commission with indigenous representation, for a thorough, objective and impartial investigation. It also recommends that the Commission's findings enrich the discussions that are occurring in Peru on the Law on Consultation and Participation of Indigenous Peoples in Environmental Matters and the regulations on the existent issue of mining and petroleum subsectors presented by the Ministry of Energy and Mines. The Committee waits to be informed of the negotiations, the constitution, the findings, conclusions and recommendations of said Commission (...) ".
We must remember that James Anaya, the Special Rapporteur recommended that this Independent Commission counts with [the participation of] international observers. And the [Bagua] Commission that late last year issued its questioned report was not independent because most of its members were former ministers of APRA or are linked to the government and it did not count with [the participation of] international observers.
The CERD has also recommended:
"To continue pushing urgently for the adoption of a framework law on indigenous peoples of Peru, encompassing all communities, trying to align and harmonize the terms to ensure adequate protection and promotion of the rights of all indigenous peoples.”
"That the State party implements a participatory and inclusive process in order to determine what is the vision of the nation that best represents the ethnic and cultural diversity of a country as rich as Peru, as a shared and inclusive vision can guide the course of the State party in its public policies and development projects.”
Other recommendations of the CERD that continue being ignored by the Alan García government are the enactment of a Law of Consultation and a Law of Preservation of Indigenous Languages.
In short, the conflict continues to fester because the historical causes remain, the demands of the Amazon mobilizations have not been met, the criminalization and stigmatization of indigenous peoples continues, the debate is focused on the police to avoid political responsibility and the Alan García government has not the slightest intention to undertake policy measures as recommended by CERD to solve it.
These are the pending tasks and indigenous organizations, all social movements and human rights organizations must continue to press for them to be carried out, without falling for distractive and cover-up manoeuvres [by the government].
Once again the Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations, CAOI, stresses that political conflicts require political solutions. If the CERD has recommended a framework law of Indigenous Peoples, we note that the solution is to give character to the Organic Law on the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of the UN. If it has recommended to "determine what is the vision of the nation that best represents the ethnic and cultural diversity" of Peru, we reiterate our call to build a pluri-national State. And we insist on the creation of an Investigation Commission that is truly independent and with international observers.
The projects of the Law of Consultation and of Free and Informed Prior Consent and of the preservation of indigenous languages, still awaiting debate in Congress must happen now. All this [must be done], without forgetting the immediate repeal of the still current legislative decrees of the FTA and an end to the criminalization of indigenous peoples and the social movements.
Due to the considerations raised and due to the lack of independence of the report issued, [the issue] should go to the UN, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and other agencies to enforce the recommendations of the CERD and establish an International Commission to clarify the facts and demand the punishment of those responsible.
Lima, January 12 2010.
Miguel Palacín Quispe is the General Coordinator of CAOI
Translated by Kiraz Janicke for Peru en Movimiento
Translators Notes:
[1] According to official government reports 34 people died in clashes between indigenous protesters and the police, including 23 police officers, on June 5, 2009, in what has become known as the Bagua Massacre. However, witness testimonies and human rights organisations say the real number is much higher and that hundreds of indigenous people have been disappeared. Witnesses report bodies of indigenous people being dumped from helicopters and incinerated at a nearby army barracks.
[2] AIDESEP is the largest organisation of Peruvian indigenous peoples, representing over 3000 indigenous communities. It has lead the resistance to the legislative decrees implemented by the García government to bring Peruvian law into line with the FTA signed with the U.S., and which open up vast swathes of indigenous peoples lands to exploitation by trans-national companies. In October 2009, Peru’s Public Prosecutor of the Ministry of Justice solicited the dissolution of AIDESEP, but withdrew the request after a nationwide outcry.
[3] In October 2007, García “penned an opinion piece titled "El syndrome del perro del hortelano," or the syndrome of the barnyard dog, for the Lima-based daily El Comercio. The title compares those advocating the protection of the Amazon's resources to a barnyard dog growling over food that it does not eat but will not let others have. Besides insinuating a racist comparison between indigenous peoples and dogs, García blamed his opponents—singling out indigenous—for standing in the way of Peru's development via foreign capital.” - Peru's Cold War against Indigenous People, Kristina Aiello July 19, 2009 (https://nacla.org/node/5995).
Republished from Agencia Latinoamericana de Información
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
Peru: ‘Free trade’, cocaine and terrorism
David T. Rowlands
Before the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement was ratified in 2007, many Peruvian and international human rights and environmental organisations said the deal would lead to increased social destabilisation and drug production.
Archbishop Pedro Barreto, president of the Episcopal Commission for Social Action of the Catholic Church in Peru, said: “We are certain that the trade agreement will increase the cultivation of coca, which brings with it a series of negative consequences including drug trafficking, terrorism and violence. ”
Tragically, these predictions are now starting to become a daily reality in Peru.
The available statistics point to a resurgence of “narco-terrorism” in regional centres associated with the cocaine trade.
From 2001 to 2006, armed groups mounted six major attacks on government installations and/or personnel. Since 2007, 20 separate attacks have been recorded.
In other words, the incidence of “terrorist” actions has risen from an average of one a year to roughly eight.
In a recent clash at Sinaycocha in the Junin region on September 2, a military helicopter taking off from a clearing was hit by bursts of heavy machine gun fire from surrounding jungle.
The helicopter crashed, resulting in 11 casualties (including three killed). Automatic fire continued to sweep the area for days.
This spike in civil violence is evoking traumatic memories of the 1980s era, when ultra-radical Shining Path guerrillas and US-backed government security forces committed a long and bloody series of atrocities against the population.
At least 69,000 people died.
However, what the corporate-owned news sources are not reporting is that the new conflict is a direct result of the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement (TLC).
In 2000, Peru’s governmental Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended that lasting peace and stability could be established in devastated regions only by providing programs that would encourage “employment and income generation”.
Perversely, this objective has been completely undermined by the TLC, which has slashed the livelihoods of the rural poor.
The TLC required Peru to remove tariffs on many staple agricultural products, leading to a steadily-increasing flow of imports from heavily subsidised US agribusiness.
Nearly a third of the Peruvian population depend on agriculture for their income and at least 1.7 million families have already begun to suffer adverse effects from the free trade deal.
With the TLC driving down commodity prices, rural dislocation is on the rise. This is lead to a corresponding increase in coca production as desperate peasant farmers strive to make ends meet.
Increased coca production has boosted profits for the cartel bosses, who have helped to revitalise the Shining Path and other like-minded groups by hiring their members as mercenary enforcers. This symbiotic arrangement has been in place for decades, but the fallout from the TLC has lent it new life.
The drug barons are not the only beneficiaries of the devastation that has resulted from the TLC. With the US eager to restore its previously hegemonic grip on South America, the so-called “War on Drugs” has provided the Pentagon with an excuse to broaden its involvement in Andean nations such as Peru.
“Coca eradication” operations have been stepped up, leading to a wave of unreported military abuses against civilians in coca-producing areas.
Under the guise of combating terrorism, the Peruvian security forces are engaged in a struggle against all forms of dissent (peaceful or otherwise) on behalf of the ruling elites and foreign corporations who stand to gain from the TLC.
Pulling the strings by supplying funds, training and material is Washington. The Bush administration designed the free trade deal with oppressive intentions, and the Obama administration is continuing to implement that foreign policy goal.
With the US strategy of fomenting instability in the region, the threat of spill-over terrorist violence striking heavily-inhabited population centres in Peru is once again an ugly possibility.
The victims will be the ordinary people of Peru — caught, once again, in the crossfire.
Having “lost” several countries in South America to “hostile” left or centre-left regimes (such as in Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador), the US is determined to shore up its political and economic stake in South America.
Ruled by a US-funded client regime, Peru (along with Colombia) remains a key asset in US strategy for the Western Hemisphere.
Having already announced its intention to establish a network of new military bases in Colombia, it may not be long before similar plans are implemented by stealth in Peru.
Republished from Green Left Weekly
Before the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement was ratified in 2007, many Peruvian and international human rights and environmental organisations said the deal would lead to increased social destabilisation and drug production.
Archbishop Pedro Barreto, president of the Episcopal Commission for Social Action of the Catholic Church in Peru, said: “We are certain that the trade agreement will increase the cultivation of coca, which brings with it a series of negative consequences including drug trafficking, terrorism and violence. ”
Tragically, these predictions are now starting to become a daily reality in Peru.
The available statistics point to a resurgence of “narco-terrorism” in regional centres associated with the cocaine trade.
From 2001 to 2006, armed groups mounted six major attacks on government installations and/or personnel. Since 2007, 20 separate attacks have been recorded.
In other words, the incidence of “terrorist” actions has risen from an average of one a year to roughly eight.
In a recent clash at Sinaycocha in the Junin region on September 2, a military helicopter taking off from a clearing was hit by bursts of heavy machine gun fire from surrounding jungle.
The helicopter crashed, resulting in 11 casualties (including three killed). Automatic fire continued to sweep the area for days.
This spike in civil violence is evoking traumatic memories of the 1980s era, when ultra-radical Shining Path guerrillas and US-backed government security forces committed a long and bloody series of atrocities against the population.
At least 69,000 people died.
However, what the corporate-owned news sources are not reporting is that the new conflict is a direct result of the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement (TLC).
In 2000, Peru’s governmental Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended that lasting peace and stability could be established in devastated regions only by providing programs that would encourage “employment and income generation”.
Perversely, this objective has been completely undermined by the TLC, which has slashed the livelihoods of the rural poor.
The TLC required Peru to remove tariffs on many staple agricultural products, leading to a steadily-increasing flow of imports from heavily subsidised US agribusiness.
Nearly a third of the Peruvian population depend on agriculture for their income and at least 1.7 million families have already begun to suffer adverse effects from the free trade deal.
With the TLC driving down commodity prices, rural dislocation is on the rise. This is lead to a corresponding increase in coca production as desperate peasant farmers strive to make ends meet.
Increased coca production has boosted profits for the cartel bosses, who have helped to revitalise the Shining Path and other like-minded groups by hiring their members as mercenary enforcers. This symbiotic arrangement has been in place for decades, but the fallout from the TLC has lent it new life.
The drug barons are not the only beneficiaries of the devastation that has resulted from the TLC. With the US eager to restore its previously hegemonic grip on South America, the so-called “War on Drugs” has provided the Pentagon with an excuse to broaden its involvement in Andean nations such as Peru.
“Coca eradication” operations have been stepped up, leading to a wave of unreported military abuses against civilians in coca-producing areas.
Under the guise of combating terrorism, the Peruvian security forces are engaged in a struggle against all forms of dissent (peaceful or otherwise) on behalf of the ruling elites and foreign corporations who stand to gain from the TLC.
Pulling the strings by supplying funds, training and material is Washington. The Bush administration designed the free trade deal with oppressive intentions, and the Obama administration is continuing to implement that foreign policy goal.
With the US strategy of fomenting instability in the region, the threat of spill-over terrorist violence striking heavily-inhabited population centres in Peru is once again an ugly possibility.
The victims will be the ordinary people of Peru — caught, once again, in the crossfire.
Having “lost” several countries in South America to “hostile” left or centre-left regimes (such as in Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador), the US is determined to shore up its political and economic stake in South America.
Ruled by a US-funded client regime, Peru (along with Colombia) remains a key asset in US strategy for the Western Hemisphere.
Having already announced its intention to establish a network of new military bases in Colombia, it may not be long before similar plans are implemented by stealth in Peru.
Republished from Green Left Weekly
Sunday, 27 September 2009
Peru: ‘A political defeat for the government’
Kiraz Janicke
In April, Amazonian indigenous peoples in Peru began an uprising to demand the repeal of more than a dozen neoliberal decrees by President Alan Garcia. The decrees opened up vast swathes of indigenous peoples’ lands to exploitation by transnational oil, mining and logging companies.
On June 5, the government unleashed a brutal crackdown on protesters in the Amazonian town of Bagua. At least 60 indigenous people were massacred.
A nation-wide backlash forced the government to repeal three of the most controversial decrees.
Tito Prado, head of the international commission of the Peruvian Nationalist Party (PNP) and PNP Congresswoman Yanet Cajahuanca spoke to Green Left Weekly about the situation in the country after the Bagua massacre and the political program of the PNP, led by Ollanta Humala.
“The political situation of the country has changed in many ways” since the Bagua massacre, said Prado, who also edits La Lucha Continua. He is a member of the PNP’s Governmental Plan and Political Program Advisory Council.
“It was a political defeat for a government that dared to suppress the indigenous protests, but in the end had to repeal the neoliberal decrees.”
Cajahuanca was one of seven indigenous parliamentarians suspended for supporting the indigenous struggle and protesting against the decrees. She told GLW that the PNP opposed the decrees, which were apart of implementing the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States.
“These legislative decrees are totally detrimental to the interests of indigenous and rural areas”, she said. “Why? Because, the neoliberal model clashes with the property rights of indigenous communities.
“These legislative decrees aimed to expropriate the land of indigenous and peasant communities, as well as giving the state the freedom to grant concessions without having to inform, to consult or hold dialogue with and involve those communities in whose subsoil the resources are located.”
Cajahuanca said the issue of indigenous land rights “has historically generated considerable unease in our country. Today indigenous and farming communities say that the large corporations that come to settle in their territories, worsen rather than improve the quality of life.
“They don’t want them to come into their territories at all.
“The 12 legislative decrees are prejudicial to the sovereignty and the rights of peasant communities, and are against their way of life. They do not respect the environment.”
Indigenous peoples have been calling for dialogue over the decrees for a year and a half, but “there has been no willingness for dialogue by the central government”.
The intransigent position of the government “has generated considerable social conflict … created a confrontation, a climate of instability. The response by the executive has been the spilling of blood: 64 Peruvians dead and many more missing.”
The PNP parliamentarians, Cajahuanca said, “have had the opportunity to visit the indigenous communities in their place of origin, where they live, after three days of travel from the capital to these sites.
“All they are asking is that the water is not contaminated and that the forests are looked after, because that’s where they live. I don’t think that’s much to ask.
“All we are asking for is the right to life, something that this economic model and Mr Alan Garcia do not want to understand.”
However, the fact that the government was forced to repeal three decrees represents “a major defeat for the government”, Prado said. As the struggle occurred on a national level, it was “a triumph not only of indigenous people, but all the Peruvian people”.
“It was a national struggle that drew a dividing line across the country: on one hand you have the government, rightist parties, armed forces, the US. And on the other hand, the indigenous peoples and the settlers, farmers, workers, students came out en masse to support them.
“It is a struggle that divided and polarised the country.”
As a result, “the government was isolated … because even sectors of their allies had to condemn the fact that they had not used consultation and avoided this political crisis.
“Not only were the decrees defeated, but the cabinet fell. All the ministers had to resign, for the second time.”
Prado said this has left the government badly weakened and “the popular movement with more confidence that, through struggle and unity, important victories can be achieved — albeit partial”.
However, Cajahuanca said: “The government of Alan Garcia is still persecuting the leaders who have been leading the indigenous and peasant struggle. Many have been jailed, others are seeking asylum.
“And not only does Garcia not respect the leaders, but he also even managed to attack us in Congress. He suspended seven parliamentarians whose crime was to defend our people, because ultimately, we come from them, we were elected simply because we offered to defend their rights.”
Prado said the Garcia government had not learned the lesson of the Bagua confrontation, and continued to insist on implementing the same neoliberal policies as part of its agreement with the US.
The cabinet has been reconstituted with people even farther to the right, he said. And, rather than seeking to engage in genuine dialogue with indigenous communities, the government is pushing for more confrontation.
It is attempting to divert attention from its role in the Bagua massacre by blaming the indigenous protests on a supposed “international conspiracy” headed by the left-wing governments in Bolivia and Venezuela.
Prado said Peru is “heading towards major confrontations. The Indigenous people have only suspended their demonstrations ... and several other sectors are moving.”
He pointed to recent strikes and protests in the southern cities of Ica, Pisco and Chincha, where two years after a massive 7.9 Richter earthquake devastated the region thousands remain living in tents and the cities look like they have been bombed.
“They have opened up a process of social confrontation, increased political polarisation. This will continue through to the electoral process of 2011.
“The Peruvian people will have to choose between the continuity offered by the neoliberal right or a big change that only the PNP is able to express, because it has managed to cohere a large majority of the population.”
Cajahuanca said: “Our project is a project of change that wants win government.”
Cajahuanca said in the social sphere, the PNP aims to promote social inclusion “that respects the differences of all our indigenous peoples” and “improves the quality of life” of all Peruvians.
In the economic sphere, Cajahuanca said a key platform of the PNP is for the state “to be more involved in strategic activities, I refer to sectors that are related to natural resources, mining, gas, oil”, and for resources to be directed “towards the development of our country”.
“We want to improve education, provide support in agrarian affairs, because it is this sector that is the poorest, and begin to industrialise our country.”
Cajahuanca said it was necessary to implement policies “to stimulate the national market”, and introduce tax reform to force large multi-national mining companies to pay taxes and royalties.
“We also want to provide opportunities to our Peruvian entrepreneurs to upgrade their activities, in order to give greater opportunities for them to go forward faster.”
Prado said one of the central proposals of the PNP “is the convening of a constituent assembly, to dismantle the constitution we inherited from the dictatorship of [former president Alberto] Fujimori, which locked-in the neoliberal model.
“We cannot make the changes we want as long as this constitution persists. Therefore we propose a democratic constitution where the people can introduce fundamental changes against this model, against state corruption ... to recover and use energy resources for the benefit of the whole country.
“Right now, the Fujimori constitution prevents the state from taking an active role in economic life.”
Prado said the PNP program is “an essentially anti-imperialist and democratic program. The project, however, opens up a dynamic that can place tasks of a much greater magnitude on the agenda, such as is happening in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.
“In that sense, part of our program is integration with Latin America, particularly with countries that have opted for change. We want to participate in ALBA [Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas anti-imperialist bloc of nations led by Venezuela and Cuba].
“And, therefore we reject FTAs as absolutely colonialist, including with the US, Europe, China and Chile.
“So we are facing a historic opportunity, because if successful, we would encourage the process of change that exists all over Latin America. It would signify a better balance of forces across the continent.”
Republished from Green Left Weekly
In April, Amazonian indigenous peoples in Peru began an uprising to demand the repeal of more than a dozen neoliberal decrees by President Alan Garcia. The decrees opened up vast swathes of indigenous peoples’ lands to exploitation by transnational oil, mining and logging companies.
On June 5, the government unleashed a brutal crackdown on protesters in the Amazonian town of Bagua. At least 60 indigenous people were massacred.
A nation-wide backlash forced the government to repeal three of the most controversial decrees.
Tito Prado, head of the international commission of the Peruvian Nationalist Party (PNP) and PNP Congresswoman Yanet Cajahuanca spoke to Green Left Weekly about the situation in the country after the Bagua massacre and the political program of the PNP, led by Ollanta Humala.
“The political situation of the country has changed in many ways” since the Bagua massacre, said Prado, who also edits La Lucha Continua. He is a member of the PNP’s Governmental Plan and Political Program Advisory Council.
“It was a political defeat for a government that dared to suppress the indigenous protests, but in the end had to repeal the neoliberal decrees.”
Cajahuanca was one of seven indigenous parliamentarians suspended for supporting the indigenous struggle and protesting against the decrees. She told GLW that the PNP opposed the decrees, which were apart of implementing the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States.
“These legislative decrees are totally detrimental to the interests of indigenous and rural areas”, she said. “Why? Because, the neoliberal model clashes with the property rights of indigenous communities.
“These legislative decrees aimed to expropriate the land of indigenous and peasant communities, as well as giving the state the freedom to grant concessions without having to inform, to consult or hold dialogue with and involve those communities in whose subsoil the resources are located.”
Cajahuanca said the issue of indigenous land rights “has historically generated considerable unease in our country. Today indigenous and farming communities say that the large corporations that come to settle in their territories, worsen rather than improve the quality of life.
“They don’t want them to come into their territories at all.
“The 12 legislative decrees are prejudicial to the sovereignty and the rights of peasant communities, and are against their way of life. They do not respect the environment.”
Indigenous peoples have been calling for dialogue over the decrees for a year and a half, but “there has been no willingness for dialogue by the central government”.
The intransigent position of the government “has generated considerable social conflict … created a confrontation, a climate of instability. The response by the executive has been the spilling of blood: 64 Peruvians dead and many more missing.”
The PNP parliamentarians, Cajahuanca said, “have had the opportunity to visit the indigenous communities in their place of origin, where they live, after three days of travel from the capital to these sites.
“All they are asking is that the water is not contaminated and that the forests are looked after, because that’s where they live. I don’t think that’s much to ask.
“All we are asking for is the right to life, something that this economic model and Mr Alan Garcia do not want to understand.”
However, the fact that the government was forced to repeal three decrees represents “a major defeat for the government”, Prado said. As the struggle occurred on a national level, it was “a triumph not only of indigenous people, but all the Peruvian people”.
“It was a national struggle that drew a dividing line across the country: on one hand you have the government, rightist parties, armed forces, the US. And on the other hand, the indigenous peoples and the settlers, farmers, workers, students came out en masse to support them.
“It is a struggle that divided and polarised the country.”
As a result, “the government was isolated … because even sectors of their allies had to condemn the fact that they had not used consultation and avoided this political crisis.
“Not only were the decrees defeated, but the cabinet fell. All the ministers had to resign, for the second time.”
Prado said this has left the government badly weakened and “the popular movement with more confidence that, through struggle and unity, important victories can be achieved — albeit partial”.
However, Cajahuanca said: “The government of Alan Garcia is still persecuting the leaders who have been leading the indigenous and peasant struggle. Many have been jailed, others are seeking asylum.
“And not only does Garcia not respect the leaders, but he also even managed to attack us in Congress. He suspended seven parliamentarians whose crime was to defend our people, because ultimately, we come from them, we were elected simply because we offered to defend their rights.”
Prado said the Garcia government had not learned the lesson of the Bagua confrontation, and continued to insist on implementing the same neoliberal policies as part of its agreement with the US.
The cabinet has been reconstituted with people even farther to the right, he said. And, rather than seeking to engage in genuine dialogue with indigenous communities, the government is pushing for more confrontation.
It is attempting to divert attention from its role in the Bagua massacre by blaming the indigenous protests on a supposed “international conspiracy” headed by the left-wing governments in Bolivia and Venezuela.
Prado said Peru is “heading towards major confrontations. The Indigenous people have only suspended their demonstrations ... and several other sectors are moving.”
He pointed to recent strikes and protests in the southern cities of Ica, Pisco and Chincha, where two years after a massive 7.9 Richter earthquake devastated the region thousands remain living in tents and the cities look like they have been bombed.
“They have opened up a process of social confrontation, increased political polarisation. This will continue through to the electoral process of 2011.
“The Peruvian people will have to choose between the continuity offered by the neoliberal right or a big change that only the PNP is able to express, because it has managed to cohere a large majority of the population.”
Cajahuanca said: “Our project is a project of change that wants win government.”
Cajahuanca said in the social sphere, the PNP aims to promote social inclusion “that respects the differences of all our indigenous peoples” and “improves the quality of life” of all Peruvians.
In the economic sphere, Cajahuanca said a key platform of the PNP is for the state “to be more involved in strategic activities, I refer to sectors that are related to natural resources, mining, gas, oil”, and for resources to be directed “towards the development of our country”.
“We want to improve education, provide support in agrarian affairs, because it is this sector that is the poorest, and begin to industrialise our country.”
Cajahuanca said it was necessary to implement policies “to stimulate the national market”, and introduce tax reform to force large multi-national mining companies to pay taxes and royalties.
“We also want to provide opportunities to our Peruvian entrepreneurs to upgrade their activities, in order to give greater opportunities for them to go forward faster.”
Prado said one of the central proposals of the PNP “is the convening of a constituent assembly, to dismantle the constitution we inherited from the dictatorship of [former president Alberto] Fujimori, which locked-in the neoliberal model.
“We cannot make the changes we want as long as this constitution persists. Therefore we propose a democratic constitution where the people can introduce fundamental changes against this model, against state corruption ... to recover and use energy resources for the benefit of the whole country.
“Right now, the Fujimori constitution prevents the state from taking an active role in economic life.”
Prado said the PNP program is “an essentially anti-imperialist and democratic program. The project, however, opens up a dynamic that can place tasks of a much greater magnitude on the agenda, such as is happening in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.
“In that sense, part of our program is integration with Latin America, particularly with countries that have opted for change. We want to participate in ALBA [Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas anti-imperialist bloc of nations led by Venezuela and Cuba].
“And, therefore we reject FTAs as absolutely colonialist, including with the US, Europe, China and Chile.
“So we are facing a historic opportunity, because if successful, we would encourage the process of change that exists all over Latin America. It would signify a better balance of forces across the continent.”
Republished from Green Left Weekly
Monday, 29 June 2009
Peru: Blood for rubber, blood for oil
David T. Rowlands
At the turn of the twentieth century, global demand for rubber from the upper reaches of the Amazon (encompassing Peruvian, Colombian and Brazilian territory) was at its height.
Capitalising on this profitable opportunity, the agents of an international consortium known as the Anglo-Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company enslaved virtually the entire local indigenous population to maximise output and reduce labour costs.
Over a decade, tens of thousands of indigenous men, women and children were worked to death. When eyewitness reports of the company’s brutal methods reached the outside world, public opinion eventually forced the British government in 1910 to convene a formal inquiry in the Peruvian rubber port of Iquitos.
The investigation found that the company “forced the Indians to work day and night at the extraction of rubber, without the slightest remuneration; that they give them nothing to eat; ... that they rob them their crops; their women, and their children to satisfy their voracity, lasciviousness and the avarice of themselves and their employees, for they live on the Indians food, keep harems and concubines, and sell these people at wholesale and retail in Iquitos; that they flog them inhumanly, until their bones are visible; that they give them no medical treatment, but let them die, eaten by maggots, or to serve as food for the chiefs’ dogs; that they castrate them, cut off their ears, fingers, arms and legs; that they torture them by means of fire, of water, and by tying them up, crucified, head down; that they burn and destroy their houses and crops; that they grasp children by the feet and dash their heads against walls and trees, until their brains fly out; that they have the old folks killed when they can work no longer; and finally, that to amuse themselves, to practice shooting…they discharge their weapons at men, women, and children, or in preference to this, they souse them with kerosene and set fire to them to enjoy their desperate agony.”
Entire tribes were exterminated. The horror remains a collective memory in the upper Amazon.
Atrocities such as the Amazonian genocide were a product of rapidly expanding capitalism. The voracious appetite of the European and North American industrial powers for the natural resources of the global South led to the systematic displacement and massacre of expendable “surplus” populations in Asia, Australasia, Oceania, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
The parallels between then and now are striking. In the present era, the forces of capitalist globalisation still hold the most vulnerable populations of the “developing” world in their exploitative grip.
This is nothing short of a global war of conquest, waged by capital against the dispossessed inhabitants of resource-rich regions in the global South.
The war has many fronts. One of them remains the upper Amazon, where the international hunger for hardwood timber and fossil fuel has led to another devastating boom.
Mindful of their history, the people of Utcubamba in northern Peru recently mounted a gallant stand against the international oil and gas companies who plan to desecrate their land and contaminate their rivers.
The government of President Alan Garcia passed a number of decrees opening up the Amazon to greater exploitation by oil and gas giants — sparking the uprising.
For millennia, the rainforest realm in Utcubamba has been safeguarded by the Aguaruna people and other tribal groups. The beauty of Utcubamba and the bond between the land and its people means nothing to the Garcia, elected in 2006 with the financial backing of the US.
Garcia returned the favour by enacting a US-Peru “free trade agreement” in 2007. The inhabitants of regions such as Utcubamba, long ear-marked for fossil fuel extraction, were denied a say in the “developmental” future of their lands.
As far as the government in Lima was concerned, the Amazon now belonged to the various international consortia to whom vast blocks of territory have been assigned. Unfortunately for these powerful interests, the indigenous people had other ideas.
The people of Utcubamba responded by blocking a section of highway near Bagua Grande (the capital of Utcumbamba) in an attempt to defend themselves and their land.
On June 5, the Peruvian police initiated a pitched battle in an attempt to end the blockade. At least 34 people were killed with many more disappeared. The total number of protesters killed remains unclear. Several police also died in the battle.
Using the June 5 clash as a pretext, the Garcia administration authorised a full-scale campaign of repression in Utcubamba to serve as a warning to other potential dissidents. Hundreds, at the least, are reported to have been summarily executed.
Despite the high toll, indigenous resistance achieved an important victory. A June 22 Counterpunch.org article by Laura Carlsen said: “Their movement to save the Amazon and their communities forced the Peruvian government to roll back implementing legislation for the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement that would have opened up the vast jungle to transnational oil and gas, mining and timber companies ...
“Peru’s Congress, deep in a political crisis of national and international legitimacy, voted 82 to 12 to repeal Legislative Decree 1090, the Forestry and Wildlife Law and 1064, the reform to permit changes in agrarian land use without full prior consent.”
In the upper Amazon, blood for rubber has given way to blood for oil. The region’s indigenous people have shown they will not accept it.
Republished from Green Left Weekly
At the turn of the twentieth century, global demand for rubber from the upper reaches of the Amazon (encompassing Peruvian, Colombian and Brazilian territory) was at its height.
Capitalising on this profitable opportunity, the agents of an international consortium known as the Anglo-Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company enslaved virtually the entire local indigenous population to maximise output and reduce labour costs.
Over a decade, tens of thousands of indigenous men, women and children were worked to death. When eyewitness reports of the company’s brutal methods reached the outside world, public opinion eventually forced the British government in 1910 to convene a formal inquiry in the Peruvian rubber port of Iquitos.
The investigation found that the company “forced the Indians to work day and night at the extraction of rubber, without the slightest remuneration; that they give them nothing to eat; ... that they rob them their crops; their women, and their children to satisfy their voracity, lasciviousness and the avarice of themselves and their employees, for they live on the Indians food, keep harems and concubines, and sell these people at wholesale and retail in Iquitos; that they flog them inhumanly, until their bones are visible; that they give them no medical treatment, but let them die, eaten by maggots, or to serve as food for the chiefs’ dogs; that they castrate them, cut off their ears, fingers, arms and legs; that they torture them by means of fire, of water, and by tying them up, crucified, head down; that they burn and destroy their houses and crops; that they grasp children by the feet and dash their heads against walls and trees, until their brains fly out; that they have the old folks killed when they can work no longer; and finally, that to amuse themselves, to practice shooting…they discharge their weapons at men, women, and children, or in preference to this, they souse them with kerosene and set fire to them to enjoy their desperate agony.”
Entire tribes were exterminated. The horror remains a collective memory in the upper Amazon.
Atrocities such as the Amazonian genocide were a product of rapidly expanding capitalism. The voracious appetite of the European and North American industrial powers for the natural resources of the global South led to the systematic displacement and massacre of expendable “surplus” populations in Asia, Australasia, Oceania, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
The parallels between then and now are striking. In the present era, the forces of capitalist globalisation still hold the most vulnerable populations of the “developing” world in their exploitative grip.
This is nothing short of a global war of conquest, waged by capital against the dispossessed inhabitants of resource-rich regions in the global South.
The war has many fronts. One of them remains the upper Amazon, where the international hunger for hardwood timber and fossil fuel has led to another devastating boom.
Mindful of their history, the people of Utcubamba in northern Peru recently mounted a gallant stand against the international oil and gas companies who plan to desecrate their land and contaminate their rivers.
The government of President Alan Garcia passed a number of decrees opening up the Amazon to greater exploitation by oil and gas giants — sparking the uprising.
For millennia, the rainforest realm in Utcubamba has been safeguarded by the Aguaruna people and other tribal groups. The beauty of Utcubamba and the bond between the land and its people means nothing to the Garcia, elected in 2006 with the financial backing of the US.
Garcia returned the favour by enacting a US-Peru “free trade agreement” in 2007. The inhabitants of regions such as Utcubamba, long ear-marked for fossil fuel extraction, were denied a say in the “developmental” future of their lands.
As far as the government in Lima was concerned, the Amazon now belonged to the various international consortia to whom vast blocks of territory have been assigned. Unfortunately for these powerful interests, the indigenous people had other ideas.
The people of Utcubamba responded by blocking a section of highway near Bagua Grande (the capital of Utcumbamba) in an attempt to defend themselves and their land.
On June 5, the Peruvian police initiated a pitched battle in an attempt to end the blockade. At least 34 people were killed with many more disappeared. The total number of protesters killed remains unclear. Several police also died in the battle.
Using the June 5 clash as a pretext, the Garcia administration authorised a full-scale campaign of repression in Utcubamba to serve as a warning to other potential dissidents. Hundreds, at the least, are reported to have been summarily executed.
Despite the high toll, indigenous resistance achieved an important victory. A June 22 Counterpunch.org article by Laura Carlsen said: “Their movement to save the Amazon and their communities forced the Peruvian government to roll back implementing legislation for the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement that would have opened up the vast jungle to transnational oil and gas, mining and timber companies ...
“Peru’s Congress, deep in a political crisis of national and international legitimacy, voted 82 to 12 to repeal Legislative Decree 1090, the Forestry and Wildlife Law and 1064, the reform to permit changes in agrarian land use without full prior consent.”
In the upper Amazon, blood for rubber has given way to blood for oil. The region’s indigenous people have shown they will not accept it.
Republished from Green Left Weekly
Wednesday, 24 June 2009
US Drug War Money Funded Peru Indigenous Massacre
Kristin Bricker
US Government Trained the Police Department that Participated in the Operation and Invested "Heavily" in the Killer Helicopters
On June 5, the Peruvian National Police (PNP) massacred up to fifty unarmed Awajún and Wampi indigenous people in Bagua who had blockaded roads in protest of land reforms related to a recently implemented US-Peru free trade agreement. Witnesses report that the PNP shot live ammunition from the ground, rooftops, and police helicopters. Anywhere between 61-400 people are reported missing following the attack.
Narco News has discovered that US drug war money is all over the massacre. The US government has not only spent the past two decades funding the helicopters used in the massacre, it also trained the PNP in "riot control."
The Peruvian National Police
The Peruvian National Police is a militarized police force and Peru's only national police force, meaning that Peru lacks a civilian federal police force. For this reason, the militarized PNP carries out regular policing functions in Peru, such as maintaining the peace and providing public security. Furthermore, "Counternarcotics operations in Peru are implemented primarily through the Ministry of the Interior by the Peruvian National Police," according to the US Government Accounting Office (GAO, now known as the Government Accountability Office). For this reason, the PNP receives a significant chunk of US drug war aid to Peru.
Basic details of the Bagua massacre such as exactly which police departments participated and how many indigenous protesters died remain unavailable two weeks after the massacre. Peru's La Primera newspaper--the only news outlet to provide information on specific police departments that participated in the massacre--writes, "The police operation was carried out by about 600 armed police from the Dinoes [Special Operations Department] and from the Anti-Drugs Department (DINANDRO), who shot head-on at protesters' bodies." Dinoes and DINANDRO are two forces within the Peruvian National Police.
Of particular interest is the participation of the anti-drugs police force, known as DINANDRO in its Spanish abbreviation. Between 2002 and 2007, the United States spent over $79 million on the PNP. 2002-2004 funds were for "training and field exercises to enhance the capabilities of DIRANDRO to conduct basic road and riverine exercises, as well as to provide security for eradication teams in outlying areas. These enhanced law enforcement efforts will require additional vehicles, communications, field gear, emergency/safety reaction gear, and drug detector canines." In 2007, the US government's funding for the DIRANDRO was expanded to "enhance the capabilities of DIRANDRO to conduct advanced road interdiction, riot control, greater security for eradication teams, and interdiction in hard-core areas." [emphasis added]. In 2007 the US government also debuted the first of at least four "Pre-Police Schools" for students that have completed secondary school education (that is, these schools are an alternative to high school). The "Pre-Police Schools" are free and designed to recruit and train young people to be members of the PNP.
Counterinsurgency
As Peru became further militarized under the pretense of the drug war, the US State Department justified its 2008 budget request for Peru by noting, "The major change in the FY 2008 police program will be the requirement to support a much-enlarged presence of the Peruvian National Police anti-drug police (DIRANDRO) in the coca growing valleys." While the region in which the massacre occurred is not by any means a major coca-growing region, it is certainly on the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's (UNODC) map (PDF file--see page 192).
The US government has a propensity to fund "anti-narcotics" operations in rebellious territory, which is then used, either overtly (note the DIRANDRO's US-provided training in riot control) or covertly, to fund counterinsurgency operations. The mere mention of the region on the UNODC's coca cultivation map combined with the presence of indigenous resistance organizations practically assures a military-police build-up in the region. In fact, a 1991 GAO report stated, "The [Peruvian] executive branch policy is to use counternarcotics aid against drug traffickers and insurgent groups linked to the drug trade....we believe the policy is reasonable." The GAO report goes on to say:
"Of the 702 police trained for counternarcotics purposes since 1989, only about 56 per cent were from units having a counternarcotics mission. The remaining 44 per cent were from police units having a primary mission of counterinsurgency. These units include the Sinchis and the Departamento de Operaciones Especiales [Dinoes, who also participated in the massacre]....In December 1990, the State Department instructed the Embassy that it could not train certain types of units, including the Departamento de Operaciones Especiales, because they were not directly involved in counternarcotics missions. Despite this notification, the Narcotics Affairs Section provided training to 32 personnel who should not have been trained; these 32 made up almost 14 per cent of the total number of police trained after the instruction was issued. According to section officials, providing special operations forces with training would help US efforts to solicit their support for future operations.... Although police from the Sinchis and the Departamento de Operaciones Especiales may perform some counternarcotics operations, their primary mission is recognized to be counterinsurgency."
While the GAO report is from the Fujimori era, the right wing presidents that followed him have done little to rectify past wrongs. One of the more blatant examples of this fact is Peru's amnesty law that protects dirty war criminals. Furthermore, current Peruvian President Alan Garcia is currently serving his second non-consecutive term; he served his first term in 1985-1990, when Peru's dirty war was in full swing. The Garcia administration has always been characterized by massacres in the face of social unrest: the current president presided over the Accomarca massacre in August 1985 (47-74 dead peasants), the Cayara massacre in May 1988 (about thirty dead and more disappeared), and various prison riots in which over 200 inmates were executed.
Unfortunately, Garcia's massacre of the Awajún and Wampi indigenous peoples at the Bagua blockade is only the latest in a series. Garcia himself seems entirely unrepentant regarding the latest massacre, reportedly calling the indigenous organizations that participated in the Bagua blockade "ignorant" and relying on typical racist arguments to downplay the indigenous movement. Implying that indigenous people are incapable of thinking for themselves and making their own decisions regarding their well-being, he told press that the indigenous organizations were being manipulated by foreign leftist forces.
Helicopters
Witnesses to the Bagua massacre claim that police fired tear gas and live ammunition from police helicopters. The helicopters, Russian-made Mi-17s, were not purchased with US dollars, but US drug war money has maintained them for years.
As part of the Andean Counterdrug Initiative, a George H.W. Bush program that spawned the infamous Plan Colombia, the US government undertook the task of upgrading Peru's fleet of police aircraft. Peru's La Republica reported that the US government aimed to upgrade the PNP's entire fleet. The US began providing funds for Peru's aircraft under the auspices of counternarcotics efforts in 1988. In 2004, the US government provided "funding for pilots, aircrews, and support personnel for 15 USG-owned UH-1H helicopters and 14 Peruvian Mi-17 helicopters," the latter being the same type of helicopter used in the Bagua massacre. Given that US foreign aid can be delayed for several years before it arrives in the recipient country, it is within the realm of possibility that the US government funded the pilots and crew that were in the Mi-17s that were allegedly used to murder indigenous Peruvians in Bagua.
In 2007, the State Department mentioned the Mi-17s amongst other PNP aircraft in its budget justification, writing that "FY 2007 funds will also cover fuel, maintenance, hangars and warehousing, aircraft rental when needed, and operational support for PNP Aviation (DIRAVPOL) personnel." A year later, the State Department wrote, "FY 2008 will continue heavy investment of funds in training and career development of PNP aviation personnel in addition to budgeting for increased flight hours."
In addition to funding Peru's existing Mi-17 helicopters, the United States has donated about 24 armed Huey II (UH-II) helicopters to the PNP. Hueys were not used in the Bagua massacre, but the massacre should make the US government think twice about donating combat helicopters with multiple guns and rocket launchers mounted all over the aircraft. The donated Huey II's came with the M16 armament system, which includes a combination of M6 flexible quad M60C 7.62mm machine guns and two seven-tube 2.75 inch MK-40 rocket launchers.
Republished from Narco News
US Government Trained the Police Department that Participated in the Operation and Invested "Heavily" in the Killer Helicopters
On June 5, the Peruvian National Police (PNP) massacred up to fifty unarmed Awajún and Wampi indigenous people in Bagua who had blockaded roads in protest of land reforms related to a recently implemented US-Peru free trade agreement. Witnesses report that the PNP shot live ammunition from the ground, rooftops, and police helicopters. Anywhere between 61-400 people are reported missing following the attack.
Narco News has discovered that US drug war money is all over the massacre. The US government has not only spent the past two decades funding the helicopters used in the massacre, it also trained the PNP in "riot control."
The Peruvian National Police
The Peruvian National Police is a militarized police force and Peru's only national police force, meaning that Peru lacks a civilian federal police force. For this reason, the militarized PNP carries out regular policing functions in Peru, such as maintaining the peace and providing public security. Furthermore, "Counternarcotics operations in Peru are implemented primarily through the Ministry of the Interior by the Peruvian National Police," according to the US Government Accounting Office (GAO, now known as the Government Accountability Office). For this reason, the PNP receives a significant chunk of US drug war aid to Peru.
Basic details of the Bagua massacre such as exactly which police departments participated and how many indigenous protesters died remain unavailable two weeks after the massacre. Peru's La Primera newspaper--the only news outlet to provide information on specific police departments that participated in the massacre--writes, "The police operation was carried out by about 600 armed police from the Dinoes [Special Operations Department] and from the Anti-Drugs Department (DINANDRO), who shot head-on at protesters' bodies." Dinoes and DINANDRO are two forces within the Peruvian National Police.
Of particular interest is the participation of the anti-drugs police force, known as DINANDRO in its Spanish abbreviation. Between 2002 and 2007, the United States spent over $79 million on the PNP. 2002-2004 funds were for "training and field exercises to enhance the capabilities of DIRANDRO to conduct basic road and riverine exercises, as well as to provide security for eradication teams in outlying areas. These enhanced law enforcement efforts will require additional vehicles, communications, field gear, emergency/safety reaction gear, and drug detector canines." In 2007, the US government's funding for the DIRANDRO was expanded to "enhance the capabilities of DIRANDRO to conduct advanced road interdiction, riot control, greater security for eradication teams, and interdiction in hard-core areas." [emphasis added]. In 2007 the US government also debuted the first of at least four "Pre-Police Schools" for students that have completed secondary school education (that is, these schools are an alternative to high school). The "Pre-Police Schools" are free and designed to recruit and train young people to be members of the PNP.
Counterinsurgency
As Peru became further militarized under the pretense of the drug war, the US State Department justified its 2008 budget request for Peru by noting, "The major change in the FY 2008 police program will be the requirement to support a much-enlarged presence of the Peruvian National Police anti-drug police (DIRANDRO) in the coca growing valleys." While the region in which the massacre occurred is not by any means a major coca-growing region, it is certainly on the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's (UNODC) map (PDF file--see page 192).
The US government has a propensity to fund "anti-narcotics" operations in rebellious territory, which is then used, either overtly (note the DIRANDRO's US-provided training in riot control) or covertly, to fund counterinsurgency operations. The mere mention of the region on the UNODC's coca cultivation map combined with the presence of indigenous resistance organizations practically assures a military-police build-up in the region. In fact, a 1991 GAO report stated, "The [Peruvian] executive branch policy is to use counternarcotics aid against drug traffickers and insurgent groups linked to the drug trade....we believe the policy is reasonable." The GAO report goes on to say:
"Of the 702 police trained for counternarcotics purposes since 1989, only about 56 per cent were from units having a counternarcotics mission. The remaining 44 per cent were from police units having a primary mission of counterinsurgency. These units include the Sinchis and the Departamento de Operaciones Especiales [Dinoes, who also participated in the massacre]....In December 1990, the State Department instructed the Embassy that it could not train certain types of units, including the Departamento de Operaciones Especiales, because they were not directly involved in counternarcotics missions. Despite this notification, the Narcotics Affairs Section provided training to 32 personnel who should not have been trained; these 32 made up almost 14 per cent of the total number of police trained after the instruction was issued. According to section officials, providing special operations forces with training would help US efforts to solicit their support for future operations.... Although police from the Sinchis and the Departamento de Operaciones Especiales may perform some counternarcotics operations, their primary mission is recognized to be counterinsurgency."
While the GAO report is from the Fujimori era, the right wing presidents that followed him have done little to rectify past wrongs. One of the more blatant examples of this fact is Peru's amnesty law that protects dirty war criminals. Furthermore, current Peruvian President Alan Garcia is currently serving his second non-consecutive term; he served his first term in 1985-1990, when Peru's dirty war was in full swing. The Garcia administration has always been characterized by massacres in the face of social unrest: the current president presided over the Accomarca massacre in August 1985 (47-74 dead peasants), the Cayara massacre in May 1988 (about thirty dead and more disappeared), and various prison riots in which over 200 inmates were executed.
Unfortunately, Garcia's massacre of the Awajún and Wampi indigenous peoples at the Bagua blockade is only the latest in a series. Garcia himself seems entirely unrepentant regarding the latest massacre, reportedly calling the indigenous organizations that participated in the Bagua blockade "ignorant" and relying on typical racist arguments to downplay the indigenous movement. Implying that indigenous people are incapable of thinking for themselves and making their own decisions regarding their well-being, he told press that the indigenous organizations were being manipulated by foreign leftist forces.
Helicopters
Witnesses to the Bagua massacre claim that police fired tear gas and live ammunition from police helicopters. The helicopters, Russian-made Mi-17s, were not purchased with US dollars, but US drug war money has maintained them for years.
As part of the Andean Counterdrug Initiative, a George H.W. Bush program that spawned the infamous Plan Colombia, the US government undertook the task of upgrading Peru's fleet of police aircraft. Peru's La Republica reported that the US government aimed to upgrade the PNP's entire fleet. The US began providing funds for Peru's aircraft under the auspices of counternarcotics efforts in 1988. In 2004, the US government provided "funding for pilots, aircrews, and support personnel for 15 USG-owned UH-1H helicopters and 14 Peruvian Mi-17 helicopters," the latter being the same type of helicopter used in the Bagua massacre. Given that US foreign aid can be delayed for several years before it arrives in the recipient country, it is within the realm of possibility that the US government funded the pilots and crew that were in the Mi-17s that were allegedly used to murder indigenous Peruvians in Bagua.
In 2007, the State Department mentioned the Mi-17s amongst other PNP aircraft in its budget justification, writing that "FY 2007 funds will also cover fuel, maintenance, hangars and warehousing, aircraft rental when needed, and operational support for PNP Aviation (DIRAVPOL) personnel." A year later, the State Department wrote, "FY 2008 will continue heavy investment of funds in training and career development of PNP aviation personnel in addition to budgeting for increased flight hours."
In addition to funding Peru's existing Mi-17 helicopters, the United States has donated about 24 armed Huey II (UH-II) helicopters to the PNP. Hueys were not used in the Bagua massacre, but the massacre should make the US government think twice about donating combat helicopters with multiple guns and rocket launchers mounted all over the aircraft. The donated Huey II's came with the M16 armament system, which includes a combination of M6 flexible quad M60C 7.62mm machine guns and two seven-tube 2.75 inch MK-40 rocket launchers.
Republished from Narco News
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
Peru: discontent rages on
Kiraz Janicke
Social unrest intensified this week in Peru, with the blockade of an important highway by mine workers, as well as strikes and demonstrations in the southern regions of Cusco and Andahuaylas. The demands of the protestors ranged from wage rises for school teachers, repealing the Water Resources Law and revoking mining concessions to fixing roads and blocking the construction of the Salca-Pucará hydroelectric plant.
The protests occurred in the wake of massive mobilizations by indigenous communities in the Amazon that forced the Peruvian government to back-down and revoke legislation linked to the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement, that would have opened up vast swathes of indigenous lands to transnational oil and gas, mining and logging companies.
However, the indigenous victory did not come without bloodshed as President Alan Garcia’s administration sent police and troops on June 5 against demonstrators to break up road blockades near Bagua in the Amazon, leaving at least 34 dead and scores disappeared.
Garcia’s brutal response to the protests sparked national outrage and the latest Ipsos Apoyo poll shows his approval rating has dropped 9 percentage points to 21 percent since the Bagua massacre.
Garcia's Cabinet chief Yehude Simon offered to resign over the incident however, Garcia has refused to accept his resignation although discontent with the government continues to rage on around the country.
The financial collapse of the U.S.-owned Doe Run Peru mining company prompted more than 3000 workers to blockade the main highway linking Lima with the country’s interior on June 22 demanding that ongoing labor issues be resolved.
Union leaders representing workers at Doe Run’s smelter in La Oroya, located 185 kilometers east of Lima, agreed at a meeting on June 20 to declare an indefinite strike and block roads.
The secretary-general of the metalworkers union representing La Oroya workers, Roberto Guzman, has called for government intervention to reactivate the plant and save jobs.
Meanwhile thousands of campesinos from Canchis and other provinces converged in Cusco on June 22 threatening to take over the local airport and demanding the repeal of the Water Resources Law, which would facilitate privitisation of water, as well as the cancellation of mining concessions and the construction of the Salca-Pucará hydroelectric plant.
In Andahuaylas thousands of campesinos that have been on indefinite strike since June 11 have blockaded roads demanding that the Ayacucho-Andahuaylas-Abancay highway is fixed and are also calling for the repeal of the Water Resources Law.
More than 5000 coca-growers have also threatened to blockade highways in Tingo María, Aucayacu, Tocache, Progreso and Tarapoto from June 29.
The announcement was made by coca-grower leaders in Alto Huallaga, Rosa Obregón and Miguel Martínez, after the government re-initiated eradication of coca crops, which indigenous communities use as part of there tradional way of life.
Obregón said that the government had signed accords with the coca-growers to suspend eradication programs while integral development plans for the Huallaga were being discussed, but has violated the accords.
If the government doesn’t listen to their demands highways in Pucallpa, Puerto Inca, and Huánuco would also be blockaded he said.
The General Confederation of Peruvian Workers has also called a national day of protest involving regional strikes and street mobilizations for July 8 in solidarity with the protests in the south of the country and an end to persecution of social movement leaders in particular those from indigenous communities.
Although the government has agreed to dialogue with the protesters, it has also authorized the mobilization of the Armed Forces in the Apurímac, Cusco and Junín regions – zones with strong social conflict - for ten days.
While it lifted the state of emergency in Bagua (decreed on May 9), it remains in place in the cities of Quimbiri and La Convención, in Cusco.
“Don't threaten too much. Don't think that the state or the government is weak,” Simon told protesters before agreeing to hold talks with them on Tuesday.
However, Simon who has been described as a “political cadaver” faces questioning in congress over the Bagua massacre, with both the left Nationalist Party and rightwing supporters of former president Alberto Fujimori calling for a censure motion and his resignation.
Garcia’s hold on congress is also tenuous, as his party, APRA, lacks a majority, and up to now he has relied on support from other right-wing parties such as Lourdes Flores’ National Unity, and Fujimori supporters to push through his neoliberal free-trade agenda.
Garcia cannot run for re-election in 2011 and in the context of economic contraction and rising social discontent he will find it increasingly difficult to implement his neoliberal agenda as indigenous communities, workers, campesinos and the poor organize to defend their interests against those of rapacious transnational capital.
Social unrest intensified this week in Peru, with the blockade of an important highway by mine workers, as well as strikes and demonstrations in the southern regions of Cusco and Andahuaylas. The demands of the protestors ranged from wage rises for school teachers, repealing the Water Resources Law and revoking mining concessions to fixing roads and blocking the construction of the Salca-Pucará hydroelectric plant.
The protests occurred in the wake of massive mobilizations by indigenous communities in the Amazon that forced the Peruvian government to back-down and revoke legislation linked to the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement, that would have opened up vast swathes of indigenous lands to transnational oil and gas, mining and logging companies.
However, the indigenous victory did not come without bloodshed as President Alan Garcia’s administration sent police and troops on June 5 against demonstrators to break up road blockades near Bagua in the Amazon, leaving at least 34 dead and scores disappeared.
Garcia’s brutal response to the protests sparked national outrage and the latest Ipsos Apoyo poll shows his approval rating has dropped 9 percentage points to 21 percent since the Bagua massacre.
Garcia's Cabinet chief Yehude Simon offered to resign over the incident however, Garcia has refused to accept his resignation although discontent with the government continues to rage on around the country.
The financial collapse of the U.S.-owned Doe Run Peru mining company prompted more than 3000 workers to blockade the main highway linking Lima with the country’s interior on June 22 demanding that ongoing labor issues be resolved.
Union leaders representing workers at Doe Run’s smelter in La Oroya, located 185 kilometers east of Lima, agreed at a meeting on June 20 to declare an indefinite strike and block roads.
The secretary-general of the metalworkers union representing La Oroya workers, Roberto Guzman, has called for government intervention to reactivate the plant and save jobs.
Meanwhile thousands of campesinos from Canchis and other provinces converged in Cusco on June 22 threatening to take over the local airport and demanding the repeal of the Water Resources Law, which would facilitate privitisation of water, as well as the cancellation of mining concessions and the construction of the Salca-Pucará hydroelectric plant.
In Andahuaylas thousands of campesinos that have been on indefinite strike since June 11 have blockaded roads demanding that the Ayacucho-Andahuaylas-Abancay highway is fixed and are also calling for the repeal of the Water Resources Law.
More than 5000 coca-growers have also threatened to blockade highways in Tingo María, Aucayacu, Tocache, Progreso and Tarapoto from June 29.
The announcement was made by coca-grower leaders in Alto Huallaga, Rosa Obregón and Miguel Martínez, after the government re-initiated eradication of coca crops, which indigenous communities use as part of there tradional way of life.
Obregón said that the government had signed accords with the coca-growers to suspend eradication programs while integral development plans for the Huallaga were being discussed, but has violated the accords.
If the government doesn’t listen to their demands highways in Pucallpa, Puerto Inca, and Huánuco would also be blockaded he said.
The General Confederation of Peruvian Workers has also called a national day of protest involving regional strikes and street mobilizations for July 8 in solidarity with the protests in the south of the country and an end to persecution of social movement leaders in particular those from indigenous communities.
Although the government has agreed to dialogue with the protesters, it has also authorized the mobilization of the Armed Forces in the Apurímac, Cusco and Junín regions – zones with strong social conflict - for ten days.
While it lifted the state of emergency in Bagua (decreed on May 9), it remains in place in the cities of Quimbiri and La Convención, in Cusco.
“Don't threaten too much. Don't think that the state or the government is weak,” Simon told protesters before agreeing to hold talks with them on Tuesday.
However, Simon who has been described as a “political cadaver” faces questioning in congress over the Bagua massacre, with both the left Nationalist Party and rightwing supporters of former president Alberto Fujimori calling for a censure motion and his resignation.
Garcia’s hold on congress is also tenuous, as his party, APRA, lacks a majority, and up to now he has relied on support from other right-wing parties such as Lourdes Flores’ National Unity, and Fujimori supporters to push through his neoliberal free-trade agenda.
Garcia cannot run for re-election in 2011 and in the context of economic contraction and rising social discontent he will find it increasingly difficult to implement his neoliberal agenda as indigenous communities, workers, campesinos and the poor organize to defend their interests against those of rapacious transnational capital.
Peru: Blood Flows In The Amazon
James Petras
In early June, Peruvian President Alan García, an ally of US President Barack Obama, ordered armored personnel carriers, helicopter gun-ships and hundreds of heavily armed troops to assault and disperse a peaceful, legal protest organized by members of Peru’s Amazonian indigenous communities protesting the entry of foreign multinational mining companies on their traditional homelands.
Dozens of Indians were killed or are missing, scores have been injured and arrested and a number of Peruvian police, held hostage by the indigenous protestors were killed in the assault. President García declared martial law in the region in order to enforce his unilateral and unconstitutional fiat granting of mining exploitation rights to foreign companies, which infringed on the integrity of traditional Amazonian indigenous communal lands.
Alan García is no stranger to government-sponsored massacres. In June 1986, he ordered the military to bomb and shell prisons in the capital holding many hundreds of political prisoners protesting prison conditions – resulting in over 400 known victims. Later obscure mass graves revealed dozens more. This notorious massacre took place while García was hosting a gathering of the so-called ‘Socialist’ International in Lima. His political party, APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) a member of the ‘International’, was embarrassed by the public display of its ‘national-socialist’ proclivities, before hundreds of European Social Democrat functionaries. Charged with misappropriation of government funds and leaving office with an inflation rate of almost 8,000% in 1990, he agreed to support Presidential candidate Alberto Fujimori in exchange for amnesty. When Fujimori imposed a dictatorship in 1992, García went into self-imposed exile in Colombia and later, France. He returned in 2001 when the statute of limitations on his corruption charges had expired and Fujimori was forced to resign amidst charges of running death squads and spying on his critics. García won the 2006 Presidential elections in a run-off against the pro-Indian nationalist candidate and former Army officer, Ollanta Humala, thanks to financial and media backing by Lima’s rightwing, ethnic European oligarchs and US overseas ‘AID’ agencies.
Back in power, García left no doubt about his political and economic agenda. In October 2007 he announced his strategy of placing foreign multi-national mining companies at the center of his economic ‘development’ program, while justifying the brutal displacement of small producers from communal lands and indigenous villages in the name of ‘modernization’.
García pushed through congressional legislation in line with the US-promoted ‘Free Trade Agreement of the Americas’ or ALCA. Peru was one of only three Latin American nations to support the US proposal. He opened Peru to the unprecedented plunder of its resources, labor, land and markets by the multinationals. In late 2007, García began to award huge tracts of traditional indigenous lands in the Amazon region for exploitation by foreign mining and energy multinationals. This was in violation of a 1969 International Labor Organization-brokered agreement obligating the Peruvian government to consult and negotiate with the indigenous inhabitants over exploitation of their lands and rivers. Under his ‘open door’ policy, the mining sector of the economy expanded rapidly and made huge profits from the record-high world commodity prices and the growing Asian (Chinese) demand for raw materials. The multinational corporations were attracted by Peru’s low corporate taxes and royalty payments and virtually free access to water and cheap government-subsidized electricity rates. The enforcement of environmental regulations was suspended in these ecologically fragile regions, leading to wide-spread contamination of the rivers, ground water, air and soil in the surrounding indigenous communities. Poisons from mining operations led to massive fish kills and rendered the water unfit for drinking. The operations decimated the tropical forests, undermining the livelihood of tens of thousands of villagers engaged in traditional artisan work and subsistence forest gathering and agricultural activities.
The profits of the mining bonanza go primarily to the overseas companies. The García regime distributes state revenues to his supporters among the financial and real estate speculators, luxury goods importers and political cronies in Lima’s enclosed upscale, heavily guarded neighborhoods and exclusive country-clubs. As the profit margins of the multinationals reached an incredible 50% and government revenues exceeded $1 billion US dollars, the indigenous communities lacked paved roads, safe water, basic health services and schools. Worse still, they experienced a rapid deterioration of their everyday lives as the influx of mining capital led to increased prices for basic food and medicine. Even the World Bank in its Annual Report for 2008 and the editors of the Financial Times of London urged the García regime to address the growing discontent and crisis among the indigenous communities. Delegations from the indigenous communities had traveled to Lima to try to establish a dialogue with the President in order to address the degradation of their lands and communities. The delegates were met with closed doors. García maintained that ‘progress and modernity come from the big investments by the multinationals…,(rather than) the poor peasants who haven’t a centavo to invest.’ He interpreted the appeals for peaceful dialogue as a sign of weakness among the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon and increased his grants of exploitation concessions to foreign MNCs even deeper into the Amazon. He cut off virtually all possibility for dialogue and compromise with the Indian communities.
The Amazonian Indian communities responded by forming the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP). They held public protests for over 7 weeks culminating in the blocking of two transnational highways. This enraged García, who referred to the protestors as ‘savages and barbarians’ and sent police and military units to suppress the mass action. What García failed to consider was the fact that a significant proportion of indigenous men in these villages had served as rmy conscripts, who fought in the 1995 war against Ecuador while others had been trained in local self-defense community organizations. These combat veterans were not intimidated by state terror and their resistance to the initial police attacks resulted in both police and Indian casualties. García then declared ‘war on the savages’ sending a heavy military force with helicopters and armored troops with orders to ‘shoot to kill’. AIDESEP activists report over one hundred deaths among the indigenous protestors and their families: Indians were murdered in the streets, in their homes and workplaces. The remains of many victims are believed to have been dumped in the ravines and rivers.
Conclusion
The Obama regime has predictably not issued a single word of concern or protest in the face of one of the worst massacres of Peruvian civilians in this decade – perpetrated by one of America’s closest remaining allies in Latin America. García, taking his talking points from the US Ambassador, accused Venezuela and Bolivia of having instigated the Indian ‘uprising’, quoting a letter of support from Bolivia’s President Evo Morales sent to an intercontinental conference of Indian communities held in Lima in May as ‘proof’. Martial law was declared and the entire Amazon region of Peru is being militarized. Meetings are banned and family members are forbidden from searching for their missing relatives.
Throughout Latin America, all the major Indian organizations have expressed their solidarity with the Peruvian indigenous movements. Within Peru, mass social movements, trade unions and human rights groups have organized a general strike on June 11. Fearing the spread of mass protests, El Commercio, the conservative Lima daily, cautioned García to adopt some conciliatory measures to avoid a generalized urban uprising. A one-day truce was declared on June 10, but the Indian organizations refused to end their blockade of the highways unless the García Government rescinds its illegal land grant decrees.
In the meantime, a strange silence hangs over the White House. Our usually garrulous President Obama, so adept at reciting platitudes about diversity and tolerance and praising peace and justice, cannot find a single phrase in his prepared script condemning the massacre of scores of indigenous inhabitants of the Peruvian Amazon. When egregious violations of human rights are committed in Latin America by a US backed client-President following Washington’s formula of ‘free trade’, deregulation of environmental protections and hostility toward anti-imperialist countries (Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador), Obama favors complicity over condemnation.
Republished from Countercurrents.org
Monday, 22 June 2009
Defeating the US-Peru Free Trade Pact: Victory in the Amazon
Laura Carlsen
Thousands of indigenous people from the Amazon jungle of Peru accomplished the unthinkable last week. Their movement to save the Amazon and their communities forced the Peruvian government to roll back implementing legislation for the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement that would have opened up the vast jungle to transnational oil and gas, mining and timber companies.
The decision did not come without blood. Police attacked indigenous roadblocks and sit-ins in Bagua in northern Peru, killing some sixty indigenous protestors members of a 300,000 strong interethnic association of Amazon groups , according to estimates by human rights groups. The Peruvian government claims that 24 police officers and nine civilians died in the violence. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN Special Rapporteur and other human rights and environmental organizations throughout the world have initiated investigations into the massacre.
Peru’s Congress, deep in a political crisis of national and international legitimacy, voted 82 to 12 to repeal Legislative Decree 1090, the Forestry and Wildlife Law and 1064, the reform to permit changes in agrarian land use without full prior consent.
As president Alan Garcia went on national television to admit errors in not consulting with the indigenous groups of the Amazon, Daysi Zapata, representative of the association celebrated the triumph:
“Today is an historic day, we are thankful because the will of the indigenous peoples has been taken into account and we just hope that in the future, the governments attend and listen to the people, that they don’t legislate behind our backs.”
Zapata called to lift roadblocks and other actions throughout the country, while anticipating more battles to come over the repeal of seven related decrees, reinstatement of legislators suspended for protesting government actions against the Amazon people and the safe return of the president of the association, Alberto Pizango, forced to seek asylum in Nicaragua.
Indigenous women fought at the forefront of protests against the displacement of indigenous communities in the Amazon in the interests of foreign-led development plans. A Spanish sub-titled video of an Aguaruna mother provides a rare glimpse of how the Amazon communities view these plans--even if you don’t understand her language, her anguish and anger cut straight to the heart. Other videos taken by journalists who risked their lives as police fired on demonstrators, quickly circulated in the cyber world, raising global indignation.
Washington’s “New” Trade Policy Leads to Amazon Massacre
The recent clash between indigenous peoples and the Peruvian national police sends a powerful message from the Amazon jungle straight to Washington. The enormous social, political, and environmental costs of the free trade model are no longer acceptable.
In addition to the dead, hundreds remain missing and reports that the police threw the bodies of the protestors in the river to hide the real death toll have begun to circulate. Survival International and Amazon Watch have deplored the violence, the subsequent crackdown on NGOs in Peru, and the role that the free-trade agreement played in the crisis.
In May 2004 the U.S. and Peruvian governments began negotiations for a free trade agreement and signed the bilateral agreement onDecember 8, 2005. The signing provoked the first round of widespread protests, led by small farmers. Demonstrations against the agreement continued up through the signing of the ratified version by former president Bush and President Garcia in January of this year; four protestors were killed in 2008.
No doubt exists about the connection between the protests, the executive decrees, and the U.S. free trade agreement. In his televised mea culpa, Garcia began by stating that the repudiated measures were designed to eliminate illegal logging and informal mining (by legalizing it in the hands of transnationals, according to critics) and was “a demand of ecologist and progressive sectors in the North American Congress in negociations to pass the Free Trade Agreement”.
The U.S.-Peru trade agreement is held up as a model of the new trade agreement developed through a compromise between free-trade Republicans and Democrats with growing anti-free trade constituencies. To avoid the negative connotations of free trade agreements it was redubbed a “Trade Promotion Agreement” and incorporates environmental and labor standards into the text. These are the standards Garcia says he was complying with when he passed the decrees to open up 45 million hectares of Peruvian jungle to developers.
The Democratic leadership in Congress pushed the new model that looks remarkable=y like the old model, although the majority of Democrats voted against it. At the Pathways to Prosperity meeting, Sec. of State Hillary Clinton hailed the agreement as “good environmental stewardship”-- just four days before Peruvian police shot indigenous activists protesting invasion of the Amazon jungle.
The Obama administration has so far avoided comments on the conflict. But neither the battle for the Amazon or the debate over free trade’s role in indigenous displacement and environmental destruction are likely to go away any time soon, despite repeal of the decrees.
A planetary lung and a legendary reserve of culture and biodiversity, the Amazon region embodies conflicting values and views of human progress.
For Peruvian President Alan Garcia, in an editorial in El Comercio, the jungle is currently just a big waste: “There are millions of hectares of timber lying idle, another millions of hectares that communities and associations have not and will not cultivate, hundreds of mineral deposits that are not dug up and millions of hectares of ocean not used for aquaculture. The rivers that run down both sides of the mountains represent a fortune that reaches the sea without producing electricity.”
Garcia argues that indigenous peoples, just because they were lucky enough to be born in the Amazon, do not have special land-use rights on the land. Instead, the Amazon should be carved up into very large plots and sold to people with the capital to make use of it. The Peruvian government coveted the free trade agreement with the United States because, along with the required changes in national legislation, it opens up the Amazon to foreign investment.
In contrast, the indigenous communities and their supporters seek to conserve the Amazon jungles, and preserve traditional knowledge and cultures, all of which would be threatened by exploitation, bioprospecting and patent law changes under the FTA.
This contest between oil wells and jungles, foreign engineers and Amazon inhabitants has spread to the rest of Peru and the world. On June 11, tens of thousands of people marched in support of the indigenous protests in cities and towns across the country, chanting, “In defense of the jungle--the jungle is not for sale.” Simultaneously, demonstrators hit the streets to show support for the indigenous communities in cities throughout the world.
And it follows similar battles in other countries. In Mexico, hundreds of thousands of farmers marched to protest NAFTA’s agricultural chapter; in Colombia, indigenous and farm organizations marched to oppose a U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement; in Costa Rica, nearly half the population voted against CAFTA; and Guatemala, CAFTA protesters were killed in the streets.
Yet somehow these voices never make it into the U.S. trade debate. The assumption that a free trade agreement is a gift to a developing country continues to be enforced by a U.S. government refusal to listen to voices other than national economic elites. Meanwhile, the New York Times echoes accusations that foreign countries or terrorist organizations have duped these thousands of women, farmers, indigenous groups, and workers into opposing progress.
As long as providing clear access and mobility for transnational companies and financial capital is accepted as the sole measure of progress, concerns for the earth and human beings with little economic power and a different view of development won’t be part of the discussion.
We have to rethink the free-trade model and listen to the men, women and children on the bottom of the economic ladder who sacrifice their lives to help save the Amazon jungles they call home. We owe them an enormous debt. The global crisis compels a new vision of sustainable growth and social equity. The Obama administration has noted the need for changes--reviewing trade policy should be at the top of the agenda.
Laura Carlsen is director of the Americas Policy Program in Mexico City. She can be reached at: (lcarlsen(a)ciponline.org).
Republished from CounterPunch
Thousands of indigenous people from the Amazon jungle of Peru accomplished the unthinkable last week. Their movement to save the Amazon and their communities forced the Peruvian government to roll back implementing legislation for the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement that would have opened up the vast jungle to transnational oil and gas, mining and timber companies.
The decision did not come without blood. Police attacked indigenous roadblocks and sit-ins in Bagua in northern Peru, killing some sixty indigenous protestors members of a 300,000 strong interethnic association of Amazon groups , according to estimates by human rights groups. The Peruvian government claims that 24 police officers and nine civilians died in the violence. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN Special Rapporteur and other human rights and environmental organizations throughout the world have initiated investigations into the massacre.
Peru’s Congress, deep in a political crisis of national and international legitimacy, voted 82 to 12 to repeal Legislative Decree 1090, the Forestry and Wildlife Law and 1064, the reform to permit changes in agrarian land use without full prior consent.
As president Alan Garcia went on national television to admit errors in not consulting with the indigenous groups of the Amazon, Daysi Zapata, representative of the association celebrated the triumph:
“Today is an historic day, we are thankful because the will of the indigenous peoples has been taken into account and we just hope that in the future, the governments attend and listen to the people, that they don’t legislate behind our backs.”
Zapata called to lift roadblocks and other actions throughout the country, while anticipating more battles to come over the repeal of seven related decrees, reinstatement of legislators suspended for protesting government actions against the Amazon people and the safe return of the president of the association, Alberto Pizango, forced to seek asylum in Nicaragua.
Indigenous women fought at the forefront of protests against the displacement of indigenous communities in the Amazon in the interests of foreign-led development plans. A Spanish sub-titled video of an Aguaruna mother provides a rare glimpse of how the Amazon communities view these plans--even if you don’t understand her language, her anguish and anger cut straight to the heart. Other videos taken by journalists who risked their lives as police fired on demonstrators, quickly circulated in the cyber world, raising global indignation.
Washington’s “New” Trade Policy Leads to Amazon Massacre
The recent clash between indigenous peoples and the Peruvian national police sends a powerful message from the Amazon jungle straight to Washington. The enormous social, political, and environmental costs of the free trade model are no longer acceptable.
In addition to the dead, hundreds remain missing and reports that the police threw the bodies of the protestors in the river to hide the real death toll have begun to circulate. Survival International and Amazon Watch have deplored the violence, the subsequent crackdown on NGOs in Peru, and the role that the free-trade agreement played in the crisis.
In May 2004 the U.S. and Peruvian governments began negotiations for a free trade agreement and signed the bilateral agreement onDecember 8, 2005. The signing provoked the first round of widespread protests, led by small farmers. Demonstrations against the agreement continued up through the signing of the ratified version by former president Bush and President Garcia in January of this year; four protestors were killed in 2008.
No doubt exists about the connection between the protests, the executive decrees, and the U.S. free trade agreement. In his televised mea culpa, Garcia began by stating that the repudiated measures were designed to eliminate illegal logging and informal mining (by legalizing it in the hands of transnationals, according to critics) and was “a demand of ecologist and progressive sectors in the North American Congress in negociations to pass the Free Trade Agreement”.
The U.S.-Peru trade agreement is held up as a model of the new trade agreement developed through a compromise between free-trade Republicans and Democrats with growing anti-free trade constituencies. To avoid the negative connotations of free trade agreements it was redubbed a “Trade Promotion Agreement” and incorporates environmental and labor standards into the text. These are the standards Garcia says he was complying with when he passed the decrees to open up 45 million hectares of Peruvian jungle to developers.
The Democratic leadership in Congress pushed the new model that looks remarkable=y like the old model, although the majority of Democrats voted against it. At the Pathways to Prosperity meeting, Sec. of State Hillary Clinton hailed the agreement as “good environmental stewardship”-- just four days before Peruvian police shot indigenous activists protesting invasion of the Amazon jungle.
The Obama administration has so far avoided comments on the conflict. But neither the battle for the Amazon or the debate over free trade’s role in indigenous displacement and environmental destruction are likely to go away any time soon, despite repeal of the decrees.
A planetary lung and a legendary reserve of culture and biodiversity, the Amazon region embodies conflicting values and views of human progress.
For Peruvian President Alan Garcia, in an editorial in El Comercio, the jungle is currently just a big waste: “There are millions of hectares of timber lying idle, another millions of hectares that communities and associations have not and will not cultivate, hundreds of mineral deposits that are not dug up and millions of hectares of ocean not used for aquaculture. The rivers that run down both sides of the mountains represent a fortune that reaches the sea without producing electricity.”
Garcia argues that indigenous peoples, just because they were lucky enough to be born in the Amazon, do not have special land-use rights on the land. Instead, the Amazon should be carved up into very large plots and sold to people with the capital to make use of it. The Peruvian government coveted the free trade agreement with the United States because, along with the required changes in national legislation, it opens up the Amazon to foreign investment.
In contrast, the indigenous communities and their supporters seek to conserve the Amazon jungles, and preserve traditional knowledge and cultures, all of which would be threatened by exploitation, bioprospecting and patent law changes under the FTA.
This contest between oil wells and jungles, foreign engineers and Amazon inhabitants has spread to the rest of Peru and the world. On June 11, tens of thousands of people marched in support of the indigenous protests in cities and towns across the country, chanting, “In defense of the jungle--the jungle is not for sale.” Simultaneously, demonstrators hit the streets to show support for the indigenous communities in cities throughout the world.
And it follows similar battles in other countries. In Mexico, hundreds of thousands of farmers marched to protest NAFTA’s agricultural chapter; in Colombia, indigenous and farm organizations marched to oppose a U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement; in Costa Rica, nearly half the population voted against CAFTA; and Guatemala, CAFTA protesters were killed in the streets.
Yet somehow these voices never make it into the U.S. trade debate. The assumption that a free trade agreement is a gift to a developing country continues to be enforced by a U.S. government refusal to listen to voices other than national economic elites. Meanwhile, the New York Times echoes accusations that foreign countries or terrorist organizations have duped these thousands of women, farmers, indigenous groups, and workers into opposing progress.
As long as providing clear access and mobility for transnational companies and financial capital is accepted as the sole measure of progress, concerns for the earth and human beings with little economic power and a different view of development won’t be part of the discussion.
We have to rethink the free-trade model and listen to the men, women and children on the bottom of the economic ladder who sacrifice their lives to help save the Amazon jungles they call home. We owe them an enormous debt. The global crisis compels a new vision of sustainable growth and social equity. The Obama administration has noted the need for changes--reviewing trade policy should be at the top of the agenda.
Laura Carlsen is director of the Americas Policy Program in Mexico City. She can be reached at: (lcarlsen(a)ciponline.org).
Republished from CounterPunch
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