By Karl Cosser, Bagua
An indigenous uprising in the Peruvian Amazon has forced the US-backed government of President Alan Garcia to repeal key decrees that aimed to open the region to greater exploitation by oil and gas corporations. However, indigenous people faced violent repression from security forces as they tried to defend their land and the environment. On June 5, a brutal massacre occurred in Bagua, with dozens of indigenous people murdered by police.
Karl Cosser, a member of the Socialist Alliance from Australia currently in Peru, recently visited Bagua. He was part of a small group led by Hugo Blanco, a veteran revolutionary and fighter for indigenous and peasant rights. Blanco is the director of the Lucha Indigena newspaper. Blanco is keen to establish links between the struggles of Peruvian indigenous peoples and Indigenous people in Australia. He is asking Indigenous rights activists and Aboriginal leaders to email him at hugucha@yahoo.com.
* * *
After an overnight bus ride thorough the Andes mountain range, we arrived at the town of Bagua just before the sun came up. Standing in the main plaza looking out into the park, it seemed surreal at how peaceful it was this time of morning, considering the brutal slaughter of local indigenous people that happened there only a few weeks before.
Overlooking the park was a two-storey high police station from which shots were fired killing and injuring dozens of civilians. Many locals had gathered around the police station after they heard that protesters had been killed by police at Curva del Diablo, just out of town. The protesters had been blocking the road.
From observations and statements by local people, it was clear the police at the station were not acting in self-defence when they fired on the crowd. The walls of the station were solid brick and concrete. There was no evidence of bullet marks on the walls.
Later in the day we travelled further into the Amazon jungle. We visited the village of Chiriaco, from where many people were reported killed, missing and injured.
Several community members displayed injuries as evidence of police repression, including wounds from beatings and bullet marks on their bodies. Local community members said they had no firearms, but carried their traditional carved hardwood timber spears. A community member said the spear was ornamental artwork as a cultural expression, not a practical weapon.
Although the people protesting had ornamental spears as an expression of indigenous pride and identity, they did not represent a genuine threat to the police that would justify an armed attack.
Holding on to his spear in a bamboo hut, a Chiriaco community member told us of further atrocities committed by the state that day. Police rounded up people who were taken away and are still missing. Up to 200 indigenous people could be dead.
Reports made state that police chased after people as they were trying to escape into the jungle, all within full view of children and other family members. It is highly likely that the children forced to witness such brutality will be traumatised by experiencing such events.
At this stage, it is difficult to get an accurate number of those who have disappeared or died. This was an act of terrorism carried out by the Peruvian people’s own government in the name of neoliberalism.
Chiriaco, among many other indigenous communities in Peru, has been the victim of neoliberal policies imposed upon it without consideration or respect for its rich culture and history.
One resident of Chiriaco told us they have their own concept of socialism and collectivism. They don’t support a system that does not include them in economic decision making for the benefit of the community.
Hugo Blanco, the director of the Lucha Indigena newspaper, said that when a multinational corporation sought to use the land of the Amazon indigenous people, they had no respect for the long term sustainability of the land and have the freedom to move on to somewhere else in the world once all resources had been consumed.
The laws of use of chemicals for agriculture in Peru are relaxed, which corporations exploit. The Amazon indigenous people, who have lived in harmony with their environment for many years, are being forced off their land. This is the reason for the urgency in the struggle for defence of the Amazon — the lungs of the earth.
The Peruvian government shows more respect for those with money to buy the Amazon than for the rights of indigenous people. Therefore, the indigenous struggle and the defence of the environment is a class struggle.
Neoliberalism, among other things, is part of a global project seeking to exploit the resources of indigenous land all over the world — including the land of Aboriginal people in Australia.
Most recently, in the form the “Northern Territory intervention”, there is an attempt to drive Indigenous communities off their land. Australian scientist Helen Caldicott said the land grab was for the purpose of uranium mining and using the Northern Territory to dump nuclear waste.
Blanco, who is from the Quechua indigenous people, is encouraging Australian Indigenous activists to contact him to extend solidarity between the indigenous peoples of Peru and Australia.
Republished from Green Left Weekly
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
Thursday, 10 September 2009
Peruvian Cited for “Most Racist Article of the Year”
LONDON – A column in the Peruvian daily El Correo that appeared to suggest the use of napalm against Amazon Indians was cited Wednesday by indigenous-rights watchdog Survival International as the most racist article of 2009.
“I don’t know what keeps the president from providing the air force with all the napalm necessary,” Andres Bedoya Ugarteche concludes in a June 13 piece that followed a police crackdown on Indian protesters.
The writer referred to the Amazon Indians involved in the protests as the “same people who perfected the art of shrinking the heads of their enemies and wearing them on the belts holding up their loincloths.”
“If the ‘natives’ didn’t shrink the heads of the policemen they killed (in the protests) and eat their remains, it was only because there wasn’t time,” Bedoya wrote.
He complained that the “savages” and “Palaeolithics” maintain that “oil – which belongs to all Peruvians – shouldn’t be exploited if it lies under what they call ‘their’ land. What a cheek! They’re against logging for the same reason.”
Bedoya also ridiculed three indigenous congresswomen as “the three starlets of the parliamentary sewers.”
Survival cited Bedoya’s column as part of its Stamp it Out campaign, “which aims to challenge racist descriptions of indigenous peoples in the world’s media.”
The London-based group plans to send Bedoya a certificate inscribed with a quotation from Lakota Sioux author Luther Standing Bear: “All the years of calling the Indian a savage has never made him one.”
Peru’s Congress voted overwhelmingly in late June to repeal two laws that sparked two months of protests by Amazon Indians in which as many as 85 people may have lost their lives.
The laws gave Lima the power to grant mining, logging and drilling concessions on Indian lands without consulting residents.
Starting April 9, indigenous people opposed to the legislation disrupted transport links and seized control of oil-industry installations, effectively shutting down a pipeline that carries crude oil from the Amazon interior to Peru’s northern coast.
The dispute became violent on June 5, when police used force to evict the protesters from a key highway near Bagua.
President Alan Garcia’s government said 24 police and nine Indians died. Aidesep, the indigenous peoples’ association that organized the protests, put the death toll among the protesters at between 30 and 40, and a leading Peruvian human rights organization said that 61 people remained missing in the wake of the violence. EFE
Republished from the Latin American Herald Tribune
“I don’t know what keeps the president from providing the air force with all the napalm necessary,” Andres Bedoya Ugarteche concludes in a June 13 piece that followed a police crackdown on Indian protesters.
The writer referred to the Amazon Indians involved in the protests as the “same people who perfected the art of shrinking the heads of their enemies and wearing them on the belts holding up their loincloths.”
“If the ‘natives’ didn’t shrink the heads of the policemen they killed (in the protests) and eat their remains, it was only because there wasn’t time,” Bedoya wrote.
He complained that the “savages” and “Palaeolithics” maintain that “oil – which belongs to all Peruvians – shouldn’t be exploited if it lies under what they call ‘their’ land. What a cheek! They’re against logging for the same reason.”
Bedoya also ridiculed three indigenous congresswomen as “the three starlets of the parliamentary sewers.”
Survival cited Bedoya’s column as part of its Stamp it Out campaign, “which aims to challenge racist descriptions of indigenous peoples in the world’s media.”
The London-based group plans to send Bedoya a certificate inscribed with a quotation from Lakota Sioux author Luther Standing Bear: “All the years of calling the Indian a savage has never made him one.”
Peru’s Congress voted overwhelmingly in late June to repeal two laws that sparked two months of protests by Amazon Indians in which as many as 85 people may have lost their lives.
The laws gave Lima the power to grant mining, logging and drilling concessions on Indian lands without consulting residents.
Starting April 9, indigenous people opposed to the legislation disrupted transport links and seized control of oil-industry installations, effectively shutting down a pipeline that carries crude oil from the Amazon interior to Peru’s northern coast.
The dispute became violent on June 5, when police used force to evict the protesters from a key highway near Bagua.
President Alan Garcia’s government said 24 police and nine Indians died. Aidesep, the indigenous peoples’ association that organized the protests, put the death toll among the protesters at between 30 and 40, and a leading Peruvian human rights organization said that 61 people remained missing in the wake of the violence. EFE
Republished from the Latin American Herald Tribune
Thursday, 6 August 2009
Peru: witch hunt against indigenous protesters
Peru's government not only ordered the brutal massacre of indigenous peoples protesting to defend the environment and their way of life from rapacious transnational companies, in Bagua on June 5, (from which at least 60 people remain "disappeared"), but has also launched racist witch hunt, forcing 2 indigenous leaders into exile, and charging a further 120 with "murder" and "sedition" in its drive to carve up the Amazon and flog it off to oil, mining and logging companies.
President Alan Garcia has cynically claimed "foreign interference" from Venezuela and Bolivia is behind the indigenous protests, while at the same time whipping up racism against indigenous communities, referring to them as "second class citizens" and saying they are like "dogs in a barnyard," in order to ram through his agenda.
Read article below about how indigenous leader Santiago Manuin, who is lying in a hospital bed fighting for his life after receiving at least 4 bullet wounds, is hounded by police armed with AK47 assault rifles.
Jail and trial are next for wounded Peru Indians
By ANDREW WHALEN (AP) Aug 3 2009
CHICLAYO, Peru — Santiago Manuin is lucky to be alive. On June 5, the Awajun Indian leader was hit by at least four bullets when police broke up a protest by Indians over government plans for large-scale economic development of their ancestral lands in the Amazon.
Inside his hospital room, Manuin lies in a bed while a plastic pouch drains his intestines. Outside the door, five police officers lounge on wooden benches, AK-47 assault rifles resting across their knees.
Manuin is the most prominent of 48 protesters wounded in the June melee who face jail the moment hospital doctors sign discharge papers, according to Peru's main Amazon Indian federation.
Critics of the government say it is no way to treat people who engaged in peaceful civil disobedience — blocking roads and rivers — to protect their traditional lands from the oil drilling, mining, farming and logging projects envisioned by President Alan Garcia.
Negotiations to resolve the dispute, involving 350,000 Amazon Indians, will be difficult if the government treats the protest leaders as criminals, the U.N. special envoy on indigenous rights, James Anaya, said last week.
The dark, wiry Manuin is more blunt.
"Justice doesn't exist for the indigenous. The government values the police more than us and doesn't want to acknowledge its mistake," the 53-year-old apu, or tribal leader, said from his hospital bed.
The government's mistake, Indian leaders and sympathizers say, has been to vilify protest leaders while failing to consider that police might have used excessive force. At least 10 civilians and 23 police officers were killed in the violence, while 200 civilians were wounded, 82 by gunshot, according to Peru's ombudsman's office.
"It's very surprising that while there are criminal investigations against people accused of killing police, no one has been arrested or implicated for the abuses that led to the death of the indigenous protesters," said Susan Lee, director of Amnesty International's Americas program. Amnesty says it has gathered testimony telling of police abuses.
Peru's justice minister, Auerelio Pastor, defended the police action before a U.N. Human Rights Committee in Geneva on Monday and said the government has no plans to drop any charges.
The government's request that protesters clear the road "by no means justifies acts of violence, and the seizure of highways and interruption of public services is illegal," he said.
Pastor also echoed a claim repeatedly voiced by Garcia: that unidentified foreign elements have incited the Indians to instigate the violence.
The president of AIDESEP, the Indian federation that organized the protests, says 120 Indians have been charged with crimes including murder and sedition. Many wounded Indians have not sought medical attention for fear of arrest, the federation's president, Daysi Zapata, told The Associated Press.
AIDESEP's top leader, Alberto Pizango, and two other officials of the organization have taken asylum in Nicaragua from sedition and rebellion charges.
In a July report following a visit to Peru, Anaya, the U.N. envoy, called for an independent, internationally backed investigation into the violence.
The government has yet to publicly respond.
Manuin is expected to be released from the main hospital in Chiclayo shortly after an operation this week to close the hole in his stomach and reconnect his intestines. He will then be jailed and tried on charges of inciting murder and unrest, which carry a maximum penalty of 35 years in prison. His lawyer has appealed to reduce his arrest warrant to an order to appear in court.
The Jesuit-schooled Manuin is an internationally recognized activist who met with Spain's Queen Sofia in 1994 after leading Awajun resistance to leftist rebels who tried to get his people to grow coca, the basis of cocaine.
On June 5, when heavily armed police advanced toward nearly 5,000 protesters at a highway blockade, he says he approached the officers seeking to talk.
"I never made it because they opened fire when I was about 50 meters (yards) away," Manuin said. Bullets tore open his left side.
Other protesters saw he was hurt, and "hand-to-hand combat broke out to remove the guns from police," he added.
Erroneous reports of Manuin's death spurred a bloody reaction hours later when Awajun protesters killed 12 police officers they had taken captive at an oil pipeline station.
Manuin faults the government, not the police officers, who he says told Indian leaders on June 4 that their superiors in Lima had ordered them to clear the highway.
The Cabinet chief at the time, Yehude Simon, said the entire Cabinet voted to issue the order. He and the then-interior minister were replaced last month as Garcia sought to allay public criticism of his handling of the protests.
The Indians had been blockading jungle highways and rivers on and off since last August, demanding the revocation of 11 decrees issued by Peru's president last year under the rubric of a free trade pact with the United States.
Peru's Congress repealed two of the decrees after protests last year and two more after June's bloodshed. Indians feared the decrees would lead to a widespread land and resource grab by private companies.
Despite the revocations of some of the decrees, 75 percent of Peru's Amazon remains carved up into oil concessions, with the government owning all subsoil rights.
"If they want to put the Amazon up for sale, they'll do it by spilling blood. Period," Manuin said.
President Alan Garcia has cynically claimed "foreign interference" from Venezuela and Bolivia is behind the indigenous protests, while at the same time whipping up racism against indigenous communities, referring to them as "second class citizens" and saying they are like "dogs in a barnyard," in order to ram through his agenda.
Read article below about how indigenous leader Santiago Manuin, who is lying in a hospital bed fighting for his life after receiving at least 4 bullet wounds, is hounded by police armed with AK47 assault rifles.
Jail and trial are next for wounded Peru Indians
By ANDREW WHALEN (AP) Aug 3 2009
CHICLAYO, Peru — Santiago Manuin is lucky to be alive. On June 5, the Awajun Indian leader was hit by at least four bullets when police broke up a protest by Indians over government plans for large-scale economic development of their ancestral lands in the Amazon.
Inside his hospital room, Manuin lies in a bed while a plastic pouch drains his intestines. Outside the door, five police officers lounge on wooden benches, AK-47 assault rifles resting across their knees.
Manuin is the most prominent of 48 protesters wounded in the June melee who face jail the moment hospital doctors sign discharge papers, according to Peru's main Amazon Indian federation.
Critics of the government say it is no way to treat people who engaged in peaceful civil disobedience — blocking roads and rivers — to protect their traditional lands from the oil drilling, mining, farming and logging projects envisioned by President Alan Garcia.
Negotiations to resolve the dispute, involving 350,000 Amazon Indians, will be difficult if the government treats the protest leaders as criminals, the U.N. special envoy on indigenous rights, James Anaya, said last week.
The dark, wiry Manuin is more blunt.
"Justice doesn't exist for the indigenous. The government values the police more than us and doesn't want to acknowledge its mistake," the 53-year-old apu, or tribal leader, said from his hospital bed.
The government's mistake, Indian leaders and sympathizers say, has been to vilify protest leaders while failing to consider that police might have used excessive force. At least 10 civilians and 23 police officers were killed in the violence, while 200 civilians were wounded, 82 by gunshot, according to Peru's ombudsman's office.
"It's very surprising that while there are criminal investigations against people accused of killing police, no one has been arrested or implicated for the abuses that led to the death of the indigenous protesters," said Susan Lee, director of Amnesty International's Americas program. Amnesty says it has gathered testimony telling of police abuses.
Peru's justice minister, Auerelio Pastor, defended the police action before a U.N. Human Rights Committee in Geneva on Monday and said the government has no plans to drop any charges.
The government's request that protesters clear the road "by no means justifies acts of violence, and the seizure of highways and interruption of public services is illegal," he said.
Pastor also echoed a claim repeatedly voiced by Garcia: that unidentified foreign elements have incited the Indians to instigate the violence.
The president of AIDESEP, the Indian federation that organized the protests, says 120 Indians have been charged with crimes including murder and sedition. Many wounded Indians have not sought medical attention for fear of arrest, the federation's president, Daysi Zapata, told The Associated Press.
AIDESEP's top leader, Alberto Pizango, and two other officials of the organization have taken asylum in Nicaragua from sedition and rebellion charges.
In a July report following a visit to Peru, Anaya, the U.N. envoy, called for an independent, internationally backed investigation into the violence.
The government has yet to publicly respond.
Manuin is expected to be released from the main hospital in Chiclayo shortly after an operation this week to close the hole in his stomach and reconnect his intestines. He will then be jailed and tried on charges of inciting murder and unrest, which carry a maximum penalty of 35 years in prison. His lawyer has appealed to reduce his arrest warrant to an order to appear in court.
The Jesuit-schooled Manuin is an internationally recognized activist who met with Spain's Queen Sofia in 1994 after leading Awajun resistance to leftist rebels who tried to get his people to grow coca, the basis of cocaine.
On June 5, when heavily armed police advanced toward nearly 5,000 protesters at a highway blockade, he says he approached the officers seeking to talk.
"I never made it because they opened fire when I was about 50 meters (yards) away," Manuin said. Bullets tore open his left side.
Other protesters saw he was hurt, and "hand-to-hand combat broke out to remove the guns from police," he added.
Erroneous reports of Manuin's death spurred a bloody reaction hours later when Awajun protesters killed 12 police officers they had taken captive at an oil pipeline station.
Manuin faults the government, not the police officers, who he says told Indian leaders on June 4 that their superiors in Lima had ordered them to clear the highway.
The Cabinet chief at the time, Yehude Simon, said the entire Cabinet voted to issue the order. He and the then-interior minister were replaced last month as Garcia sought to allay public criticism of his handling of the protests.
The Indians had been blockading jungle highways and rivers on and off since last August, demanding the revocation of 11 decrees issued by Peru's president last year under the rubric of a free trade pact with the United States.
Peru's Congress repealed two of the decrees after protests last year and two more after June's bloodshed. Indians feared the decrees would lead to a widespread land and resource grab by private companies.
Despite the revocations of some of the decrees, 75 percent of Peru's Amazon remains carved up into oil concessions, with the government owning all subsoil rights.
"If they want to put the Amazon up for sale, they'll do it by spilling blood. Period," Manuin said.
Monday, 20 July 2009
Peru's 'Cold War' Against Indigenous Peoples
Kristina Aiello
The recent conflict in the Peruvian Amazon is only the most violent symptom of an ongoing cold war being waged by President Alan García and his ruling Aprista party against indigenous groups. Besides a racist propaganda campaign and violent repression, the government has tried highly suspect legal mechanisms to disarticulate indigenous power.
Government propaganda is aimed at pushing a free market economic development model with a strong focus on trade and natural resource exploitation. García has issued a series of decrees required by the U.S.-Peru free trade agreement (FTA) to open up the Amazon to exploration and exploitation of its natural resources. A recent study shows García's initiative projects to concession off blocs covering up to 72 percent of Peru's Amazon to oil and gas companies.
In the process, the García administration has placed its free market ideology on a collision course with collective indigenous land and natural resource rights, which are protected under international law. But the plan backfired amid the government's response to opposition and its brutal repression of indigenous protestors. A recent poll found that 92 percent of Peruvians support the indigenous cause against the Amazon decrees.
The most despised of García's decrees were repealed. But the government has nonetheless continued a low-intensity conflict against Peru's indigenous groups. For García, a central tactic has involved trying to associate indigenous groups with Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. In a recent statement, clearly alluding to his left-leaning rivals, García said, "Peru is living a cold war against foreign leaders."
But even before the violence broke out in the Amazon, the real cold war was the one being waged by García against Peru's indigenous peoples. The battle in the Amazon was the violent culmination of months of government harassment and low-intensity conflict. Despite stirring up intense opposition, García seems intent on pushing forward with his unpopular agenda.
The Propaganda War
Even prior to the formal implementation of the FTA with the United States last February, García was already laying down the foundation for his cold war. In October 2007, he 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 for 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.
Since Peru's congress ratified the FTA, García has twice faced off against Amazon indigenous groups over the natural resources in their territories. On both occasions – in August 2008 and the recent uprising in June – García's decrees sparked large public protests principally led by the Association for the Development of the Peruvian Amazon (Aidesep), Peru’s largest national organization of Amazonian indigenous communities. The President responded to both protests by suspending constitutional guarantees in the restive provinces and the mass deployment of security forces to the regions.
García also made statements intended to frighten Peruvians who have only recently begun to recover from twenty years of political violence. He evoked images of dangerous armed insurgents in an attempt to paint indigenous protests as part of a larger plot to destabilize the country. He resorted to the language of Peru's brutal civil war in which 75,000 people lost their lives by absurdly blaming the protests on "international communism."
A police general even blamed indigenous protestors for firing on a helicopter, an act that in reality occurred hundreds of miles of away in an incident with drug-funded Shining Path guerrillas, according to Ideele Magazine. The deliberate confusion of the two events was a clear attempt to draw correlations between the indigenous protests and the armed group that terrorized Peru for so many years.
'The Communist Threat'
The García administration made outlandish accusations that the main opposition party and the Bolivian and Venezuelan governments were behind the protests. And in an apparent attempt to weaken political opposition, one government-aligned leader of the Congressional Ethics Committee stated her intention to investigate whether sufficient evidence existed to take action against opposition legislators with ties to Alberto Pizango, Aidesep's President. The indigenous leader was recently forced to flee Peru after the government filed sedition and rebellion charges against him for the violence in Bagua, which was the epicenter of the most recent mobilizations.
García has portrayed the protests as part of a communist plot initiated by Venezuela and Bolivia, but he has publicly admitted to having no evidence for the accusation. Prime Minister Yehude Simon, who has been a key figure of the government's propaganda campaign, echoed the baseless charges. (Amid public pressure, Simon has since been replaced.) For Simon, it was all part of a vast conspiracy in which Bolivia and Venezuela were trying to weaken Peru's hydrocarbons industry in an effort to boost their own.
García has backed these accusations with actions. His administration recently launched an investigation into Aidesep by the Peruvian Agency for International Cooperation (APCI). The President modified APCI’s authority through a much-criticized 2006 statute that greatly enhanced governmental controls over the operations of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This is the second time Aidesep is being investigated by the APCI.
The Legal Machinations
APCI’s mandate includes monitoring NGO projects and activities to ensure that they are in line with the government's own development goals – in the case of the García administration, free trade and the exploitation of natural resources. As part of this process, the agency requires NGOs receiving international funding and certain state benefits to register with the agency. The law also introduced new enforcement measures that allowed the agency to fine NGOs and even revoke their legal status, barring them from receiving outside funds for non-compliance with ACPI registration and government development directives. In a September 2007 opinion, a Peruvian high court declared parts of the law unconstitutional, but many of the stipulations introduced by García remain.
The timing of the investigations and statements made by APCI officials indicate strong political motivations. The first APCI investigation was launched in August 2008 during intense negotiations between indigenous protestors and the government. At that time, APCI executive director Carlos Pando advised NGOs to abstain from involving themselves in social conflicts because that went against the nature of their work. He expressed being concerned about the influence that certain NGOs had over indigenous communities by providing them with false information that often led them to protest government actions. He also warned them that these activities could lead to the cancellation of NGO's legal status. By the end of August, however, Congress repealed the controversial decrees and the APCI investigation concluded without result.
The second investigation was announced in May 2009 in the middle of the 60-day standoff in the Amazon. Its announcement sparked widespread condemnation by human rights groups angered by its apparent arbitrariness. Critics of the move noted that APCI was strictly barred from using its fiscal authority to threaten the daily workings of an NGO. They also asserted that the second APCI investigation appeared to violate governmental assurances of objectivity made during an October 2008 thematic hearing on the subject held at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C.
At the same time, the administration was trying to portray indigenous peoples as a threat to the country’s national security, García again labeled indigenous protesters as simple people who failed to understand the true purpose of the decrees opening up the jungle for resource extraction. He asserted that contrary to harming indigenous lands, the decrees were designed to actually protect the Amazon from coca producers, contamination from illegal mining and illegal logging. These assertions were repeated in proclamations published by Peruvian embassies abroad, likely in an attempt to quell the huge global recrimination of his government’s actions.
Local Media Complicity
The national Peruvian media, often accused of representing the interests of the politically and economically powerful, eagerly supported the racist stereotyping of indigenous peoples. Indigenous were routinely portrayed as uneducated or ill prepared and therefore not qualified to participate in any national debate over the future of their country.
A particularly egregious example was a front-page photo of indigenous congresswoman Hilaria Supa, a representative from Cuzco, that appeared in the April 17, 2009, edition of the Peruvian daily El Correo. The photo, published in the middle of the Spring protests, shows a close-up of her handwritten notes that were obviously presented to ridicule the native Quechua speaking congresswoman for her Spanish writing abilities.
The accompanying articles insinuated that congresswoman Supa’s limited Spanish skills were evidence of her lack of preparation for high office, something she only achieved, said the newspaper, because of racial politics. The articles attacking Supa’s credibility did not stop there. They also referenced her previous stands against the García administration’s aggressive free trade policies as examples of her “poor” work as a congresswoman. García echoed these same sentiments when he referred to indigenous protesters as "second-class citizens" who dared to block Peru’s progress.
García's Utter Failure
Despite all his efforts, García appears to have lost yet another battle in this long cold war against indigenous groups. Once again, the Peruvian Congress has decided to repeal the controversial Amazon decrees – an action García now states he supports in the name of national unity. But the cold war continues and could possibly intensify into open battle, as happened the last time the government provoked the indigenous to protest.
In late June, a congressional committee approved a bill that amends the APCI statute to again allow for broad governmental regulation of NGOs. The new bill allows for the agency to regulate funding from private foreign sources. The law also expressly prohibits NGOs from making any kind of statement that could incite violence – an incredibly broad standard that could be used to criminalize NGOs as well as impose limits on their right to the freedom of expression and association.
Rolando Souza, a congressional ally of disgraced and jailed former President Alberto Fujimori, used the Bagua violence as an example of why the government should monitor the foreign financing of local groups. Congressman Souza singled out Aidesep as the principle reason for the legislative action. Still, those making such arguments have not presented a shred of evidence to support the claim of any foreign involvement.
Meanwhile, a June poll found that García's approval rating has sunk to a meager 21 percent. Broad sections of Peruvian society continue to take to the streets in protest of the García administration’s policies. In Cuzco campesinos recently declared a general strike to protest the granting of mining concessions totaling 70 percent of their province. Protestors were also demanding the enactment of a new Water Resources Law that declares water a national resource with its usage regulated by the state. Again, the government sent in troops to remove the protestors, resulting in the death of a campesino.
The government also continues to face the repercussions of the events that occurred in Bagua. On July 10, the Peruvian Ombusdman's Office announced its investigation into the disappearance of Lewis Wassum, a member of an Amazon indigenous community. Wassum was last seen in a photograph published June 8 that showed him being led into a police station in handcuffs. The government and indigenous leaders have also agreed to initiate an investigation into the events in Bagua.
The question remains as to whether or not García will continue his cold war against the country's indigenous peoples. But one thing seems certain: His administration has refused to back down on its goal of extracting resources from the Amazon, whatever the consequences. Less than two weeks after the Bagua violence, which some rights groups have called the Amazon's Tiananmen, the government gave a green light to a French oil company to begin drilling for oil in an area of the Amazon inhabited by uncontacted indigenous groups.
Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, which advocates for indigenous rights worldwide, said, "Anyone who hoped that the dreadful violence of the past few weeks might have made Peru’s government act with a bit more sensitivity towards the indigenous people of the Amazon will be really dismayed at this news."
Corry continued, "The timing couldn’t be worse – the government is trying to present a more friendly image in public, but as far as the oil companies are concerned, it looks like business as usual."
Kristina Aiello is a NACLA Research Associate and a human rights advocate.
Republished from NACLA.
The recent conflict in the Peruvian Amazon is only the most violent symptom of an ongoing cold war being waged by President Alan García and his ruling Aprista party against indigenous groups. Besides a racist propaganda campaign and violent repression, the government has tried highly suspect legal mechanisms to disarticulate indigenous power.
Government propaganda is aimed at pushing a free market economic development model with a strong focus on trade and natural resource exploitation. García has issued a series of decrees required by the U.S.-Peru free trade agreement (FTA) to open up the Amazon to exploration and exploitation of its natural resources. A recent study shows García's initiative projects to concession off blocs covering up to 72 percent of Peru's Amazon to oil and gas companies.
In the process, the García administration has placed its free market ideology on a collision course with collective indigenous land and natural resource rights, which are protected under international law. But the plan backfired amid the government's response to opposition and its brutal repression of indigenous protestors. A recent poll found that 92 percent of Peruvians support the indigenous cause against the Amazon decrees.
The most despised of García's decrees were repealed. But the government has nonetheless continued a low-intensity conflict against Peru's indigenous groups. For García, a central tactic has involved trying to associate indigenous groups with Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. In a recent statement, clearly alluding to his left-leaning rivals, García said, "Peru is living a cold war against foreign leaders."
But even before the violence broke out in the Amazon, the real cold war was the one being waged by García against Peru's indigenous peoples. The battle in the Amazon was the violent culmination of months of government harassment and low-intensity conflict. Despite stirring up intense opposition, García seems intent on pushing forward with his unpopular agenda.
The Propaganda War
Even prior to the formal implementation of the FTA with the United States last February, García was already laying down the foundation for his cold war. In October 2007, he 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 for 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.
Since Peru's congress ratified the FTA, García has twice faced off against Amazon indigenous groups over the natural resources in their territories. On both occasions – in August 2008 and the recent uprising in June – García's decrees sparked large public protests principally led by the Association for the Development of the Peruvian Amazon (Aidesep), Peru’s largest national organization of Amazonian indigenous communities. The President responded to both protests by suspending constitutional guarantees in the restive provinces and the mass deployment of security forces to the regions.
García also made statements intended to frighten Peruvians who have only recently begun to recover from twenty years of political violence. He evoked images of dangerous armed insurgents in an attempt to paint indigenous protests as part of a larger plot to destabilize the country. He resorted to the language of Peru's brutal civil war in which 75,000 people lost their lives by absurdly blaming the protests on "international communism."
A police general even blamed indigenous protestors for firing on a helicopter, an act that in reality occurred hundreds of miles of away in an incident with drug-funded Shining Path guerrillas, according to Ideele Magazine. The deliberate confusion of the two events was a clear attempt to draw correlations between the indigenous protests and the armed group that terrorized Peru for so many years.
'The Communist Threat'
The García administration made outlandish accusations that the main opposition party and the Bolivian and Venezuelan governments were behind the protests. And in an apparent attempt to weaken political opposition, one government-aligned leader of the Congressional Ethics Committee stated her intention to investigate whether sufficient evidence existed to take action against opposition legislators with ties to Alberto Pizango, Aidesep's President. The indigenous leader was recently forced to flee Peru after the government filed sedition and rebellion charges against him for the violence in Bagua, which was the epicenter of the most recent mobilizations.
García has portrayed the protests as part of a communist plot initiated by Venezuela and Bolivia, but he has publicly admitted to having no evidence for the accusation. Prime Minister Yehude Simon, who has been a key figure of the government's propaganda campaign, echoed the baseless charges. (Amid public pressure, Simon has since been replaced.) For Simon, it was all part of a vast conspiracy in which Bolivia and Venezuela were trying to weaken Peru's hydrocarbons industry in an effort to boost their own.
García has backed these accusations with actions. His administration recently launched an investigation into Aidesep by the Peruvian Agency for International Cooperation (APCI). The President modified APCI’s authority through a much-criticized 2006 statute that greatly enhanced governmental controls over the operations of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This is the second time Aidesep is being investigated by the APCI.
The Legal Machinations
APCI’s mandate includes monitoring NGO projects and activities to ensure that they are in line with the government's own development goals – in the case of the García administration, free trade and the exploitation of natural resources. As part of this process, the agency requires NGOs receiving international funding and certain state benefits to register with the agency. The law also introduced new enforcement measures that allowed the agency to fine NGOs and even revoke their legal status, barring them from receiving outside funds for non-compliance with ACPI registration and government development directives. In a September 2007 opinion, a Peruvian high court declared parts of the law unconstitutional, but many of the stipulations introduced by García remain.
The timing of the investigations and statements made by APCI officials indicate strong political motivations. The first APCI investigation was launched in August 2008 during intense negotiations between indigenous protestors and the government. At that time, APCI executive director Carlos Pando advised NGOs to abstain from involving themselves in social conflicts because that went against the nature of their work. He expressed being concerned about the influence that certain NGOs had over indigenous communities by providing them with false information that often led them to protest government actions. He also warned them that these activities could lead to the cancellation of NGO's legal status. By the end of August, however, Congress repealed the controversial decrees and the APCI investigation concluded without result.
The second investigation was announced in May 2009 in the middle of the 60-day standoff in the Amazon. Its announcement sparked widespread condemnation by human rights groups angered by its apparent arbitrariness. Critics of the move noted that APCI was strictly barred from using its fiscal authority to threaten the daily workings of an NGO. They also asserted that the second APCI investigation appeared to violate governmental assurances of objectivity made during an October 2008 thematic hearing on the subject held at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C.
At the same time, the administration was trying to portray indigenous peoples as a threat to the country’s national security, García again labeled indigenous protesters as simple people who failed to understand the true purpose of the decrees opening up the jungle for resource extraction. He asserted that contrary to harming indigenous lands, the decrees were designed to actually protect the Amazon from coca producers, contamination from illegal mining and illegal logging. These assertions were repeated in proclamations published by Peruvian embassies abroad, likely in an attempt to quell the huge global recrimination of his government’s actions.
Local Media Complicity
The national Peruvian media, often accused of representing the interests of the politically and economically powerful, eagerly supported the racist stereotyping of indigenous peoples. Indigenous were routinely portrayed as uneducated or ill prepared and therefore not qualified to participate in any national debate over the future of their country.
A particularly egregious example was a front-page photo of indigenous congresswoman Hilaria Supa, a representative from Cuzco, that appeared in the April 17, 2009, edition of the Peruvian daily El Correo. The photo, published in the middle of the Spring protests, shows a close-up of her handwritten notes that were obviously presented to ridicule the native Quechua speaking congresswoman for her Spanish writing abilities.
The accompanying articles insinuated that congresswoman Supa’s limited Spanish skills were evidence of her lack of preparation for high office, something she only achieved, said the newspaper, because of racial politics. The articles attacking Supa’s credibility did not stop there. They also referenced her previous stands against the García administration’s aggressive free trade policies as examples of her “poor” work as a congresswoman. García echoed these same sentiments when he referred to indigenous protesters as "second-class citizens" who dared to block Peru’s progress.
García's Utter Failure
Despite all his efforts, García appears to have lost yet another battle in this long cold war against indigenous groups. Once again, the Peruvian Congress has decided to repeal the controversial Amazon decrees – an action García now states he supports in the name of national unity. But the cold war continues and could possibly intensify into open battle, as happened the last time the government provoked the indigenous to protest.
In late June, a congressional committee approved a bill that amends the APCI statute to again allow for broad governmental regulation of NGOs. The new bill allows for the agency to regulate funding from private foreign sources. The law also expressly prohibits NGOs from making any kind of statement that could incite violence – an incredibly broad standard that could be used to criminalize NGOs as well as impose limits on their right to the freedom of expression and association.
Rolando Souza, a congressional ally of disgraced and jailed former President Alberto Fujimori, used the Bagua violence as an example of why the government should monitor the foreign financing of local groups. Congressman Souza singled out Aidesep as the principle reason for the legislative action. Still, those making such arguments have not presented a shred of evidence to support the claim of any foreign involvement.
Meanwhile, a June poll found that García's approval rating has sunk to a meager 21 percent. Broad sections of Peruvian society continue to take to the streets in protest of the García administration’s policies. In Cuzco campesinos recently declared a general strike to protest the granting of mining concessions totaling 70 percent of their province. Protestors were also demanding the enactment of a new Water Resources Law that declares water a national resource with its usage regulated by the state. Again, the government sent in troops to remove the protestors, resulting in the death of a campesino.
The government also continues to face the repercussions of the events that occurred in Bagua. On July 10, the Peruvian Ombusdman's Office announced its investigation into the disappearance of Lewis Wassum, a member of an Amazon indigenous community. Wassum was last seen in a photograph published June 8 that showed him being led into a police station in handcuffs. The government and indigenous leaders have also agreed to initiate an investigation into the events in Bagua.
The question remains as to whether or not García will continue his cold war against the country's indigenous peoples. But one thing seems certain: His administration has refused to back down on its goal of extracting resources from the Amazon, whatever the consequences. Less than two weeks after the Bagua violence, which some rights groups have called the Amazon's Tiananmen, the government gave a green light to a French oil company to begin drilling for oil in an area of the Amazon inhabited by uncontacted indigenous groups.
Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, which advocates for indigenous rights worldwide, said, "Anyone who hoped that the dreadful violence of the past few weeks might have made Peru’s government act with a bit more sensitivity towards the indigenous people of the Amazon will be really dismayed at this news."
Corry continued, "The timing couldn’t be worse – the government is trying to present a more friendly image in public, but as far as the oil companies are concerned, it looks like business as usual."
Kristina Aiello is a NACLA Research Associate and a human rights advocate.
Republished from NACLA.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
