Indigenous Protest Against Land Reforms in the Peruvian Amazon
The following is an article I wrote for English-speaking newspaper, The Santiago Times, Chile. It appears here in it its original, unedited form.
(June 17, 2009) At least 60 people are dead following bloody clashes between indigenous Amazonians and Peruvian security forces on June 5. The protesters were fighting to protect the Amazon forest – home to half a million indigenous peoples and millions of animal species – against creeping deforestation at the hands of multi-national oil and gas giants.
Devil’s Curve: a stretch of the Fernando Belaunde highway deep in the Amazon rainforest, 870 miles north of Lima. Thousands of indigenous demonstrators stand firm in a roadblock, carrying spears and wearing feathered crowns. Three MI-17 helicopters from the National Police Special Forces fly in at 6 a.m., firing tear gas to disperse the blockade. Simultaneously, police on the ground arrive carrying AKM automatic rifles.
Police fired live rounds into the crowd, “killing people as if they were dogs,” according to protester Clementina Paayatui. Eyewitnesses reported seeing police shooting from the helicopters.
Residents in the nearest town of Bagua Chica started a rebellion upon hearing of the “massacre,” burning the ruling-party APRA headquarters and government buildings.
Peruvian authorities report that 23 police were killed, some with their throats slit. Around 40 protesters are believed dead according to indigenous organizations and many are still unaccounted for.
“According to a preliminary count we have more than 150 disappeared,” said Leoncio Calla, a leader from the indigenous Awajun community.
“The dead were only recovered from the road but many more were in the hills, those bodies have disappeared.
“It’s a matter of time, once we return to our communities, and we see who is missing, then we will find out how many dead there really are.”
President Alan García responded by declaring a state of emergency throughout the Amazon region, suspending constitutional rights and establishing military control. The decree extends an existing state of emergency announced on May 9.
Land laws open the Amazon to oil and gas concessions
Peru’s Congress voted last Wednesday to suspend two land laws that form the focus of the protests. Indigenous groups fear that several legislative decrees issued by President García on June 28, 2008, will open up the Amazon to oil and gas concessions without their consultation.
Congress vested García with special executive powers in December 2007 to implement a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States. The powers, limited to six months, could only rule on issues concerning the FTA. On June 28, 2008, García announced a raft of legislative decrees just before the deadline, some of which involved issues outside the agreed mandate, such as universities.
Indigenous groups have criticized six of the laws, which would open roughly 60 percent of the Peruvian Amazon to potential development and exclude indigenous communities from consultation on changes to zoning permits for existing concessions.
García is using the laws to implement an economic strategy to convert Peru from a net importer into a net exporter by encouraging investment in – and consequent exploitation of – its natural resources.
“The primary resource is Amazonia,” García wrote in the Peruvian daily newspaper El Comercio.
“The opposition says that one cannot grant ownership in the Amazon (and why can we, then, on the coast and in the highlands?). They also say that granting ownership over huge blocks [of land] would give earnings to large companies – of course, but it would also create hundreds of thousands of formal jobs to Peruvians who live in the poorest areas.”
Violation of Convention 169
The laws underpin García’s argument that the Amazon belongs to all of Peru, not only people that live there. This violates the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169. The convention, to which Peru is a signatory, requires the consultation of indigenous peoples on issues affecting their homeland.
Public bodies in Peru have also criticized the legislation, but moves to repeal it have been stalled at every corner. In August 2008, the Public Ombudsman’s Office filed a suit against DL 1015 and 1073, declaring the laws unconstitutional. President of Congress Javier Velasquez announced a congressional commission to review the laws’ constitutionality, though its findings were never presented to the chamber.
The commission finished its report in December 2008 but its presentation was initially delayed due to congressional vacations. Velasquez eventually deferred the report in April 2008 to a multi-partisan commission, on the condition that it was first approved by a board of spokespersons. The board of spokespersons did not approve the presentation of the report to the plenary.
After months of government inaction, indigenous groups represented by the Association for Inter-Ethnic Development of the Peruvian Jungle (AIDESEP) voted to mobilize in April 2009. Over 30,000 protestors are involved in the strike, blockading roads and waterways. State oil company Petroperú was forced to shut down its 530-mile pipeline on May 18 due to the protests, which in turn affected Pluspetrol’s operations. On June 1, protesters seized two valves on a natural gas pipeline, although operations have not been affected according to the pipeline’s owner, Transporter of Peruvian Gas (TGP).
The government issued an arrest warrant on June 6 for AIDESEP leader Alberto Pizango. Pizango escaped, obtaining political asylum in the Nicaraguan Embassy in Lima. He is charged with radicalizing the indigenous protestors, despite having renounced on May 16 a previous call he made for “insurgency” after negotiations with the government broke down.
Government cover-up?
The government’s response to the protests has been widely condemned, drawing criticism from the international community and allegations of human rights abuse.
Indigenous communities estimate more than 100 people are still missing following the protests on June 5th, fueling suspicions that the government is hiding the actual number of people killed in the conflict.
Human rights lawyers have accused the government of a cover-up. Ernesto de Jara, a lawyer from the Institute for Legal Defense, called on the government to begin an independent judicial investigation. “Dead bodies may be covered up for now but, little by little, the truth will come out and they will have to respond.”
Zebelio Kayap, president of the Frontier Communities of the Cenepa Organization (ODECOFROC), told Peruvian newspaper La República, “Some of the natives’ bodies may have been burned by the police and thrown into the Marañón River.”
Democratic process was weakened following the 120-day suspension of seven members of Congress representing the Nationalist Party who held a sit-in demanding the suspension of the laws affecting indigenous rights.
Minister of Women’s Affairs and Social Development, Carmen Vildoso, resigned from García’s cabinet following the clashes in Bagua. Prime Minister Yehude Simon confirmed that Vildoso resigned in part to protest against a propaganda video diffused on television by Peru’s Interior Ministry.
The video denounces the Bagua protesters as “extremists”, showing corpses of police officers killed in the clashes interspersed with images of indigenous peoples armed with spears. “Their throats were cowardly slashed when they were unarmed . . . 22 humble policemen were furiously and savagely murdered by extremists encouraged by international forces hoping to hold back Peru,” says the video’s narrator. “Don’t let the homeland lose to their advances.”
One week after the clashes, Peruvian authorities closed down the only local radio station to broadcast live updates on the protests, La Voz de Utcubamba, saying that the station had not completed licensing paperwork within deadline.
But La Voz says that its paper work is in order. “They shut us down because we were broadcasting information about the massacre of indigenous people that occurred in our area,” said La Voz’s Director Carlos Flores.
U.S. Congress and the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) offered their support on Friday to negotiate a solution with the indigenous protesters regarding the land laws, which Peru’s government claim are essential to the FTA between Peru and the United States. U.N. Special Rapporteur for indigenous affairs, James Anaya, is expected to arrive in Peru soon to examine the situation.
Corruption and human rights abuse
García is no stranger to controversy in office – his administration has a troubling history of human rights abuses. In his first term as president, 1985-1990, García sent the navy to crush prison riots during June 18-19, 1986, in the San Juan de Lurigancho, Santa Mónica and El Frontón prisons in Lima and Callao. The resulting military assault on the prisons led to over 100 prisoners being “summarily executed” according to U.S. diplomatic sources. Human Rights Watch estimates that over 244 prisoners were killed in total.
One of the naval officers implicated in the orchestration of the “massacre”, Luis Giampietri, later served as vice-president during García’s second term in office.
In October 2008, the entire cabinet, led by Garcia’s ARPA party, was forced to resign following an oil corruption scandal. Recordings shown on Peruvian television implicated an ex-government minister from García’s first presidential term, Rómulo León, and Petroperú Director Alberto Químper in a shares-for-concessions deal involving Norwegian firm Discover Petroleum.
Amazon development: The facts
The Western Amazon, unlike eastern Brazilian areas, has remained largely untouched until now, preserving some of the world’s most bio-diverse ecosystems. It is home to over one thousand indigenous communities, including some of the world’s last uncontacted peoples living in voluntary isolation. Large reserves of oil and gas underlie the unique ecosystem, of which the pressures to exploit are increasing as global reserves decline.
Peru has auctioned off an estimated 72 percent, or 49 million hectares, of its jungles to oil and gas concessions, leasing the land as blocks. Around 180 blocks cover the Western Amazon including neighboring countries – approximately 688,000 square km – according to a report by scientists at Duke University. The blocks, operated by more than 35 multinational oil and gas companies, occupy the most bio-diverse parts of the Amazon, often overlapping indigenous or protected areas. Oil and gas operations also require access roads which accelerate deforestation by encouraging third parties to occupy the land.
Laws designed to protect indigenous areas are vulnerable to exploitation. Ecuador established a new constitution in 2008, “prohibiting extraction in protected areas except by Presidential petition in the name of national interest”, according to the report by scientists from Duke University. Ecuador has earmarked around 65 percent of its jungles for oil concessions.
The scientists report that in Peru, “at least 58 of the 64 blocks overlay lands titled to indigenous peoples. Further, 17 blocks overlap areas that have proposed or created reserves for indigenous groups in voluntary isolation.”
Aside from the obvious effects, oil and gas concessions also impact communities in more subtle ways. Contact with previously isolated tribes carries a high risk of disease, killing between a third and half of the tribal population within the first few years. Oil leaks and river contamination are common – between November 2006 and March 2009, 48 spillages were reported in concessions managed by Pluspetrol, 22 of which were considered major, affecting the Rivers Tigre and Corriente and their tributaries. U.S. oil companies are also implicated in law suits alleging the dumping of billions of gallons of toxic waste into the forests.
Protests continue
The brutal events on June 5 serve as a grave reminder of the real cost of economic expansion at the expense of human rights. At least 60 people are dead, over 150 wounded and others still missing. Seven members of Congress are suspended from participating in congressional debates which may decide the future of the laws they vowed to fight. A key news source in the conflict area has been censured, and Amazonian regions remain under military supervision.
As Peru bolsters its economic ambitions, the fight for the Amazon continues – protesters started blockading an access road to the Orcopampa gold mine on Monday.
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For more photos of the clashes, see the photos published by Catapa, a Flemish NGO whose volunteers were present at the scene.
Header image courtesy of Servindi, an excellent news sources on indigenous affairs.
