Wednesday 13 May 2009

State of Emergency in Peruvian Amazon - Indignous People Take Up Arms

Peru has declared a 60-day state of emergency in some of its Amazon basin regions as indigenous groups protest against forest and energy legislation. Mainstream media seem to be ignoring the crisis. However, the following site is very helpful.
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/05/07/peru-indigenous-communities-continue-protests/

As some background to understanding what is going on now in the Peruvian Amazon, I am sharing an article I wrote in 1990 about efforts by the indignous peoples of the Amazon, especially the Peruvian Amazon, to organise themselves. It seems that the article is still very relevant today.

LIMA, Peru – Faced with increasing invasions by landless peasants, harassment by leftist guerrillas, expansion of coca fields by powerful drug lords, and ill-conceived government development schemes, more than a million Amazon Indians – many of them former head-hunters – have organized themselves to defend their land and way of life.

By uniting, Indian leaders say they are not only assuring the survival of about 300 ethnic groups into the 21st century, but also the survival of the world’s largest remaining rainforest.

According to tropical ecologists, an estimated 50 to 100 acres of tropical forest – much of it Indian land – is disappearing in the Amazon every minute. Trees are cut down for logging, farming and pasture land. In some countries, the trees are cut down to make room for expanding coca fields for the Colombian drug cartels.

In addition, thousands of gold miners are leaching ore with mercury, dumping tons of the poison into Amazon Basin rivers every year.

Tropical deforestation, according to Thomas Lovejoy, a tropical ecologist and assistant secretary for external affairs at the Smithsonian Institution, is “no longer a matter of obscure and anonymous vanishing species in some distant place.

“The problem of tropical deforestation...and the greenhouse effect, which will engender further species loss, must now be seen as an enormous global problem. We are all locked in the greenhouse together,” Lovejoy said.

To defend their rapidly disappearing habitat, an estimated 1.3 million Amazon Indians in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru formed national coalitions in each of their countries.

Although many of the Indians have been enemies for centuries, they went on to forge an effective alliance that spans the five countries. On March 26, 1984, the five national coalitions joined together to form the umbrella Coordinating Body for the Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) – an international, Indian-run lobbying organization.

Together, the Indians are fighting the battle to save the Amazon, combining weapons and tactics that date back to the Stone Age with modern technology.

COICA president Evaristo Nugkuag, an Aguaruna Indian from the Peruvian Amazon, is a descendant of head-hunters – warriors who practiced “tsantsa,” the shrinking of a decapitated enemy’s head.

He also is one of the few Amazon Indians with a university education. That, coupled with innate political savvy, has helped make him a shrewd negotiator, someone comfortable both in the rainforest and in the political labyrinths of the world’s capitals.

For Nugkuag and COICA, there are no more urgent problems than defending the rights of the Amazonian Indians and, thereby, preventing the wholesale destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
“All the Amazonian countries,” he said, “have made preposterous claims that the great, empty Amazon jungle can finance national development; that it can provide an alternative for overcoming historical, structural problems, and that it can become the countries’ breadbaskets.

“These flippant and irresponsible claims, which have been the basis for development policies for over three decades, are of great concern to us – not only because of their disastrous consequences for our indigenous peoples – but also for the threat they pose to the very future of the entire Amazon Basin.”

Declared Nugkuag: “The Amazon that is burning right now is our life.”

Almost immediately after it was founded, COICA set out to identify an alternative course of action for the development of the Amazon Basin. The organization’s findings were presented last fall at a meeting with environmentalists in Washington, D.C.

“An important task of the Coordinating Body, “the COICA document states, “is to present to the international community the alternative which we indigenous peoples offer for living within the Amazonian biosphere, caring for it and developing within it.

“This is one of our important contributions to a better life for humankind.”

The document outlines what COICA calls “Our Program for the Defense of the Amazonian Biosphere,” and lists four major points:

· The defense of the Indians’ territory, along with the “promotion of our (indigenous) models for living within that (Amazon) biosphere and for managing its resources;

· The defense of the Amazon biosphere “must go hand-in-hand with the recognition of and respect for the territorial, political, cultural, economic, and human rights of the indigenous peoples;

· The right of self-determination for indigenous peoples within their territory is “fundamental for guaranteeing the well-being of the indigenous population and of the Amazon biosphere; and,

· Concrete proposals for international cooperation, including programs for economic development, public health, bilingual and intercultural education, resource management, territorial demarcation and legal defense, among others.

“Much of the Amazon continues to be beyond the law,” said Nugkuag. “A fierce racism and contempt for indigenous peoples make them easy targets for all sorts of crimes. These crimes are so commonplace, they rarely make the newspapers.”

The Indians are fighting their battle to save the Amazon on two fronts:

On the first – the isolated rainforests of the Amazon Basin, which drain an area the size of the United States – they have had to resort to such traditional weapons as spears, bows and arrows, and blowguns with poisoned darts, to defend themselves and their land.

Last December, for example, a leftist Peruvian guerrilla group known as the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA) kidnapped and killed the political and spiritual leader of the Ashaninka Indians.

The Ashaninka live in a part of the Peruvian Amazon that has been plagued not only by the MRTA insurgency, but also by drug-traffickers and the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas, Peru’s most feared terrorist organization.

At first, the two rival guerrilla organizations tried to “win the hearts and minds” of the Ashaninka. In turn, the Indians tolerated the first group, the MRTA.

While the MRTA is a fairly small organization that generally refrains from indiscriminately killing people, the Shining Path is Peru’s largest and most violent terrorist group. Its victims have routinely included peasant women and children in the country’s Andean region.

Last August, however, the two rival terrorist groups stepped up their activities, concentrating their efforts on Puerto Bermudez, a town on the edge of Ashaninka territory.

On December 8, the MRTA entered the town and kidnapped Alejandro Calderon Espinoza, the Ashaninka’s political and spiritual leader, from his home, along with two other Indians, Rodrigo Chauca and Benjamin Cavero.

According to Cavero, who later escaped, the guerrillas said they wanted to meet with Calderon to discuss some of the problems that the recent MRTA and Shining Path incursions into Puerto Bermudez had caused Indian communities in the area.

After moving the kidnapped Indians to several different hiding places, they killed Calderon while he was “tied up like an animal,” Cavero said. Chauca also was killed.

A few days later, the MRTA issued a communiqué stating that it had killed Calderon because he had handed over an MRTA guerrilla to Peruvian authorities. The group refused to turn over his body to his people for burial.

In retaliation for the murder of their leader, the Ashaninka declared an all-out war against the MRTA. Thousands of warriors, armed with spears and blowguns, attacked MRTA bases in the rainforest.

After two months of fighting, MRTA leaders sent word that they wanted to negotiate. However, Ashaninka leaders replied they would fight until every guerrilla was either dead or had fled the territory.

“The guerrillas,” said Nugkuag, “have left.”

The Indians’ second front is in the political labyrinths of national capitals and multilateral institutions, where indigenous leaders tend to rely more on computers, fax machines, negotiations, lobbying and press conferences to achieve their goals.

Last fall Nugkuag led a delegation to Washington, D.C. There the Indians not only criticized such international organizations as the World Bank for lack of sensitivity to Indian problems, but also took environmentalist groups to task.

“The environmentalists don’t take the inhabitants of the Amazon into account,” said Wilfrido Aragon Aranda, a Quichua Indian from Ecuador and vice president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuadorian Amazonia, one of the five groups that make up COICA.

The Indian leaders also voiced their concerns about “debt-for-nature swaps,” an arrangement by which conservation groups assume a portion of a country’s debt to foreign banks in exchange for the country setting aside land for protection or establishing local conservation programs.

Debt-for-nature swaps have been especially popular in Latin America, a region burdened by huge foreign debts.

“We don’t see how it is possible for groups in this country to negotiate with governments without including the indigenous peoples,” Nugkuag told the environmentalists. “We must be at the center of any negotiations about our home.”

In an effort to achieve this goal, a summit meeting of the various Amazonian Indian groups is scheduled to open May 7 in Iquitos, Peru. At the top of the agenda is the Indians’ role as future custodians of the Amazon rainforest, and debt-for-nature swaps.





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