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.

Indignous people in the Peruvian Amazon Struggle to Survive

In the mid 1980s, while attending the School of International Service (SIS) at The Americn University in Washington, D.C., I met Evaristo Nugkuag, a remarkable man who helped organise the indigenous people of the Amazon Basin. He received the Right Livelihood Award in recognition of his achievements. We became good friends and Evaristo would visit me and my family whenever he was in Washington, D.C. He invited me to visit the Peruvian Amazon and see for myself how his people were organizing themselves to confront their challenges. I did so on numerous occasions, providing advice on development projects and facilitating several workshops. I also wrote several articles. Over the years, I would work with indigenous people in numerous countries, and even in Siberia, and sadly discover that they all faced, and continue to face, similar problems. Environmentalists haven't always been their best friends. Native Americans in the U.S. and Canada and indigenous people everywhere could benefit tremendously by sharing information and collaborating. It has been going on for years, but it needs to be stepped up. The new social communication tools available through the internet should help with this.

Having just finished reading Sherman Alexie's The Lone-Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a collection of related fictional stories about life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation in the U.S. state of Washington, I thought I would share this article about the struggle of the Aguarunas and Huambisas. The article was published by several newspapers in the U.S.

NAPARUCA, Peru – The two Aguaruna Indians – sullen men in their 30s – arrived here with an unconscious seven-year-old girl in a peke-peke, a long, narrow dugout canoe powered by a sputtering nine-horsepower motor.

The girl was haemorrhaging from the nose and mouth.

One of the men was the girl’s father, the other was the owner of the canoe. They were both from the same village.

The girl had been bitten by a poisonous snake while picking fruit near her hut earlier in the day. By the time her mother returned from fishing and her father returned from hunting, she was already unconscious.

Because it was late at night and the Rio Maranon is dotted with treacherous whirlpools – especially in the rainy season – it took nearly four hours to get from the girl’s village to Naparuca, which has the only clinic within a two-day’s journey.

At the clinic, Lucio “Lucho” Yuu Tsamahain, 35, the newly appointed director of health for the Consejo Aguaruna y Huambisa (CAH), tried desperately to save the girl’s life. She was more than a patient to him – she was also his niece.

However, Yuu’s eight years’ experience as a paramedic told him that his attempts were useless. Too many hours had already passed. There was nothing he could do to counteract the snake’s venom.

The girl died.

Yuu’s eyes welled up with tears. The bloodstained body on the examination table became a watery blur, and he could no longer see the father’s pain. He could only hear the sobs – his own and the father’s.

Alone, the two men stood near the table and grieved.

After a while, the father wiped the blood from his daughter’s face, picked her up and carried her down to the muddy bank of the river for the long journey home.

Yuu locked up the clinic for the night. He paused for a few seconds at the door, looked toward the river, then headed in the opposite direction.

Exhausted from another 16-hour day, saddened by the girl’s death and angry at his inability to save her life, Yuu walked slowly, hesitantly, past the CAH headquarters, a long, concrete building with a tin roof. He walked past the hut that sheltered the generator, and on past the guest house, where foreign development workers frequently stayed while inspecting the projects their organizations had funded.

With so many changes in the last few years, Yuu wondered, were his people really better off than before?

That is a question being asked more and more by Indians throughout the Amazon Basin, as they daily attempt to confront a host of threats to their environment and culture.

In this sense, the Aguarunas and Huambisas are representative of all Amazon Indians.

Until recently, ceremonial war and headhunting played a prominent part in Aguaruna life. They were key to a man’s self-image. Life was meant to be adventurous and dramatic, death heroic.

The most highly prized virtues for a man were virility and contempt for death. Women were expected not to shy away from committing suicide if they felt their dignity was offended.

However, the last inter-tribal war between the Aguaruna and Huambisa was fought in the 1950s. No one is sure of the exact date. The last major internal war, a blood feud involving a large number of Aguaruna families, was fought in the late 1960s.

Today, 45 years after the Indians established contact with the outside world, the 47,000 Aguarunas and Huambisas of Condorcanqui province are undergoing a painful transition.

They are threatened by colonization, an influx of impoverished peasans from the Andes. Their culture is being undermined by fundamentalist Christian missionaries. And the penetration of the Peruvian market economy is having an adverse effect on the Indians’ environment.

Although traditional enemies, the Aguarunas and Huambisas decided in 1976 to unite and confront their common threats together. They formed the Consejo Aguaruna y Huambisa (CAH) – the Aguaruna and Huambisa Council.

While the CAH is a non-governmental, Indian development organisaton, it also serves as the Indians’ political structure. With the help of European development organizations, the CAH set up five programs: health, education and culture, legal defense, economic promotion, and a motorboat repair shop.

Today, the CAH has one of the best health-care systems in the Amazon. It boasts of a clinic with a pharmacy, as well as 100 “health posts” in as many villages. A trained paramedic is assigned to each post.

It is now looking into the possibility of acquiring computers powered by solar cells. With a modem, CAH officials would be able to keep in touch with the Lima offices of the Coordinating Body for the Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) – an international, lobbying organization founded by one of their former members, Evaristo Nugkuag.

The computer could also be used by the clinic to gather needed medical information, and th3 economic promotion program to keep abreast of the latest prices for plantains, the banana-like fruit that is a primary foodstuff.

Despite the CAH’s advances, life for the Indians of Condorcanqui province is still tough, by any measure. The average life expectancy is 39. Instead of heroic death, there is only death by snakebite, malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhea.

Although men continue to desire two or three wives, they can no longer afford to keep that many. Since their involvement in the market economy prevents them from hunting or otherwise providing for their families, they tend to abandon one of the wives, who usually hav anywhere from eight to 12 children.

The woman’s response, all too frequently, is to commit suicide.

“At least 28 women killed themselves last year alone,” said Maria Rebeca Deten Regoso, who is in charge of te clinic’s maternal and infant health unit. “Because of the many abandoned women, widows and single mothers, it is impossible for them to support their families. They need help.”

Deten is attempting to form a women’s organization that would offer counselling, and design and implement small-scale enterprises for women.

“But,” she asked, “where are we going to get the funding?”

While the Aguarunas and Huambisas have never been very organized beyond the extended family, they have always had the ability to forge key alliances when facing a common threat. This flexibility, according to anthropologists, allowed them to form the CAH.

Last fall the CAH inaugurated a two-month, bilingual/bicultural course for approximately 500 Aguaruna and Huambisa teachers. CAH officials said it marked the beginning of the Indians’ struggle to reclaim their culture.

“We need to re-establish or own traditional values before it is too late,” insisted Santiago Manuin Valera, the CAH’s vice president.

At the opening ceremony, Manuin summed up the feelings of the Indian community. In a speech directed at the few Peruvian government officials who had bothered to accept the CAH’s invitation to attend the inauguration, Manuin said:

“We have heard the government representative say that we should live together, mestizo (mixed-blood) and Indian, in peace and harmony. These are beautiful words. Beautiful. But we don’t want any more words. We want concrete action. For too long the indigenous people have been repressed. For too long the indigenous people have been exploited. But now I say, ‘Enough is enough!’”

Later that day, Yuu wondered whether his people would be able to survive. The problems seem overwhelming. The resources few.

But then Yuu smiled as he thought of something past that gave him encouragement.

“The Incas tried to defeat us,” he said. “Then the conquistadores came. They tried to defeat us. Then the mestizo came.”

Yuu’s smile spread across his face.

“You know, we have never been defeated,” he said proudly.