 On June 6, 2009, military police began shooting at indigenous protesters who were peacefully blockading a stretch of highway known as the Devil’s Curve near Bagua, Peru. It is unclear how many indigenous protesters were killed—many estimates are around 40 though some feel it could be much higher. The bodies of many of the dead are still missing. The protest was part of a coordinated effort by Peru’s indigenous peoples to keep the government and multinational oil, logging, pharmaceutical and mining companies out of their ancestral lands in the Peruvian Amazon. The Garcia government had authorized the “Law of the Jungle,” a set of decrees allowing, among other things, private interests to buy indigenous land without prior consultation. Indigenous groups have been blockading road and waterways to protest these decrees and to have them repealed. International aid agencies, NGOs and other groups around the world are protesting the Garcia government’s handling of the situation and its assault on the rights of indigenous peoples’ in Peru.
Astrid Bant is an anthropologist who lived and worked in Peru for 20 years and has worked for three years, early on, with the indigenous people involved in the incident in Bagua. Until June, she was the Director of the Latin America Division of Oxfam Novib and continues to advise international organizations on work with indigenous groups in Peru and throughout Latin America.
Please tell us a little about your background and the work you’ve done with indigenous peoples in Latin America.
I am an anthropologist, trained at the University of Amsterdam and at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1985, I started my graduate research in the Ashaninka territory in the central tropical rainforest (Selva Central) of Peru when the internal war, in which the Ashaninka became tragically involved, started to intensify. I worked on issues around adequate education for indigenous children with the Ashaninka of Rio Tambo. In 1989, I took part in an innovative, intercultural teacher-training program initiated by the Inter-Ethnic Development Association of the Peruvian Amazon (AIDESEP), the indigenous umbrella organization, in collaboration with a regional public teacher’s college in Loreto. I taught art and was the research coach for the Awahun (also known as Aguaruna) students who enrolled in the program. Both AIDESEP and the Awahun are now key players in the present conflict in Peru.
Since 1992, when I left the indigenous education program, I have been interchanging field assignments and activism with policy writing and funding work, increasingly directed to strengthening indigenous women in their specific struggles. I’ve worked at the EU, IWHC, UNIFEM, and recently worked on a socio-environmental study commissioned by FUNAI, in very remote indigenous areas in the state of Acre, in Brazil. There I observed the irreversible alteration of the ecosystem by deforestation in favor of (failed) cattle ranching, and, experienced –for the first time in many years of working in tropical rainforests- droughts, a result of global climate change, which turns mighty rivers into muddy trickles that do not allow even a canoe to pass.
Looking back, what were the events that lead up to the present conflict?
The current conflict is one more expression of a centuries old, unresolved tension between indigenous peoples and the governments of Peru. This particular conflict had its origin in an unusual initiative put forth early in 1988 by President Alan Garcia. He published an article in the national press in which he expressed his opinion on indigenous peoples’ protection of natural resources. In his view, they refuse others who need them the ability to put those resources to good use. The article carried the title, “El Perro del Hortelano (The Gardener’s Dog),” a Spanish-language metaphor referring to the senseless attitude of keeping others from using what you yourself don’t use. It was the first step in a strategy to weaken public support for the progress indigenous peoples have achieved over the years in the realization of their collective rights. Pitching non-indigenous and/or urban people, who in their majority have been left out of a growing but extremely inequitable economy, against indigenous people is not difficult task in a setting in which poverty is generalized and exclusion of “indios” on the basis of very crude historical stereotypes is the norm. Indigenous people, in Garcia’s discourse, were the reason why most people in Peru stay poor. Pointing the finger at indigenous people put all actors on edge, created a situation in which hate once again is justified.
What do you think the impact of the “Law of the Jungle” or the individual decrees within it would be on the indigenous peoples living in the Peruvian Amazon?
Well, the next step in Garcia’s strategy was to take advantage of extraordinary, temporary legislative powers given by the Congress to the Executive in order to facilitate the implementation of the TLC (Free Trade Agreement), signed between Peru and the USA. Garcia put in place more than one hundred decrees, which went much further than their original mandate. Many constitutional lawyers, of all political colors, warn that several decrees are in unconstitutional. Many of the presidential decrees, collectively known as the “law of the jungle” (la ley de la selva) are directed, de facto, at dismantelling the collective rights of indigenous communities (laws that guarantee indigenous land-titles came into being in 1972 but many communities spend years in the process to comply with all the prerequisites to obtain collective titles) and reviving the notion that all subterrainian resources, regardless of the specific land-ownership arrangements in situ, always belong to the State. The decrees, which have not been approved by Parliament, make it easier for the Government to sell land in the Amazon to (multinational) companies, without consulting the indigenous population in the area. The decrees also criminalize protest, protect armed forces from being prosecuted, and make it possible for land that is part of native communities to be sold. Turning communities into commodities to be bought and sold by individuals will mean a road of no return for many indigenous people and lead to the disappearance of their collective existence, but before that they will suffer, as they already do, health and subsistence problems when mining companies will increasingly pollute and destroy their habitats.
How have the indigenous peoples, particularly the Awahun and the Wampi people, responded to these planned incursions into their lands?
Awahun and Wampis are warriors originally, but their leaders have been, for decades, at the forefront of the modern indigenous movement in Peru and in Latin America. There are more indigenous voters than non-indigenous voters in these smaller, political, geographical units in the region of Bagua, Condorcanqui. Many municipalities are run by Awahun mayors, working side by side with local mestizo and highland-Indian neighbors. This may explain the support the indigenous protesters received, before and after the assault by the armed forces, from the non-indigenous population in Bagua.
On several occasions, indigenous groups have tried to take legal action against the previous illegal occupation of their territories by government-condoned mining companies and were denied access to have their complaint considered by the relevant authorities. In 2006, the Achuar people took control of installations of an oil company in their territory after their legal strategy failed, and only then wrung a commitment from the government to restore some of the damage done to the environment.
In response to the presidential decrees and the government’s rigid refusal to engage in dialogue, the Awahun, Wampis and other indigenous groups organized the blockade of roads and bridges in the Northern Selva in order to force the government to withdraw “la ley de la selva” in March 2009.
How has President Garcia’s government responded to these organized protests?
AIDESEP and other indigenous organizations, as well as the National Ombudsman who protested the decrees, were buffetted for months between the Executive and the Legislative branches. The fact that the final decision by Congress against withdrawing the decrees was immediately followed by a military intervention to repress protesters who had already been blockading a road leading into the northern selva for many weeks already, substantiates the hypothesis that these two powers had been partners in a joint plan.
Meanwhile, they prepared the general public with a media campaign aimed at discrediting indigenous leadership, by linking them to foreign leaders such as President Morales and President Chavez, as well as to narco-terrorism, for a intervention by the armed forces with the objective of killing a large number of indigenous protesters. That took place on June 6th, leaving tens of protesters who were armed with wooden lances, dead, and hundreds wounded, some of them shot from a helicopter. The army has hidden the bodies of the dead protesters and the government has ordered the arrest of AIDESEPs leader, Alberto Pizango, who has taken refuge in the Nicaraguan Embassy.
How have other countries, NGOs, and UN agencies responded?
The Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Andes (CAOI), a collaboration of indigenous organizations in six Latin American countries has announced that they will initiate a court case against the Alan Garcia government at the International Criminal Court. AIDESEP and national NGOs mobilized large segments of the Peruvian population, which has resulted in demonstrations throughout the country. As I said, the solidarity of the non-indigenous population in the region is remarkable.
The brutality of the repression of the indigenous protest and Garcia’s blatantly discriminatory discourse about the rights of indigenous citizens in Peru have put into action many international solidarity networks and multilateral organizations which are targeting Peruvian embassies abroad with direct actions or by lobbying their own governments to take action. The force and reach of Internet campaigning becomes evident in situations like this, and in my view, has made the government of Peru aware that they are being watched.
International NGOs, like Oxfam, have been working to strengthen the position of indigenous organizations in Peru for decades and will continue supporting national organizations and building capacity to keep the Peruvian government accountable in relation to environmental and social issues around mining and multinational companies and, most importantly, the active protection of individual and collective rights of indigenous peoples as are agreed upon in international conventions, which Peru has ratified.
Past Close Up Articles
Jessica Devi Chandrashekar, Media Coordinator Canadian Humanitarian Appeal for Relief of Tamils (Canadian Hart)
Harmit Atwal, Editor, Institute of Race Relations
Avy Skolnik, Network Coordinator, National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs
Senem Doganoglu, Attorney for Pembe Hayat (Pink Life)
Leonardo Crippa, Staff Attorney, Indian Law Resource Center
Jim Harrington, Director, Texas Civil Rights Project
Prof. Brian Levin, Director, Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism
Juliana Rotich, Program Director, Ushahidi.com
Christina Iturralde, LatinoJustice PRLDEF
Anene Ejikeme Assistant Professor, Trinity University
Alexander Verkhovsky, Director, SOVA Center for Information and Analysis (Moscow)
Innokenty Grekov, Human Rights First
Paul St. Clair, Executive Director, Roma Community Centre
Rev. Allan Ramirez, Latino Advocate
Dr. Agapito López, M.D.
Bill Habern, defense attorney
Anya Cordell, activist
Rais Bhuiyan, survivor
Allison Moore, Volunteer
|
|
