The massacre
The government’s initial reaction to the brutality in the Peruvian province of Bagua is significant: within a day, the Ministry of the Interior had published a TV advert (1) showing how ‘terrorist’ indigenous people, promoted by an ‘international conspiracy’, are attempting to undermine economic progress and development in Peru, ‘ferociously’ killing ‘humble’ policemen in the process.
In many cases, instant and aggressive defensiveness may be used to dissemble uncomfortable truths. Indeed in spite of the government’s efforts to suppress these truths, what happened on 5 June on the ‘Curva del Diablo’ on the road near the town of Bagua in northern Peru has proved increasingly uncomfortable for Peruvian authorities. According to the government story, which was the only one picked up by foreign media during the first few days after the violence, Awajún and Wampi people attacked the police at a road blockade. The blockade was being held in protest at the unequivocal and one-sided passing of a dozen presidential decrees, which would open up the Amazon to large-scale industrial agriculture, mining and oil exploitation. According to the indigenous story – backed by raw video and photographic footage unreported in the Peruvian media – the police started firing on them at dawn, while some were still asleep, at the blockade site.(2) They were unarmed and ploughed through with bullets, even as they tried to help their wounded and dying friends.(3) Some indigenous blockaders began to fight back using stones, sticks and spears, helped by the local mestizos; others tried to flee. The police were shooting from helicopters at the crowd and at those who were attempting to run away, and were throwing tear gas into the crowds to confuse them.(4) A small group took a number of policemen hostage in the local controversial petrol processing plant, resulting in more deaths.
The official number of police deaths amounts to 23 and indigenous deaths to 9;(5) the actual number of indigenous deaths is around 60, with hundreds more wounded. How come we have no effective body count? Every non-government eye-witness at the site tells a compounding and horrific story: indigenous bodies being removed using helicopters and thrown into the river, bodies being burned, bodies being slung into hastily covered mass graves, bodies being forcibly removed from hospitals. In fact, in their haste, it seems they inadvertently ‘disappeared’ the body of one of their own, whose remains, like the hundreds of indigenous people, are still being searched for by family members. The local Awajún and Wampi communities are currently not reporting their dead for fear of reprisals.(6) Those detained have spoken of rape, torture and threats at the hands of the police.
The reaction to this massacre by those in government was shameful. The finger of blame was shoved in the face of the leaders of the indigenous movement, a movement which, so far, and despite the continuous and unabated pressure on their lands and livelihoods, has not used violence and consistently calls for peaceful solutions in indigenous-state conflicts. For some in government, the situation was embarrassing enough that it has led them to resign: the Prime Minister Yehude Simon has promised his resignation once the independent investigation on the massacre is completed, while the Minister for Women and Development, Carmen Vildoso, resigned a few days after the tragic event. Nevertheless, Alberto Pizango, the leader of AIDESEP, the principal national indigenous organisation, along with a few other key leaders, have warrants for arrest for sedition and treason.
The silence the Peruvian government attempted to enforce was rapidly broken. Two Belgian volunteers present at the site took a large number of incriminating photographs.(7) The international media picked up the story from the indigenous perspective.(8) The Interamerican Court on Human Rights asked for an independent investigation, while the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, Prof. James Anaya, visited Peru last week in order to obtain information from the indigenous groups themselves about what happened. Remain to be seen the effects of these interventions.
The history
Ever since the independent Peruvian Republic was created in 1821, the Amazon region (which covers jut over 60% of the country) has been seen as a rich and bottomless well of resources for the Peruvian state. Early agricultural colonisation of the Amazon, in the mid-19th century, was a military affair – settlers were protected by the army, and given guns to hunt Indians with. In the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th century, much more blood than rubber flowed out of the Amazon – the Huitoto alone lost more than 30,000 people to the bloodthirsty frenzy for raw material.(9) Settlers carried on flowing in, and by the mid-20th century, many indigenous lands had been taken over by latifundos, huge production farms on which many indigenous people worked in conditions of enslavement. In 1974, the military government of Velasco Alvarado, finally granted a law for titling indigenous community lands. While the law remains fundamentally flawed, and only a small percentage of indigenous lands were titled, they have provided some form of control over land and resource use for indigenous communities. Subsequently, the civil war of the 80s and 90s caused a hiatus in the Peruvian government’s relentless bulldozing of the Amazon and its peoples – a process which has been resumed with extraordinary ferocity since the beginning of the 21st century, and particularly under Alan Garcia’s presidency.
The driving force for the renewed efforts at plundering the Peruvian Amazon is the Free Trade Agreement between the Peruvian and the US governments, ratified by the US congress in December 2007.(10) In order to ensure the smooth transformation of Peruvian soil into the pound-shop for the US’s daily needs, from food to raw materials to energy, the Peruvian congress granted the president special powers to pass emergency decrees. The executive lost no time in drafting and passing these decrees, over 100 of which severely weaken indigenous control over their lands. Alan Garcia’s policy for the Amazon was set out in a series of editorials published in the leading newspaper El Comercio in 2007 and 2008: Amazonian peoples are like the ‘dog in the manger’ – they don’t eat and they don’t let anyone else eat.(11) In other words, they live upon untold quantities of unexploited resources; they are uncivilised, selfish and are hindering progress for the whole country; they must be forced into giving it up – their lands, what lies beneath their lands, their livelihoods, their cultures, and their aspirations for the future – for the benefit of ‘the Peruvian nation’. “The Amazon”, says Garcia, “is [Peru’s] first resource” and “it belongs to all Peruvians”.(12)
In August 2008, a month-long indigenous protest in the Amazon resulted in the derogation of a few of these damaging decrees and in an incipient dialogue between indigenous groups and the government, but Garcia kept them coming. By the end of 2008, the fires of protest were fanned once more as dialogue evaporated and the government became increasingly impatient and threatening. On 9 April 2009, the protests took up again. Roads and waterways throughout the Amazon were blocked, as were oil and gas pipelines and routes leading to and from petrol exploitation facilities in the north of the country. The government got impatient and the police pulled their guns. Indigenous people, who had been sitting at the blockade sites for over 50 days defended themselves as best they could. Hundreds of Awajún and Wampi remain ‘disappeared’ and Peru’s international standing (and Garcia’s national ratings) have plummeted.(13) Since then, a state of emergency was declared all over the Amazon (and martial law applied), and a curfew was imposed in Bagua. The indigenous movement has revealed how organised it really is, and the government has been forced to back down – the two most offending decrees were repealed.
The objective
The injustices do not end here: Amazonian indigenous peoples’ lands, lives and rights are not only violated by damaging decrees, but also by routine imposition-without-consultation of petrol exploration and exploitation concessions, mining concessions, forestry concessions and more recently hydroelectric dam concessions.
The map of the Peruvian Amazon’s petrol concessions looks like this:
Most of the Amazon has been, or is in the process of being, concessioned out to petrol companies. The green concessions already have contracts for exploration signed, the orange concessions are in negotiation, the yellow ones are up for grabs, and the blue ones are under agreement and awaiting confirmation.
The map of the Peruvian Amazon’s 15 mega-dam concessions looks like this:
Legend:
Mustard = titled indigenous communities
Green = protected areas
Dark brown = uncontacted indigenous peoples’ reserves
Brick = proposed uncontacted indigenous peoples’ reserves Read the rest of this entry »
Giandaniele Castangia