In the wake of the violence: what now for Amazonian peoples in Peru?

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

The objective of these petrol and dam concessions, as well as the mining, forestry and extensive agricultural concessions is, ostensibly, to ensure the ‘development’ and ‘progress’ of Peru. The reality is that such large-scale projects rarely result in ‘development’, the ‘trickle down’ effect is a fantasy, and their consequences are most often increased corruption, inequalities and human rights abuses.

The affected

The contracts for the construction of six of these dams, five of which directly affect indigenous territories, have already been signed with the Brazilian government, who, in exchange for receiving cheap energy from Peru, agree to sell the latter the services of their dam construction companies, headed by Electrobras.

The headlining dam – with construction commencing within the next few years – is the Pakitzapango dam on the Ene River in Selva Central; the dam site is embedded deep within indigenous territory. The titled communal territories belong to the Ashaninka nation, the largest group of indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon. The area affected by the Pakitzapango dam is the same area affected by one of the larger petrol concessions in the Peruvian Amazon (Block 108, Pluspetrol). Its ‘proximity’ to Lima and the highlands has meant that this region was also severely affected by the rubber fever and its indigenous inhabitants have suffered uncontrolled colonisation from the sierras.

More significantly, it was one of the few indigenous areas to be massively impacted by the civil war. In fact, the Ashaninka are the only Amazonian peoples to have a special chapter dedicated to them in the 10,000 page 2001 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru, a document which attempts to account for the 69,000 deaths at the hands of both the military and Sendero Luminoso, a maoist revolutionary group, during the dirty war of the latter 2 decades of last century.(14) Around 4,000 Ashaninka from the Ene were killed during this bloody episode, and another 5,000 displaced. As unwilling actors in the theatre of a war unconnected to them, the Ashaninka eventually chose to take up arms and fight against their oppressors: in this case the Senderistas whose bloodthirsty revolutionary tactics were alien to Ashaninka concepts of living well. They became the nation’s unsung heroes, as their courage in battle was essential to the military’s victory over Sendero Luminoso.

While the proposal for the exploitation of petrol is threatening, the dam, for the Ashaninka, quite literally signifies the end of the world. In Ashaninka apocalyptic mythology, the end of the world will take place when a huge crab will block the EneRriver, flooding all the Ashaninka communities living upstream. Sadly, it is not only in myth that this dam may end their world. Dams, the world over, have been shown to consistently result in dramatic human rights abuses: loss of lands and livelihoods, disease, displacement, militarization, dramatic transformations in the local ecosystem which wipe out natural food and irrigation sources, and local climate changes amongst many others. The World Commission on Dams, a United Nations initiative regrouping actors from the entire spectrum(15) to review the effectiveness of dams, reported in 2001 that dams almost invariably result in environmental degradation and human rights abuses and rarely, if ever, produce the ‘promised’ development results.(16) Despite the research and huge amounts of popular resistance to dams over the past 30 years, the Peruvian government has chosen the ‘development’ pathway of mega-hydroelectric projects – and as usual, plans to use the vast ‘empty’ space of the Amazon to plant them in.

In my two years of working with the Ashaninka, as one new government-imposed project for colonisation and exploitation of their lands is superimposed on another, the dam being the latest and most significant threat, a question is increasingly asked throughout Ashaninka organisations, communities and families: does the Peruvian government want to exterminate us?

One racist commentator on the recent events in Bagua wonders why Alan Garcia didn’t order napalm on those ‘prehistoric savages’. Under a certain light, it appears that the Ashaninka’s question genuinely needs to be asked.

The future

The violence that occurred in Bagua has had some profound consequences. The two most damaging decrees have been revoked and a couple of ministers have resigned. This is far from a positive outcome. After weeks of refusing to admit any wrong-doing, Alan Garcia admitted yesterday (29th of June) that there were some ‘deficiencies’ in the police operation in the jungle, albeit calling the Awajún and Wampi ‘assassins’ in the same statement. The reluctance with which the government is recognising the truth of the events, the disappearances, and its fundamental responsibility is not only frustrating, but also is a warning sign for all: the fight for the Amazon has only just begun. The petrol, dam, mining and forestry concessions have not been repealed. The FTA with the United States stands, without any alterations. Fundamental and systemic change is required for the country to avoid another ‘Curva del diablo’. Human rights must be respected above and beyond any contract with foreign states and/or companies. Any laws, projects or concessions regarding both titled and customary indigenous territories in the Amazon must be consulted with indigenous peoples and the final decisions they make regarding any such intervention must be respected. Furthermore, Peruvians as well as their government must all start seeking alternatives to the plunder of the Amazon for the economic development of their country.

With regards to other Peruvians, the violence has resulted in an awakening to the fact that not only are there people (still) living in the Amazon, but that ensuring that their rights are respected is the responsibility of the whole citizenry – democracy can only be effected by the people themselves.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

REGARDING BAGUA

-    Donations for humanitarian aid to the indigenous people wounded during the protests. Donations will be sent to the Vicariato of Jaen, a local religious institution that has many years of experience in the area and supports the local indigenous peoples. Money can be sent to them via Amazon Watch (http://www.amazonwatch.org/peru-protests.php)
-    Send letters to Alan Garcia and sign petitions calling for the violence to end, a full investigation into the events, and for the laws to be repealed (http://www.avaaz.org/en/peru_stop_violence/?cl=250912030&v=3462)
-    Hold vigils / demonstrations outside Peruvian Embassies
-    Circulate information to all contacts, especially press
-    Write to SPDA, (Peruvian Society for Environmental Law) which has been advising the Government on environmental law, including the laws the indigenous people are protesting against, asking them to take international indigenous rights agreements into account, and support the repeal of the laws (postmaster@spda.org.pe, Prolongación Arenales 437 Lima 27, Perú)

REGARDING PAKITZAPANGO DAM

-    Send letters to Alan Garcia – see www.pakitsapango.ashanincare.org for model letters – demanding that the Ashaninka communities from the Rio Ene be fully consulted regarding the proposal for the construction of the Pakitzapango hydroelectric dam, and that their final decision regarding the dam be respected.

-    Send similar letters to the President of the Regional Government Vladimir Huaroc (see website)

-    Check the CARE’s website regularly for updates on the campaign: www.ashanincare.org

Footnotes:

1 The Peruvian government’s propaganda: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDVgw4pbHEk
2 The truth behind the government lies: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/8/peruvian_police_accused_of_massacring_indigenous and for an effective immersion into events that morning, see Peruvian journalists’ raw & unreported video footage, which is cut up into 14 ‘chunks’, the first of which is found on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOLvtote2Us, and the other 13 available to download thereon.
3 The Amazon’s Tiananmen: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/images-reveal-full-horror-of-amazons-tiananmen-1708990.html & for the full photo story of the events, as told by the photographers present at the site: http://www.nrc.nl/redactie/buitenland/peruphotostory.pdf
4 For a post hoc investigation into what actually happened, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG7rHB1nnOw
5 Added to these indigenous deaths are a significant number of local mestizos who were killed both as they came to support the indigenous resistance at Curva del Diablo, and if they were mistaken for Awajún in the local town of Bagua. One 8-year old girl was killed by a stray bullet in that town.
6 What happened with the body counts? http://reflexionesperuanas.blogspot.com/2009/06/reflexiones-peruanas-n-206-al-volver-de.html#links
7 See http://www.nrc.nl/redactie/buitenland/peruphotostory.pdf
8 Amongst others:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8093729.stm & http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/06/08/peru.violence/  & http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13824454 & http://www.repubblica.it/2009/06/sezioni/esteri/amazzonia-rivolta/amazzonia-rivolta/amazzonia-rivolta.html?ref=search & http://www.repubblica.it/2009/06/sezioni/esteri/amazzonia-rivolta/prete-italiano/prete-italiano.html?ref=search & http://www.lemonde.fr/archives/portfolio/2009/06/12/au-perou-les-indiens-d-amazonie-font-chanceler-le-gouvernement_1205839_0.html
9 See, for a brilliant analysis, Taussig, M (1986) Shamanism, Colonialism & the Wild Man
10 See http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6191#_ftn4 for a good overview.
11 It is tragic and ironic that Garcia should use the analogy of indigenous peoples as dogs, given that for many Awajún and Wampi victims and witnesses of the 5th of june massacre, it felt like they were being indiscriminately “shot at like dogs” by the police (cf http://reflexionesperuanas.blogspot.com/2009/06/reflexiones-peruanas-n-206-al-volver-de.html#links and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8093729.stm)
12 First came http://www.elcomercio.com.pe/edicionimpresa/Html/2007-10-28/el_sindrome_del_perro_del_hort.html, in which Garcia presents the ‘syndrome’ and all of its causes and symptoms, then he refines his vision and provides a prescription for cure in http://www.elcomercio.com.pe/edicionimpresa/Html/2007-11-25/receta_para_acabar_con_el_perr.html then he shows how the ‘dog in the manger’ is hurting ‘the poor’ in http://www.elcomercio.com.pe/edicionimpresa/Html/2008-03-02/el-perro-hortelano-contra-pobre.html
13 Although interestingly, and despite his country’s deep embroilment in the political landscape within which the violence is embedded, President Obama has made no comment or statement regarding the massacre or the human rights violations.
14 See the pages of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission http://www.cverdad.org.pe/
including private sector, public sector, research institutions, development agencies, activists, etc
15 See the pages of the World Commission on Dams http://www.dams.org/
16 If you can handle this horrific editorial, see http://www.correoperu.com.pe/correo/columnistas.php?txtEdi_id=4&txtSecci_parent&txtSecci_id=84&txtNota_id=73466

EMILY ZITA CARUSO, All Rights Reserved

Rome 29/06/2009