After 188 years of 'independence' government of Peru continues racist genocide of Indigenous and Afro descendant peoples with discriminatory policies

How would you feel if one American woman would die for every 416 child deliveries? What would you do if the entire population of women in Washington, DC, gets sterilized for life by the U.S. government? If you thought the 2,500 victims of Katrina was a sign of racism, imagine 3,500 people being killed every year due to government neglect.

This is not happening in the United States, but this is the tragic reality affecting the Indigenous and Afro descendant peoples of Peru, where more Native children have died in 2009 of pneumonia and cold weather related diseases, than all of the victims of the swine H1N1 flu in the world combined.

Peru praises itself to be one of the fastest growing economies in Latin America, with over $30 billion dollars in international reserves -the biggest in Latin America- and over $34 billion in annual exports of natural resources. Why then our Indigenous peoples are still living in extreme poverty levels as high as 90% in some regions? Why are our children starving and our women dying of preventable diseases?

Indigenous soldiers of the Peruvian army in front of the French and Hispanic influenced designed Palace of Government of Lima. Photo by unknown

This is Peru, the same country whose economic model -imported and imposed by the U.S. and Europe- is praised by the corporate sponsored media and international credit organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Peru says it is one of the fastest growing economies in Latin America, with over $34 billion dollars of exports (mostly natural resources) annually.

But how can one explain then -as BBC mentions- that about 250 Indigenous children have died this year only by the neglect of the centralist Peruvian government, during an intensely cold weather wave in the Andean region of southern Peru. The numbers could be higher as far highland populations in other parts of Peru are hardly ever reached by authorities or researchers.

What motivates a country that claims an economic growth of 6% average in the last 7 years, and one of the top mining producers of the world –fifth Gold world producer, third in Silver and many others commodities- to refuse to provide with basic health care and vaccines for Andean and Amazonian children who are dying of preventable diseases. Peru has had more deaths of children due to cold weather in 2009 than all the victims of the H1N1 flu in the world.

We are talking about over 200 thousand Peruvians killed in the last three decades, with hundreds of injured -not including victims of common crimes, which are many thousands more. In a country of 28 million people, this is an average of one dead for every 140 Peruvian person or more. Something very few have denounced.

How can anyone call this progress? Why is that the Indigenous and Afro descendant peoples of Peru are still living under extreme poverty? In some regions poverty is as high as 90% of the population!

As Peru gets ready to commemorate the 188th anniversary of its independence from the Hispanic rule, we the Indigenous peoples of Peru are reminded once again that such “independence” didn’t mean a true change or the improvement for our communities, instead we continue being exploited and abused.

The creation of Peru as a country didn’t mean much improvement for our living conditions or the respect of our civil rights. We remained as the servants of a tiny elite of creoles or Spaniards born in the Americas, and other European immigrants that are still coming today. Those elites have always had the support and protection of imperialist powers like Spain, then England and France, and now the United States and the European Union.

To those powerful elites, some non white Peruvians have joined forgetting their roots and trying to benefit from a system that promotes human exploitation and corruption. This division of race and class continues even today, as one of the worst heritage of the colonial times, poisoning the Peruvian nation. Racism is one of the worst consequences of this historical process where Indigenous and Afro descendant peoples have been left behind.

In that process, the Indigenous and Afro descendant peoples of Peru have being historically ignored and abandoned by its own government. Except of course when there is a need for soldiers and cheap labor, the first ones to defend the red and white flag have been always the poorest of Peruvians.

The government plans in Peru have been designed to keep Black and Brown Peruvians under poverty and dependence, while they favor the elites. Thus, they will keep the control and will avoid any attempt to change this unfair system. To prove this I could review the history of Peru since its creation as a country, but I will only refer to some events happening in the last 3 decades.

Even after centuries of ethnically and cultural mixture, today most of Peruvians are of Indigenous heritage -including the mestizo or mixed blood Natives- and about 10% of our population is of African origins. The 10% remaining are of European and Asian heritage, also Arab and other minority groups.

However, the racism against the non white majority is still playing an important role in the government policies, the distribution of the country’s resources, its social dynamics, economic development models and investment plans from the Lima government. The racism in Peru is promoted not only from the minorities, but also from our own Indigenous and Afro descendant peoples who reject their roots. Peru's racism is so deep that some Peruvians can't even realize how bad this problem is affecting their lives, they are used to take "their place" in society.

Racism in the government in Peru is really obvious on its actions. An average of 240 Indigenous women die for every 100,000 live births in Peru, according to the Amnesty International report released on July 9, 2009. The report says that “nearly 60 per cent of the [Indigenous] communities covered by the [2007] census did not have access to a health facility.” These deaths are clearly intentional, racism as its worst. As Amnesty International's Researcher Nuria Garcia said:

'The rates of maternal mortality in Peru are scandalous. The fact that so many women are dying from preventable causes is a human rights violation. The Peruvian state is simply ignoring its obligation to provide adequate maternal health care to all women, regardless of who they are and where they live.'

The tactics -intentional or not- for the killings of Indigenous and Afro descendant peoples in Peru go beyond imagination. An estimated 31,555 Peruvians –mostly Natives- have been killed in the last 10 years, as a result of preventable car accidents.

These 'accidents' occur mostly in obsolete roads of the Andes, coastal rural areas and poor sections of the huge city of Lima -places where almost no white people live- with over 400,000 injured. We are talking about mostly poor people who even if they don't die they will remain injured for a long time, some for ever.

Only in 2007 there were 3,500 Peruvians killed in car accidents, which is about 1 death per 8,000 Peruvians or 292 casualties per month. To compare, this rate is a bit lower than the 43,000 annual victims in the U.S. which has a 10 times bigger population, a bigger and extensive road system, an average of 2 cars per family and where gasoline is 3 times cheaper. The high death toll for Peruvian roads is caused mainly by the level of alcoholism in the Peruvian society, the lack of respect for the public law, the low police control and rise of crime, and the primitive state of some Peruvian roads which were designed over a century ago.

The government of Lima obviously doesn’t care much about these issues. As alcoholism is wide spreading among the poorest populations in Peru, some people of the Lima elites are making good profits benefiting from that addiction. Driving while drunk is a common practice in Peruvian roads, and delinquency as well.

To regulate public transportation is not a priority for the government of Peru - most of Peruvian mass transport businesses are small and informal- and anyone who visits Lima can see of the chaotic and brutal way Peruvians drive, or the miserable conditions that people in Lima face daily to get around in the city.

Map of poverty levels 2007 in Peru. The darker the poorer and some get to be 90% poor, the poorest areas are the same where most Native people live. Coincidence? Source INEI - Peru government statistics agency and La Republica newspaper

Seems like the welfare and good living standards for non-white Peruvians are not profitable business, nor a first priority anyways. So the government of Peru keeps ignoring thousands of its poorest citizens dying every year for preventable causes.

The true priority of the Peruvian government has been since the last three decades, to protect the comfort and privileges of the richest Peruvians, who are mostly of European descendants.

Such unfair model is supported mainly by the United States, and it allows for the rich of Peru to live under first world conditions and with exclusive amenities like the best urban infrastructure in the country, with the best services, best hospitals and highly sophisticated schools. Meanwhile less than 5 miles away from those fancy neighborhoods surrounded by huge walls, video surveillance cameras and private security, there are hundreds of Black and Brown children working in the streets, selling anything they can in the corners of Lima.

While most of Peruvians live with less than $2 dollars a day, there are the rich ones who pay as much as $400 dollars for a concert ticket of foreign musicians, performing in the fancy part of Lima, and that amounts to 3 times the minimum wage of Peru. Today there are million-dollar homes in Lima and exclusive cars -the latest models in the world- are sold constantly by dealers in Peru.

This horrible inequality has caused the increase of crime in Peruvian cities. In Lima, any well intentioned Peruvian will warn tourists to never get in an unregistered taxi cab, to avoid getting mugged by the very same drivers. Taking money out of an ATM at night hours is considered a suicidal action in most Peruvian cities. Homes, cars and pedestrians get robbed any given day and time and this has forced some Peruvians to live in a permanent state of alert. Houses and streets are fenced up with cameras and even private security. In many cities, youth gangs are in the rise both in numbers and violence, and drug consumption has increased 250% in Peruvian schools in the last year.

In Trujillo, the second biggest city of Peru and where most people are of Muchik Indigenous heritage (or Mochica, Chimu), about 45 civilians have been killed in the last year. These were extra judiciary killings by death squads with ties to the National Police and the APRA political party. They have been justified by the racist authorities as “collateral damages” in the fight against the increasing delinquency rates, in a region which claims to have achieved one of the biggest growths in Peru’s agribusiness boom.

How can't we talk about racism in Peru, when its government prefers to have our Native children die, before building hospitals and the most basic housing. The ambition for money and its corrupting effects have blinded the Peruvian authorities, who don't think is worth it to build safe roads, better schools, prevent addictions and bad social behaviours among our peoples.

The ideal solution for the racist Peruvian government is not to help the Indigenous and Afro descendant peoples, but to kill them or prevent our reproduction. Backed by the myth of over population, the government has reduced the birth rate in the country by 5 points in eight years, an impressive achievement celebrated by the World Bank, IMF and other economic regulators of the rich countries.

Now you might think I am exaggerating but consider this: in the 1990’s decade and during the Fujimori regime, over 300,000 Indigenous women and 22,000 Indigenous men were sterilized after being threatened, coerced, or manipulated with “economic incentives”. These are the same people that current president Alan Garcia calls "not first class citizens" but savages who oppose the progress of the country. This same insulting statements are commonly heard in Lima, by Peruvians who forgot their Andean and Amazonian heritage.

When Indigenous leaders -including Quechua Congresswoman Hilaria Supa- and human rights activists protested for these racist crimes, the government opened a useless investigation process. Last month the government of Alan Garcia has decided to close the investigation without charging anyone, and the corporation who sponsored the program -Population Research Institute (PRI) - is still running partly funded by the U.S. government.

Other regions that are seeing an agribusiness bonanza are Ica, and the valley south of Lima, where most people are also Indigenous and especially Afro descendants. Thousands of peoples are still living in shanty towns and houses made of disposable materials after the 2007 earthquake, which devastated the area. As delinquency rates have increased, people wonder where the hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid have gone. They reached Lima but never arrived to this region.

While employment rates have increased in those valleys, the jobs available are temporary and low paid, mostly day laborers. This has led to labor abuse cases, because Peruvian justice never lean for the poor workers especially if the employer is white, which is what often happens with agribusiness corporations. To make things worse, Peru doesn't have a national labor legislation and 75% of its workers are informal or hired by third-party agencies, and they almost never respect labor rights.

Lima has been for centuries a place of racism and centralist dominance, since the colonial and republican times, even today the city looks down to other regions of the country -which are called the provinces. Today Lima benefits from the free trade pacts the government of Peru has signed with developed nations, with poverty rates around 35% of the population. Meanwhile most Andean Indigenous regions are still facing an average of 77% of poverty levels, with no signs of change in the near future. If these are the official statistics, imagine what the reality could be.

This trend of centralist abuse and violence against the Indigenous peoples is nothing new. It had its peak during the two decades that followed the U.S. backed military rule of Francisco Morales, who was placed in power as part of the Operation Condor. A violent civil conflict exploded in Peru in 1980 between the Maoist and Marxist guerrillas of Sendero Luminoso and MRTA, against the government military and police forces and the right-wing aprista paramilitary groups.

This violent war occurred not in the rich areas of Lima or where the elites live, but in areas where mostly poor Indigenous peoples live for centuries causing about 70 thousand people to be massacred. Not a coincidence, but a pattern.

The Truth Commission in Peru said that 75% of the victims were Quechua speaking Peruvians -mostly Indigenous. But the number of Indigenous peoples killed ought to be higher since such data doesn’t include the policemen, military and paramilitary members who were mostly of Indigenous and African origins. This was a war between Native and Black peoples sent by the government while the elites of Lima built walls in their neighborhoods and the soldiers remained keeping them safe. At the end, the same groups remained in power since then.

These are only few examples of how the Peruvian government -which is basically a controlling political system working in behalf of the Peruvian elites- kills its own Balck and Indigenous populations. They do it directly or by third parties, with a clear intention: to continue their domination.

Because these deaths not only affect the victims, but also their relatives, friends, entire communities. A terrorized community with a low moral becomes a community with no soul, easy to manipulate, to control. We are talking about over 200 thousand Peruvians killed in the last three decades, with hundreds of injured -not incluiding victims of common crimes, which are many thousands more. In a country of 28 million people, this is an average of one dead for every 140 Peruvian person or more. Something very few have dennounced.

This is racism at its worst: these deaths mean nothing when the victims happen to be part of the discriminated groups.

So it is not surprising that the government of Peru doesn't care about the health of millions of Indigenous peoples, many of whom are dying because of the pollution caused by mining and oil extraction in the Andes and the Amazon forest regions. They don't care about the Afro descendant populations that show higher rates of preventable diseases, and they disproportionate rates of incarcerated Black people as the urban populations are plagued with high crime and drug consumption rates.

These human tragedies are signs that some things are deeply wrong in the very foundations of the Peruvian nation, where a tiny group controls and decides the survival of millions of peoples, and they can even cause the deaths of innocent peoples or avoid any action to prevent them.

It is not a coincidence that in the last three decades Peru has been ruled by right-wing political groups: from Morales, then Belaunde, the first Garcia term -he pretended to be a leftist but opened the road for the neoliberal policies to follow- to the Fujimori, Toledo and again Garcia.

Last month the world watched horrified the killings of hundreds of Indigenous peoples in Bagua in the Amazon region of Peru. Many ignored that that that was an action of racist genocide, but those of us of Peruvian Indigenous heritage, we were aware that through our history. The very same government that is supposed to protect us, has actually committed the worst attacks against our peoples, several times. That is why is not surprising that president Garcia is hiding the true numbers of Indigenous peoples killed, and that he hasn't yet apologized by his crimes.

By July 28, most Peruvians will rise the red and white flag in their homes all around Peru. That image will be in the memory of millions of Peruvians all over the world. It will be a day to celebrate for some, but for most will be a time to remember that we don't have yet a country that is fair, united and truly inclusive. Not yet.

On that day, we must reflect on the country we have. We must honor our fallen and the peoples that for centuries have been slaved and massacred, by colonial power that care less about our communities. We Peruvians must committ ourselves to change the path of Peru, and replace that terrible history of racist genocide we inherited in order to build a country where racism has not place.

Otherwise, Peru will fail as a nation and the oppresed peoples -mostly Indigenous and Afro descendants- will be forced to reconsider what country we are pledging allegiance to. Although most Peruvians are proud of our nationality, but it gets really hard for us to respect and honor a government that kills our children, our mothers, sisters, brothers. Really hard.

In order to survive, our peoples will have to take actions to change the country, or we will have to switch countries with a second independence.


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