What's next? This is a great article sent to me by several friends who are involved with the Peruvian Indigenous struggle. Now that the Alan Garcia government has decided to repeal two of the infamous free trade decrees, and that its prime Minister Yehude Simon has decided to step down. What to do now to assure the rights of Indigenous peoples in Peru?
Please read this article, originally written in Spanish -I will post it next- by one of the Indigenous leaders in Peru. And don't forget to spread the word.
How to stop capitalist ethnocide in Peru?By Roberto Espinoza, Technical Coordinator for the Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indigenas (Andean Coordinating Body for Indigenous Organisations) -CAOI
June 13, 2009
This translation by CACIM, New Delhi, India, June 16, 2009; with thanks to Camila with notes by Carlos A. Quiroz. Photos by FENAMAD and Ben Bowless.
The Bagua Massacre left 34 dead
(*), 158 wounded by gunfire, dozens of prisoners, and disappeared civilians, police, Bagua residents, Awajun, and Wampis [Indigenous peoples] who have not yet been identified. This exemplifies not only the beginning of a dictatorial phase in Peru, but also the aggravation of an old pattern of ethnocide permitted and promoted by the State. For a long time there has been a complex ideological, judicial, political, and repressive offensive of narcissistic, privatization-oriented, and neoliberal tendencies against the indigenous communities, peasants, and traditional inhabitants of the Andean, coastal, and Amazonian regions of the country. This process has continued with the support of business associations, the majority of the media, and the Apra party, the Unidad Nacional party, and Fujimori group, and where [former presidents] Toledo’s and Belaunde’s political platforms are also consistent with these practices.
The offensive is further illustrated in the following cases: More than 33 million Amazonian [land] hectares have been auctioned to petroleum companies, over 3,000 Andean communities are living with mining interests overpowering their territories, along with minimum job-creation and incredibly low taxes paid by the said companies; there is impunity regarding the contamination and predation involved in the mining industry; there is refusal by the State to recognise and certify more than 250 Amazonian communities, to extend the land titles of hundreds of vulnerable communities in crisis due to population growth, and to establish land reserves in voluntary isolation; and there is the pressure exerted by Cofopri to fragment and privatise community land titles to open the ‘land market’ claimed by the neoliberal right.
Family of David Jausito, 19, shot and killed by Peru’s Police in the Devil's Curve. Inside their house
The present haste to sign free trade agreements that begun with [former president Alejandro] Toledo’s submissive “yes or yes” policy towards the US and its subsequent adherence by all traditional parties expresses the anxiety to judicially freeze and prolong the literal invasion and plunder of mother earth, therefore excluding and destroying the social fabric of traditional inhabitants of the region. Under this Free Trade Agreement, 102 decrees were imposed in June 2008 under the silence of Congress leading to an authentic legislative self-blow. Several of the decrees (1090, 1064, 1020, 1089, 1081, 1083, 1080, and others) are aimed at weakening, fragmenting, privatising, and threatening the overall stability of indigenous territories denoted as “second-class” land and facilitating the invasion of extractive capital. The ideological explanation was given in the [Alan Garcia's] articles of “El Perro de Hortelano” in which said communities are accused of “demagoguery” in their cultural identities and the “historical mistake” of giving land to the poor without productivity and the ensuing condemnation to belonging to the ‘past” by the President himself. This is a clear and violent social judgment that leaves them outside Peru’s future and is institutionalized racism from the State.
All of the above means that there are public policies that hinder, assault, and violate the necessary social conditions for the social and cultural traditions of the aboriginal peoples to thrive. If this doctrine continues to gain force, the mortality, disease, literacy, urban migration, and degenerative toxic rates will increase. Besides these effects, socio-cultural-environmental conflicts will be intensified; therefore accumulating more clashes, murders, disappearances, wounded, maimed, and persecuted persons. This is what we call state policies that allow ethnocide backed by the racism in the Apra, Unidad Nacional, and Fujimori parties.
Charred landscape left by the fighting
To stop these multiple aggressions that have been taking place, it is urgent – although insufficient - to repeal decree 1090. The government continues to aggravate the problems. The arrogance of imposing, by means of force and violence, the incoherent “suspension” of this decree demonstrates that it is only a part of a much larger capitalist offensive that calls for profoundly different alternatives to be also taken into account. Indigenous territories have no guarantees at present and they must have assurances immediately. This social aggression must be stopped, because it will continue to aggravate an unnecessary conflict pattern and social violence. The depth and breath of the ethnocide make – among many others - the following measures necessary :
- Repeal of the pro-FTA, anti-Indigenous decrees (994, 995, 1090, 1064, 1020, 1089, 1081, 1075, 1083, 1080, and others) and those that criminalise the exercise of indigenous and popular rights (982, 983, 988, 989).
- Contribute to closing the wounds of the Awajun and Wampis by suspending the aggressions taking place by the Dorato mining company and Hocol petroleum company in the aborigines’ territories. Establishing a Commission for Peace and Truth composed by international forces dedicated to identify the disappeared, free the detained, tend the wounded, and stop the ‘rastrillaje’ in the Amazonian communities.
- Consolidating ownership of Indigenous lands, whose titles have been maimed by more than 50% in forest areas under contracts of transfer of use. The thirty-year-old petition to incorporate forest areas as part of territorial titles must be heeded immediately.
- Amnesty for Alberto Pizango, leaders of AIDESEP, and the more than 1,000 leaders of Amazonian and Andean communities persecuted for defending mother earth, their territories, and their social and cultural rights.
- Recognize and grant land titles to more than 250 new communities and extend more than 300 territorial reserves of isolated communities. It is not enough to put it on paper as a rule or norm. Political will, allocation of funds, and ordering its execution to an entity other than ‘privatising oriented’ Cofopri are of utmost importance.
- Complete a territorial reorganization as a condition prior to any investment, project, or state proposal of business in the Amazon region especially regarding concessions to forestry industries, agro fuels, mining, and oil industries.
- Establish as a national law with binding force the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as Bolivia [and Venezuela] have already done.
- Crosscut ILO Convention 169 (decree 26253) and the UN Declaration, to bring under these international treaties the laws of natural resources such as water, energy, mining, hydrocarbon, forestry, education, health, and justice, amongst others.
- Denounce the state ethnocide in Peru before the International Labour Organisation, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the UN Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Some of this has already initiated by CAOI with evidence presented by ‘El Perro de Hortelano’.
It is a matter of ever-changing political forces and alliances that determines if the necessary conditions are given or not in Congress to offer assurances as the ones mentioned above. Whether the solutions take months to take place depends on the national actions and opinions, but that does not change the social exclusions and gaps that must be exposed. There has been an excessive amount of blood spilled (including that of the six policemen of Bagua that were abandoned to their fate when the government ordered the site to be emptied), and this adds to the hundreds of years of neglect, indifference, deceit, humiliation, and corruption suffered by the aboriginal tribes from the state and the ‘systemic’ political parties. It is not only historical mistrust, it is now a deep wound caused by state violence.
Let’s get over the fractures, inconsistencies, and failures of imposing a uni-national State following the capitalist model of viewing life as a commodity and lets advance in the transformation towards a pluri-national state and a society of Living Well (not “living better”): Unity in Diversity without exclusion, racism, and ethnocide. It is essential to enable this historic reparation to take place in 2009. This one would add itself to the ones left pending by the reports of the Truth Commission between 1980 and 2000. Two historical processes, two mass murders, two lessons, two lost opportunities; hopefully the future repetition of this predictable story will see a different outcome.
The national strike on July 7th, 8th, and 9th will attempt to open new paths in this direction: We are all invited and we will make it happen with the support of the local and international communities.
This is the mother of Felipe Sabio, his wife and his children. A nearly identical photo made the front page of La Republica, a national Peruvian newspaper on June 14th.
(*)[ Note: the Peruvian government official death toll in the Bagua attacks of 34 deaths, does not include a number of disappeared civilians, which some Indigenous leaders say might be up to 250 Indigenous people.]
Please send this to your friends, thanks for reading.
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Foto Carlos A. Quiroz
