Written by Jennifer Moore Friday, 31 July 2009
They had been at war twice in the last century, but today they’ve found a common enemy: the governments of Peru and Ecuador have singled out their own citizens who resist extractive industry expansion.
“Something terrible is taking place,” says Father Marco Arana, a member of the executive committee of the Latin American Observatory of Mining Conflicts speaking at the Third Continental Meeting in Quito, “such that the discourse of 21st Century Socialism coincides with the logic and discourse of the most ultra-conservative governments like that of Peru.”
Presidents Alan García and Rafael Correa have been polarizing the internal clash over development vision in their respective countries with that of indigenous peoples, mestizo farmers, environmentalists and human rights activists, raising concern about possible future confrontations.
A leading metal producer with ambitions to exploit agricultural, wood, mineral, and water resources in sensitive regions such as the Amazon, Peru’s most recent stand-off resulted in the deaths of at least twenty three police officers, five indigenous people and five residents from the town of Bagua when state forces cracked down on a 58-day protest by Amazonian peoples on June 5th, according to preliminary figures from the People’s Ombudsman (Defensoría del Pueblo).1
Independent investigators, however, were prevented access to the site by police for five days following the incident and local witnesses have testified that cadavers of indigenous people were dumped into the river indicating that the number killed was much higher.2 At least two hundred more were wounded, the majority civilian, and eighty four face legal investigations of which eighteen are currently imprisoned. Police are subject to an internal police probe and an investigation by the office of the public prosecutor.3 Indigenous and human rights organizations have asked for a truth commission to carry out further investigations instead of the national police. The same month, the People’s Ombudsman registered 128 social-environmental disputes across the country, almost doubled from the same time last year.4
Despite strong economic growth in recent years, García is paying a high political cost for favouring big capital investments and aggressive free trade policies over the well-being of his own people, resulting in recent cabinet changes and plummeting popularity ratings.5
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