How to stop capitalist ethnocide in Peru

dawn — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:49:05 +0000

Analysis and demands by the technical coordinator for the Andean Coordinating Body for Indigenous Organisations (CAOI)

The Bagua Massacre left 34 dead, 158 wounded by gunfire, dozens of prisoners, and disappeared civilians, police, Baguins, Awajun, and Wampis 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 Fujimoriism, and where 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 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 recognize 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 privatize community land titles to open the ‘land market’ claimed by the neoliberal right.

Roberto Espinoza

How to stop capitalist ethnocide in Peru