Peru's filthy President Alan Garcia, who already had a record of massacres against Peruvian people under his belt from his first stint as Peru's President in the 1980's, was so "Presidential" during the proceedings to label the victims of his bloodbath as "savages," and portray them as selfish a-holes who were attempting to withhold progress from the rest of Peru.
To inform, or refresh memory among those who didn't seem to notice any of the news about this bloodbath by a US ally only a week ago:
The Global Significance of the Amazon Protest
June 11, 2009
By Sam Urquhart
Countercurrents.org
Peru’s Amazon region has been locked down, after the death of perhaps 40 indigenous protesters and 20 police during an attempt to break up a blockade last Friday. Some reports put the death toll as high as 84, in the worst violence that the Amazon region has seen since the height of the Shining Path insurgency in the 1980s. <http://enlacenacional.com/2009/06/05/enfrentamiento-[br />entre-policias-y-nativos-en-bagua-deja-tragico-saldo/]
On 6 June, a peaceful blockade was allegedly fired upon by helicopters from the nation’s army. Most of the dead were indigenous protesters, part of a contingent at the blockade in Bagua province which numbered thousands - all of them seeking to resist the expansion of energy exploration and logging into Peru’s Amazon region. And many of them appear to have been not just peaceful, but asleep.
As the NGO Amazon Watch reported, <http://www.amazonwatch.org/[br />newsroom/view_news.php?id=1829] “At approximately 5 am…the Peruvian military police staged a violent raid” during which “several thousand Awajun and Wambis indigenous peoples were forcibly dispersed by tear gas and real bullets.” In a brutal attack, helicopters dropped tear gas bombs from on high while police moved in on the protesters - shooting some in the process. The NGO also reports that “as the unarmed demonstrators were killed and injured some wrestled the Police and took away their guns and fought back in self-defense resulting in deaths of several Police officers.”
Doctors in Bagua allege that the evacuation of casualties was obstructed. As Dr Jose Sequen Reyes told El Mundo, “During great part in the morning…the police did not allow the passage of the ambulances for the evacuation.” <http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/[br />2009/06/06/internacional/1244268533.html] El Mundo’s correspondent Beatrice Jimenez also reported that “the bodies of the dead being “disappeared” by those paid by the police Special Operations Directorate” - allegations that are backed up by Peru’s National Coordinator of Human Rights, who has blogged about reports that his organization has received of corpse-burning by the authorities.
This has been reported by Amazon Watch, which reported on 8 June that “numerous eyewitnesses are reporting that the Special Forces of the Peruvian Police have been disposing of the bodies of indigenous protesters who were killed” in what Amazon Watch spokesperson Gregor McClennan calls “an apparent attempt by the Government to underreport the number of indigenous people killed by police.” <http://www.amazonwatch.org/[br />newsroom/view_news.php?id=1843]
Over one hundred protesters remain in detention while, according to McClennan, “Eye-witness reports also confirm that police forcibly removed some of the wounded indigenous protesters from hospitals, taking them to unknown destinations.” Fears grow that other blockades, such as one ongoing outside the town of Yurimaguas, could be due to face similar repression, as an atmosphere of fear and intimidation spreads across Amazonian Peru.
More:
http://www.coha.org/2009/06/the-global-significance-of-the-amazon-protest/
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