Activists Urge Obama to Use Trade Pact as Leverage

[Judi Lynn]

Published on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by Inter Press Service
Activists Urge Obama to Use Trade Pact as Leverage
by Haider Rizvi

NEW YORK - The United States government is coming under intense pressure from rights organisations and environmental groups to redefine its trade pact with Peru, a tool that they charge the government in Lima is using to justify oppression against the indigenous population.

"Whether or not the U.S. intended it, the reality is that the U.S.-Peru Trade Agreement gave license to the Garcia administration to roll back indigenous rights and has contributed to increasing social conflict and human rights abuses in Peru," said Andrew Miller of Amazon Watch.

On Monday, Miller's group joined a broad coalition of 14 other organisations in sending a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other high-level officials calling for immediate U.S. action regarding the ongoing political conflict in Peru between the state authorities and indigenous rights movement.

Last year the Garcia administration issued several decrees to implement the U.S.-Peru free trade agreement. The decrees are controversial because they are designed to regulate investment in the Amazon, which is a source of concern for environmental organisations as well as the indigenous population.

On Jun. 5, the police opened fire on indigenous activists at a roadblock near the northern Peruvian town of Bagua. The demonstrators were blockading traffic to protest the government's policy to let foreign investors use indigenous lands in the Amazon. In the clashes, an as yet uncertain number of protesters were killed, along with a number of police.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/06/17

[Judi Lynn]

1. Peru: Radio Silenced, Legislators Suspended

Peru: Radio Silenced, Legislators Suspended

On June 8 Peru’s Transportation and Communication Ministry (MTC) cancelled the license of Radio La Voz de Bagua, a family-owned radio station with a signal of 100 watts in Utcubamba province in the Amazonas region in the north of the country. The MTC cited technical issues with the station’s equipment, but La Voz news director Carlos Flores Burgos dismissed this as “a lie.” The station is based in the area where dozens of people died on June 5 in a confrontation between police and indigenous protesters , and Flores said the station had made it possible for members of the public to report alleged abuses by security forces. After the June 5 killings, Interior Minister Mercedes Cabanillas accused the station of agitating the situation and called for sanctions against it, while Congress members Aurelio Pastor, Jorge Del Castillo and Mauricio Mulde, all from the Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP) of President Alan García, accused La Voz and Flores of supporting and inciting violence.

The Press and Society Institute of Peru (IPYS), an organization of independent journalists, questioned the license cancellation and said it might be a “reprisal.” (Radio Programas del Perú (RPP) 6/12/09; Los Andes (Puno, Peru) 6/13/08; La República (Peru) 6/13/09)

On June 12 the Peruvian Congress, which is dominated by the PAP, voted a 120-day suspension for seven legislators from the opposition Peruvian Nationalist Party (PNP) of Ollanta Humala for having staged a protest in the legislature’s chamber in support of the Amazonian indigenous protesters. The suspended Congress members were María Sumire, Hilaria Supa, Nancy Obregón, Juana Huancahuari, Cayo Galindo, Yaneth Cajahuanca and Rafael Vásquez. The suspension was approved 58-18 with one abstention; voting with the PAP for the suspension was National Unity and the Alliance for the Future of former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), convicted of human rights abuses on Apr. 7 and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The protests in the Congress began on June 10 after the legislators voted to suspend indefinitely decrees on drilling, mining and land use that had sparked the indigenous protests. The PNP members called for the decrees to be repealed rather than suspended, and nine PNP legislators began a fast to protest the vote. A total of 22 Congress members from the PNP and left groups stayed in the chamber overnight and prevented Congress from holding a session the morning of June 11. The protesters finally left later to join a march in Lima, part of a day of nationwide strikes and mobilizations in support of the indigenous demands. (Correo (Lima) 6/12/09; La Raza (Chicago) 6/13/09 from EFE; La Jornada (Mexico) 6/12/09 from Reuters, AFP, DPA; AFP 6/12/09; NACLA 4/15/09)

http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/2009/06/wnu-993-haitian-students-protest-for.html

[Judi Lynn]

2. PERU: Families of Dead Native Protesters Tell Their Stories

PERU: Families of Dead Native Protesters Tell Their Stories
By Milagros Salazar

BAGUA, Peru, Jun 16 (IPS) - Sobbing, an indigenous woman dressed in black cries out as she sees us arrive: "My son, my son, they have killed my son!" She is Andrea Rocca, the mother of Felipe Sabio, a young man who died in a clash between police and indigenous protesters in the northern Peruvian region of Amazonas.

Men, women and children from the village of Wawas were gathered around the doorway of the Sabio family home when IPS and other journalists arrived on Saturday Jun. 13.

Fear and consternation have been aroused by the death of Sabio, who was regarded as one of the few educated men in this village, a four-hour drive from the town of Bagua, where the violent clash took place on Friday, Jun. 5.

"He was a defender of indigenous rights and he gave his life to defend our territories," said Germán Llagkuag, Sabio's uncle, who told journalists they must publish the indigenous people's side of the story, as they are being blamed by the government of President Alan García for the violence and bloodshed that put an end to their two-month protest and roadblock near Bagua.

The indigenous groups are protesting decrees issued by the government for the implementation of the free trade agreement (FTA) signed with the United States, which promote private investment in their territories and open up the Amazon jungle to oil, mining, agribusiness and logging companies.

A multi-party congressional committee had declared in December that the decrees were unconstitutional.

~snip~
On Jun. 6 they brought her the body of her dead husband from Bagua with a bullet wound on the left side of his chest, and five days later her daughter was born. She also has three other young children.

"My children cry all day and ask me, 'Where's daddy?' How am I going to look after them now without my husband? Here I am, absorbed with this thought and this suffering," she said between sobs, her baby in her arms and her three other children, ages two to four, clustered around her.

Her husband Sabio, a correspondent for a local radio station, was reporting on the indigenous protest to the communities in coordination with the Regional Organisation of the Indigenous Peoples of the Northern Amazon (ORPIAN).

He was shot near the main square of Bagua on Jun. 5, when the police were trying to disperse local people who were angrily protesting the deaths of the indigenous demonstrators a few hours earlier on the Fernando Belaúnde Terry highway and in nearby ravines.

"We were about to leave"

Aguanash told IPS that 15 days before the bloody events of Jun. 5, some 2,600 indigenous people from five villages in the district of Condorcanqui went to Curva del Diablo, where they were joined by 140 more from San Ignacio in the province of Cajamarca region, and another 1,000 from Paután in the Nievas district in Amazonas province.

Among the demonstrators on the highway was 19-year-old David Jausito, an Awajun Indian from the village of La Curva, who was the first to die in the clashes at Curva del Diablo, according to Aguanash.

"The police fired first from the helicopters, and then two armoured cars came toward us along the highway. There were bullets everywhere, and several of our brothers fell, but David was the first," the indigenous leader told IPS.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47242