Violent Crackdown on Amazon Oil Protest Reverberates Around the World

There are dates that will live in infamy. June 5, 2009, has become one for the people of the Amazon.

That morning, a group of about 2,500 indigenous Peruvians from the Awajún and Wambis tribes stood at Curva del Diablo on the Fernando Belaunde Terry highway outside Bagua, near Petroperu’s oil pipeline pumping station No. 6.

They were peacefully protesting, as they had been since April 9, against the opening of vast tracts of the Peruvian Amazon to oil drilling, logging and other forms of exploitation in order to fulfill a free trade agreement with America.

Some of it was land to which they held title under the Peruvian constitution, and they didn’t want it despoiled. At the very least, they wanted to be consulted before foreign firms ripped up the trees and the earth and poisoned the waters.

Nevertheless, Bagua’s police chief had been ordered on June 4 to open the road, so when morning came and the protesters were still there, 500 police, Special Forces and paramilitary opened fire with tear gas and live ammunition.

The government's violent response and the widespread international protests that it sparked forced the resignation last week of Peruvian Prime Minister Yehude Simon, and on Saturday, President Alan Garcia dismissed seven more Cabinet ministers. The government repealed two of the land laws that had fueled the protests, but indigenous groups are demanding the repeal of seven more, plus the safe return of their leader, who fled the country.

At least 34 people were killed at Bagua, and more than 100 others missing. Witnesses suggest that some bodies may have been thrown in the river or burned.

AIDESEP, Peru’s leading indigenous organization, says the figures are in dispute because Peru’s ombudsman visited fewer than a quarter of the Awajún and Wampis communities from which most of the protesters came.

During the crackdown, AIDESEP’s director, Alberto Pizango, fled into the jungle and from there to the Nicaraguan embassy in Lima after a judge ordered his arrest for allegedly inciting violence. Four other AIDESEP leaders also face charges in Peru.

“We know that he (Pizango) made a public presentation in Nicaragua, but not in Peru, because the Peruvian government said that would be a violation of asylum rules. We are also aware that an extradition procedure may be on the way,” says Juan Arellano, a Peruvian activist and head of Global Voices Online.

Pizango had accused Garcia’s government of genocide to further land policies that were enacted to facilitate the U.S.-Peru free-trade agreement, which was approved by the U.S. Congress in 2007, signed by Garcia and former President George W. Bush, and went into effect this year.

Just before Congressional approval of that agreement, which in effect gave title to Peru’s Amazon to those corporations with the most money and influence, Garcia wrote an article in the Lima newspaper El Comercio describing the Amazon as a resource, and the refusal on the part of indigenous people to exploit it as foolish.