IAI alerts to the humanitarian crisis in the Peruvian Amazon
On Friday 5th June 2009, a contingent of armed military police, accompanied by Armed Forces special personnel, opened fire on around 1,000 indigenous settlers who were protesting in Bagua, northeast Peru. The protestors were demanding the repeal of a series of laws passed by the executive to dispossess them of their land, in favour of multinational companies who are seeking to appropriate the Amazon rainforest.
The death toll so far includes at least 25 protestors, two journalists, and 11 police officers. Currently some other 1,000 indigenous people are occupying the Petroperú plant in the same zone, surrounded by a strong police cordon. They are threatening to blow up the plant if the police enter by force.
We call out to people of good will, social organizations, civil society institutions, and local and regional democratic governments, to join forces and undertake an international campaign of solidarity against the genocide of the Peruvian Amazonian population. To these ends, the International Alliance of Inhabitants supports the constitution of an international solidarity committee, which will be in direct and permanent contact with the affected peoples.
Stop the State violence against the indigenous peoples of the Amazon and respect of their rights
With a balance of dozens of dead and wounded, particularly among the members of the Awajun indigenous group, the removal from the positions they occupied in Bagua, in the areas of Corral Quemado and Curva del Diablo, has today been carried out. This massacre has claimed among its victims the President of the Committee for the Protection of Rights of the Indigenous Peoples of Condorcanqui, Mr Santiago Manuin Valera, who was killed as a result of a police intervention that was carried out – as reported by the residents and authorities of Bagua themselves – using “bullets of war".
The Indigenous Peoples of the Peruvian Amazon are mobilised to defend the ancestral lands that they occupy in the high and low jungles of our Amazon, which contain an extraordinary biodiversity that is native to the ecosystem of the eastern slopes of our jungle, and which they have preserved for centuries.
Finally, we would like to call on the national and international community to mobilize to prevent a genocide from taking place in the Amazon region and to safeguard the right of our Indigenous Peoples to self-determination.
>>> Send signatures to: rocioval@speedy.com.pe
Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana
Agencia de Noticias SERVINDI
Video WSF TV
Foto Lucha nativa 5 de mayo de 2009
The Volunteer translators for housing rights without frontiers of IAI who have collaborated on the translation of this text were: