“Communities that take a stand against environmental destruction are now in the firing line of companies’ private security guards, state forces and contract killers. For every land and environmental defender who is killed, many more are threatened with death, eviction and destruction of their resources. “These are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of a systematic assault on remote and indigenous communities by state and corporate actors.” Billy Kyte, Global Witness
Environmental activist Olivia Arévalo Lomas of the Shipibo Konibo Indigenous people of Peru was assassinated April 19, 2018 with five shots to her heart, Cultural Survival reported. She was murdered in her home in the Amazon rainforest community of Victoria Gracia located 20 minutes from the town of Yarinacocha, in front of her family according to witnesses. Her death is part of a surge of murders against environmental activists worldwide. Peru, has the 4th highest murder rate. She died in the defense of all of us, protecting the lungs of the Earth with only the power of her voice.
Most of the victims of environmentally motivated violence are grass-roots leaders who stand up for their communities when threatened by environmental calamity. Most of the resources that the industrialized world desires, is in poor countries with large swaths of indigenous lands. “There’s a resource that someone wants, people are displaced to get it. They organize and speak up, and their leaders are killed. It’s happening all around the world, and it needs to be investigated.”
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The Hill provides a background on the
2007 bilateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Peru and the United States. It is shocking and disturbing.
Increasingly, those seeking to defend our forests are coming under violent attack. Assassinations of environmental activists in Peru have surged. The nongovernmental organization Global Witness found that at least 57 environmental activists in Peru have been killed since 2002, with the majority assassinated since 2010. Peru has become the fourth most dangerous country in the world to be an environmental or land defender.
Late last year, Edwin Chota, a leader of the Ashenika Indian community and an outspoken opponent of the illegal logging rampant in his remote Amazon region, was found dead with three other local leaders. Peru's president, Ollanta Humala, told reporters that "those responsible are apparently mafias that have economic interests in illegal logging." But there has been no action under the FTA to counter the illegal logging plague or the associated assassinations and human rights violations.
Sadly, the FTA’s initial implementation foreshadowed the pact’s threats. In Peru, we remember the day six years ago when 32 people died, including indigenous protestors and police, in what is called the “Bagua massacre,” an incident that was widely reported in your newspapers. On June 5, 2009, Peruvian security forces attacked several thousand indigenous Awajun and Wambis protestors, including many women and children, who were blocking the “Devil's Curve,” a jungle highway near Bagua, 600 miles north of Lima. The protestors were demanding revocation of decrees providing new access to exploit their Amazonian lands for oil, gas and logging that had been enacted to comply with the FTA’s investor rights requirements.
In 2017, The Guardian wrote that 2016 was the most perilous year ever for people defending their community’s water, land, natural resources and wildlife, with “new research showing that environmental defenders are being killed at the rate of almost four a week across the world”. They note that over 200 activists, wildlife rangers and indigenous leaders were murdered.
“There is now an overwhelming incentive to wreck the environment for economic reasons. The people most at risk are people who are already marginalised and excluded from politics and judicial redress, and are dependent on the environment. The countries do not respect the rule of law. Everywhere in the world, defenders are facing threats.
“There is an epidemic now, a culture of impunity, a sense that anyone can kill environmental defenders without repercussions, eliminate anyone who stands in the way. It [comes from] mining, agribusiness, illegal logging and dam building.”
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In May, farmers in Brazil’s Maranhão state attacked an indigenous settlement, hacking with machetes at the hands of their victims in another land conflict that left more than a dozen in hospital. There have also been killings of environmental defenders and attacks on others in Colombia, Honduras, Mexico and many other countries since the new year.
Most environmental defenders die in remote forests or villages affected by mining, dams, illegal logging, and agribusiness. Many of the killers are reportedly hired by corporations or state forces. Very few are ever arrested or identified.
Peru moves to create huge new indigenous reserves in Amazon
Two “naked” people spotted hunting armadillo. One “naked” family on a river-bank. About five other “naked” people - plus houses, settlements and crops - seen from small planes. Fresh footprints on a path, on a tree trunk, and along a Canadian oil company’s seismic lines. Noises in the night. Whistling and birdsong imitation. A loosed arrow. Fishing utensils, abandoned fires, and food stolen from inhabitants in the surrounding areas. . .
This is just some of the vital evidence currently being used to promote the establishment of two new reserves for indigenous peoples living in “isolation” that together could extend for more than 2.5 million hectares across one of the remotest parts of Peru’s Amazon, along the border with Brazil. If created, they could become the biggest indigenous reserves in the country.
The reserves, dubbed Yavari-Mirin and Yavari-Tapiche for short, were formally proposed 15 years ago in Peru’s vast Loreto region but have never been established. Yet a major advance has recently been made. In December 2017 a government Multi-Sector Commission voted to “recognise the existence of the indigenous peoples in isolation” in both the proposed reserves, and recommended that the Culture Ministry take the necessary administrative steps to ensure that a Supreme Decree law doing the same is promulgated.
h/t Standing Rock Camp
Tuesday, Apr 24, 2018 · 4:08:22 PM +00:00 · Pakalolo
A Canadian man was beaten and lynched in the Peruvian Amazon after local people accused him of killing an 81-year-old indigenous healer, a police officer leading the murder investigation told the Guardian.
Olivia Arévalo, a female shaman with the native Shipibo-Konibo people, was shot twice and died on Thursday near her home in the village of Victoria Gracia in Peru’s central Amazon region of Ucayali.
Some villagers blamed Arévalo’s murder on a Canadian citizen Sebastian Woodroffe, 41, who lived in the region and was believed to be one of her patients,
Police found the Canadian’s body buried in a shallow grave about one kilometre (0.6 miles) from Arévalo’s home on Saturday.
A cameraphone recording of the lynching was released in the local press and on social media. The video shows a bloodied man crying out as he lies in a puddle in front of a wooden home with a thatched roof.
Two men put a rope or rubber hose around his neck and drag him along the ground until he goes limp and falls silent. A group of people, including children, look on.
General Jorge Lam, the police officer leading the double murder inquiry, said police were following several lines of investigation.
“The body had been fully identified (as that of Sebastian Woodroffe) using fingerprints,” he said.