by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 10, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling, Obstruction & Occupation, Toxification
By Ronald Suarez, Network of Peruvian Indigenous Communicators, Ucayali
Over 400 villagers in the Native Community of Canan de Cachiaco in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon have taken control of nine oil wells, belonging to oil company, Maple Gas, in oil lot 31B.
Community members took over the oil wells on September 2nd, and continue to hold them as a result of 37 years of oil contamination in their territory by the company.
The community leader, Basilio Rodriguez Venancio, said the action was made necessary because the company did not consider the environmental impact assessment carried out by an independent consultant.
The community is demanding that the company pay them compensation for the use of their lands and for the environmental damage they have suffered for 37 years. Such damage includes the contamination of their rivers, their only source of drinking water, and the contamination of their soils due to the company’s use of chemicals and heavy minerals, which the population says has significantly affected the productivity of their land.
Several community members testified that they have become sick due to the company’s negligence and contamination of their drinking water. There have been several instances in the past years of cancer and ¨unknown deaths¨ that the community attributes to company abuses.
The community awaits the arrival of state representatives from the Ministry of Energy and Mines and Ministry of Environment, scheduled for Thursday, September 13th, to resolve this conflict.
Meanwhile the villagers are still stationed in the camp until authorities settle their claims.
From Alianza Arkana
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 4, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Carla Salazar / Associated Press
More than 100 rural Peruvians have been sickened by the spill of a toxic copper concentrate produced at one of the Andean country’s biggest mines, authorities said Friday.
The Ancash state regional health office said 140 people were treated for ‘‘irritative symptoms caused by the inhalation of toxins’’ after a pipeline carrying the concentrate under high pressure burst open in their community.
Most of the injured had joined in efforts to prevent liquid copper slurry from reaching a nearby river after the pipeline linking the Antamina copper mine to the coast ruptured last week in the village of Santa Rosa de Cajacay, said the community’s president, Hilario Moran.
‘‘Without taking into account the consequences, we pitched in to help,’’ Moran told The Associated Press by phone.
The people used absorbent fabric provided by the mine but were not given gloves or protective masks, said Antonio Mendoza, the mine’s environmental director. Shortly afterward, people became ill, vomiting, suffering headaches and nose bleeds.
‘‘That’s unethical and irresponsible and they should know better,’’ Greg Moller, a professor of environmental chemistry and toxicology at the University of Idaho-Washington State University, said of the mining company’s enlisting villagers in the cleanup without proper protective gear.
Mendoza said the substance that spilled ‘‘was not necessarily toxic.’’
‘‘It’s a dangerous substance to the extent that it’s an industrial substance,’’ he said. ‘‘They are dangerous substances that require a particular handling but aren’t necessarily toxic.’’
Moller disputed that characterization.
‘‘This was actually a toxic episode and these people are intoxicated,’’ he said, adding that the alkaline copper concentrate likely damaged lung tissue, causing chemical burns.
He said it was his understanding that the rupture released a mist of concentrate, which could have created a fine cloud of toxic airborne particles.
‘‘There are a lot of chemical and physical irritants in that mix,’’ Moller said.
About 30 people were taken to the San Pablo hospital in the highlands regional capital of Huaraz immediately after the July 25 rupture, Moran said. ‘‘Some people continue to get sick and continue to go to Huaraz,’’ he added.
Read more from Boston.com:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 5, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Protests & Symbolic Acts, Repression at Home
By the Associated Press
A civilian was killed and a prominent anti-mining activist arrested in protests on Wednesday against Peru’s biggest gold mining project, further inflaming tensions after the government declared a state of emergency.
Peru’s prime minister, Oscar Valdés, announced the civilian’s death at a news conference in Lima but did not provide further details. It was the fourth protest-related death in two days.
Marco Arana, a former Roman Catholic priest, was arrested hours earlier in Cajamarca, one of three provinces where the state of emergency was declared. A video broadcast by a local TV channel showed riot police scooping him off a bench in the city’s central square and taking him away in a chokehold.
The 49-year-old veteran of anti-mining protests wrote on Twitter that “in the police station they hit me again, punches in the face, kidneys, insults”.
Chief local prosecutor Johnny Diaz told AP he had designated a prosecutor to investigate Arana’s claim. Diaz said Arana was arrested for organising meetings, an activity prohibited during a state of emergency. He said authorities had not issued any arrest warrants or made any mass arrests on Wednesday.
In addition to Cajamarca, the state of emergency was declared in two neighbouring provinces late on Tuesday after three people were killed during a violent protest in the region.
It was the second emergency declared in five weeks to quell the protests. A 30-day emergency period had just ended in Espinar, a highlands province near the former Incan capital of Cuzco. Two people were killed in the area on 29 May while protesting against a copper mine.
The focus of Tuesday’s protest is the $4.8bn (£2.5bn) Conga gold mining project, which was suspended late last year by US-based Newmont Mining Co. Protests were started by local residents who said the mine would hurt their water supplies.
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/05/peru-anti-mining-protests-escalate
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 2, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Gethin Chamberlain / The Guardian
A fierce row has broken out over a controversial plan to drive a road through pristine Amazon rainforest, imperilling the future of some of the world’s last uncontacted tribes.
The 125-mile (200km) road would pass through the Alto Purús national park in Peru, connecting a remote area to the outside world but opening up the most biologically and culturally important area of the upper Amazon to logging, mining and drug trafficking. Opponents of the plan fear it will threaten the existence of uncontacted tribes such as the Mashco-Piro. The first detailed photographs of members of the tribe made headlines around the world earlier this year after they were spotted on a riverbank.
The majority indigenous population of the region appears to be largely united in its opposition to the road, which would run parallel to the Brazilian border, connecting the towns of Puerto Esperanza and Iñapari. Conservationists warn it would cause irreparable harm to the environment and the area’s people.
But the road has the support of many mixed-race settlers – or mestizos – who make up roughly one fifth of the region’s population. With the Alto Purús currently accessible only by plane, they believe that the road would improve their quality of life, bringing lower prices for fuel and food and creating profitable development opportunities.
The campaign to build the road has been led by an Italian missionary, Miguel Piovesan, who claims that indigenous people are being kept isolated and denied the chances for development available to the rest of the population. He first proposed the road in 2004, around the time the Peruvian government announced that the Alto Purús was to become the country’s largest national park.
Piovesan’s plan’s met with little initial enthusiasm, but his long and determined campaign, using his own radio station and parish website, has been so successful that the country’s Congress is now due to debate a bill to allow construction to start. Piovesan has been scathing about his opponents, particularly international organisations such as Survival International and the WWF, which he accuses of profiting from keeping the tribes in isolation.
“These international organisations gain money because they present themselves as the saviours of the Indians, this is what it’s all about. So if the Indians evolve, they [the NGOs] lose their business,” he said on a recent radio show. Last week he told the Observer that the reality was that the indigenous people were being kept in a condition of “captivity and slavery incompatible with the true ecology”.
But Piovesan’s opponents suspect that he is more interested in gaining access to potential converts for his church. Reports from Peru say that he has denied the existence of the uncontacted tribes. The main indigenous organisation in Puerto Esperanza, Feconapu, has demanded that the Vatican remove the priest, accusing him of insulting and humiliating the native population.
One indigenous leader, Julio Cusurichi, warned that building the road would amount to “ethnocide” of the uncontacted tribes. According to the last census, in 2007, there are only about 3,500 people living in the region, including eight known tribes and an unknown number of uncontacted Indians living in the Madre de Díos territorial reserve. The 6.7m-acre national park is also home to wildlife including jaguar, scarlet macaw and giant river otter.
The Upper Amazon Conservancy, which works with the indigenous population, has been one of the most vocal critics of the road. Its director, Chris Fagan, accused the road’s supporters of short-sighted greed and said the majority of the population were vehemently opposed.
“They depend on the forest and rivers for daily sustenance. They see the highway as just the latest example of mestizo greed and exploitation – of rubber, their religion, animal skins, mahogany, and now a highway accessing their homelands,” he said. “It will ruin one of the wildest and culturally important places on Earth. Will reason or greed prevail?”
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/01/amazon-highway-peru-tribes-risk
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 19, 2012 | Repression at Home
The struggle for the world’s remaining natural resources is becoming more murderous, according to a new report that reveals that environmental activists were killed at the rate of one a week in 2011.
The death toll of campaigners, community leaders and journalists involved in the protection of forests, rivers and land has risen dramatically in the past three years, said Global Witness.
Brazil – the host of the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development – has the worst record for danger in a decade that has seen the deaths of more than 365 defenders, said the briefing, which was released on the eve of the high-level segment of the Earth Summit.
The group called on the leaders at Rio to set up systems to monitor and counter the rising violence, which in many cases involves governments and foreign corporations, and to reduce the consumption pressures that are driving development into remote areas.
“This trend points to the increasingly fierce global battle for resources, and represents the sharpest of wake-up calls for delegates in Rio,” said Billy Kyte, campaigner at Global Witness.
The group acknowledges that their results are incomplete and skewed towards certain countries because information is fragmented and often missing. This means the toll is likely to be higher than their findings, which did not include deaths related to cross-border conflicts prompted by competition for natural resources, and fighting over gas and oil.
Brazil recorded almost half of the killings worldwide, the majority of which were connected to illegal forest clearance by loggers and farmers in the Amazon and other remote areas, often described as the “wild west”.
Among the recent high-profile cases were the murders last year of two high-profile Amazon activists, José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espirito Santo. Such are the risks that dozens of other activists and informers are now under state protection.
Unlike most countries on the list, however, the number of killings in Brazil declined slightly last year, perhaps because the government is making a greater effort to intervene in deforestation cases.
The reverse trend is apparent in the Philippines, where four activists were killed last month, prompting the Kalikasan People’s Network for Environment to talk of “bloody May”.
Though Brazil, Peru and Colombia have reported high rates of killing in the past 10 years, this is partly because they are relatively transparent about the problem thanks to strong civil society groups, media organisations and church groups – notably the Catholic Land Commission in Brazil – which can monitor such crimes. Under-reporting is thought likely in China and Central Asia, which have more closed systems, said the report. The full picture has still to emerge.
Last December, the UN special rapporteur on human rights noted: “Defenders working on land and environmental issues in connection with extractive industries and construction and development projects in the Americas … face the highest risk of death as result of their human rights activities.”
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/19/environment-activist-deaths
