Peru's 'Cold War' Against Indigenous Peoples

[subsuelo]

Jul 15 2009
Kristina Aiello

The recent conflict in the Peruvian Amazon is only the most violent symptom of an ongoing cold war being waged by President Alan García and his ruling Aprista party against indigenous groups. Besides a racist propaganda campaign and violent repression, the government has tried highly suspect legal mechanisms to disarticulate indigenous power.

Government propaganda is aimed at pushing a free market economic development model with a strong focus on trade and natural resource exploitation. García has issued a series of decrees required by the U.S.-Peru free trade agreement (FTA) to open up the Amazon to exploration and exploitation of its natural resources. A recent study shows García's initiative projects to concession off blocs covering up to 72 percent of Peru's Amazon to oil and gas companies.

In the process, the García administration has placed its free market ideology on a collision course with collective indigenous land and natural resource rights, which are protected under international law. But the plan backfired amid the government's response to opposition and its brutal repression of indigenous protestors. A recent poll found that 92 percent of Peruvians support the indigenous cause against the Amazon decrees.

The most despised of García's decrees were repealed. But the government has nonetheless continued a low-intensity conflict against Peru's indigenous groups. For García, a central tactic has involved trying to associate indigenous groups with Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. In a recent statement, clearly alluding to his left-leaning rivals, García said, "Peru is living a cold war against foreign leaders."

But even before the violence broke out in the Amazon, the real cold war was the one being waged by García against Peru's indigenous peoples. The battle in the Amazon was the violent culmination of months of government harassment and low-intensity conflict. Despite stirring up intense opposition, García seems intent on pushing forward with his unpopular agenda.

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[Judi Lynn]

1. Can't believe their media even stooped so low as to take a photo over the shoulder of an indigenous

Congresswoman, then enlarge the material she was writing so they could ridicule her grasp of Spanish, then question her compentance to serve in Congress. All to serve the greater good of reinforcing European-descended scums' tyranny over the indigenous people in whose land they are living.

So Two Breaksfasts is hitting the old label-slinging crap we see from nazi assholes right here: red-baiting from the racist.

One day these people will come face to face with the consequences of their behavior, with nowhere to run, and no one to hide behind.

So Two Breakfasts has opened other plunder to a French oil company seeking to invade previously uncontacted indigenous people. Just yet another Peruvian maggot President. Time for a change, Peru.