Trade Agreement Kills Amazon Indians

[Judi Lynn]

Published on Friday, June 19, 2009 by Foreign Policy In Focus
Trade Agreement Kills Amazon Indians
by Laura Carlsen

The recent clash between indigenous peoples and Peruvian national police sends a powerful message from the Amazon jungle straight to Washington: The enormous social, political, and environmental costs of the free-trade model are no longer acceptable.

Using a combined offensive of helicopter and ground forces, the police attacked a peaceful demonstration of 2,000 Wampi and Aguaruna indigenous people near the town of Bagua. The protesters belong to the interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle, an organization of about 300,000 members and 1,350 communities in the region. They blocked roads and occupied oil facilities to protest the executive decrees of President Alan García to implement the U.S.-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement (TPA). The decrees open up the Amazon to foreign investment, particularly gas and oil extraction.

Graphic Violence
In the police attack and counterattack by protestors and nearby residents of Bagua, indigenous organizations and international news reports count over 50 dead and hundreds missing. The Peruvian government claims that 24 police officers and nine civilians died in the violence.

Reports that police threw the bodies of protestors in the river to hide the real death toll have begun to circulate on the Internet and in the international press. International human rights and advocacy organizations such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Survival International and Amazon Watch, have deplored the violence, the subsequent crackdown on NGOs in Peru, and the role that the free-trade agreement has played in the crisis.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/06/19-10

[roody]

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