[News] Peru and Ecuador: A Common Enemy - their own citizens
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Fri Jul 31 12:17:05 EDT 2009
Peru and Ecuador: A Common Enemy
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/2021/1/
Written by Jennifer Moore
Friday, 31 July 2009
They had been at war twice in the last century,
but today they've found a common enemy: the
governments of Peru and Ecuador have singled out
their own citizens who resist extractive industry expansion.
Something terrible is taking place, says Father
Marco Arana, a member of the executive committee
of the Latin American Observatory of Mining
Conflicts speaking at the Third Continental
Meeting in Quito, such that the discourse of
21st Century Socialism coincides with the logic
and discourse of the most ultra-conservative governments like that of Peru.
Presidents Alan García and Rafael Correa have
been polarizing the internal clash over
development vision in their respective countries
with that of indigenous peoples, mestizo farmers,
environmentalists and human rights activists,
raising concern about possible future confrontations.
A leading metal producer with ambitions to
exploit agricultural, wood, mineral, and water
resources in sensitive regions such as the
Amazon, Peru's most recent stand-off resulted in
the deaths of at least twenty three police
officers, five indigenous people and five
residents from the town of Bagua when state
forces cracked down on a 58-day protest by
Amazonian peoples on June 5th, according to
preliminary figures from the People's Ombudsman
(Defensoría del Pueblo). 1 Independent
investigators, however, were prevented access to
the site by police for five days following the
incident and local witnesses have testified that
cadavers of indigenous people were dumped into
the river indicating that the number killed was
much higher. 2 At least two hundred more were
wounded, the majority civilian, and eighty four
face legal investigations of which eighteen are
currently imprisoned. Police are subject to an
internal police probe and an investigation by the
office of the public prosecutor. 3 Indigenous and
human rights organizations have asked for a truth
commission to carry out further investigations
instead of the national police. The same month,
the People's Ombudsman registered 128
social-environmental disputes across the country,
almost doubled from the same time last year. 4
Despite strong economic growth in recent years,
García is paying a high political cost for
favouring big capital investments and aggressive
free trade policies over the well-being of his
own people, resulting in recent cabinet changes
and plummeting popularity ratings. 5
In Ecuador, conflicts have not grown so violent,
while Correa remains highly popular having just
won a historic re-election with over 50 percent
of the presidential vote after the first round in
late April. However, Correa also faces
differences with the country's social movements
over resource extraction on the domestic front
that some worry could become more serious should they go unattended.
Correa has expressed intolerance for public
protests, especially those opposed to a new large
scale metallic mining sector intended to
substitute for declining oil production. Protests
against a new mining law in early January 2009
faced a heavy-handed response. In the
south-central province of Azuay, locals reported
that police sprayed tear gas into their homes. In
the southern Amazonian region, one man was found
shot and wounded, while others face terrorism
charges arising from these events.
In areas such as the Southern Amazon, where the
biggest projects belonging to Vancouver-based
Corriente Resources and Toronto's Kinross Gold
are situated, recent election results at the
local and regional level reflect a certain
disillusionment with the government with the
success of competing parties critical of Correa's
economic development policies. This situation is
further complicated for the government by key
indigenous federations that maintain a firm
stance against extractive projects on their territories.
The indigenous Pachakutik party won the
presidency of eleven municipalities, as well as
the prefecture and one national assembly member
in each of the two south-eastern Amazonian
provinces in April. 6 As well, President Pepe
Acacho of the Interprovincial Shuar Federation
whose organization represents 500 Shuar
indigenous centres and 50 such associations in
the Amazonian provinces of Morona Santiago,
Zamora Chinchipe and Pastaza states, We have an
irreversible position...no to any type of
extractive industry on our territory which
includes mining, oil, logging and hydroelectric generation.
Sounding a lot like his conservative counterpart
García, Correa insists that he cannot let a few
people stand in the way of national development.
Instead, he prefers to downplay the significance
of these tensions while frequently insulting
opponents and emphasizing promises to
redistribute mining revenues and implement
stronger state controls over the nascent sector.
Speaking to Amy Goodman at the end of June on the
widely respected program Democracy Now!, he
misrepresented election results saying, We won,
overwhelmingly so, in all the mining
regions...So, clearly the population trusts us.
He denied calling protesters nobodies and
concluded, But three or four people are enough
to make a lot of noise, to appear in the media,
and so on. But, quite sincerely, they dont have
the popular backing or the representation. 7
It is true that extractive industry critics have
been marginalized given the current balance of
power in Ecuador. However, Peru's experience
suggests that economic growth does not
automatically resolve conflicts and that they are
likely to persist with costly outcomes unless a
more democratic approach can be found.
Peru: Majority rules and repression reigns
On June 28 shortly after the tragedy in Bagua,
President Alan García published a lengthy
treatise called With the Faith of the Vast
Majority in which he disregarded protesters
concluding that they represent a small minority
of the population. They threaten and block
roads, he wrote, because they know that they
are few in number and that they have lost the
game. 8 He calculated that about 50,000
Peruvians are involved, and purported that
foreign governments, understood to include
Presidents Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales, 9 have helped spark the unrest.
But Father Marco Arana, a native of Cajamarca,
Peru where the largest gold mine in Latin America
has been radically transforming local life since
the early 1990s, suggests that there is another
reason why indigenous people, as well as peasant
and mid-scale mestizo farmers, block roads. It is
that they lack real political representation in
Peru and that channels that should work for their complaints do not.
The result is a very complicated and polarized
scenario, comments Arana, which is exactly what
should be avoided in order to stem further
violence and such that democratic and respectful
solutions can be brought about. He believes that
current signals from the government favouring
dialogue with indigenous groups are merely an
attempt to buy time and that there is little
indication that such efforts will be beneficial
or address the demands of indigenous peoples.
Indigenous peoples participating in the recent
mobilization at Bagua protested numerous
presidential decrees enacted last year by
President García in order to implement the free
trade agreement with the United States that
would, amongst other things, enable sale of their
lands. The decrees are also consistent with Alan
García's thesis outlined in a 2007 editorial
called The Dog in the Manger, 10 in which he
describes indigenous peoples and peasant
communities as poor, uneducated, and lazy. He
suggests that they are the main obstacle
preventing Peru from benefiting from natural
resources found on their territories.
But strong economic growth has not been
benefiting Peru's poor. Companies and the
government have confused economic growth with
development, says Nicanor Alvarado from the
Vicar's Office in Jaen, not far from the Devil's
Curve where protests took place in early June.
It's meant growth for the transnationals and
industry, but not for local peoples.
Between 2004 and 2008, Peru sustained an economic
growth rate averaging 7.5%, largely driven by
mining. 11 However, as a recent report from OXFAM
America underlines, poverty rates in the Andean
highlands of Peru continue to soar above 70% and
despite greater redistribution of mining revenues
to certain regions of the country, institutional
weaknesses often prevent them from being channelled into local development. 12
Instead of addressing such issues, President
García has not only polarized the country, he has
also been criminalizing dissent. Father Arana,
also founder of the Training and Information
Group for Sustainable Development (GRUFIDES),
which helps communities monitor environmental
impacts of mining on their lands and take
peaceful action, describes various changes García
has made to the criminal code including an
extended definition of extortion. The new
definition includes any act that could be
interpreted as extracting economic benefits under
pressure, such as impeding flow of traffic,
public services or the construction of
legally-authorized public works. Sentences have
been boosted to up to 25 years in jail. Also,
authorities who support their people by
participating in protests can now be disqualified
from their posts, adds Arana.
The overall conclusion is that the protests will
continue, says Nicanor Alvarado who accompanied
the indigenous uprising in Bagua and who has also
been accused of terrorism as a result of
participating in a popular referendum concerning
mining activities in the northwestern department
of Piura in 2007. He forewarns, The communities
who I have been accompanying have a culture of
defending their territory, their language and way
of life. They live from the land and they will
fight to the end, I swear to you.
The steady rise in social-environmental conflicts
in recent years as tracked by the People's
Ombudsman suggests that conflicts are likely to
persist in many parts of the country. For Alan
García, his popularity is seeing a reverse trend
indicating that protesters are perhaps not as
politically illegitimate as he would like to believe.
Ecuador: A strong state solution?
Although a forty year veteran of oil production,
Ecuador is at a much earlier stage in the
development of a new large scale mining sector
that will affect parts of the country as of yet
untouched by extractive industry. Similar to
García, Correa has polarized conflicts by
defining activists as self-interested political
opponents instead of human and environmental
rights defenders. Without the same history of
large scale mining, however, he has gained
support from certain sectors by promising to
reinvest mining profits in social programs and
local development. But observers see warning
signs that Correa's current trajectory could aggravate disputes.
At the conclusion of a visit to Ecuador in July,
investigator Anthony Bebbington from the
University of Manchester, who is leading a major
research project into extractive industry
expansion and social conflict in the Andes, says
that even those that don't have a particular axe
to grind [with Correa], are concerned that
things could spill over and conflicts be
serious particularly in the southeast Amazonian
region. Reflecting on the President's reluctance
to admit this publicly, he says, One presumes
that [Correa] knows what's at play....So in not
recognizing it, if something spills over he can
cultivate it and say like Alan García did
that this was something cultivated by darker or
foreign interests as a way to ignore the
political implications and to use repressive
measures to try and diffuse the conflicts.
Allusions have already been made to foreign
conspirators supposedly manipulating rural
peoples in government propaganda. 13
Considering Correa's arguments around greater
state control and redistribution of mining
revenues, Bebbington says these might buy the
President time, but they will not resolve existing tensions.
Drawing on years of research in Peru, he
comments, Unless you have all of your
organizational, institutional and bureaucratic
ducks lined up in order to be able to translate
that money into local development, there's no
reason that that will happen and there's no
reason to believe that that approach is going to
free you from local conflict dynamics. He
concurs with Nicanor Alvarado and says that
despite enormous fiscal transfers to certain
areas of Peru results have been immensely
disappointing both in terms of real investments
and also in the ways that local politics get
distorted and new leadership and movements emerge
to try to get access to those resources. He is
not convinced that outcomes in Ecuador will be much different.
But Correa seems to be avoiding other issues as
well; issues closer to the heart of current
disputes with indigenous peoples and mestizo farmers.
For example, how do you align a commitment to
extractive industry with a commitment to
indigenous people's territorial rights and other
collective rights to exercise control over the
life paths that they want to build? How do you
align this commitment to constitutional rights
and to the environment having rights? Those seem
to me to be important discussions that lay at the
heart of making Ecuador a healthier democracy,
says Bebbington, recalling new gains in Ecuador's
political constitution approved last September
which recognizes rights for nature and declares
the country a plurinational state.
It seems to me that that conversation is not
happening. And it's being blocked through this
argument that we're going to have a state
industry, and we're going to increase revenues
that accrue from extraction, and therefore this
must be a good thing. It is also being blocked
by a strong industry lobby backed by the Canadian
Embassy in Ecuador that is wary of any measure
that might exclude mining from certain areas.
Risky business
Affected communities bear the greatest risks of
avoiding such debate, whether through the
environmental and social impacts of extractive
industry or when they are subject to severe
repression for defending their rights like in
Bagua or as is feared might happen in the
Southern Amazon. But singling out one's own
citizens also has political ramifications.
It has yet to be seen what will happen as various
indigenous, farmer, environmental and human
rights groups become distanced from Correa. In
the case of Peru, Father Arana believes that they
have reached the point at which a new political
option is essential in order to avoid greater
chaos, violence and authoritarianism.
Now in the process of seeking the thousands of
signatures necessary to run for president in
2011, Arana is leading a new movement called Land
and Liberty. They will aim to advance an economic
model based upon ecological sustainability and
plurinationality in which extractive industry
expansion should be subject to land use planning
and ecological zoning. They also propose to
legislate the right to free, prior and informed
consent for indigenous and peasant communities as
outlined by the International Labour
Organization's Convention 169. While many details
of their program remain unclear and achieving
such goals will entail serious challenges, they
are central issues to making peace once again within these Andean nations.
Notes:
1. All figures based upon research carried out by
the Defensoría del Pueblo between June 5th and
June 30th 2009:
<http://www.defensoria.gob.pe/modules/Downloads/informes/varios/2009/informe-adjuntia-006-2009-DP-DHPD.pdf>http://www.defensoria.gob.pe/modules/Downloads/informes/varios/2009/informe-adjuntia-006-2009-DP-DHPD.pdf
2.
http://www.politicaspublicas.net/panel/noticias/america-latina/318-peru-comunicado-mision-fidh.html
3.
<http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47454>http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47454
4. The 64th Report on Social Conflicts from the
Defensoría del Pueblo of Peru:
<http://www.defensoria.gob.pe/conflictos-sociales/objetos/paginas/6/44conflictos_-_reporte_64_-_junio_2009.pdf>http://www.defensoria.gob.pe/conflictos-sociales/objetos/paginas/6/44conflictos_-_reporte_64_-_junio_2009.pdf
5. http://www.coha.org/2009/07/garcias-decline-in-peru/
6. Hacia la segunda fase de la revolucion
ciudana Mario Unda,
<http://alainet.org/active/30562>http://alainet.org/active/30562<http://alainet.org/active/30562>
7.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/29/ecuadoran_president_rafael_correa_on_global
8.
<http://www.ediciones.expreso.com.pe/2009/jun/28/index8fa6.html?option=com_content&task=view&id=57434&Itemid=1>http://www.ediciones.expreso.com.pe/2009/jun/28/index8fa6.html?option=com_content&task=view&id=57434&Itemid=1
9. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8106248.stm
10.
<http://www.elcomercio.com.pe/edicionimpresa/html/2007-10-28/el_sindrome_del_perro_del_hort.html>http://www.elcomercio.com.pe/edicionimpresa/html/2007-10-28/el_sindrome_del_perro_del_hort.html
11.
http://www.economist.com/countries/PERU/profile.cfm?folder=Profile-Economic%20Data
12. Mining Conflicts in Peru: Condition Critical March 2009, OXFAM America
13. For example, see La Mineria en el Ecuador:
Una Fuente de Esperanza from the collection La
Patria es de Todos available here:
<http://secretariadepueblos.gov.ec/Web/Joomla/MATERIAL%20SPPC/COMICS/COMIC8.pdf>http://secretariadepueblos.gov.ec/Web/Joomla/MATERIAL%20SPPC/COMICS/COMIC8.pdf
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