By Carlos Monge, Claudia Viale and Leon Portocarrero of RWI Latin America
One month of massive rallies and protests. Rivers interrupted by chains of canoes, central roads and even provincial and regional airports occupied by indigenous protesters. Pumping station shutdowns blocking the flow of oil to refineries and export stations and threatening to disrupt both national energy supplies and critical exports. A state of emergency across the entire Amazon region, with some constitutional rights suspended and the Army and the Navy poised to intervene in order to restore order and maintain the flow of Peru's precious black gold. After weeks of silence, a roundtable arranged for negotiations between the executive and the indigenous leadership.
What is going on? Wasn't Peru doing relatively well?
This remarkable wave of unrest stems from events in October 2007, when Peruvian President Alan García published three articles laying out his Perro del Hortelano1 theory to explain poverty and underdevelopment in Peru.
According to President García, though many in Peru were not using natural resources in an efficient manner, they were also unwilling to allow others to use them. Many analysts saw his statement as a declaration of war against the small communal and individual producers who own most of the land in Peru, and who have been at the centre of conflicts over large-scale mining, oil and gas projects.
A few months after these articles were published, the National Congress awarded the executive branch extraordinary faculties to adjust Peru's legal framework to the recently signed Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. Through this delegation, the Peruvian government approved more than 100 Law Decrees, several of which were immediately denounced by indigenous organizations as threatening to communal property and encouraging commercial forestry development, large-scale agribusiness and hydro-carbon extraction in the Amazon Basin.
Demanding that the decrees be revoked, these organizations led the strikes that began on August 9, 2008. After almost two weeks of massive mobilizations, Peru's Congress agreed to repeal two of the most critical Law Decrees and revise the rest. Though the executive branch expressed its disagreement, leaders in Congress recognized that the laws had not been passed in consultation with the indigenous peoples and that they violated the Constitution.
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Despite these concessions, Congress dragged its feet while the executive branch embarked on new legislation along the same lines as the above mentioned Law Decrees, and granted new concessions to oil companies in the Amazon. In response to these latest actions, the indigenous organizations went on strike again, in early April 2009. Though many weeks passed, government officials remained nearly silent, and the executive branch continued to appear uninterested in resolving the conflict, choosing instead to impose the state of emergency in all the Amazon territory. Nevertheless, as we write these lines, the indigenous leadership has finally met with the Prime Minister, and President García has approved the establishment of a roundtable between the Prime Minister and his cabinet and the leadership of the indigenous peoples' organization AIDESEP. What will come out of these new negotiations remains to be seen.
The immediate reason for the strike is of course the rejection by the regional indigenous organizations of the Law Decrees and subsequent regulations, which they feel threaten their communal lands and open the door to a variety of large-scale developments in what they consider their ancestral territories. We hope that a solution can be found soon and that confrontation is avoided at all costs.
But the underlying issues are more much more complex, and can be traced to two strategic decisions that Peru needs to make as a nation. One involves the true place of indigenous peoples in the land called Peru. The other involves the unique role that the Amazon region plays in the global economy of the 21st Century.
Is Peru prepared to recognize itself as a nation that is in truth made up of various nations? Is Peru ready to give the indigenous peoples of the Amazon region the right to make decisions about their territories, including the resources under the ground?
Is Peru prepared to decide that the Amazon region should no longer be seen as a provider of wood, agribusiness resources and fossil fuels, to sustain the unsustainable consumption and development patterns of the North and the emerging BRICs nations? Is Peru ready to decide that the Amazon's role should be to provide the world with oxygen and fresh water, the two scarce resources of the future?
These are the more profound structural conflicts at the root of the indigenous peoples' strike in the Amazon. That's what lies beneath.
1 Perro del Hortelano is the title of one of Spanish author Lope de Vega´s comedies, published in 1618. It popularly refers to someone who doesn’t use something, but does not allow others to use it either.
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