The leader of Peru's Amazon Indians will be flown to exile in Nicaragua after seeking asylum following violent demonstrations that killed scores of police and protesters...
Human rights lawyers have since accused the President Alan Garcia's regime of an orchestrated cover-up. Official figures put the death toll at just 32, including 23 policemen. News reports say the number of deaths is closer to 60, and vast numbers of missing people have yet to be accounted for.
Police open fire on Amazon Indians blocking the road in Bagua Grande in Peru's northern province of Utcubamba on Friday. (AP)
Trade unions are organising a strike across the country today, hoping to fan public outrage over the incident, which began when police fired tear gas and automatic weapons into noisy crowds of protesters...
The crisis follows months of escalating controversy over Mr Garcia's attempts to implement a free trade agreement with the US. New laws, brought in to increase the number of oil and logging concessions in the country's 67 million hectares of rainforest, appear to allow for the sale of tribespeople's ancestral territories.
In April, Aidesep supporters began blocking roads and rivers in rural areas of the country. A crucial oil pipeline across northern Peru has been shut down since the end of the month, costing the state oil company an estimated US $ 120,000 (£75,000) a day.
Indigenous people, who account for almost half of Peru's 28 million inhabitants, have for years had a tense relationship with the ruling class, who are largely descended from Europeans. Mr Garcia's has attempted to dismiss his Amazonian opponents as brutal savages, accusing them of "elemental ignorance".
"They just don't know their place. Can't they just learn that they lost, we won and their elemental culture has no place in the modern world".
To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed be the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation. The truth, seldom mentioned but there for anyone to see, is that nature is not so easily molded... Rachel Carson,Silent Spring, 1962
"It has been demonstrated that forest can be put back on the most barren lands. What is required is an organized effort to rehabilitate these areas. This means trained men, and money, with legal authority over the area in question, to prevent private interests from again creating barrens and destroying the natural forest protection of vital watersheds. Considerable public sentiment has been aroused against wholesale destruction of private woodlands. Legislation, and machinery to administer the enforcement of forest protection on our important watersheds, should at least be given first consideration."
October 1944
Edmund Zavitz (1875 - 1968)
Former Deputy Minister of Forestry
"Father" of modern environmentalism in Ontario and beyond
The views expressed are those of the editor and do not necessarily reflect those of OPSEU.
Co-dedicated to Ken Saro-Wiwa
"I’ll tell you this, I may be dead but my ideas will not die. "
"... as I see it, the generation to which I belong is about to leave the scene. There is a need for the next generation to prepare itself to continue where we shall have left off."
Ken Saro-Wiwa Executed by the Nigerian state in 1995 for defending the Ogoni people and the environment
Co-dedicated to Rachel Carson
"Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life." Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, 1962.
Police open fire on Amazon Indians blocking the road in Bagua Grande in Peru's northern province of Utcubamba on Friday. (AP)
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