South American tribes fight for land rights.

With remarkably scant recognition in international news, over the last week indigenous tribes in Peru have been desperately fighting to protect their rights to land, resources and sovereignty.

Armoured only with bows and arrows and spears, several thousand Awajun and Wambi Indians were pitted against a highly militarised police force which dispatched automatic weapons, teargas, helicopters and armoured cars.

In an ongoing dispute over oil, a bloody stand-off ensued whereupon at least 50 Indians and 9 police officers were killed.

John Vidal commenting in The Guardian said that this was “some of the worst violence in Peru in 20 years.”

Survival International, the indigenous rights group, claimed it was “Peru’s Tiananmen Square.”

Speaking to the Guardian, one of the protest leaders Servando Puerta said: “"For thousands of years, we've run the Amazon forests.

“This is genocide. They're killing us for defending our lives, our sovereignty, human dignity," said Puerta.


The protests are a warning to South America of what could happen if corporate companies are given free access to the Amazonian rainforests to exploit an estimated 6bn barrels of oil and cut away the forest.

On Friday, as demonstrations in Lima were diffused by police, curfews were enforced in many Peruvian Amazonian towns.

Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, refused to condemn the massacre.

In a token gesture, he suspended, but only for a three month period, the laws which afford the exploitation of the Amazon.

Amid this terrible furor, Amazonian shaman Davi Kopenawa Yanomami has returned to British shores to alert people to the extreme predicament indigenous people are facing in South America.

Kopenawa is part of the Yanomami tribe, one of the most isolated tribes in the world, whose existence is threatened by gold mining and climate change.

He left Watoriki, his village in northern Amazon with his grave warning.

“The world is ill, he told the Guardian, “The lungs of the sky are polluted.

“The indigenous people have never damaged or robbed their land of resources.”

Twenty years ago, he came to London to alert the British government to the destruction of the rainforest due to rampant gold mining.

Back then, 20,000 gold miners plus had invaded Yanomami tribal lands.

In addition to the aggressive felling of forests and poisoning of rivers, they brought violence and disease.

One in five Yanomamai died within a few years from measles, malaria and other illnesses.

The upshot was that the tribe was nearly driven to extinction.

But Kopenawa’s message was heeded, and the issue was by and by resolved.

Now history is repeating itself.

"They are repairing and expanding the old airstrips. Kopenawa told the Guardian

“The cattle ranchers are coming in, cutting down the forest.

“They are coming with planes and helicopters, guns and machines and rafts.

“They bring malaria and destroy the rivers. We are warning the world that without your help the Yanomami people will die,” he said.

"The error of the whites is to take the riches of the land.

You only want to take the riches. But the land is sacred.

If the Yanomamai die the shamans will disappear and the governments will continue to take the land. You are worried about climate change.

“It is arriving. The rains come late, the sun behaves in a strange way.

"We are shamans. We care for the planet, the sun, the moon the darkness and the light.

“Everything that exists we look after.

“You cannot go on destroying nature.

“We will all die, burned and drowned, and that is the Yanomamai word."

Sources:
'We are fighting for our lives and our dignity'- John Vidal http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/13/forests-environment-oil-companiesWhen Davi Kopenawa Yanomami leaves home, you know the world is in trouble- John Vidal http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/13/davi-yanomami