Peru’s Andeans Celebrate Mining Rejection Despite Torture, Killings
AYABACA, Peru, September 10, 2008 (ENS) – Campesinos and townsfolk from Ayabaca and outlying rural communities in the Piuran Cordillera are celebrating the first anniversary of their citizen referendum rejecting the open-pit mining projects proposed for this Andean region.
Since September 1, they have been participating in a series of conservation talks and festivities centered around enhancing public appreciation for the unique cloud forests and treeless paramos that remain here and their vital role in supplying water for humans and wildlife.
Cloud forest in the Peruvian Andes
(Photo by Ben Yehuda)
These include many plants and animals found nowhere else on Earth and the majority of Peru’s few remaining, critically endangered mountain tapirs, a species highlighted throughout the events.
The festivities will culminate on September 16, the actual date of the 2007 referendum by which 95 percent of citizens voted to reject the mining projects seeking gold, silver, copper, and molybdenum that would alter their environment.
Many Andeans depend upon radio communication as their window to the outside world. Public addresses and discussions concerning the conservation and ecology of this region and how these would be affected by the mining proposals are being broadcast from Ayabaca’s major radio station.
Local conservationist Alejandro Zegarra, with support from the Andean Tapir Fund, will be making several public and radio addresses.
Though mining interests have sought to minimize the importance of the referendum, its validity is grounded in Peru’s national constitution and is a public reaffirmation of the power of ordinary citizens.
Conservationists here, however, remain on guard to prevent the type of violent repression they have experienced from the mining companies and their well-heeled and aggressive supporters.
Today, more than 300 residents of Piura state are being investigated under charges of terrorism for exercising their rights as citizens to vocally oppose the mining projects that threaten diminishing wildlife populations, their water supply and their way of life.
Additionally, dozens of Piuran citizens are imprisoned for protesting the mining proposals and for insisting upon the enforcement of laws governing environmental protection and the upholding of community and individual rights, including those concerning property and the right of citizens to determine their own future.
Speakers at a Piuran community forum support
culture, education, reject mining. (Photo credit
unknown)
Their community leaders have been accused of terrorism by the mining companies and by Peruvian President Alan Garcia.
Mining companies and their employees have unsuccessfully offered local citizens bribes to accept mining, but protest roadblocks leading into the mining concessions remain in place.
According to many local sources, mining protesters have suffered social, economic and even physical repression from mining company employees and government authorities.
Protesters have been harassed, beaten, and jailed. Some have been killed and their bodies buried in remote areas, according to local media reports.
One opposition leader, agrarian engineer Reemberto Herrera Racho, was killed in 2004, as was the protest leader Melanio Garcia Gonzales in 2005.
Huancabamba community director Benito Guamizo witnessed Garcia fall dead from a rifle bullet. Immediately, his corpse was taken by the police and all evidence for a judicial case vanished.
Mining protester Javier Neira lost
his right eye. (Photographer’s name
withheld by request.)
Thirty campesinos were kidnapped and tortured for three days in the Majaz mining encampment. The right eye of protester Javier Neira was destroyed by a blow with the butt of a pistol.
Over 200 campesinos were charged for invading lands in their own municipalities.
Witnesses claim that both the Peruvian national police and security forces of the Majaz Mining Company perpetrated these attacks, whose victims continue to suffer painful symptoms.
In 2005, an American doctor from Physicians for Human Rights, who declined to be named for this report, came upon 28 tortured campesinos who had been detained against their will in the Majaz mining encampment. Since then he has been treating these campesinos and attests their long-term suffering, both physical and psychological, caused by extreme tear gas attacks, blows from heavy clubs, knife cuts, exposure to toxic substances, asphyxiation, sleep deprivation, nudity and sexual violations and whippings.
In this case, official charges have been brought before the Piuran police by Peru’s national coordinator for human rights. Charges of kidnapping, torture and homicide are leveled against the security forces of the Majaz Mining Company and against officers of the national police.
But Piuran and Cajamarcan communities were encouraged in August when the Peruvian Congress voted to rescind a development plan for Peru’s portion of the Amazon Basin. This plan called for a massive step-up in logging and mining projects, including oil extraction.
Congress declared as unconstitutional various Legislative Decrees, including 1015 and 1073 that would have opened up remaining Amazonian forests to development at the expense of the natural ecosystem and the indigenous people who live there.
Since the Piuran Cordillera is a vital part of the Amazon headwaters, the cancellation of the open-pit mining concessions here by the federal government may now ensue.
Forest destruction by mining interests in
Piura (Photographer’s name withheld
by request)
Much destruction has already taken place. In a speech March 2 at an ecological forum in Piura, Huancabamba community director Benito Guamizo testified that Majaz employees had already destroyed hundreds of hectares by constructing roads, though the company has only an exploration license.
Guamizo said the mining company has eliminated a significant portion of the remnant Andean forests upon which mountain tapirs, spectacled bears and other rare species depend in this area.
The paramos and cloud forests of Yanta and Tapal in Ayabaca province, Segunda-Cajas in Huancabamba, and adjacent communities both in Piura and Cajamarca states have evolved in a unique way, ecologists say.
The paramos are glacier-formed valleys and plains with a large variety of lakes, peat bogs and wet grasslands intermingled with shrublands and forest patches occurring between the upper forest line, about 3,800 meters high, and the permanent snow line, which begins at about 5,000 meters.
These ecosystems are situated near the lowest pass of the 4,600 mile long Andes are they are rich in biodiversity. Recent field studies conducted by Peru’s Natural History Museum have identified at least 1,695 species occurring here, including 374 birds and 61 mammals.
Juvenile Andean tapir (Photo by Craig
Downer courtesy Andean Tapir Fund)
They are inhabited by most of Peru’s remaining mountain tapirs, Tapirus pinchaque, that number just a few hundred, ecologists estimate. The largest mammal in the tropical Andes, the mountain tapir is listed as Endangered in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Peru lists the mountain tapir as in “critical danger of extinction” so its presence in this area should by law cancel the open-pit, heap-leach mining concessions that would ruin its remaining habitat. These concessions threaten many thousands of hectares of remnant cloud forest and paramos.
Several new species have been discovered this year, and conservationist Zegarra reports a newly found population of the Peruvian Huemul, Hippocamelus antisensis, known locally as taruca, a small member of the deer family.
Ecologists with the Andean Tapir Fund working here have documented hundreds of endangered plant and animal species that are listed in the IUCN Red List and/or Peru’s national endangered species list.
The Andean Tapir Fund has compiled extensive species inventories of these plants and animals and is presenting these to local, national and international officials in order to create the Cerro Negro Nature Sanctuary encompassing remaining cloud forests and paramos.
This initiative has gained the support of local communities, and a General Assembly is expected to soon allow local citizens to legally declare this sanctuary.
However, exact boundaries and maps with ecological overlays need to be prepared and for this the Andean Tapir Fund [www.andeantapirfund.com] is seeking financial support and professional collaboration.
For previous ENS coverage of this issue, see:
“Peruvians Vote 95% to Save Andean Forests from Mining” [www.ens-newswire.com]
and
“Anti-Mining Demonstrators Blockade Peruvian Roads” [www.ens-newswire.com]
