LATIN AMERICA: Battles over land spread across Amazon basin

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Oct 7 1995 (IPS) - Four months ago, native peoples were evicted at gun-point in Roraima near Venezuela. Landless peasants were massacred in Rondonia near Bolivia in August. And shooting broke out in the last few weeks at gold mines in Suriname.

These are just a few of the violent incidents that have marked the last few months in South America’s dense Amazon forests that stretch from Bolivia across Brazil to Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela in the north.

Accounts of macabre incidents have made their way outside the region.

“They shot a six-year-old girl dead as she tried to walk to safety by a towering tree, forced one prisoner to eat soil mixed with his blood, and another to eat the brains spilling from a battered corpse they had ordered him to carry,” wrote a New York Times reporter recently.

Many of these conflicts are touched off by the invasion of miners and loggers into the remotest parts of the Amazon to extract coal, gold and timber. These groups range from small artisenal miners, known locally as “pork knockers”, to giant timber companies from faraway Indonesia and Malaysia.

Other conflicts have been sparked by poor peasants in search of land for farming, Government security forces have also set off bloody battles with both indigenous people and landless farmers.

Worst hit by the invasions are groups like the Yanomami on the Brazil/Venezuela border who had never encountered industrial society.

Two years ago, Brazilian miners in search of gold slaughtered 20 Yanomami peoples on the Upper Orinocco, provoking an international outcry but little by way of action.

Today, deadly conflict continues in Venezuela, note Marcus Colchester of the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) and Fiona Watson of Survival International. The two, based in Britain, have just completed a report on the Venezuelan peoples.

“Killings of Indians by military and police forces have been reported from Wayuu and Yupka areas in the north west of (Venezuela),” writes Colchester in the report, ‘Venezuela: Violation of Indigenous Rights’.

The Wayuu and the Yupka have lost their lands in the Sierra de la Perija to large, state-controlled open-cast coal mines and oil drilling. The Yupka, together with the Bari peoples, their neighbours, have also lost land to poor farmers and ranchers who invaded from neighbouring Colombia.