ENVIRONMENT-LATIN AMERICA: Battles over land spread across Amazon

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Oct 5 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.

Development schemes in other parts of Venezuela have also brought death, displacement, and disease to native peoples. The lands of the Pemon, the Kapon, the Kari’na, and Lokono peoples in Bolivar state near the border with Guyana have been turned into timber concessions.

These land grabs are not new to the Pemon who have been displaced more than once in the last 15 years as aluminium, iron, and steel industries have been set up with financial support from the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank.

Colchester and Watson note that the incidents took place even though Venezuela created a national law based on International Labour Organisation (ILO) conventions to prevent this from happening. The two authors have recently appealed to the ILO to investigate Venezuela’s failure to implement this law.

Violence came this year to other groups in the Amazon like the Maroons — former African slaves who escaped their colonial masters 350 years ago to set up their own societies in remote areas.

In the last few weeks the Saramaca tribe of Maroons, who live at Nieuw Koffiekamp in northern Suriname, were shot at by security officials working for the Canadian-owned Golden Star mining company, according to reports from local human rights organisations like Moiwani ’86.

“I have seen the security guards riding around in the white jeeps with M16 assault rifles. I don’t think they got people in their sights but the situation has become very serious for the people of the interior,” says Gary Branashute, an anthropologist from George Washington University here who returned from a visit to the mine site a week ago.

Golden Star officials do not deny that they carry weapons.

“Our personnel are under strict rules and will only use force in response to an immediate threat to life,” wrote Peter Donald, the general manager of Golden Star’s operations in Suriname in reply to letters of protest.

Golden Star, which is also a shareholder in the Omai gold mine in Guyana, has come under a lot of pressure since a major cyanide spill occurred at Omai in August, destroying the local rivers.

In many of these conflicts, the local governments side with private industry, say observers. Branashute says that the Surinamese government has sent a contingent of police to back up Golden Star security forces.

“Three years ago, the government signed an agreement, brokered by the Organisation of American States, to protect the Maroons and recognise their land rights. It was obviously just rich words and empty prose,” he told IPS.

The agreement ended six years of bloody conflict over land rights between the Saramacas, led by ‘Jungle Commando’ Ronnie Brunswijk and the government. The truce was broken briefly last year when the Saramacas took over the Afobakka power station, alleging abuse and neglect of local villages.

Government troops have also been accused of attacking the Macuxi, an indigenous group numbering about 12,000 who live in Brazil near the border with Venezuela.

Though the Brazilian army went in ostensibly to help protect the Macuxi in March, it is instead “driving indigenous people from their homes, destroying houses, and intimidating communities at gun point,” say reports from the Indian Council of Roraima.

“The army has assumed ‘exclusive powers’ over the area, consistently siding with the thousands of gold miners and migrants who have invaded the Macuxi homeland,” it adds.

Loggers looking for mahogany wood are also reported to be invading the land of the Arara peoples near Belem at the mouth of the Amazon in northern Brazil with the help of local government officials.

Both the Arara and the Macuxi land is officially protected by the Brazilian government under the 1988 constitution which required the government to set aside 557 protected areas covering 11 percent of Brazil’s land mass for the 320,000 indigenous people in the country.

Local politicians and businesses argue that it is unfair that the native groups, who comprise less than one percent of the 160 million population, should get so much land.

But social activists point out that the real problem is that 10 percent of the population controls 80 percent of the land. Some two million families are estimated to be looking for land.

These landless peasants have also suffered at the hands of the army. Two months ago the Brazilian army was accused of massacring and injuring dozens of poor landless peasants in Rondonia, which borders Bolivia.

Riot police wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying tear gas made a dawn raid on ‘Fazenda Santa Helena’ (Santa Helena farm) which had been set up by squatters less than a month before.

“Many people are lost in the bush and some wounded, dazed by the tear gas, plunged in the river. At this point it’s impossible to know exactly how many people died,” wrote an eyewitness whose report flashed across the world via computer two days later.

“The police battered and killed the squatters, using women as human shields and torturing, executing and stomping on prisoners,” said tYH’Yn+KWU+V