Members of the 16 rural families who refuse to abandon their homes in the village of Taquiruta until the company running the Las Bambas mine compensates them fairly for the loss of their animals, pens and houses. In the background can be seen the biggest mine in Peru. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Aramis Castro and Milagros Salazar
LIMA/CHALLHUAHUACHO , Sep 17 2016 (IPS)

Of the 150 socioeconomic conflicts related to the extractive industries that Peru’s new government inherited, one of the highest-profile is the protest by the people living near the biggest mining project in the history of the country: Las Bambas.

The enormous open-pit copper mine in the district of Challhuahuacho, in the southern department of Apurímac, is operated by the Chinese-Australian company MMG Limited, controlled by China Minmetals Corporation, which invested more than 10 billion dollars in its first project in Latin America.

Peru, where mining is the backbone of the economy, is the third-largest copper producer in the world and the fifth-largest gold producer.

Las Bambas, which started operating in January, is projected to have an initial annual production of 400,000 tons of copper concentrate.

The conflict reached its peak in September 2015 when three people were killed and 29 wounded in a clash between local residents and the police. The former government of Ollanta Humala (2011-2016) assembled a working group to address local demands.

The working group’s first meeting since conservative President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski took office on Jul. 28 was held on Aug. 22.

“We don’t want conflicts. But if we give you the mine, we have to set conditions,” Daniel Olivera, a local farmer from the community of Ccayao, told IPS with regard to the neglected demands of people living around the mine, which has reserves of 7.2 million metric tons of copper, in addition to molybdenum and other minerals.

The working group was set up in February, to address four issues: human rights, environment, sustainable development with public investment, and corporate social responsibility.

The only concrete result achieved so far, according to the representatives of the Quechua communities surrounding the mine, was compensation for the families of the three people killed in the violent clash.

The last session took place Sep. 7-8, but it mainly dealt with technical aspects. The head of the Front for the Defence of the Interests of the Province of Cotatambas, Rodolfo Abarca, told IPS that he expects the next meetings, scheduled for October, to deal with “substantive issues”.

The mine’s three open pits and the processing facilities are located 4,000 metres above sea level in the Andes mountains, between the Cotabambas and Grau provinces in the Apurímac region.

The Front demands that an independent study be carried out in order to shed light on the origins of the conflict: the changes approved by the Ministry of Mines and Energy to the environmental impact assessment of the project, without consulting the local population, in spite of the potential impact on the water sources, soil and air.

The most controversial move was made in 2013 when the authorities allowed the transfer of the plant that separates molybdenum from copper, from Tintaya in the neighboring region of Cuzco, to Fuerabamba, in Cotatambas.

Two girls with their mother on a street of Nueva Fuerabamba, the town where the relocated Quechua villagers were transferred because of the open-pit copper mine in Las Bambas, removed from their traditional way of life, in the department of Apurímac, in the Andean highlands of southern Peru. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

The transfer meant new studies were necessary to measure the potential environmental impacts at the new site. But this step was disregarded in the supporting technical report, according to the environmental engineers who went through the more than 1,500 pages of project records with the team from the investigative journalism site Convoca.

While the Ministry of Mines and Energy and the mining company Las Bambas saw these changes as minor and involving insignificant impacts, the experts said they were significant modifications that required a closer analysis.

The supporting technical report is part of a simplification of requirements carried out by Humala’s government in 2013 through decree 054-2013-PCM, aimed at accelerating private investment in the country.

Among the simplifications was a new rule that the local population no longer has to be consulted before allowing changes in environmental impact studies, on the assumption that these changes only affect secondary components of the project or expansions for technological improvements.

Convoca’s journalists told IPS that the environmental engineers informed them that in the case of Las Bambas, the technical supporting report was used to rapidly justify changes, without having to conduct specific studies to prevent potential environmental impacts, and to avoid consulting local communities.

The technical supporting report also made it possible for the minerals to be transported by truck, instead of only through pipelines as in the past. As a result, the trucks have been throwing up clouds of dust since January, a problem that has further fuelled the local protests.

The company told Convoca via email that they use “sealed containers” and that they spray the roads with water before the trucks drive by.

With the removal of the requirement for pipelines went the hopes of people in the 20 farming communities and four small towns in four different districts, who expected to lease or sell the lands crossed by the pipelines that were projected in the initial environmental impact assessment.

The decision “hit us like a bucket of cold water… It’s very sad,” added Olivera, who is from a community where the pipelines were supposed to cross.

The environmental engineers argued that what should have been done was a study of the environmental impact caused by the transport of minerals by truck instead of through a pipeline.

They also said a health impact assessment was needed after the relocation of the filtration plant, “since besides copper, molybdenum is also processed and produced, which is harmful to human health,” causing liver failure and different types of arthritis.

The Ministry of Mines and Energy said by email that the relocation of “the molybdenum plant, as well as the filtration area and the concentrate storage facility,” only required a technical supporting report because the management plan approved for the plant was not modified.

Moreover, they said the area of influence of the project was reduced, and argued that a plan approved to recirculate the mining process water was an “improvement.”

The company said that before submitting their report, it “identified and evaluated the impacts that would be generated in each case,” and concluded that “they would not be significant.”

In his inaugural address, President Kuczynski said he would demand compliance with all environmental regulations and would respect the views of every citizen regarding a project’s environmental impact.

But the former vice minister of environmental management, José de Echave, pointed out to IPS that “there is no mechanism for public participation,” even when local residents are not opposed to a project.

According to the ombudsperson’s office there are 221 unresolved social conflicts in Peru, 150 (71 percent) of which are centered on territories where extractive projects are being carried out and have an environmental component.

De Echave said the government should create strategies to monitor social conflicts and deal with them through dialogue with government agencies.

Access to land is another issue behind the social conflict in Las Bambas.

There are 16 families in the village of Taquiruta, on the edge of the town of Fuerabamba, who live very close to the centre of operations of Las Bambas and refuse to leave their homes and parcels of land until the company provides them with fair compensation. The minerals are under the ground where their houses sit.

They are the only ones that until now have not left. Over the last two years, more than 400 families have been relocated to a new settlement, half an hour away from the community, named Nueva Fuerabamba (new Fuerabamba).

De Echave said the government should implement a land-use planning law to anticipate potential conflicts over access to natural resources.

With reporting by Alicia Tovar (Lima).

Peruvian lawmaker Jaime Delgado reads out the final declaration of the Sixth Forum of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean, in Lima. From left to right: John Preissing, FAO representative in Peru; Ecuadorean lawmaker María Augusta Calle; and Uruguayan legislator Bertha Sanseverino, with other participants in the meeting. Credit: Aramís Castro/IPS

By Aramis Castro and Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Nov 19 2015 (IPS)

With eight specific commitments aimed at pushing through laws and policies on food security and sovereignty, family farming and school feeding programmes, legislators from 17 countries closed the Sixth Forum of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean.

During the Nov. 15-17 Forum in the Peruvian capital, the delegates of the national chapters of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger (PFH) reasserted their determination to promote laws to “break the circle of poverty and enforce the right to food” in the region.

The more than 60 legislators who took part in the Forum, including guests from Africa and Asia, stated in the final declaration that of all of the world’s regions, Latin America and the Caribbean had made the greatest progress in reducing hunger, cutting the proportion of hungry people by more than half, in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which had a 2015 deadline. “After six years of debate, we understand the concept of food sovereignty to mean eliminating injustice to preserve the environment and biodiversity.” -- María Augusta Calle

But after stressing these results, John Preissing, representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Peru, called on the legislators not to be content “with averages” that hide inequalities between and within countries.

He also stressed that “it will be much more difficult” for the region to reduce the proportion of hungry people to two or three percent, than what they already managed to do: to cut the percentage from 32 to seven percent.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, some 37 million of the region’s 600 million people are still hungry, of a total of 795 million hungry people around the world, the Forum participants were told.

The final declaration emphasised that it is essential that the PFH work together with the governments of each country to create programmes and pass laws aimed at eradicating hunger, and to promote the three main areas for doing so: food security and sovereignty, family farming, and school feeding.

To advance in these three complementary areas, eight specific accords were reached, including the need for PFH legislators to participate in the debate on public budget funds, in order to guarantee that governments finance programmes against hunger.

The final declaration included the conclusions of the working groups on these three central themes, where one of the key issues was the importance of promoting public policies to benefit small farmers.

In another agreement, the lawmakers committed themselves to backing a new concept of food sovereignty.

“After six years of debate, we understand the concept of food sovereignty to mean eliminating injustice to preserve the environment and biodiversity,” Ecuadorean lawmaker María Augusta Calle, who the Forum ratified in her post as regional coordinator of the PFH, told IPS.

Members of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean sign the final declaration of the Sixth Forum at the end of the Nov. 15-17 gathering in Lima, Peru. Credit: Aramís Castro/IPS

The next step, according to Calle, is to deliver the accords – especially the ones linked to food sovereignty – to the heads of state and government of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), during the summit to be held in January 2016 in Ecuador.

“They asked us to draw up the concept of food sovereignty that has been debated here,” said Calle.

The parliamentarians also agreed to support CELAC’s plan for its member countries to reach the goal of “zero hunger” by 2025 – five years before the deadline established by the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) approved by the international community in September.

Uruguayan legislator Bertha Sanseverino, the subregional coordinator of the PFH in South America, told IPS that the Forum established long-term commitments to “eradicate hunger by 2025” in the region.

She said that meeting this goal will require “a complex effort to design public policies and laws.”

One hurdle standing in the way of the many initiatives launched by the PFH national chapters, said Sanseverino, is the inevitable and democratic renewal of parliament. “Sometimes they have a good Parliamentary Front, but those legislators serve out their terms, and the following year you come up against the need to put the Front together again,” she said.

The FAO’s Preissing said eradicating hunger in the region is “an uphill task….But we can do it, there is evidence here, there are commitments,” he added optimistically.

The Forum expressed its support for small-scale community agriculture, as well as traditional knowledge and practices of Latin America’s indigenous peoples, as instruments of healthy, diverse diets.

It also warned about a food-related problem that is new in the region, and has begun to affect the population of Latin America – the junk food craze, which is bringing problems that did not previously exist, like widespread obesity.

Before the Sixth Forum came to an end, all of the participants sent a communiqué to the president of the host country, Ollanta Humala, urging him to approve the regulations for the bill on the promotion of healthy eating, which was signed into law in May 2013, and whose implementation has been blocked by his failure to do so.

“This law has been a pioneer in Latin America, and they (the participants in the Forum) are surprised that since we were pioneers, the law has not been codified,” the coordinator of the Peruvian chapter of the PFH, Jaime Delgado, told IPS, pointing out that the law had served as a model for countries like Ecuador.

He added that the PFH is trying to make sure that the 2016 budget about to be approved includes funds earmarked for the fight against poverty, while he complained that “there are programmes that do not benefit small farmers,” who are the main link in the country’s food security chain.

Next year, the members of the regional front will meet in Mexico, in a new edition of the parliamentary forum.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A panel in the Sixth Forum of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean, held Nov. 15-17. Second from the right is indigenous leader Ruth Buendía, who represented rural communities in the Forum. Credit: Aramís Castro/IPS

By Milagros Salazar and Aramis Castro
LIMA, Nov 17 2015 (IPS)

Lawmakers in the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean decided at a regional meeting to work as a bloc for the passage of laws on food security – an area in which countries in the region have show uneven progress.

The Nov. 15-17 Sixth Forum of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger (PFH) in Lima, Peru drew more than 60 legislators from 17 countries in the region and guest delegations from parliaments in Africa, Asia and Europe.

The coordinator of the regional Front, Ecuadorean legislator María Augusta Calle, told IPS that the challenge is to “harmonise” the region’s laws to combat poverty and hunger in the world’s most unequal region.

Calle added that a number of laws on food security and sovereignty have been passed in Latin America, and the challenge now is to standardise the legislation in all of the countries participating in the PFH to strengthen policies that bolster family farming.“We have reduced hunger by 50 percent (since 1990), but this is still insufficient. We cannot continue to live in a world where food is a business and not a right. It cannot be possible that 80 percent of those who produce the food themselves suffer from hunger.” -- María Augusta Calle

In Latin America, 81 percent of domestically consumed food products come from small farmers, who guarantee food security in the region, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which has advised the PFH since its creation in 2009.

Twelve of the 17 Latin American countries participating in the PFH already have food security and sovereignty laws, Calle said. But it has not been an easy task, she added, pointing out that several of the laws were approved only after long delays.

During the inauguration of the Sixth Forum, she said the region has reduced hunger “by 50 percent (since 1990), but this is still insufficient. We cannot continue to live in a world where food is a business and not a right. It cannot be possible that 80 percent of those who produce the food themselves suffer from hunger.”

The fight against hunger is an uphill task, and the forum’s host country is a clear illustration of this.

In Peru, the draft law on food security was only approved by Congress on Nov. 12, after two years of debate. The legislature finally reacted, just three days before the Sixth Forum began in the country’s capital. But the bill still has to be signed into law and codified by the executive branch, in order to be put into effect.

“How can it be possible for a government to put forth objections to a law on food security?” Peruvian Vice President Marisol Espinoza asked during the opening of the Sixth Forum.

Espinoza, who left the governing Peruvian Nationalist Party in October, took the place of President Ollanta Humala, who had been invited to inaugurate the Sixth Forum.

Display of native varieties of potatoes at a food fair during the Sixth Forum of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger held Nov. 15-17 in Lima. Defending native products forms part of the right to food promoted by the legislators from Latin America and the Caribbean. Credit: Aramís Castro/IPS

The coordinator of the Peruvian chapter of the PFH, Jaime Delgado, told IPS that he hopes the government will sign the new food security bill into law without setting forth observations.

Indigenous leader Ruth Buendía, who took part in the Sixth Forum in representation of rural communities in Peru, said the government should pass laws to protect peasant farmers because they are paid very little for their crops, even though they supply the markets in the cities.

“What the government has to do is regulate this, for the citizens,” Buendía, who belongs to the Asháninka people, told IPS. “Why do we have a government that is not going to defend us? As we say in our community: ‘why do I have a father (the government)?’ If they want investment, ok, but they have to regulate.”

Another controversial question in the case of Peru is the more than two-year delay in the codification and implementation of the law on healthy food for children and adolescents, passed in May 2013, which requires that companies that produce food targeting this age group accurately label the ingredients.

Congressman Delgado said food companies are lobbying against the law, which cannot be put into effect until it is codified.

“It would be pathetic if after so much sacrifice to get this law passed, the government failed to codify it because of the pressure from business interests,” said Delgado.

He said that in Peru, over 200 million dollars are invested in advertising for junk food every year, according to a 2012 study by the Radio and Television Consultative Council.

Calle, from Ecuador, said the members of the PFH decided to call for the entrance into effect of the Peruvian law, in the Sixth Forum’s final declaration.

“The 17 countries (that belong to the PFH) are determined to see the law on healthy food codified in Peru. We believe it is indispensable. It is a wonderful law,” said the legislator.

Peasant farmers from the Andes highlands dancing during one of the opening acts at the Sixth Forum of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger held Nov. 15-17 in Lima. More than 80 percent of the food consumed in the region is produced by small farmers, while the same percentage of hungry people are paradoxically found in rural areas. Credit: Aramís Castro/IPS

She explained that in her country food and beverage companies have been required to use labels showing the ingredients, despite the opposition from the business sector.

“In Ecuador we have had a fabulous experience (regarding labels for junk food) which we would like businesses here in Peru to understand and not be afraid of,” Calle said.

The regional coordinator of the PFH said that to address the problem of food being seen as business rather than a right, “we need governments and parliaments committed to the public, rather than to transnational corporations.”

Another country that has made progress is Brazil, where laws in favour of the right to food include one that requires that at least 30 percent of the food that goes into school meals is purchased from local small farmers, Nazareno Fonseca, a member of the PFH regional consultative council, told IPS.

Calle said Brazil’s efforts to boost food security, in the context of its “Zero Hunger” programme, marked a watershed in Latin America.

The PFH regional coordinator noted that the person responsible for implementing the programme in the crucial first two years (2003-2004) as extraordinary food security minister was José Graziano da Silva, director general of FAO since 2011.

Spanish Senator José Miguel Camacho said it is important for legislators from Latin America and the Caribbean to act as a bloc because “there is still a long way to go, but these forums contribute to that goal.”

The commitments in the Sixth Forum’s final declaration will focus on three main areas: food security, where the PFH is working on a single unified framework law; school feeding; and efforts to fight overnutrition, obesity and junk food.

Peru’s health minister, Aníbal Velásquez, said the hope is that “the commitments approved at the Sixth Forum will translate into laws.”

And the president of the Peruvian Congress, Luis Iberico, said people did not enjoy true citizenship if basic rights were not guaranteed and hunger and poverty still existed.

The indigenous leader Buendía, for her part, asked the PFH legislators for a greater presence of the authorities in rural areas, in order for political declarations to produce tangible results.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Two peasant farmers with a calf in the Andes highlands community of Alto Huancané in the southeastern department of Cusco. Small farmers like them provide around 80 percent of the food for the inhabitants of Latin America and the Caribbean. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Nov 7 2015 (IPS)

Undertaking the challenge of pushing for new legislation to guarantee food security in their countries, legislators from Latin America and the Caribbean, together with guest lawmakers from Africa and Asia, will hold the Sixth Forum of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger Nov. 15-17.

The Forum will provide an opportunity to share experiences, said Aitor Las Romero, in charge of organisation of the forum in the Peruvian office of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which provides support to the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger, created in the region in 2009.

The list of participants in the forum is still open; “other countries of Latin America that have not yet formed their Parliamentary Front, but want to start working towards that goal, are even participating,” the FAO expert told IPS.

The central issues at the sixth Forum will be food security, healthy eating, and other proposals to fight hunger, Peruvian congressman Modesto Julca, who was the first coordinator of the Peru chapter of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger, told IPS.

FAO estimates that 34.3 million people in the region are hungry, according to the latest edition of the Panorama of Food and Nutritional Security in Latin America and the Caribbean, released in May by the FAO regional office in Santiago, Chile.

Peruvian anthropologist Jorge Arboccó said “poverty and hunger are closely intertwined with land use, those who administer it, and the role of states in that relationship.”

In Latin America, 81 percent of food products come from small-scale family agriculture. “They are the farmers who generate the most employment in our countries, employing between 57 and 77 percent of the economically active population,” Arboccó has stated, based on FAO figures.

Although the fight against hunger transcends borders, each national chapter of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger works at its own pace according to the political situation in each parliament.

In the case of Peru, the Front is made up of 13 members “and some participate more than others, but we are working for it to be represented better by all the political forces,” Las Romero told IPS.

The sixth Forum will focus on three main thematic areas, according to the agenda released Friday Nov. 6. The first will be “the plan for food security, nutrition and hunger eradication in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) by 2025.”

The other two are “parliamentary dialogue between the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger of Latin America and the Caribbean with parliamentarians from Asia-Pacific, Africa and other regions,” and “the construction of commitments and policies that strengthen the enforcement of the right to adequate nutrition and food and nutritional sovereignty and security.”

These three thematic areas will overlap during the discussions among the legislators in Lima with three issues considered a priority by the Front: family agriculture and its decisive weight in guaranteeing the right to food and food sovereignty; schools meals as an essential tool in the fight against hunger; and the new challenges presented by overnutrition, a form of malnutrition.

One of the last fronts formed in the region was Peru’s. After a year of work, it got the single-chamber Congress to approve a law on family agriculture. But it has not yet managed to push through two other draft laws, on food security and school meals.

Despite the difficulties, “the fact that parliamentary fronts have been set up throughout Latin America and that today we are the headquarters of that front is representative – it is recognition that we are a country with great diversity,” the coordinator of the Peruvian front, Jaime Delgado, told IPS.

Delgado said they have been working together with civil society on issues like agriculture and food controls under the question of hunger or malnutrition.

In Peru, more than 90 percent of agricultural producers are family farmers and 75 percent of the food consumed is grown on farms less than five hectares in size, said Arboccó, the anthropologist, based on statistics from the 2012 agricultural census.

Although hunger levels have been significantly reduced in Peru according to FAO, there are still 2.3 million hungry people in this country of 30 million.

Poverty affects 33.8 percent of the population in Peru’s Andean highlands, 30.4 percent in the jungle region, and 14.3 percent in the coastal areas, according to 2014 figures from the national statistics institute.

“As an indigenous woman, I am now in Congress, insisting on issues like food sovereignty, family farming, climate change, and healthy eating,” Claudia Coari, a congresswoman for the southeastern department of Puno, told IPS.

“So this is a strength that we are just starting to take into account,” said the lawmaker, who forms part of Peru’s parliamentary front.

Coari said the Forum to be held in Lima is an opportunity to “learn from other countries that have already made progress” and to reinforce what has already been done in Peru. “Now we have to all work together,” she said.

With additional reporting from Aramís Castro in Lima.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Cayetano Huanca, who lives near the Ausangate glacier in the department of Cuzco in Peru’s Andes mountains. In just a few years, the snow and ice could be gone, something that has happened on other glaciers in the country. Credit: Oxfam

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Dec 12 2014 (IPS)

Snow-capped mountains may become a thing of the past in Peru, which has 70 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers. And farmers in these ecosystems are having a hard time adapting to the higher temperatures, while the governments of 195 countries are wrapping up the climate change talks in Lima without addressing this situation facing the host country.

Some 100 km from a glacier that refuses to die – the Salkantay mountain in the department of Cuzco – there is a monument to passion fruit, which hundreds of local farmers depend on for a living, and which they will no longer be able to plant 20 years from now, according to projections.

The monument, which is in the main square in the town of Santa Teresa, near the famous Inca ruins of Machu Picchu, shows a woman picking the fruit and farmers carrying it on their backs, cutting the weeds, and hoeing.“It’s important to assess how the retreat of the glacier affects the local population, to know how they can adapt, because the loss of these snow-capped peaks is irreversible.” -- Fernando Chiock

That scene frozen in time reflects real life in Santa Teresa, where passion fruit (Passiflora ligularis) grows between 2,000 and 2,800 metres above sea level. But due to the rising temperatures, farmers will have to move up the slopes. And once they reach 3,000 metres above sea level, they won’t be able to plant passion fruit anymore.

“There is a strong impact in this area because the locals depend on the cultivation of passion fruit for their livelihoods,” environmental engineer Karim Quevedo, who has frequently visited the Santa Teresa microbasin as the head of the agro-meteorology office of Peru’s national weather service, Senamhi, told IPS.

That microbasin is one of the areas studied by Senamhi as part of a project of adaptation by local populations to the impact of glacier retreat. The glacier that is dying next to the town of Santa Teresa is Salkantay, which in the Quechua indigenous language means “wild mountain”.

Salkantay, at the heart of the Vilcabamba range, supplies water to local rivers. But in the last 40 years the glacier has lost nearly 64 percent of its surface area, equivalent to some 22 sq km, according to the National Water Authority (ANA).

“It’s important to assess how the retreat of the glacier affects the local population, to know how they can adapt, because the loss of these snow-capped peaks is irreversible,” the head of the climate change area in ANA, Fernando Chiock, told IPS.

Both Chiock and Quevedo said it was crucial to take into account the direct effects on the local population and to prioritise funding to mitigate the impacts, at the end of the COP20 – the 20th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – whose final phase was attended by leaders and senior officials from 195 countries.

Monument to passion fruit in the town of Santa Teresa – a crop that local farmers will no longer be able to grow 20 years from now because of the rise in temperatures in this mountainous area of Cuzco in Peru’s Andes. Credit: Courtesy of Karim Quevedo

COP20, which began Dec. 1, was scheduled to end Friday, but is likely to stretch to Saturday.

“What is yet to be seen is how to bring what is agreed at this climate summit to the ground in local areas. One of the challenges is to form connections between the big treaties,” Quevedo told IPS in Voices for the Climate, an event held near the military base in Lima, known as El Pentagonito, where COP20 is being held.

The outlook is alarming, experts say. Since the 1970s, the surface area of the 2,679 glaciers in Peru’s Andes mountains has shrunk over 40 percent, from more than 2,000 sq km to 1,300 sq km, said Chiock.

Some glaciers have already completely disappeared, such as Broggi, which formed part of the Cordillera Blanca, the tropical mountain range with the greatest density of glaciers in the world, which like the Vilcabamba range forms part of the Andes mountains.

Around 50 years ago, Broggi was retreating at a rate of two metres a year, but in the 1980s and 1990s the pace picked up to 20 metres a year.

In 2005, monitoring of the mountain stopped because the surface of the glacier, equivalent to signs of life in a human being, disappeared completely.

Today, glacial retreat in Peru ranges between nine and 20 metres a year, according to ANA. At the same time, the melt-off has given rise to nearly 1,000 new high-altitude lakes, Chiock said.

In the short-term, the appearance of new lakes could sound like good news for local populations. But according to the ANA expert, these new sources of water must be properly managed, to avoid generating false expectations in the communities and to manage the risks posed by the lakes, from ruptured dikes.

Chiock explained that safety works are currently in progress at 35 lakes that pose a risk.

There is a sense of uncertainty in rural areas. New lakes appearing, glaciers dying, hailstorms destroying the maize crop, unpredictable rainfall patterns, heavy rains that affect the potato crop, intense sunshine that rots fruit, insects that hover like bubbles over a boiling pot.

“The climate patterns have changed,” Quevedo said. “You can’t generalise about what is happening; each town or village faces its own problems. But what is undeniable is that the climate has changed.”

Some crops have been affected more than others. With the high temperatures, potatoes have to be planted at higher altitudes because they need cold nights to flourish. In some areas, coffee benefits from intense sunshine, but in others the plants suffer because they also need shade.

The influence of the climate on crops is 61 percent, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.

“These minor climate events are the ones that cause the greatest damage to the population, and they are the most invisible to the international community,” Maarten Van Aalst, the director of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre, who took part in the COP20, told IPS.

He said it shouldn’t take a hurricane sweeping away entire harvests, like in Haiti in January 2010, for governments to sit up and take notice.

But hopes are melting that they will do so before COP20 comes to an end here in Lima.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Children playing next to mine tailings in Morococha, a mining town in the central Peruvian department or region of Junín. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Aug 14 2014 (IPS)

The leading mining companies in Peru have brought a rash of lawsuits to fight an increase in the tax they pay to cover the costs of inspections and oversight of their potentially environmentally damaging activities.

The lawsuits have come one after another. As of Aug. 7, 14 mining companies had filed legal injunctions in different courts to fight the “Aporte por Regulación” (APR – Regulation Contribution) that they are charged, Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal told IPS.

The legal action targets different institutions in the executive branch, including the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Energy and Mines, and OEFA, Peru’s environmental oversight agency, which collects the APR.

Javier Velarde, the general manager of the Yanacocha mining company, told IPS that a total of 26 mining corporations, including his firm – the largest gold producer in Latin America – have brought legal action against the APR.

Yanacocha is a joint venture owned by the U.S.-based Newmont Mining Corporation and the Peruvian company Buenaventura.

The National Society of Mining, Oil and Energy, which represents the leading companies in the industry, also brought action against the APR, arguing that it is unconstitutional.

At the same time, four companies opened administrative proceedings with the Commission for the Elimination of Bureaucratic Barriers of the National Institute for Defence of Competition and Protection of Intellectual Property (INDECOPI).

The companies argue that the APR amounts to a “confiscation”.

One of the companies that turned to INDECOPI is the Peruvian firm Caudalosa, which in 2010 caused a major spill of toxic waste from a tailings dam, poisoning the rivers that provide water to the people of Huancavelica in central Peru, one of the poorest departments (regions) in the country.

The corporations that have brought court action include foreign firms like Cerro Verde, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc, and two subsidiaries of the Anglo-Swiss multinational Glencore Xstrata.

The Peruvian companies include Casapalca, which is facing several lawsuits for environmental, labour and safety violations, and Volcan, which has been fined on a number of occasions for causing environmental damage.

“Companies are getting bolder and bolder,” in a political context where efforts are being made to reduce “bureaucratic hurdles” to investment, Deputy Minister of Environmental Management José de Echave told IPS.

Delia Morales, left, and Sandra Rossi, officials at OEFA, Peru’s environmental oversight agency, reviewing the legal injunctions presented by mining companies. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

In July, Congress approved a package of measures introduced by the government of President Ollanta Humala to boost private sector investment by simplifying environmental requirements and streamlining bureaucratic procedures, due to the slowdown in the economy triggered by declining demand for raw materials.

Peru is the world’s fifth-largest producer of gold, second of silver, third of copper, zinc and tin, and fourth of lead. Mining accounts for nine percent of the country’s GDP, 60 percent of exports, 21 percent of private investment and 30 percent of income tax. It also provides mining companies with billions of dollars in profits.

“We are defending ourselves and we are sure that we will demonstrate that the measure has sound legal standing,” Minister Pulgar-Vidal told IPS, after confirming that the judiciary had already thrown out one of the lawsuits, filed by Antapaccay, a subsidiary of Glencore Xstrata.

The inspection tax was originally created in 2000 to finance the regulatory agencies. It was established at the time that the contribution would not exceed one percent of a company’s annual earnings after taxes, OEFA officials explained.

But in December, the government decreed that the contribution would be reduced to 0.15 percent of annual sales in 2014 and 2015, and to 0.13 percent in 2016.

The president of the OEFA board of directors, Hugo Gómez, said that if one percent was not a “confiscation” then a smaller contribution was even less so.

But Yanacocha’s Velarde argued that the decree that set the amount of the contribution was tacked onto the original law, which it distorted, because the amount “far exceeds the cost of activities of monitoring and oversight.”

At stake in this legal battle is not only money but also the Independence of environmental oversight activities.

Before OEFA took over the environmental monitoring of the mining industry in 2010, the task was in the hands of the Supervisory Body for Investment in Energy and Mining, which charged a “mining tariff”.

The tariff was calculated according to what the Supervisory Body specifically spent for each company inspected: days of work for the inspector, costs of lab testing of samples, and other expenses for services. The companies were billed directly for the cost of the inspections, OEFA director of supervision, Delia Morales, told IPS.

The tariff system was inherited by OEFA, but in December 2013, a percentage for the APR was set, which brought in more money.

From nearly 400,000 dollars, which the regulatory body took in with the mining tariff in 2013, the total went up to nine million dollars under the APR in the first half of this year alone.
OEFA estimates that it will bring in some 15 million dollars this year for oversight of the mining industry alone. Up to mid-2013, it had collected 17 million dollars for monitoring and inspection of three sectors: fossil fuels, mining and electricity.

IPS learned that in its court injunction against the APR, Xstrata Las Bambas, which also belongs to Glencore Xstrata, argued that with the new APR it ended up paying 36 times more than what it paid with the mining tariff.

OEFA official Sandra Rossi told IPS that technical calculations were made to set the amount of the APR because the way the mining tariff was determined “limited oversight.”

“It was an outdated system” that did not make it possible to carry out technical work and prevention efforts to inform communities of what impacts the extractive industry activities could have, Morales said.

The manager of Yanacocha said he did agree that mining companies should finance oversight activities. But he argued that they should be charged in relation to “the real costs” and should not have to finance other activities that are not directly related to monitoring and inspection.

But Iván Lanegra, a specialist in environmental policy questions and a former deputy minister of intercultural issues, told IPS that “environmental oversight is not limited to specific monitoring of a given company. It is broader than that. What was created was not an OEFA for each company, but an overall oversight and inspection structure.”

In his view, “It’s fair for the companies that receive significant benefits” to pay for the oversight, because they carry out activities that pose serious environmental risks. Lanegra said it would not be right for the expense to be financed with the taxes paid by all Peruvians.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A Jepelacio resident carries a blue jerrycan with 20 litres of “Jepe water” along one of the dusty but clean streets of this town in the Peruvian Amazon, a healthful routine many families carry out daily. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
JEPELACIO, Peru, Jul 2 2014 (IPS)

He may look like a rapper, but 33-year-old José Antonio Bardález is the mayor of Jepelacio, in the Peruvian Amazon. His ingenious innovations in the municipality include transforming waste management into a source of income and making spring water a source of drinking water.

“I’m a civil engineer, but people think I’m an environmental engineer,” the mayor told IPS, driving his pickup truck and stopping frequently to greet and joke with local people in the district, located in the department of San Martín, in the country’s northern Amazon region.The eye-catching blue jerrycans of “Jepe water” are delivered free to schools and to 100 “healthy families” who have kept their houses and surroundings clean and have processed their waste appropriately.

Bardález wears torn denim jeans and dark glasses, and styles his hair with gel. His black pickup, with polarised windows, is part of his image, and he has changed the letters of its brand name around to “Jepe”, the brand of the town’s sustainable products.

Jepelacio, one of the principal districts in Mayobomba province, has over 20,000 people distributed in 70 villages. Most local people make their living from agriculture, mainly coffee growing. The district has lush biodiversity, but also suffers from serious deforestation.

Between 2006 and 2011, deforested areas in San Martín fell to an average of 36 percent, but the level of deforestation in the Gera valley, one of the main basins in Jepelacio, is still 65 percent, according to the Asociación Amazónicos por la Amazonia (AMPA – Amazonians for the Amazon), an NGO.

Half the population lives in poverty, and 26 percent of children under five were chronically malnourished in 2009, according to official figures.

When Bardález became mayor in late 2010, he decided to turn the disadvantages into an opportunity for change. His monthly budget was 93,000 dollars, or about four dollars a head.

He began to mobilise local people to collect garbage to be turned into cheap agricultural fertiliser. Local families keep the streets clean and separate organic from inorganic materials, putting them in plastic buckets, sacks, bags or any other suitable containers.

Small containers of classified rubbish can be seen outside the houses that line the dusty unpaved streets of Jepelacio. These are emptied by municipal personnel and the garbage is processed with the aid of efficient microorganisms, found in yeast mixture, molasses, milk whey or cow rumen.

One litre of this fermentation culture can decompose 100 tonnes of organic material, said the mayor. In five days, the waste material can reach a temperature of 70 degrees Celsius, and the residue is passed through a sieve until the final product is “Jepe fertiliser.” The process lasts a little over two weeks.

Every month the municipal district decomposes 30 tonnes of organic waste, at a cost of 3,500 dollars, which is covered by sales of the fertiliser at 143 dollars a tonne.

In Bardález’s view it is a win-win formula, because building a sanitary infill to dump rubbish would cost nearly one million dollars, equivalent to the municipality’s budget for a whole year and preventing it from undertaking any other works.

“The best thing of all is that the microorganisms do not generate bad odours, there is zero pollution, and people are learning to process waste in order to make an income from fertiliser sales,” he said.

Mayor José Antonio Bardález at the treatment plant producing “Jepe fertiliser”, an initiative that is generating sustainable changes in his district in the Peruvian Amazon. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

To replicate the project, the municipality is organising a fertiliser mini-plant contest among 10 of its outlying villages. “This means I have gained 10 clean townships,” the mayor said.

In the upper years of the district’s secondary schools, students are being taught how to make the fertiliser as well as the basics of how to run a family business, in order to help improve the management of their family farms.

“This fertiliser has a value. It’s no good giving it away for free, if it costs people nothing they don’t value it,” Bardález said, explaining that some government programmes give sacks of fertiliser to farmers, and instead of using them they sell them on at half price in order to get cash in hand.

“It’s good that they’re making that fertiliser to sell to people more cheaply,” said Martina Díaz Vásquez, a 39-year-old mother of seven. She told IPS that she had come to Jepelacio from Cajamarca at the age of 11.

More than 80 percent of the district’s residents come from other departments, mainly in the Andean region, like Cajamarca and Piura. The challenge is to involve them in a project in an area other than their birthplace, AMPA director Karina Pinasco told IPS.

“It is highly innovative for an authority to transform a problem (like waste) into an opportunity. I have not seen anything like it elsewhere in San Martín,” Pinasco said.

Bardález’s ingenuity has been applied to other municipal projects related to the district’s natural resources.

The mayor saw the potential for making the clear water of a natural spring fit for human consumption, and so solve the problem of diarrhoeal diseases in the district. Now the water is filtered and processed with fine silver rods, which have a powerful bactericidal effect.

For the past two years, residents have been able to buy 20-litre containers of drinking water for less than 50 cents. “It’s good to drink, we don’t have to boil our water any more. We save time and money,” Margarita Delbado, who has three children, told IPS.

At present the eye-catching blue jerrycans of “Jepe water” are delivered free to schools and to 100 “healthy families” who have kept their houses and surroundings clean and have processed their waste appropriately.

In April 2013 the municipality of Jepelacio was recognised by the San Martín departmental government as a key ally in the implementation of a special programme for improving child nutrition.

In December, the Health ministry recognised it as one of the municipalities that has contributed to overcoming social problems that affect people’s health.

In addition to waste management and water treatment, a natural swimming pool has been created under a waterfall on the Rumi Yacu stream. A pool of water was simply dammed up and surrounded with rocks, creating a recreational space for children and their families.

“Innovation can happen in small stages. The next step is to provide more ‘Jepe water’ for the whole district, to improve waste treatment and to keep making progress,” said Bardález, who went into politics because in his technical job he was unable to realise the changes he wanted.

Early in his term of office he asked for a loan to buy heavy machinery. Criticism rained down on him: Why purchase an excavator, a tractor, a bulldozer or a dumpster? people asked.

But these voices faded away when people saw roads being built and stones being moved. Bardález is convinced that it is well worth taking risks. As indeed he has.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Technicians from Peru’s national water authority, ANA, inspecting a polluted stretch of river in the department of Huancavelica in south-central Peru. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Jun 10 2014 (IPS)

Peru urgently needs a national plan for the management of water over the next two decades, one that will take into account the effects of climate change and the social and environmental conflicts triggered by problems over water.

In his office surrounded by papers, maps and graphics, Humberto Cruz, an engineer with the national water authority, ANA, told IPS that the country desperately needs a plan to improve the unequal distribution of water and its inefficient use in this South American country.

Cruz and other technicians in ANA spent over a year drawing up a draft plan, which President Ollanta Humala said he would present in March. However, it has not yet been passed by Congress, despite the president’s emphasis of the importance of recognising that access to clean water is a basic right.

The situation involving water in Peru is not encouraging, although some efforts have been made, the ANA technicians told IPS.

“The information we have on the watersheds in the highlands and the Amazon rainforest is very generic….What I have found is data with a very high margin of error,” Cruz said.

The expert said that due to the margin of error, the estimates were up to 20 percent too high or too low, which means there is a distorted assessment of the water situation in the country – and as a result, decisions on access to water may be misguided.

There is no reliable information on the amount of water in 119 of the 159 river basins in the Andes highlands and Amazon jungle that supply household needs as well as different activities in the country, such as mining, the oil and gas industry and agriculture.

The 119 watersheds for which there is no reliable information represent 75 percent of the country’s river basins and over 95 percent of the volume of water available to the Peruvian population. And they are mainly in the areas where social conflicts have broken out over water.

“Due to the lack of reliable information, the decisions taken by the state with regard to productive activities in the interior of the country can affect communities that depend heavily on water, especially in the upper reaches of the watersheds,” environmental engineer Pavel Aquino, who saw these cases in his work in ANA and the Ministry of Energy and Mines, told IPS.

Aquino said that problems over access to water fuelled rural migration, which in turn drives up demand for water in cities along the coast, where it is especially scarce.

“There is unequal distribution of water in the national territory,” Ismael Muñoz, an economist at the Pontifical Catholic University, told IPS. “The result is that although 70 percent of the population lives along the Pacific coast, they have only 1.8 percent of the water, because of the way nature has distributed it,” he wrote in an academic paper.

Muñoz also noted that “because the water is mainly – up to 80 percent – used in agriculture, the state has prioritised coastal areas when it comes to investment in water supplies, accentuating the regional inequality with respect to the highlands and the jungle.”

The other problem, according to Aquino, is that “a high margin of error in the information on water supply in the river basins” means that if the estimate of the amount of water is too high, less money is invested in infrastructure works for water supply, such as reservoirs, dams, and water transfer or irrigation projects.

Conversely, if the estimate of the water supply is too low, more funds than are strictly necessary could be invested in such infrastructure, the engineer said.

There is only reliable data available on the main rivers along the coast. In the case of rivers in the Amazon jungle and the Andes, information has not been steadily available over the last 10 years, nor is there broad coverage, the ANA technicians said.

There is a shortage of hydrological stations to monitor the rivers. Peru has a total of 1,832 meteorological and hydrological stations, of which only 864 were operating as of March, according to the national meteorological and hydrological service, SENAMHI. And of these, just 142 measure water flow.

SENAMHI is in charge of keeping hydrological statistics and supplying them to the institutions involved, like ANA. But insufficient budget funds have made it impossible to install the necessary stations.

For that reason, ANA and the Environment Ministry are working to set up new stations in pilot basins.

According to SENAMHI technicians consulted by IPS, in the case of basins that do not have a single monitoring station, data is extrapolated from the information available on the nearest basins.

The ANA experts, meanwhile, told IPS that at least 10 years worth of solid data is needed in order for the results of the monitoring to be reliable.

The preliminary draft of the national plan on the management of water includes an assessment of the quality and quantity of water in the country’s river basins, based on this patchy data.

ANA’s press office informed IPS that the draft law is being reevaluated due to changes in the leadership of the water authority in April. The new head of the agency, Juan Carlos Sevilla, has not publicly spoken out on the plan that was already ready when he was appointed.

Josefa Rojas, the Environment Ministry’s head of climate change adaptation projects, told IPS that the preliminary evaluation of water supplies that was carried out was a step forward and that “we can’t wait until we have all of the information. It’s time to accumulate verified data in order to project what is going to happen with the water that we need in order to live.”

The Ministry has put a priority on the gathering of detailed information on 30 high-mountain basins, due to the accelerated melting of the glaciers which feed the rivers.

Although the plan is still pending, ANA managed to get the Ministry of Economy and Finance to transfer some four million dollars, of the 12.5 million dollars requested to carry out the studies needed to assess the quantity of water in 12 basins where social conflicts over water are raging.

ANA is also helping to organise the creation of water councils, to draw up new hydrological studies and improve watershed management in coordination with regional and local authorities, local residents and companies. But the challenges that lie ahead are daunting.

Alberto Pizango (standing) speaking at an event organised by the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), which he heads. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, May 16 2014 (IPS)

The trial of 52 indigenous people that just got underway for a 2009 massacre near the city of Bagua in northwest Peru will test the judicial system’s independence and ability to impart justice.

The oral phase of the trial opened Wednesday May 14 in a court in Bagua in the northern region of Amazonas. The next hearing will be held May 26.

The defendants are indigenous leaders and residents involved one way or another in the Jun. 5, 2009 clash between security forces and protesters that left 34 people dead – 24 police officers and 10 civilians – and around 200 injured.

Indigenous people in that Amazon region had blocked a highway near Bagua for two months, demanding the repeal of decrees passed by the government of Alan García (2006-2011) that opened up native territories in the rainforest to oil, mining and logging companies, violating rights guaranteed in the constitution.

Several of the decrees were repealed.

But the bloody incident made headlines around the world.

The 52 people on trial – a 53rd died last year – are facing anywhere from six years to life in prison, one of the defence lawyers, Juan José Quispe of the non-governmental Legal Defence Institute (IDL), told IPS.

The public prosecutor’s office has not yet filed charges against 12 police officers also implicated in the violence, Quispe said.

The bodies of some of the indigenous people killed in Bagua. Credit: Courtesy Fedepaz

But it is demanding a life sentence for seven of the 52 civilians, including indigenous leader Alberto Pizango, president of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), which organised the 2009 protest and roadblock.

“We follow the people’s mandate,” Pizango told IPS a few days before the start of the oral phase of the trial.

After the massacre, Pizango went into exile in Nicaragua. But he returned in May 2010. The other defendants facing a possible life sentence are Santiago Manuim, Héctor Requejo, Ronald Requejo, Danny López, Feliciano Cahuasa and Joel Shimpukat.

According to Quispe, there have been irregularities from the very start. For example, he said, the justice system did not accept the defence’s request to interrogate former president García and several of his ministers.

“The court told us it was not summoning them because they were not eyewitnesses,” the lawyer told IPS. “But this case has political implications.”

One key aspect that must be investigated, said Quispe, is whether the cabinet of ministers knew that, a day before the massacre, the indigenous leaders had sent a letter to the police station in Bagua informing the police that they would peacefully withdraw from the Devil’s Curve, where they had set up the roadblock.

The indigenous leaders say an agreement had already been reached with the police chief that, if the order to dismantle the roadblock came from Lima, the protesters would be warned ahead of time, to allow them to peacefully pull out.

But at 5:00 AM the morning of Jun. 5, 600 heavily armed police swarmed in to disperse the protesters on the Devil’s Curve, a stretch of the road that links the main rainforest cities in northern Peru with the coast.

When they heard that the police had opened fire at the roadblock and that protesters were being killed, the Awajún native demonstrators occupying a nearby oil pumping station – Estación 6 – decided to take reprisals against a group of police posted there.

At the first hearing of the trial, the court did not provide interpreters for the Awajún speakers.

“They needed to take down the full names, place of birth, number of children, incomes of the defendants,” Quispe told IPS. In the end, one of the indigenous leaders, Merino Trigoso, “had to act as interpreter,” he added.

But the failure to supply an interpreter meant the reading of the charges by the public prosecutor had to be suspended, because the 14 defence attorneys – provided by the IDL, the Catholic Vicariate of Jaén, and AIDESEP – demanded that the written document be translated into the Awajún language.

According to Quispe, the president of the court, Gonzalo Zabarburu, made another mistake when he sentenced one of the defendants, Feliciano Cahuasa, to house arrest in a city different from the one already determined by another judge.

“That arbitrary decision affects the defendant, who had already done all the paperwork and taken the steps needed to comply with the order of the other judge, and now has to find a new home, to serve his house arrest,” said Quispe.

Cahuasa, accused in connection with the death of police Major Felipe Bazán during the incident in Bagua, spent nearly five years in prison without a sentence, despite the fact that under Peruvian law the limit is three years. The defence finally managed to get him transferred to house arrest.

The court also made a risky decision by ordering that one of the defendants, Trigoso, be transferred to a police station during a recess in the trial rather than leaving him in one of the rooms in the court building until the hearings began again.

Trigoso was escorted by several police through a large crowd of indigenous family members and supporters anxiously waiting outside the building.

“Something regrettable could have happened because of an absurd order by the judges,” said Quispe. But there were no incidents.

One of the first lessons that Bagua left indigenous communities was that they needed to move from “the big protest to the big proposal, and from the big proposal to the big action, which consists of the full exercise of the right of self-determination of [indigenous] people,” Pizango told IPS.

“The people will never again block highways, because now they know the trap the Peruvian state sets up. If you come out to defend the voice of the people, what you receive is aggression, bullets and a whole system of misinformation,” he added.

Claudia Alvarado, with her parents and her nail polish, who along with Peru’s Plan Esperanza have helped her to bravely face the treatment for leukaemia. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Apr 10 2014 (IPS)

Her tiny fingers and toes have been painted with different shades of nail polish, the bright colours contrasting sharply with the bleak road she has been on for half her young life.

Since she was three years old, Claudia, who has not yet turned seven, has been fighting leukaemia, with the help of a public health cancer treatment programme in Peru: Plan Esperanza or Plan Hope."When you are diagnosed with breast cancer, you immediately think your life is over. But if you find out there is a programme that can help you, you carry on and fight." -- Susana Wong

As in the rest of the Americas, cancer is the second cause of death here, following cardiovascular disease. In this country of 30.5 million people, the annual death toll from cancer is 107 per 100,000 population, and each year 45,000 new cases are diagnosed, according to the Health Ministry.

The ministry estimates that 157 people per 100,000 population suffer from cancer in this South American country.

To bring down these statistics and the high costs of cancer treatment, the Peruvian government launched Plan Esperanza in November 2012. The programme is aimed at improving comprehensive treatment for cancer patients and providing guaranteed oncology services, especially for the poor.

Claudia Alvarado was diagnosed with leukaemia in June 2010. Since then, she has undergone constant lab tests and often painful treatments.

Attending school and having friends have been replaced by long, exhausting trips between hospitals in Lima, the capital, and La Libertad, the northern department where she used to live.

Her hometown is Santa Rosa, a community of rice farmers. Her mother, Ivon Sánchez, told IPS that the one-hour bus ride to the public hospital in the city of Chepén took them through “three ghost towns.”

From Chepén, Claudia was referred to a public hospital in Chiclayo, the capital of another northern department, Lambayeque. And from there she was sent to the National Institute of Neoplastic Disease (INEN) in Lima, another public health institution.

At the institute, she underwent an aggressive treatment programme, which was fully covered by the Intangible Solidarity Fund for Health (FISSAL), which finances care in cases of high-cost health problems like cancer for those affiliated with the national Seguro Integral de Salud (SIS – Comprehensive Health Insurance).

The SIS also provides free healthcare for people in the fourth or fifth income quintiles, such as Claudia’s family.

In January 2012, Claudia suffered a relapse. Her mother remembers that she broke down in grief and anger because she knew the term “relapse” might be a euphemism for a journey with no return.

The only option was a bone marrow transplant. But the tests showed that Claudia’s brother, 12-year-old Renzo, was not compatible as a donor. “We thought it was all over,” Claudia’s mother said.

But in November 2012, the government launched Plan Esperanza, and that year the SIS and FISSAL signed international agreements with two hospitals in the United States to perform bone marrow transplants on children who had not responded well to chemotherapy or who had suffered relapses.

Claudia received the transplant on Sep. 6, 2013 in the Miami Children’s Hospital in the U.S.

The operation took eight hours, followed by 28 days of fever as high as 40 degrees C.

She pulled through and flew back to Lima with her mother in December. Since then she has continued to fight her illness, in the house the family has rented in a poor district in the south of Lima, where IPS visited her.

Her family moved to the capital in order to be together, and her father, Fortunato Alvarado, left his job as a farm labourer and now works as a taxi driver.

As Claudia waits for the 200 critical post-operation days to pass, she has to rest and avoid active play, while staying away from other children to keep from getting sick. Her skinny body weighs just 18 kilos.

She is disciplined about taking her medicine, and eats lemon drops after swallowing the most bitter-tasting pills.

Up to late 2013, Plan Esperanza, whose services are completely free of charge, had benefited 57,531 people, with a total public spending of over 6.4 million dollars. The Plan also includes nationwide campaigns for cancer prevention and diagnosis.

So far 600,000 people have participated in mass screenings for early cancer detection, and three million people nationwide have received counselling and advice, oncologist Diego Venegas, the coordinator of Plan Esperanza, told IPS.

“The important thing is to provide patients with complete treatment, in order to save their lives,” he said.

Of those diagnosed, 75 percent had advanced stage cancer, so the plan began to include home treatments.

Venegas explained that treatment under the Plan is initially reserved for the nearly 13 million affiliates of the SIS.

The most common forms of cancer covered by FISSAL funds are cancer of the cervix, breast, colon, stomach, prostate, leukaemia and lymphoma.

Forms of cancer that are not included in the Plan are still treated free of charge for SIS affiliates.

Treatment in each case costs an average of 260,000 dollars.

In the case of Claudia, the costs of the transplant in Miami, the plane tickets for the patient and her mother, and the six-month stay in the U.S. amounted to more than 300,000 dollars. Added to that are the costs of the chemotherapy and medicines she received in Peru before and after the transplant.

Susana Wong, president of the Club de la Mama (Breast Club) at the National Institute of Neoplastic Diseases, has seen hundreds of breast cancer patients who have benefited from Plan Esperanza.

“People now have a chance to live, because treatment is very expensive. When you are diagnosed with breast cancer, you immediately think your life is over. But if you find out there is a programme that can help you, you carry on and fight,” Wong, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006, told IPS.

Dr. Miguel Garavito, the head of FISSAL, said the state funding is compensated by the large number of patients – mainly from poor families – and the success of the transplants.

“Peru is one of the few countries in the world that have this kind of free coverage for cancer treatment,” he told IPS.

A more precise register of cancer cases is being drawn up, because currently statistics are only available from the three largest cities: Lima, Arequipa and Trujillo.

Venegas said more staff is needed, as well as training in advances made in cancer treatment, and greater decentralisation so that treatment reaches patients in more remote regions.

A multisectoral commission is being set up to fight cancer on all fronts, including better access to clean water and sanitation.

The link between poor sanitation and cancer is exemplified by the central department of Huánuco, where 70 percent of the people lack potable piped water. Deaths from gastric cancer total 150 per 100,000 population, significantly higher than the national average.

This type of cancer, according to Venegas, is associated with drinking water quality.

As a public health problem, cancer merits a strong response from the state – at least as strong as Claudia has proven herself to be, after spending over half of her life fighting leukaemia, and cheering herself up with her favourite colours of nail polish.

Excerpt:

Alfonso Ramos (left) shows a newspaper reporting the death of his sister Celia in Piura due to forced sterilisation. Micaela Flores (centre) and Sabina Huillca are sterilisation victims from Cusco. All three have been waiting for justice for 17 years. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Feb 3 2014 (IPS)

Shelving the case of the forced sterilisations of more than 2,000 women in Peru during the Alberto Fujimori regime was a surprise move by the prosecutor in charge. What happened? An IPS investigation found that legal avenues to pursue justice have not been exhausted.

On Jan. 24, prosecutor Marco Guzmán announced an end to the investigation of forced sterilisations carried out in Peru between 1996 and 2000. He said he would not pursue criminal charges against Fujimori (1990-2000), three former health ministers and other officials accused of being responsible for the crime."The doors were padlocked. They carried me off on a stretcher, tied my feet and cut me.” -- Micaela Flores

“They took us in trucks. We got in quite innocently and contentedly. But then we heard screams and I ran… The doors were padlocked. They carried me off on a stretcher, tied my feet and cut me,” Micaela Flores, then a mother of seven from Anta province in the southern region of Cusco, told IPS.

On that occasion about 30 women went to the health centre, duped by a campaign offering general check-ups, she said.

Guzmán has decided to prosecute only health personnel in the northern department of Cajamarca. The sterilisations were part of the Voluntary Surgical Contraception Programme (AQV – Anticoncepción Quirúrgica Voluntaria), created by Fujimori and his government to bring about a drastic reduction in the birth rate in the poorest parts of the country, especially among rural Quechua-speaking women.

Guzmán, as head of the second supraprovincial prosecutor’s office, took over the case in July 2013 after the investigation was reopened in November 2012.

There are currently 142 volumes of evidence in this longstanding case. In May 2009 the prosecution shelved the probe into the former ministers and other officials for the first time, in spite of repeated urging for its completion from the inter-American human rights system.

In 2003, the Peruvian state signed a friendly settlement agreement before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in the case of Mamérita Mestanza, who died in 1998 as a result of a poorly performed tubal ligation procedure done without her consent.

The government promised to pay an indemnity to her family and investigate and bring to trial the government officials who devised and implemented the forced sterilisation campaign.

After years of delays and foot-dragging, human rights organisations had their hopes raised when Guzmán showed interest in investigating Fujimori’s command responsibility for the generalised, systematic practice of sterilisations.

In late November the prosecutor said there were “indications of the alleged participation of Alberto Fujimori in the crimes,” and expanded the investigation into the cases of Mestanza and others.

Rossy Salazar, a lawyer with the women’s rights organisation DEMUS who is representing the victims, told IPS that this statement by the prosecutor appears on page 60277 of the file as part of a report on the case addressed to Víctor Cubas, the prosecutor who coordinates all human rights cases.

In an interview with IPS, Guzmán acknowledged having said “there were indications that Fujimori had participated.” At that point he had interviewed over 500 victims, mainly in the northwestern department of Piura and in Cusco, he said, although in his latest 131-page decision he states he only interviewed around one hundred.

Guzmán was also in possession of evidence that the programme had targets, incentives, and even sanctions for personnel who did not fulfill sterilisation quotas, according to documents obtained by government agencies that investigated the facts of the case.

DEMUS invoked these official documents in an appeal against the prosecutor’s decision to shelve the case, which it presented Jan. 28 before the Office of the Public Prosecutor.

The appeal refers to four letters from the former health minister, Marino Costa, to Fujimori in 1997. In one document the minister reports to the president on the increased numbers of AQV operations performed and says “by the end of 1997 our total production should be fairly close to the target.”

IPS asked Guzmán: “After determining in November that there were indications of Fujimori’s participation, why did you absolve him from responsibility so soon afterwards?”

“In order to examine him I had to interrogate him. I went to interrogate Fujimori and he answered some questions, but not others. For some he invoked the right to silence. Then his defence lawyer gave me a number of documents. This was important because Fujimori had never been questioned about this case before,” he said.

Fujimori’s interrogation on Jan. 15 in the Barbadillo prison, where he is serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses, lasted less than three hours. One week later, Guzmán closed the case against the ex-president.

“Was your interview with Fujimori decisive for determining whether he participated in the crimes?” persisted IPS.

“It was taken into consideration, but it was not decisive. The decisive thing is the legal package I have to apply… There is no legal support for imputing guilt,” Guzmán said.

The prosecutor argued that Peruvian law does not provide for the crime of forced sterilisation, and therefore there is no legal support. In his decision he said the victims’ complaints would not be classed as crimes against humanity, which refer to generalised or systematic attacks on a civilian population and have no statute of limitation.

In international terms, the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, does recognise the crime of forced sterilisation. The statute entered into force in Peru in July 2002, after the sterilisations were carried out and denunciations were initiated, but “the international community has regarded forced sterilisation as a crime since the early 1990s,” Salazar said.

In its appeal, DEMUS argues that the prosecutor’s decision “should not halt the criminal investigation.” It is “only the first step in the search for truth” and does not end the evidence collection phase. DEMUS asks for a higher level prosecutor to bring charges so that the case can continue. Another means of re-opening the case would be for another victim to bring a new complaint.

DEMUS also plans to bring the case to the attention of the IACHR in March.

On Jan. 31, an article by Guzmán was published in the newspaper El Comercio, saying that “the only way Fujimori could be held responsible is by demonstrating command responsibility, and according to the Constitutional Court the requirements for this are not fulfilled, because there is no rigid vertical structure involved, and doctors cannot be obliged to operate against their will.”

“They are isolated cases,” he told IPS.

According to the Health ministry, 346,219 sterilisations were performed on females and 24,535 on males between 1993 and 2000, 55.2 percent of them in the period 1996-1997 alone. During that period an average of 262 tubal ligations were carried out a day.

More than 2,000 persons were documented to have been deceived or threatened into undergoing sterilisation. Women in Cusco were among the worst affected, because on average nearly five operations a day were performed there, according to Health ministry figures and the testimony of victims.

Sabina Hillca, from Huayapacha in the Cusco region, told IPS that she set out for the health centre in Anta when she was due to give birth to her daughter, Soledad, but the birth happened on the way.

The nurses told her she should stay to be “cleansed” and avoid infection. The next day she woke up crying, with sharp pain, an incision close to her navel, and tied to the bed. Afterwards she fled to her village, cleaned the wound with soap and water, removed the stitches as best as she could, and went to her mother for herbal treatments.

“Now I have cancer because dry blood collected in my ovaries,” she said, showing the dark scar on her abdomen.

Peasant women working on the family plot of land near the village of Padre Rumi in the Andes highlands department of Huancavelica in Peru. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Jan 9 2014 (IPS)

A new institution set up in Peru will strengthen small-scale organic farming, providing support to some 43,000 exporters of ecological products and another 350,000 who supply the domestic market with environmentally-friendly products.

The National Council for Organic Products (CONAPO) was formed to support the weakest link in the food chain, small-scale agriculture, the very year that the United Nations dedicated to family farming worldwide because of its social and productive importance.

“There is no public spending that puts the priority on small-scale farmers,” Moisés Quispe, a Peruvian farmer, told IPS. “The budget for agriculture is reduced year by year, even though over 70 percent of the food that Peruvians consume comes from small farms.”

According to the last agricultural census, carried out in 2012, 72 percent of farms in this Andean country are smaller than six hectares, and they mainly supply the domestic market.

Quispe is executive director of the National Association of Ecological Producers of Peru (ANPE), which groups 21,000 organic farmers, 60 percent of whom are smallholders.

For the members of ANPE, the new council represents an opportunity to reach agreements with the state that were never possible before, said Quispe, who has been farming for four decades in the southern department or region of Cuzco.

Agriculture represents 25 percent of all jobs in Peru, around 7.5 percent of GDP and nine percent of exports, according to official figures.

The technical secretary of CONAPO, José Muro, told IPS that Jan. 24 is the date set for the first meeting of its members, who include representatives of key sectors of the executive branch, the regional organic production councils and civil society.

According to the law for the promotion of organic and ecological production, in effect since 2008, regional and local governments are to put a priority on providing support for organic agriculture in their plans, programmes and projects.

The law also requires Peru’s agriculture development bank, Agrobanco, to grant loans to certified farmers during the period of conversion to organic production. In addition, the government must provide incentives to promote the production and commercialisation of organic products.

“Organic production is extremely important for Peru,” Agriculture Minister Milton von Hesse said at the installation of CONAPO on Dec. 22.

Von Hesse stressed that the council recognised “the key role that small farmers play in rural development” – one of the arguments cited by the United Nations for naming 2014 the International Year of Family Farming.

Quispe said full enforcement of the 2008 law is urgently needed, in order to expand agricultural frontiers for small farmers, who face challenges from all sides: lack of access to credit; water scarcity; low prices due to dependence on middlemen; and a lack of state investment in infrastructure.

Muro said the Agriculture Ministry has made progress in support policies, thanks to which exports of organic products, principally cocoa, bananas and coffee, have surpassed 350 million dollars a year.

Some 43,000 small farmers are registered with Peru’s agricultural health service, SENASA. But that number only includes farmers who are certified to export their products.

The head of the Organic Agriculture Network (RAE), Alejandra Farfán, told IPS that there is another large segment of farmers who supply the domestic market, estimated at around 350,000. “We don’t have official figures, but the challenge is to see how to bring them visibility through the Council, so they can also benefit,” she said.

Farfán described the creation of CONAPO as a “milestone,” after years of waiting.

She is a representative of civil society on the council, and also presides over the Peruvian Agroecological Consortium.

“We know that small farmers are steeped in poverty,” she told IPS. “So the hope is that in 2014 they will be included on the agenda of policies for productive infrastructure.”

She said it was necessary to incorporate them in existing government agriculture programmes, and to bolster organic production, with an emphasis on the poorest rural families.

Because of the lack of support, campesinos or peasant farmers have been abandoning their small plots of land to find seasonal or temporary work, in order to feed and clothe their families, Quispe said.

Rural migration to mining areas is one of the most visible and painful consequences of the lack of attention to small farmers, he said.

But even those who are exclusively dedicated to producing and exporting organic products year-round face a major challenge: commercialisation.

On average, 30 percent of the organic coffee produced in the country is sold as regular beans due to the lack of markets, said Miguel Paz, sales manager for the Central Association of Farmers from Pichanaki, in the Amazon jungle department of Junín in central Peru.

Farmers in the valleys of Junín produce 25 percent of the coffee consumed in the country, Paz told IPS.

In his view, it is time to look for new markets and turn to other countries, like Japan or Australia. Today, exports of Peru’s organic coffee mainly go to Germany and the United States.

“The government should make headway into new markets for organic products by means of different strategies, ranging from printing a good pamphlet in several languages to encouraging and teaching producers to participate in business rounds, to learn who’s who,” said Paz, who has taken part in several international negotiations.

In February he will travel to Germany, Belgium and France along with representatives of a dozen cooperatives from different parts of the country.

The task of opening up new markets falls to the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism, which is also represented in CONAPO, along with the Ministry of Production and the National Institute for the Defence of Competition and Intellectual Property.

Farfán said the Environment Ministry should also be included, because climate change has a huge impact on organic production.

The new council will now draw up a National Plan for Organic Production, internal rules for the plan, and regulations for the regional councils. Based on that, the government is to earmark the necessary budget funds to carry out the plans.

“The idea is to guarantee that the population has healthy food. Clean agriculture won’t only benefit the people of Peru, but humanity as a whole,” Quispe said with conviction.

Critics say Peru's new law on cybercrime is vaguely worded and threatens access to information. Credit: Public domain

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Nov 27 2013 (IPS)

A new law against cybercrime that restricts the use of data and freedom of information in Peru clashes with earlier legislation, on transparency, which represented a major stride forward in citizen rights.

The advances made in the law on transparency and access to public information have been undermined by the hastily passed law on computer crimes, which restricts and penalises the use of online databases, according to experts consulted by IPS.

The new law was put into effect to crack down on cybercrimes, including sexual harassment of minors. But civil society organisations complain that elements attacking the right to information were incorporated without debate or public input.

The Defensoría del Pueblo or ombudsman’s office says the transparency law, which entered into force in 2002, has a few shortcomings, but is important because of the creation and use of government databases – which would be hindered, however, by the law on cybercrime.

The transparency law was passed with the aim of making government more transparent, to comply with the 1993 constitution, which guaranteed the right of people to request and obtain public information, and established the right of habeas data, under which any government official or civil servant who denies that right can be sued.

Since then, the Defensoría del Pueblo has received 6,714 complaints about requests for public information that did not receive a satisfactory response from the authorities, according to a report to be published in the first week of December, to which IPS had access.

Based on those complaints, the assistant ombudsman on constitutional affairs, Fernando Castañeda, told IPS that his office identified and interviewed 122 public employees responsible for turning over the information, to find out why the requests had not been met.

The main conclusion reached by his office was that an independent authority was needed to monitor and oversee responses to information requests, because civil servants are limited by the orders of their superiors, and in some cases have been punished when they provide information to members of the public.

And things do not get any better when citizens take legal action to complain about the lack of response to their requests for information, especially in rural areas.

Between January 2007 and March 2013, 841 habeas data actions were handled in the justice system, where cases can take up to a year in the first instance court, another year in the second instance court and two more in the Constitutional Court, Castañeda pointed out.

In other words, a four-year journey to try to obtain public information that has been denied.

The official said that the most significant aspect of the law was the creation of tools to facilitate citizens’ access to information, with websites and open access to databases, under the concept of open data.

However, that access will be directly restricted by the new law on computer crimes, which was given fast-track treatment in Congress and signed into law a few weeks later, on Oct. 22, by President Ollanta Humala.

Protests by experts and civil society groups forced Justice Minister Daniel Figallo to state on Nov. 13 that he would study proposed reforms to the law. “We will revise some articles of the law,” he said.

But Figallo defended the legislation, saying the aim was to fight data interference or interception rather than the dissemination of information. His ministry argues that Peru is thus accepting the guidelines of the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime, the first international treaty of its kind, which since 2001 has provided global guidelines for the adoption of laws against computer crimes.

The president of the congressional justice commission, Juan Carlos Eguren, also said he was open to suggestions.

The law creates a three- to six-year sentence for people found guilty of capturing computer information from a public institution, to find out, for example, what is spent on social programmes and to complement that with the introduction of new data or alteration to analyse the information, lawyer Roberto Pereira of the Press and Society Institute (IPYS) told IPS.

That is based on article three of the law, which penalises those who use computer technologies to “introduce, delete, deteriorate, alter or suppress data, or render data inaccessible.”

The law also establishes a three- to five-year sentence for creating a database on an identified or identifiable subject to provide information on any aspect of his or her personal, family, financial or labour life, whether or not it causes harm.

A common practice by journalists is to create databases on companies that are subcontractors for the state, in order to monitor public spending. But under the new law, doing that would automatically make them “cyber criminals,” Pereira explained.

The IPYS stated in a communiqué that the law poses “a serious threat to the freedom of journalistic information, and to research and investigation in general.” The majority of the local media, regardless of their ideological bent, agree with that criticism.

The law on cybercrime could “end up criminalising legal behaviour in cyberspace,” said Pereira.

It also creates “an unacceptable framework of discretionality in its application,” because of the broad, ambiguous criteria it contains, and ends up undermining other basic rights, he said.

There has been a great deal of speculation in Peru on what lay behind the passage of the controversial law.

Pereira cited three explanations: the legislators’ ignorance about cyberspace; the interest on the part of some public figures in criminalising digital freedom and thus blocking investigations of corruption; “and the genuine interest of sectors of the government in improving penal legislation on cybercrime.”

The non-governmental organisation Hiperderecho, which defends digital rights, noted in a communiqué that Congress passed the law “in less than five hours, with their backs turned to the public.”

The organisation criticised the fact that on Sept. 12, Congress suddenly began to debate a bill that had just been introduced by the government, without incorporating in the discussion a long-debated justice commission ruling on another cybercrime bill.

The executive branch presented its bill after a telephone conversation by Defence Minister Pedro Cateriano was made public, and after progress was made towards a common regional code against cybercrime during a technical level meeting of experts of the Ibero-American Conference of Justice Ministers (COMJIB), held in Lima in June.

Miguel Morachimo, a representative of Hiperderecho, admitted to IPS that it was reasonable for the government to fight cybercrime. But he said that when the bill was debated in Congress, “it was completely overhauled.”

In his view, the government was pressured by COMJIB and the banking association – which is worried about card cloning – and ended up acting in haste as a result.

The Defensoría del Pueblo’s office on constitutional affairs has not yet taken a stance on the details of the new law, said Castañeda. But it did acknowledge that it runs counter to some objectives of the transparency law.

Hiperderecho has sent suggestions to Congress for improving the law on cybercrime. Meanwhile, what one law defends, the other blocks.

One of the mothers from Ayacucho at the “El Ojo que Llora” Memorial, demanding compensation for her lost loved one. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Sep 2 2013 (IPS)

Venisia Ávalos, a 65-year-old indigenous woman from Peru’s highlands region of Ayacucho, looks for her son’s name among a labyrinth formed by thousands of small grey stones.

Each one of the fist-sized stones carries the name of a victim of the country’s armed conflict between government forces and left-wing guerrillas.

“Here’s my son, here he is!” she cries, bursting into tears. Her son disappeared 30 years ago, and she never found his remains – not even a garment he was wearing that day, not a single trace. Just this small stone, today.

Ávalos came to Lima from Ayacucho in Peru’s south-central highlands to take part in the activities for the commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the presentation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) report.

The CVR investigated the human rights crimes committed during the government’s 1980-2000 counterinsurgency war against the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) guerrillas.

The CVR estimated that 69,000 civilians – mainly Quechua-speaking indigenous people – were killed by the guerrillas or the state security forces. The Commission held the Maoist Shining Path responsible for just over half of the killings.

Ávalos is not alone here. Dozens of mothers and other relatives of victims from the regions hardest hit by the violence reached the capital on Wednesday Aug 28 to continue to press for two chief demands: comprehensive – in other words, not just monetary – reparations and a thorough search for the remains of the victims of forced disappearance.

These two aspects are enormous debts that the state has so far failed to address in a satisfactory manner, according to a resolution recently published by the Defensoría del Pueblo, or ombudsman’s office.

As of March, the government had paid individual reparations to just 37 percent of the 78,000 people registered to receive compensation, while only 33 percent of the collective or community reparations had been paid, according to official figures.

In the search for the victims of forced disappearance, the work has moved even more slowly. As of April, 2,418 bodies had been recovered from clandestine burial sites, 1,371 of which had been identified and returned to the families.

“Given that not much over 2,000 bodies have been recovered in 10 years, at this pace it would take around 80 years in the best of cases to recover the 16,000 victims that the state estimates are in the burial sites – which is an underestimate,” states the book “Los muertos de Ayacucho” (Ayacucho’s Dead), by the non-governmental Human Rights Commission (COMISEDH).

Ayacucho, one of the poorest and most remote, rural and heavily indigenous parts of the country, accounted for a full 47 percent of the 69,000 victims.

One of the places where the families searching for missing loved ones gathered Wednesday was the “El Ojo que Llora” (The Crying Eye) Memorial, where Ávalos found the stone bearing the name of her son, Rigoberto Huamaní Ávalos.

The memorial has a labyrinth of thousands of smooth stones, each bearing the name, age and year of death of a victim. In the middle of the labyrinth is a sculpture, with a small stone in the form of an eye at the centre, which continuously trickles water, reflecting the grief of the families who want to find out what happened to their loved ones.

“Classmates of my son are now teachers, which he could have been too,” Ávalos told IPS. “They have families, and my son could have had one too.”

Rigoberto was her firstborn. In 1983, the security forces hauled him away from his school along with his teacher and several classmates, says Ávalos, who is furious at what she sees as the pittance she was given in compensation: 10,000 soles (3,600 dollars).

“That’s what my son is worth?” asks the grieving mother, who is a member of the National Association of Families of the Kidnapped, Detained and Disappeared of Peru (ANFASEP), founded 30 years ago in Ayacucho.

The CVR was created in response to demands of the women grouped in ANFASEP.

The families are calling for the government to pay higher individual reparations, of 39,000 soles (13,900 dollars) per victim, instead of 10,000.

Isabel Coral, who was executive secretary of the government’s High-Level Multisectoral Commission (CMAN), told IPS that the higher amount was based on an agreement reached directly with Peruvian President Ollanta Humala, who took office in July 2011.

“I explained to Humala that the violence had been so atrocious for these people, who had been deprived of all possible strategies for getting back on their feet and moving ahead on their own, that integral, effective reparations were urgently needed,” she said.

Coral said she had agreed to draft the chapter on compensation in Humala’s government programme in exchange for his compliance with higher payments to the survivors if he was elected.

But today “there is no political will,” she complained, saying the government had not stuck to its promises and had instead been paying out small amounts of money “in trickles”.

In the massacre of Lucanamarca, in Ayacucho, Ervenciana Huancahuari lost her mother, her husband, and a sister. Some of her other sisters lost their husbands too.

She is 64 years old, and has only received 5,000 soles. In accordance with the law on reparations, she will receive the other half of the money when she turns 65.

The money received by Huancahuari has already been distributed among her five children. But the 1,000 soles (357 dollars) that each received is long gone. And she didn’t keep any for herself.

“My (dead) mother was a cow? Was she a bull, for us to be paid 5,000 soles?” she asks IPS.

José Sayán, president of CONAVIP, the national umbrella of organisations of families of victims of the political violence, tells IPS that the 14 organisations he represents are demanding the modification of the decree that set the amount of reparations at 10,000 soles per victim, which was approved by Alan García in his second term (2006-2011).

Coral said that in December 2011 she presented a proposal, approved by 11 cabinet ministries, for the government to modify the decree, in order to officially increase the amount of reparations from 10,000 to 39,000 soles. But the ministry of the economy and finance blocked the initiative, she added.

Sayán and other activists met with lawmakers on Aug. 28 to get them to press for the modification of the decree.

Rocío Paz, a representative of the National Human Rights Coordinator, told IPS that the Humala administration had made progress on paper but not in terms of implementation.

Acting ombudsman Eduardo Vega said there had been a “setback” in the area of justice and reparations.

The president of COMISEDH, Pablo Rojas, was also discouraged. But he said the participation of the families in the 10th anniversary of the CVR report helped underscore the urgent need for public policies addressing their plight.

In response, the executive secretary of CMAN, Adolfo Chávarri, told the government news agency Andina on Aug. 29 that more progress had been made with this administration than with the last one.

He also noted that the support provided was not only economic but included scholarships as well as psychological assistance for the families when the remains of their loved ones are returned to them.

But Dora  Astuñaupa, who lost her father during the conflict, in the central jungle region of Satipo, complained that she hadn’t received any kind of support yet. Her eyes shining with sadness and anger, she said a promise was no longer enough.

Yolanda Chaucayaqui shows the scale model of what her town, Yanaquihua, will look like. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
QUEQUEÑA, Peru , Aug 15 2013 (IPS)

Women and young people are central players in dozens of small businesses and environmental protection plans that are changing the lives of poor rural families in the Andes highlands of southern Peru.

The initiatives are financed by the government programme Sierra Sur and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

In her colourful traditional indigenous outfit, Yolanda Chaucayaqui shows a grey scale model that reflects what things were like until recently in her town, Yanaquihua, where deforestation and informal sector mining reigned.

Then she smiles as she shows another, brightly-coloured, scale model, which reflects the future she dreams of: avocado orchards kept green with a drip irrigation system, a water tank – and no mining.

“We want our town to be free of all of these negative things, and we are working to forge the way to a different kind of future,” she tells IPS.

Chaucayaqui rode seven hours in a cart from Yanaquihua to Quequeña, a smaller town in the region of Arequipa where hundreds of campesinos or peasant farmers took part in the last Sierra Sur/IFAD projects fair, on Aug. 3.

The fair was attended by IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze from Nigeria, who told IPS that he was pleased with the advances made, and especially with the strong presence of women.

Peru has been working with the specialised United Nations agency for 20 years, fomenting the creation of small enterprises that improve the lives of poor rural families.

Some 18,000 families have benefited from the second phase of the Sierra Sur programme in the regions of Apurímac, Arequipa, Cuzco, Puno, Moquegua and Tacna.

Of that total, 48 percent of the participants were women committed to business and natural resource management plans, who have managed to join the financial system by opening savings accounts, José Vilcherrez, the head of project evaluation and monitoring for Sierra Sur II, tells IPS.

In these southern regions, 550 business plans are being carried out, each one involving around 20 men and women. On average, 80 percent of each business is financed by the government programme, with loans from IFAD, while the remaining 20 percent comes from the community.“These women win a new space in their families, respect from their husbands and their kids. They start to be listened to.” -- José Vilcherrez

Each project is chosen through a transparent selection process in fairs like the one held in Quequeña, by the local fund allotment committee, made up of residents and authorities from the participating villages and towns.

The businesses are diverse, and women participate in almost all of the activities, from livestock-raising and pasture improvement to bakeries, dairy products, textiles and craft-making.

“These women win a new space in their families, respect from their husbands and their kids. They start to be listened to,” says Vilcherrez, who is evaluating the impact of Sierra Sur on the female population, to determine how support from the programme can be improved.

Women have asked for more information, in order to gain access to new areas of business activity, and to learn about their rights, the expert explained.

Nelly Roxana Cheña presides over a group of local craftswomen in the region of Puno. Thanks to her involvement in Sierra Sur, she discovered her talent for knitting and began to earn money to pay for schooling for her children.

“We have never appreciated our talents,” she tells IPS. “But thanks to the training, we rise at four in the morning, we get our housework done, and we work hard, to pull ahead. We want to continue to receive training,” she enthuses, surrounded by her fellow knitters and balls of yarn and wool caps.

Cheña says the women in her town are actively involved in protecting the environment. There are 127 natural resource management plans in the southern regions, where families are carrying out activities to preserve and administer water sources and soil. The best projects are rewarded with funds from the programme.

“We want to contribute to the recovery of our villages,” says Rosemary Quispe, from Cuzco region. “We want to live in nice, neat houses while preserving the natural resources for ourselves and the next generations,” adds the 19-year-old, one of the many young people taking part in the Sierra Sur projects.

Since late 2012, IFAD has been encouraging youth participation in rural areas of Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Peru, providing financial and technical support through the Young Rural Entrepreneurs programme.

In Peru, 344 young people are involved in 28 rural enterprises, half of them in the south of the country.

“Young people have few opportunities to stay in their village, which fuels poverty and migration,” Wilder Mamani, the head of Procasur, an NGO that works in partnership with IFAD, tells IPS.

Sinthia Yucra, 21, decided to stay in her village, and is generating income for her family by raising chickens.

She lives in the village of Lucre, in Cuzco region, more than 3,000 metres above sea level, where she and nine other young people now have 1,000 hens and another 1,000 chicks. Eight of the 10 people involved in the project are women.

“This has strengthened my family and brought us closer together,” Yucra tells IPS. “I never thought our parents would support us. This is exciting. I have a lot of plans for my village.”

The group, who clarified that they don’t believe in welfare-style assistance, took out a loan to launch the small business and build the sheds. They are now being trained by Procasur technicians and plan to hire an economist, to prepare for selling their products to supermarkets.

IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze, with Peru’s agriculture minister, Milton von Hesse, to his right, meeting with local campesinas in the highlands town of Quequeña. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
QUEQUEÑA, Peru , Aug 7 2013 (IPS)

Some 40 multicoloured tents were set up to showcase the fruits of community-based rural development projects in the main square of this village in southern Peru during a visit by IFAD president Kanayo Nwanze.

The event organised in this highlands community in the southern Peruvian department of Arequipa showed the fruits of 20 years of collaboration between the specialised United Nations agency and this South American country.

Dishes made with the protein-rich quinoa; mushrooms that grow 4,000 metres above sea level; chubby guinea pigs; brightly coloured garments; homegrown honey; different kinds of cheese; and scale models of towns, rivers and valleys were presented while a popular local band played.

On his first trip to Peru, the Nigerian expert who heads IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) visited Quequeña on Aug. 3, where products made by community projects in Arequipa and the neighbouring southern departments of Moquegua, Cuzco and Puno were displayed.

“It’s not strange that Peru has been the laboratory where we decided to launch these initiatives,” Josefina Stubbs, director of IFAD’s Latin America and Caribbean Division, told IPS.

Stubbs, who accompanied Nwanze, said the Local Resource Allocation Committees (LRACs) developed in southern Peru have drawn attention from other countries, like Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia.

Peruvian technical experts involved in the project will soon travel to China to share their experiences, which are focused on meeting needs in communities based on the transparent community management of resources, said Stubbs.

The funds IFAD provides the Peruvian government are transferred to the communities’ own bank accounts, explained the expert from the Dominican Republic.

The project in southern Peru is the oldest of the three that the government is carrying out in rural areas with loans and technical advice from IFAD.

Here in Arequipa, the communities design and implement their own productive initiatives, which help generate income to cover their basic needs. Crop improvement, guinea pig and livestock raising, weaving and gastronomic undertakings using local products are some of the projects.

“IFAD supports the government’s efforts to enable people to produce enough to have access to buy something to feed themselves,” Nwanze told IPS.

On Sunday, the head of IFAD visited the highland villages of Sibayo and Callalli, which are also in Arequipa, before returning to Lima on Monday and flying from there to Colombia, where similar projects are being carried out.

Every three years, IFAD distributes some 300 to 400 million dollars in loans for agricultural and rural development in Latin America, where it supports a range of projects in nearly every country in the region.

Nwanze added that the next step for Peru would be to strengthen the decentralisation of the management of the projects so the “regional authorities take responsibility for the programme and the financing.” He mentioned the progress IFAD has made along those lines in Argentina and Brazil.

Stubbs said the idea was for more villages and towns to adopt this kind of initiative. With that aim, IFAD authorities met Saturday morning with the governor of Arequipa, Juan Manuel Guillén. A working group will now be created to launch this new stage, she said.

For his part, Peru’s minister of agriculture, Milton von Hesse, praised IFAD for seeing campesinos as “the most qualified to decide what kind of technical assistance they need” and for fomenting connections between markets.

The important thing is that the products made by local campesinos make it outside their communities, and even outside the country, he said.

“It has been 20 years of continuous learning; we have also made mistakes,” he told IPS. “But what is important is that successful experiences have been incorporated in our public policies, and we will continue doing that with all of the lessons that are learned.”

In middle-income countries like Peru, IFAD continues to grant loans, but it especially provides technical assistance because, as Stubbs said, “macroeconomic stability will not by itself bring development.

“For the first time, I have the privilege to see that all of the governments, of whatever political stripe, have really understood that closing the inequality gap is in everyone’s interest,” she said.

Juan Moreno, programme manager for IFAD’s Latin America and Caribbean Division, informed IPS that the agency only has an allotment of 25 million dollars for working with Peru through 2015.

“We don’t have one billion dollars, like the World Bank,” Stubbs said. “Latin America doesn’t need IFAD’s money – it needs IFAD’s knowledge.”

To illustrate, she mentioned the case of Argentina, which two years ago launched a 150 million dollar project, of which IFAD only supplied seven million dollars. Most of the funds came from the government itself.

In the midst of regional economic growth based in large part on the extractive industries, Stubbs said governments and civil society should exercise more oversight of the activities of mining and other industries, to preserve water sources and land, which poor rural populations depend on for subsistence.

She said every country should undertake its own kind of development, depending on its ecosystem.

Nwanze, meanwhile, said governments should invest in infrastructure like roads to generate new opportunities for local development. He added that in rural areas, “when particularly women have access to economic empowerment, the community starts to change.”

He said it is difficult to say, in a few words, how to fight poverty. But he added that access to basic services is key to working with the most disadvantaged communities from a human rights perspective.

“For me, human rights are basically in everything, it is not only a question of people having freedom of speech,” the Nigerian expert said before heading to his next destination.

Long before he became president of the World Bank, South Korean physician Jim Yong Kim was on the dusty streets of the working-class Lima neighbourhood of Carabayllo, helping cure local residents of tuberculosis.

His work with the poor and the new approach he is seeking in the World Bank filled experts and officials in South America with enthusiasm during his recent visit to three countries in the region.

Jim Yong Kim at a press conference in Chile’s presidential palace. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

Kim, president of the World Bank since July 2012, met Saturday with Bolivian President Evo Morales after visiting Peru and Chile. During his Jun. 29-Jul. 7 tour, he also met with the presidents of these two countries, Ollanta Humala and Sebastián Piñera, respectively, putting an emphasis on the changes that the international lender has undergone.

“There was a time in the history of the World Bank, 20 years ago, when the approach looked more like prescriptions,” Kim told IPS after a Jul. 4 press conference he gave in Santiago.

Not giving blanket prescriptions to all countries is one of the biggest changes, he said, “because it doesn’t make sense to force a government into debt over things it doesn’t want,” he had said the day before during a meeting with students and academics at Peru’s Pontifical Catholic University in Lima.

“We come to countries that ask us to work on different kinds of problems,” he added.

Kim said in Santiago that “in the early-1990s when I had just graduated from college, one of the first trips that I made to Washington DC was to be part of a group called 50 Years Is Enough. I was part of a demonstration to try to close the World Bank…because we thought that the prescriptions were too prescriptive: one-size-fits- all, just do these things and everything else will fall into place.”

Kim is right to emphasise the shift seen in recent years in the World Bank, former Peruvian deputy economy minister Carlos Casas commented to IPS. “They are listening more to governments and acting according to their demands,” he said, adding that he himself saw this when he was a government official in 2010.

“His visit could be seen as a confirmation of that new approach,” said Casas, who is head of the economy department in the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima.

The World Bank has no other choice today, because countries like Peru have strong macroeconomic figures and no longer depend as they did before on aid from multilateral lenders, he said.

“Technical assistance in designing reforms of the state is perhaps the most important thing the Bank can provide at this time, because at the level of economic resources its contribution has shrunk in the region,” he added.

In 2009 and 2010, the World Bank Group, which includes the International Finance Corporation, contributed 17 billion dollars a year to the region. The amount has since shrunk to nine or 10 billion dollars a year, according to the Bank’s figures.

According to the vice president of research at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Pepi Patrón, Kim’s background is important when it comes to moving the World Bank towards a kind of assistance that sees the different faces of poverty and its multidimensional nature.

She told IPS that this means a coordinated, multifaceted look at different areas: health, education, adaptation to climate change, public policies with a gender focus, and interculturalism, among other aspects.

“This new president is a doctor, not a banking and finance specialist, who has experience that helps him understand poverty, not only in monetary terms,” said Patrón, who is also a member of the Council of Eminent Persons who advise World Bank chief economist Kaushik Basu.

If only the monetary dimension is taken into account – in other words, the 284 soles (just over 100 dollars) a month that according to official figures put people in Peru over the poverty line – the poverty rate in Peru would be reduced to zero with just two percent of the public budget, Federico Arnillas, vice president of the Mesa de Concertación para la Lucha contra la Pobreza – a public-private partnership against poverty – told IPS.

When Kim lived in Peru, he worked as a doctor in the poor neighbourhood of Carabayllo, supporting the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Catholic priest who wrote the first book on liberation theology, the progressive current in the Catholic Church in Latin America that attempted to respond to the question of how to be a Christian in a poor, oppressed region.

“This testimony is interesting because the challenge we are facing is how to put the option for the poor at the centre of policy-making,” Arnillas said.

Kim took advantage of his visit to Lima to meet with Gutiérrez and two dozen other representatives of civil society.

According to Patrón, who took part in the meeting, Kim said it was possible to avoid the “natural resource curse” and generate development, citing his home country, South Korea, as an example, which has progressed on the basis of technology, without mineral wealth.

Kim said there was no dichotomy between sound macroeconomic fundamentals and social development.

In Santiago, he highlighted experiences in the region that could serve as lessons, like Chile’s copper price stabilisation mechanism.

In La Paz, Kim presented a virtual map of Bolivia showing projects financed by international donors. He also launched a web site for Bolivians to offer suggestions and ideas to public institutions that implement projects or administer public services.

In addition, the World Bank signed a memorandum of understanding with the Bolivian government for the sustainable production of quinoa – a protein-rich seed from the Andean highlands – and other traditional agricultural products. The World Bank has projects worth more than 500 million dollars in Bolivia, South America’s poorest country.

* With additional reporting by Marianela Jarroud in Santiago.

When the state respects human rights, it exercises its sovereignty, says James Anaya. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
DARWIN, Australia, Jun 3 2013 (IPS)

“There is a belief that consent is about saying yes or no, about who wins,” observed James Anaya, the United Nations special rapporteur on indigenous rights. But consultation with indigenous peoples is a matter of “creating open processes where they can voice their opinions and influence decisions, and where there is the necessary will to seek consensus.”

Anaya, an attorney, professor and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples, formed part of the diversity of faces, languages, cultures and experiences that came together at the World Indigenous Network (WIN) Conference held May 26-29 in Darwin, Australia.

In his 30-minute presentation, Anaya stressed the importance of the implementation of measures by national governments to ensure respect for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007.

During his brief stay in Darwin, Anaya made time to speak with Tierramérica about the controversial implementation of prior consultation with indigenous peoples and the challenge of designing models of development that can enable countries to achieve prosperity while respecting the rights of native communities.

In his opinion, Peru is the Latin American country that has made the most regulatory progress in the implementation of prior consultation with indigenous peoples on projects or activities that affect their territory or culture, as established in Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO).

But Peru still needs to demonstrate its capacity for respecting indigenous rights in practice. “Learning comes from experience, and in Peru they are working on building an adequate process,” he commented.

Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil and Colombia are discussing these mechanisms, although they have yet to establish rules or protocols for conducting consultations. In Anaya’s view, countries do not necessarily have to adopt laws before beginning the consultation process. The main requirement is the “will” to respect indigenous rights, he said.

Q: There is a perception that some governments in Latin America operate with a double standard: they sign international instruments to protect indigenous rights, but don’t implement measures to respect them. Do you agree with this view?

A: I believe the fact that almost all the Latin American countries have voted in favour of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and ratified Convention 169 is an advance. These are important steps.

Now it is time to implement these processes, but this is very complex. States need to make efforts to confront this challenge. There are a number of issues that need to be considered here: first, state officials need to be educated to understand that these rules are not only a question of international relations, but that they need to be applied internally, because they are directed at the indigenous peoples who live in their territories.

The second thing needed is the political will, and sometimes this is the problem, because there are various political and economic forces that need to be dealt with. Third is the establishment of mechanisms for collaboration with indigenous peoples in order to implement the rules.

Q: One of the areas where there is a great deal of resistance on the part of national authorities is the implementation of prior consultation. What is your view of the criteria being used by governments to establish whether an indigenous community has the right to be consulted?

A: That varies a lot between countries, it depends on the state.

Q: In Peru, for example.

A: In Peru they are just beginning to apply their law and its regulations. I know there is a whole debate on the registry (of indigenous communities), but we still have to see how they are going to apply the law. I hope they will do it in accordance with international standards.

On the other hand, it should be recognised that consultation is based on basic rights that in some way apply to everyone. In the case of indigenous peoples, because of their characteristics, there need to be special and differentiated procedures. This is not a matter of abstract considerations, it has to be addressed on the ground.

Q: Speaking of concrete cases, in Peru there is a consensus on consulting indigenous peoples in the Amazon, but this is not the case when it comes to communities of peasant farmers that are located precisely in the areas where extractive activities are carried out.

A: The rights of indigenous peoples must always be protected. It is necessary to move forward with development for the benefit of everyone, but protecting indigenous rights. And achieving both things is possible; they are not incompatible.

Q: Perhaps that is the problem: governments feel that respect for indigenous rights has to be left aside in order to promote private investment in their lands…

A: The problem is that the models that have existed up until now have shown these (indigenous rights and economic development) to be incompatible. Perhaps it is a question of creating new models based on human rights, models that respect the rights of indigenous peoples. It’s not a question of putting a brake on development.

Q: That seems like something so easy to understand, but there is a lot of resistance.

A: There is a great deal of polarisation between the different parties, there needs to be more dialogue.

Q: Do you think the state would lose its sovereignty if an indigenous community has the last word on whether or not an investment project can be undertaken on their territory?

A: The state does not lose its sovereignty if it respects human rights or indigenous rights. It has to comply with these rules to respect those rights; the state cannot do whatever it wants.

I would say that the respect of these rights is a way of ensuring that this sovereignty is exercised. When the state respects human rights, it exercises its sovereignty, because it is acting in favour of its citizens and peoples.

Q: Nevertheless, there has been a loss of trust in governments. What can be done to ensure legitimate consultations and to open up dialogue?

A: The mistrust and prejudice need to be overcome. It is a matter of creating open processes where indigenous peoples can voice their opinions and influence decisions, and where there is the necessary will to seek consensus.

The problem is that sometimes there is a belief that consent is about saying yes or no, about who wins. Consent is linked to consultation; the purpose of consultation is to reach consent, to reach consensus. It is not a question of one side imposing its opinion on the other.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

The delegates selected to speak at the closing session in Darwin stressed the commitment to strengthening the global indigenous network, to get their collective voice heard around the world. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
DARWIN, Australia, May 30 2013 (IPS)

Some good-byes can actually mean the start of a long road working together. That was how it felt at the end of the World Indigenous Network (WIN) conference in this northern Australian city.

The big challenge is to consolidate “the indigenous network so its collective voice can be heard” and to get governments to implement its proposals, said one of the 10 speakers chosen by the delegations from more than 50 countries to sum up what was discussed in four days of sessions at the May 26-29 conference.

The gathering, supported by the Australian government, enabled face-to-face exchanges among indigenous people from around the world, who shared best practices in conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity and in the sustainable use of protected natural areas in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Canada and Australia.

The delegates to the conference of the “international network of indigenous and local community land and sea managers” stressed the importance of the world recognising that for ages, indigenous people have protected the land and sea thanks to their ancestral knowledge, and that their culture and way of life depends on their territories.

After these few days in Darwin, “I have the courage to continue my work with my community,” an enthusiastic Aei Satu Bouba, coordinator of the Cameroon Indigenous Women Forum, told IPS.

The new developments that came out of the WIN conference included the announcement of the creation of the Pacific Indigenous Network (PIN).

Rosiana Lagi, a doctoral student at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, told IPS that through PIN, the Pacific island nations would seek “the support of our governments.”

The University of the South Pacific is supported by 12 island countries: Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

The importance of global efforts was highlighted on Wednesday, the last day of the conference. The conservation work of ICCA Consortium was presented as an example of such efforts.

Since 2010, the global association of indigenous organisations, local communities and supporting NGOs from around the world has promoted the national and international recognition of and support for ICCAs: Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Community Conserved Territories and Areas.

Taghi Farvar, president of the ICCA Consortium, told IPS that they work closely with the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which requires that countries include indigenous people and local communities in the conservation of fauna and flora.

Challenges and problems were also discussed alongside the successful practices presented at the four-day WIN conference. The representatives who spoke at the closing session stressed that not only the participation of indigenous and community leaders needed to be guaranteed, but local and grassroots involvement as well.

The majority agreed that more dialogue should have been allowed in the presentations.

In the full auditorium during the closing session, perhaps the most sensitive issue was brought up by the representatives of Latin America, whose spokespersons pointed out that the question of defending indigenous territories was glaringly absent during the conference.

They also complained about the shortage of interpreters.

However, the participants highlighted the efforts of the delegates to understand each other, despite the language barriers.

The Latin American delegation, mainly made up of people from Ecuador and Brazil, as well as activists from Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, said they went “one step further” by demanding that governments recognise indigenous rights over their ancestral territories.

“It’s not just about indigenous people taking care of parks and protected natural areas, but about a question of legitimacy, of states recognising that we have been the owners of the territory for a very long time,” Paulina Ormaza, an indigenous woman who formed part of the group from Ecuador, told IPS.

Juan Chávez, a member of the Shipibo indigenous community from Peru, remarked to IPS that Latin America’s experience in that area would have helped to “expand the vision” of participants from other regions, especially in a context of promoting private investment on indigenous land.

How can conservation of the environment and of indigenous territories be advanced in the midst of the interests of the states? the Latin American delegates asked, pointing out that this thorny issue is actually faced by countries in every region.

Melissa George, a member of the Wulgurukaba aboriginal tribe of Australia and co-chair of the WIN National Advisory Group, told IPS that in her country, the extractive industries “are always the winners.”

Perhaps the only difference between indigenous people in Australia and Latin America is that Australia’s aborigines are not displaced from their territories by these investments, she said.

The defence of indigenous land is related to the implementation of the requirement that local and native communities be previously consulted about any investment project affecting their territory or culture, as stipulated by International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples.

The tension and activism surrounding the question of prior consultation in Latin America today was not discussed in Darwin. Peru was the first country in the region to pass a specific law to guarantee that right, in line with Convention 169, against a backdrop of conflicts and protests over mining, oil and infrastructure investment.

Ecuador recognises the right to prior consultation in its constitution, but the specific rules and regulations for implementation have not yet been approved, as demanded by the country’s indigenous organisations, their representatives told IPS.

The approval of the regulations for prior consultation is also under debate in Brazil. Cristina Cambiaghi, an adviser to the government’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), told IPS that “this process serves as an opportunity for dialogue to achieve recognition of the rights of the 305 indigenous peoples in Brazil.”

During her participation in the conference, Cambiaghi also pointed to pilot programmes for the application of a policy of indigenous territorial and environmental management.

“The aim is to guarantee and promote the protection of their territories, respecting their autonomy in line with the country’s laws,” she said.

But to face such challenges, it is necessary to strengthen the global indigenous network, participants in the conference agreed.

To that end, Eileen de Ravin, manager of the Equator Initiative, told IPS that they were waiting for a response from the different countries, under the premise that “governments are in power to serve, not just to say.”

The Equator Initiative is a partnership that brings together the United Nations, governments, civil society, businesses, and grassroots organisations to build the capacity and raise the profile of local efforts to reduce poverty through the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

Juan Chávez of Peru and Koku Agbee Koto of Togo discuss their communities’ efforts to preserve forests, at the WIN conference in Darwin. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
DARWIN, Australia, May 29 2013 (IPS)

This city in northern Australia brought them together to share their experiences this week. They are indigenous Shipiba people fighting indiscriminate logging in Peru’s Amazon jungle region and delegates from the Ando-Kpomey community in Togo, which created and protects a 100-hectare forest.

“Without the forest we are nothing – it’s like losing life itself,” said Juan Chávez, a Shipibo Indian from the eastern Peruvian region of Ucayali, in a conversation with IPS during a break in his participation in the World Indigenous Network (WIN) conference that ended Wednesday in Darwin, Australia.

Chávez and others have been working for 15 years to keep six Shipibo communities from being seduced by illegal logging for a quick profit, and to help restore the indigenous group’s tradition of forest preservation.

To that end, they designed communal development plans, based on reviving traditional knowledge on management of land, water and forest resources, with the support of the Association for Integral Research and Development (AIDER), a Peruvian NGO.

The 1,200 indigenous representatives from some 50 countries focused their attention Tuesday, the third day of the four-day WIN conference, on successful cases of reviving ancestral and traditional cultures and knowledge, under the premise that “sustainable development not only depends on modernity; it’s also important to look to our roots,” as Chávez put it.

Some of the cases, like the Shipibo experience presented by Chávez, have won prizes from the Equator Initiative, which brings together the United Nations, governments, civil society, businesses and grassroots organisations to acknowledge and foment local sustainable development solutions.

“We are not poor devils; we also come up with solutions,” Ecuadorean indigenous leader Manuel Tacuis said in his presentation at one of the WIN sessions. The delegation from Ecuador was the largest from Latin America, along with Brazil’s.

As the representatives of indigenous and local communities from around the world exchanged experiences, it became more and more clear that the everyday lives and the challenges faced by people in rural Africa were not so different from those of native people in the Amazon rainforest.

The community of Ando-Kpomey in the West African nation of Togo began over a decade ago to restore the forest on their land, which had been destroyed by the seasonal burning of grasslands by hunters.

Koku Agbee Koto, an avid 35-year-old representative of the community, told IPS that the destructive practice had finally been significantly reduced.

So far, more than 100 hectares have been reforested, benefiting around 2,500 villagers, he said.

But the Togolese and Peruvian representatives concurred that traditional knowledge was no longer sufficient to sustainably mange land and adapt to climate change.

“We have to appreciate both cultures: indigenous and scientific,” said Chávez, after admitting that there was still resistance among his people to recognising what science could contribute.

The indigenous and community delegates taking part in the WIN conference demonstrated their openness.

Koto, from Togo, constantly took notes on the different experiences shared by indigenous and local people from around the world, used his limited English to ask for more information, telephone numbers and email addresses, spoke “un poquito de español” with Chávez, while chatting easily in French when meeting with delegates from other French-speaking countries in Africa.

Koto was taken by the success of an ecotourism project in the Anja Miray community in
Madagascar, which he felt could be replicated in his village.

The Anja Reserve community-managed forest and ecotourism site, another Equator Prize-winner, generates income for the elderly, children and vulnerable segments of the community, who are assisted with basic services and scholarships, while restoring the forest and curbing desertification.

Víctor Samuel Rahaovalahy, one of the leaders of the reserve run by the Anja Miray association, told IPS that they were still looking for ways to generate more income and more effective methods to adapt to climate change.

“We need more capacity-building, not only for my community, but for surrounding ones as well,” Rahaovalahy said. “We all have to come together to fight desertification in a coordinated manner,” he added, saying the local communities and governments must work together more closely in order to get results.

Not all of the participants were clear on how to tackle negative developments in their territories or how to confront big challenges like the effects of climate change.

For over a decade, the Sami people in northern Sweden have faced unusually severe winters due to climate change. But they have not yet come together to confront the sudden changes in the climate in an organised way, despite their traditional knowledge, biologist Berit Inga, a Sami descendant, told IPS.

Inga said the Sami were more concerned about dealing with more immediate challenges, such as the activities of the mining industry.

But everyone at the conference agreed that it was not possible to come up with solutions in an isolated fashion.

The manager of the Equator Initiative, Eileen de Ravin, told IPS that successful local experiences should be taken up by governments in the design of public policies that recognise and value indigenous and community knowledge.

In the last decade, 152 of the roughly 2,500 nominated indigenous and local community projects won the Equator Initiative prize. The representatives of the winning organisations met at the conference Wednesday to discuss WIN’s future plans.

Indigenous activists Ángel Durán from Bolivia and Bernardette Angus from Australia share their experiences in conservation at the WIN conference in Darwin. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
DARWIN, Australia , May 28 2013 (IPS)

“Are you a park ranger?” IPS asked. “No, I am one of the owners of the territory,” Ángel Durán responded in a firm voice. The Bolivian indigenous leader is in this northern Australian city along with 1,200 other native delegates from over 50 countries for the World Indigenous Network (WIN) conference.

Durán, who was born in and lives on a collectively-owned native territory, is attending the conference in representation of eight native groups from Bolivia’s Amazon region that total more than 20,000 people.

Although he is not on the programme as an official speaker and can only communicate in Spanish, this is not stopping him from sharing his knowledge and experiences with other indigenous leaders walking from one auditorium to another at WIN headquarters in Darwin, the capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory.

The meeting, supported by the Australian government, runs May 26-29, with presentations of successful projects for the preservation of ecosystems and biodiversity, the sustainable use of protected natural areas, and the development and food security of indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America and other countries like Canada or Australia itself.

On Monday, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples James Anaya stressed the importance of governments recognising international instruments that protect the basic rights of native people.

Melissa George from Australia told IPS that the conference was a major contribution by the Australian government and a form of recognition that indigenous people were the first to use their knowledge to protect the territory.

George, who belongs to the Wulgurukaba aboriginal tribe, added however that there was still much to be done.

The activist has dedicated 20 years – nearly half her life – to developing projects for administering natural resources in aboriginal territories. She is now co-chair of the WIN National Advisory Group.

The international network of indigenous and local community land and sea managers recently became an official part of the United Nations after the government of Australia handed over its management to the Equator Initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The initiative brings together the United Nations, governments, civil society, businesses and grassroots organisations to advance local sustainable development solutions and support the work of indigenous people around the world by means of capacity-building.

Eileen de Ravin, manager of the Equator Initiative, told IPS that this concerted effort opens up enormous possibilities for people from a South American country like Bolivia to learn directly what is happening in Canada or Australia.

“Our goal is to influence the governments to get them to respect and listen to these valuable experiences and solutions,” de Ravin said.

The Equator Initiative awards a prize every two years, recognising 25 outstanding local sustainable development projects. In the past decade, 152 indigenous community organisations, of 2,500 that have been nominated, have won the prize.

One of the presentations at the WIN conference was on the conservation of protected areas by indigenous and local communities in Canada, Australia, Sweden and Brazil by means of indigenous forest rangers, park rangers or environmental agents.

“The name doesn’t matter, the objective is the same: to make use of traditional knowledge to protect nature and culture from the different threats,” Brazilian activist Osvaldo Barassi with the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) told IPS.

ACT’s annual indigenous park ranger training programme provides conservation and land monitoring capacity-building to native communities, including the use of tools like GPS tracking technology.

Since 2005, the Brazilian organisation has trained 190 people from 30 native ethnic groups in forest management and conservation, which has enabled the communities to develop projects to monitor illegal logging in order to protect the local flora and fauna.

But in spite of the contribution made by the indigenous forest rangers trained by ACT, they receive no payment from the government for their work.

That is in contrast to Australia’s indigenous land stewardship programme, which has created Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) in more than 50 locales on traditional aboriginal lands over the last 15 years, covering a total of 43 million hectares.

Bernardette Angus, a park ranger from Western Australia, told IPS that it is indigenous people who have been caring for the plants and animals and protecting the land and the sea since a long time ago, and who are teaching young people to continue doing so when the current generation is gone.

In Bolivia, the federation of indigenous peoples from north of La Paz, led by Durán, are seeking to go one step further in their conservation efforts, and have asked the government of Evo Morales – the country’s first-ever native president – to legally recognise the “guardians” of community-owned indigenous land to enable them to levy penalties on those who invade their land and make illegal use of their natural resources.

Durán, who belongs to the Leko de Apolo indigenous community, said no government plan aimed at protecting biodiversity could leave out the communities. “Not even scientific knowledge can compare to the ancestral know-how of the local people. We take care (of nature) because it is our way of life,” he told IPS.

But while Barassi recognised the importance of indigenous knowledge, he warned that it was not always a guarantee in and of itself of the successful management of natural resources. For that, capacity-building is key, the ACT activist stated.

Participants at the conference agreed on the need to join forces to maximise results in the face of threats from illegal activities, large-scale private investment projects, or the effects of climate change.

“I never imagined that the forests could disappear, but it is happening,” said Joao Evangelista, a Brazilian park ranger who was unable to travel to Darwin, but sent a videotaped message presented by Barassi to an audience keen on cutting the distances between them.

“That’s why capacity-building is important; it’s a form of liberation for us, and of preparing ourselves to confront outside threats,” he said.

Women and children from a Nanti community in initial contact with Western culture in the Peruvian region of Madre de Dios. Credit: INDEPA

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Mar 26 2013 (IPS)

In the dense Amazon rainforest of Peru, there are five reserves inhabited by indigenous groups who have chosen to remain totally or partially isolated from the rest of society. But these areas are not officially demarcated as indigenous lands, and only one is protected with a control post.

The authorities responsible for them are now attempting to reinforce protection of these vulnerable populations, ignored for years by the state.

“A reserve is an instrument to protect the rights of these communities, who have found themselves obliged to live in isolation due to a series of violations they have suffered, particularly during the rubber boom. We owe them a historical debt,” Paulo Vilca, the general director of intercultural affairs and peoples’ rights at the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs, told Tierramérica*.

Throughout the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the expansion of rubber tapping in the Amazon brought disease, death and virtual extermination to the rainforest’s indigenous peoples, who were forced into slave labour.

Groups living in “voluntary isolation” have chosen to avoid all contact with the rest of society in the countries where they live, for historical reasons such as the extermination described above. Other groups are categorised as living in “initial contact”: while they remain largely isolated, they engage in contact with the outside world for certain concrete reasons, such as health care.

After many years of waiting, a multi-sectoral commission in Peru recognised five reserves in August 2012. Three of them – Isconahua, Murunahua and Mashco-Piro – are in the eastern region of Ucayali. The Madre de Dios reserve is in the southeastern region of the same name, while the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve is in the southern region of Cusco.

The latter is additionally home to the Matsiguenga and Yora peoples, but it also overlaps with the natural gas fields in Lot 88, an area under lease to the Camisea gas consortium.

All five are currently classified as “territorial reserves” but are slated to be designated as “indigenous reserves”, a category created in 2007 by Law 28.736 to provide greater protection for people living in isolation or initial contact.

In order for this reclassification to be official, the executive branch must issue a supreme decree. The Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs submitted the proposal in the first week of March, and it is now under study by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

The categorisation of these lands as indigenous reserves would mean the official demarcation of the territory needed to provide greater guarantees for these populations who face permanent ongoing threats, said Vilca.

Julio Ibáñez, an attorney with the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), stressed the need for indigenous organisations to form part of the commission responsible for evaluating these requests, in order for the native peoples themselves to have a say in the decision.

“This would guarantee that the rights of indigenous peoples in isolation or initial contact are represented and protected by genuinely representative organisations,” Ibáñez told Tierramérica.

This commission is currently made up by representatives of the national government, regional governments and universities, but includes no indigenous delegates.

Vilca reported that his department is drafting a proposal for the inclusion of indigenous organisations in the commission.

Since becoming active again in mid-2012, the commission has had to deal with a number of pending issues, such as the evaluation of requests for the recognition of another five reserves, which date back 10 to 14 years.

Vilca is preparing a report on this matter, after receiving the files for these requests in December from the National Institute for the Development of Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian Peoples (INDEPA).

He acknowledged that the state has not paid sufficient attention to these populations, but is now trying to rectify that situation.

Of the five territorial reserves that have been recognised, only the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve is protected with a control post.

The vice ministry has announced the signing of agreements with local governments and the National Natural Protected Areas Service to guarantee the protection of the other reserves.

In the meantime, a whole range of threats loom over them, from illegal logging to oil and gas operations.

Argentine-based Pluspetrol, which heads up the Camisea gas consortium, is seeking to expand its activities in Lot 88 into a section of the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve – which encompasses three communities in initial contact: Santa Rosa de Serjali, Montetoni and Marankeato – and the buffer zone around Manu National Park.

In 2010, the government agency that promotes oil and gas industry investment accepted the request from Pluspetrol, which presented the terms of reference and a citizen participation plan to modify its environmental impact assessment in order to include the new activities.

In May 2012, technicians from INDEPA and Vilca’s department stated that gas exploration activities would pose a risk to the populations living in isolation.

As a result, the public participation mechanisms should only apply to the three communities in initial contact mentioned above.

Pluspetrol then asked Vilca’s agency if it should present a citizen participation plan to inform these three settlements of its activities.

The response, which came in late August, was that this would not be necessary unless the communities themselves demanded it, and that it should be carried out in coordination with the Vice Ministry, since it would be an ad hoc procedure.

The non-profit organisation Law, Environment and Natural Resources (DAR) questioned this response, since it opens up the possibility of information-sharing workshops in territories that are supposed to be protected.

Vilca replied that the mission of the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs is not to promote investment, but rather “to enforce respect for the rights of the peoples.”

In addition, his team must still evaluate the modification of the environmental impact assessment for the expansion of activities in Lot 88, and in this case, its evaluation will be binding.

After Pluspetrol activities were reported in the Manu National Park buffer zone, the company stated that it would not continue with its plans in the area. But DAR and indigenous organisations believe that the matter is far from settled.

Tierramérica contacted Pluspetrol and the Department of Energy-Related Environmental Affairs for their input on the subject, but neither had responded by press time.

In the meantime, a million dollars in funding from the Inter-American Development Bank will be used this year to step up protection of indigenous reserves, reported Vilca.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

In the dense Amazon rainforest of Peru, there are five reserves inhabited by indigenous groups who have chosen to remain totally or partially isolated from the rest of society. But these areas are not officially demarcated as indigenous lands, and only one is protected with a control post.

Nanti women and children, members of an indigenous community in initial contact with Western culture in the Peruvian region of Madre de Dios. - INDEPA

“A reserve is an instrument to protect the rights of these communities, who have found themselves obliged to live in isolation due to a series of violations they have suffered, particularly during the rubber boom. We owe them a historical debt,” Paulo Vilca, the general director of intercultural affairs and peoples’ rights at the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs, told Tierramérica.

Throughout the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the expansion of rubber tapping in the Amazon brought disease, death and virtual extermination to the rainforest’s indigenous peoples, who were forced into slave labour.

Groups living in “voluntary isolation” have chosen to avoid all contact with the rest of society in the countries where they live, for historical reasons such as the extermination described above. Other groups are categorised as living in “initial contact”: while they remain largely isolated, they engage in contact with the outside world for certain concrete reasons, such as health care.

After many years of waiting, a multi-sectoral commission in Peru recognised five reserves in August 2012. Three of them – Isconahua, Murunahua and Mashco-Piro – are in the eastern region of Ucayali. The Madre de Dios reserve is in the southeastern region of the same name, while the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve is in the southern region of Cusco.

The latter is additionally home to the Matsiguenga and Yora peoples, but it also overlaps with the natural gas fields in Lot 88, an area under lease to the Camisea gas consortium.

All five are currently classified as “territorial reserves” but are slated to be designated as “indigenous reserves”, a category created in 2007 by Law 28.736 to provide greater protection for people living in isolation or initial contact.

In order for this reclassification to be official, the executive branch must issue a supreme decree. The Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs submitted the proposal in the first week of March, and it is now under study by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

The categorisation of these lands as indigenous reserves would mean the official demarcation of the territory needed to provide greater guarantees for these populations who face permanent ongoing threats, said Vilca.

Julio Ibáñez, an attorney with the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), stressed the need for indigenous organisations to form part of the commission responsible for evaluating these requests, in order for the native peoples themselves to have a say in the decision.

“This would guarantee that the rights of indigenous peoples in isolation or initial contact are represented and protected by genuinely representative organisations,” Ibáñez told Tierramérica.

This commission is currently made up by representatives of the national government, regional governments and universities, but includes no indigenous delegates.

Vilca reported that his department is drafting a proposal for the inclusion of indigenous organisations in the commission.

Since becoming active again in mid-2012, the commission has had to deal with a number of pending issues, such as the evaluation of requests for the recognition of another five reserves, which date back 10 to 14 years.

Vilca is preparing a report on this matter, after receiving the files for these requests in December from the National Institute for the Development of Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian Peoples (INDEPA).

He acknowledged that the state has not paid sufficient attention to these populations, but is now trying to rectify that situation.

Of the five territorial reserves that have been recognised, only the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve is protected with a control post.

The vice ministry has announced the signing of agreements with local governments and the National Natural Protected Areas Service to guarantee the protection of the other reserves.

In the meantime, a whole range of threats loom over them, from illegal logging to oil and gas operations.

Argentine-based Pluspetrol, which heads up the Camisea gas consortium, is seeking to expand its activities in Lot 88 into a section of the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve – which encompasses three communities in initial contact: Santa Rosa de Serjali, Montetoni and Marankeato – and the buffer zone around Manu National Park.

In 2010, the government agency that promotes oil and gas industry investment accepted the request from Pluspetrol, which presented the terms of reference and a citizen participation plan to modify its environmental impact assessment in order to include the new activities.

In May 2012, technicians from INDEPA and Vilca’s department stated that gas exploration activities would pose a risk to the populations living in isolation.

As a result, the public participation mechanisms should only apply to the three communities in initial contact mentioned above.

Pluspetrol then asked Vilca’s agency if it should present a citizen participation plan to inform these three settlements of its activities.

The response, which came in late August, was that this would not be necessary unless the communities themselves demanded it, and that it should be carried out in coordination with the Vice Ministry, since it would be an ad hoc procedure.

The non-profit organisation Law, Environment and Natural Resources (DAR) questioned this response, since it opens up the possibility of information- sharing workshops in territories that are supposed to be protected.

Vilca replied that the mission of the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs is not to promote investment, but rather “to enforce respect for the rights of the peoples.”

In addition, his team must still evaluate the modification of the environmental impact assessment for the expansion of activities in Lot 88, and in this case, its evaluation will be binding.

After Pluspetrol activities were reported in the Manu National Park buffer zone, the company stated that it would not continue with its plans in the area. But DAR and indigenous organisations believe that the matter is far from settled.

Tierramérica contacted Pluspetrol and the Department of Energy-Related Environmental Affairs for their input on the subject, but neither had responded by press time.

In the meantime, a million dollars in funding from the Inter-American Development Bank will be used this year to step up protection of indigenous reserves, reported Vilca.

Representatives of native communities in the Amazon region of Peru, where the first ever “prior consultation” about a project affecting their territory will be held, have pressured the authorities into promising that their views will be taken into account every step of the way. But the government’s word is no longer enough to assuage their mistrust.

Native leaders from the Amazon at the meeting of the Congressional working group. Credit: Puinamudt

“If they want to be respected, they must also respect our decisions. It’s not just about direct respect for the son; respect is first due to the father,” said Andrés Sandi, an Achuar Indian and president of the Federation of Native Communities of the Corrientes River (FECONACO).

Sandi wore a headdress of red and yellow feathers, symbolising his status as an “apu” (leader), when he talked to IPS a few days after a series of meetings with authorities in Lima on Jan. 24-31, together with other leaders of indigenous organisations in the northern department (or province) of Loreto in Peru’s Amazon region.

The purpose of their journey from the depths of the Amazon jungle to the Peruvian capital was to drive home to the authorities that there can be no consultation unless there is prior respect for the representatives of native organisations.

The leaders complained that technical personnel from PeruPetro — the state company responsible for putting out to tender the Loreto oil lot 192, known as Lot 1AB – attempted to enter their territory in late January without consulting the leaders. “We will stop everything dead if our voices are not heard,” they warned.

This is the first time that the Law on the Right to Prior Consultation of Indigenous or Original Peoples on all actions within their ancestral lands will be implemented in Peru. Promulgated in August 2011, the law was provided with regulations to define its concrete policies in April 2012.

"Indigenous people have lost confidence in the state."
FECONACO is part of a coalition, the Amazonian Indigenous Peoples United in Defence of their Territories (PUINAMUDT), which includes three other organisations of members of the Achuar, Urarina, Kukama-Kukamira, Secoya, Matsés and Quechua ethnic groups.

“The PeruPetro authorities have had to alter their approach because they cannot get around the way these communities organise and take decisions,” Congresswoman Verónika Mendoza told IPS.

Mendoza belongs to the congressional working group that is developing the consultation process. On Feb. 4, the commission called in the PeruPetro authorities for talks on the issue. At the meeting, the lawmakers called the company to account for its actions, and its executives committed themselves to keep native people informed at every step.

The law’s regulations say that consultations must be held directly with members of the indigenous peoples affected by economic activities being developed in their territory.

This new process marks the long-awaited fulfillment of Peru’s ratification in 1994 of the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries.

The ILO convention establishes special protection mechanisms for native peoples, including consultation on laws, productive projects and policies affecting these peoples’ development and environment.

According to Mendoza, the law and its regulations are one thing, and what actually happens on the ground is quite another. Carrying out consultations without involving the apus is not viable, she argues.

“However, some positive steps have been taken,” said Mendoza, highlighting a point in PeruPetro’s presentation to Congress: if there are found to be impacts on the collective rights of the native peoples, “adjustments in the texts of the basis and model of the contract” could be incorporated for the new company operating the lot.

In 2015 the concession on Lot 1AB expires, and the tendering process for the new concession, as well as the contract with the winning company, must include proposals arising from prior consultation with the native peoples.

On Jan. 30, representatives of the four indigenous organisations put forward their observations and recommendations about the present and future situation to the current operator, Pluspetrol Norte, at a meeting at PeruPetro’s headquarters.

“We refuse to be taken by surprise by the authorities,” said Sandi, of FECONACO. He used an analogy to sum up native people’s fears: “Indigenous people have lost confidence in the state; it is as though you hit a child, and then say ‘It’s OK, I’m not going to hit you any more’; (the child) is not sure if it is true, or not,” he said.

The leaders want greater openness from the authorities responsible for consultation. Their criticism is directed partly at the Vice Ministry for Intercultural Affairs, the government body in charge of the process, which has created a database of the native peoples to be consulted, but has not yet published it.

IPS requested an interview with Intercultural Affairs Vice Minister Iván Lanegra, but he declined to comment at this time.

However, reports have emerged that his office has identified 52 native cultures, 48 of which are in the Amazon region and four in the Andean region of the country. It has also been said that this year, the vice ministry intends to carry out five consultations on the same number of projects.

In October 2012, the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs said the first consultation would be carried out in February or March of 2013, but the lack of trust on the side of indigenous people and the vagaries of government policy make this goal an elusive one.

In spite of the difficulties, representatives of indigenous peoples and of PeruPetro agreed to meet in the second half of February in the city of Iquitos, the capital of Loreto, to coordinate a timetable and a mechanism for the first consultation. A date for the actual consultation could emerge from this meeting.

But reaching an agreement is not just a matter of fixing a timetable.

The native communities in Loreto showed the authorities scientific proof of the environmental impact of 40 years of oil exploitation in their waters and on their territory.

They communities have videos, photographs, and technical reports drawn up by their own environmental monitors. In their view, no consultation can negate these findings, related as they are to indigenous peoples’ basic rights.

In Lima they met with representatives of the multisectorial commission responsible for indigenous peoples’ environmental and social problems, which is headed by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

At the meeting they said that a new concession for Lot 1AB will not be possible without previously arriving at concrete solutions to remedy environmental damage.

Pressure from these organisations led environmental monitoring agencies to carry out an analysis of the degree of pollution in the area. The work began in the Pastaza river basin and the results were alarming.

In early February, PUINAMUDT received a preliminary report from the Environmental Assessment and Oversight Agency (OEFA), which indicates that in some cases the concentration of toxic chemicals in the waters of the Pastaza river were over 90 times the permitted limits.

Indigenous organisations have still not received the final report, but they are already examining the preliminary findings in order to communicate them to their communities and warn them of the risks.

“First of all, we are going to ask for this type of study to be carried out in the other river basins, to obtain the results. Then we will tell the state: now take responsibility and clean it up,” said Aurelio Chino, president of the Pastaza River Quechua Indigenous Federation (FEDIQUEP).

“We can’t accept consultations without such a commitment,” Chino told IPS, flanked by a delegation of apus, all wearing their red and yellow headdresses.

(END)

A view of the Peruvian Amazon. Credit: Jake G/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Jan 17 2013 (IPS)

Peru’s economic growth is largely dependent on its wealth of natural resources, which provide over 50 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and 80 percent of exports. In view of this fact, the government is developing a project for the valuation and protection of this natural bounty.

“There is a natural infrastructure tied to the physical infrastructure, which the state must protect,” Fernando León, an economic incentives advisor to the Initiative for Conservation in the Andean Amazon (ICAA), told IPS.

By way of example, he noted that “if you only worry about the pipes and other infrastructure for a drinking water treatment project, and not about the river basins that provide the water that will go through the pipes, then what will you treat for the population to drink in the future?”

Until late 2011, León headed up the Ministry of Environment’s Department for the Assessment, Valuation and Financing of Natural Resources, where he advocated the promotion of projects for the protection of these resources under the National System of Public Investments (SNIP).

His successor, Roger Loyola, who has continued with these efforts, announced that by the end of the year, a so-called “Green SNIP” will begin to operate.

Loyola and his team have been working in coordination with the Ministry of the Economy and Finance (MEF), which oversees SNIP, to draw up the guidelines, conceptual framework and terms and conditions for the environmental projects envisioned.

This process has posed a challenge for the financial specialists, because they have had to demonstrate that these initiatives will be economically profitable for the country, for example, by demonstrating the economic benefits of protecting an endangered species, explained Loyola.

During this stage, projects are being studied in the areas of biodiversity, climate change, land management and zoning, and protected natural areas, all of which fall under the remit of the Ministry of Environment (MINAM).

Sources at the MEF investment policy office told IPS that “the first step being undertaken is to assess which of all these projects qualify as public investments.”

Once a conceptual consensus has been reached within MINAM to serve as a reference for other sectors and the environmental and economic considerations have been reconciled, they will move on to developing the guidelines and methodology for the design and approval of individual projects.

Biologist Sandro Chávez, national coordinator of the environmental NGO Foro Ecológico and former head of the National Protected Natural Areas Service, believes the Green SNIP initiative to be a generally positive step.

However, speaking with IPS, Chávez warned of the danger that the government will make the mistake of taking environmental issues into account only with regard to investments in conservation projects, “when the environmental component should be mainstreamed in all of the projects presented by all sectors of the state to ensure that they are sustainable.”

León, for his part, stressed that the specific projects promoted by MINAM should be seen as a first stage, since he knows first-hand from his experience promoting the development of a Green SNIP as a public official that it will not be easy to convince the Ministry of the Economy to take this step.

But despite this resistance, he noted, a number of “green” projects are already being undertaken by the MEF.

Last September, at a regional workshop on financing for biodiversity public policies and conservation in the Andean Amazon, Mónica Muñoz Nájar from the MEF investment policy office announced that 15 environmental projects were being carried out under the SNIP.

These include a project undertaken by the government of the northern region of San Martín for the recovery of ecosystem services that provide water for the population.

Loyola reported that there are high expectations among regional governments planning to submit environmental projects for financing under the Green SNIP. León added that initiatives should be prioritised as soon as the new system is up and running, “because what we consume in the cities is connected to rural areas, to what is in the interior of the country.”

The experts believe that reports should be prepared on an ongoing basis to demonstrate the benefits provided by environmental resources and the losses incurred when the environment is mistreated, in order to dispel the myth that nature’s resources are freely available and infinite.

In an analysis of the environmental situation in Peru in 2007, the World Bank concluded that the environmental damages inflicted on this country have an economic cost of 3.9 percent of GDP and primarily affect the poorest sectors of the population.

The World Bank report estimated that “the impact of environmental degradation on the poor in comparison with the non-poor is 20 percent greater in terms of impact per 1,000 people and 4.5 times greater in terms of impact per unit of income.”

An inter-sectoral committee comprising 28 institutions and headed up by the Statistics and Information Institute (INEI) was launched in Peru last August to establish a system of “green accounting” that contemplates environmental degradation, water and forests, with technical assistance from MINAM.

The goal is to “incorporate environmental variables into national accounting practices,” said Araceli Urriola, an environmental accounting specialist at the Department for the Assessment, Valuation and Financing of Natural Resources. “In other words, the supply and demand (in environmental terms) of all economic activities,” she told IPS.

Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia have made significant progress in this area, noted Urriola. In Peru, however, this process of valuing environmental benefits and losses and establishing a green GDP is just beginning. The members of the inter-sectoral committee are expected to meet before the end of this month to agree on a work plan, the INEI told IPS.

“Environmental impacts are cumulative and are not always felt immediately. Because of this, some governments have not placed any importance on conservation and preservation. That is why, through the valuation of environmental damage, we hope to highlight the importance of conservation, because otherwise, we will pay for it tomorrow,” stressed Loyola.

(END)

Coffee growing in the forests of Puno, Peru illustrates the displacement of crops by climate change. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru, Dec 27 2012 (IPS)

“When someone in Peru sneezes, someone in Brazil catches a cold. When a barrel of oil is produced in Ecuador, a neighbouring country ends up buying it,” says prominent environmentalist Yolanda Kakabadse.

Everything that happens in Latin American countries is closely connected, as if they were vital organs shared by the same body, maintains Kakabadse, former environment minister of Ecuador and current regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN).

This is why the CDKN is promoting an initiative that will allow Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia to exchange and assess evidence-based information on the risks, impacts and threats of climate change shared by the countries of the Amazon region.

The aim is not only to measure impacts that are already evident, but also to foresee damages in the medium to long term. What will be the implications for the lives of the most vulnerable people if global temperatures increase two degrees by 2025? This is the kind of questions that need to be asked, explained Carolina Navarrete of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), which is also supporting the initiative.

For example, Navarrete told Tierramérica*, “a two-degree increase in temperature could make it necessary to move coffee crops up 300 meters higher, and the same thing would happen with other crops. How can we prepare for this situation without causing pressure on sensitive areas, such as protected natural areas, for example?”

The goal of the project is help the region’s authorities respond to these crucial questions for the population’s survival with concrete actions, Kakabadse and Navarrete told journalists from the five countries gathered in Puerto Maldonado, the capital of the Peruvian Amazonian region of Madre de Dios.

Kakabadse announced that Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar Vidal would be responsible for convening his counterparts, between the months of January and February, in order to jointly define measures to be adopted. It is hoped that a formal agreement will then be reached by April or May.

But the Ministry of Environment has yet to make an official statement in this regard, as it is still “working with other sectors and agencies involved in environmental affairs,” according to a communiqué received by Tierramérica at press time.

Nevertheless, as Kakabadse stressed to Tierramérica, the initiative must reach beyond the particular governments in power at a given moment, because “there is a great deal that needs to be done in the medium and long term.”

As a first step, a scientific working group has just completed a preliminary report that reveals the vulnerability of the Amazon region in a scenario of climate change.

For the report, coordinated by the Global Canopy Programme and CIAT and financed by the CDKN, the team of specialists reviewed more than 500 publications from the last 15 years and consulted websites and databases on deforestation and hydrologic modeling.

The report places emphasis on the threats to water, food and energy resources and how they are interrelated. Without water security in the region, there can be no food, energy and health security, it stresses.

The greatest impact will be on water quality, due to deforestation, energy extraction, mining and the use of fertilizers, among other activities that threaten the rainforest and its natural wealth, says the report.

In the last decade, the Amazon region suffered two unprecedented droughts in 2005 and 2010, while floods wiped out thousands of hectares of crops. According to the UK-based Met Office Hadley Centre for climate change research, extreme events like these will intensify and could occur every two years by 2025.

Under this scenario, competition for water will increase. The most powerful users will likely have greater control over this vital resource, while local populations, almost always the poorest, will have access to water of lesser quality and in smaller quantities, warns the report.

Energy generation also depends to a large extent on the Amazon. In Peru, the rainforest accounts for 73 percent of total oil and natural gas production. Hydroelectric plants in the Amazon provide over a third of electricity in Ecuador and Bolivia.

Meanwhile, the appetite for the large proven reserves of crude oil in the Amazon is exerting pressure on the protection of fragile ecosystems in a context where hydroelectricity generation could be compromised by changes in the flow of rivers.

In the Brazilian Amazon region, the total hydroelectricity potential is estimated at 116 gigawatts (GW), of which only 16 GW is currently exploited. Of the rest of this potential, 25 percent would affect indigenous territories, while 16 percent is located in protected natural areas, notes the report.

At the same time, there are growing exports of foods supplied by the Amazon rainforest – a region in which, paradoxically, one out of every three inhabitants suffers from hunger.

The appearance of vectors of diseases in areas where they were previously unimaginable – such as malaria, a hot-climate disease, in the cold environs of Lake Titicaca – also demands that the problem of climate change be confronted by the region’s countries as a bloc, say the experts.

All of these impacts and projections demonstrate that “long-term planning is as important as risk management in the present,” said Navarrete.

Kakabadse, for her part, stressed that no matter what, it is crucial not to lose sight of the enormous importance of the conservation of the Amazon and its protected natural areas. They are the “savings account” that must be preserved for the even more difficult times ahead, she said.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Environmental monitors inspecting an old oil well. Credit: Courtesy of Amazon Indigenous Peoples United in Defense of their Territories

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Dec 12 2012 (IPS)

At the end of every month, with the skill of an environmental engineer, Wilson Sandi prepares a work plan that will be used by Achuar indigenous people, like him, to document the scars left by 40 years of oil drilling in the Peruvian Amazon region of Loreto.

Sandi is the coordinator of the Environmental Monitoring Programme created by the Federation of Native Communities of the Corrientes River (FECONACO), which focuses its efforts on Lot 1AB and Lot 8, operated by the Argentine oil company Pluspetrol Norte.

Using GPS equipment, photographs and video recordings, the monitors document oil industry-related environmental liabilities that date back many years, as well as new oil leaks in rivers, streams and soils on which indigenous communities depend for their survival.

Since FECONACO began implementing the programme in 2006, 120 leaks have been documented. Together with two other indigenous organisations in the vast territory of Loreto, in northeastern Peru, they have discovered environmental liabilities that even the government had not detected, and which are therefore not included in official records.

All together, the monitors from FECONACO, the Quechua Indigenous Federation of the Pastaza River (FEDIQUEP) and the Federation of Native Communities of the Alto Tigre River (FECONAT) comprise more than 40 inspectors who travel up and down these three river basins.

They are the trained eyes of the communities, who accumulate technical evidence to back up the denunciations and demands made by indigenous leaders to the government and the company, within a general climate of mistrust.

“This is the best mechanism that we have adopted as organisations,” Quechua leader David Chino, the vice president of FEDIQUEP, told Tierramérica*.

A fourth organisation, the Cocama Association for the Development and Conservation of San Pablo de Tipishca (ACODECOSPAT), will soon replicate the initiative in the Marañón River basin to fill the large void left there by the government.

After four decades of oil drilling in Loreto, Peru has not managed to compile a complete and up-to-date registry of the environmental liabilities created by this industry in the region, much less in the rest of the Amazon region and the country as a whole.

Some 9,000 abandoned oil wells have been documented, mainly in the northern area of the country. More than 6,000 were improperly sealed and represent some type of environmental impact. Of the total, only 300 of the abandoned wells recorded are in the rainforest, engineer Jorge Villar from Peru’s energy and mining investment regulator, OSINERGMIN, told Tierramérica.

The government has made very little progress in locating abandoned and poorly sealed wells in the rainforest. As a result, “we are doing what the authorities should have dealt with a long time ago,” Sandi commented to Tierramérica.

Through their monitoring and documentation efforts, the indigenous leaders succeeded in capturing the government’s attention. A parliamentary delegation visited the area earlier this year and prepared a report on the situation.

They also managed to get the environmental control authorities to initiate the administrative processes for a field investigation and the environmental mapping of these river basins in Loreto. The ultimate goal is the updating of the registry of liabilities and new damages.

When Pluspetrol Norte began to operate in the area, the damages left behind in Lot 1AB by the U.S. oil transnational Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) had not been fully documented, as anthropologist Peter Rodríguez, an advisor to FEDIQUEP, told Tierramérica.

As a result, Pluspetrol could not be held responsible for the remediation of the damages it had inherited, and accurate monitoring of the damages caused by its own activities could not be implemented.

For the moment, the compilation of a full inventory of environmental liabilities, mandated by a law passed several years ago, remains at a standstill because OSINERGMIN and the new environmental regulatory agency created within the Ministry of Environment, the OEFA, cannot agree upon which agency should be responsible for this task.

Frustrated with this bureaucratic limbo, indigenous communities decided to take matters into their own hands, said Sandi.

“In the past the company would say, this picture could be from Ecuador. Who knows where it was really taken? But now all of our photographs and videos are stamped with coordinates. We don’t lie,” he added.

As a result of legal proceedings initiated by indigenous communities, the Dorissa Agreement was signed in October 2006 between Pluspetrol Norte, FECONACO and the regional government of Loreto, under which the company was to undertake remediation and development work in the areas affected. Among the commitments assumed by the company was financing of the indigenous environmental monitoring programme.

In addition, the company is obliged to supply information in order for the monitors to carry out their work.

The indigenous organisations provide ongoing training for the monitors on matters related to environmental engineering, hydrocarbons, the operation of equipment, and other subjects.

And today it is these organisations who have the most complete databank of environmental damages. FECONACO alone has compiled 22,500 digital files.

The work of the monitors is grueling. For two weeks out of every month, they make their way through endless kilometres of dense rainforest, and their work day rarely lasts a mere eight hours. While the monitors initially took part as volunteers, those who work in the Corrientes River basin now receive a symbolic salary of just under 300 dollars a month.

All of the monitors are selected by their own community, and most have completed secondary school. They range in age between 18 and 60.

They are also given ongoing encouragement to keep up their efforts, so as to continue gaining ever greater skills and knowledge. This is important, since some younger monitors have been lured away by Pluspetrol to work on its own monitoring teams, or tempted with new jobs in the city, said Rodríguez.

Now the organisations are pushing for official recognition of this programme by the Loreto regional government and adoption of a proposed law on indigenous environmental monitoring.

The political context is interesting. The first prior consultation undertaken in Peru in compliance with the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries is scheduled to take place in Loreto.

Indigenous leaders see this as an opportunity to demand that the government provide solutions for the environmental damages that have accumulated here over the course of decades.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

They work with the precision of technicians and the enthusiasm of volunteers. They are indigenous inspectors documenting the damages caused by oil industry activity in three river basins in the Peruvian Amazon region.

Environmental monitors inspecting an old oil well. - Courtesy of Amazon Indigenous Peoples United in Defense of their Territories

Sandi is the coordinator of the Environmental Monitoring Program created by the Federation of Native Communities of the Corrientes River (FECONACO), which focuses its efforts on Lot 1AB and Lot 8, operated by the Argentine oil company Pluspetrol Norte.

Using GPS equipment, photographs and video recordings, the monitors document oil industry- related environmental liabilities that date back many years, as well as new oil leaks in rivers, streams and soils on which indigenous communities depend for their survival.

Since FECONACO began implementing the program in 2006, 120 leaks have been documented. Together with two other indigenous organizations in the vast territory of Loreto, in northeastern Peru, they have discovered environmental liabilities that even the government had not detected, and which are therefore not included in official records.

All together, the monitors from FECONACO, the Quechua Indigenous Federation of the Pastaza River (FEDIQUEP) and the Federation of Native Communities of the Alto Tigre River (FECONAT) comprise more than 40 inspectors who travel up and down these three river basins.

They are the trained eyes of the communities, who accumulate technical evidence to back up the denunciations and demands made by indigenous leaders to the government and the company, within a general climate of mistrust.

“This is the best mechanism that we have adopted as organizations,” Quechua leader David Chino, the vice president of FEDIQUEP, told Tierramérica.

A fourth organization, the Cocama Association for the Development and Conservation of San Pablo de Tipishca (ACODECOSPAT), will soon replicate the initiative in the Marañón River basin to fill the large void left there by the government.

After four decades of oil drilling in Loreto, Peru has not managed to compile a complete and up-to- date registry of the environmental liabilities created by this industry in the region, much less in the rest of the Amazon region and the country as a whole.

Some 9,000 abandoned oil wells have been documented, mainly in the northern area of the country. More than 6,000 were improperly sealed and represent some type of environmental impact. Of the total, only 300 of the abandoned wells recorded are in the rainforest, engineer Jorge Villar from Peru’s energy and mining investment regulator, OSINERGMIN, told Tierramérica.

The government has made very little progress in locating abandoned and poorly sealed wells in the rainforest. As a result, “we are doing what the authorities should have dealt with a long time ago,” Sandi commented to Tierramérica.

Through their monitoring and documentation efforts, the indigenous leaders succeeded in capturing the government’s attention. A parliamentary delegation visited the area earlier this year and prepared a report on the situation.

They also managed to get the environmental control authorities to initiate the administrative processes for a field investigation and the environmental mapping of these river basins in Loreto. The ultimate goal is the updating of the registry of liabilities and new damages.

When Pluspetrol Norte began to operate in the area, the damages left behind in Lot 1AB by the U.S. oil transnational Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) had not been fully documented, as anthropologist Peter Rodríguez, an advisor to FEDIQUEP, told Tierramérica.

As a result, Pluspetrol could not be held responsible for the remediation of the damages it had inherited, and accurate monitoring of the damages caused by its own activities could not be implemented.

For the moment, the compilation of a full inventory of environmental liabilities, mandated by a law passed several years ago, remains at a standstill because OSINERGMIN and the new environmental regulatory agency created within the Ministry of Environment, the OEFA, cannot agree upon which agency should be responsible for this task.

Frustrated with this bureaucratic limbo, indigenous communities decided to take matters into their own hands, said Sandi.

“In the past the company would say, this picture could be from Ecuador. Who knows where it was really taken? But now all of our photographs and videos are stamped with coordinates. We don’t lie,” he added.

As a result of legal proceedings initiated by indigenous communities, the Dorissa Agreement was signed in October 2006 between Pluspetrol Norte, FECONACO and the regional government of Loreto, under which the company was to undertake remediation and development work in the areas affected. Among the commitments assumed by the company was financing of the indigenous environmental monitoring program.

In addition, the company is obliged to supply information in order for the monitors to carry out their work.

The indigenous organizations provide ongoing training for the monitors on matters related to environmental engineering, hydrocarbons, the operation of equipment, and other subjects.

And today it is these organizations who have the most complete databank of environmental damages. FECONACO alone has compiled 22,500 digital files.

The work of the monitors is grueling. For two weeks out of every month, they make their way through endless kilometers of dense rainforest, and their work day rarely lasts a mere eight hours. While the monitors initially took part as volunteers, those who work in the Corrientes River basin now receive a symbolic salary of just under 300 dollars a month.

All of the monitors are selected by their own community, and most have completed secondary school studies. They range in age between 18 and 60.

They are also given ongoing encouragement to keep up their efforts, so as to continue gaining ever greater skills and knowledge. This is important, since some younger monitors have been lured away by Pluspetrol to work on its own monitoring teams, or tempted with new jobs in the city, said Rodríguez.

Now the organizations are pushing for official recognition of this program by the Loreto regional government and adoption of a proposed law on indigenous environmental monitoring.

The political context is interesting. The first prior consultation undertaken in Peru in compliance with the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries is scheduled to take place in Loreto.

Indigenous leaders see this as an opportunity to demand that the government provide solutions for the environmental damages that have accumulated here over the course of decades.

Yagua indigenous people in the Amazonian department of Loreto. Credit: Richard Smith/IBC

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Oct 16 2012 (IPS)

The titling of the lands of indigenous and peasant communities has been at a practical standstill for two years, with many of the corresponding files lost or incomplete. But the promotion of foreign investment is moving full steam ahead in the same regions.

“Without land titles, people are forced to move from one place to another, and have even been the target of death threats. Some have been able to gain ownership of their farms, but in other cases, the companies have moved in,” said Valbina Miguel Toribia, a member of the Yanesha indigenous community in the central Amazonian region of Pasco. “This means they have no choice but to fight for their own piece of land,” she told Tierramérica.*

Miguel Toribia tackled numerous conflicts of this kind when she was the leader of the Federation of Yanesha Native Communities, and today she is a witness to similar struggles in neighboring communities.

This situation is repeated throughout Peru, because the titling of the lands of communities who occupy more than 27 percent of the country’s total area has slowed down significantly in recent years.

Between 2006 and 2010, while Alan García was in office, a mere 19 land titles were granted, in addition to 23 territorial expansions, according to the Agency for the Formalisation of Informal Land Ownership (COFOPRI).

Progress has been slow for communities in the Andes and on the coast, but the situation is much more chaotic in the Amazon region, where gas, oil and infrastructure investments and projects are concentrated.

Peru, an Andean and Amazonian country with a Pacific Ocean coast, is a world mining power and has oil and gas reserves as well. It is also a multi-ethnic nation of 30 million inhabitants, 31 percent of whom are indigenous.

Since 2010, when the government transferred COFOPRI’s land titling function to regional administrations, the process has practically ground to a halt.

While 24 of the country’s 26 regional governments can now officially exercise this function, they have not been provided with the corresponding files or complete information by COFOPRI, which means there is little they can do, sources from the Secretariat of Decentralisation told Tierramérica.

Moreover, there is no central government institution to regulate the process, and in various cases, the necessary resources and trained personnel are also lacking, Alicia Abanto, assistant director for the Environment, Public Services and Indigenous Peoples at the Ombudsman’s Office, told Tierramérica.

As of September 2010, according to official figures, 6,069 peasant communities in the Andes and on the coast and 1,649 indigenous communities in the Amazon region had been registered and recognised. Of this total, 16 percent had still not been granted land titles.

However, sources at the non-governmental Institute of the Common Good (IBC) maintain that the real number of these communities is much greater, and that in the Amazon rainforest, the actual number of communities without land titles could be up to four times greater than the government’s estimate.

One of the main problems is the lack of systematised and updated information “to know where the communities are and subsequently implement actions and policies,” Eduardo Nayap, a lawmaker and member of the Awajún ethnic group, told Tierramérica. “We indigenous people are not counted in the statistics,” he said.

To fill this void, in September the IBC released the Directory of Native Communities of the Peruvian Amazon, based on official files from the registration and titling of lands between February 1975 and April 2012. During this time, 1,807 communities were officially registered, while 663 have been carrying out the procedures to receive land titles for more than a decade.

“There is no state policy that establishes the procedure and mechanism for land titling, which places these communities in a fragile situation in the face of private investments (on communal lands),” said lawyer Pedro Castillo of the Peruvian Centre for Social Studies (CEPES), one of 18 organisations participating in the Secure Territories for the Communities of Peru campaign.

As of October 2010, more than 60 percent of the country’s Amazon region was covered by oil and gas concessions, according to official figures compiled by the IBC’s Information System on Native Communities of the Peruvian Amazon.

In some parts of the Andes, the situation is similar. For example, mining concessions have been granted for 47.3 percent of the Cajamarca region in northwest Peru, according to a report prepared by the non-governmental organisation CooperAcción based on official statistics.

Given the continued lack of progress in communal land titling under the current administration of President Ollanta Humala, the Ombudsman’s Office has formulated a series of recommendations for the institutions involved.

In meetings held up until September with officials from 10 regional governments, it was determined that there are “serious problems with the documentation required, because of files that are incomplete or non-existent,” Ombudsman’s Office representative Mayra Quicaño told Tierramérica.

Almost half of peasant community lands have also not been incorporated into a central registry database. The maps and descriptive notes are scattered among the offices of regional governments, public registries and other institutions, reported the Ombudsman’s Office.

In the Amazon region, the legal framework is over 20 years old and does not reflect the current reality. As a result, conflicts over the lack of communal land titles continue to simmer.

The Ombudsman’s Office told Tierramérica that in June, the various institutions involved reported that a draft decree is being studied that would establish the Ministry of Agriculture as the body responsible for overseeing the land titling process, a move that is viewed positively by both the Ombudsman and CEPES representative Castillo.

However, sources at the Secretariat of Decentralisation revealed that the adoption of the decree has been halted by a lack of agreement between the legal departments of the Ministry of Housing, to which COFOPRI is attached, and the Ministry of Agriculture.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

Oil-polluted water in the Amazon region of Loreto. Credit: Courtesy of the office of Congresswoman Verónika Mendoza

By Milagros Salazar
IQUITOS/LIMA, Sep 5 2012 (IPS)

Peru will debut a new mechanism for prior consultation with indigenous peoples by seeking their approval for a new stage of oil drilling operations in the infamous Lot 1AB in the northeastern Amazon region of Loreto.

Local indigenous leaders are still skeptical about the announcement, given that the region has suffered from the ongoing impacts of oil industry activities for decades.

From the open mouth of a jaguar painted on a wall emerges the declaration: “You cannot buy my rivers or my happiness.” In the background are the forest, the sun, the river, children, women and men.

The image, which covers the façade of the office of the Regional Organisation of Indigenous Peoples of the East (ORPIO) in the city of Iquitos, succinctly sums up the environmental defense headed up by native leaders in recent years.

Iquitos is the capital of Loreto, where oil drilling operations date back 40 years. Indigenous leaders from four river basins in the region, all members of ORPIO, told Tierramérica about the impacts of these operations on their communities and the environment.

“The government has ignored us and has not obliged the companies to comply with their commitments. If a parent abandons its child, who has to pay for these damages? The parent, the government. And in second place, the company,” said David Chino, vice president of the Quechua Indigenous Federation of Pastaza.

Chino was in Lima during the last week of August along with another three “apus” (leaders) to meet with authorities from the legislative and executive branches of government, representing communities in the basins of the Pastaza, Corrientes, Tigre and Marañón Rivers.

On Aug. 27, the indigenous leaders succeeded in getting a multi-sectoral commission, headed by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, to agree to hold a consultation with local communities before signing a contract with the new operators of Lot 1AB, which is currently held by the foreign oil company Pluspetrol Norte.

This consultation will be the first implemented in compliance with the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries, which gave rise to the adoption of a law and regulations for its application in cases of projects in ancestral indigenous territories.

In addition, on Sep. 5-7, government technicians will visit the Pastaza area to assess the extent of the damages, the native leaders told Tierramérica*.

In Loreto, oil contamination is concentrated around Lots 1AB and 8. According to a report issued in July by a congressional working group that toured the region, in some areas of the four river basins the degree of toxicity is so high “that the use of bioremediation to break down the oil would be useless.”

That same month, indigenous community members working as environmental monitors reported 25 unremediated environmental liabilities in Lot 1AB – 17 on the Tigre River, two on the Corrientes and six in the Pastaza River basin.

In Lot 8, nine liabilities were identified in the Corrientes River basin.

In August, state-owned oil company Petroperú announced that the government would organise an advance tender for three lots, including 1AB. This raised the alarm among indigenous communities, and their leaders, during their visit to Lima, urged the authorities to not let any new operators in until the existing pollution has been cleaned up.

“How can I let you back into my house if you have done me harm? You have to fix the damage for me to believe in you,” commented Chino.

The Presidency of the Council of Ministers stated in a communiqué on Aug. 28 that a consultation will be held with local communities before a contract is signed for exploitation of Lot 1AB, and Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar confirmed the announcement the following day.

Details on how the consultation will be carried out are still unknown.

“Which communities will be consulted? What are the terms and conditions? Indigenous peoples need answers to these questions, because there is a great deal of mistrust,” Verónika Mendoza, a ruling party member of congress who participated as an observer in the working group that drafted the report, told Tierramérica.

“We think it is good that they will hold a consultation. But how can they remedy all of the damage they have done to us in the last 40 years in just a short time? They need to explain that to us first,” said Achuar indigenous leader Andrés Santi, president of the Federation of Native Communities of Corrientes.

Peru does not have an up-to-date inventory of environmental liabilities. However, it has been determined that there are over 6,000 resulting from oil and gas industry operations between 1863 and 1993. Close to 300 of these pose significant danger and are located in the Amazon region, particularly in Loreto, according to engineer Jorge Villar of Peru’s energy and mines regulator, OSINERGMIN.

Moreover, between 2007 and 2011, indigenous environmental monitors recorded 112 new oil spills, of which 82 were found in the area of Lot 1AB and the remainder in Lot 8.

The main cause of the spills is the corrosion of the pipelines used to transport the oil, according to the congressional working group’s report. But representatives of Pluspetrol Norte claim that a number of them were caused by acts of vandalism which are currently under legal investigation.

The congressional report found that the executive branch does not sufficiently monitor these risks, and recommended better control and epidemiological studies to determine the extent of the health impacts faced by the local population.

“The gills of the fish are black, full of oil. We eat at least a kilo of fish a day. When it rains, the polluted rivers overflow and flood everything, the soils, the forest,” Alfonso López, president of the San Pablo de Tipishca Cocama Association for Development and Conservation, told Tierramérica.

The working group’s report also stressed that the maximum limit of total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH) established for soil remediation in Lot 1AB is 30 times higher than in Lot 8, although the situation in both is similar.

“We will follow up on the recommendations to deal with this serious problem. For a great many years, no one has paid attention to these peoples,” opposition Congresswoman Marisol Pérez Tello, who also participated in the drafting of the report, told Tierramérica.

Photos and videos of the contamination observed by the lawmakers have been passed on to the environmental prosecutor’s office.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Ceremony held to hand over the remains of victims of Peru’s civil war to family members in Ayacucho. Credit: Courtesy of COMISEDH.

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Aug 30 2012 (IPS)

Of the 69,000 people killed during the 1980-2000 armed conflict in Peru, at least 16,000 were buried in secret unmarked graves. So far, only 2,064 of these bodies have been recovered, and just 50 percent have been identified, according to a new report.

“The exhumation process is slow and disorderly, and moreover it is not a priority for the authorities, even though no democracy can grow strong without reconciling with its past and without recovering its dead,” historian Carola Falconí, executive director of the non-governmental Human Rights Commission (COMISEDH), told IPS.

For example, the forensic medicine institute (IML), which is in charge of the exhumations and answers to the attorney general’s office, does not have a national plan for forensic anthropological investigations to recover the remains of the victims of the civil war between government forces and the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas.

Nor do the authorities have up-to-date records on the areas where bodies were buried, often in mass graves, which would give a complete picture of what still needs to be done, says the book “Los muertos de Ayacucho. Violencia y sitios de entierro clandestinos” (The Dead of Ayacucho: Violence and Clandestine Burial Sites), presented by COMISEDH on Tuesday Aug. 28.

The book was published nine years after the independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) released its final report, which stated that 69,000 people, mainly indigenous peasants, were killed or forcibly disappeared, as victims of Sendero or the state security forces.

IML officials estimate that there are 15,731 victims – acknowledged to be an underestimate – of the conflict buried at more than 4,000 sites around the country documented by the CVR up to 2003.

But the IML was only able to find 2,064 bodies between 2002 and 2011, which means that at this rate, it would take eight decades to exhume the rest of the bodies, and much more time to identify them and turn the remains over to the victims’ families, says the book, whose journalistic investigation was carried out by this reporter.

The government inaction is especially notorious in the southern department or region of Ayacucho, which suffered the highest number of victims during the armed conflict. Official figures indicate that in the last 10 years, the remains of 1,196 of the 8,660 victims buried there – a conservative estimate – have been exhumed.

COMISEDH reveals in its book that in Ayacucho there are another 1,818 burial sites, besides the 2,234 reported by the CVR in 2003.

The new figure emerges from the updating of the records carried out by COMISEDH from 2004 to 2009, after the CVR stopped operating.

The figure has since been updated, to a total of 6,462 secret unmarked graves.

To locate the sites, a team of COMISEDH researchers headed by Falconí interviewed thousands of family members of victims, survivors and witnesses in some 100 villages and towns of Ayacucho. Several of the experts had been in charge of putting together the original CVR list in that region.

Falconí said that in late September, she would give the updated list to the office of the public prosecutor and the ombudsman’s office, so it could be used as “a tool to draw up a plan for forensic anthropological investigations and an orderly, efficient process of exhumation, in accordance with international standards.”

In its 2003 report, the CVR recommended that the government craft a national plan for forensic anthropological investigations, to make it possible to recover and identify the remains of victims and hand them over to the families, in an efficient and planned manner, especially necessary given the complexity of the events in question and the number of years that have passed.

“It’s not the same thing to exhume the body of someone who died recently as those of people who were murdered over two decades ago,” said Falconí.

Exhuming bodies implies stirring up past crimes. Forensic anthropological investigations make it possible to identify the cause of death, and provide clues as to who may have been responsible, as a result of analysing the bones and scraps of clothing and other belongings and carrying out a reconstruction of events.

The head of the IML, Gino Dávila, told IPS that his team has an annual schedule for exhumations, but that a document with a medium- to long-term scope such as the one called for by the CVR would be difficult to come up with because the government forensic experts work on the basis of requests by the prosecutors who are investigating the civil war-era human rights violations.

“For this year, we have programmed some 400 exhumations, to try to speed things up and gain time. If we assessed what would be needed to complete the work (recover the remains of all of the victims), a great deal of funds would be needed,” Dávila said.

The specialised IML forensic team has a budget of about 600,000 dollars a year – 80 percent less than what Dávila had requested from the attorney general’s office for the purpose of recovering and identifying the remains of victims, including DNA testing.

Only 50 percent of the bodies exhumed have been identified so far. The rest are still pending DNA tests. And in some cases, it is impossible to determine the identity of the victim due to the poor state of the remains, the absence of family members to provide blood samples to match with DNA, or the lack of materials to carry out the required technical process.

This high proportion of unidentified bodies indicates inadequate investigation prior to the exhumation, according to experts at the only two specialised civil society institutions, the Andean Centre for Forensic Anthropology Research (CENIA) and the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (EPAF).

There are family members who have been waiting for results of DNA tests for seven years, when they gave blood samples. The civil society experts say that at the very least, grieving relatives should be informed when a match is made and a body is identified.

In response to the indifference and ignorance of much of society and the lack of political will on the part of the authorities, COMISEDH proposed a plan of forensic anthropological investigations for Ayacucho, in order to recover the victims in a more efficient manner, Falconí said.

The head of the human rights investigation team in the ombudsman’s office, César Cárdenas, said that “Allowing them to stay there (in the ground) is like recognising that Sendero Luminoso, which started the armed struggle, was right. And we know that this is not true.”

The residents of the town of Morococha in central Peru will be displaced to make way for mining operations by the Chinese company Chinalco. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Milagros Salazar
LIMA, Jul 31 2012 (IPS)

A random review by the Peruvian government of 205 environmental impact assessments approved between 2001 and 2010 revealed that 86 percent lacked complete information on how they had received the green light from the authorities.

In 60 percent of the 205 cases analysed, the incomplete information referred to dissemination and citizen participation; in 74 percent, to the admissibility of the studies involved; and in 95 percent, to the way in which the terms of reference for their implementation had been approved.

These environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are merely a sampling, representative of different economic activities, of the 2,360 that the Peruvian government approved between January 2001 and November 2010, and 62 percent correspond to the mining and energy sectors, as reported in May by the vice minister of Environmental Management at the Ministry of Environment, Mariano Castro, during a meeting in the Peruvian Congress.

Civil society has put forward proposals to confront this problem, while the government has pledged that changes will be made.

Since January 2006, as of this month, 211 people have been killed and 2,700 wounded in social conflicts, most of them environment-related, according to the Ombudsman’s Office of Peru.

During President Ollanto Humala’s first year in office, which ended Jul. 28, there were 15 deaths and 430 people wounded in protests. In response to the outcry over this situation, which was stepped up after five people were killed earlier this month in protests against the Conga gold mining project, Humala announced a new relationship with the mining industry, the country’s primary source of foreign currency.

Conga, a mining project headed up by the multinational corporation Yanacocha in the northern region of Cajamarca, has been the target of especially fierce opposition because it will entail the destruction of four high mountain lakes. The resulting unrest forced the government to submit the EIA for the project to an international expert review.

This review concluded that two of the four lakes were to be emptied out to extract the gold, while the other two would be used to deposit the earth and rock removed.

But no detailed hydrological or hydrogeological studies were carried out for the project, even though they are essential to prevent leakage of toxic waste. Nor was an integral study of the micro-basins that could be impacted by the mining activity carried out, and the local communities that would be affected were not all informed about the Conga gold mining project.

Civil society organisations have submitted proposals to the Ministry of Environment for improving the government’s environmental assessment system.

The Peruvian Environmental Law Society (SPDA), for example, has just published a book by lawyer Isabel Calle which sets out seven specific recommendations.

One calls for the creation of a technical body, attached to the Ministry of Environment, to review and approve EIAs for projects in all sectors of the economy.

Currently, each ministry has its own unit responsible for both the approval of environmental studies and the promotion of investment in its particular sector.

“Unfortunately, the public does not trust in the impartiality of the government and believes that these ministries will always take the side of the companies,” Calle told Tierramérica*. “But if this review process is taken over by the ministry that is responsible for the protection of the environment, it could be considered a good sign.”

The creation of this technical body was discussed by a multi-sectoral committee established in early July to improve the environmental and social conditions in which productive activities are developed. The committee is expected to submit a proposal for reform of the system in early August, Vice Minister Castro told Tierramérica.

Castro and the SPDA concur that that the transfer of this key function to the Environment Ministry must take place gradually, to ensure that it is not overburdened with work.

“If these recommendations are incorporated into the system and help to reduce damages and take better advantage of opportunities, everyone will benefit,” said Castro. “A reform would improve the quality of decision-making, contribute to building trust, and reduce uncertainty and conflict.”

Companies are not opposed to these changes, as long as the 90-day deadline for the approval of EIAs continues to be respected, said the director of environmental responsibility at the Peruvian branch of Canadian mining company Barrick Gold, Gonzalo Quijandría.

“It is fine for these state bodies to monitor us, but they must demonstrate their technical quality. For companies it is important that any new initiatives do not cause delays,” Quijandría told Tierramérica.

Among the key aspects are the terms of reference: the technical specifications, objectives and structure that every EIA should have. The SPDA calls for monitoring these more closely.

The organisation also recommends that baseline studies – the initial measurements of all indicators that could be affected by the project in question – should include information on contingency areas and fragile ecosystems, specific measures for the prevention, mitigation and remedy of potential damages, and a plan for social inclusion and environmental compensation, among other aspects.

The social inclusion plans proposed by the SPDA would involve the joint undertaking by the companies and the government of efforts to ensure that poor communities living near mining areas have access to basic services and employment.

At a meeting in July 2010, officials from the department of mining-related environmental affairs pointed out to company executives that numerous EIAs conducted by consulting firms contained entire paragraphs copied from other documents, which reflected a lack of seriousness in the assessment of potential impacts, as revealed in a report by IDL-Reporteros, an independent group of investigative journalists.

Quijandría admitted that there are assessments “of all kinds” but said that companies are willing to improve their quality. However, “even if we have a study conducted by a Nobel Prize winner, the public will still not trust it, because they are politically inclined not to,” he claimed.

Environmental lawyer Calle believes that requirements should be established for the technicians who carry out the assessments, and that failure to fulfill them should lead to penalties that could even include the suspension of the project, in the event of irregularities such as plagiarism or the under-reporting of potential impacts.

The SPDA is also calling for the establishment of a fund that would allow communities to hire technical consultant services, as well as a single point of contact or “one-stop shop” for all permits, authorisations and other procedures required for environmental certification.

Other recommendations include giving regional governments the authority to submit technical opinions on EIAs, and coordination among different government bodies to prevent the overlapping of rights and concessions in the same place for ecotourism, conservation or forestry activity.

For his part, Castro stressed the need to update the regulatory framework, environmental quality standards and maximum permissible limits for particular substances in certain sectors; to establish protocols and methodologies; and to standardise the criteria for EIA review and approval.

But Cecilia Rosell, manager of corporate social and environmental responsibility at Peru’s National Society of Industries, believes that environmental impact assessments should not be the sole focus, because there are other instruments for environmental and social management that should be taken into consideration.

For Manuel Glave, head researcher from the Analysis for Development research centre, the changes should be incorporated into a broader land management plan, because access to and use of natural resources are at stake.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

In under two days, five demonstrators were gunned down by security forces in the northern Peruvian highlands region of Cajamarca, where a state of emergency has been declared.

Marco Arana is arrested by police in Cajamarca. Credit: Red Verde Cajamarca Blog

That makes a total of 15 dead and 430 injured in social protest-related incidents in less than a year since President Ollanta Humala took office.

Health authorities of the department (province) of Cajamarca told IPS that 27 members of local communities and four policemen were wounded in clashes on Tuesday in the district of Celendín, and another 13 civilians were injured on Wednesday in Bambamarca.

For the second time in six months, the government called a state of emergency in the area, where local and peasant communities are mobilising to protest against the Conga gold mining project headed by the multinational corporation Yanacocha-Newmont.

These demands are not new. Protests staged in December 2011 led to a change of ministry authorities and prompted an international environmental impact assessment in Conga, which did not satisfy project opponents.

“Almost all the civilians hurt in these clashes had bullet wounds, while the policemen had only concussions and minor injuries,” Cajamarca regional health director Reinaldo Núñez Campos told IPS, after confirming the death of the fifth victim, 29-year-old José Antonio Sánchez, at 6:45 a.m. Thursday.

Sánchez had been wounded while he participated in a demonstration broken up by police and army officers. The demonstration had been called to protest the Conga project and express discontent with the administration of Mauro Arteaga, the mayor of Celendín, a district some three hours away by car from the provincial capital of Cajamarca.

At the time this story was published, President Humala had not yet commented on these incidents. Only Prime Minister Óscar Valdés mentioned the matter briefly in a press conference at government headquarters, on Wednesday, while justice minister Juan Jiménez urged regional social leaders to “keep calm”.

Roque Benavides, CEO of the mining company Buenaventura, a Yanacocha shareholder, said that despite protests they would go ahead with the construction of the water reservoirs required by the government.

Police violence and international reports

More than 20 people had been arrested as of Wednesday, according to the ombudsperson’s office, including environmental leader Marco Arana, who was beaten and dragged by police to the Cajamarca city police station.

A video broadcast on local TV by Channel 45 shows Arana being picked up by police in the city’s Plaza de Armas square, while sitting on a park bench. A few minutes later, Arana posted on his Twitter account that he had been beaten. His attorney, Mirtha Vásquez, described what happened to IPS.

“They took him to a room in the police station where some three policemen came down on him with their sticks, hitting him for 20 minutes, and yelling, ‘This is what you get for terruco (terrorist).’ He was then taken to another office. I know this because he told me, but also because I saw the bruises on his face,” Vásquez said.

Arana, a former Catholic priest who founded the Land and Freedom Movement, was released early on Thursday, along with eight young people who had also been arrested for protesting.

“Violence will only end when police brutality stops and Conga mining works are suspended, along with any other citizen practices that can generate further violence,” the environmental activist said in a press conference, after spending 12 hours behind bars.

“The government is mistaken if it thinks it is going to quash the just demands of Cajamarca with bullets, torture or beatings. We want Yanacocha out,” he added.

Arana’s lawyer will file a complaint against the policemen and a report with the Organisation of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). In 2007 the IACHR had granted precautionary measures in favour of Arana and Vásquez, in response to a report of intimidation and threats made against them, and asked the Peruvian state to adopt the necessary measures to protect them.

Rage in Celendín

While the population of Cajamarca is increasingly divided and opposition leaders seek ways to get around the state of emergency, the nearby community of Celendín is terrified, fearing further repression, and the media is viewed with growing distrust.

“I try not to give any statements because the media in Lima keeps twisting the facts. I can’t have the people against me,” Elí Guerrero, president of the Federation of Celendín Journalists, told IPS.

IPS also spoke with several residents who oppose the mining project in this district, and all of them asked to remain anonymous.

According to media accounts demonstrators had caused damages and even burnt down part of the facilities of the Celendín municipality, accusing mayor Arteaga of being a “traitor.”

The violent incident apparently erupted as a result of claims made by Arteaga against opponents of the project.

“They’re a handful of extremists who think they can use force to make the government and civil society agree with them… I don’t think it’s right to force your ideas on anyone at gunpoint,” Arteaga had said on Jun. 28 on the TV programme La Hora N.

By Tuesday, opponents were calling to step up protests, and demonstrators marched into the municipality, causing material damages. “There were few policemen at the scene and as things got out of hand the army, who had been standing by, stepped in,” a resident said.

“Shots were heard, then two helicopters arrived and more shots were heard,” a woman said. The confrontation went on for hours.

Arteaga refused to comment on this incident. “We don’t want to add fuel to the fire.” “Just look at the reaction a minor interview on TV gets,” Celendín municipality PR chief Richard Díaz, who was in the building during the incidents, told IPS.