Images of 'Amazon's Tiananmen'
Peru accused of cover-up after indigenous protest ends in death at Devil's Bend
First, the police fire tear gas, then rubber bullets. As protesters flee, they move on to live rounds. One man, wearing only a pair of shorts, stops to raise his hands in surrender. He is knocked to the ground and given an extended beating by eight policemen in black body-armour and helmets.
Demonstrators getting worked-over by the rifle butts and truncheons of Peru's security forces turn out to be the lucky ones, though. Dozens more were shot as they fled. You can see their bullet-ridden bodies, charred by a fire that swept through the scene of the incident, which has since been dubbed "the Amazon's Tiananmen".
The events of Friday, 5 June, when armed police went to clear 2,000 Aguaruna and Wampi Indians from a secluded highway near the town of Bagua Grande, are the subject of a heated political debate. They have sparked international condemnation and thrown Peru's government into crisis.
Yet until today, details were shrouded in mystery. Now, pictures have emerged. They were taken at the scene by two Belgian aid workers, Marijke Deleu and Thomas Quirynen, and provide compelling details of the chaotic confrontation that killed a reported 60 people, many of them unarmed, with vast numbers still unaccounted for.
"At first, we saw police firing guns and tear gas at a mass of protesters," said Ms Deleu, who reached the highway at 7am, an hour after heavily armed police arrived at the location, 870 miles north of Lima. "Then we saw them beating and kicking people detained on the ground. Later, they shot people in the back as they started fleeing."
A dossier of photographs, many too graphic to be printed in this newspaper, will be shown to MPs at the House of Commons on Monday by Ms Deleu and Mr Quirynen, who are volunteers for Catapa, a Flemish organisation supporting indigenous communities in Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala.
Called Death at Devil's Bend, it attempts to explain what happened when police tried to evict the indigenous tribespeople, who had been blockading the road for several weeks in protest at new laws allowing energy and mining companies to exploit swaths of their ancestral homelands.
One series shows police stopping a passing ambulance. They force four injured protesters out of the vehicle, and beat them for several minutes, claiming, without any apparent justification, that their vehicle was carrying concealed weapons. Another, taken later in the day shows rows of wounded being treated in local hospitals. Nineteen are at Bagua Grand; 47 in Bagua Chica. Many have heavy bruising, and bandages covering bullet wounds.
"Several people said they had been shot while they were fast asleep," said Ms Deleu. "They claim the police woke them up by opening fire. One of the bodies had a bullet wound in his shoulder, which suggested to me that he'd been shot while lying down."
Further pictures, which will only fuel rumours of a government-orchestrated cover-up, show twisted corpses of native Indians lying by the side of the road. When tribal leaders tried to collect them, they came under fire and were refused access. By the next day, the corpses had disappeared.
The Peruvian President, Alan Garcia, has claimed 32 people were killed in the incident, of which 23 were police officers. However human rights lawyers and news reports put the number of confirmed deaths at closer to 60, and say hundreds are still missing.
Until this week, many international observers have been unable to visit the region because of a curfew. Pressure groups have accused security forces of burying and burning corpses to hide the extent of the death toll.
"There needs to be an independent investigation to establish exactly what happened," said Jonathan Mazower of Survival International, which will today publish Ms Deleu and Mr Quirynen's dossier on its website. "Our initial reaction to these dramatic photographs is that they may provide the first impartial account of what actually went on."
The pictures emerged as Alberto Pizango, the head of Aidesep, the organisation representing 56 of Peru's indigenous tribes, arrived in Nicaragua, after being granted political asylum. Last week, he was prosecuted for "sedition, conspiracy and rebellion".
Meanwhile Mr Garcia has been forced to suspend the introduction of laws allowing foreign companies to exploit the rainforest. His Prime Minister Yehude Simon resigned on Monday, joining populist minister Carmen Vildoso, who quit last week during a general strike in protest at the incident.
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Comments
To separate this out would require a separate set of photos, for those who want to 'opt-in' to see the more graphic content. But to even offer that feature does feel like sick voyeurism.
Perhaps it's time to label the Peruvian government a "state sponsor of terrorism" and treat them accordingly.
And identify the multinationals who've been filling President Garcia's bank account and bring them before an international tribunal.
Housing is costly--a lot of about 20 x 100 m costs $100,000 in the provinces--so many families live together in one room; hunger is common, and in Puno children are dying from the cold while Garcia and his government live in palaces and eat regularly. Crime is a daily event, and murder merits at most 20-30 years in prison, while rape is rejected as a crime by the police, theft is hourly and if the thief is over 50 that person is told to go home and pray, as the government controls and is controlled by the churches: Roman Catholic, Episcopal/Anglican, evangelical which demands total allegiance and offers nothing and yet is a major part of the curriculum.
Nothing will change until Peru enters the secular world, dump TLC (NAFTA), and takes charge of its own natural resources, cutting military spending to help the poor, and training competent people so that the nation is no longer a servant to USA interests.
I wish people like you - and there is a depressingly large number of you on the Indie threads - would stop trying to link and conflate *every single issue and event*, anywhere in the world, with the Arab-Israeli problem!
There are bulletin boards and discussion forums by the *thousands* covering that issue, where you can bang on - and on - about it to your heart's content.
But when you try to hijack a thread on a *completely different topic* just to ride your favourite hobby horse, you come across as a single-issue fanatic, and someone who does not actually *care* about the victims in this story at all, and whose remarks are therefore not only completely irrelevant but also rather callous.
Stay on topic or get off the thread, you silly woman!
However, that being said, I agree with your comments about the UN - they show themselves to be utterly inept and impotent in situations like this; UN = Useless Numpties.
Again indigenous people are subject to the rapacity of international corporations. My understanding is that Canadian and American corporations are responsible for the real, or potential, devastation of the aborignal people's homeland. It's been going on for decades and has contributed to guerrilla/"terrorist" protest: poor and frightened people have no other way of attempting to protect their living-space.
Who remembers Rio Tinto and Bougainville? Who cares?
What reports circulate about Canadian destruction of native peoples' habitat? Demure democratic Canada is home to several of the world's most destructive mining companies, both in Canada - especially Alberta - and around the world.
And Australia? The take-over of aboriginal land and resources is a tale too terrible to be told.
During a previous presidency, Peru's Alan Garcia cooperated with multinational corporations to pillage his country. Now back in power, he is again their tool.
NAME THE CORPORATIONS. NAME THE CEOs AND CONTACT PERSONS. PUBLISH PHOTOGRAPHS OF THEM, not dead natives.
And when will a courageous journalist write about the corporate practice of destroying aboriginal peoples and their habitat in diferent parts of the world? He might start by googling John Perkins.com to glimpse how things have been done behind the "democratic" stage-scenery.
Garcia has been a continuing embarrassment--he had a record inflation of over 7649% in 1986, and his cummulative inflation before he fled in disgrace (first to Guatamala, then to France) was 2,200,200% (which is even recorded on wikipedia.com) One of the largest landowners on the coast of Peru, he has a colored past that nears the atrocities of Fujimori (when not raiding the Peru Treasury to send his children to USA schools, so that Keiko could ultimately sit with her uncle and mother in Congress [and now run for the presidency to pardon her father]). Under Garcia's orders, the army and police were told to "shoot them [the Amazonians] in the head" and leave no survivors. I live now in Peru near the Amazons, and the sky was black with smoke as military and police heliocoptors filled the airwavs and shot at the civilians indiscriminately. Garcia should be tried, sentenced, convicted and imprisoned for crimes against humanity, while Alberto Pizango, the only hero of this dark time and of the people of the Amazon merits the Peace Prize and worldwide acclamation for standing up against the tyrant Garcia and his gaggle of goons.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun
http://amazonwatch.org/peru-protests.ph
Even the bishops say it is genocide. Peru's Health Ministry found high levels of several heavy metals in the blood of the Achuar people living along the Corrientes River in northern Peru. Experts say that the metals (which can cause neurological problems) probably came from water pumped into streams and the river as a byproduct of oil drilling. See: http://www.wcr.ab.ca/news/2009/0601/per
video from an anthropologist: http://memeticshift.com/
police beating and kicking unarmed civilians: http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun
jacksondevive has no idea of what he was talking about, and I seriously doubt he was there. The police invaded private homes and set them ablaze, forcing fire even on to the clothing of children: http://intercontinentalcry.org/police-v
But, I keep forgetting that, to most "Christians," their religion seems only to be just another religion of either daily or weekly sanctimonious ceremonies, with verbalized meanings and participation in rituals that symbolize penitence and supposed "forgiveness," but with only a corporate-style mass grouping of "believers" who, having gone through their appointed rituals, feel freed. On such an emotional high, they leave, go home, and move quickly on to the next pleasure. But, where is the real change in their lives? Where is the boring-made-sweet that Jesus preached and lived? Every soldier who "did his ordered duty to his country," is as personally guilty as those who ordered him to do what he did to these innocent people. This indictment includes those "foreign companies" at whose behest these atrocities have been committed!
M