ALBOAN

Bringing Hippos to the Amazon: Alan García’s indigenous policy in Peru 

A reflection on the Peruvian government’s policy towards indigenous people 

The Peruvian people will remember 5 June 2009 as a dreadful moment in the history of their country. Early in the morning in a remote town of the Amazon, a clash between riot police and a crowd of Awajun and Wampis indigenous people who were blockading a road triggered a mass killing. As usual, this bitter history is written in the rural areas of the country and acutely affects the indigenous population. Though the indigenous communities were victims, the country’s elite in the capital of Lima blame the indigenous population for these tragic events and indeed the problems of the whole country.

Hippos in the Jungle

In the early 1990s, when I was working in the Awajun’s region, a government official told me his ‘fantastic and original’ idea to solve the protein deficit of the Amazonian population by introducing African hippopotami. His argument was straightforward: hippos are gentle, like water, and have a lot of flesh.

The policy of Peru’s president, Alan Garcia, towards the Amazon region is akin to this grotesque idea. He believes the jungle is underexploited and that too much land has been reserved for indigenous people who lack the capacity and the financial resources to effectively extract the richness of the territory. To counteract this, the government introduced a set of legal norms to facilitate investment in extractive activities (oil, gas, mining and logging) – his personal hippopotamus. The new legislation eased the market for land, eroding the indigenous people’s power to control their own territory and ignoring commitments to international treaties on the protection of indigenous people. 

The Government’s responsibility

Garcia’s actions follow a long tradition of exclusion of the Amazonian population. Peruvian elites concern themselves with the Amazon only when they anticipate a business opportunity. Limeños dream of an empty jungle that they can manage freely. They either disregard the indigenous populations or consider them a nuisance impeding national development.

In August 2008, a massive indigenous mobilisation forced Parliament to promise to revise the norms, and the government offered to set up a committee to negotiate with indigenous organisations. Neither Parliament nor the government honoured their promises and in April indigenous groups around the country decided to initiate a new cycle of protests. Issues came to a head on the 5 of June, when the police’s attempt to end a road blockage led to a tragic toll of 24 policemen and 12 civilians dead, 150 injured and the disappearance of another undetermined number of civilians.

Official explanations of these events cause shock and indignity – the former because the first official declaration following the bloodbath was to celebrate the “restoration of the constitutional order”, the latter because of the government’s approach to concealing its responsibility. The government has closed its eyes to the indigenous people’s claims and treated them like children. It is also responsible for a poorly planned and executed police operation and for trying to cover this failure by portraying the protesters as terrorists and savages under the command of foreign interests.

The Government’s failure

In a democratic regime, a government that fails so dramatically to protect the lives of its citizens should immediately resign. Even governments confronting the most brutal of terrorist factions have a duty to evaluate their operative capacity and the consequences of their actions. The citizens elect the government because they trust in its capacity to protect and defend its citizens, both policemen and civilians.

The government was not fighting a terrorist group – it was removing a group of tired and irritated people who had been peacefully blockading a road for 11 days. The testimony of direct witnesses contradicts the government’s account. Witnesses report that police forces arrived at the location and without warning immediately started to use tear gas to break up the demonstration. One of the most respected Awajun chiefs, Santiago Manuin, tried to negotiate an ordered withdrawal with the police. However, the police kept pushing thus infuriating the demonstrators who resisted on the road. At one point the policemen started firing their weapons, initially aiming toward the sky, and then turning toward the ground. Some of the bullets ricocheted, killing one person and injuring others. The group responded by moving toward the police who answered by shooting indiscriminately, triggering a bloody battle. In this confrontation a group of indigenous people encircled, disarmed and killed 8 policemen. Later, the battle spread to surrounding areas.

The killing of the policemen is horrible and unjustifiable. But eyewitness reports do not support the government’s claim of a confrontation with a group of organised terrorists conspiring against the democratic state and aiming to kill government officials. It seems more likely that poor preparation on the part of the police, in combination with political pressure to end the demonstration at any cost, resulted in the inferno.

The questions that now need to be answered

These painful clashes have left open questions that the government should answer in the coming days. The lack of information about the exact number of civilian casualties, and those missing is disturbing and the government does not seem to be interested in revealing this. Nor does the government appear to be concerned about defending the lives of all Peruvian citizens equally. Another critical unresolved issue is an explanation of the chain of political responsibility behind the police operation.

President Garcia’s has repeatedly referred to the Amazonian and Andean indigenous population as ignorant, opposed to development and incapable of deciding what the best is for them. His patronising authoritarianism has a long tradition in the Peruvian republican history but is particularly insulting in the 21st century. The government does not need to look for conspirators beyond the national borders to explain the current political disorder. Its inability to understand what is happening in the countryside and to answer people’s demands in the rural settings of the Amazon and the Andean Highlands has alienated the population. Rural residents are rebelling against the establishment that excludes and insults them. 

Javier Arellano Yanguas, Dphil researcher at IDS, lived some years with the awajun-wampis people in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest.