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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

Land Invasions Abound in the Amazon

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

December 3, 1995

OVERVIEW & SOURCE

The Inter-Press Service, in a pre-edited version, reports on the

rise of violence against indigenous peoples of the Amazon. This

piece should not be republished or recirculated without the

permission of the author.

g.b.

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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:

/* Written 2:40 PM Dec 3, 1995 by pchatterjee in

igc:rainfor.genera */

/* ---------- "land invasions in the amazon" ---------- */

From: Pratap Chatterjee <pchatterjee@igc.apc.org>

this is a pre-edited version of the story.

ENVIRONMENT-LATIN AMERICA: Violence in the Amazon mocks the law

By Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Oct 3 (IPS) - Four months ago native peoples were

evicted at gun point in Roraima near Venezuela. In August landless

peasants were massacred in Rondonia near Bolivia. In the last few

weeks shooting has broken out at gold mines in Suriname.

These are just a few of the violent incidents that have marked the

last few months in the dense Amazon forests in South America that

stretch from Bolivia in the south across Brazil to Guyana,

Suriname and Venezuela in the north.

Accounts of some of the incidents have been macabre. "They shot a

6-year-old girl dead as she tried to walk to safety by a towering

tree, forced one prisoner to eat soil mixed with his blood and

another to eat the brains spilling from a battered corpse they had

ordered him to carry," wrote one reporter about the Rondonia

massacre.

Many of these conflicts are touched off by miners and loggers who

have invaded the remotest parts of the Amazon to extract coal,

gold and timber. These groups range from small artisenal miners

known locally as "porknokkers" to giant timber companies from

faraway Indonesia and Malaysia who have invaded the lands of

native groups throughout the region.

Other conflicts have been sparked by poor peasants in search for

land for farming, Government security forces have also set off

bloody battles with both indigenous people and landless farmers.

In theory most of the conflicts should not have happened because

legal agreements were put in place to prevent them but apparently

these agreements are not working.

Worst hit by the invasions are groups like the Yanomami who live

on the border of Brazil and Venezuela, who have never encountered

industrial society.

Two years ago Brazilian miners in search of gold slaughtered 20

Yanomami peoples on the Upper Orinocco provoking an international

outcry but little by way of action.

Today deadly conflict continues in Venezuela, according to Marcus

Colchester of the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) and Fiona Watson

of Survival International, both based in England, who have just

completed a report on the peoples of the country.

"Killings of Indians by military and police forces have been

reported from Wayuu and Yupka areas in the north west of

(Venezuela)," writes Colchester in the report entitled:

"Venezuela: Violation of Indigenous Rights."

The Wayuu and the Yupka have lost their lands in the Sierra de la

Perija to large state controlled open-cast coal mines and oil

drilling. The Yupka, together with the Bari peoples, their

neighbours, have also lost their land to invasions of poor farmers

and ranchers from neighbouring Colombia.

Development schemes in other parts of Venezuela has also brought

death, displacement and disease to native peoples. The lands of

the Pemon, the Kapon, the Kari'na and Lokono peoples in Bolivar

state near the border with Guyana have been turned into timber

concessions.

These land grabs are not new to the Pemon who have been displaced

more than once in the last 15 years when aluminium, iron and steel

industries were set up with financial support from the Inter

American Development Bank and the World Bank.

Colchester and Watson say that these incidents should not have

happened because Venezuela signed a national law based on

International Labour Organisation conventions to prevent this

from happening. The two authors have recently appealed to the ILO

to investigate Venezuela's failure to implement this law.

Violence came this year to other groups in the Amazon like the

Maroons of Suriname -- former African slaves who escaped their

colonial masters 350 years ago to set up their own societies

in the forests.

In the last few weeks the Saramaca tribe of Maroons, who live at

Nieuw Koffiekamp in northern Suriname, were shot at by security

officials working for Canadian-owned Golden Star mining company,

according to reports from local human rights organisations like

Moiwani '86.

"I have seen the security guards riding around in the white jeeps

with M16 assault rifles. I don't think they got people in their

sights but the situation has become very serious for the people of

the interior,'' says Gary Branashute, an anthropologist from

George Washington university in this city, who returned from a

visit to the mine site a week ago.

Golden Star officials do not deny that their officials carry

weapons. "Our personnel are under strict rules and will only use

force in response to an immediate threat to life," wrote Peter

Donald, the general manager of Golden Star's operations in

Suriname in reply to letters of protest.

Golden Star, which is also a shareholder in the Omai gold mine in

Guyana, has come under a lot of pressure in in recent months

after a major cyanide spill occurred at Omai destroying the local

rivers.

In many of these conflicts the local governments side with private

industry, say observers. Branashute says that the Surinamese

government has sent a contingent of police to back up Golden Star

security forces.

"Three years ago the government signed an agreement, brokered by

the Organisation of American States, to protect the Maroons and

recognise their land rights. It was obviously just rich words and

empty prose," he told IPS.

Government troops have also been accused of attacking the Macuxi,

an indigenous group numbering about 12,000 who live in Brazil near

the border with Venezuela.

This March the Brazilian army was sent in ostensibly to help

protect the Macuxi. Instead the "army is driving indigenous people

from their homes, destroying houses, and intimidating communities

at gunpoint," say reports from the Indian Council of Roraima.

"The army has assumed "exclusive powers" over the area,

consistently siding with the thousands of gold miners and migrants

who have invaded the Macuxi homeland,'' it adds.

Loggers looking for mahogany wood are also reported to be invading

the land of the Arara peoples near Belem at the mouth of the

Amazon in northern Brazil with the help of local government

officials,

Both the Arara and the Macuxi land is officially protected by the

Brazilian government under the 1988 constitution which required

the government to set aside 557 protected areas covering 11

percent of Brazil's land mass for the 320,000 indigenous people in

the country.

Local politicians and businesses argue that it is unfair that the

native groups, who comprise less than one percent of the 160

million population, should get so much land.

But social activists point out that the real problem is that 10

percent of the population controls 80 percent of the land. Some

2 million families are estimated to be looking for land.

These landess peasants have also suffered at the hands of the

army. Two months ago the Brazilian army was accused of massacring

and injuring dozens poor landless peasants in Rondonia, which

borders Bolivia.

Riot police wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying tear gas made

a dawn raid on ''Fazenda Santa Helena'' (Santa Helena farm) which

had been set up by squatters less than a month before.

"Many people are lost in the bush and some wounded, dazed by the

tear gas, plunged in the river. At this point it's impossible to

know exactly how many people died,'' wrote an eyewitness whose

report flashed across the world via computer two days later.

"The police battered and killed the squatters, using women as

human shields and torturing, executing and stomping on prisoners,"

says a New York Times report of the August incident published

recently.(ENDS/IPS/PC/95)

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