Dear Friends,
The Advisory Council of the National Coffee Board of Peru (JNC) has commissoned us to share with you our deepest sorrow over the violence carried out against the indigenous population of the provinces of Jaén, Utcubamba and Bagua, in the north of the country, causing the loss of lives and hundreds of wounded. These methods of resolving the legitímate demands of those marginalized social sectors only generate greater violence and provoke more injustices, behavior which is at odds with the democratic values that are so frequently invoked.
It is vital that we be able to count on your solidarity with the indigenous and small farmers of the north of Peru.
Lorenzo Castillo, JNC
We received this email a few days ago accompanied by a formal letter of protest from the Peruvian National Coffee Board expressing solidarity with the communities in the north of Peru where a massacre occurred early in the morning on Friday, June 5th.
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The following information has been compiled from several reports written by the Quixote Center:
For the past two months, communities throughout the Peruvian Amazon have been protesting new laws that usher in an unprecedented wave of extractive industries – expanding logging, oil drilling, mining, and destructive agriculture into the Amazon Rainforest. President Alan Garcia’s government passed these laws under “fast track” authority he had received from the Peruvian congress to make laws to facilitate implementation of the US –Peru Free Trade Agreement (FTA).
Over 30,000 indigenous people have taken to blockading roads, rivers, and railways to demand the repeal of these new laws that allow transnational oil, mining and logging companies to enter indigenous territories without seeking prior consultation or consent. The indigenous are using these nonviolent actions to protest this unprecedented expansion of new transnational petroleum, mining and logging actions which threaten indigenous communities, their resource rights, and the future of the Amazon. (more…)
Small Farmers. Big Change. 