Can Peru Control the Murderous Resource Rush on its Forest Frontiers?
Can Peru Control the Murderous Resource Rush on its Forest Frontiers?
By Andrew C. Revkin
October 10, 2014 12:06 pm
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Edwin Chota in 2013 at a sawmill with some of the 800 logs that he said were extracted
illegally from his community in Peru.Credit Tomas Munita for The New York Times [/font]
Six weeks ago, a powerful voice for conservation and governance on Peru’s ragged, violent Amazon rain forest frontier was silenced, adding the name Edwin Chota to the lamentable list of campaigners and others killed around the world in places where a rush for valuable resources takes place in the absence of enforced rules.
Chota, a leader of the Ashaninka Indian village of Saweto near the border with Brazil, was murdered with three companions on Sept. 1.
As Scott Wallace so vividly reported for National Geographic in 2013, Chota was adept at organizing patrols to confront loggers on tribal territory, echoing the work of Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper who similarly fought — and died — just across the border in Brazil in 1988.
A critical issue in the Peruvian forest is land title. “As long as we don’t have title, the loggers don’t respect native ownership,” Chota told Wallace in 2013. “They threaten us. They intimidate. They have the guns.”
And they use them.
As I wrote in the updated edition of “The Burning Season,” my book on Mendes’s life and legacy, Brazil moved assertively in the years following the assassination of Mendes to bring meaningful governance to the Amazon. There is still violence there, but the rate of killings has plunged since the 1980s (and the deforestation rate is way down, as well).
Peru would do well to follow Brazil’s lead.
More:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/can-peru-control-the-murderous-resource-rush-on-its-forest-frontiers/?_php=true&_type=blogs&partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0