Peru: Four Dead After Government Crackdown on Protests Against US Trade Deal

[Judi Lynn]

Peru: Four Dead After Government Crackdown on Protests Against US Trade Deal
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:01:27 -0600

By Daniel Denvir
Republished from Alainet.org

Brutal repression in Peru after farmers start two-day agrarian strike.

A two-day national agrarian strike against a pending Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States ended on Wednesday February 20th, leaving four farmers dead after President Alan Garcia declared a state of emergency and ordered a violent crackdown. Farmers are demanding financial support from the government in the face of a predicted increase in the importation of highly subsidized U.S. crops with the passage of the trade deal. 700 farmers were detained, a number of whom face terrorism charges.

The strike, called by the Peruvian Farmers Confederation (Confederación Campesina del Peru, CCP) and other organizations began on Monday February 18th and ended once the government agreed to talks. The strike was in protest of what the CCP called “government indifference that has descended into the total abandonment of our nation’s farms.”

Over the last week teachers, doctors and residents also struck, angry at a series of neoliberal policies advanced by the Garcia administration.

The CCP also demanded an end to plans to privatize and exploit public lands in the Amazon, attacks on teachers´ job security, attempts to privatize water and a proposed law that would allow the privatization of cultural patrimony, including a number of sites in historic Cusco. Tens of thousands of Cusco residents blocked access to the ancient Incan ceremonial complex of Machu Pichu and other popular tourist sites and partially shut down the city's airport, leaving over two thousand tourists stranded.

The Garcia administration vacillated between declarations that the strike was a failure and angry denunciations of farmers as "extremists" and "enemies of national development." According to José Coronado of the CCP , "On Monday the 18th, when men from the country began their protest, the Minister of the Interior, who in reality is a minister of nothing, came out and said that the country was in order, ´that nothing happened´, while the country's highways were blocked by the agrarian strike. And the person pretending to be the Minister of Agriculture, who in reality is nothing more than a private banker, came out to say that ´the agrarian strike is a failure´, and then, as if nothing happened, went on to declare a State of Emergency in the provinces where the strike was strong." While claiming that all was normal on television, police cracked down against protesters in an effort to stamp out the strike, which generated an estimated $8.6 million in economic losses.

More:
http://www.guerrillanews.com/headlines/16873/Peru_Four_Dead_After_Government_Crackdown_on_Protests_Against_US_Trade_Deal

article continued on:
http://alainet.org/active/22414&lang=en

[subsuelo]

1. I believe Garcia has called the farmers "terrorists" previously

[Judi Lynn]

2. Unacceptable. Didn't know. He already ran up a human rights deficit in his earlier abuse of

authority as Peru's President.

Hoping they won't let him get by with this.

This should be the era in which Latin America leaves these U.S. pawns behind permanently.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Bush's guy, Garcia, SUSPENDED CIVIL RIGHTS in eight provinces!

"The state of emergency suspended a number of constitutional rights, including the right to public assembly and the right against arbitrary home searches. The declaration also gave the military control over domestic policing in the eight provinces."
http://alainet.org/active/22414&lang=en

When did Hugo Chavez ever do anything like this? Never is the answer. And who gets called a "tyrant" and a "dictator" by the Bushites, the collusive Democrats and the global corporate predator 'news' monopolies?

It's okay to be a dictator if you kill the poor. But it's not okay to "dictate" reasonable terms to Exxon Mobil, on behalf of the poor.

Alice in Wonderland.