Peruvian indigenous groups desperately trying to protect the Amazon have been massacred (dozens shot, burned, bodies dropped from helicopters) in recent days by their country’s armed forces. They had been peacefully protesting the current administration’s having pushed through legislation allowing intensive mining, logging and large-scale farming in the rainforest.

I just signed a petition urging President Alan García to immediately cease the suppression of indigenous protests, to suspend laws that open up the Amazon to extractive industries, and to engage in a genuine dialogue with the indigenous groups.

These indigenous groups are on the frontline of the struggle to protect our earth. Let’s stand with them and call on President Alan Garcia (who is widely known to be sensitive to his international reputation) to immediately stop the violence and open up dialogue. Click below to sign the urgent global petition.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/peru_stop_violence/98.php?CLICK_TF_TRACK

More than 70 percent of the Peruvian Amazon is now up for grabs. Giant oil and gas companies, like the Anglo-French Perenco and the North Americans ConocoPhillips and Talisman Energy, have already pledged multibillion-dollar investments in the region. These extractive industries have a very poor record of bringing benefits to local people and preserving the environment in developing countries – which is why indigenous groups are asking for internationally recognized rights to consultation on the new laws.

For decades the world and indigenous peoples have watched as extractive industries devastated the rainforest that is home to some and a vital treasure to us all (some climate scientists call the Amazon the “lungs of the planet” – breathing in the carbon emissions that cause global warming, and “exhaling” oxygen).

Sources:

1. Civilians and police killed: Human rights lawyers accuse the government of a cover-up, BBC, 10 June:
   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8092453.stm
2. Civil Society Condemns Massacre of Indigenous People in Peru, 8 June:
   http://www.globalwitness.org/media_library_detail.php/765/en/global_witness_condems_violence_in_peru
3. On Peru’s rift over economic policy and the controversial free trade agreement with the US, Reuters, 9 June:
   http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN09374943
4. Research Article: Oil and Gas Projects in the Western Amazon: Threats to Wilderness, Biodiversity, and Indigenous Peoples, M. Finer et al.:
   http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.pone.0002932
5. Oil companies “should withdras” as Peru “faces its Tiananmen,” Survival International, 8 June:
   http://www.survival-international.org/news/4640
6. Peru’s Amazon oil deals denounced, BBC News, 3 February:
   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6326741.stm

Also, photos of the horrific violence, & videotaped testimony in Spanish, are available here:
http://peruanista.blogspot.com/2009/06/update-on-peru-crisis-new-video-proves.html