Peru: Native Peoples' Right to Consultation on Land Use Enshrined in Law

[Judi Lynn]

Peru: Native Peoples' Right to Consultation on Land Use Enshrined in Law
Written by Milagros Salazar
Tuesday, 01 June 2010 08:41

(IPS) - Indigenous peoples in Peru finally have a law that obliges the state to consult them about any project or provision that affects their territory or communities. But it will be difficult to implement, as the body charged with this task is in need of reforms, and additional legislation is needed before it can be fully enforced.

It took the single-chamber Congress 16 years to pass the law on indigenous peoples' right to prior consultation after the country ratified International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169, which commits nations to protecting indigenous and tribal peoples.

Native peoples must be consulted in advance on any legislative or administrative measure, development or industrial project, plan or programme that directly affects their collective rights, according to the new law approved by the legislature on May 19.

The Peruvian Ombudsman's Office said the law is a momentous step in recognising indigenous peoples and institutionalising "intercultural dialogue between (native peoples) and state authorities."

The new law comes at a time when private investment projects are mushrooming in ancestral indigenous territories, generating a number of high impact social conflicts. The most serious took place Jun. 5, 2009 in the northern Amazon jungle province of Bagua, where 33 demonstrators and police were killed when the security forces clamped down on indigenous protesters.

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2517-peru-native-peoples-right-to-consultation-on-land-use-enshrined-in-law

[Peace Patriot]

1. I'm afraid that this may be mere cosmetics for multinational corpos' exploitation of Peru's

resources and people. Indigenous control of their lands is a difficult issue even in countries with leftist governments and good democracies, such as Venezuela and Ecuador. Both Venezuela and Ecuador have a similar law, which provides for "consultation" but does not allow Indigenous veto of projects nor Indigenous control of the mineral resources on their lands. Ecuador's leftist president has come into direct conflict with the Indigenous over this issue. They wanted a stronger provision (a veto) in the new Constitution; he didn't. He won that point. He says that Ecuador's resources belong to ALL Ecuadorans, not just the Indigenous, even when they manage to regain ownership of some lands. These leftist governments have facilitated the Indigenous regaining ownership of some lands, but not the mineral rights. Peru has an extremely corrupt (and very unpopular) "free trade for the rich" (U.S. client) government. They will likely throw every bureaucratic obstacle in their arsenal into retarding or preventing Indigenous land tenure. I suspect that this new law in Peru is intended, not to empower the Indigenous, but rather to impress U.S. Congresscritters, in an effort to quell criticism of "free trade for the rich" enforced by U.S.-funded helicopter gunships.

There is also, lurking behind all this, the vast scandal of U.S. $7 BILLION in military aid to Colombia. whose government and military have the second worst human rights record on earth. Our corporate rulers are desperate for resources, slave labor and "market" monopolies in Latin America, and the horrors in Colombia threaten that program. Peru's corrupt government has no doubt been advised to cool the enforcement end of "free trade for the rich" and create more of a "happy camper" cover for all of these horrible mining, oil and other multinational contracts and arrangements. That's Clintonism in a nutshell. Bushwhackism is to mow down the Indigenous (fighting with tribal spears) with bullets from the sky and unleash the death squads against all opposition. Clintonism is to "forget" such horrors, wherever they have been encouraged and funded (and/or inflicted) by the Bushwhacks, and benefit from the prior reign of state terror to enhance the "rights" of Monsanto, Chiquita, Exxon Mobil, et al, to plunder the country. U.S. military force and the client state's U.S. "war on drugs" establishment stand ready to reassert bloody control when necessary.