Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Devil's Curve

2011; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 28; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0740277511402804

1936-0924

Emily Schmall,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

Bagua grande, Peru—Daylight had not yet broken on a remote road outside this small city in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest of northern Peru. but along the narrow strip of highway—known to locals as the Devil's Curve—thousands of protesters were huddled. Most were members of indigenous tribes. It was June 5, 2009, and they had been blocking the highway for two months.The tribes and the environmental activists allied with them were demanding the repeal of two legislative decrees that had opened the rainforest to oil exploration, mining and large-scale agricultural development. The Amazon natives feared new exploration would force them out, and felt slighted after the government set a plan in action without consulting them. Their confrontation with Peru's president, Alan Garcia, had reached a fever pitch.Protesters built makeshift tents of plastic sheeting on the highway and used tree trunks and rocks to block passage to a lucrative oil pipeline and the road to Peru's northern ports. Helicopters swarmed over the crowd. Officers from the national police force trained their automatic weapons on the protesters gathered below.The sense of crisis had spread all the way to the capital, Lima. Just a day earlier, Ollanta Humala, the head of the Peruvian Nationalist Party and a rival of Garcia, had called on Congress to set up an extraordinary session to repeal one of the decrees. His plea went unheeded. On June 5, Garcia ordered security forces to clear the highway. The siege began around 5:30 in the morning. Some 500 security officers flooded the road, firing tear gas into the crowd. As the violence continued throughout the day, 34 people died by gunfire, including 23 police officers.“The number of people injured is unimaginable,” reported Carlos Flores, a journalist for Radio La Voz de Bagua. “They're strewn all over the highway. Please, we need help to make the violence stop.”Journalists later reported seeing police dump bodies into the nearby Utcubamba River, and human-rights groups condemned the siege as a state-orchestrated massacre. Townspeople sympathetic to the indigenous protesters contributed to the melee, burning down a police station. Each side accused the other of responsibility for the brutal attacks. The political fallout began with the resignation of the prime minister several weeks after the siege. Eighteen months later, five indigenous leaders accused of inciting the tribes to violence in the protests leading up to Bagua were convicted of treason and sentenced to four years in prison. At least 250 other government complaints have been lodged against protesters, according to the indigenous-rights advocacy group Amazon Watch.The incident at Bagua—the Baguazo, as it became known in Peru, using a local idiom to express the size of the event—attracted little international attention. But it serves as a stark reminder of the potentially high costs, both human and political, faced by developing countries hoping to spur economic growth by taking advantage of natural resources in environmentally vulnerable areas. It's a tempting path. But it comes with serious built-in risks and trade-offs—social and political, as well as economic—as Peru's leaders and citizens are discovering.As commodity prices soar on growing demand from China and other large markets, Peru might emerge as a proving ground for Latin American approaches to balancing economic growth with human rights, environmental concerns, and a respect for the way of life—or, in some cases, the very survival—of indigenous people.The tension between these competing aims is roiling the entire Amazonian region and posing major challenges to its political leaders. In Ecuador, President Rafael Correa has pledged to refrain from drilling for oil in the Yasuni National Park, a 10,000-hectare, species-rich area of the Amazon that sits above nearly 20 percent of the country's oil reserves, forfeiting $3.6 billion in revenue. In Bolivia, environmental activists are waging a crusade to protect Madidi National Park, a 1.9 million-hectare nature preserve in the upper Amazon River basin where the Bolivian government hopes to drill for gas and oil.But it is in Peru where the conflict has become most stark. Among the world's fastest-growing economies, Peru has passed a series of laws promoting foreign investment and bolstered growth with oil, natural gas and mineral exports. But these initiatives risk trampling the rights of large numbers of its people, especially those who live off the land, while destroying the nation's environmental heritage. The stakes are high. Peru is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. Half of all species in Peru are found nowhere else. That means that what happens in this corner of Latin America should be of concern far beyond its borders.Peru's way forward depends to a great degree on President Garcia, a veteran of the country's political system and its many intrigues. Garcia has undertaken a broad effort to transform the structure of the nation's economy, at times ignoring indigenous concerns along the way. During his first term as President, in the late 1980s, Garcia's protectionist policies—referred to in Latin America as economic “nationalism”—drove the economy to near collapse. Voters tossed him out in 1990 after one term, and elected Alberto Fujimori to succeed him. After Fujimori's government began investigating Garcia's conduct while in office, Garcia fled into self-imposed exile abroad until 2001.During his time out of power, many of his economic views shifted—as did his ideas about the political means necessary to implement them. In a series of essays and books published in the run-up to the 2006 election, Garcia presented his plan to develop Peru by exploiting natural resources and encouraging major foreign investment. Developing millions of acres in the Andes and Amazon rainforest would not only benefit big companies, Garcia wrote in one essay, “but also will create hundreds of thousands of formal jobs for Peruvians who live in the poorest zones of the country.” After winning office, Garcia signed free trade agreements negotiated by his predecessors, Fujimori and Alejandro Toledo, opening Peru to unprecedented foreign investment and industry.Garcia has said he wants Peru to be a “first world” country by 2021, its bicentennial year. But his push for economic growth has produced uneven results. Since 2006, GDP has increased by 41 percent, according to the World Bank. But the wealth created by this new growth has been unevenly distributed. Still, there has been a “rising tide” effect. When Garcia was sworn in as president in 2006, Peru had a nearly 50 percent poverty rate. Official numbers say the current poverty rate has decreased to about a third of the population. Significant downsides notwithstanding, Garcia's approach has lifted a substantial portion of Peruvians out of poverty. “It's an example for Latin America of how to coordinate social policy and economic policy with the goal of reducing poverty,” says Marcos Robles, an economist at the Inter-American Development Bank. “It's not the country that has most reduced poverty, but it's the country that worked most insistently to achieve these goals.”But the poverty-reduction statistics do not tell the whole story. Peru spends less than any other Latin American country on social programs like education and health care. Weak enforcement reduces regulation to little more than lip service to the goals of improving living or working standards for the vast majority of its most deprived. “If you look at the social statistics, they don't yet paint Peru as a stable country,” Robles concedes. It is estimated that 25 percent of the total population has no access to water, and more than half lack adequate sanitation. The quality of education is among the lowest in the hemisphere, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. In those vital measurements of a country's overall well-being, there has been little change for the better in decades—as ordinary Peruvians are all too aware.Victor Raul Zapata Ramos, 23, used to work at a foreign-owned textile factory. Now selling handmade jewelry for 10 soles (about three dollars) outside an upscale, oceanfront shopping mall in Lima, Zapata abandoned his job at the factory because of the tough working conditions. “For us, nothing has changed. Companies exploit you. You work 12, 13 hours a day, Monday to Saturday, and even that work is not secure,” he says.For indigenous tribes living in the Amazon, conditions have only worsened, according to Amazon Watch. “We're seeing an intensification of poverty in the Amazon Basin,” says Britton Schwartz, the group's advocate for Peru. Schwartz points to the loss of fishing opportunities on the Urubamba River that have resulted from increased boat traffic associated with nearby resource-extraction projects.But in the wake of the Bagua clash, Garcia was more concerned with assuaging a different constituency—the residents of Peru's coastal cities, who have been enriched by five years of pro-investment policies. That was Garcia's target audience during a televised interview he gave on the day of the clash. “If 400,000 natives can say to 28 million Peruvians, ‘You can't come here,’ that is a very grave error,” he said. “Anyone who thinks that way wants to take us on an irrational and primitive retreat into the past.” In another interview, Garcia described the protesters as standing in the way of Peru's economic progress, likening his opponents to a dog who doesn't want food but doesn't want anyone else to eat either. Failing to move forward would condemn Peru's rural and indigenous communities to “another century of misery,” he warned.Most provocatively, Garcia compared the demonstrators to the Shining Path, a quasi-Maoist insurgent group that spent more than two decades trying to topple the Peruvian state, killing thousands of civilians and security personnel. Garcia used this dubious comparison to justify declaring a state of emergency in four different regions, including Bagua, giving security officers license to use force to disperse crowds. But judging from the strength of subsequent demonstrations over the use of natural resources, the environmental protest movement is only gaining ground.As it happens, many opponents of Garcia's approach are members of the country's mainstream political establishment. During the administration of Alejandro Toledo, former First Lady Eliane Karp, a Belgian-born anthropologist and former World Bank employee, championed pro-Amazonian legislation as head of the Commission of Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian Peoples. The measure called for Congress to consult indigenous groups before passing laws that would affect them. After Bagua, Congress passed the bill. But Garcia dragged his feet. In August 2010, he said he would only sign the law if it included several modifications that critics claim would blunt its impact. “We're not going to accept a law that has been mutilated and slanted by the government,” said Melchor Lima of the Campesina Confederation of Peru, a group that promotes the rights of indigenous people.Despite Peru's steady economic growth during Garcia's term, the indigenous groups in Bagua enjoy a good deal of public support across the nation—posing an enormous political challenge to the government. While the fighting was underway in June 2009, huge crowds gathered in Lima in support of the protesters. The crowds received alarming reports about the ongoing violence from one of the demonstration's leaders, Alberto Pizango, president of the Interethnic Association for the Development of Peru's Jungle.“They're shooting at us just like if we were delinquents, or animals,” Pizango told a group of foreign journalists gathered for a press conference in Lima the day after the police intervention. Pizango was subsequently charged by the government with inciting rebellion and sedition, and for leading a protest in August 2008 when demonstrators seized a natural gas field and a petroleum pipeline. He fled to Nicaragua but was arrested upon his return to Peru in May 2010. The case against Pizango remains at the trial stage. His is just one of an estimated 250 criminal cases lodged against participants in demonstrations held in the months before Bagua and in the Bagua protest itself, according to Amazon Watch.Several weeks after the Bagua siege, Prime Minister Yehude Simon apologized for the government's hard-line response and resigned, along with the government ministers in charge of the military and police. Simon, a former left-leaning political activist who Garcia appointed in an effort to appease nationalist groups in the country, acknowledged that the tribes should have been consulted before the decrees opening the rainforest to development were given the force of law. At the same time, Congress repealed the decrees and passed the consultation law—which remains unsigned by Garcia.As in neighboring Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia, the entry of private industry—through land concessions for mineral and hydrocarbon exploration—has been a polarizing social and political issue in Peru. In October 2008, Garcia purged his entire cabinet amid an ongoing scandal over whether officials in the government received bribes in exchange for oil exploration concessions. In turn, Pizango and other Garcia critics launched massive protests in response to the corruption charges. “There are social conflicts related to an economy that is growing really fast and steadily upward and the kind of inequality that produces. The rich are getting richer and there's resentment over who is getting a cut of the pie,” says Cynthia Sanborn, a professor of political science at Lima's Universidad del Pacifico.None of this, however, seems to be slowing the economic juggernaut. Peru's economy is estimated to have grown 8.8 percent in 2010. Within Latin America, Peru is second only to Brazil in attracting foreign investment. The United States is Peru's biggest trading partner, and following a free trade agreement between the two countries that went into effect in February 2009, American investment in Peru rose from $5 billion in 2006 to $8.5 billion in 2009—a substantial portion of Peru's total foreign direct investment, which grew some 20 percent from $15.5 billion in 2006 to $18.8 billion in 2009, according to Peru's government. A free trade agreement with China went into effect in March 2010.Peru's social strife apparently hasn't diminished the allure of Peru for foreign investors. “It's already priced in,” says Jorge Rave, a spokesman for the Canadian trade group Export Development Canada. Many foreign investors have shrugged off the unrest in the country as nothing more than inevitable growing pains as Peru's economic role expands. But there are many sides to the Peruvian growth story—and the tensions that have punctuated it.In the past decade, Peru has made huge investments in agriculture, improving irrigation systems to convert some 370,000 acres of coastal deserts into arable land. It is now a top exporter of specialty crops like asparagus, grapes and avocados. Farming the heavily populated, arid coastal lands satisfies a growing foreign demand for Peruvian produce, while offering jobs to farm workers. Still, maintaining that output requires ever more water, leading to the development of major irrigation projects to direct water from the Andes or Amazon River basins to the coast. These projects have become another rallying cry of advocates for the indigenous, who claim that water diversions to the coast threaten the water supplies of tribes in the source regions.Last September, an international consortium was awarded a $424 million contract to build a dam and two hydroelectric plants and irrigate 38,000 acres in Arequipa, about 600 miles from the capital. More than 1,000 protesters opposed to the project broke through the walls surrounding the airport, killing one person, injuring 18 others, and shutting down tourist destinations in nearby Cusco. The protesters claimed the project will drain local aquifers, depriving residents of water for household and agricultural use.In December, President Garcia signed off on the project. In January, however, a Cusco judge ordered the project halted until an impact study is conducted.Peru's 2009 free-trade agreement with the United States specifically stipulated that multinational corporations would receive greater access to Peru's natural resources—especially its hydrocarbons. The Peruvian government projects foreign investment in mining, oil, and natural gas could total $35 billion in the next five years. But energy exploration is a risky endeavor. In 2004, the government signed a $3.9 billion deal with the Camisea consortium, led by Argentina's Pluspetrol and Texas's Hunt Oil, to extract natural gas from a pristine stretch of the Amazon. Four months after the project came online, its main pipeline ruptured, and an explosion ripped through the jungle, spewing contaminants into the rivers and streams. Eight months later, it happened again—then once more, 18 days later. By March 2006, the rainforest pipeline had seen five ruptures. In the lush jungle village of Echarati, the most recent rupture caused a fire that engulfed farms and set roofs ablaze, sending three burn victims to the hospital.Critics called on the government to reevaluate the laws regulating hydrocarbon exploration. Protests over the issue in August 2008 closed down parts of the Camisea project and shut down electricity stations in the northern Amazon. Last August, Garcia's administration declared a state of emergency after demonstrators burned a camp and attacked a gas pumping station near the Camisea gas fields. Several days later, 1,000 activists blocked the road leading to Camisea to protest its exportation of liquefied natural gas. The demonstrators demanded that the government reserve some of the gas for the domestic natural gas market and ask for higher royalty payments from the Camisea consortium. This marked a sharp shift in the opposition's tactics—from a blanket effort to preserve the entire eco-structure to a more accommodating political strategy. Local indigenous leaders, it seemed, had been co-opted by the promise of higher royalties.The government conceded one lot's proven reserves to the domestic market, pending a renegotiated contract with the companies who hold the licenses. Renegotiations are ongoing. Meanwhile, Peru's government has already divvied up 70 percent of the rainforest into oil and gas concessions. While oil has been drilled in the Amazon for 35 years, the scale of past exploration pales in comparison to what's in store. In 2003, there were 27 energy concessions in the Peruvian rainforest. There are now more than 100. Environmental protections are baked into most of the energy concessions, but no regulatory mechanism has been introduced to enforce them. An environmental ministry was created in 2008, to help the government comply with standards imposed by the free-trade agreement with the United States. But observers say it's still struggling to get on its feet.“The biggest fear is that the most remote, and therefore most intact, sections of the Peruvian Amazon will soon be inhabited with islands of drilling platforms and, even worse, new roads and pipelines,” says Matt Finer, an ecologist who co-authored a Duke University study of Amazon oil and gas projects that recommended finding a way to introduce further exploration without building any new roads.President Garcia has been heralded by some as a pragmatist for taking steps to confront economic realities and the resulting social changes that some see as all but inevitable. “During the administration of Alan Garcia, the country experienced tremendous growth. The fact that the economy has been growing for so many consecutive years has been positive. However fragile and however unequal, the growth itself is positive,” says Cynthia Sanborn, the professor of political science at Lima's Universidad del Pacifico. But Garcia's willingness to crush any opposition by using force may cost his center-left party the elections in April 2011. (Garcia himself is prohibited by law from seeking a second consecutive term.)The latest ipsos poll shows former president Toledo ahead of three likely contenders: former Lima Mayor Luis Castaneda; Keiko Fujimori, a popular legislator and the daughter of former President Fujimori (currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for crimes committed during his tenure); and Ollanta Humala, the nationalist candidate who narrowly lost the 2006 election.Anger over the violence against demonstrators has aided the political fortunes of parties tied to indigenous groups. Protest leaders have won seats in office and secured higher royalties for their regions. In local elections last September, politicians supporting nationalist economic policies—such as increasing the royalties paid to Peru by multinational mining companies—prevailed at the polls. Yet in a victory of sorts for Garcia, whoever succeeds him will almost certainly maintain his pro-development economic policies. Indeed, all three frontrunners in the race to replace him are perceived as center-right. That is partly the result of the political failure of the coalition of indigenous-rights advocates and environmental groups that have been Garcia's most vocal opponents. Though the events in Bagua provoked widespread outrage, opponents of Garcia's economic-development approach were not able to convert that anger into increased political influence for themselves.The uncertain strength of tribal advocates and environmentalists is a political reality that will have implications beyond Peru. The country has been generously rewarded by international investors for displaying less reluctance than its neighbors—namely Ecuador, Bolivia and Colombia—to open up environmentally sensitive land occupied by indigenous people to exploration and drilling. The fact that Garcia, or at least his policies, seem to have triumphed in Peru may be changing the political calculations of leaders in those neighboring states. Indeed, Peru's neighbors have already begun reversing previous stances and are beginning to move in a direction similar to Peru. Bolivia plans to drill for oil and build a hydroelectric dam within a national park while Ecuador is offering greater numbers of concessions to oil and gas companies to drill in its portion of the Amazon.Following Peru's lead may prove advantageous in the short term to Bolivia's Evo Morales or Ecuador's Rafael Correa. But in the long run, if the Amazonian states do not find a way to enroll the vast bulk of their disenfranchised populations in the economic miracle that today benefits only the privileged few, they risk unrest on a scale that might make the violence in Bagua seem merely a prelude.