Word: oiling
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According to the official count, 32 people - 23 police officers and nine protesters - were killed June 5 when long-running demonstrations by indigenous people against oil development spun out of control. Hundreds more were injured and arrested. The violence was unleashed when police officers received word from Lima, the capital, to remove the protesters who were blocking a highway and the nearby pumping station on the northern pipeline. The officers moved in with tear gas and automatic weapons. The protesters were mainly armed with spears, but some had guns. Fighting along the tragically named Devil's Curve took 20 lives...
...modify the series of laws that sparked the protests. The president, addressing a military ceremony over the weekend, said he had no intention of backpedaling, claiming that there was "a conspiracy afoot to keep Peru from using it natural riches." (Read a story about the ecological perils of oil development in the Amazon rain forest...
...facilitate implementation of a free-trade agreement with the United States. The agreement came into force this past February. Indigenous communities, under AIDESEP, objected to a number of decrees that dealt with water and land rights. They argued that the decrees would not only increase the number of oil and logging concessions already granted in the country's 67 million hectares (165 million acres) of rain forest, but allow for the actual sale of their ancestral territories...
...round of protests were low-key in the beginning, but tensions increased as the weeks passed. Indigenous demonstrators began blocking roads and rivers, as well as the northern oil pipeline. The pipeline was closed in late April and the state oil company announced it was losing nearly $120,000 daily. Oil fields in the northern jungle were closed in early June. This was, apparently, one of the reasons that led to the fatal decision to order police officers to open roads and the remove protesters from the pipeline. Garcia has been talking about making Peru an oil and gas superpower...
...oil and gas concessions currently on the books, many approved during Garcia's term, 59 are in the jungle. They cover around 40 million hectares. The government claims that around 6 billion barrels of oil are just waiting to be found under the Amazon. Investment in exploration will top $1 billion this year, something the administration does not want to lose to protests. "This government wants to occupy the Amazon with concessions as if no one lived there, but it has come up against indigenous resistance," says La Torre. "What is needed now is a plan to stop the bloodshed...