this is a pre-edited version of the story.
ENVIRONMENT-LATIN AMERICA: Violence in the Amazon mocks the law
By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Oct 3 (IPS) - Four months ago native peoples were
evicted at gun point in Roraima near Venezuela. In August landless
peasants were massacred in Rondonia near Bolivia. In the last few
weeks shooting has broken out at gold mines in Suriname.
These are just a few of the violent incidents that have marked
the last few months in the dense Amazon forests in South
America that stretch from Bolivia in the south across Brazil to
Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela in the north.
Accounts of some of the incidnents have been macabre. ''They
shot a 6-year-old girl dead as she tried to walk to safety by a
towering tree, forced one prisoner to eat soil mixed with his
blood and another to eat the brains spilling from a battered
corpse they had ordered him to carry,'' wrote one reporter
about the Rondonia massacre.
Many of these conflicts are touched off by miners and loggers
who have invaded the remotest parts of the Amazon to extract
coal, gold and timber. These groups range from small artisenal
miners known locally as ''porknokkers'' to giant timber
companies from faraway Indonesia and Malaysia who have invaded
the lands of native groups throughout the region.
Other conflicts have been sparked by poor peasants in search
for land for farming, Government security forces have also set
off bloody battles with both indigenous people and landless
farmers.
In theory most of the conflicts should not have happened
because legal agreements were put in place to prevent them but
apparently these agreements are not working.
Worst hit by the invasions are groups like the Yanomami who
live on the border of Brazil and Venezuela, who have never
encountered industrial society.
Two years ago Brazilian miners in search of gold slaughtered 20
Yanomami peoples on the Upper Orinocco provoking an
international outcry but little by way of action.
Today deadly conflict continues in Venezuela, according to
Marcus Colchester of the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) and
Fiona Watson of Survival International, both based in England,
who have just completed a report on the peoples of the
country.
''Killings of Indians by military and police forces have been
reported from Wayuu and Yupka areas in the north west of
(Venezuela),'' writes Colchester in the report entitled:
''Venezuela: Violation of Indigenous Rights.''
The Wayuu and the Yupka have lost their lands in the Sierra de
la Perija to large state controlled open-cast coal mines and
oil drilling. The Yupka, together with the Bari peoples, their
neighbours, have also lost their land to invasions of poor
farmers and ranchers from neighbouring Colombia
Development schemes in other parts of Venezuela has also
brought death, displacement and disease to native peoples. The
lands of the Pemon, the Kapon, the Kari'na and Lokono peoples
in Bolivar state near the border with Guyana have been turned
into timber concessions.
These land grabs are not new to the Pemon who have been
displaced more than once in the last 15 years when aluminium,
iron and steel industries were set up with financial support
from the Inter American Development Bank and the World Bank.
Colchester and Watson say that these incidents should not have
happened because Venezuela signed a national law based on
International Labour Organisation conventions to prevent this
from happening. The two authors have recently appealed to the
ILO to investigate Venezuela's failure to implement this law.
Violence came this year to other groups in the Amazon like the
Maroons of Suriname -- former African slaves who escaped their
colonial masters 350 years ago to set up their own societies
in the forests.
In the last few weeks the Saramaca tribe of Maroons, who live
at Nieuw Koffiekamp in northern Suriname, were shot at by
security officials working for Canadian-owned Golden Star
mining company, according to reports from local human rights
organisations like Moiwani '86.
''I have seen the security guards riding around in the white
jeeps with M16 assault rifles. I don't think they got people in
their sights but the situation has become very serious for the
people of the interior,'' says Gary Branashute, an
anthropologist from George Washington university in this city,
who returned from a visit to the mine site a week ago.
Golden Star officials do not deny that their officials carry
weapons. ''Our personnel are under strict rules and will only
use force in response to an immediate threat to life,'' wrote
Peter Donald, the general manager of Golden Star's operations
in Suriname in reply to letters of protest.
Golden Star, which is also a shareholder in the Omai gold mine
in Guyana, has come under a lot of pressure in in recent
months after a major cyanide spill occurred at Omai destroying
the local rivers.
In many of these conflicts the local governments side with
private industry, say observers. Branashute says that the
Surinamese government has sent a contingent of police to back
up Golden Star security forces.
''Three years ago the government signed an agreement, brokered
by the Organisation of American States, to protect the Maroons
and recognise their land rights. It was obviously just rich
words and empty prose,'' he told IPS.
Government troops have also been accused of attacking the
Macuxi, an indigenous group numbering about 12,000 who live in
Brazil near the border with Venezuela.
This March the Brazilian army was sent in ostensibly to help
protect the Macuxi. Instead the ''army is driving indigenous
people from their homes, destroying houses, and intimidating
communities at gunpoint,'' say reports from the Indian Council
of Roraima.
''The army has assumed "exclusive powers" over the area,
consistently siding with the thousands of gold miners and
migrants who have invaded the Macuxi homeland,'' it adds.
Loggers looking for mahogany wood are also reported to be
invading the land of the Arara peoples near Belem at the mouth
of the Amazon in northern Brazil with the help of local
government officials,
Both the Arara and the Macuxi land is officially protected by
the Brazilian government under the 1988 constitution which
required the government to set aside 557 protected areas
covering 11 percent of Brazil's land mass for the 320,000
indigenous people in the country.
Local politicians and businesses argue that it is unfair that
the native groups, who comprise less than one percent of the
160 million population, should get so much land.
But social activists point out that the real problem is that 10
percent of the population controls 80 percent of the land. Some
2 million families are estimated to be looking for land.
These landess peasants have also suffered at the hands of the
army. Two months ago the Brazilian army was accused of
massacring and injuring dozens poor landless peasants in
Rondonia, which borders Bolivia.
Riot police wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying tear gas
made a dawn raid on ''Fazenda Santa Helena'' (Santa Helena
farm) which had been set up by squatters less than a month
before.
''Many people are lost in the bush and some wounded, dazed by
the tear gas, plunged in the river. At this point it's
impossible to know exactly how many people died,'' wrote an
eyewitness whose report flashed across the world via computer
two days later.
''The police battered and killed the squatters, using women as
human shields and torturing, executing and stomping on
prisoners,'' says a New York Times report of the August
incident published recently.(ENDS/IPS/PC/95)