Mario Vargas Llosa
Last week the Peruvian Congress repealed the legislative decrees that had provoked a riot indigenous to big proportions in the Amazonia: I block of highways, capture of companies, paralyzation and armed actions in which 24 police officers perished (decolletes, speared and burned) and ten (shot) civil ones and approximately 150 persons turned out to be hurt, according to numbers verified by the Defensoría of the People. On eve, from Palace of Government, the president of the Republic, Alan García Pérez, promoter of those decrees, had done his self-criticism, regretting without having consulted them previously with the indigenous communities and telling that this crease of the Government was done so as to keep the peace and to finish the blood spilling.
This way, the Interethnic Association of Development of the Peruvian Forest (Aidesep), in which there are member approximately 1.300 native communities and his leader Alberto Pizango (now given shelter in Nicaragua), who led the rebellious movement, they obtain an indisputable victory. Although, to keep the forms, the abolition of the decrees has come accompanied from a vague proposal to install a negotiations table, from now on, to harmonize ideas between authorities and native, we all know that neither this one nor probably future governments will dare in Peru to try to put the hand again in the Amazonia to encourage the private investment and the economic development of this region, the poorest and depopulated of Peru, which represents approximately two thirds of the national geography.
A thing is, then, completely guaranteed: the 332 Amazon native thousand, that, according to the census of 2007, distributed in approximately fifteen groups etnolinguísticos, speak nearly 70 dialects, will keep on being in the future years the most helpless and exploited citizens of Peru, which receive the worst education, they have less opportunities of work and the worst expectations of health and of life of the whole country. If this is not a pyrrhic victory: what is?
In spite of his slightly diffuse language, the satanizados decrees were in the fund quite well faced. They were chasing a pressing need: to attract private investment and top technology towards a region that has big reservations of gas, oil and many minerals and might be a source of prosperity and modernization for this poor country that is Peru, starting, clearly, for who more it helps they need: the native communities of the Amazonia.
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It is false of any falsity, for anyone who throws a simple glimpse to the decrees in question, which in them one was not trying to know the right of property of the native ones to his ancestral grounds. The other way round: his intention, explicit and implicit, it was to demarcate these districts in order that his legalization was effective and not, as till now, a mere abstraction contradicted every day by the multiple invasions of that these grounds are victims on the part of the drug traffickers, the wild deforestation that is turning his forests into desert, the illegal mining and frenzied contamination of rivers and lakes that the Amazon fauna and the flora is annihilating.
It is true that the Government, before sending to the Parliament these decrees, should carry out an intense campaign of information and dialogues with the native communities. It is not sure that it had been more effective than the demagogues and extremists who, for time, with the support desembozado of Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez, have poisoning to the whole Amazon region with a revolutionary sermon which basic supports are the anticapitalism, the nationalism and the racism. Namely the rejection of the private enterprise and of the foreign investment – except, clearly, if she is a Venezuelan, Cuban or Iranian - simultaneously that the recognition of "indigenous nations" that would have the exclusive right to the Amazon grounds. But, trying that dialogue, at least the dead persons and injured men would have been avoided, and the big material damages that this has caused to Peru. And the Government had saved a political defeat that the enemies of the democracy – a minority of spiteful and nostalgic of Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Luminous Footpath - are going to interpret now as an incentive for new violent actions that should finish with the dynamic rhythm of growth that has the country, ruin it and this way bring it over more to the orbit chavista of the revolution bolivariana and to the Cuban "model". (He will continue)
(*) Published in The Commerce, of Lima (Peru), in his edition of June 28.
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