How did we miss this until now? PLAN COLOMBIA MILITARIZES PERUVIAN AMAZON

[Judi Lynn]

PLAN COLOMBIA MILITARIZES PERUVIAN AMAZON

Indians Accuse Armed Forces of Illegally Seizing Land--as New "Resource Mafia" Replaces Narcos

by Bill Weinberg

Peru's vast and remote stretch of the Amazon rainforest south of the Colombian border has been declared a "national security" priority, and in the four years since Plan Colombia was launched the Peruvian government has re-established control over what had been a lawless region--with the help of US military aid and advisors. But indigenous and campesino leaders in the Peruvian Amazon say military forces--including bases that host US advisors--are operating illegally on usurped indigenous lands. And, ironically, so is a new mafia, this time based on resource exploitation rather than drug-smuggling--with the connivance of the military and authorities.

Iquitos Naval Base: Green Berets on Contested Turf

The Peruvian Amazon port of Iquitos is one of the biggest cities on the river, and the last major trade hub before the Brazilian border some 300 kilometers downstream. Just across the Rio Nanay, a tributary that meets the Amazon at Iquitos' harbor, is the major Peruvian Navy base for the region--a critical point for coordinating operations along the Colombian border, which lies across 200 kilometers of dense, roadless jungle to the north.

In March 2002, the US and Peru signed a bilateral Peru Riverine Plan, to increase joint military-police patrols against narco-traffickers on the Amazon waterways. Under this agreement, the US provides an annual $3 million--mostly slated for operations coordinated from Iquitos. The US State Department Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs has requested an aditional $135 million for fiscal year 2003 to support narcotics enforcement efforts in Peru--again with a major focus being the Amazon region policed from Iquitos.

Since 1999, the Iquitos naval base has hosted a permanent contingent of 33 US military advisers--"Green Berets"--who rotate every 90 days. The US has also supplied gunboats for the Iquitos base. One of the seventeen radar sites maintained by the Pentagon's Southern Command to detect possible drug-smuggling flights is at the Iquitos base--with another two also in the region, down the Amazon at the Colombian port of Leticia and up the Rio Ucayali at Puallpa, Peru.

But Washington seems not to have taken account of the land dispute at Iquitos Naval Base, which encompasses five vilages of the Cocama-Cocamilla and Huitoto-Murruy indigenous peoples. The vilagers are prohibited by Navy declaration from building any new structures in their communities without official authorization from the military. Mario Jaramillo, a traditional Cocama-Cocamilla leader at the village of Santo Tomas, calls the policy one of "systematic extermination."

More:
http://www.ww4report.com/static/peru1.html

[Wilms]

1. k&r n/t

[Peace Patriot]

2. Kicked! Too late to recommend. Thanks for posting! nt

[subsuelo]

3. "a lawless region"

That was of course one the U.S. excuses for wiping out the Native Americans. That the indigenous people were "lawless" or "savages" and needed to be tamed and controlled.