Another war for oil

Our companion blog Socialist Courier has already raised the issue of the war against the indigenous peoples of Peru in the pursuit of capital expansion .

"We are all aware of the critics of Karl Marx who say that he may have had something to say about early capitalism but his criticisms are old-fashioned and out of date. Away back in 1867 Marx wrote about the "so-called primitive accumulation of capital" wherein he showed how the capitalist class in England had obtained its great wealth by such acts as the enclosure acts to throw peasants off their land. Today a similar process is taking place in Peru...Far from being outdated Marx's view on the development of capitalist ownership is being re-enacted in today's newspaper headlines."

Over the last two months, indigenous Peruvians have been protesting government policies that would allow major corporations to mine for oil and gas on indigenous communities' ancestral lands. The demands are that Congress revoke laws to promote oil and natural gas extraction, logging and large-scale agriculture on traditional Indian lands. Garcia decreed the laws to comply with a new U.S.-Peru free trade agreement. He is a free-market champion who is opening vast tracts of jungle to oil exploration by companies including France's Perenco SA, Spain's Repsol-YPF and U.S.-based ConocoPhillips. Peru's worst political violence since the Shining Path have prompted Indian and labor groups to call a general strike for Thursday.

Survival International has called on all oil and gas companies to suspend operations in the Peruvian Amazon until the conflict can be resolved, maintaining that only when indigenous communal land rights are recognized can fair negotiations take place between local communities and mining corporations.
"In the last few years more than 70 percent of the Amazon has been parceled out to oil and gas companies for exploration, and a series of large-scale finds threaten to transform much of the Indians' virgin forests," notes Survival.

In neighboring Ecuador, exploitation of natural resources has also been tied to chronic pollution and ill health of local indigenous peoples.

Peru is not converting its resource wealth into benefits for its poorest citizens," says Oxfam America. While half of Peru's population lives in poverty, the government receives more than $2 billion per year from extractive industries, such as gold and silver mining, and the construction of natural gas pipelines, specifies the international development agency.

"We don't get anything from this huge exploitation, which also poisons us. We've never seen any development and my community lives in poverty," local Aguaruna leader Mateo Inti told The Associated Press in Bagua, the scene of Friday's violence.