The Ucayali river winds through Amazon rainforest in Peru
The slaughter of six farmers in the Peruvian Amazon has
placed a spotlight on issues of land grabbing, corruption and illegal
deforestation in the eastern region of Ucayali.
The farmers, members of the Bello Paraiso Association of
Agriculturalists, were tied up, tortured and shot by a group of between 20 and
40 assailants on 1 September. The attack stemmed from a dispute over the
ownership of agricultural land in the area, with local farmers and press
reports blaming land
traffickers.
“We have received death threats from the same land
trafficking gang,” Robert Guimaraes, president of the local indigenous
federation Feconau, told
the Guardian.
Land activists in Ucayali have previously received death
threats for opposing land grabs. In November 2015, activist Bolivar
Washington received a note that read: “We will kill you if you keep on screwing
with us. Those lands are not yours… let us work if you do not want all of you
to die.”
At the time, Washington was supporting the struggle of the
Shipibo indigenous community of Santa Clara de Uchunya, located just 10km from
the site of the recent killings. Santa Clara residents were opposing land grabs
by the palm oil firm Plantaciones de Pucallpa (PDP), which illegally
cleared more than 5,700 hectares of forest between 2011 and 2016.
PDP claimed to have ceased operations in November 2016.
However, as Earthsight reported in May,
work on the area it illegally cleared continued into 2017. Community members
were still being threatened by individuals “with close ties to the palm oil
company and a local land trafficking mafia,” according to the Forest Peoples
Programme. There are no suggestions that PDP was in any way involved in the
threats or the recent killings.
The situation in Ucayali has been exacerbated by the
institutional weakness and alleged corruption of the regional authorities. In
2015, an official
from the national government found that firms including PDP were
clearing forest in Ucayali without the necessary legal documents. In July this
year, a
report by Peru’s Human Rights Ombudsman highlighted numerous examples
of agricultural activities taking place in Ucayali “without environmental
authorisation certificates, land use change plans or deforestation permits
being granted by the competent authorities.”
There is also evidence that the authorities have
deliberately distributed illegitimate land titles. An investigation by Peruvian
news outlet Convoca alleges
that officials from the Ucayali Agriculture Directorate withdrew land titles
from local farmers and awarded them to individuals related to the Melka group,
owner of Plantaciones de Pucallpa, who subsequently sold them on to the palm
oil firm. The investigation found that the Directorate granted more than 3,500
land ownership certificates between 2011 and 2014 – the same time period that
the Melka group began expanding aggressively into Ucayali.
“Everything points to regional government people being
involved in trafficking land,” Jose Luis Guzmán, an environmental prosecutor in
Ucayali, told
the Guardian.
Indigenous leader Robert Guiamares blames the regional
government for fuelling land conflict. “These peasant farmers have paid the
price for the inaction of the state and the local authorities in tackling land
trafficking,” he told the Guardian.
“The lack of clarity and consistency of land titling in the
Peruvian Amazon has long been a ticking bomb for violent social conflict,”
Julia Urrunaga, Peru director for the
Environmental Investigation Agency, added.
The recent killings intensify fears that conflict could be
fuelled by the Peruvian government’s drive to promote palm oil. In June 2016,
the Ministry of Agriculture published a ten-year
national plan for the sustainable production of oil palm, focused on
expanding the country’s palm oil industry through improved productivity and
better access to national and international markets. But in an environment of
corruption and impunity such as that which persists in Ucayali, observers worry
that palm oil could drive up land prices and fuel a surge in land grabbing and
related violence.
