Achuar community speaks truth
to power in the Amazon
By Alan Moore I
f Africa seems an unlikely place to be innovating with networked communications technology, then the Amazon rainforest seems to be perhaps an even more unlikely destination. Gregor MacLennan works for Amazonwatch,
an organisation
which campaigns for the rights and lives of indigenous tribes living in the Amazon rainforest in Peru.
MacLennan explains that huge tracts of the Amazon have been sold to international companies for mineral extraction. Those companies come and extract the minerals but they leave a lot behind: pollution on an unprecedented scale, deforestation and the undoable disruption of the communities that live there. The mining companies literally tear up and destroy the habitat in which the indigenous people live. Rather than wishing to protect the indigenous people of the Amazon, MacLennan says the government in Lima perceives them more as an irritant, so is quite content to let the destruction of its own people continue, as long as the world doesn’t know.
A new report has uncovered 90 oil spills by Pluspetrol in northern Peru’s Amazon rainforest over the past 3 years. Covering two oil blocs—1-AB and 8—the report, complied by the
38 entrepreneurcountry
Federation of Indigenous Communities of the Corrientes River (FECONACO), recorded 18 major oil spills in 2011.
A few years back, the indigenous tribes, after extensively trying to get the Lima government to engage in dialogue about deforestation and the threat to their way of life, and without success, came together to protest at a logging station and refused to move. This went on for several months. But at some point the authorities’ patience snapped and they sent in the troops. Many people were brutally beaten and killed. The government claimed it was putting down a terrorist attack: why would anybody believe differently? There was no evidence, no film crews, right? Wrong, two Dutch travellers filmed the event. They got to a local town with an internet connection and the murder and beatings of unarmed people now lives on YouTube.
This story demonstrates how powerful networked communications can be. MacLennan’s objective is to enable the indigenous tribes to speak their truth to the power in Lima, and also to the power within the companies that come and mine the land of the Amazon. Here’s how he does it.
First, MacLennan gathers the entire
village in the main house, and asks them to collectively pool their knowledge by drawing on a large sheet of paper the rivers where they fish, the land they hunt, the areas where they may grow crops or harvest the forest for its bounty – all the things that enable that tribe to flourish in the jungle. MacLennan and his team then teach the group to use GPS positioning equipment to turn the hand-drawn map that the entire village has contributed to into hard data. That information is then fed into survey maps of the area, which will not contain such detailed information. And so a new map is created. These maps are then presented to the government in Lima, to board directors and shareholders of mining companies, forcing them
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