Peruvian historian Antonio Zapata leaves successful TV history series to return to academia

By Paul Goulder
After nine years directing a history series for national television, historian Antonio Zapata has decided it is time to go back to university to teach and do research full time.

Sucedió en el Perú has been broadcast on the national television channel, Canal 7, since 2001 and has dealt with a wide range of historical topics (are there any left to cover?). Read more…

Best social networking site for Peru’s expat community gets FB-like facelift

By Rick Vecchio
~ Peruvian Times Editor ~
Peruvian Times’ sister site Expatperu.com has undergone a major redesign with a fabulous social networking application for Peru’s English-speaking international community, or anyone interested in getting an inside view of how things really work in South America’s third largest nation. Read more…

Chile military exercises irritate Peru

Twenty military aircraft and some 450 military personnel from the United States, Argentina, Brazil and France arrived in the Atacama desert this week for a major joint military exercise hosted by the Chilean Air Force.  Observer nations are Ecuador, Paraguay and Venezuela, and perhaps Bolivia.

The operation, Salitre II –which includes Mirage 2000, F-15C and KC-135 aircraft and continues until October 30– is being held around Antofagasta, part of the expanse where saltpeter or nitrate fields were the cause of the War of the Pacific in the late 19th century, when Peru and Bolivia lost that territory to Chile. The scars of that war remain sensitive. Read more…

Fujimori, Arana, massacres, impunity and immunity

By Paul Goulder ~

In April ex-President Fujimori was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison and the long fight for justice by relatives of those killed at Cantuta and Barrios Altos, and who had absolutely no connection with terrorism, have seen some belated and grim reward. It has been called “un hito jurídico mundial[i]” (an international legal milestone). Read more…

Strike in Amazon

By Antonio Zapata

Note: This article was written 15 April 2009 for La República newspaper by historian and commentator Antonio Zapata. It has been translated for the Peruvian Times in order to provide some general background to the ongoing critical dispute in the Amazonian area of Peru.
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While the Fujimori case has been the focus of public attention, the strike (by associations of peoples) in the Amazon continues to develop in importance. The protagonists are ethnic groups in the tropical, Amazon forest area of Eastern Peru – communities originarias (indigenous people) – who have maintained traditional ways of life. They have been relentlessly assaulted by a succession of colonization projects – mainly foreign, exploiting natural resources for export.

Historically, rubber was the most important case. It established a pattern that has been repeated up to the current time. The schemes involved could be called “predators of the forest” and an aggression against the peoples who have been living there since ancient times. National governments proceed as if the Amazon forest contained no people, as if it were a blank space and an inexhaustible resource that simply has to be commercialized.

Yesterday it was rubber (the rubber boom was approx.1882-1910). Now there are three main products: petroleum, timber and minerals. In the era of rubber, it was said that it replaced the nitrate deposits lost in the Pacific war. There was a boom that resulted in almost complete extinction of certain ethnic groups, virtually enslaved as rubber workers. The most notorious case was that of the Peruvian rubber baron Julio César Arana, who had oppressed the Putumayo Huitotos almost to the point of extermination, but he was arraigned before a Parliamentary committee in the United Kingdom, where his company was based. The committee was investigating charges of slavery committed by his company in the Putumayo border region (Peru /Colombia).

Now the Amazon is being divided up in the form of large concessions. For example in the case of oil, from 2000 until today, the number of requests for concessions in the jungle area of Peru has increased tenfold. Most are still in their exploration phase, demonstrating the wish of governments in this decade to increase economic activity in the oil industry.

The same applies to mining. In principle, the law does not permit the presence of foreign mining companies in border zones, though this is not without exception (the government has granted concessions). For example, a sensitive area near the Cordillera del Condor has been granted to a mining concern, causing “inconvenience” to our neighbors (Ecuador / Colombia) to the north, who had been conserving their area as a natural forest.

Such policies have been taken to the extreme in the case of timber. It should not be necessary to point out that among the trees being felled, people and animals coexist in a complex and fragile ecosystem. If the forest is cut down, it spells the end for natural and human life that has been there since time immemorial.

Meanwhile, compared to farmland, which is pretty scarce in the selva area, trees in the Amazon are rooted in layers of organic matter that they themselves produce. Widespread logging kills this organic layer and the area becomes a wasteland.

Official policy is contained in a series of decree laws that Amazonian Peruvians see as undermining their ancestral rights. Accordingly they asked for their repeal, which they obtained following a general strike last August. The government gave way and Congress is committed to repeal the legislation. Additionally, they appointed a committee to review the laws, and it concluded by recommending their annulment. But the recommendation was not passed through the full parliamentary process and in the meantime, the government has enacted another law that strengthens the attack on the forest. This is Law 29317, known as the Ley Forestal (Forest Act), which appears to encourage the over-exploitation of the Amazon ecosystem.

The Amazonian people are organized. Perhaps they don’t carry much weight in the nerve centers of the country, but the pueblos originarios of the Amazon remain united around their communities. They have also created modern associations such as AIDESEP, the Association of Inter-Ethnic Development of the Peruvian Jungle, which have greater influence than organizations from the coastal areas and the sierra. The Amazon people are heard at a distance, but they are strong because their message is consistent and they manage their territory well.

The protesters have been leaving their usual jobs and assembling their craft at certain points on the rivers, disrupting river traffic, although they let canoes through. They do not stay long, they appear and dissolve, to create barricades at other points in the river system. This time they are determined to go all the way because they feel they have been deceived. They were promised reforms and then treated with contempt. The government would do well to take things seriously, because the Amazonian people do what they promise.

Ramon Castilla’s Dream

By Paul Goulder

On March 6 Capt. Carlos Saavedra stepped down from his command of the oldest working single-screw iron ship in the world, the Yavari. We might say that she is, together with her sister ship the Yapura (today the Navy’s BAP Puno), not only the oldest but also the “highest” in the world given that their home port is Puno, Lake Titicaca (3,810 meters, or 12,500 ft, above sea level). Read more…

Peru delves into violent past: 49 “disappeared” victims exhumed in highland village of Huanta

Forensic experts began to exhume the bodies of 49 people found buried in four mass graves in 1984, after they were allegedly tortured and executed by Peruvian Navy officials, daily El Comercio reported Tuesday. Read more…

Peru Defense Minister to put together photo exhibit to honor memory of fallen soldiers during civil war

Just over a week after Peru’s government came under fire for rejecting a $2 million donation to build a memorial museum, Defense Minister Ántero Flores Aráoz said that the Armed Forces will put together a photo exhibit to honor the memory of soldiers who died during Peru’s bloody 1980-2000 internal war.

I got the idea for this project after visiting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s photo exhibit, said Flores, “and I felt that it had to be complemented by (the expression of) what our Armed Forces suffered.”

Last week, Peru President Alan Garcia rejected a $2 million donation from Germany, arguing that the European country’s proposal did not “reflect the national vision.”

The donation from Germany was offered after a visit made last year by the German minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, to the Yuyanapaq exhibition, a photographic history of the 20-year war that is housed temporarily in the Museum of the Nation. The donation would apparently be managed primarily by the Ombudsman’s office.

Flores, who argued that priorities such as tackling hunger and poverty were more important than constructing a memorial museum, is known for his staunch criticism of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or CVR.

The Commission’s report -which was published in August 2003 – has never been accepted by the military nor by the political parties that governed the country during the 20-year insurgency, namely Accion Popular (the Belaunde government), APRA during President Garcia’s first administration, and supporters of President Fujimori, who is currently on trial for human rights abuses committed during the latter years of the war. And although priests and religious leaders at grassroots level were witnesses to many of the events, Cardinal Luis Cipriani, whose own position during his time as Bishop of Ayacucho was severely questioned by human rights groups, has rejected the report outright on numerous occasions.

Apologizing would bring the state, “which defended all of us,” to its knees, Flores argued last year, after he refused to present an official apology for the excesses committed by Peru’s armed forces during the 1980-2000 internal conflict.

“I frankly believe that it would be an error,” he said.

The CVR’s report determined that 54 percent of all deaths in the conflict were caused by the Maoist Shining Path insurgency. Peru’s armed forces were blamed for 30 percent, and most of the remainder by government-backed peasant militias.

Eighty-five percent of the victims were poor, Quechua-speaking Indians from the Ayacucho region and five other departments in Peru’s Andean highlands, a fact that the CVR report noted was proof of the country’s continuing exclusion and rejection of Andean peasants and their communities and traditions.

Peru government harshly criticized for turning down $2 million donation for museum

Over the weekend, Peru’s leading op-ed columnists continued to criticize President Alan Garcia’s decision to reject a $2 million donation from the German government to build a museum to honor the memory of 70,000 people who died as a result of Peru’s 1980-2000 civil war.

The criticism prompted President García to admit that the successive governments in the 20-year struggle commited “terrible abuses” but questioned the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report and said that Germany’s proposal for a museum did not “reflect the national vision.”

Educator Leon Trahtemberg titled his column “From damaged memory to lacerated future”,  while analyst Raul Wiener recalls that “the same government that wanted to organize the 2006 Olympic Games considers it almost a frivolity to use a foreign donation to build a Memorial Museum.” Read more…

China’s famous Terracotta Army to be displayed in Peru

China’s renowned Terracotta Army will be exhibited in Peru’s capital, Lima, in 2010, China’s ambassador to Peru, Gao Zhengye, told state news agency Andina on Wednesday.

“We will exchange exhibits,” said Zhengye. “An important exhibit will travel from China to Peru, and Peru will do the same in Beijing.”

The Terracotta Army – considered the eighth wonder of the Ancient World – is comprised of unique and life-size warriors and horses, dating back to 210 BC. It was discovered in 1974 by local farmers who dug a well near Xi’an, Shanxi province.

Built by more than 70,000 workers for China’s First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, the tomb was once filled with legendary treasures, and more than 8,000 life-size clay warriors, horses and chariots.

As part of the intercultural exchange deal, Peru could lend China an important collection of Mochica artifacts, Andina reported.

The Moche civilization, or Mochica culture, flourished in northern Peru from about AD 100 to AD 800. They are particularly noted for their elaborate painted ceramics, goldwork, and irrigation systems.

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