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Six weeks ago, a powerful voice for conservation and governance on Peru’s ragged, violent Amazon rain forest frontier was silenced, adding the name Edwin Chota to the lamentable list of campaigners and others killed around the world in places where a rush for valuable resources takes place in the absence of enforced rules.

Chota, a leader of the Ashaninka Indian village of Saweto near the border with Brazil, was murdered with three companions on Sept. 1.

As Scott Wallace so vividly reported for National Geographic in 2013, Chota was adept at organizing patrols to confront loggers on tribal territory, echoing the work of Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper who similarly fought — and died — just across the border in Brazil in 1988.

A critical issue in the Peruvian forest is land title. “As long as we don’t have title, the loggers don’t respect native ownership,” Chota told Wallace in 2013. “They threaten us. They intimidate. They have the guns.”

And they use them.

As I wrote in the updated edition of “The Burning Season,” my book on Mendes’s life and legacy, Brazil moved assertively in the years following the assassination of Mendes to bring meaningful governance to the Amazon. There is still violence there, but the rate of killings has plunged since the 1980s (and the deforestation rate is way down, as well).

Peru would do well to follow Brazil’s lead.

The longtime Amazon rain forest researcher Tom Lovejoy and former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt just co-wrote an essay for the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo making this point and gave me permission to run the English version here:

A Foreshadowed Death



By Bruce Babbitt and Thomas Lovejoy It was a death foreshadowed by years of warnings and repeated threats. The prediction materialized last month, when gunmen assassinated Edwin Chota, Peruvian leader of the Ashaninka of the Tamaya River, along with his three companions in the forest close to the Brazilian border. The horror of this event brings to mind another assassination, in Xapuri, Brazil, in 1988 – the death of Chico Mendes. Twenty-six years later, we find that Chico Mendes did not die in vain. Brazil reacted to its conscience and to world opinion by reforming its forest laws, creating extractive reserves, more indigenous reserves, and other protected areas. The question that is now before President Ollanta Humala is whether Peru will be able to honor the memory of Edwin Chota and redeem itself in the face of this tragedy. Chota was a Chico Mendes of his time. The horror of his death cannot be restricted to the remote forests of northern Peru. The Peruvian Ashaninka people live in the headwaters of the Tamaya River, where they had been forgotten, passing unnoticed, until a new threat under the guise of a demand for mahogany and other hardwoods began to extend its tentacles into their remote region. In the last decades, while loggers and drug traffickers have occupied the region, the Ashaninka have become fugitives in their own land. They have been forced to work as guides and been threatened with violence. At various moments, Chota and his followers were forced to cross the Brazilian border, where the government created a reserve for the Apiwtxa and sent in the federal police to remove loggers. In 2002, Chota and his people began to send petitions to the Peruvian government, demanding the creation of a protected reserve on the Peruvian side. Refusing to be armed, using only machetes, Chota pressured the authorities to give the Ashaninka title to their occupied lands. With the help of Peruvian NGOs, indigenous allies, and international support, the Ashaninka finished delineating the borders of their land and have submitted the request for the recognition of their lands. Nevertheless, after over ten years, they have not persuaded the regional or national governments to act. Their elected leaders have abandoned them. The money and influence of the loggers, sawmills, and other participants in the export chain of mahogany to the US and Europe have been heard instead. President Humala promised an investigation. To correct this tragedy, the Peruvian government needs to bring those responsible to justice. Until now, however, Peruvian authorities have been silent about those reforms necessary to stop the violence that is spreading around the region, to create a reserve for the Ashaninka and control illegal logging. At the same time, Peru, Brazil, and other members of the OAS, beyond the UN, should address the rights of these indigenous peoples who have been massacred just for living in their own lands. This is a human rights challenge that is just as urgent as those global conflicts that we read about daily. By taking concrete measures to enact ample reform, emulating the precedent created by Brazil after the assassination of Chico Mendes, Peru and the global community can honor Edwin Chota and other martyrs, giving some meaning to this tragedy

For more, watch this 2013 video report by The Times on the situation in the region:

Video

Finally, here’s a bit of relevant music. I’ve added Bruce Cockburn‘s searing 1988 song “If a Tree Falls” to my performances of late (you can hear me sing it tonight after the performance of “Extreme Whether” at Theater for the New City in Manhattan and at the Beacon Sloop Club Pumpkin Festival on Sunday in Beacon, N.Y.)

As Cockburn wrote:

From Sarawak to Amazonas

Costa Rica to mangy B.C. hills –

Cortege rhythm of falling timber.

What kind of currency grows in these new deserts,

These brand new flood plains? If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?

If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?

Does anybody hear the forest fall?… Cut and move on. Cut and move on….

I’ve added a verse including these lines: