Mongabay Series: Forests of the World
“This pandemic is taking our wise men,” Kayap, indigenous leader of the Cenepa Border Communities Organization (ODEFROC), said in a voice damaged zebelio Kayap. Kayap speaks with indignation about what is in the communities of the Awajon and Wampis peoples in the Peruvian Amazon.
“So far, another 35 people have been killed by coronavirus in the Awajon and Wampis communities. One of them is Santiago Manuin,” Kayap explains.
Santiago Manuin Valera fought for his life for two weeks. Indigenous leader Awajon survived the explosion of a firearm during the 2009 indigenous uprising in Bagua province, known as Baguazo, but died on July 1 of COVID-19.
Manuín died in the town of Chiclayo, a day after being admitted to the Luis Heysen Inchustegui Hospital, and after spending several days at the Heroes del Cenepa hospital in Bagua, which had no oxygen supply. A request for assistance for Manuín circulated on social media from 18 June, when he entered the gymnasium of Santa María de Nieva, capital of the province of Condorcanqui in the Amazon.
Peru is among the 10 countries most sensitive with the number of coronavirus infections. According to the coordinating organization of indigenous organizations in the Amazon basin (COICA), there are lately 3,639 indigenous people with COVID-19 in Peru, and a death toll of 379. This makes it the largest Amazonian country of the moment, after Brazil, because of the number of Aboriginal cases affected by the pandemic.
“The leaders that preceded us are the non-secular guides of our struggles and we will keep them in our minds,” says Wrays Pérez, president of the autonomous territorial government of the Wampis Nation, adding that there are several other Awajun indigenous leaders who died. as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Manuin in particular has been identified around the world for his struggle to protect the territory of his people. In 2014, he identified with the National Human Rights
On the same day of Manuin’s death on 1 July, Francisco Juwao Untsumak died in Condorcanqui Province, who served for several periods as mayor of Santa Maria de Nieva.
Other Awajon leaders who also died from COVID-19 come with Hernández Kinin Inchipish, communicator of the Regional Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Northern Amazon of Peru (ORPIAN-P) and the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle. (AIDESEP); and his brother, Arturo Kinin Inchipish. Both, along with Manuin, were accused of the 2009 indigenous demonstration in Bagua opposed to oil exploration activities in the Peruvian Amazon. The Kinin Inchipish brothers were still being tried at the time of their death.
Pérez, the leader of Wampis, says that other indigenous leaders also lost their lives in the following month, adding Jabian Antun Marcial Trigoso, Solicio Impi, Gerardo Shimpukat Vicente Esash, Alejandro Paati, Carmen Wasmit, Melida Yanua and Hilda Nachijan, all sensitive men. Awajon people.
“It is the indifference and forgetfulness of the government. A historic debt owed to us by the state. We are about to celebrate two hundred years of independence, but the government is not doing anything for the peoples of the Amazon border,” Perez said of the people of Wampis.
“It does not weaken us, on the contrary, it strengthens us,” says Pérez, who comes from the Galilee network of Rio Santiago, one of the 3 border districts of Condorcanqui.
Pérez says he sent a letter to the government asking him to pay urgent attention to indigenous communities in the region about the spread of coronavirus. If they are not heard, he says, he does not rule out filing a complaint contrary to the government.
In the Amazon region, the number of other people who tested positive for the virus doubled in the last two weeks of June. According to official figures from the Regional Directorate of Health of the Amazon (DIRESA), as of 1 June 2005, 1214 more people had tested positive for COVID-19 and 33 had died as a result of the disease. As of July 5, DIRESA had reported 3,192 positive cases and 99 deaths.
During the first months of the pandemic, indigenous communities in the Amazon region remained isolated, their borders closed and strict surveillance. However, the return of indigenous peoples living in other peoples of Peru and the displacement of the population by state subsidies have undermined the preventive measures followed through the Awajun and Wampis communities.
Evelio Paz Tume, a physician and head of the Huampami gym micro-network in the Cenepa border district, said that there had been no cases of COVID-19 in indigenous communities in the region in April. “Communities closed their borders and they didn’t let in.” After the government issued a decree on April 14 authorizing the motion of others living outside their own apartment or workplace, the stage began to change, Paz said.
“The return of the migrants was intended to be subject to certain biosecurity criteria, but some were not met and others even escaped from the places where they were supposed to be quarantined,” Paz explains.
The scenario has been exacerbated by the distribution of emergency subsidies through the government. “This is how network transmission began. Within days of receiving the grants, there were patients with symptoms,” he says, adding that he is now recovering from COVID-19.
Paz says that he and his gym staff went to the 4 communities where the grants would be distributed: Huampami, Mamayaque, Wawain and Pampa Entsav. “We visited retail outlets to state that they put all biosecurity measures in place imaginable, called for masks to be distributed and hand-washing kits installed in ports, squares and shops.”
But overcrowding may not be possible. “People from around the district, from about 70 communities, accumulated in those 4 places to collect grants and benefits from the Together program,” Paz says. Traders also came here to sell their products. A few days after these demonstrations, Paz and her team began receiving calls from others reporting symptoms of a “very serious flu.”
According to the district and provincial poverty map of 2018, the province of Condorcan, which is among the 10 poorest in Peru. “There is a maximum rate of child malnutrition, HIV, diabetes and maximum blood pressure,” Paz says.
Shapiom Noningo Sesen, technical secretary of the autonomous territorial government of the Wampis Nation, says the Awajun and Wampis peoples have complied with quarantine since the government announced a state of emergency throughout Peru. “We have closed borders and entered communities. He painted for two months, but the Aboriginal brothers and sisters who were in the villages returned and paintings or money were discovered. That’s how infections started.”
Noningo also indicates that subsidy invoices are one of the reasons for the spread of contagion. “In my area, in the district of Rio Santiago, scholarships were distributed in June and the brothers had to move to populated centers where the pandemic was already. They went to the bethlehem network, where there were instances of COVID-19. Now the symptoms are already appearing in other communities,” he says.
Noningo says a scenario happened in the morona and Cenepa districts. The coronavirus has now spread to the basins of the Morona, Pastaza, Cenepa, Corrientes and Santiago rivers. “Despite the approval of a fund for indigenous communities, so far there have been no drugs or biosecurity devices in communities and fitness personnel have resigned for fear of contagion,” says Noningo.
He said that local and regional governments had complained, but that their demands had not been met through Governor Altamirano. Mongabay Latam called the governor to comment on the scenario of the Awajun and Wampis communities in the Amazon, but got no response. The governor agreed to return the call, but did not do so at the time of publication of this article.
The Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion (MIDIS) states that the payment of subsidies to receiving families was made through shipping companies (STC) in automobiles intended as a secure payment mechanism due to the physical security measures implemented through the Ministry of Health (MINSA). Fixed adding deployment of non-inflamed personnel.
In written reaction to Mongabay Latam, MIDIS states that “there is no epidemiological evidence or research demonstrating a link between the payment mechanism of the various monetary subsidies and any contagion option of the population” and that “official instances have already been detected”. the Amazon room where the Array payment transactions were placed before they started. »
The ministry states that the bills were developed in constant coordination with the mayors and leaders of the network, as well as with the regional fitness and culture directorates, and that the allocation of payment posts was decided through the position of the apartment in the recipients. ID card. Letters
MIDIS also denies the option that the distribution of Together donations may be only a source of contagion.
Paz says that since the start of the fitness emergency, the Amazon gyms have asked the provincial fitness government in Condorcanqui and DIRESA to send them medicines, biosecurity equipment, immediate control kits and oxygen to treat those affected by COVID-19.
He says the gym only runs four of the other 22 people who worked there before the pandemic. This center is located in the fitness pole network rate in the cenepa district. “There are 20 centers that have to serve a population of more than 15,000 people in 72 communities and we don’t have a single doctor,” Paz says.
Chávez Wajuyat Shimbucat, a member of the Mobile Indigenous Emergency Care System (UAS), traveled through 8 communities in the Border Zone between Peru and Ecuador. During this trip, he treated more than three hundred people with COVID-19 symptoms. “Health posts don’t have medication. Some even closed due to lack of staff. We’ve received drug donations to deliver to communities, but that’s not enough. Aboriginal brothers use classic plants.”
Wajuyat also helps to carry out a death count in Aboriginal territories. He says that seven other people died in Cenepa and in Santa Maria de Nieva two. It also says that after the distribution of emergency subsidies, the contagion spread throughout the region.
As of 3 July, 529 cases of COVID-19 were recorded in condorcanqui province, with the largest concentration in the town of Nieva, according to data sent through the Ministry of Health to Mongabay Latam. In the district of Imaza, Bagua province, more than 406 cases of COVID-19 were reported in the same period.
“There are no medications or medical bodies of the workers in the fitness stations. The government has failed to take into account the Amazon region,” indigenous leader Zebelio Kayap said of the fitness scene facing the region.
He said there was a lack of preparation on the part of the government component to deal with the pandemic, as the fitness posts had been set up. “We warned that if the virus reached our communities, it would be devastating, but the government did not heed our claims,” Kayap says.
On July 5, the Ombudsman’s Office reported that 19 sports facilities, thirteen in Condorcanqui and 6 in Bagua, had been closed, leading to a shortage of physical fitness after several inflamed with COVID-19.
The scenario in the Amazon region of Peru was only revealed after the Ombudsman’s Office remotely oversaw the 133 gymnasiums in the two provinces, covering 387 indigenous communities and 94,313 others in the Awajon and Wampis communities.
“A solution will need to be found quickly,” says Nelly Aedo, director of the Ombudsman’s Indigenous Peoples Programme. “People in these communities do not have access to repair and there are approximately 100,000 other people in the villages of Awajon and Wampis. The Amazon region wants urgent attention.”
The Ministry of Health says it maintains constant contact with fitness networks and micro-networks in the Amazon region. Its Directorate of Indigenous and Indigenous Peoples has immediate testing, molecular testing, medicines for the remedy of COVID-19 and other pathologies, as well as oxygen concentrators, fans, network mask and protective equipment for the body fitness of workers in the area, the ministry said. .
In his written reaction to Mongabay Latam, he states that so far approximately 690,000 sets of protective equipment have been distributed to the body of fitness workers in the Amazon region, with oxygen tanks provided to the fitness facilities. It also indicates that 40 oxygen concentrators have been delivered and some other 40 are in process, in addition to the 1,200 oxygen concentrators that will be purchased for exclusive use through fitness amenities at the service of indigenous peoples.
Cover image: Santiago Manuin. Image courtesy of CAAAP.
This story was first reported through Latam’s team on Mongabay and was posted here on our Latam online page on July 6, 2020.
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