Rising gold costs have led to violent land grabbing, and valid landowners remain to protect themselves and the rainforest from attack.
Juan Julio Fernandez Hanco shot in the head outside his brother’s door in March. His circle of relatives says they know the visual killers and still see them in La Pampa, a gold rush city and organized crime center in Madre de Dios. region, on the road through the Peruvian Amazon.
Fernandez, 52, and his circle of relatives are well known locally. The space where he died belonged to his brother, Germán, who helped manage the nearby Tambopata National Reserve, seeking the paradise of Peruvian ecotourism in the rainforest of miners who would cut down his trees and leave him scarred through toxic puddles.
“They keep threatening us,” says Dr. Salvador Fernandez, 38, a brother. “They say they’re going to kill us all and take away our land. “
Salvador is skeptical of the police’s efforts, saying, “If they wanted to catch them, they would have done it by now, but [the killers] are free. I don’t think we’ll see justice throughout my parents’ lives. He returned to live with his grieving 80-year-old parents, who still own the plot of land that the circle of relatives uses for forestry and farm animal husbandry in what was a nonviolent domain before a paved road and the economic crisis of 2008. Thousands of illegal gold miners and gangs of thieves.
Fernandez, one of 29 other people killed since the beginning of the covid pandemic in 2020 for protecting their rights or land from illegal mining, drugs and land trafficking, according to Peru’s human rights coordinator.
While gold costs have risen, in part due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, murder, extortion and violent land invasion rates have also increased. Criminal gangs have benefited from lack of law enforcement, unemployment and the development of poverty. Where they want land, they look for loans.
In 2019, the Peruvian government introduced an offensive against illegal mining, Operation Mercury. The goal was to raze La Pampa, home to about 25,000 people, off the map.
They gave him results. Deforestation caused by illegal mining has been reduced by 92 percent, according to satellite images from Maap.
But a lack of strategy and political will has reversed the gains, according to Karina Garay, a former environmental prosecutor for the 2019 task force.
“We’ve taken a step forward with Mercury, now we’ve gone back two steps,” he says. “There have been mafias here. Now that the illegal miners are back, so are the criminals.
According to a recent report, more than 46,000 people mine in Madre De Dios, more than the 2020 report by Peru’s Ministry of Mines, which estimated there were about 50,000 across the country.
In September 2020, Demetrio Pacheco, 66, discovered his son’s frame after a frantic search. Roberto Carlos, 34, shot dead after years of death threats. his family’s forest plot, and Roberto Carlos beaten and threatened.
Pacheco, surrounded by piles of documents in his bungalow in Puerto Maldonado, the regional capital, says he believes justice will triumph even if it advances at a “snail’s pace. “Five other people are involved in the killing of her son. Two he knows, their names are on false documents – name claims to their land.
Pacheco, 66, is in constant legal battles for his land against thieves bribing lawyers and regional government officials.
In July, Herly Huanqui, 50, beat a gang of men armed with sticks. Their neighbors were also attacked and expelled from their lands.
“We held an assembly in the hope of a dialogue, but they came here armed,” says Huanqui, agriculture secretary in Santa Rita Baja, about 125 km (75 miles) west of Puerto Maldonado. “They beat us savagely with machetes and sticks. “
He ended up with a permanently broken eye and an old woman and her daughter were beaten with a machete plate.
“They were going to expel us from our land, we had to protect it,” he says. The gang had invaded part of their land and then divided it into plots, which they were going to sell to other settlers.
“We called the police and they ignored us, they arrived after several hours,” Hanqui said. “Then they misrepresented the facts. We passed our name to buy and sell to the police and it disappeared,” he said, referring to one of the few documents corroborating the name of his land. “Impunity is what fills me with a sense of helplessness. “
The Guardian approached Madre De Dios police for comment, but was told they may not respond due to a command replacement.
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