Other Peruvian indigenous people in the pandemic and armed with spears attacked an agreement for oil personnel in the depths of the Amazon, prompting a confrontation with police that left 3 other people dead.
Frustrated over oil spills and what they say is government neglect of natives during the coronavirus crisis, around 70 Indigenous people tried to overrun the oil company settlement around midnight on Saturday in a bid to halt work at a well in the remote town of Bretana in the Loreto region.
Other Aborigines complain that the well, known as Lot 95 and operated through a Canadian company called PetroTal, caused pollutants in its land through a series of oil spills.
The company said after the confrontation that it postponed the paintings on the site, where it employs about a hundred people.
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Interior Minister Jorge Montoya said the confrontation left three other indians dead. The ministry said six police officers and 11 Aboriginal officers were injured.
A government delegation sent to Loreto to review and calm things down, Montoya said.
ORPIO, an umbrella organization representing indigenous peoples in the Peruvian component of the Amazon, said the attack opposed “the oil company and the state for the forgetfulness and abandonment of their loved ones for lack of medicine and medicine” in the pandemic.
There were other stories about how the violence began.
The ministry said that in addition to spears, the natives had shotguns and that the clash started when they opened fire with buckshot and wounded a police officer.
But ORPIO said so by the police that he fired first and that in the chaos that followed, in the middle of the night, some officials ended up shooting.
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“Our Aboriginal brothers had no weapons. They carried spears as an ancient defense tool,” ORPIO said in a statement.
“They sought to retake the oil field,” he said.
The government said a prosecutor with the police seeks to defend itself against the aggression of indigenous peoples.
The pandemic has wraged the dozens of poverty indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon.
Aerial view of Iquitos on the Amazon River of Agostini Editorial
The authorities estimate that in Iquitos, for example, the main city of the Peruvian Amazon, seven out of ten people have become inflamed with the virus.
In May, their morgues overflowed and hospitals disappeared into oxygen tanks.
The Loreto region is one of the least populated in Peru and one of the most affected by the pandemic.