Opinion: The Foretold Death of Edwin Chota

10/08/2014 - 09h14

It was a death foretold by years of repeated warnings and threats. The prophecy was realized this month when unknown gunmen ambushed and assassinated Edwin Chota, the Peruvian leader of the Tamaya Ashaninka along with three of his companions in a remote forest near the border with Brazil.

The horror of this event calls forth memories of another assassination that occurred in Brazil, in Xapuri back in 1988 - the murder of Chico Mendes.

Twenty-six years after that event, we can note with pride that Chico Mendes did not die in vain. Following his assassination, Brazil responded to its own conscience and to world opinion with strong reforms of its forest laws, including the creation of extractive reserves (areas reserved to local inhabitants for extraction of rubber and Brazil nuts), more indigenous reserves and other protected areas.

The question now for President Humala is: Can Peru honor the memory of Edwin Chota and redeem this tragedy by following the example set by Brazil?

We knew Edwin Chota from our work in the Amazon over the past decade. He was a latter-day Chico Mendes - a decent, honorable advocate for basic human rights in his small corner of the world. The horror of his death must not end in the remote jungle of Northern Peru.

The Peruvian Ashaninka people occupy the headwaters of the Tamaya River, where they had been by-passed and forgotten until a new threat in the form of world demand for mahogany and other tropical hardwoods began reaching its tentacles into their remote region.

In the last several decades as loggers and cocaine traffickers have moved in, the Ashaninka have become fugitives in their own land, constantly under threat of enslavement as laborers in the logging camps. They have been pressed into service as guides and threatened with violence against their families.

Again and again, Chota and his followers have been forced across the border to relative safety in Brazil where the government has established the Apiwxta reserve and sent Federal police to remove loggers.

In 2002, Chota and his people began to petition the Peruvian government for a protected homeland on the Peruvian side. Refusing to take up arms, and with no weapons other than machetes, Chota pressed officials to grant title to lands occupied by the Ashaninka, insisting their lands could be "better defended by maps than guns."

Aided by Peruvian NGO's, indigenous allies and international supporters, the Ashaninka completed the detailed, technical task of delineating the boundaries of their land, and they applied for recognition.

Yet, after more than ten years trying, they have not succeeded in persuading officials in the regional government in Pucallpa or the national government in Lima to act. Their elected leaders have profoundly let them down.

The money and influence of loggers, sawmill operators and other participants in the shadowy chain of mahogany export to the United States and Europe have prevailed.

President Humala has promised a thorough investigation. To redress this tragedy, the Peruvian government must start by bringing the perpetrators to justice.

So far, however, however, Peruvian officialdom has remained silent about reform measures necessary to halt the wave of violence spreading across the region, to establish a homeland for the Ashaninka, and to control the illegal logging that threatens both the forests and their indigenous inhabitants.

Concurrently, Peru, Brazil and the other nations in The Organization of American States, as well as the United Nations, should explicitly address the rights of indigenous people who are slaughtered for living on their own land.

This is a challenge to human rights every bit as urgent as those we read about daily in the more visible global conflicts. Forest peoples and their lands are at risk from Latin America to Africa to Indonesia.

By taking meaningful action and enacting broad reforms, emulating the precedent set by Brazil after the assassination of Chico Mendes, Peru and the global community of nations can honor Edwin Chota and his fellow martyrs, and bring some measure of meaning to this tragedy.

BRUCE BABBITT served President Clinton as Minister of Natural Resources and Indigenous Affairs from 1993-2001

THOMAS LOVEJOY, University Professor at George Mason University, has been working in the Amazon since 1965