Global Ad Campaign For Peru’s Uncontacted Tribes
Survival International
May 5, 2010
An ad supporting Peru’s last uncontacted tribes is appearing in publications around the world in a bid to stop Peru’s government allowing an oil pipeline to be built through the Indians’ territory…
Prosperous Chile’s Troubling Indigenous Uprising
Dec. 12, 2009
Time Magazine
Compared to high-profile groups like the Quechua of Peru and the Yanomami of the Amazon rain forest, Chile’s Mapuche are a relatively obscure indigenous cohort in South America. But that has changed dramatically in recent months as a growing number of armed and masked Mapuche activists, pursuing a centuries-old claim to land they say was taken from them by the Spaniards and then the Chilean government, have engaged in a wave of arson attacks… (more…)
December 23, 2009
On Monday, Brazil decreed nine new indigenous reserves covering 51,000 square kilometers (19,700 square miles) of the Amazon rainforest, an areas larger than Denmark or Switzerland, reports the AFP…
Survival International: Call for Napalm Bombing of ‘Savages’ in Peru’s Amazon Wins “Most Racist Article of the Year Award”
Peruvian Times
September 2, 2009
An article implying that Peruvian natives should be bombed with napalm has been named by London-based Survival International as the ‘most racist article’ published in the last year by the mainstream media.
Native Protestors at the entrance of Yurimagua, in the northern Peruvian Amazon
Blood at the Blockade: Peru’s Indigenous Uprising
NACLA (May-June 2009)
Gerardo Rénique
On June 6, near a stretch of highway known as the Devil’s Curve in the northern Peruvian Amazon, police began firing live rounds into a multitude of indigenous protestors – many wearing feathered crowns and carrying spears. In the nearby towns of Bagua Grande, Bagua Chica, and Utcubamba, shots also came from police snipers on rooftops, and from a helicopter that hovered above the mass of people. Both natives and mestizos took to the streets protesting the bloody repression.
Groups say Peru oil project threatens Indians
The Associated Press
January 26, 2009
LIMA, Peru: The development of a remote oil field in Peru’s Amazon jungle could threaten the survival of isolated Indian communities in the region, an Indian rights group said Monday.
This month, Peru’s Finance Ministry approved plans submitted by Anglo-French oil company Perenco SA to invest $1 billion over the next three years to extract crude from an oil field in the northern province of Loreto near Ecuador’s border.
An international tribal-support organization and local Indian rights groups say the oil field is the ancestral home of up to three nomadic Indian communities living in voluntary isolation.
Ayoreo natives in Paraguay
(Note: The Ayoreo-Totobiegosode are thought to be the last group of uncontacted South American Indians living south of the Amazon Basin. Roughly 300 Totobiegosode have not yet been contacted…
The Amazon Rainforest–home to nearly 80% of the world’s uncontacted tribes
(Note: An estimated 100 uncontacted tribes still exist in the world, with the majority of them inhabiting Brazil (with an estimated 67 uncontacted tribes) and Peru (with 15). Most are located not far from the Peru-Brazil border… (more…)
June 7, 2008
Armed With a Pen, and Ready to Save the Incas’ Mother Tongue
NYT
CALLAO, Peru
“Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago.”
Simple enough, right? But not for Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui.
Instead, he regales visitors to his home here in this gritty port city on Lima’s edge with his Quechua version of the opening words of “Don Quixote”:
“Huh k’iti, la Mancha llahta suyupin, mana yuyarina markapin, yaqa kay watakuna kama, huh axllasqa wiraqucha.”
(Above: A 16th century drawing of Francisco Pizarro meeting the Inca emperor Atahualpa, in Cajamarca, Peru in 1532)
Mr. Túpac Yupanqui, theologian, professor, adviser to presidents and, now, at the sunset of his long life, a groundbreaking translator of Cervantes, greets the perplexed reactions to these words with a wide smile.
“When people communicate in Quechua, they glow,” said Mr. Túpac Yupanqui, who at 85 still appears before his pupils each day in a tailored dark suit. “It is a language that persists five centuries after the conquistadors arrived. We cannot let it die…”