Oxfam America Blog

Father Marco Arana:

Reports about recent conflict in Peru have me thinking about a day I spent last November, riding around in the back of a truck in Cajamarca. I was with Father Marco Arana, a Catholic priest, writing a story about his work for our magazine.

At one point we passed a contingent of heavily armed men. Father Arana whipped out his phone and called his office to report their location. The men were elite police officers, he explained to me after he’d hung up, part of a DINOES unit (Dirección Nacional de Operativos Especiales, sort of like a SWAT team). They are used to quell violence that occasionally flares up near the Yanacocha gold mine when local farmers and indigenous people protest a lack of water or other problems that they attribute to mining. This type of violence is part of a pattern: indigenous people, farmers—those without sufficient political clout to get their local government to address a problem—sometimes block a road, or seize an oil well, anything to get someone to pay attention. Hopefully their protest will spur an official to come and talk with them, maybe promise to fix a problem, and everyone can go home.

Or DINOES can come.
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I remember my first encounter with bribery. It took me a little while to register that that’s what was actually happening—a $25 payout for a set of travel papers that would have been mine for a lot less if I had been willing to wait for days for someone—somewhere—to process the request. But by that time, I would have long-missed the flight to my destination. I had to get there and the bureaucrats in charge of the papers probably knew it.

So I forked over the money, as did a friend with whom I was travelling. Our handlers knew the drill well. Before we could even begin to worry about  this unexpected outlay, one of them handed us a piece of paper that said “justification for expenses without receipt.” It was stamped with a government seal and the amount recorded at the bottom. Read the rest of this entry »

In recent weeks indigenous people in Peru have been protesting against new laws that will allow the government to grant foreign companies access to oil, gas, and mineral resources on their community lands. Indigenous people have the right to be consulted about these sorts of decisions under international law, but the government says the resources belong to the entire country. This past weekend there were violent confrontations between the protesters and the police resulting in 50 deaths. Both sides are accusing the other of human rights violations.

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Godfried Ofori, a member of the Concerned Citizens Association of Prestea, Ghana, looks out over an open pit at the Bogoso/Prestea gold mine. Photo: Jane Hahn / Oxfam America

Riding in the back of a taxi the other night, I heard a BBC news story that sounded strangely familiar. After a lawsuit that dragged on for 13 years, the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell agreed to pay a $15.5 million settlement to Nigerian families as compensation for its alleged complicity in past human rights abuses, including the 1994 execution of local leaders who spoke out for the rights of people affected by the oil industry.

The company denied any wrongdoing, but said it welcomed the settlement as part of “a process of reconciliation.” Meanwhile, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs hailed the outcome as a message that “corporations, like individuals, must abide by internationally-recognized human rights standards.” (The case made it all the way to the US courts, based on an old law that allows international human rights cases to be tried here.)

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Community meeting in a small village in Ghana, where explosions in a nearby mine pit routinely shake people

Going out to visit farmers in villages displaced by mines is usually a sobering experience. I’ve done this in Ghana, Mali, Peru, and Honduras. A few farmers get a job at the mine, but they seem to be lucky. Most of the time the farmers tell me tragic stories:

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Indigenous woman in Cusco, Peru, shows visitors where her farm has been taken over by a copper mine. Photo by Diego Nebel/Oxfam America

Yesterday, my colleague Keith in Washington, DC, released a paper about violence in Peru over mining.

Over the years I have visited a few communities in Peru where violent conflict has erupted; I have spoken with people who’ve been beaten, imprisoned, or persecuted by the government for standing up for their rights. The alleged crimes vary. Refusing to sell your farm to a mining company—or holding out for a better price—comes up a lot. One indigenous woman from the highlands of Cusco told me how the police threw her in jail, accusing her of trespassing on her own land! Her farm is now part of a copper mine. It took two decades before she was compensated as part of a conflict-resolution effort Oxfam helped create. It took years to sort out the rights violations, relocate farmers, and set up a development fund.

Right now, the same mistakes are being made in northern Peru, where a British and Chinese mining company is trying to set up a copper mine in the Rio Blanco region. Read the rest of this entry »

The relocated community of San Andres, Honduras. Photo by Edgar Orellana / Oxfam America

A rock hitting a metal roof makes a certain sound.

When I heard it I was in a meeting in a small house in San Andres, Honduras, with a group of people who had been moved off their farms to make way for a large gold mine. They are now living in a tidy, well-laid out town built just for them.

When you talk to the people they say they are disappointed: “They gave us [building] plots, just three meters by 20 meters [about 10 feet by 66 feet], and there is no place to expand. We can’t have chickens or pigs, there’s just no room,” one man reluctant to give me his name said.  “This is a place for middle class people, not poor people, it just does not work for us.” 

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