David Hill

So much has been written about the indigenous “Mashco-Piro” in the remote Peruvian Amazon in recent weeks - some of it accurate, some misleading, some outright garbage.

A loud hammering noise rings out across a neighbourhood in the small town of Pailón in the eastern Bolivian lowlands. On the pavement in front of a store, amongst all the soft drinks, fruit and advertising hoardings, a man wearing a poncho is bent over a tree-trunk-turned-table and banging away at something. A nail or some other piece of metal-work, perhaps?

In January this year, some 330 days after receiving the first of two letters from Peruvian indigenous federation AIDESEP raising human rights concerns about plans to disburse up to 60 million euros to promote supposedly “sustainable” logging in Peru, Germany’s KfW Development Bank finally replied.

Some years back I found myself with the unfortunate task of having to locate two recently-widowed indigenous Ashéninka women living in one of the Peruvian Amazon’s biggest towns, Pucallpa, home to some 300,000+ people. They had been forced to flee from their remote community out in the forest near the border with Brazil, Alto Tamaya-Saweto, after their partners and two other men had been murdered and apparently dismembered.

It can't be often that a critically-acclaimed, multi-award-winning film starring one of the world’s most famous actresses opens with an indigenous shaman from the Peruvian Amazon singing a sacred healing song, or elsewhere features a photo of another shaman blowing tobacco smoke over that same actress’s head.

Try thinking of the victims of the global cocaine trade and any number of people might readily come to mind. The 100,000s of Mexicans who have been murdered, perhaps, or the however many small-scale farmers, indigenous people and community leaders in countries like Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Peru who have suffered untold abominations. The 10,000s who have “disappeared”, or the women trafficked for sex.

Germany’s KfW bank is poised to start disbursing 60 million euros to Peru’s national forests agency in an apparent attempt to promote a more sustainable timber industry, which no doubt Peru desperately needs help with. Yet at the very same time that agency, the Servicio Nacional Forestal y de Fauna Silvestre (SERFOR), is ignoring calls to annul almost 50 illegally-established logging concessions extending for some 300,000 hectares across the remote Amazon.

As irresponsible, dangerous and frankly disgraceful legislative proposals go, at least in the human rights and environmental spheres, this one must be right up there with the best of them.

You could call it, riffing on Colombian writer Gabriel García Marquez, “Chronicle of an Arrow Attack Foretold.” After years and years of warning of the dangers of permitting an industrial-scale logging company to operate in an area of the south-east Peruvian Amazon that is part of the territories of indigenous people living in “isolation”, tragedy finally struck.

The timing could hardly have been more unfortunate. Just while the United Nations (UN) climate change conference has been taking place in Egypt, where political leaders and others are ostensibly trying and failing to avert planetary breakdown, the world’s finest cricketers have been competing in a tournament sponsored by an oil and gas company that has arguably done more to change the global climate - for worse - than any other.