From: Geelong Advertiser
IT'S not quite jungle drums booming a message through the dark continent, not in this day and age, for even the deepest Amazon can find access to email and regular satellite access to send it to exotic, faraway Australia.
Deep in the Amazon, a trans-continental highway is being built to connect the east and west coasts of South America. Not surprisingly, it augurs for all manner of development - mining, industry and, to many living in the jungle, exploitation. Together with presidential decrees easing restrictions on mining, oil drilling, wood harvesting and farming in the Amazon rainforest, the auguries have been deemed a threat to life as it was known.
And recently, jungle Indian fears about Peru's political ambitions to boost these oil, gas, logging, mineral and biofuel prospects turned to violence in the country's northeast jungle. Peru is renowned for its industrial activism but this was different. Some 2500 Indians, many armed with spears and machetes, took on 400 police. And 35 died, officially, maybe more, before the government suspended the decree.
It was more than enough to resurrect fears of the Shining Path Maoist horrors of the 1980s and 1990s in which disenfranchised villagers across Peru, many all but starving, were easy recruits for the so-called terrorists. Up to 70,000 deaths, little known in the West, unfolded in the bitter civil war that ensued.
As the latest bloody riots unfolded, the good folk at Posada Amazonas on the Tambopata River, near Puerto
Maldonado, further south in the Madre de Dios region, emailed to remind me they're at the world capital of biodiversity. And that this was worth protecting but that their hold on everything was tenuous.
The jungle in this part of the Amazon basin is isolated, remote, dangerous, poverty-stricken, primitive, environmentally threatened and scary. It's also beautiful, diverse, enlightened, even mystical. It's sultry. Leaves are so dripping in condensation you'd swear it's raining.
It hosts creatures such as red howler monkeys, jaguars, giant river otters, terrifying caimans and bushmaster snakes, fire-ants, the hoatzin, the horned screamer, brilliantly-coloured macaws, woodpeckers, toucans, jacaras, piranha, squirrel and saddle-back monkeys, butterflies galore. The rainforest is full of nocturnal screeching and bellowing in foliage high overhead, leafcutter ants and stinging trees to which, local folklore has it, adulterers are tied as punishment.
Naked children play on riverbanks, shamans grow psycho-tropic drugs, riverside gold-mining operates from makeshift canoes. Jaguars, taipirs, parrots and more parrots, waterways rise 12 metres plus in flood. It's diversity in spades.
But, as those at Posada Amazonas tell me, all this and much more needs broad support from around the world - starting with the region's indigenous tribes.
More than 7000 of them live in 18 communities, many remaining in the jungle only because they can work within the local ecotourism industry. Which, development fears notwithstanding, has been booming. Even graduates are coming into the area from Lima, in small numbers admittedly, to work there - reversing, albeit in small terms, a nationwide trend towards the capital.
This ecotourism industry is sustained by 25 lodges in the Madre de Dios region that draw some 35,000 tourists a year and generate several million dollars a year. It's the second most important industry, working up 14 per cent of the local gross income. The biggest is gold, spinning $120 million a year, mainly extracted from the Madre de Dios river, which subsequently cuts a bright-orange serpentine path through the never-ending green.
The government of Alan Garcia, a resurrected president earlier ousted from office for crooked dealings, was accused of the worst slaughter of these people in the last 20 years by the Indian leader Alberto Pizanges, before the national legislature voted 59-49 last month to suspend Decree 1090, also known as the "Law of the Jungle".
It's fair to say Peruvians have sustained their fair share of conquest down the ages - from the murderous conquistadors of the Cortez brothers who tore the Incas to bloody pieces in the 16th century right through a long and chequered political history to corruption allegations against the likes of Garcia and his successor/predecessor Alberto Fujimoro scarring any and every democratically-elected government.
"Welcome to South America," locals smile, resignedly. But they're a hardy lot who strike long and hard against any form of injustice. Boulders across highways and railroads, aimed at the nation's critical tourist trade, are regular and effective tools. But the most recent have been quite deadly. And given what the jungle people have seen of mining and resource exploration, it's not especially surprising.
How will the jungle folk survive the ever-growing pressure of development? How will the jungle survive? As one colleague quipped to me: "Sounds like a job for the Phantom." It will take all of that and more.
(Image: Peruvian natives angered at government easing of land use restictions.)