AMERICAS

- Guyana: Empowerment of indigenous peoples through participatory mapping

Despite decades of lobbying successive governments for full legal recognition of their traditional land rights, the 55-60,000 Amerindians in Guyana still find themselves in one of the most precarious land tenure situations in South America: many communities lack any legal land title whatsoever, while the others can only count on an insecure title which covers just a fraction of their ancestral territory, and which can be revoked unilaterally at any time by the Minister of Amerindian Affairs. Since national independence in 1966, the Guyanese state has titled just 6000 square miles of the 24,000 square miles recommended for title by the Amerindian Lands Commission (ALC) --a body set up by the British in 1966 to resolve the Amerindian land question in response to consistent pressure from grassroots Amerindian leaders. Indigenous peoples complain that Government's repeated broken promises on land rights issues constitute the large-scale theft of their ancestral territories by the state.

Untitled areas on so-called "state land" are the subject of mining and timber concessions issued by central government without prior consultation with Amerindian Communities. Gold and diamond concessions, for example, cover around 35% of the country --an area that affects many of the traditional territories of the Akawaio, Macusi, Wapichan and Wai Wai peoples. Indigenous communities protest that poorly regulated commercial resource extraction dominated by outsiders from the coast has caused environmental damage in their territories and wrought social and cultural upheaval in their communities.

The indigenous struggle for land security and their rejection of top-down destructive resource exploitation on their lands took a major step forward in 1991 with the formation of the Amerindian Peoples Association (APA). The APA unites more than 80 Amerindian communities that represent all nine indigenous peoples of Guyana. Many of the local APA "units" are linked to its central office in Georgetown via a radio network. The APA works to promote indigenous rights at the national level, to keep member communities informed of government policies, laws and projects that may affect their welfare and to raise local Amerindian concerns with central government. A key part of APA activity involves training workshops for indigenous leaders on the national and international laws relating to indigenous rights and natural resources.

In 1994, Amerindian leaders from Region 7 of Guyana and APA staff had a meeting with their country's President in order to once again press for inalienable title to the full extent of their ancestral territory that covers 3000 square miles in the Upper Mazaruni. In response, the President challenged them to show how they use their land and why they demand ownership over such an extensive area.

Following a series of meetings in the six Amerindian communities in the Upper Mazaruni, the Akawaio and Arekuna people decided that they would need to map their traditional land and demonstrate that all the forests and savannahs in their territory have been used and occupied by them according to their custom for generations. They agreed that drawing up their own map could help demonstrate that their view of property, ownership and resource use is very different to the government view.

In 1995 the mapping project began in the field with technical support from the APA and international NGOs including the Forest Peoples Programme and Local Earth Observation. A team of four indigenous mappers were trained over six weeks in map work and the use of Global Positioning System technology (GPS). Over nine months the whole territory was mapped to show boundaries, past and present-day settlements, natural resources and cultural sites using names and categories defined by the communities themselves in accordance with their language and traditions. The final community map showed the whole Upper Mazaruni basin to be covered in an impressive blanket of indigenous place names, extensive and multiple indigenous land uses, burial grounds and special traditional areas such as bodawa: "hunting and fishing reserves". Since the map was published in 1998 it has been praised by many individuals and organisations including the Organisation of American States and the World Bank. Sadly, however, the government of Guyana still refuses to acknowledge the map as a legitimate claim to indigenous land ownership.

Undeterred by the stubbornness of the national government, Amerindian communities throughout Guyana have been inspired by the Upper Mazaruni mapping project. Since 1998, the APA has carried out further projects with its own indigenous cartographers who are trained in digitising base maps, inputting the field data and printing off draft maps for verification by the participating communities. This in-house team has worked with Arawak, Carib, Wapichan, Wai Wai and Akawaio communities to complete four more community mapping projects covering a total of 14,000 square miles. Two more projects are also currently underway and several more are planned. The local mapping teams for all these projects have been trained by an Arekuna Amerindian tutor who first gained his skills as a team member on the original mapping project.

Those who have participated in the mapping activities point out that the projects have been an empowering experience in a number of ways. They emphasise that traditional knowledge has been revitalised as younger people have worked with elders to collect the information for the maps. Mapping has also raised grassroots awareness about land use and resource management issues. Community mapping has turned out to be a useful tool for the defence of indigenous territories. An increasing number of trained indigenous mappers are now able to use the GPS technology and their own maps to pinpoint resource concessions that overlap their boundaries. Likewise, they can spot cases where companies have made incursions into indigenous lands, plot this infringement on a map and show the company that they are on Amerindian territory without permission. Already, companies have been obliged to withdraw their equipment when faced with this strong evidence.

The benefits of the pioneering community mapping work in Guyana are now spreading to other countries. The indigenous tutor has already helped Amerindian communities in neighbouring Suriname to map their traditional lands in the lower Marowijne. Practical lessons gained through the APA's innovative mapping projects are now being shared with indigenous peoples' organisations in the Ecuadorian Amazon who are preparing projects to self-demarcate their traditional territories. One lesson from Guyana is clear: a combination of village-level capacity building in land rights issues and participatory mapping can be empowering for local people and also provide the basis for an effective territorial defence strategy.

By: Tom Griffiths, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail: tom@fppwrm.gn.apc.org

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- Peru: Camisea gas project undermines the rights of indigenous peoples

In December 2000 the Argentina-based company Pluspetrol won the concession to extract natural gas from the Camisea basin in South East Peru. However, Pluspetrol's intention to conduct seismic and drilling operations within the Nahua/Kugapakori state reserve has attracted controversy because of potential impacts on its indigenous inhabitants living in voluntary isolation and initial stages of direct interaction with national society. Block 88 superimposes the Nahua/Kugapakori reserve, that was established by the state in 1990 to protect the Nahua and Kugapakori (also known as the Nanti) indigenous groups from the dangers of contact with national society. The group headed by Pluspetrol also includes US company Hunt Oil and the Korean SK corporation.

Critics point to the project's potentially devastating physical consequences: increased access by outsiders to the reserve will intensify pressure on its resources and expose the inhabitants to diseases to which they have little or no resistance. Equally grave are the projects' violations of the internationally agreed rights of indigenous peoples as well as undermining the right to say no to contact that is currently being exercised by those peoples living in voluntary isolation. The project is now at make or break time; support from the US banks, who are currently evaluating the project, is essential if it is to go ahead but activists are pressurising the banks to reject funding while the project still fails to address the rights of the indigenous peoples within the reserve.

The 443,887 hectare Nahua/Kugapakori reserve is the ancestral home for Nahua, Nanti and Matsigenka peoples. Most of these groups are in the initial stages of direct interaction with Peruvian national society. These groups in initial interaction (with the exception of the Nahua), do not speak Spanish, have only sporadic direct contact with some other indigenous communities living outside the reserve and are highly vulnerable to introduced diseases and exploitation by outsiders. At the same time there are some Nanti and others of uncertain ethnic origin who have taken a choice to avoid all direct contact with national society and live in a state of voluntary isolation. Through remaining in voluntary isolation, these peoples are exercising their right to say no to direct contact with national society. These latter groups are even more vulnerable to introduced diseases and live in remote headwaters of the Timpia, Serjali and Paquiria rivers including the area where seismic testing is taking place. The Peruvian indigenous federation FENAMAD state that "contact by outsiders with these peoples would constitute a serious threat to their fundamental rights to health, cultural identity, well being and possession of land……and make possible their extinction as individuals and as indigenous peoples". Estimates of the total population of the reserve range from 1000 - 2000 people.

Pluspetrol have acknowledged that unwanted encounters with the peoples who live in voluntary isolation in the area of seismic testing in the headwaters of the rivers Paquira and Serjali are possible. Testing began in the reserve in May 2002 and Pluspetrol assured critics that; "this contact will not be encouraged", that they have reduced the seismic area in order to avoid such encounters and that contingency plans are in place. Plans consist of sending parties of local indigenous people ahead of the seismic testing groups as well as vaccinating all workers against potentially contagious diseases. In reality it is unclear what is happening in the field. Some local Pluspetrol workers say there have been reports of sightings but no direct encounters with "naked or uncontacted Indians".

The independent review of the environmental assessment (EA), that was commissioned by local and national indigenous federations COMARU and AIDESEP, concluded that "it cannot be assumed that the (contingency) plan will effectively prevent harmful impacts like the spread of introduced diseases that could prove fatal for the isolated populations". In fact, when Shell Oil conducted preliminary exploration in the region in the 1980's, over half the Nahua population died as a result of respiratory diseases contracted from loggers. Pluspetrol have responded by stating they are in the process of developing an independent community environmental monitoring program albeit 3 months after work started in the reserve. The reports of sightings, although denied by Pluspetrol in Lima --whose representatives stated that these sightings are referring to the "traditional Matsigenka" populations on the lower Camisea which neither explains their nakedness or their sightings in the seismic zone-- confirm the conclusion of the independent review: "no matter how many precautions are taken the only fully effective policy is to avoid working in those areas known to be inhabited by such groups". Aside from the physical risks of inadvertant encounters, working in areas known to be inhabited by such groups undermines their fundamental right to avoid all direct contact with national society that they are currently exercising.

Pluspetrol's EA acknowledges that the reserves inhabitants will be both directly and indirectly affected by the project, whose plans within the reserve include the construction of 3 wells and seismic exploration in over 800km² of rainforest. The independent review of the EA however identifies many threats such as increased colonisation, shrinking resource base and poorer health that the EA did not acknowledge. As a result there is a corresponding lack of concrete measures to adequately address them. Article 7 of ILO convention 169 refers to indigenous peoples rights' to participate in the formulation, implementation and evaluation of development plans that may affect them. Ensuring adequate consultation is not simply a responsibility of the company but an obligation of the Peruvian state who have ratified ILO 169.

While some visits have been made by Pluspetrol to Nanti, Nahua and Matsigenka settlements there has been no disclosure of the details of these visits nor identification or development of methodologies of engagement with groups who in the main have no working knowledge of Spanish let alone understandings of seismic explosions. One of the Matsigenka groups living in between the Paquiria and Camisea rivers say they were persuaded to abandon their homes by the advance parties of Pluspetrol. Former residents of Shiateni say that they moved when one of the advanced parties of Pluspetrol told them that the army would arrest them or they would be decimated by diseases if they didn't relocate. This was denied by Pluspetrol who say that their advance parties only established contact with these groups to inform them of Pluspetrol plans. This relocation they say was an independent decision taken as part of a traditional and seasonal movement. One possible conclusion is that this illustrates the challenges of communicating the impacts of gas exploration to people who have almost no working understanding of Spanish let alone alien concepts of property, money or even seismic explosions. Whether this is a genuine case of forced relocation is unclear. However, what is clear from the rushed, unsystematic and untransparent nature of all these visits is that their purpose has been to implement the project with as little recognition of the rights of the reserve's indigenous peoples as possible.

Work in the reserve started in May 2002 yet engagement with its inhabitants has to date been governed by the pressures of work schedules rather than a respect for their internationally recognised rights or concern for their health and security. The most worrying problems are: the serious inadequacies in the EA regarding indirect impacts for the reserve's inhabitants, the real risks of potentially fatal encounters between seismic parties and peoples in voluntary isolation and a failure on the part of both Pluspetrol and the state to comply with the legal obligation to consult as stated explicitly in ILO convention 169. Perhaps most worryingly, project activities are undermining the rights of those peoples living in voluntary isolation to say no to direct contact with national society. Given these flaws, activist groups should support the findings of the independent review that calls on the Peruvian government to "protect these populations by not allowing industrial activities within the reserve". They should also urge the US banks to reject funding proposals until the fundamental rights of the reserve's inhabitants are properly addressed by the Camisea consortium; the banks' decision is to be taken in December 2002.

By: Conrad Feather, Shinai Serjali, e-mail: conrad@serjali.org . For more information on the Nahua/Kugapakori reserve and its indigenous peoples please visit http://www.serjali.org and http://www.onr.com/cabeceras/

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- Suriname: Chinese Logging Companies and Tribal Rights

Chinese logging companies are relatively new arrivals in South America. In Suriname, at least two have been operating since 1997. The widely reported ban on domestic logging in China, in part prompted by devastating flooding related to forest loss, is one obvious reason for the internationalization of Chinese logging. According to Surinamese government statistics for the years 2000-01, Chinese loggers were by far the largest producers of round wood and China was by far the largest export destination for Surinamese round wood, exceeding the next highest destination fourfold.

This short article looks at one area of Suriname where the Chinese have set up operations, the impact of those operations on the Saramaka people, one of the six Maroon tribes living within Suriname's borders, and the measures the Saramaka have taken to seek respect for their rights. Maroons are the descendants of escaped slaves who fought themselves free from slavery and established viable, autonomous communities along the major rivers of Suriname's rainforest interior in the 17th and 18th centuries. Their freedom from slavery and rights to lands and territory and the autonomous administration thereof were recognized in treaties concluded with the Dutch colonial government in the 1760s and reaffirmed in further treaties in the 1830s.

The Saramaka people are one of the largest Maroon tribes, amounting to around 20,000 persons living in over 70 villages located along the Suriname River, one of the main watercourses in the country. Ownership of Saramaka territory is divided among a number of matrilineal clans. Members of the clans have rights to hunt, fish, farm and gather forest produce in the area owned by their clan, but ownership remains vested collectively in the clan. Despite this, Suriname presently maintains that the Saramaka, and other indigenous and maroon peoples, have no rights to their lands and resources, all of which are owned by the state and can be exploited at any time.

The Saramaka first became aware that part of their territory had been granted to a logging company when the employees of a Chinese company calling itself NV Tacoba arrived in the area in 1997. When they challenged the company, the Saramaka were told that the company had permission from the government and any attempt to interfere with its operations would be punished by imprisonment. A Chinese company calling itself Jin Lin Wood Industries surfaced in the area in 2000. This company has relations with Ji Sheng, another Chinese company operating in Saramaka territory. A concession of 150,000 hectares held by Chinese company, NV Lumprex, was also recently discovered in Saramaka territory. Lumprex and Tacoba are ultimately owned by China International Marine Containers (Group) Ltd., a company registered on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. This company uses the timber to make wooden floor boards for shipping containers. Finally, a Chinese company known as Fine Style is also operating in Saramaka territory.

Concessions held by the Chinese companies, which were granted without even notifying the Saramaka, are presently guarded by active duty Surinamese military personnel armed with military issue weapons. According to eye-witnesses, these companies have caused widespread environmental damage and substantially restricted the Saramaka's ability to use their forest resources. One Saramaka eye-witness, for instance, stated that "The soldiers told me: 'Leave the Chinese, go hunting here (in an area where the Chinese have finished cutting already). But don't let the Chinese see you.' Well, I went there: there was destruction everywhere; the forest was destroyed. In Paramaribo [the capital] people don't know what the Chinese are doing. Should not someone control the logging-activities of foreign investors? The Chinese cut hundreds of trees, dragged them to a place and piled them up there. They abandoned them in the forest because they did not need them anymore. For us, people from the interior, it is terrible to see cedar trees cut down that are so important for us. And all this destruction made the animals flee away also."

After discovering that their territory had been given to logging companies, the Saramaka began organizing and held a series of meetings. They decided to file formal complaints with the Suriname government asking that the concessions be revoked and that their rights to their territory be legally recognized. Three complaints were submitted between October 1999 and October 2000, none of which received any response. Faced with silence and increased logging activity, the Saramaka decided to seek the protection of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and filed a petition there in October 2000. This petition cited Suriname's failure to recognize Saramaka rights to land and resources as defined by the American Convention on Human Rights and active violation of those and other rights due to the logging and mining concessions granted in Saramaka territory.

On August 8, 2002, the IACHR issued a request to the Government of Suriname asking that it "take appropriate measures to suspend all concessions, including permits and licenses for logging and mine exploration and other natural resource development activity on lands used and occupied by the 12 Saramaka clans until the Commission has had the opportunity to investigate the substantive claims raised in the case." This request, technically called precautionary measures, is intended to protect the Saramaka people from human rights abuses and environmental degradation caused by logging companies operating in Saramaka territory while the IACHR conducts an investigation of the situation and are only issued in extreme case that pose an immediate and irreparable threat of harm.

This request was issued after the Saramaka had highlighted the urgent need for the IACHR's immediate intervention in order to avoid irreparable harm to the Saramaka people's physical and cultural integrity caused by the logging activities. Writing in support of IACHR intervention, Dr. Richard Price, an anthropologist and leading academic expert on the Saramaka, wrote that without immediate protective measures, "ethnocide - the destruction of a culture that is widely regarded as being one of the most creative and vibrant in the entire African diaspora - seems the most likely outcome." And, "The use of Suriname army troops to "protect" the Chinese laborers who are destroying the forests that Saramakas depend on for their subsistence, construction, and religious needs is an extraordinary insult to Saramaka ideas about their territorial sovereignty. … Their presence in the sacred forest of the Saramakas, with explicit orders to protect it against Saramakas, on behalf of the Chinese, is an ultimate affront to cultural and spiritual integrity. By unilateral fiat, and through the granting of logging and mining concessions to Chinese companies, the postcolonial government of Suriname is currently attempting to expunge some of the most sacred and venerable rights of Saramakas. In this respect, the destruction of the Saramakas' forest would mean the end of Saramaka culture."

The case filed by the Saramaka is the first time that either Suriname's failure to recognize indigenous and tribal territorial rights has been challenged in an international human rights body. If successful, the case may represent a precedent that will benefit all other indigenous peoples and maroons in Suriname. The case is presently pending a decision on the merits by the IACHR. The Saramaka have requested that the IACHR make itself available to mediate a friendly settlement that will hopefully result in a negotiated settlement withdrawing the logging concessions and recognizing Saramaka territorial rights. Failing that they ask that the case be submitted to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights for a binding decision.

To-date, Suriname has failed to respond in any way to the allegations made in the petition despite repeated requests from the Commission to provide information on the case. Also, despite substantial press coverage of the IACHR's request for precautionary measures, Suriname has failed to take any action to honour the request or to protect the rights of the Saramaka to their lands traditionally occupied and used.

By: Fergus MacKay, Coordinator, Legal and Human Rights Programme, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail: fergus@euronet.nl

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- Venezuela: Mapping a way forward

The Caura river in Venezuela is the last large affluent of the Orinoco which has not been polluted, carved up, dammed or diverted by mining, roads, logging and large-scale development projects. The upper reaches are home to two ethnic groups, 'Amazonian Indians'. These are the Ye'kwana, a people with a tradition of well-developed shifting agriculture and of building huge conical collective dwellings, who have been in the area at least as long as historical records relate; and the Sanema (Northern Yanomami) a more mobile group of hunters, gatherers and incipient agriculturalists who moved into the area from the south about a hundred years ago. In all, about 3,500 Indians scattered in some two dozen settlements occupy the four million hectares of river, forest and mountain that stretch between frontier "criollo" settlements on the lower river and the Brazilian border to the south.

Ye'kwana tales and chants tell of a primordial time when one of their culture heroes, Kuyujani, walked the boundaries of the territory naming and creating the high mountains, waterfalls, sacred rocks and pools. These stories constitute charters which establish the deep spiritual ties that bind the Ye'kwana to their homeland. Sanema spirituality is likewise deeply imbued with a knowledge of the power of forests spirits and animal beings whom Sanema shamans communicate with and embody through dreams, during nightly chants and through the use of hallucinogens during daytime rituals. When Sanema fall ill, the shamans recruit the power of these tutelary spirits to combat the malign forces that cause disease. Veiled from our eyes in the day, the spirits can be discerned in the roaring voices of waterfalls, in light shining through foam and seed down, in the drip of water from pools in the crotches of giant forest trees and in the calls of animals and birds. The forest is alive --not just as a useful 'ecosystem' abundant in food and 'resources'-- but as a veritable society of meaning and power that gives these peoples their identity.

The Venezuelan government has long viewed the Caura river as a potential source of hydropower. One proposed dam at the Para falls, where the mighty Caura crashes over a hundred metre drop down to the lower river, would impound the whole river. A second dam proposed further up the Caura's main tributary, the Mereveri, would divert over half the river's water across the watershed into the neighbouring Paragua river, to supplement the water already flowing through the Guri dam on the Caroni. Both options would mean the inundation of the Indians' richest agricultural and hunting lands and require their forced relocation. Electricity from these dams would be exported to Brazil to fuel development in the State of Roraima, conveyed along power lines already cut across the lands of the neighbouring Pemon people. Ecologists can barely guess at the environmental implications, especially for the million hectares of swamp forest in the lower river, which would likely dry out if the river was to be dammed. The Indians are clear, however. They don't want the dams.

To avert these threats, the Ye'kwana and Sanema formed their own inter-ethnic association, which they called Kuyujani. The association --and the network of radio transmitters they have implanted-- links together all the widely dispersed settlements of the river and meets annually to elect political representatives and decide strategy about how to deal with the challenges facing the river basin --gold miners, the agricultural frontier, tourism, and hydropower-- and how best to push for recognition of their rights to land. With technical assistance from the Forest Peoples Programme, and funding from the IUCN-Netherlands, Rainforest Foundation and Nouvelle Planete, the Indians have mapped their territory. This has meant a trained team of Ye'kwana and Sanema visiting every settlement and canoeing and trekking to every area of significance in their domain. Using Global Positioning System devices they then 'geo-referenced' all this information so it could then be plotted on a base map with the help of the Universidad Nacional Experimental de Guayana. The result is a huge and detailed, highly coloured map which shows the Indians' names for all the features in their territory. Now, as part of second project, Kuyujani is developing a 'management plan' for this area, based on self-run community-level workshops to establish the customary system of resource management and complement this with western ideas of resource management through the training of eight community members at the University in the biological sciences.

These pioneering initiatives have helped promote a shift in national policy towards the Indians. In 1999, Venezuela adopted a new Constitution recognizing, for the first time, indigenous peoples' rights to their 'habitats'. In 2001, the Venezuelan Congress adopted a law establishing a mechanism for the recognition of these 'habitats', which was strongly influenced by the Caura model. The National Commission required to enact the law was established in August the same year. In early 2002, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) was informed that the Venezuelan Congress had also ratified ILO Convention 169. Meanwhile, discussion continues on a new organic law on indigenous peoples, which would provide further recognition of indigenous rights and institutions. Meanwhile, Kuyujani has submitted the first official application to the National Commission to seek legal recognition of the Upper Caura as the habitat of the Ye'kwana and Sanema. Kuyujani leaders have also provided advice and training to other indigenous communities in the Venezuelan Amazon on how to map and claim their lands. As long as the Venezuelan government sustains its commitment to this enlightened new policy, the basis has now been set for a country-wide recognition of indigenous rights to their lands.

By: Marcus Colchester, Forest Peoples Programme, e-mail: marcus@fppwrm.gn.apc.org