The CIA is hiding what it knows about emblematic conflict in the Amazon
US intelligence agency says all information about violence that shook Peru is classified
Today, 5 June, is something of a big day for many Peruvians. Not because it is the United Nations’ World Environment Day, or because this year it is the day before the country decides who its next President will be, but because 12 years ago, on 5 June 2009, more than 30 people died following extraordinary violence in the northern Amazon region of Amazonas. At the time, the director of the human rights organisation that I was working for, Survival International, called it the “Amazon’s Tiananmen.”
Around dawn that day, “special forces” police started to clear Awajún and Wampis indigenous people who were peacefully blocking a highway running into the Amazon. According to the most reliable reports, the conflict that ensued, together with violence that erupted in the nearby town of Bagua Grande, led to 11 policemen, five indigenous people and five non-indigenous people being killed, while in another Amazonas district a further 11 policemen were executed after being taken hostage, apparently in retaliation for what was believed to be happening along the highway. More than 200 people were injured too, many from being shot at. These tragic events became known as the “Baguazo.”
That highway blockade was part of Peruvian Amazon-wide protests - dubbed a “paro Amazónico” - that effectively dated from August the previous year, but had been suspended and then re-started on 9 April. The reasons? There were many, depending on the region, including oil, gas and mining concessions, but arguably the most obvious, most significant and most unifying was a series of new laws promulgated using temporary powers granted by Peru’s Congress to the Executive with the stated aim of enabling the country to comply with a new “trade promotion agreement” signed with the US. Indeed, one of the demands made by the paro was that that agreement should be annulled.
“We responded peacefully to [President Alan] García’s laws, but García responded violently to us,” Wampis leader Wrays Perez told me some years later when I visited Bagua and the surrounding region. “We don’t want to have to confront other Peruvians like that ever again.”
According to a “minority report” of the government-appointed commission to investigate the Baguazo, written by two members of the commission who refused to put their names to the official report, the main concern of many indigenous protesters was what some of those new laws meant for their land, livelihoods and lives. To put it simply, they undermined indigenous peoples’ rights and made it much easier for others to access and exploit their territories - and yet they weren’t consulted about any of them.
“Thinking about the reasons for what our brothers were fighting for on that historic day of 5 June 2009 is the same as thinking about what we’re fighting for today,” ran a statement from the Lima-based indigenous federation, AIDESEP, arguably the paro’s main convenor, which was released in 2014 to mark the five year anniversary. “Today we’re continuing to fight in order to defend our lives and territory, which we consider sacred. We’re fighting so that the territory we depend on for our survival is legally recognised - the territory that has belonged to us since ancestral times and was entrusted to us by our grandparents as the only way to keep our peoples and culture alive. With our fight we’re saying to the state: “No more violating the rights accorded to us by the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 169”, “No more establishing concessions in our territory”, and “No more laws that affect the ownership and access of our people to that which has always belonged to us and which we have learnt to manage and protect.”
The commission’s “minority report” noted that 99 laws had been promulgated using those temporary powers - most of them never discussed by Congress and unconnected to the US trade agreement. According to that report’s reading of another report by an eminent Peruvian lawyer, who was later Minister of Justice and then President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the percentage of the laws actually relating to the trade agreement “wasn’t greater than 20%.” “It is therefore obvious that public opinion was manipulated by exploiting a discourse of development around the expected benefits of a free trade agreement in order to legislate without any public participation on issues that had nothing to do with the trade agreement but were about other things, mainly connected to resources in the Amazon region,” the minority report stated.
As revealed by Wikileaks in 2014, on 1 June, four days before the violence broke out along the highway, the US Ambassador to Peru, Michael McKinley, had written a cable to the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, saying that “the government’s reluctance to use force to clear roads and blockades” was “contributing to the impression that the communities have broader support than they actually do. . . Should Congress and President García give in to the pressure, there would be implications for the recently implemented Peru-US Free Trade Agreement.” The very next day, Peru’s Minister of the Interior, Mercedes Cabanillas, replaced the country’s top police officer with another who, on the next day again, 3 June, effectively replaced the police general overseeing operations around Bagua, who had been regularly liaising with the protesters along the highway and warning against trying to disperse them by force.
Those decisions in top police personnel were described as “radical changes” by the “minority report.” “They were of decisive importance for the way in which events developed on 5 June around Bagua,” it stated. “Effectively, replacing General Uribe - an official whose mission, as he himself pointed out to the commission, was to dialogue until the end - with General Muguruza indicated a change in attitude.”
Did Clinton, or one of her aides, representatives or underlings, respond in any way to that cable from McKinley sent on 1 June? My attempts to contact the former Secretary through the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation in New York and her personal office met with no success, while the former Ambassador told me via email, “I will not be able to help with your query.”
Given all this, particularly the obvious links to the US trade agreement and the much-lesser-known cable to Clinton, it seemed reasonable to me to wonder what US intelligence knows about the Baguazo. What has never been made public? How might it deepen our understanding of what happened? Don’t Peruvians, particularly all those families who lost loved ones, deserve to know as much as possible? However, after submitting a Freedom of Information request to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), I was told somewhat remarkably that everything - absolutely everything - that they have on those tragic events is classified.
“We completed a thorough search for records responsive to your request and located material which we determined is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety on the basis of FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3),” the CIA tells me. “Exemption (b)(3) pertains to information exempt from disclosure by statute. The relevant statutes are Section 6 of the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, as amended, and Section 102A(i)(l) of the National Security Act of 1947, as amended.”
That response only raises further questions but, whatever the answers, what is clear for now is that no one in Peru wants another Baguazo, as indigenous people like Wrays Perez and others have told me over the years, and as I’ve seen scrawled on countless placards and posters at protests and demonstrations across the country. “No más Baguazo.” Whoever is elected President tomorrow must respect indigenous peoples’ rights and work towards genuinely sustainable development in the Amazon, Andes and other parts of the country, and other governments, banks, corporations and all the rest of us should do what they can to support that.