Indigenous and Amazonian leaders from Peru denounced the violation of their rights due to the impact of extractive activities on their territory to the United Nations Rapporteur on Toxic Substances and Human Rights, Marcos Orellana.
The National Organization of Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Women of Peru (Onamiap) reported this Saturday, in a statement, that the rapporteur visited its headquarters in Lima to meet with its president, Melania Canales Poma, and the secretary of Youth and Children of the organization, Karen Huere Cristóbal.
Also, with grassroots leaders Margarita Machacca Quispe, Guadalupe Flores Chacca, from the southern Andean region of Puno, and María Luz Canaquiri Murayari, from the Amazon region , from Loreto.
In the meeting, the representatives affirmed that extractive activities “imposed without complying with prior, free and informed consultation and consent, poison the blood and territories of indigenous peoples”.
In addition, they denounced that the Peruvian State, represented by the Ministry of Energy and Mines, “refuses to submit to consultation and consent the granting of mining and oil concessions in indigenous territories ”.
The leaders also emphasized the “lack of an indigenous institutionality in the structure of the State”, since, as they indicated, the Vice Ministry of Interculturality “omits its obligation to promote and protect the rights groups” and also “develops regressive policies on this issue”.
Onamiap added that the oil spills “that since For more than fifty years” the Amazonian peoples have suffered and the mining tailings in the Andes “leave thousands of people with heavy metals in their blood, produce new diseases, as well as women who cannot conceive or suffer spontaneous abortions.”
“Added to this are the polluted rivers, where there are no longer any fish, livestock that and poisons by drinking its waters, lands that no longer produce. In short, the loss of their survival activities, the migration of youth, and the deterioration of cultural identity”, emphasized the organization.
According to the statement, Orellana remarked that his visit a Peru was academic and not official, but it stated that the obligation of the State is to guarantee the human rights to which it has committed itself through international treaties and that the role of indigenous organizations is to demand those rights.
He pointed out that although the problem exposed “affects many people and in many places”, it does so to a greater extent to indigenous peoples and women who “live in harmony with the environment, and this gives them not only material sustenance, but also spiritual and cultural identity”.
“You provide lessons to overcome the climate emergency”, he indicated, addressing the women leaders.
At the end of his visit to Onamiap, Orellana requested to maintain contact and that information be sent to him on the situation of the rights of indigenous peoples and women in Peru.
Orellana also met on Friday with representatives of communities from the jungle and the Peruvian coast, who asked for the UN’s help in the face of oil spills , a problem that has affected them for decades and has been in force in the country since last January 10,400 barrels of crude oil in the Lima sea from the La Pampilla refinery, operated by Repsol.
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