Politics: Latin America: Peru's rainforest Aboriginals take on professional Army soldiers, a more mix-blooded stratum

Perhaps not a revolution, yet a powerful mass blow to the regime of Peru's current prez, Alan Garcia. The President himself is no pure-bred Conquistador, and so (to the glance of these casual eyes), he offers us a perceivably different "look" from the tribal people/s who are coming from the rainforest to "clash," as the media say. It's the "divisions between [the generally l+ter-skinned] elites in Lima and the rural poor [generally darker, decidedly more aboriginal, threatening] to derail the government's push to further open Peru to foreign investors.

Indigenous protesters and Peru's army refused to back down and a truce looked distant Saturday, after two battles in the Amazon jungle killed some 50 people in the worst crisis of President Alan Garcia's term.

Protesters said 30 of their own died and the government said 22 members of the security forces perished in two days of clashes over Garcia's drive to bring foreign companies to the rain forest to open mines and drill for oil.

Under the Garcia presidency (which, if I recall correctly, commanded the votes of many of the urban and rural poor to enable him to become incumbent in his office), Peru has headed in a different direction from other recent regime-change presidencies in Latin America. I'm thinking of Evo Morales ...

Mr. Garcia claims he will cut poverty faster than a new wave of leftist presidents [elsewhere] that he often trades barbs with: Bolivia's Evo Morales and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. But he has yet to win support from the poor.

Indigenous groups oppose laws passed last year as Mr. Garcia moved to bring Peru's regulatory framework into compliance with a free-trade agreement with the United States.

Tribes said Mr. Garcia's allies acted in bad faith when they blocked a motion in [Peru's] Congress Thursday to open debate on a law they want overturned. Violence erupted the next day.

Peru already cooperates to some degree, with the USA international anti-cocaine program -- cocaine being a real cash crop if the poor are permitted to cultivate, harvest, and sell it. So, without the most economically-viable but legally-unviable coke production, where do the Peruvian poor go to obtain an income?

They flock to the mines and oil-drill rigs for whatever work they can get.

The poor who find work and a tiny income in the new rainforest industry envisioned by President Garcia, these newly-arrived poor coming from elsewhere to mine and drill, now compete with the Aboriginals for the very habitat to which the pristine rainforest way of life has long been adapted, become indigenous as a cultural form, a societal shape with its own contours.

Garcia may have, must have weighed his options carefully, in regard to the Peruvian national economy. That he decided to bring in big-bucks investors and professional mining and drilling companies (with some spill over of jobs to the native population from the still-surrounding forest) but the revenues from the presence of the foreign companies' would perhaps at least pay for more serious services to the poor. The still-somewhat tribal persons native to the rainforsst are f+ting against the near-total destruction of their way of life, what remains of it.

--Politicarp