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Amazon leader calls on Peru to investigate forest activists’ murder

By Bethany Ao, GSS correspondent

PARIS — [Editor’s note: GSS news editor Bethany Ao is attending COY11 in Paris, where she met Diana Ríos, a leader of the Asheninka people in Peru. In September 2014, four activists in Pullcalpa, in Peru’s Ucayali province, were ambushed and brutally executed while walking home from a community meeting. Three men have been charged but three more suspects are believed to be at large.

Among the activists killed was Ríos‘ father, Jorge Ríos Pérez, who was fighting for legal title to the Asheninka’s lands in order to prevent illegal logging in the Amazon. Diana Ríos, who had a daughter with Edwin Chota, another one of the killed activists, was forced into hiding.

Page 2 of August 2015 title granting land to the community of Alto-Tamayo-Saweto.
Page 2 of August 2015 document granting land to the community of Alto-Tamayo-Saweto.

But she and other activists continued to fight, and on Aug. 18 Peru granted the Asheninka people title to almost 200,000 acres of their ancestral land. It was the culmination of a 10-year fight to protect the Amazon. 

The massive forests of the Amazon are considered a key to solving climate change, with an estimated 17 billion tons of above-ground carbon, more than three times as much carbon as the U.S. emits in a year.

As indigenous people whose lives depend on the land, the Asheninka and other indigenous people say they are best able to preserve these forests.

Read on for Ao’s live tweets of Ríos’ address to COY today.]

bethany staff page—Photos by Bethany Ao. Ao is GSS News Editor for Europe and a junior at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. See more of her on-the-ground reports from COY11 on Twitter @GSSVoices, #GSS_COY11 and on Facebook. Follow Ao @BethanyAo and email her atbethanyao2017@u.northwestern.edu.

Beatrice

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