Peru: March of Sacrifice Wika Karitama or People Power

Servindi / ACODECOSPAT, June 17, 2014 -. A few hundred men and women, old and young, began last Sunday at 4 am a March of Sacrifice from Nauta to the city of Iquitos. With cramped and blistered feet they walked under the sun along 44 of the 100 kilometers that separate them from their destination.

The Wika Karitama or People Power March of Sacrifice is to remind President Ollanta Humala that his primary role as head of State is to defend the lives of the Kukamas Kukamirias Indigenous Peoples and protect the species harbored by the Pacaya Samiria Reserve and its buffer zone.

The Kukama Kukamirias expect to meet the head of State face to face today, June 17 at the 28 of July Plaza in Iquitos, since as it is election time is coming to the city to personally ask for people´s votes.

They do not want to meet with officials but personally with the President. The marchers do not understand why they are being ignored, why the President does not listen forcing them to raise their voice and stand up and fight to be heard.

They are mobilizing at great sacrifice to warn that the Pacaya Samiria Reserve, a Natural Heritage, is in danger as are the lives of the Kukama Kukamirias Peoples.

They want to tell him personally that the people did not elect him to grant impunity to the oil companies.

Projects to harness rainwater for consumption, to supply safe drinking water to communities, to implement production centers, are lost amid endless and useless formalities and paperwork and that are eventually returned for insufficient funds.

The emergency funds from the oil royalties like the food production projects from the Ministry of Agriculture are useless, since in the end it is the same story. There are no funds.

The Kukama Kukamiria people never needed external food assistance. They always enjoyed their food sovereignty, but the contamination of their territories and the pollution of rivers and groundwater ruined their capacity to feed themselves.

The Kukama Kukamiria people are tired of empty promises, deceptions and endless lies of the central and regional government. Their hardship makes them capable to withstand the sun, rain, cramps, muscle aches, and they endure today in the march to demand the end to the neglect and exclusion of indigenous peoples.

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Traducción de Luis Claps para IWGIA y Servindi.