Campaign Update:

In an attempt to provide easy access to impartial information about the deforestation of the Amazon, The National Institute of Space Research (INPE) has launched a new website. This site provides information based on the digital records of satellite images, including LANDSAT images and maps of the deforestation. The site allows to spatially localize areas of drastic tree loss; an aide that will permit a more comprehensive analysis of the factors behind deforestation and help develop policies to protect against further forest loss.

At least 70 workers on the Camisea natural gas pipeline in Ayacucho were kidnapped early Monday morning by unidentified assailants and held for a ransom of one million dollars and assorted communications equipment. On Tuesday the army led a raid on the kidnappers, freeing the captives. The whereabouts of the kidnappers are unknown. President Alejandro Toledo said afterward that he believed the kidnappers were remnants of the Maoist Shining Path, whose insurgency led to an extremely violent civil war that killed over 35,000 during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Indigenous leaders from the Achuar, Shuar, and Zapara peoples have been staging protests outside the international headquarters of Burlington Resources in unified opposition to the company’s oil exploration and extraction policies in their territories. Purchaser of the oil concession referred to as Block 24, Burlington Resources owns blocks in the primary rainforest of the southern Ecuadorian Amazon, overlapping with the ancestral territories of the Achuar, Shuar, and Quichua peoples.

Approximately seven hundred Kosovo Romani, Ashkaelia and Egyptian refugees -- including around three hundred and fifty children - have been living in a "collective center" in the Orizari municipality of the Macedonian capital Skopje, sheltered under short-term, temporary ‘surrogate protection’ since being ethnically cleansed from Kosovo in 1999.

On May 6, program director Paula Palmer met Sea Turtle Restoration Project's Doug Israel and Global Response members Crystal Law, Philip Paul and Bill Bernthal at United Nations headquarters in New York City, where they delivered over 1,100 letters addressed to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights issued an order of precautionary measures in favor of the Sarayacu indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Commission ordered the Ecuadorian government to put in place all the necessary measures to protect the life, safety, and territories of the Sarayacu people. 

A Landmark Agreement Recognizing the San’s Intellectual Property Rights

On March 24, 2003, a small group of people gathered in the Kalahari Desert of far northern South Africa to observe a momentous occasion. After years of negotiations and uncertainty, representatives of the San peoples of southern Africa joined representatives from South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) to celebrate the signing of a benefit-sharing agreement for a drug being developed from a traditional mainstay of the San diet – the seemingly humble Hoodia plant.

In the wake of reports of renewed oil exploration on U’wa lands in Colombia, Cultural Survival spoke with Campaign Coordinator Kevin Koenig of Amazon Watch for an update. Mr. Koenig reports that Ecopetrol has taken over the abandoned OXY drill site and has drilled further and deeper than before. In the weeks that followed this drilling, mixed reports have come from the drilling location.

In June 2001, a crucial meeting was held on Big Mountain, Black Mesa, Arizona. Grassroots Diné (also known as Navajo) and Hopi organizations, national environmental groups, ordinary people and politicians came together and shared the message “Water Is Life” (see article in Cultural Survival Voices, Fall 2001).

On April 10, the Specialized Commission of Human Rights of the National Congress of Ecuador decided to officially visit certain territories, including Sarayacu, to investigate allegations by indigenous leaders against CGC and other oil companies. The principal objectives of this visit are the gathering of testimony from inhabitants of Sarayacu and inspection of areas where CGC has been active, and accused of violating the human rights of the local Kichwa people. This visit will take place on April 25, and a report regarding the situation in the region will follow.

Sarayacu community leaders, who continue to oppose the entry of oil companies onto their land, are now threatened by an order to "locate and detain" them, apparently from the Presidential office of Ecuador. They claim they face trumped-up charges of taking hostages, theft, and the destruction of goods. This order means that at any time leaders can be detained and kept in jail until the end of lawsuits between Sarayacu and CGC Oil Company.