Our thirst for natural resources is wreaking havoc in Peru.
Last weekend approximately 30 protesters died trying to save their rainforest home from being plundered for minerals and oil and anything else that might feed the US and EU's need to consume. this isn't about a few people trying to protect their backyard, these protests are about saving whole tribes, complete cultures whose world will be wiped out.
It's not hard so see why President Garcia thinks billion-dollar deals will bring benefits to Peru's population, but at what price? Life? The lives of those protesters, of entire tribes, of great swathes of rainforest and the ecological repurcussions they entail?
If money is so important then I say:
* boycott Peru as a holiday destination,
* protest to the multinationals - such as Anglo-French oil company Perenco, who want to extract oil, gas and minerals from the rainforest,
* consume less.
I have a vested interest in Peru. I've been there, as part of a year-off I travelled through Central and South America eight years ago and I spent about six weeks there. It is an astonishingly lovely country. It has a spiritual charm and a natural beauty that Western values will ruin. Yes, it has terrible poverty but we all know how aid money is ransacked and no amount of cash changes the problems caused by one of human nature's less appealing traits - greed.
