Ancient Amazon Tribe’s Handling By Oil Giants Is Litmus Test for 21st Century Respect for Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples

The Matses Tribe of Peru is an endangered indigenous people of the Amazon Rainforest, dwindling like the Amazonian Rainforest due to pressures not of culture on their ancient ways, but of a corporate oil company’s desire to exploit the area that they have made their home for hundreds of years. Rights to the area have been sold from a regional oil trust working with a Canadian oil company. Together, the sheer political and economic power of these giants threaten “the Cat People”, known because of their former worship of the Jaguar,  ceremonial cat whisker decorations, tattoos, and body paint.

Resource exploitation corporations must be led to find a reasonable balance with bio-cultural concerns, creating flagship legal precedents for other indigenous peoples under pressure from resource exploitation corporations.

A rights-based approach to development is essential for the advance of the global economy, according to former ten- year World Bank Chairman, James Wolfensohn. Nobel Prize winner in Economics Amartya Sen sees the expansion of freedom for both corporation and individual as ‘the ends and the means’ for joint development. The upper strata of cultural and economic leadership has momentum toward the expansion of the discipline of macro international human rights applied at the micro applied tactical level. The Cat People of the Amazon must be treated as a valued artifact rather than an object to be removed. This respect metric will be the litmus test as to where high minded rhetoric meets common sense application.

Mantes Tribes people voluntarily invited missionaries to stay with them some 40 years ago, and the tribe has lost its animist majority, but animism is still a very strong cultural factor in their fashion. Most tribes-people wear very scant clothing if any at all, just the ceremonial type decorations. Hunting is done with custom made bows, and tediously made arrows that are long and very accurate. Most tribes in the Amazon have gone to using shotguns to hunt their prey and rely on the outside world, but not the Cat People. They make everything they use to sustain their society themselves, a lesson that we could all learn from. This characteristic occurred when 150 years ago a disease pandemic hit their tribes and they withdrew deep into the Amazon jungle on the borders of Peru and Brazil. Generally no one enters their area without their permission, and only as their guest. They do not allow vacationers to just walk through their villages and gawk. They will allow them however to try their frog poison medicine on occasion if the guests dare. Several have died attempting what Cat People consume with regularity. The transitional bridge to a new century and way of living for the Cat People is the clothing that children may wear at school is modern and not made within the borders of their domain. Perhaps this is a sign future agreements will be made between resource exploitation corporations and indigenous peoples where teams are created with mutual benefit and respect for each other’s rights and opportunities.

Three questions for readers of World Poverty & Human Rights Online are these: Should this tribe have the right to remain where they are as they have been for thousands of years, one of the last remaining tribes in Peru that is indigenous to the country and the entire continental rainforest area?

Should the Mantes Tribe be forced to move for the greater good of an economically poor region that would use new oil production jobs to move into the 21^st century information age and to stay competitive with the rest of civilization?

More importantly, neighbors in Venezuela and Brazil have invested heavily in oil and are being recognized on the world economic stage for their energy leadership, should the human rights of a few thousand tribes people stand in the way of the manifest destiny of a booming oil economy for the rest of the country?

Ultimately the answer should come from the tribes people themselves.  Negotiations should be conducted by oil companies with the Mantes tribe to make them offers. The reality is that if there is any rule of law, these peoples should benefit from the oil company use of land, and it should be done responsibly and transparently from the start of the transaction.

One of the longest running civil wars on the planet today is the Maoist Peruvian Shining Path versus their own government. The Shining Path was born in the universities of Lima to violently represent the downtrodden indigenous peoples that had been getting short shrift since the Spanish invaded and colonized centuries ago. Respecting indigenous tribes-people of the Amazon jungle with a sacred dignity shows a better way ahead for the 21^st century rather than the 20^th century industrial revolution style land grabs that contributed to the terrorist violence we see in the world today. Conducting business with sacred dignity toward indigenous peoples is okay, as it is okay to have plans for macro economic growth in a region to counter the influence of Hugo Chavez and his friends in Iran, while supplying opportunity for your own citizens.

Instead of a North American “glass beads for land” transaction reminiscent of United States acquisition history in the past, pillars of modern civilization such as oil companies, the governments of Peru and Brazil, the United Nations, and similar eagle view platforms should capture the highest and best uses of human rights for indigenous peoples.  Expanding the freedom of the powerless will ultimately expand the rights of the tax-paying citizens closer to the cities to also have economic upward freedom and opportunity. In doing this, stakeholders would also succeed in preserving anthropological signposts for the culture of the Amazon that will, hopefully, help others around the world to understand and better interact with their own ecosystems. The latter is certainly a lesson oil companies, people, and governments can all learn and appreciate for all civilization.

We might comment how we could find a new cure for cancer among the fauna and flora of the Mantses tribal lands, and that is why we should be careful in ejecting those that preserve such jungle laboratories for future pharmaceutical profits. The reality is that the Cat People may hold the sociological key in their self sustaining behavior for basics of how the Amazon may be preserved, while simultaneously harvesting for sustainable commercial gain for the inhabitants of the region. This case of the protection of Human Rights for a poverty ridden but self sustaining society should be the precedent for private industry taking responsibility as corporate citizens without government having to hold their hand to make sure they play nicely.

If oil companies could make respect for human dignity and self determination the rule instead of the exception, perhaps the global economy could get moving again without having to sell our souls.

Bibliography

Http://www.amazon-indians.org/page02.html. Issue brief. Web.

Alston & Robinson, pp. 19-41 ( Wolfensohn, Some Reflections on Human Rights and Development). Web.

Sen, Amartya Kumar. Development as freedom. New York: Anchor, 2000. Print.

Http://www.matses.org/. Issue brief. Web.

© 2010, Daniel Cameron Morris. All rights reserved.

Tags: Amazon Rainforest, Indigenous peoples, international intervention, leadership, macro-economic strategy, Peru, South America, tribal rights

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 8:36 PM and is filed under 2010, Development, Education, Food/Housing, Front Page, Int'l Econ, South America, WPHR Students. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.