Double Handshake

Well, since DH cannot be anymore “harmonized” in China than it already is, I thought I’d offer a quick update on the “Amazon’s Tiananmen,” a label that’s been used to describe the violent clashes between indigenous Indians and Peruvian police in June over land use in Peru’s Amazon jungle. The tensions bubbled over three months ago, as Peru’s government continued opening up more areas of the country for oil and mineral exploration without consulting the local inhabitants. All in all, around thirty police officers and protesters were killed and more than 200 were injured.

When I first wrote about the clashes in the days that followed, I questioned the “Tiananmen” comparison. Aside from the timing (happening in early June, around the time of the 20-year anniversary of the China protests) and easily simplified narrative (oppressive government cracking down on its own people), I didn’t find a lot of similarity between the two protests.

One thing that I did get wrong in that earlier post, however, was the amount of media coverage Peru’s protesters got. I had rashly predicted that the incident would not capture international attention like China’s protesters got twenty years previously. Yet, in the weeks that followed Peru’s clashes, the incident made front-page headlines worldwide. Some of these news sources jumped on the “Amazon’s Tiananmen” label, while most did not.

Regardless, mounting international pressure and Lima’s backtracking culminated in the apology and resignation of the country’s prime minister Yedude Simon and congress’s repealing some of the laws granting wanton commercial development in tribal areas. This is not to say that all foreign development has stopped in the area, but I submit that the protests did have a major impact in Lima, something I would not have predicted had you asked me in June.

So, what then of the “Tiananmen” label? Survivor International, a British NGO, whose director Stephen Corry coined the term as far as I can tell, is still using it. Last week, Survivor published another indictment of Peru’s government in the 100 days that followed the “Amazon’s Tiananmen” and called for an independent investigation of what happened really happened in June.

But while China’s Tiananmen legacy inside the country is hushed at best and forgotten at worst, it seems to me that the Peru’s “Tiananmen” stands to be held up by indiginous groups as a major (if bloodied) victory, given Lima’s repentance over the incident. Would anyone in participating in the 1989 demonstrations claim the same?