In countries like Peru,
extractive industries contract police to suppress Indigenous protesters and
detain international observers — including me.
By Jen Moore, October
21, 2019.
In late April 2017, U.S.
investigative journalist John Dougherty and I were screening John’s
documentary Flin Flon Flim Flam in
Peru. The film documents violence, environmental contamination, broken
promises, and police repression at mining projects owned by the Canadian mining
company Hudbay Minerals in several countries — including in Peru.
As we left the Cusco Cultural
Center after a Friday evening screening, we were surrounded by 15 to 20 plain
clothes police and a handful of immigration officials.
They brought us to the Cusco
immigration office, where they detained and interrogated us for four hours —
the maximum time permitted by law. We were finally released after midnight,
thanks no doubt to pressure from friends and colleagues in Peru, throughout
Latin America, and in the U.S. and Canada.
It was political detention,
and the Interior Ministry made no secret of it.
Less than 12 hours after our
release, the ministry released a communiqué accusing us of violating our
tourist visas and posing a threat to public order by talking about the risks of
mining, and by “inciting” communities to oppose mining activities. The ministry
defended Hudbay’s mining operations — and said we should be expelled.
Concerned for our safety and
upon advice from our lawyers, we left Peru that same day. The next day, we were
indefinitely banned from re-entry.
Police as Contractors
Hudbay operates the Constancia
open-pit copper mine in southern Peru. John had filmed there in late 2014, when
the community of Uchuccarco was protesting the company’s failure to live up to
promises related to environmental monitoring, jobs, and social projects. Women
were out in particularly strong numbers.
The footage John captured,
which appears in the documentary, shows national police firing teargas at men
and women during a protest in which at least 17 were injured.
Why would police fire at
demonstrators? Because Hudbay, like many
mining, oil and gas companies operating in Peru, has a contract with police
for its security services. The police, in short, had sold themselves to the
company as private security guards.
At the time, human rights
observers saw police both inside and outside the company gates, including some
dressed in ponchos with company logos holding police riot shields. This is
characteristic of police work on private contracts, in which they often use
state-issued arms and uniforms while defending company interests.
In 2017, I was working as the
Latin America Program Coordinator for MiningWatch Canada and collaborating with
the Peruvian organization Human Rights Without Borders — Cusco and
Cooperacción. We worked together to organize screenings of John’s film in
communities near Hudbay’s mine, as well as in Cusco and Lima.
Even before we arrived,
efforts were underway to derail our plans. An anonymous columnist published a
defamatory article accusing us and our Peruvian counterparts of organizing “an
ambush” against Hudbay.
And in the days leading up to
our detention, we were filmed by unknown individuals, while community leaders
reported being questioned by police and company representatives about the
screenings. At our last community stop, the film screening was suddenly
canceled, and police tried to get our personal information from a hotel we had
stayed in.
Shortly afterward, we were
detained in Cusco.
A Built-in Bias
John and I were convinced that
Hudbay was involved. But the company denied any role.
Finally, this fall — two and a
half years later — a Lima court ruled in our
favor in response to a habeas corpus motion filed on my behalf by the
Institute for Legal Defense (IDL), Human Rights Without Borders – Cusco (DHSF),
the Association for Life and Human Dignity (APORVIDHA), and Cooperacción.
The decision states that
sharing information about the negative impacts of mining does not threaten
public order, nor does it violate migratory law in Peru. Rather, it is part of
exercising one’s rights. As such, the court found that our detention was a
violation of both our individual rights to freedom of expression, as well as
local communities’ collective rights to obtain information.
Significantly, these
violations occurred as a direct result of the police’s contract with Hudbay,
which the judge ruled had caused the police and Interior Ministry to act with
bias in the company’s interest.
The ruling is subject to
appeal, but it’s a good first step — for us and for other journalists,
filmmakers, academics, public interest researchers, or independent technical
consultants who might seek to share critical views about the negative impacts
of extractive projects with communities in Peru.
It’s also fodder for those
fighting to stop private police contracts.
A Dangerous Occupation
The truth is, John and I got
off light.
In an area not far from Cusco,
police repression against Indigenous communities protesting environmental
contamination in 2012 ended with dozens injured and two dead. And
Peruvians often face much more punitive legal proceedings than we did.
For instance, the governor of
Puno province has been sentenced to six years
in jail for allegedly organizing Aymara Indigenous communities to
protest mining concessions for the Canadian company Bear Creek Mining in 2011,
over very real concerns about the
water contamination that results from gold mining.
Laws like the one that allows
police contracts with mining companies are just one example of how the law has
been turned against Indigenous peoples and mining-affected communities in Peru
and elsewhere, making fighting mega-projects an ever more dangerous vocation.
Meanwhile, laws favorable to
extractive industries have been entrenched with support from the World Bank and
governments in the Global North. These laws typically privatize mineral
extraction, make permitting processes easier, and keep taxes and royalty
payments to a minimum.
Moreover, thousands of
international trade agreements lock in investor interests by letting
transnational corporations sue democratically elected governments for
public interest regulations or other government decisions that may affect the
value of their investments in binding arbitration courts.
Against this backdrop, while
the recent court decision is an important moment in the fight against putting
police in the pay of corporations, it’s only a small step in a much bigger
struggle against the ever greater dangers facing those defending their
territories against devastating mega-projects.
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