Social and Environmental Issues in Peru

Peru’s socio-economic climate

In Peru as in all Latin American countries, social issues revolve around the economy. In Peru’s case, it has meant sustaining economic growth after an extended bout of political unrest and economic turmoil following a 20-year civil war against violent radical insurgent movements.

The issue is complicated by race issues relating to Peru’s colonial heritage. Eighty-two percent of the country is of either indigenous or mixed indigenous-Spanish descent, while 15 percent of populace is Caucasian of purely Spanish heritage, yet that same 15 percent continues to make up the majority of Peru’s upper-class with its attendant domination of industry and politics. This in turn has led to ongoing civil unrest resulting from large-scale poverty and resentment among the mostly disenfranchised non-white majority This is further exacerbated by a lingering racism that originated in the arrival of the Spanish and pervades popular culture, such as in television shows and advertising, which presents Caucasian as closer to an ideal of physical desirability than Indigenous.

This came to a head with the emergence of two separate radical factions during the early 1980’s: the Shining Path, which was Maoist, and Túpac Amaru, which was Marxist-Leninist. Both organizations recruited among the poorest in Peru’s rural areas and used violence and terror to achieve their aim of taking over the country – and for some time it seemed that the Shining Path movement might succeed; at one point 60 percent of the country, mostly the rural sectors, was under its control.

The presidency of leftist Alan Garcia during this time was nothing less than an abject disaster – during his term inflation reached 2,200,200%, resulting in three changes of currency as the Peruvian monetary kept losing its trade value. In addition, incomes dropped, foreign investment stopped, and unemployment soared – all of which contributed to support for the two competing revolutionary movements, especially the Shining Path guerrillas, who increased the degree and severity of violence against Peru’s urban sector.

Peruvians turned to the hard-line candidate Alberto Fujimori, who intensified and broadened the military campaign against the rebels. He also reversed many of Garcia’s economic measures and introduced wide-sweeping free market reforms, privatizing many industries and opening up greater sections of Peru’s Amazon for oil drilling. This measure, despite its positive effect on the economy, was widely criticized for the impact it had on Peru’s ecology and the lives of Peru’s tribal indigenous.

The Fujimori government was able to reverse both Peru’s economic tailspin as well as defeat both Shining Path and Túpac Amaru, but at the cost of curtailing democracy and permitting the country’s security forces to commit human rights abuses. There was also evidence of extensive corruption throughout in the administration, including dealings with Columbian narcotraffickers.

After winning a questionable election in 2000, Fujimori abruptly resigned while on a visit to Japan, using his duel citizenship with that country to avoid being prosecuted for a variety of criminal charges that were being brought against him.

However, with Peru’s economy on the rebound and the threat of a Maoist or Marxist takeover in recession, the work ahead for post-Fujimori Peru has been to keep moving forward. Unfortunately, the reconciliatory presidency of centrist Alejandro Toledo, while restoring some of the democracy that was restricted during the previous administration, was overwhelmed by corruption scandals and unpopular economic measures, which resulted in Toledo’s approval dropping as low as 8%.

Despite the failures of his first term in office, Alan Garcia made a political comeback and was narrowly re-elected president against the Hugo Chavez-backed leftist military candidate, Ollanta Humala. Garcia now claims to have revised his political philosophy and hopes to approximate the success of Chile’s free-market economy.

Garcia’s announced a thirteen-point plan that includes increasing public and private investment, keeping inflation below 2% a year, building a quarter of a million new homes, teaching just as many Peruvians how to read and write, reduce poverty from 50% to 30% percent (poverty in rural areas is as high as 70%), reduce malnutrition from 25% to 16%, increase access to electricity and running water to 90%, create 1,500,000 new jobs, increase federal reserves by nine billion dollars, confer property deeds to 800,000 landowners, and reduce Peru’s national debt from 24% to 13%.

This is a daunting challenge. Currently the number of business that evade paying taxes is as high as 53%, though Carsten Korch, editor of www.livinginperu.com claims that actual tax evasion is over 90%.

Curiously not on President Garcia’s agenda is the pervasive and profound issue of crime. The U.S. State Department has rated Peru as a Critical Threat post for crime, and even Peru’s National Police report that in Lima a crime occurs every three minutes. Crime is virtually institutionalized in Peru, from petty theft to organized crime rings that traffic in drugs, sex slavery, illegal immigration, and the unlawful sale of Peru’s archeological heritage. The problem is further exacerbated by Peru’s often-corrupt law enforcement.

President Garcia will be walking a careful tightrope in maintaining enough credibility for his centrist policies but without the larger popular working class and indigenous support enjoyed by his more demagogic and leftist fellow Andean leaders in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, who represent the modern indigenous movement in Latin America. In the Hobbesian climate of Latin American politics, Ollanta Humala will be keeping a close watch on Alan Garcia between now and the next election.

The Machu Picchu vs Yale University Controversy

In this context, Alan Garcia has been fortunate to seize upon a nationalist and patriotic issue, one especially relevant to Peru’s indigenous population: the relics removed by National Geographic explorer Hiram Bingham from Machu Picchu after his discovery of the historic city in 1912. They have been residing at Yale University ever since. Yale claims that the government of Peru legally signed off on the artifacts, which comprise everything from crockery to clay deities, while Peru maintains that Yale’s custody of them was only for the sake of research and with the understanding that they would eventually be returned.

In the nearly one-hundred years since Bingham’s discovery, generations of Peruvians have lived and died without access to some of the most valuable tokens of their ancestral heritage. However, how much access they would have had if the items remained in Peru is an open question. In an investigative piece by Arthur Lubow in The New York Times, Lubow noted that “Peru’s record in safeguarding archaeological treasures…is spotted with the traces of disappearing objects.” For example, in 1979, literally hundreds of pieces of Incan and pre-Incan pieces went missing from the National Museum of Archaeology. In 1993 almost the entire gold collection from Cusco’s Museo Inka disappeared.

There is also the fact that, visually, much of what is in Yale’s Peabody Museum is less interesting and less impressive than is on already on display on museums throughout Peru. Garcia is threatening to take up the issue, nonetheless, in an international court.

Environmental Issues

Peru has some of the richest and most abundant natural resources of any country in the world, but with the economic crises and political turmoil of the last several decades has put safeguarding the country’s environment secondary to exploiting it. As a result, Peru is experiencing panoply of ecological problems that have raised concerns of environmentalists around the world. These include air and water pollution, soil contamination and erosion, and deforestation.

Industrial and vehicle emissions in Peru create over 26 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, while in the rural areas, due to industrial, sewage, and petroleum-drilling waste, only 62% of the population has access to pure drinking water. Overgrazing in the sierras and the coasts, meanwhile, has brought about soil erosion.

Half of Peru is forest, and experiences a deforestation rate of 0.35 to 0.5 %, largely as a consequence of subsistence farming resulting from migrant farmers exploiting a squatter’s law that allows citizens to obtain public land if they can prove they have lived in it for at least five years. The greater degree of deforestation, however, is wrought by commercial logging, both legal and illegal, as well as mining, petroleum drilling, and road development.

Most of the logging in Peru going on is illegal; estimates are that up to 95% of the country’s mahogany is unlawfully cut and sold, much of it from national parks and federal reserves, but with law enforcement underfunded and vulnerable to bribery and corruption, almost no commercial loggers are either charged or prosecuted.

Then there is the deforestation brought about by oil-drilling. In 2005 a contract was granted to the China National Petroleum Corporation in the Madre de Dios region of southern Peru, an area that is home to more then 10% of the world’s bird species.

Coca production, both legal and illegal, has taken its toll as forests have been cleared in order to make way for coca plantations.

Gold mining also contributes substantially, since the process involves destroying river banks and clearing floodplain forests. Furthermore, this creates an incentive to bring independent miners who then cut trees to for firewood and shacks. Mercury is a necessary component of the mining process, but the effect is to poison soil and water.

A very controversial construction project in Peru’s Amazon basin is the proposed construction of a superhighway across the jungle connection Peru to Brazil. There are concerns that the road will essentially urbanize everything along its path, consuming or endangering all flora and fauna in the area.

Peru has up to 2,937 varieties of amphibians, birds, mammals, and reptiles, and 17,144 species of plants. Currently, Peru’s endangered species list includes 46 mammal varieties including the yellow-tailed woolly monkey and the black spider monkey, 64 types of birds including the tundra peregrine falcon and the white-winged guan, and 653 categories of plants – and many of these are endemic, that is native only to Peru. There are a number of reptiles at risk as well, including the hawksbill turtle, the leatherback turtle, the spectacled caiman, and the Orinoco and American crocodiles.

Here are some related tips to help plan your trip to Peru: Inca Trail: Environmental Issues, The Peruvian Amazon Environmental Issues, The Shining Path, Politics in Peru, Lori Berenson: An American Behind Peruvian Bars and The Economy of Peru.