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Peruvian community leader murdered by illegal loggers

New York Times reporter Andy Revkin reports on the murder of Julio García Agapito, a community leader from the Madre de Dios region of Peru who was murdered by illegal loggers after reporting their illicit activities to the authorities.

 

Madre de Dios is a department in the Peruvian Amazon renowned for its biological diversity. Thirteen percent of the land area in Madre de Dios is reserved for logging concessions, as the department is among the last remaining outposts for harvesting mahogany on a commercial scale. Despite the concessions, evidence suggests that illegal logging is commonplace. In fact, illicit mahogany harvesting is on the rise as work continues on the Inter-oceanic highway, a transport artery that will link Peru’s neighbor Brazil with the Pacific Ocean through Madre de Dios.

 

On February 26, 2008, Julio García Agapito alerted Peruvian authorities to a truck hauling illegally harvested mahogany. The authorities, including the Peruvian national police, intercepted the truck and began unloading its cargo until a man with extra keys to the vehicle commandeered it and drove it from the scene. As police pursued the fleeing truck, Julio García Agapito remained in the INRENA agency offices. Within minutes he was dead, shot ten times by a collaborator in the illegal logging operation who then immediately fled to Bolivia. Madre de Dios had lost a conscientious and dynamic local leader whose sole transgression was standing up for the law.

 

Unfortunately, the untimely death of Julio García Agapito is not an isolated incident. As Revkin reports, it is but “the latest to illustrate how the lack of governance on the world’s remaining resource frontiers threatens both ecological integrity and human rights.”


Read Revkin's article in its entirety here.

 

 

Posted By Colby Clabaugh at 4:00pm on March 28, 2008

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