“Vulnerability” refers to the lack of defenses against attacks or threats. In a political sense, vulnerability is counterpoised to the mechanisms of  – physical, social and economic – security provision by the state. The exclusion of violence as a means of conflict resolution, the system of fundamental human rights accompanied by civil-political liberties, and the creation of a social security system serve to protect citizens and communities from lethal conflict, arbitrary intrusions by public officials to individual and social life, the unpredictable shocks of the market, and the like. Vulnerability as such is not a pre- or un-political susceptibility to violence or material deprivation; rather, criteria of inclusion/exclusion, societal differentiation and stratification, order and conflict, are determined through political mechanisms that generate, legitimize and reproduce power relations in every society. Exclusion from legal-political status, i.e. citizenship, for instance, has led to the most troubling vulnerability of modern times – what Hannah Arendt calls the “right to have rights”. Arendt’s reading of the Interwar era as a precursor of the Holocaust demonstrates that revoking the right to participate in a political community (Rights of Citizen) nullifies even the most basic defenses of universal and inalienable human rights (Rights of Man).

While legal-political inclusion in a political community is indispensable to overcoming vulnerabilities, mere citizenship is by no means sufficient when individuals and communities lack meaningful access to their – legally recognized – rights, and political participation in conflict-resolution mechanisms. What the Amazonic peoples of Peru face today are precisely such a plurality of vulnerabilities in which the historic facts of socioeconomic deprivation, lack of effective access to national political processes and racist exclusion are combined with a new type of market-based defenselessness due to the extraction of natural resources by state-run and multinational companies – an increasing trend not only in Peru, but in the entire Western Amazon. (link to a topographic study of the oil and gas projects in the vast region) While this novel constellation of conflict dates back to 2004, when the-then President Alejandro Toledo decided to open indigenous lands of the Peruvian Amazon to oil/gas exploration and extraction, and logging. The following government of Alan Garcia adopted a more aggressive posture to carry out neoliberal policies, which met resistance by the native populations of the selva. The 57-day process of road blockades and strikes, accompanied by the government’s reluctance to initiate formal dialogue, resulted in violent clashes on June 5 and 6 in the community of Bagua, with cycles of attacks and counterattacks between the National Police and armed natives, which left a balance sheet of at least 22 policemen and many natives dead, and hundreds more injured, and claims of forced disappearances by security forces. Actual facts of violence are still hotly debated, as the official version does not match testimonial evidence and fotographic documentation collected by native groups, as well as by national and international NGOs and press. (For an excellent compilation of alternative versions of the incidents: a Spanish-language blog) In response, the government derogated the law proposals to ease the tension.

As the commentator Mirko Lauer notes, the latest violent incident attests to the failure of a conflict management strategy that the Peruvian state has long subscribed to: ignoring popular demands unless national and international media pay attention, and if they do (which almost always requires sensational spectacles of violence and interruption of economic activity), “satisficing” demands in lengthy processes of negotiation and concession. In fact, there is no justifiable explanation for why the state chose not to initiate dialogue with the Amazon peoples for two months – by the way, consulting indigenous populations over the use of their lands is not a mere practical requirement, but a right safeguarded by international agreements ratified by the Peruvian state. It seems that the government was expecting to end the social protest with police action, but the native people proved much better organized and armed than expected – which explains the high number of police casualties. While the violence deserves absolute moral and legal condemnation, from a political perspective, however, the question remains: why was the State unable to resolve the conflict for two months (if not many years) before the violent turn of events?

The discourse before, during and after the Bagua violence sheds light into the nature of exclusion suffered by the native communities. The classic racist discourse pictures these people as “savages” with no appreciation of economic development, a disposition for violence and an unpatriotic land-ownership discourse at the expense of the rest of Peru.

"Development"

While the “historical exclusion” leg of the vulnerability is constituted through racism, the natives face a second form of exclusion, one whose origins lie in the Cold War national security doctrines and whose contemporary form was shaped by post-9/11 trends: the protesters constitute a threat to national security. The criminalization of social protest goes hand-in-hand with the de-legitimizing of natives as agents of subversive foreign interests – not surprisingly, Venezuela and Bolivia are the privileged objects of demonization. The natives are savage enemies of technology, yet they use the most advanced communications technologies to humiliate Peru before the international public; they are remote, self-isolated pre-Hispanic cultures, yet they collaborate with Chavez and Morales in an international conspiracy; they have a primitive way of understanding economic development, yet they have the capacity to obstruct economic activity in the fastest-growing Latin American nation in the last fifteen years. The simultaneous adoption of centuries-old fears and the modern national security discourse seeks to achieve discursive exclusion by hegemonizing the entire ideological universe of meanings available to the national public.

Exclusion requires much more than discursive tools, of course. Laws, despite their capacity to resolve conflicts in other settings, have served as a weapon of vulnerability against vast sectors of the Peruvian population. The criminalization of social protest is achieved through laws sanctioning terrorism and sedition. The political economy of exclusion is likewise the consequence of legal developments: the Constitution of 1993, prepared and ratified during the first year of the Fujimori dictatorship, removes the inalienability of the Peruvian soil. The Free Trade Agreements between Peru and other states (chiefly the USA) generates pressures for the adoption of laws and regulations that facilitate the commercialization of land, while the Peruvian state has been unable to liberalize its land regime, mostly due to the resistance of the Amazonic communities and their national and international allies. The Garcia administration failed to pass two land liberalization laws in 2008, which led to the current (again failed) attempts to pass similar legislation. (For a legal analysis of the ongoing crisis over the Amazon lands, see the study by Instituto de Defensa Legal, in Spanish)

The ensuing political stalemate can be understood as two simultaneous paradoxes:

(1) the particular interests of a local, criollo economic/political elite, combined with the interests of multinationals, are presented as the universal interests of the entire Peruvian society. National security and economic developmentalism, two pillars of national legal normativity and media discourse, conceal the naked profit motive devoid of social responsibility, the erasure of regional or national boundaries, and the distributive limitations of neoliberal economic growth.

(2) The absence of legality, or even sheer police control, in vast areas of the Peruvian selva, generates a new regime of sovereignty in which politics is understood as a series of crisis management techniques rather than a territorial legal order aimed at justice, freedom and security. The state finds legitimation in no longer invoking its traditional source of legitimacy. Ensuring economic activity at an acceptable social cost is the test for ensuring popular consent. While the continued economic growth seems to support this model of politics-as-crisis-management, the “social cost” in Bagua – in the form of countless dead, disappeared and injured – will definitely challenge the current administration, if not the legitimation model as such.

The neoliberal model of politics-as-crisis-management by no means excludes violence as an abnormality, aberration or externality in a political society; violence is internalized as a social cost. Since sociohistorical discriminatory exclusion denies any meaningful access to political claim-making, social protest in the periphery of the nation has effectively no outlet but sensational, scandalizing displays of violence, until the disturbances threaten economic activity and the image of the government to the point that the imperatives of crisis-management necessitate a temporary and limited instance of dialogue between protesters and government. Then, there shall be no violence until the next wave of violence!

To finish, I believe that the defense of people’s rights should discard violence as a political means, and should focus on creating networks across local, national and transnational actors to ensure access to national and international judicial remedies. I fear that the depiction of native peoples as freedom-fighters with a spirit of “fierce independence”, however benevolent it may be, reproduces racial stereotypes, fails to appreciate the complexity of contemporary social protest, facilitates the criminalization of legitimate demands, and provokes the death of innocents – civilians and security forces alike. As for indigenous lands, there is an emerging normative framework: several domestic laws and regulations, such as the Regulation of Citizen Participation for the Realization of Hydrocarbon Activities (2008), the  ILO Convention (No. 169) concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries (1989),, Article 10 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), and Interamerican Court of Human Rights decisions establish beyond doubt that there is a process of norm-creation that will establish the “informed consent” of indigenous populations as the precondition of economic activity on indigenous land. Environmental protection, another emerging legal field, has already resulted in a major lawsuit, when the representatives of Peru’s Achuar people sued the California-based Occidental Petroleum for violation of industrial standards and contamination of waters in a US court – the latest available online news shows that the lawsuit is undergoing a process of appeal, following an early dismissal. In countries like Peru, where a certain percentage of the population even lacks an ID card, activists and politicians should focus on inclusion, that is to say, encouraging the “right to have rights”, and meaningful access to legal mechanisms to stop violence, seek justice and resolve conflicts.