By Gaston Rodriguez on February 4, 2020
Record numbers of land clearings in the province of Salta have deprived communities of their territories and their way of living. Six Wichi native children have already died. Environmentalists are focusing on soy expansion.
“The media refer to six Wichi children who died in Salta but there are many more who preceded them in this unfair reality; children whose well-being disappeared together with their territory; children who suffer even before they’re born from the plundering that the disappearance of the forest means; children without the right to eat because their natural store was destroyed; children without the right to water because many times soy producers contaminate their natural sources. Wichi people need the forest to survive.”
These are the words of Noemi Cruz, coordinator of the Forest Campaign in Greenpeace. She is the person who pays the most attention to the relentless advance of deforestation in northern Argentina, denouncing environmental damage, condemning the abandonment of native people. An intimate reason justifies it: “As descendant of indigenous people who were left without a forest, I can tell you how hard it is to survive without your home, the stress you feel in your soul for generations, and how important the forest is for one to continue being, to be the person one came to be.”
Hunger is the urgent reason. The early death of Wichi children and the many—too many—hospitalized with different forms of malnutrition overshadows any analysis, closing any debates. However, the victims themselves warn that there is a much deeper cause that remains conveniently invisible.
“National, provincial and municipal states do not want to reveal what is happening. They show the deaths of the kids but they don’t say that all companies in this area dump toxic waste, into the Bermejo river for example, with total freedom. What is killing people is the cancer of pollution; people have the illness in their body; they can’t eat; they can’t use their force. No State has paid attention to this as they are focused only on deforestation, logging, and the sowing of soy, beans and corn. This is how they dragged down the whole forest and that is the biggest cause of what is happening to us,” said Leonardo Pantoja, president of the National Commission to Investigate the Genocide for the Historical Reparation of Argentina’s Native People and reference among the Wichi community of El Trafico, 45 kilometers away from Embaracion, where some of the dead children lived.
The “socio-health emergency” declared by governor Gustavo Saenz in the departments of Oran, Rivadavia and San Martin has a particularity that helps to understand: the last two are the most deforested areas in the province of Salta. In just the last four years, Salta chopped down about 80,000 hectares of forests.
The property zoning changes illegally made by former governor Juan Manuel Uturbey had alot to do with this. Now living in Spain, Uturbey authorized the work of bulldozers in areas protected by the Law on Forests, favoring the interests of powerful friends, such as Alejandro Braun Peña, cousin of former Cabinet Minister Marcos Peña, or his own family, for instance, when he directly benefitted his brothers by passing a “law on territorial re-ordering” allowing them to deforest areas that were banned up until then.
“The Wichi are historically a hunter-gatherer people who can hardly survive without their territories. Besides, they are suffering great droughts that are then followed by serious floodings; these extreme changes bring in turn the aggravation of diseases. It’s very difficult for them to leave their forest remnants, where they are refugees. They are victims of all these abuses, alien to their culture,” Cruz complained.
“The only thing the State did—insisted Avila Vasquez—is fostering the agribusiness. Thus, natives are a problem, a burden. This is why they want them to go to the cities. But these natives do not leave, different to other more advanced cultures of native people, these natives of the mountain tend to stay, hoping to find a place where they can live. The State faces this problem and all it does is causing the disappearance of communities, as it is happening.”
EVICTED
Over the last ten years, the agribusiness cleared 1,200,000 hectares of forest in Salta and about 100,000 people from different native communities were evicted from those territories. The companies, some of them linked to local powerful men such as former chief of the Cabinet of Ministers Marcos Peña, former governor of Salta Juan Manuel Uturbey, and deputy Alfredo Olmedo, have sowed a million hectares of soy, corn and beans.
WITHOUT MISSION
Doctors Without Borders had received a letter from native leaders requesting them to intervene in Salta. However, the organization responded that “after establishing contact with various provincial authorities and social organizations in the area, it was decided not to carry out an exploratory mission (step before opening a mission) in that region” of the country.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano, translation, North America bureau