As we speak, we are trying to determine how to deal with these problems in Peru. Indeed, we are grappling with some serious conflicts in our Amazon. The Peruvian Amazon makes up half of the country. Indeed, the Amazon begins with Peru. The crisis in the western world that caused a sharp drop in securities on the stock market, though it did not necessarily affect you here in Canada, certainly had an impact on our American neighbours and Europe, and as a result a large proportion of investments was redirected toward us. That is what is happening.
Recently, there were some conflicts between indigenous Amazonians and certain mining investors, both local and foreign ones. There were fatalities on either side. This was a national crisis. The issue was to see how we could help the aboriginal people and give them some guarantees. As I already said, the first issue is that all of those who traditionally defend the aboriginal peoples, and who have a lot of merit because they have given their lives to help them, believe that they want their territory to be protected, but in the form of collective property.
However, when the indigenous people came to negotiate with the government, they very clearly wrote that even if they constitute a political community, they feel different from the rest of the country regarding the control of their financial activities. They are very poor, but they do not believe that the community should control their natural resources in some collective fashion. They are individual or family owners. This is spelled out in their documents. We have just published a brief summary of these findings. It includes documents in which they say this in connection with their own organizations. We are not putting words in their mouth: they are the ones who are making these statements. Be that as it may, a large part of the Peruvian political class traditionally believes that they are dealing with Asterix and Obelix. But they have evolved and we have to find a way of integrating them.
With that in mind, we have imported—and this may not be the best way of putting it—aboriginal people from Canada and the United States. Manny Jules is one of them; he is Chief of the Kamloops Indian Band in British Columbia, and there were others. The idea was that they could talk with our indigenous people and compare the Canadian reality with the Peruvian one. The point was to see whether, by comparing their different situations and geographical areas, some truths would emerge. As the philosophers say, truth can emerge out of friction.
The Chief of the Kamloops Indian Band and the Canadians we “imported” told us that a distinction needs to be made—and this is why we maintain close contact with your aboriginal people—between sovereignty and property. They told us that one of your former prime ministers, Mr. Trudeau, wanted to set some conditions, and assimilation was one of them. They did not want to be assimilated; they did, however, want property. Assimilation is something else altogether. That is a very important distinction, and it has guided our recommendations, be it for Peru or any other country.
Here are those recommendations. The first political decision must be whether you want to govern yourselves as a separate nation, like Puerto Rico or Alaska. Do you want a separate political regime, because you feel different? It is a question.
That question having been settled, the next matter is to know whether you want the same type of property rights as we have in the western world, in Poland or in France, or if you want something different.
In any case, the important words of Manny Jules, from Canada, when he was among us—in English, since he did not speak French—were the following:
“Whatever you decide you want to do, you Peruvian indigenous people, make sure that you're not treated as a museum piece. Let everybody understand that you have your own opinion, that you're in the 21st century, and that you'll decide by yourself”.
My feeling is that the first problem is a political one. It reveals a vast difference between sovereignty on the one hand and the economy on the other.
Finally, there is a problem that is common to Canadians and Peruvians. Even if our indigenous people opt for sovereignty, we don't have a single aboriginal nation in Peru, we have 5,000 of them. How can a country function if it contains 5,000 other countries, with an average population of some 200 inhabitants? It seems you have the same situation in Canada. That is why I was saying that this is extremely complex, whether you are in Arabia or elsewhere. However, it is not mysterious, since these are problems that you have resolved for the most part with your citizens in the past. The big mistake is to think that some nice gentleman who invents a
software for a geographical information system,
or a cartographer who will be making maps of the area will be able to solve these property rights issues. We are dealing with a political problem.