Mr. Speaker, in looking at this agreement, one of the concerns expressed has to do with a decree by the Peruvian government, legislative decree 1015, which was designed to facilitate the privatization and stripping away of communal lands held by indigenous people, allowing them to perform the subsistence farming that supports their communities.
That particular decree was pushed back but many others are coming forward from the same government. Our government seems to feel that those decrees are business as usual or that doing business with the Peruvian government is just fine. As I said, these new laws are meant to facilitate the expropriation of the country's land.
Interestingly enough, a similar thing happened some years ago in Colombia where that government, in order to facilitate trade agreements with the United States, privatized land. It took land away from the indigenous people who were farming it. In the case of some of the people living in the mountains, some of the territories had gold mines on them. Canada, of course, jumped on the gravy train on this one. Essentially, these people were stripped of a livelihood that was centuries old. Canadian and American mining companies went in and simply grabbed whatever they could.
Like the people of Peru, those people stood their ground. They literally stood at the entrances of their villages and told the junta and death squads that they could not enter. They did not care whose businesses the junta and deaths squads felt they were protecting. They were not going to allow them to enter and kill their children.
This whole reality in terms of how we deal with South America seems to be repeated in this Peruvian agreement. I wonder if the member, as a human rights expert, could comment on what we are seeing with regard to these trade deals and the abuse of human rights.