"Consolata Missions", the most popular missionary revue in Italy, in its November issue features a report by journalist Paolo Moiola who tells of the miseries and the splendors of a land often forgotten, but greatly exploited.
Reachable only by river or air, Iquitos is the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon. Like Manaus, Iquitos has also experienced the golden age of rubber. Today it lives on trafficking (often illegal) and exploitation (senseless) of the great resources of the Amazon forest.
In Moiola’s story, the interventions of testimonies that have borne witness to this reality, are the focal points of the report as well as the hope for emancipating and overthrowing situations of violence and exploitation. One of the greatest emergencies is human trafficking and child and adult prostitution.
After working in the Rio Maranon area, Augustinian Father Miguel Fuertesm pastoral vicar of Iquitos, who operates in the jungle of Loreto since 1983, denounced the little work and great violence against the population.
"It is impossible to explain this city without seeing it. Iquitos is like an island, since it is separate from the rest of the world. The only way to reach it is by plane. Or by river, which takes a lot longer. There are no roads. That is why Iquitos is a very expensive city compared to the rest of Peru. That is why there are no industries and why it is very difficult to take products out of the area. All this has disastrous consequences: there is not sufficient work for everyone. There is a very informal market: the same product can be sold and re-sold 3-4 times before it reaches the final consumer."
The author of the inquiry also tells of devastation of indigenous territories and the mediation and defense by missionaries: of Miguel Angel Cadenas and ManoloBerjon. Spanish Augustinians, who work on the RioMarañón. Their church is called Santa Rita de Castilla and includes 100 communities with a total of almost 20,000 people, the vast majority of which are of Kukama ethnic.
In Iquitos works "Paul Mac Auley, El Hermano", of the Red Ambiental Leuretana who risked expulsion because of his battles on behalf of the Amazon and its indigenous inhabitants, the indigenous populations, like Father Mario Bertolini, the priest from Roccafluvione in the Marche region, who lived in Peru for 30 years and tells of the plot behind the false accusations against him and another 7 people, by the Peruvian government.
The cleric, who defends the cause of the Amazon Indians of Yurimaguas, ended up on trial for inciting the local population to revolt. The indigenous tribes of the Amazon have been fighting for years in the name of the environment and their culture, against the central power that wants to exploit the rainforest to search for oil and natural gas.
According to "Save the Forests", the observatory on the planet's primaryforests and on indigenous peoples, the small local owners who work limited plots of land, without altering the environment, were never recognized their ownership, sold it to a giant in the agriculture business for the cultivation of palm oil. The task of the Church, says Father Bertolini "is to help our people to become aware of their dignity, help them to organize themselves so that they are in charge of their own development and not subject to development imposed by high up figures, which responds to the interests of powerful groups."
But above all it is the black gold, the most attractive Treasure in the area, which is at the center of the contrast between extreme poverty and great wealth of multinational and international predators, not to mention the environmental damage that oil companies do, without complaints from the political authorities. "The Peruvian Amazon - Moiola writes - is a puzzle of petroleum lots assigned to dozens of foreign companies in an industry that moves mountains of money. Corruption is the order of the day and the real benefits to national and local politicians, but certainly not to the population go who are only left with crumbs, and an increasingly contaminated environment."
Now with the new president of Peru, Ollanta Humala, something is changing, even if it is not easy to dismantle the network of multinational mining privileges obtained with the previous governments of Alejandro Toledo and Alan Garcia.