Blood on Your Ottoman: Your Furniture's Link to a Murderous Logging Epidemic [View all]

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.takepart.com/feature/2015/02/06/sutainable-furniture-killing-indigenous-people?cmpid=tpfeature-eml-2015-02-08-logging

Once just a climate threat, illegal deforestation is becoming a human rights crisis.

February 06, 2015 By Alexander Zaitchik

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance writer based in New Orleans. He has written for The New Republic, The Nation, Salon, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, and others.

PuCALLPA, Peru—One afternoon last September, Edwin Chota and three colleagues were walking the dirt track that connects the villages of their Asháninka tribe along the Peru-Brazil border. They were on an organizing mission. Illegal loggers were destroying the forests around Chota’s village of Saweto, and the government was doing little to stop it. So the men went to meet with their fellow tribesmen across the border to strategize about what might be done. They never returned.

The four anti-logging activists were shot and killed, their bodies dumped in the jungle. Their widows traveled for three days by boat to report the murder to authorities here, the nearest city, which has recently grown into a timber boomtown.

For years, Chota had faced down death threats for loudly demanding the government stop illegal logging in the forest where the tribe, like others throughout the region, has lived sustainably for centuries. Those threats had grown more specific with time, and came from powerful people. Before his death, Chota testified to police that a local timber boss warned him, “someone from Saweto is going to die.” The widows promised to continue their husbands’ work, leading to yet more pointed warnings, and eventually to the government’s stationing of police near Chota’s village—a rare state security presence in the remote jungles where, as Chota told National Geographic, “The only law is the law of the gun.”

FULL story at link.