The decades of servitude in the extraction of rubber and chestnuts under the yoke of military men, prefectural authorities and the Brazilian, Peruvian, and Bolivian mafias that control the triple Bolivian-Peruvian-Brazilian border have not been enough. The traffic in drugs, wood, and “washed” money comes from the hand of the violence has subjugated decimated peoples for more than a century of rubber exploitation.

As if it this would not have been sufficient, now the blood of peasants in Pando is running, at the hands of prefectural lackeys, mounted in the machinery of Prefectural Road Service. On Thursday, September 11th at three in the morning in Tres Barracas, near the town of Porvenir, the prefecture’s people ambushed and brutally machine-gunned the peasants as they marched towards a congress of their departmental organization. Men, women and children ran to save their lives, but they were immediately riddled with bullets, wounded or taken by force to be tortured and later cynically handed in by illegal groups associated with the Prefecture to the Police, pretending that the victims of the barbarism were the guilty.

“The highway was blockaded with Prefecture trucks, there they started to shoot us. Thos who escaped towards the river were pursued and killed on the shore. Some of the wounded that arrived to the hospital in Riberalta were murdered” asserted one of the survivors. Also they denounced that some kidnapped women, including the elderly, pregnant and mothers with children, were forced to strip naked to be tortured. There is worry for the teacher Victor Choque from El Chivé, member of the Integral Agricultural Cooperative of Peasants of Pando, who they tortured in the hospital but who is believed to be alive.

The Bolivian government has decreed 24 hours of national mounring, but the wounded remain in the jungle or in the river, without ambulances or vehicules to help them. Neither the Red Cross, nor the Defender of the People, nor the priest of Pando have made themselves present in the place of the massacre: no-one is brave enough to offer help, the leaders are threatened that they will appear as the dead of the Brazilian mafia, if they appear at all.

It is time for national actions from all the organizations of the State, government, and society. Lawyers, soldiers, policemen, press, international denouncement, expressions of solidarity and mobilizations. Those responsible for the barbarism should be judged and punished at the national and international levels.

For the people of Pando it is essential that we end with this painful and infinite mourning.

FOBOMADE
Bolivian Forum on Development and the Environment
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La Paz – Bolivia