Peruvian Indigenous Leader and Environmental Activist Edwin Chota Murdered in the Amazon

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Edwin Chota, an indigenous leader and outspoken Peruvian opponent of illegal logging, was brutally killed in a remote region of the Peruvian Amazon bordering Brazil, along with three other Asháninka community leaders he was traveling with on foot.  Chota had received frequent death threats from illegal loggers during years of struggle by his community to expel them from lands to which the natives claim title.  Not surprisingly, these “narcomadereros” are suspected in the killings, Asháninka regional leaders say.  Mr. Chota and the others were killed around the beginning of September while traveling from Saweto, the community he led on the Upper Tamaya River, to a meeting about the logging issue with Asháninka leaders in the nearby Brazilian village of Apiwtxa.  Their bodies were not discovered for several days.  The Ashánika communities claim that rampant corruption allows the illegal loggers to operate with impunity, and in the process, they are denuding the Amazon region’s river basins of valuable hardwoods.  Peruvian authorities are investigating the killings.