SAWETO, Peru — Illegal logging persists unabated in this remote Amazon community where four indigenous leaders who resisted it were slain in September, and the fear remains palpable.
Even a police post the government established with 25 officers provides no comfort, villagers and environmentalists say.
"It has neither the mandate nor the desire to start protecting the community," American philanthropist Alexander Soros told reporters last week after visiting Saweto by helicopter with activists from the Global Witness environmental group.
Edwin Chota and the three other slain Ashaninka leaders campaigned for more than a decade for title to the community's ancestral 300-square-mile (80,000-hectare) tract bordering Brazil.
Margoth Quispe, a former regional ombudsman advising the community, said only a few bureaucratic hurdles remain to obtain the title, but it's "no guarantee against illegal logging."
Trees are felled a two-hour walk from Saweto, where loggers have base camps and drag trees to the Putaya River for transport.
A villager serving as a guide said the site was too dangerous to visit, but he paddled a visiting photojournalist up the Putaya, where freshly cut logs floated downriver accompanied by three men in a dugout. Diana Rios, a daughter of Chota, later identified two of those men as illegal loggers from a photograph.
Rios and other villagers complained that the investigation into the killings has been slow. Two men arrested shortly after the slayings as suspects are widely believed to have acted on behalf of others.
