Through three oral interventions before the experts of the UN Human Rights Council for indigenous peoples, Peruvian lawyer Karina Baca Gómez Sánchez, raised in Geneva the terrible situation of many peasant communities of the native Quechua peoples in her country. She said that they are under threat of being evicted or dispossessed of their own ancestral territories, due to court rulings in favor of the sons of landowners who are claiming restitution of lands supposedly belonging to their relatives from the colonial era. (1)
Responsible for the National Association of Indigenous Peoples in Peru, Karina Baca Gomez Sanchez, a lawyer specialized in the defense of indigenous peoples, echoed the complaints that the victims of this plundering have been making public for some time, without getting a definitive recognition of the Peruvian justice system, nor the support of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the competent body of the OAS, which has not provided precautionary measures. That is why they are now turning to the UN.
The Peruvian justice has not issued sentences that guarantee the property titles of the territories of these Quechuas, leaving them helpless at the mercy of the present neo-colonial violence. The conquest took away their lands and haciendas were set up where the indigenous people worked as slaves until the agrarian reform, when their lands were returned to them, the community was recognized and their titles were officially registered, said Karina Baca Gómez Sánchez.
However, in the Tancalla case of 2005, a lawsuit for not having notified the former landowners of the loss of the property initially assigned by the continuators of colonialism, has been judicially imposed de facto, given the defenselessness of the Quechuas, who could not defend themselves on equal terms against the alleged descendants of the colonizers, due to conditions of poverty, exclusion and severe discrimination, stressed Karina Baca Gómez Sanchez.
She also stressed that the figure of usurpation has been used to criminalize the defense of the geography of the native peoples, recognized by the Peruvian state, a questioning also wielded by former hacienda owners for the dispossession of the properties of the peasant communities by those who have economic power and access to ordinary justice. He explained that equality without discrimination based on ethnicity is still alien to the native populations of Peru.
He added that the judicial proceeding in Peru took place in a Mixed Court in Santiago, outside its jurisdiction, with a judge who was removed for corruption by the National Board of Justice, questioning Quechua people who registered the lands 20 years ago, who were never subjected to any control of conventionality. Nevertheless, they are now forced to vacate their lands, occupied by housing and social services, under intimidation of demolishing the buildings and launching police intervention, with the power to arrest those who oppose them.
Karina Baca Gómez Sánchez justified her initiative before the UN Human Rights Council by requesting the "unenforceability of the sentence of unconstitutionality and violation of the communal jurisdiction" of the sentence against the Quechua residents of the lands now being questioned by colonialist nostalgics. He justified this because the UN is a "supranational instance" for Peru regarding the application of international norms on indigenous peoples ratified by the country.
In particular, he recalled Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), which guarantees the ownership and possession of lands by the peoples who traditionally occupy them, and that "appropriate procedures must be instituted within the framework of the national legal system to resolve land claims formulated by the peoples concerned", an instrument ratified by Peru, whose rights have been confirmed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and Peru's own domestic legislation,
(1) He gave as an example the cases of the peasant communities of Tantacalla, Patabamba, Incacona, Sihuina, Urinsaya Ccollana Huarondo, Usi and others in the Cusco region (mainly), which are part of the original Quechua peoples in the provinces of Anta, Calca, Espinar and Paruro in Peru.