Ecuadoran officials are investigating the reported killings of an undetermined number of Huaorani Indians by illegal loggers in an Amazonian nature reserve, Security Minister Gustavo Larrea said on Thursday.
"The information was passed to us by certain people in the region, and we are trying to confirm it now," Larrea said.
Huaorani leaders said illegal loggers killed five tribesmen with shotguns in Yasuni National Park -- revising their initial estimate of as many as 15 killed.
Several indigenous groups live in Yasuni National Park -- Ecuador's largest and a UNESCO biosphere reserve where logging is prohibited. Conflicts with illegal loggers are common, but arrests are rare because of the tribes' isolation.
Ecuador's national indigenous federation and an organization representing the Huaorani Indians denounced the killings on Wednesday, after a local tribesman sent word that illegal loggers may have fired at the Indians between Feb. 4 and 6.
The shootings were not reported for more than a week because the victims, Tagaeri and Taromenane tribesmen that belong to the Huaorani ethnic group, live in voluntary isolation deep within the 758,000-hectare biosphere reserve.
"It's difficult to know if there were only five murdered or more," said Enqueri Nihua Ehuenguime, president of the Huaorani Nationality Organization of Ecuador.
"To tell the truth, it is a dangerous trip" to the place where the bodies were reported found," he said.
Yasuni, like much of Ecuador's Amazon basin, is rich in mahogany, cedar and other trees that yield valuable lumber. The jungle area also holds an estimated 1 billion barrels of crude oil.
The Interamerican Human Rights Commission has petitioned the Ecuadoran government to implement controls to protect the Tagaeri and Taromenane, and in October the government prohibited all logging and mining activity in the area.
Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa has asked the international community for at least US$350 million a year in contributions for 10 years to compensate the government for income lost by not drilling in the park's Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha oil fields.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS