"CONTROVERSY SURROUNDS THE DEATH OF KAKATAIBO INDIGENOUS DEFENDER", 05 January 2023

...On the night of 17 December Benjamín Flores, a Kakataibo indigenous and former municipal employee and active participant in the land titling of the Mariscal Cáceres indigenous community in Ucayali region, was found dead in his hut...

The following day ORAU, the regional affiliate of the national Amazonian indigenous organisation AIDESEP, issued a communiqué together with FENAKOKA, the representative organisation of the Kakataibo peoples, denouncing Flores’s death as a reprisal for his environmental activism. Flores would thus be the 33rd indigenous leader assassinated since 2013 for defending indigenous lands against invasion, illegal logging, and the illicit drug trade, and the fifth Kakataibo to be assassinated in three years...

The killing, and the public reaction to it, is part of a story repeated over and over in recent years in various parts of the Peruvian Amazon. However, it received an unusual twist when a controversial indigenous leader, Washington Bolivar, claimed that Benjamín, his uncle, had not been assassinated but had died from a possible snake bite or other natural cause and that AIDESEP had claimed he was assassinated to ensure its funding from foreign donors...

Bolívar’s version was publicly rejected by ORAU and FENAKOKA, as well as community leaders. They argued that Bolívar was a fraudulent Kakataibo leader who had been expelled from the community on two occasions for falsifying documents and usurping community leadership in 2020 and 2021. They also denounced him as leader of a campaign to defend the Ocho Sur palm oil company, accused of illegal occupation and deforestation of community territory. Bolivar had been expelled in 2002 for the illegal sale of timber, land trafficking and demanding payments from drug dealers to gain access to communal land...