Peruvian Problems

Bracelets, coffee, hand-carved gourd boxes, delicate silver earrings, finger puppets. Here at World Next Door, we import a lot of things from Peru, and we love it all. One thing we could do without is violence.
But, unfortunately, it seems that this is exactly what the people of Peru are facing right now as clashes between indigenous Peruvians and national police have been ongoing since Friday.
(I'll admit, I didn't stumble upon this news completely at random--my younger sister, Mary Emily, is spending most of this month in Peru as she volunteers in a Lima orphanage during her summer break from college.)
Here's a summary of the situation from CNN:
The violence started Friday when national police attacked a roadblock near the city of Bagua in the Amazonian part of northwestern Peru. About 2,500 indigenous people had blocked the main road to protest measures the government has taken to sell land to energy companies and other businesses. Indians native to the area say that it is their land even though they don't have formal property titles.
When it was over, many lay dead and wounded.
...
Analysts agree this is the worst violence in Peru since the brutal Marxist Shining Path guerrilla insurgency died down in the 1990s.

Estimates of the dead range between 33 (Peruvian police) and 100+ (Indian rights groups). News of this uprising is particularly poignant as many of our store's Peruvian fair trade items are made by native Peruvians.
For instance, our finger puppets (an eye-grabbing collection of knitted, finger-sized animals and people) are made by the Aymara women who live near Lake Titicaca on the Andean mountain plateau. Click here to read more about the artists who make a living from their textile knitting.

Word is that the current uprisings are taking place in the northwest part of the country, while a quick Google search of the Aymara showed they mostly live in the southern part of the country. Still, although they may not be the primary group affected by this week's violence, they, like other indigenous peoples throughout the country, will surely bear the ramifications of the recent violence.
CNN reporter Arthur Brice summed up international worries over the uprisings at the end of his article, saying:
The crux of the issue concerns Peru's economy and how the indigenous population fit in a 21st-century world.
This is an issue all of us, wherever we live, share.