 |
| Wichí farmer, Argentina.
©Jonathan Mazower/Survival |
A Wichí Indian village has won an important victory in its battle to
hold on to some of its land, in the face of a brutal campaign by absentee
landowners.
The Wichí village of Hoktek T'oi, in the northern Argentinian
province of Salta, has seen all its ancestral land bought up by rich
businessmen and politicians living thousands of miles away. They have
bulldozed and burnt huge swathes of the Wichí's forests, turning them
into vast plantations of beans and cotton. The village has repeatedly
been sprayed with pesticides, and the Wichí have had to physically stop
bulldozers destroying their homes, their burial ground and their last
remaining tracts of forest. Other Wichí villages nearby have been
similarly affected.
The Wichí went to court when a landowner attempted to destroy the last 17
hectares of their forest near the village. Survival wrote to the judge, urging
her to finally give the Wichí justice. In her verdict, the judge ruled that the
land does indeed belong to the Indians. The landowner appealed, and his appeal
has also been rejected.
The Wichí wrote to Survival expressing their 'happy and affectionate
thanks' and saying that 'the response you gave to our plea for
help shows that there is a force greater than the obstacles that confront
us.'
