Matsés massacre
The Matsés massacre was a set of military bombings carried out by the state of Peru against Matsés communities in the northeast of the country in 1964, during the first presidency of Fernando Belaúnde. The number of deaths and injuries is unknown.
The northeastern jungle was already of interest to the Peruvian government. Belaúnde had published La conquista del Perú por los peruanos in 1959, in which he said that the natural resources of the Peruvian Amazonia must be exploited, especially wood, and that a highway must be built to connect the cities of the Amazon to the rest of the country. The massacre was part of the clash between the mixed-race, "civilized" western world and the Amazonian indigenous world.
The Belaúnde administration justified the attack by claiming that the Matsés were forming communist militias.
Historical context
Relationship between Peru and Loreto
The Department of Loreto had made attempts at independence in the past; the indigenous population of the department was favorable to almost all of these attempts, leading to tense relations between the government of Peru and the residents of the department.Violence against the indigenous population
Loreto was disconnected from the rest of the country, but during the Amazon rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many fortune-seekers were drawn to the area. One of them, Julio César Arana, was the main perpetrator of the Putumayo genocide between 1879 and 1912, in which the people of the Putumayo and Caquetá river basins were enslaved and forced to extract rubber.While the Matsés inhabited the Javary River basin, far from the area of conflict, they still experienced subjugation by Brazilian and Peruvian rubber barons, provoking hostilities between the Matsés and non-indigenous intruders into their territories. The Belaúnde government posted a sign, in Spanish warning that they could continue their behavior and be killed by bombs and poison, or be welcomed into civilization. The Matsés had developed many survival techniques to avoid being detected by settlers, such as teaching their dogs not to bark when ordered, cultivating small farms in different hidden parts of the forest, and establishing shorter periods of itinerant agriculture.
Development
In October 1964 in Requena province, in the east of Loreto, Peruvian lumberjacks and colonists were ambushed by a group of Matsés. In response, Belaúnde sent the Peruvian Air Force to bomb the villages of three of the four most important Matsés clans. The action was received positively by the Peruvian public. According to Stefano Varese, the Air Force used a napalm bomb in their attack, as a practice run for later use against the National Liberation Army of Peru and the Revolutionary Left Movement of Peru.Residents of the area disputed the alleged relationship between the Matsés and the guerillas:
At the end of the military campaign, Belaúnde congratulated the lumberjacks in the Government Palace and traveled to the city of Requena to inaugurate a new airport. The use of napalm was confirmed on October 9, 1968 after the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces of Peru performed a successful coup against the Belaúnde government earlier that year.