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Joseph Zarate’s Heroes

The Lady of the Lake Vs the Black Lagoon

From Etiqueta Negra

When an unstoppable mining giant meets an immovable peasant woman: how the Peruvian arm of Denver’s Newmont Mining ground to a halt when it came face to face with Maxima Acuna. From Etiqueta Verde’s Joseph Zarate, an extraordinary profile of a woman and her attachment to her land; a place whose beauty and abundance must be destroyed to dig up a few grains of the yellow metal that lies beneath it:

One morning in January 2015, with the objective of building a foundation for a house, Maxima Acuna Atalaya was chipping rock from a hillside with the hard, sure chops of a lumberjack.

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The Woman Who Bore the River on Her Back

From Etiqueta Negra

Chief of a tribal confederation which has fought the destruction of its little corner of the Amazon rainforest with remarkable success; survivor of Peru’s savage civil war with the mad revolutionaries of the Shining Path: in Joseph Zarate’s remarkable portrait of Peruvian native environmental activist Ruth Buendia, the attitude of her fellow Ashaninka tribesmen toward their leader is careful, unidealistic in spite of all her achievements.

The first time they tried to bribe her, the Ashaninka activist Ruth Buendia responded to the timber trafficker’s offer with four words.

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The Man Who Chose the Forest, and Died For It

From Etiqueta Negra

One day, Peruvian electrician Edwin Chota abruptly abandoned the life of the city, and the various children he had failed to raise, for the jungle and for an indigenous tribe whom he adopted as his own. For over a decade he lived under death threats for denouncing illegal logging on his lands. His pleas for protection were ignored. In the end, the timber traffickers murdered him.

Those who knew him said that Edwin Chota had a wide, exaggerated and contagious smile, with a prominent gap where a front tooth was missing.

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