Costa Rican indigenous leaders hope the long-delayed Indigenous Autonomy Bill might finally get a hearing in the Legislative Assembly as result of April’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruling ordering the government to take precautionary measures to protect indigenous groups in the Salitre Indigenous Reserve in southwestern Costa Rica.
An indigenous rights issue has put Costa Rica’s much-vaunted human rights record to the test as the country struggles to protect members of the Bribrí and Teribe indigenous communities from non-indigenous people who have forcibly, and at times violently, removed them from indigenous ancestral lands.
The Mashco-Piro of Peru have turned up repeatedly along river banks in the Madre de Dios region, begging for food from boat travelers. Their brazen appearances with bows and arrows have sown panic in some remote settlements, and they have ransacked others — making off with pans, clothing, machetes, even the occasional rifle, which they do not know how to use.
