Car Culture // Current

Crowd Sourced Rally Fighter Desert Racer

The Local Motors Rally Fighter is a milestone for the automotive industry. It's... more

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LTE Connected Car redefines the 'mobile' in mobile broadband (video)

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Flying cars are Ready for Takeoff

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Top Gear's Stig gets a ticket in Amsterdam city centre

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Ferrari powered Citreon CV2

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Extreme custom Japanese minivans

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9 Best eco-apocolyptic science fiction movies of all time

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Slo-Mo video of car pulling a wheelie off the start line

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Full Size Batmobile Replica

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Vote for your favorite Drive Smarter Video to decide who wins the $5,000 prize!

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VCAM MINI - Excite the Planet: Fai un gesto MINI - Versione alternativa

Viviamo in un luogo meraviglioso e dobbiamo far sí che resti tale. Ad ognuno di noi... more

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13 Hot Eco-Cars That Go Zoom

A GOooooooooooo! Green Showroom That Flores It!

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Watch out Tesla, here comes the Audi e-tron

Boasting specs like 3,319 pound-feet of torque, it can't help but make gearheads... more

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Drive Smart Video Contest - Enter to Win 5K, VIP NASCAR & Indy Race Passes

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Southwest Rod and Customs, Shop Dog. My Pal Bruno!

Here's a small dog with a BIG NAME (BRUNO), an 11 pound Miniature Pomeranian,, and... more

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Indigenous Tribes: 'We are fighting for our lives and our dignity'

Across the globe, as mining and oil firms race for dwindling resources, indigenous peoples are battling to defend their lands – often paying the ultimate price.

It has been called the world's second "oil war", but the only similarity between Iraq and events in the jungles of northern Peru over the last few weeks has been the mismatch of force. On one side have been the police armed with automatic weapons, teargas, helicopter gunships and armoured cars. On the other are several thousand Awajun and Wambis Indians, many of them in war paint and armed with bows and arrows and spears.

In some of the worst violence seen in Peru in 20 years, the Indians this week warned Latin America what could happen if companies are given free access to the Amazonian forests to exploit an estimated 6bn barrels of oil and take as much timber they like. After months of peaceful protests, the police were ordered to use force to remove a road bock near Bagua Grande.

In the fights that followed, at least 50 Indians and nine police officers were killed, with hundreds more wounded or arrested. The indigenous rights group Survival International described it as "Peru's Tiananmen Square".

"For thousands of years, we've run the Amazon forests," said Servando Puerta, one of the protest leaders. "This is genocide. They're killing us for defending our lives, our sovereignty, human dignity."

Yesterday, as riot police broke up more demonstrations in Lima and a curfew was imposed on many Peruvian Amazonian towns, President Garcia backed down in the face of condemnation of the massacre. He suspended – but only for three months – the laws that would allow the forest to be exploited. No one doubts the clashes will continue.

Peru is just one of many countries now in open conflict with its indigenous people over natural resources. Barely reported in the international press, there have been major protests around mines, oil, logging and mineral exploitation in Africa, Latin America, Asia and North America. Hydro electric dams, biofuel plantations as well as coal, copper, gold and bauxite mines are all at the centre of major land rights disputes.

A massive military force continued this week to raid communities opposed to oil companies' presence on the Niger delta. The delta, which provides 90% of Nigeria's foreign earnings, has always been volatile, but guns have flooded in and security has deteriorated. In the last month a military taskforce has been sent in and helicopter gunships have shelled villages suspected of harbouring militia. Thousands of people have fled. Activists from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta have responded by killing 12 soldiers and this week set fire to a Chevron oil facility. Yesterday seven more civilians were shot by the military.

The escalation of violence came in the week that Shell agreed to pay £9.7m to ethnic Ogoni families – whose homeland is in the delta – who had led a peaceful uprising against it and other oil companies in the 1990s, and who had taken the company to court in New York accusing it of complicity in writer Ken Saro-Wiwa's execution in 1995.

Meanwhile in West Papua, Indonesian forces protecting some of the world's largest mines have been accused of human rights violations. Hundreds of tribesmen have been killed in the last few years in clashes between the army and people with bows and arrows.

"An aggressive drive is taking place to extract the last remaining resources from indigenous territories," says Victoria Tauli-Corpus, an indigenous Filipino and chair of the UN permanent forum on indigenous issues. "There is a crisis of human rights. There are more and more arrests, killings and abuses.

...full article at linkAcross the globe, as mining and oil firms race for dwindling resources, indigenous... more