Rights of indigenous peoples ‘embraced by Pope Francis’

Pope Francis’ visit to the Amazon next January is a gesture of solidarity with the rainforest’s indigenous peoples who are struggling with illegal mining, child labour and human trafficking, a Columban missionary has said.

Addressing the National Justice and Peace Network (NJPN) of England and Wales’ annual conference in Swanwick, Derbyshire, last weekend, Fr Peter Hughes, who has lived in Peru for 50 years, warned that if the destruction continues at current levels in the Amazon and the Congo, “we are all going to have less and less air to breathe and water to drink”.

Outlining the work of Red Eclesial PanAmazónica (REPAM), a church-sponsored initiative of which he is a board member, he said it aimed to “humanise the operations of extractive industries” by forcing companies to respect legislation  and the rights of indigenous peoples.

Fr Hughes told almost 260 justice and peace workers that indigenous peoples, who are often treated as “non-people” on the periphery, were a good contemporary parallel for the lepers in the Gospel.

Pope Francis’ visit to Peru will take in Lima, as well as Trujillo, which was badly affected by flooding, and Puerto Maldonado, a place where all the issues around mining, particularly illegal mining, child slavery, trafficking and prostitution come together.

Other speakers at the NJPN conference included Ruth Valerio of Tearfund, whose talk focused on the need for “inner ecological conversion” and Kathy Galloway, a former leader of both the Iona Community and Christian Aid Scotland.

She hit out at the media’s stigmatisation of inner city and peripheral estates where people’s energies were often tied up with trying to defend their “hostile environments” as they sought better housing, transport, policing and schools.

“It is a gross insult that it should take a shameful tragedy like Grenfell to change that story even for a moment. I hope that many people saw the extent to which the kind of care, concern and raising of issues have been ignored, dismissed and silenced and recognise that this is not only true abut Grenfell and Kensington and Chelsea council. This is the experience of people across the British Isles,” she said.