Two important anti-government protests - outside of Iran - that changed the world this month

With all the media coverage of this month's courageous public protests against government corruption and election fraud in Iran, major clashes between protesters and governments in two other countries have unfortunately failed to garner the attention they also deserve:

In the city of Shishou in central China, after local government officials initially refused to allow the family of 24-year-old Tu Yuangao, who was found dead at a hotel under highly suspicious circumstances, to have an autopsy conducted on his body, a small group of local protesters surrounded the young man's body and refused to allow local police to take it.

As local police called provincial authorities for backup, the crowd of protesters grew, reportedly organizing via text messaging and Twitter. Rioting in the streets lasted for several days; reports of the final size of the protest vary wildly across different news sources; Reuters quotes one witness estimating the crowd at 10,000, but some estimates of the peak crowd have been as high as 70,000. Some protesters managed to circumvent Chinese government blocks on internet access to post video of the incident to YouTube:

Tu Yuangao's family and the protesters claim the young man was murdered by a business owner with ties to organized crime who is a relative of the town's mayor; his family reports his body showed signs of torture. and that the local government wanted to cover up the crime by cremating the body before an autopsy could be performed.

Also this month, in the rainforests of Peru, alongside the Amazon river, a group of indigenous people armed only with traditional wooden spears staged a mass protest against a new Peruvian government initiative to allow Occidental Petroleum, a U.S.-based company with a history of widespread environmental destruction that has previously been implicated by the EPA in over 127 major environmental incidents requiring government cleanup, to begin drilling for oil near their homes. 

Initially peaceful, the protests turned violent when Peruvian President Alan Garcia ordered police to clear road blocks the protesters had set up to block progress into the forest. Police attacked the protesters with firearms, injuring many and killing at least 30 civillians.

Garcia has said of the protesters:

These people are not first-class citizens. Forty thousand natives think they can tell 28 million Peruvians they don’t have the right to come around here? There is no way. That’s a serious mistake.

But this week, in an 82-12 vote, over the President's objections, the Peruvian Congress listened to the protesters and repealed the recently passed land laws that would have allowed oil drilling in the region, effectively blocking Occidental Petroleum's plans, affirming the indigenous locals' right to a voice in Peru's national discussion on how to manage natural resources, and likely saving large swaths of rainforest from environmental destruction.

Comments

[wine bag]

It makes me think. Every event is relevant to what happen in our history.