Alberto Pizango

Alberto Pizango Chota is the current president of AIDESEP, the premier indigenous rights organization in Peru. Most notably, Pizango has been actively resisting the Peruvian Government's selling of oil concessions to foreign oil companies of lands legally titled to indigenous people in Peru.

In August of 2008, Pizango supported protests by indigenous Amazonians in which the tribal groups seized control of two energy installations -- a natural gas field being developed in southern Peru by the Argentine company Pluspetrol, and an oil pipeline in northern Peru owned by PetroPeru. During the protests, the natives took two Peruvian police officers hostage. In response, the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency in the departments of Cusco, Loreto and Amazonas, a move that gave it the power to send in the army to forceably remove and arrest the protesters. Tensions peaked when Pizango responded to the government's threat to send in troops by stating that "Indigenous people are defending themselves against government aggression."

Subsequently the protests ended when Alberto Pizango and his AIDESEP organization persuaded Peru's Congress to repeal two land laws aimed at opening up Amazonian tribal areas to oil companies, which originally led to the protests by the indigenous tribes. On Friday, September 6, 2008, Congress repealed the laws created by President Alan Garcia, who had created the laws by special presidential decree. Alberto Pizango stated that his victory was "A new dawn for the country's indigenous peoples."