The multinational Yanacocha mining company is again violently harassing her, says the indigenous Peruvian activist who won a major lawsuit brought against her by the company in late 2014.

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Yanacocha Inc. has released a few press statements asserting that they were protecting their property and nothing else.

However, Maxima Acuña de Chaupe and family members are saying that the company is illegally attacking them and their home.

In the last three weeks mining officials have erected another fence around her property, closed a key road to the home of Acuña de Chaupe, as well as tore down an addition to her home her family was building according to the indigenous activist.

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Acuña de Chaupe and family members said the first incident occurred on May 22 while the activist and her husband, Jaime Chaupe, were in the nearby city of Chelendin, attending a hearing of a legal action taken against them by Yanacocha.

The activist’s daughter Ysidora, spoke to the press the following day to assert that Peruvian police had entered the property, tore down the addition and assaulted her other sister-in-law, Maribel Gil Briones, who was alone at the site when the officers appeared.

Then on June 2, according to a press release issued by the Peruvian human rights agency, Grufides, the company closed the Las Pozadas - Chugurmayo – Sorochucho Road, an ancestral byway used by many generations of the activists family. By doing so the family is effectively blocked from reaching an important local town where they do business.

¨They impeded our mobility when they displaced us from Cajamarca to Santa Rosa before, and today they closed the road we use to walk with our animals from my house to Sorochuco,” Acuña de Chaupe said.

“This attitude of the Yanacocha Mining Company is another assault against the people’s right to travel freely in the local territory, preventing Maxima from taking her products to the market and obtaining some goods for support of her children,” according to the Grufides press release.

The activist has contacted local authorities and the regional Ombudsman to avoid the abuses of the company which have become regular and more frequent in the last year.

Then on June 9, the activist announced that the company had recently constructed a metal fence that blocked another route to the markets used by the family.

In recalling a conversation Acuña de Chaupe had with a Yanacocha representative she said the rep told her, “We want a dialogue, and I replied, What dialogue do you want? Are you going to recognize my property? Are you going to recognize all the harm you’ve done to my family?”

 

As of press time, no announcement of further investigations into the charges has been made by Peruvian authorities.