The Platform for Environmental and Human Health in Junín, which is presided over by the Red Uniendo Manos Peru (Joining Hands Peru) issued a public declaration with regard to COVID-19, the vulnerability to communities where extractive activity is happening, and a call to improve the health attention they are receiving.
Here is an excerpt of the English translation of the public declaration:
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed us before an unprecedented global humanitarian challenge which affects all the communities of our countries and the world. The pandemic is causing people’s daily lives, and educational, health, labor, economic and financial systems to undergo drastic changes, affecting many aspects of health and life.
Communities and populations that interact with extractive activities are at greater risk of being adversely affected by COVID-19; either, due to the movement of outsiders in their territories, residing in areas of environmental contamination from mining or oil, depending on waters not suitable for human consumption, or being exposed to greater vulnerability due to poverty or social markers such as race, ethnicity, geographic distance or age, among others.
They are populations that are still forgotten in this context of COVID-19, in which the threat of fracture and social collapse is evident, further revealing social inequalities.
Read the full English translation of the declaration here
Read the full original declaration in Spanish here
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