Green priest expelled by greedy government



As the greenwash continues those who actually work for the environmenta and justice face repression.

I have just heard that the Peruvian government are expelling a British Roman Catholic priest originally from Portsmouth who helped indigenous people stop part of the Amazon being stolen by oil companies.

The drive to kill our planet and wreck the lives of indigenous people continues apace and I am dismayed by how few environmentalists seem to know about the stories of resistance.

A mild-looking, bespectacled Catholic priest, born in Portsmouth, educated at Oxford and now working in the Peruvian rainforest, is behind an important victory for local people over the logging companies laying waste to large stretches of Amazonia.

A year ago Father Paul McAuley, now 57, helped some 70 of his parishioners in the little settlement of Mazan, on one of the Amazon's main tributaries, to seek an injunction to protect large swathes of rainforest, containing valuable tropical timber. Last week a court in Iquitos, the capital of Peruvian Amazonia, ordered a halt to the government's sale of 40-year leases of forest land for only 22p an acre.

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