Lima - Six people died in Peru police tried to clear a roadblock set by wildcat miners protesting the government's push to impose environmental controls on them, officials said on Monday in the latest round of conflict over natural resources.
The violence broke out on Sunday in the southern province of Arequipa, injuring 20 protesters and nine police near Chala, 600km south of the capital Lima. Two of the dead were bystanders, including a taxi driver struck by a stray bullet and a woman who suffered a heart attack.
Hundreds of protesters were still blocking a stretch of the country's main highway to Chile on Monday, snarling traffic in both directions. Interior Minister Octavio Salazar promised to break the roadblock in the coming hours.
President Alan Garcia, whose term has been marred by periodic clashes over his natural resources policies, said wildcat miners must pay taxes and stop polluting.
"How can we permit a savage type of mining that doesn't pay taxes, doesn't pay proper wages and doesn't use modern equipment ... and which continues to contaminate the Amazon?" Garcia said.
Peru is a leading exporter of zinc, copper and gold and a major importer of mercury, most of which ends up in the hands of wildcat miners who use it to isolate gold from clumps of mud and rock. Wildcat miners produce 10 to 20 percent of all gold in Peru, the world's No. 6 producer of the precious metal.
Miners say the new measures, which aim to limit dredging in rivers and prevent wildcat mining in nature reserves, would leave them without jobs and that they need the work to support their families.
Environmental groups blame wildcat gold miners for dumping toxic mercury into forests and streams.
Miners blamed police for the violence, though there were conflicting local media reports that protesters were armed.
"Pollution must be mitigated ... but not through repression," said Teodulo Medina, head of Peru's national association of wildcat miners, said on RPP radio.
His group represents about 300 000 miners who work in rough conditions in hundreds of informal mines in the country's desert coast, the Andean highlands and the Amazon basin.
Residents in poor isolated towns say Garcia has pushed investment by big foreign mining and oil companies but done little to fight poverty, which affects more than a third of all Peruvians.
Two dozen people died last year in Peru's Amazon basin as indigenous groups rejected laws designed to lure billions of dollars in investment in mining and oil concessions to the rain forest.
- Reporting by Patricia Velez