Peru–United States Trade Promotion Agreement
[1] On December 4, 1991, under the George H. W. Bush administration, the United States enacted the Andean Trade Preference Act, eliminating tariffs on a number of products from Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador.Humala's Union for Peru won 45 of 120 seats in Congress, the largest share by a single party, prompting the debate and ratification of the agreement before the new legislature was sworn in.[25] The government had made a mistake by failing to consult with indigenous communities before passing 10 decrees that modified Peru's legal and regulatory framework on access to and use of natural resources in the country's Amazon jungle region.[26] The decrees were declared unconstitutional in December 2008 by a multi-party parliamentary commission because they undermined the right of native people to prior consultation with respect to mining projects or other economic activities affecting their communities.Between January 2008 and June 2009, the government auctioned 7,700 square miles of land for mining, including forest area that is the ancestral home of the Awajun and Wampis indigenous groups.In October 2007 the AIDESEP, a Federation Representing 350,000 Indigenous Peoples in Amazon Region, sent a letter to congress and made the following statement: "The FTA will give incentives for further and irreversible destruction of virgin rainforest, which will in turn increase global warming and displace our communities from their home territories… Provisions contained in the Peru FTA are directly incentivizing this massive takeover that is threatening our livelihoods and leading to irreversible destruction of virgin rainforest".[30] A cross-party congressional commission, created after the indigenous protests in the Amazon in August 2008, recommended the repeal of two of the laws that opened up communally-owned native lands to private investment.