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In June this year, near a stretch of motorway known as the "Devil's Curve" in the northern Peruvian Amazon, simmering tensions within the local indigenous community boiled over.

Police began firing live rounds into a group of protesters, many wearing feathered crowns and carrying spears. Snipers also fired into crowds in the nearby towns of Bagua Grande and Bagua Chica.
 
Both local natives and mestizos took to the streets protesting the bloody repression with indigenous leaders suggesting the Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, is guilty of "genocide" and have called for an international campaign of solidarity with their struggle.

Rising tensions

Indigenous unrest in the Peruvian Amazon began late last year.

Since April, protests by Amazonian indigenous groups have grown in size and intensity, including shutdowns of oil and gas pumping stations as well as blockades of road and river traffic.

García says the government response has been appropriate and blamed the indigenous communities for thinking they could decide what happens in their territories.

In a special programme Al Jazeera's Teresa Bo travelled through the Pastasa river to the border with Ecuador to find out why indigenous communities are angry with the government.

Most of them depend on nature for their survival and the contamination left by oil companies is putting their livelihood at risk.

They say it is not progress they oppose but the fact that development for them translates into contamination and hunger.

They say that nothing is done for them to replace what is being taken away, namely the animals and fish found in the jungle.