Peru: Prime Minister Yehude Simon set to resign in the coming weeks
Peru's prime minister set to resign
Peru's Prime Minister Yehude Simon said he will resign in the coming weeks once a crisis over Indian rights in the Amazon has been settled and calm returns.
"I will leave as soon as everything has been calmed down, which should be in the coming weeks," he told the privately owned Lima radio station RPP.
Simon has been at the forefront of a confrontation between the state and indigenous leaders over government plans to open the Amazon to development, which erupted in violent clashes earlier this month, leaving at least 34 dead, an AFP report said.
The prime minister will speak tomorrow with President Alan Garcia, who will have "enough time to decide what he has to do".
Simon's action came a day after a dramatic reversal in policy by the government, which had come under pressure from the opposition and international reaction to the bloody crackdown.
The prime minister travelled yesterday to the eastern Amazon basin and personally announced to the Indian chiefs that the government would seek the repeal of the unpopular decrees that sparked the crisis.
Indian leaders, angry that they were not consulted, launched a strike in April in opposition to measures they said would threaten their way of life by opening the Amazon rainforest to foreign oil and mining companies and other commercial interests.
The strike erupted into bloody clashes from 5 June to 6 June after police were sent into clear roads of Indian-manned blockades around the city of Bagua, 1000 kilometres north of Lima.
In the radio interview, Simon defended the government's decision to yield to the Indians' demands.
"The government has to know how to listen," he said. "We have done the right thing. If the Cabinet has to take a step back, we will take a hundred steps back of the country."
He said a bill scrapping the decrees would be introduced in the parliament tomorrow.
Tensions were easing on the strike-hit roads and riverways in north-eastern Peru, and an important east-west highway re-opened yesterday.
The opposition, the Peruvian press, as well as the main Indian collective, had demanded Simon's resignation, but he had said he would not leave under pressure.
But yesterday, he raised the possibility he might step down, saying he would have no problem doing so once the crisis with the Indians was resolved.
He appeared to have been shaken by the deaths of police officers and Indians in the violence 10 days ago, saying their deaths would stay with him "until death".
Simon, a leftist who describes himself as a "humanist", was named prime minister last October to give a "social face" to president Alan Garcia's liberal economic policies.