By FRANKLIN BRICENO and FRANK BAJAK – 2 hours ago

TARAPOTO, Peru (AP) — The Aguaruna Indians have a well-earned reputation as warriors. In pre-Columbian times they successfully resisted Inca subjugation. And during Peru's 1995 border war with Ecuador, they served as guides for the army.

Those who know them weren't surprised, then, at the fierce resistance — 23 police officers were killed — when President Alan Garcia's government sent heavily armed police to clear several thousand Aguaruna and their Wampi cousins from an Amazon highway blockade.

The ensuing turmoil has set Garcia's government, which critics accuse of exhibiting racism typical of Peru's traditional European-descended ruling class, on a collision course with this Andean nation's indigenous peoples.

London-based Survival International, which promotes tribal rights, called Friday's melee "Peru's Tiananmen Square," comparing it to China's bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.

It was Peru's worst political violence since the Shining Path guerrilas were quelled in the mid-1990s, and prompted Indian and labor groups to call a general strike for Thursday.

They are demanding — first and foremost — what the Amazon Indians have sought through their protests: that Congress revoke laws decreed by Garcia to fulfill terms of the newly enacted U.S.-Peru's free trade agreement that promote oil and natural gas extraction as well as logging and large-scale agriculture on traditional Indian lands.

"We don't get anything from this huge exploitation, which also poisons us. We've never seen any development and my community lives in poverty," local Aguaruna leader Mateo Inti told The Associated Press in Bagua, the scene of Friday's violence.

They also want Garcia and his Cabinet prosecuted for the bloodshed, which Indian leaders call unprovoked "genocide" in which at least 30 of their people died.

They are outraged that the government has put the civilian death toll at nine — accusing police of burning and hiding bodies — while hailing the slain police as martyrs.

The protesters are also incensed by sedition charges filed Saturday against Alberto Pizango, the Shawi Indian who led anti-development protests and who heads an organization representing 350,000 people from 56 Amazon nations.

"We're not taking even one step back. We haven't lost this fight," the vice president of the organization Pizango leads, Daysi Zapata, told reporters.

Pizango took refuge Monday in the Nicaraguan Embassy and was seeking asylum in the Central American nation. His comrades said they didn't trust Peru's justice system to treat him fairly.

Also Monday, Garcia's minister of women and social development resigned to protest the government's handling of the crisis.

"It's for political reasons, obviously," Carmen Vildoso told a radio reporter without elaborating. Cabinet chief Yehude Simon said she objected to government TV ads that show gruesome photos of slain police and claim an international conspiracy "wants to prevent Peruvians from benefitting from their oil."

The implication is that Venezuela is somehow behind the unrest. Garcia has long accused the petrostate's leftist president, Hugo Chavez, of interfering in Peruvian politics but has made no specific accusations this time.

Protests appeared to ease, meanwhile, on jungle highways and rivers intermittently blocked since early April by protesters who believe Garcia is trying to privatize their communal lands.

Hundreds of police reinforcements were sent to the conflict zone, where Indians agreed to lift a blockade for most of the day on the highway linking the jungle cities of Tarapoto and Yurimaguas so food and gasoline can get through.

The Indians' allies include Roman Catholic bishops in the Amazon, who in a May 9 open letter complained of massive deforestation and large-scale river contamination through poorly regulated logging and mining, saying the new decrees "threaten the region with greater poverty."

Garcia's first presidency ended in 1990 with hyperinflation and an unresolved conflict with fanatical Shining Path insurgents. Then a leftist, Garcia had alienated Wall Street by defaulting on foreign loans,

Now he is a free-market champion who, by opening vast tracts of jungle to oil exploration by companies including France's Perenco SA, Spain's Repsol-YPF and U.S.-based ConocoPhillips, has alienated much of indigenous Peru, which accounts for nearly half the Andean nation's 28 million people.

Large-scale exploration has yet to begin, however, and Peru remains a net importer of oil.

Spokesman Fernando Daffos of Perupetro, which runs the only pipeline pumping oil from Peru's jungle, said officials expected crude to resume flowing to the coast Tuesday. Protests had halted the flow in late April.

The Indians have not, however, disrupted the Camisea natural gas pipeline that supplies Lima from fields in the southern interior run by a consortium led by Argentina's Pluspetrol and Texas-based Hunt Oil Co.

Garcia, meanwhile, has barely concealed contempt for the Indian protesters. In several speeches since Friday, he expressed outrage at the Indians' "barbarity" and "savagery," noting that at least seven of the slain officers were pierced with spears and some had their throats slit.

Indians opposed to Garcia's pro-development policies either suffer from "elemental ignorance" or are under the sway of foreign agitators, he said.

"It's not just racism," Nelson Manrique, a Catholic University political analyst, said of Garcia. "Indigenous groups are insisting (his government) be tried for crimes against humanity and he's still bent on moving ahead with his project to deliver the Amazon to multinationals."

Meanwhile, he added, "it's now clear the Indians aren't exaggerating when they say they are prepared to die in defense of their land."

One of the decrees they want overturned has been widely interpreted as promoting the planting of single crops such as African Palm, a key biofuel source, over large expanses. Inti, the Aguaruna leader, said that would destroy the Amazon's biological diversity.

But what most upsets the Indians, he said, is their inability to obtain title to most of their communal lands.

"My community has been asking for land titles for 25 years," Inti said. "And we only have 2 square kilometers registered. That's not even 10 percent of the total."

Franklin Briceno reported from Tarapoto and Frank Bajak from Lima. Associated Press writer Carla Salazar in Lima contributed to this report.

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