LEADING Peruvian opponent of illegal logging Edwin Chota and three other native Ashaninka community leaders have been shot dead, villagers said on Monday night.

Mr Chota had received frequent death threats from illegal loggers who he had tried for years to expel from the community’s lands.

Corruption enables the loggers to operate with impunity, stripping the Amazon region’s river basins of prized hardwoods, especially mahogany and tropical cedar, supporters claim.

“He threatened to upset the status quo,” said Professor David Salisbury, who had been advising Mr Chota. “The illegal loggers are on record as wanting Edwin dead.”

Mr Chota and the other activists were apparently killed on September 1, the day they left Saweto village to hike to a Brazilian Ashaninka community, said village schoolteacher Maria Elena Paredes.

When the men did not show at the Brazilian village, worried comrades who had travelled ahead of them returned and found the bodies — apparently killed by shotgun blasts — near some shacks on the Putaya river, Ms Paredes said.

“The community has always and continues to be threatened by the big loggers,” she said in Ucayali regional capital Pucallpa, where she arrived on Monday night after a three-day boat journey with the widows and children of the slain men.

Peru’s main indigenous federation AIDESEP, expressed outrage at police and the judiciary for “doing absolutely nothing despite repeated complaints” to protect the slain men who it said had joined “the long list of martyrs who have fallen in defence of their ancestral lands.”