Indigenous peoples in Peru living in voluntary isolation or only recently contacted by the outside world face continued threat from expanding oil and gas activities in their reserves, a new report by the nonprofit Earth Insight has found.
According to Peru’s Ministry of Culture, the country has some 7,500 Indigenous people living in isolation and initial contact, or PIACI. These communities’ established and proposed Indigenous territorial reserves cover nearly 8 million hectares (20 million acres) of Amazon Rainforest. However, new maps by Earth Insight show that currently active and proposed oil and gas concessions overlap with 1.6 million hectares (4 million acres) or 20% of PIACI reserves.
“The amount of hectares threatened in established and proposed reserves is shocking, along with the fact that there are so many oil and gas blocks, varying from promotional blocks to production blocks, surrounding these reserves and threatening around 435 Indigenous communities,” Edith Espejo, program manager at Earth Insight, told Mongabay.
PIACI live in some of the remotest, most intact and biodiverse parts of the Amazon. They’re also highly vulnerable to exchanges with outsiders like loggers, miners, drug traffickers and missionaries: the Indigenous communities typically lack immunity to otherwise common diseases, and contact with the outside world increases risks of violent encounters. In July, for instance, members of the Mashco Piro community, thought to be the world’s largest isolated Indigenous group, reportedly had a violent altercation with loggers on the fringes of their officially recognized territory.
Similarly, oil-related activities have “significantly impacted Indigenous territories, affecting 41 out of 65 recognized Indigenous tribes in Peru,” the Earth Insight report notes.
For example, exploration, production and transportation of oil in the Peruvian Amazon resulted in some 474 oil spills between 2000 and 2019. Many of these spills have contaminated important rivers that the Indigenous peoples rely on, like the Marañon, compromising the communities’ food and health. Oil and gas operations also open up the forests to illegal logging and drug trafficking. “Over the past decade, 143 cases were filed against 16 oil companies for environmental violations,” the report notes.
Yet, new oil and gas blocks continue to be announced. In February 2023, Peru’s state energy agency, Perupetro, announced 31 new oil and gas exploration areas in the basins of rivers like the Marañon and Ucayali. That same month, the agency announced the reactivation of Lot 192, Peru’s biggest oilfield, which overlaps with several Indigenous territories, for a period of 30 years.
“If you look at the map, a large portion of the proposed Napo Tigre reserve is covered by oil and gas blocks,” Espejo added. “It was important to report on because reserves like this can get caught up in bureaucratic processes for decades, in part because they overlap with oil and gas blocks. The Napo Tigre Reserve was first proposed back in 2003 and has not moved forward in the approval process, which is supposed to only take about two to three years.”
Update (08/13/2024): The story was updated to include comments from Edith Espejo.
Credits
