Environmental News Network - For Indigenous in the Amazon, a Dual Threat: Big Oil and the Virus

Details: By Yale Environment 360; 21.Jul

Indigenous rainforest communities in northern Peru have chalked up a significant victory in their efforts to expel oil companies from their lands.

Julie Swatson

Indigenous rainforest communities in northern Peru have chalked up a significant victory in their efforts to expel oil companies from their lands. Last week, the Chilean oil giant GeoPark withdrew from a project that the company had earlier claimed would deliver enough oil to supply a quarter of Peru’s needs.

But the victory was bittersweet. For it came just two weeks after the death from Covid-19 of one of the tribal leaders who has spearheaded the campaign to repel Big Oil — and there is growing concern that the spread of the virus in this remote region of the Amazon rainforest could have been triggered by employees of oil companies.

GeoPark gave up its role as the operator of Block 64, covering traditional territories of the Achuar and Wampis people the size of New Jersey, citing “force majeure,” meaning extraordinary circumstances beyond their control. Its letter to its partner, the state oil company Petroperu did not specify what those circumstances were.

But it came after a year in which the two Indigenous groups had contested and forced the company to withdraw an environmental impact assessment on the project, making action within the project area illegal, and two months after the Wampis presented a criminal complaint with local prosecutors, claiming the company’s staff were moving around the forest in breach of Peru’s coronavirus lockdown.

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For Indigenous in the Amazon, a Dual Threat: Big Oil and the Virus