Pastor Dahua, president of the community of Monterrica, on the Marañón River in the Peruvian Amazon, scoops oil from a spill from a Petroperu pipeline on his community’s land. Barbara Fraser.
Hunching his shoulders against a driving rain Pastor Dahua scrambled down a muddy bank and stepped across a pool of blackened water to a makeshift shelter that marked the place where crude oil had spilled from an oil pipeline.
The spill in Monterrico, the community of Kukama and Urarina people of which Dahua is president, is one of 10 that have occurred since January along the pipeline that runs from oil fields in the Peruvian Amazon across the Andes Mountains to a port and refinery on the Pacific coast.
The rain worried Dahua. Between November and May, water levels in Amazonian rivers rise by 30 feet or more, flooding villages and forests. If the spill was not cleaned up by the time the flooding began in earnest, Monterrico’s only water supply—a stream that crossed the pipeline near the end of the oil spill—could be contaminated.
Monterrico is one of dozens of communities affected by recent spills. Even more people are exposed to contamination from 40 years of oil operations that dumped oil and salty, metals-laden water into rivers, streams and lakes in Peru’s oldest Amazonian oil fields.
Government agencies have identified more than 1,000 sites needing cleanup, but have a budget of only about $15 million for testing and remediation. Experts say that is just a fraction of the amount that will be needed.
Anger over the sluggish pace of efforts to address decades of pollution and neglect have come to a head in Saramurillo, on the bank of the Marañón River, a few hours by boat downstream from Monterrico.
Hundreds of people from more than 40 indigenous communities converged there on September 1, blocking boat traffic on the Marañón River, a key transportation route in the northeastern Peruvian region of Loreto, where there are virtually no roads.
Despite an initial meeting with government officials in October, the protest dragged on into December, amid tensions among both the protesters and the travelers and merchants trapped by the blockade.
Indigenous protesters stand watch on bank of Marañón River in Saramurillo, Peru, blocking boats from passing, as they pressure the government to solve problems related to pollution from four decades of oil production in the Peruvian Amazon. Barbara Fraser.
This in depth look at the reality of oil spills, and their impact on Indigenous people is very necessary reading. The impact of such is not at all limited to Indigenous people, and the more Indigenous people fight against having pipelines on their land, the more the impact of spills will spread, further and further out, into a horrible web of contamination.
Everyone needs to stand up against fossil fuels, now more than ever, with the new climate change denying, fossil fuel loving administration poised to take over.
“Can’t they drink Perrier water?” -- Marie Antoinette
:Snort: That may as well be the official response. It’s plain to see, everywhere in the world there’s a spill, they say the same things “not that bad”, “cleaned up”, and so on. The reality is very different.
I notice that it’s the government paying for the testing and remediation -- and as someone who has some familiarity with remediation, that $15,000 per well maximum figure is just disgustingly low.
It’s a workable process too. Remediation can clean things up a whole lot better than the companies ever bother to, and if the fucking companies had to do it properly and pay for it themselves (with some restrictions on executive pay in the process) there would probably be vastly fewer spills in the first place.
I can’t even begin to imagine how you can clean up a spill like that, esp. with the rain coming.
Company CEOs and board members should be drafted into that work. By force. Or else forced to live on the contaminated land themselves with no external resources of their own.
Or something. Because the callous lack of concern regarding the people who need to live near their pipelines is criminal.
Maybe there should be a regulation similar to what banks have in Brazil for oil, gas and mining companies, worldwide: The CEO and the (largest) owners have an unlimited liability for the damages and debts of the company.
This is also a reminder of what can happen when corporations have wealth so vast they can bully small nations; legislation dealing with their particular industry has been watered down so much, penalties for a breach amount to a slap on the wrist. Which they still fight in court purely because they can!
Tobacco giants have done the same.