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Peru's Northern Amazon: Blighted By The Toxic Legacy of Oil
For time immemorial, the Achuar indigenous people have lived in the Amazon rainforest of northern Peru in harmony with their natural environment. Their homeland contains some of the highest biodiversity on Earth. Well into the twentieth century, the Achuar practiced their traditional way of life, relatively isolated from the rest of Peruvian society. Still today, over 11,000 Achuar live in the Peruvian Amazon along the Corrientes, Pastaza, and Morona rivers. To reach this remote region from the capital city of Lima can take up to a week by bus and canoe. Travel on foot between villages often takes days.
Achuar land also sits on top of some of the western Amazon's most lucrative oil reserves. Successive oil companies - first US-based Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) and now Argentina's Pluspetrol - have been pumping oil in the concession known as Block 1AB since the early 1970's. Until very recently, flagrant pollution has been the norm. Oxy's legacy of harm continues to be felt: their reckless operations dumped approximately 9 billion barrels of "produced waters" - which contain highly toxic substances such as barium, boron and arsenic - throughout 30 years of operations (averaging 850,000 barrels per day). Oxy's practice of using unlined earthen pits to store crude oil was banned in US oil-producing states by the 1970s, as was its discharge of produced waters into streams.
The companies polluted for decades - in violation of international standards and laws - lowering their production costs and maximizing return for their shareholders. There have been grave costs, however, paid by the Achuar indigenous communities with their health, livelihoods, and lives. Agricultural crops have been contaminated, animals poisoned, and over half of all local children have dangerously high blood-lead levels. Local residents cite countless tales of unexplained diseases, tumors, and skin ailments developing since they have been exposed to oil contamination. Community members believe that many premature deaths have been the result of pollution-caused health problems
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