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Project Overview Peru's Camisea Gas Project is arguably the most damaging project in the Amazon Basin at the time of writing. Located in the remote Lower Urubamba Basin in the south-eastern Peruvian Amazon, the $1.6 billion project includes two pipelines to the Peruvian coast, cutting through an Amazon biodiversity hotspot described by scientists as "the last place on earth" to drill for fossil fuels.
Nearly 75 percent of gas extraction operations for "Block 88", as the original Camisea concession is known, are located inside a state reserve for indigenous peoples living in isolation. In violation of both stated company policy and international laws such as ILO Convention 169 and the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, employees of Veritas, a contractor working for consortia member Pluspetrol have made contact with these communities, pressuring them to abandon their ancestral lands. Pluspetrol also facilitated helicopter transport of missionaries to remote areas to contact isolated indigenous groups.
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Click to enlarge Camisea maps:
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Additionally, another 22 indigenous communities living in intermittent contact with outsiders, as well as dozens of farming communities have suffered a range of direct and "indirect" impacts, from the loss of local fish and game populations on which they depend for their subsistence to landslides, infectious diseases and STD outbreaks. A May 2004 report, published by the Peruvian health ministry's General Office of Epidemiology confirmed that that incidences of infectious diseases had increased in the reserve among one isolated group, the Nanti, to such an alarming extent that only one in four now reaches adolescence. These serious environmental and social impacts now affecting the entire local population were predicted by environmental and human rights campaigners.
In the first 18 months after it became operational in August 2004, the Camisea pipeline, which runs from the Amazon, over the Andes, to the Pacific Coast, has ruptured four times, with at least three major spills. This appalling record is highly unusual for such a pipeline and comes despite repeated assurances from the downstream consortium and the Inter-American Development Bank that no such problems would occur. According to a February 2006 independent report by non-profit engineering consultancy E-Tech International, the pipeline was constructed by unqualified and untrained welders using corroded piping and rushing to avoid onerous late completion fees that would have totalled $90 million.
The project also has upset many in Peru given the gas processing facility on the Peruvian coast was built within the buffer zone of the Paracas Marine Reserve, an internationally important wetland area recognised by the RAMSAR convention and Peru's only marine reserve. Despite repeated appeals by Peruvian civil society, the consortium refused to choose an alternative site.
In January 2006, Hunt Oil broke ground on a $1 billion plant to liquefy natural gas for export to planned markets in mainland Mexico and Western United States.
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