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Indigenous Peoples Pay the Price for Company Profits We have this deep fear for our children and for the heritage that will be left behind. Because our children will have children and our grandchildren will too. But maybe we won't exist anymore. Marianeli Mantaro Ortega, Shivankoreni Community, June 2003
© 1998 Lilly/Amazon Watch.
Some of Camisea's children. |
The Camisea Project continues to jeopardize the health and safety of Machiguenga indigenous communities who live in small communities along the Urubamba and Camisea Rivers. The reduction in fish and game stocks caused by project construction has adversely affected their staple diet of fish and game. Illness is on the increase throughout the Urubamba Ð recently dozens of new cases of syphilis were reported by the health post in the indigenous community of Kirigueti. Local health workers have testified that small children are at risk from chronic malnutrition. A Machiguenga man stated: Now there is such a combination of illnesses that we can't identify the illnesses that we get.
The Nahua, Nanti, and Kirineri are semi-nomadic peoples who live in voluntary isolation in the Nahua Kugapakori State Reserve, neighboring the Urubamba River, and had little or no contact with the outside world. The government of Peru created the Reserve in 1990 to protect these vulnerable peoples from outside intrusion. However, in violation of internationally recognized indigenous rights, Camisea companies forcibly contacted them, robbing them of their right to choose their own lifestyle and exposing them to sickness.
Forty-two percent of the Nahua population had already died from introduced diseases to which they have no immunity when Shell conducted gas exploration in the mid-1980s. There is evidence that increased disease among the Machiguenga was also infecting peoples within the Reserve. This drove the Nahua to take the unprecedented step of publicly communicating through local advocates their rejection of all oil and gas operations within their lands:
In the past, Shell worked here and almost all of us died from the diseases...We know that if another company comes here, our rivers and land will be destroyed. What will we eat when the rivers are dead and the animals have run away?
To fuel its ambitious export project, Hunt Oil has acquired another oil concession, Block 56, located on the lands of Machiguenga communities adjacent to Block 88. The demands of indigenous organisations for a transparent, free and informed consultation process regarding Block 56 were ignored, with no major structural changes to the process by which Block 88 was opened up. Along with neighboring blocks 57 and 90, an area or rainforest totalling nearly four million acres, some 10 times larger than the original Camisea concession of Block 88, will now be opened up to the devastating effects of gas extraction and the cumulative impacts this will have on both the ecosystems and their indigenous inhabitants.
© Amazon Watch.
Camisea has a diverse indigenous population. |
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