
A boy holds up oil sludge from the Marañón River in the Peruvian Amazon. Credit:Federación de Comunidades Nativas del Río Corrientes Wednesday, 07
July 2010 12:24
Written by David Hill
On June 19 hundreds of barrels of oil were spilled in a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon, leading to calls for a ‘state of emergency’ to be declared and an appeal to the United Nations to intervene.
The oil was spilled by Argentine company Pluspetrol on the River Maranon in Loreto, northern Peru. This is far from the first time. According to a June 25 article in the Peruvian weekly Hildebrandt en sus trece, the same company has spilled oil 78 times in the last four years in this region: four spills in 2006, 23 in 2007, 18 in 2008, 23 in 2009, and 10 this year already.
‘We went down to the river to do our washing and realised there were traces of oil in the water. That was a shock. We went a little further along the bank and soon realised that there were patches of oil everywhere in the river,’ said one local resident in an interview with radio station La Voz de la Selva, which has followed events closely.
Local reaction has centred on two main concerns. First, the fact that so many people rely on the river for their survival. According to leading indigenous organization Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana (AIDESEP), at least 28 indigenous communities – in other words, thousands of people – use the river for their drinking water, cooking and fishing. Continue reading →