Midway through last month the UK’s ITV4 broadcast an intriguing five minute segment about the French company TotalEnergies attempting to green its image and bolster its “carbon neutral” credentials through a variety of advertising, marketing and other initiatives. These include dropping the name Total Oil, changing its logo, sponsoring a team in the Tour de France cycling event - which was underway at the time - and buying carbon credits from Peru’s Amazon.
“Today we’re restricted in our ancestral practices of fishing, hunting and collecting seeds for our craftwork or plants for medicinal purposes,” indigenous Kichwa leader Marisol García Apagueño told ITV4’s Matt Rendell. “Our forests are being used to sell carbon credits to multinational companies - the largest polluters - who have already run up an impossible-to-pay debt. We’ve discovered that TotalEnergies, one of the world’s biggest oil firms, has bought $84.7 million of credits [from a project overlapping our land].”
ITV4 went on to show García Apagueño vigorously protesting outside the headquarters of one of Total’s investors in Paris last year, before concluding with what appears to have been a summary of a statement from the company distancing itself from some of the accusations flying around.
“TotalEnergies denies it engages in greenwashing through its sports partnerships, and says it is reducing some emissions,” ITV4 reported. “It says that to its knowledge, the carbon offsetting project in Peru complies with law, was subject to a consultation with local communities and they can still practice their ancestral traditions in the forest. It adds that the project creates funding for conservation and the communities.”
Unfortunately, ITV4 didn’t go into any of the details - namely, that the carbon project from which Total has bought credits is the frankly scandalous one involving Peru’s fourth biggest national park, Cordillera Azul, which was slapped on top of a vast swathe of what more than two dozen Kichwa communities consider to be their territory, as I’ve highlighted previously on Substack. In other words, not only do the Kichwa allege that they have faced various kinds of restrictions on accessing and using parts of their land since the park was created in 2001, but Total, along with Shell, is apparently compounding that state of affairs by buying credits from the project and using that association to boost its image by appearing more “green” - all the while continuing to commercialise large quantities of oil.
A ‘Total Distraction’, you might call that strategy.
What ITV4 also didn’t have time to mention was the fascinating yet under-reported lawsuit initiated in 2023 by four Peruvian indigenous federations - CEPKA, FEPIKECHA, FEPIKBHSAM and CODEPISAM - against several national and regional Peruvian state agencies. Although it has just been overturned on procedural grounds, that legal action had resulted in an historic ruling in May when a court in the Amazon town of Tarapoto “ordered the demarcation of the [indigenous] territories overlapped by the [Cordillera Azul park and the Cordillera Escalera Regional Conservation Area (CERCA), created in 2005] and recognised the State's duty to demarcate Indigenous territories within protected areas.”
In other words, the court ruled that parts of the park - and by implication the carbon project - and the CERCA should be included within legally-titled Kichwa communities.
“The most significant aspect of the ruling is that it establishes that the recognition of territorial rights and the protection of the environment through protected areas are compatible,” lawyer Cristina Gavancho León, acting for the federations, was quoted saying by Peruvian newspaper La Republica.
The three Kichwa federations behind the lawsuit - all of whom have written to Total about the carbon project - have been quick to condemn the grounds on which that historic May ruling was overturned. They have issued furious statements vowing to continue their legal fight as well as make formal complaints, with two saying they themselves will demarcate their territories inside the park if the state doesn’t get on with it.
“We feel betrayed by Peruvian justice,” García Apagueño, FEPIKECHA’s president, tells me bluntly.
When I ask her what she thinks of Total’s statement to ITV4 implying that local communities have no problem with the carbon project, she says it is “another clear example of how human rights don’t matter to transnational companies.” The carbon project is “contributing to the dispossession of indigenous people from their land”, she alleges, and accuses the company of “double standards” because it is paying to supposedly protect part of Peru at the same time it is building a a new pipeline - the “East African Crude Oil Pipeline” - across Uganda and Tanzania.
So what might TotalEnergies make of these developments in the Kichwa’s legal struggle, since they make it clear things can’t be as rosy with the carbon project as its statement to ITV4 apparently implied? The company - which has previously issued statements acknowledging “how important it is to respect indigenous rights”, recognising that land tenure is a “core issue”, and affirming that the Cordillera Azul park was established according to Peruvian law - didn’t respond to requests for comment.