10 years ago this week Peru established the spectacular 1.3 million hectare Sierra del Divisor National Park in the remote Amazon, to rapturous national and international media attention. But what was entirely ignored by the media and almost every NGO and conservation organisation, including several based in the US, was that roughly 40% of the park was overlapped by an oil concession run by a Canadian-headquartered company, Pacific Exploration and Production.
“Shhhh, don’t mention the oil,” was how one Peruvian NGOer intimately involved with the park’s establishment in the final few years described the atmosphere at the time to me. “You can’t say anything about the oil.”
Although Pacific subsequently abandoned its concession in March 2017 and therefore never actually pumped any oil, after undergoing a “comprehensive restructuring transaction” in 2016 and being taken over by a Canadian private equity firm, evidence suggests that it had hoped to operate in the park after it was established. For example, in 2015 and 2016 the company continued to move ahead with plans to conduct exploratory drilling, having already done seismic tests in the region in 2012 and 2013, while the key legal and administrative documents regarding the park’s creation were clear that its “acquired” or “pre-existing” rights would be respected.
Pacific’s Enrique Ramirez Puig, at the time the company’s Peru General Manager, told me in Lima several years later that the 2012/2013 exploration had revealed the existence of a geological “structure” and possibly “large, very large” oil deposits in the north of what later became the park. Although he himself was far from convinced about it, and the exploratory drilling still needed to be done.
“The seismic can only tell you so much,” he said.
The possibility of Pacific continuing to operate in its concession was confirmed a year later, November 2016, when the park’s official Management Plan was approved. SERNANP, Peru’s parks agency, was explicit that the company could carry on working, according to its highly tendentious interpretation of the country’s environmental legislation, and effectively gave Pacific a role in managing the park too.
This was particularly outrageous not only because it undermined the fundamental purpose and integrity of the park, where normally in Peru oil operations and other kinds of “natural resource extraction” are prohibited, but because Pacific’s concession overlapped the ancestral territory of the indigenous Matsés people and the proposed Yavari Tapiche Reserve for indigenous people living in “isolation”, which eventually was established in 2021.
In other words, far from providing indigenous people and their land with greater protection, as might be assumed, the park was actually putting them more at risk. In that sense, conservation acted like a kind of “Trojan Horse” for the oil industry.
In Peru, parks and other kinds of “protected natural areas” (PNAs) are known in the Spanish as “areas naturales protegidas”, or “ANPs” as the acronym. A riff on that might be: “ANPPPs”, i.e. “areas naturales protegidas para petroleras” or “natural areas protected for oil companies.”
At the time, indigenous federations such as AIDESEP, ORAU and ORPIO were furious, saying they had only backed the park’s establishment on the understanding that indigenous people’s rights would be respected and their territories protected. After the Management Plan was approved in late 2016, ORPIO took legal action against SERNANP, the Energy Ministry and the state oil and gas promotions agency Perupetro, leading to a “historic” victory three years later, which SERNANP subsequently appealed.
Why draw attention to this now? Not just because 10 years is up, or because a few days ago SERNANP and others released almost 4,500 baby turtles into the park, or even because it acts as a useful reminder of what some conservation organisations are capable of, but because in July this year a Peruvian Congressman, Jorge Luis Flores Ancachi, submitted a bill that would explicitly open up the country’s parks and other kinds of off-limits PNAs to extractive industries like oil. To date, parks like the world-famous Manu and Bahuaja Sonene have been identified as most at threat from that bill, although a recent move by Perupetro suggests it might be more interested in the latter’s buffer zone than the park itself.
But it is worth highlighting that in the long-term the Sierra del Divisor park, which has also been struggling against illegal logging and the cocaine trade, could be at risk from Flores Ancachi’s bill too - if it passes into law, if other legal and administrative hoops are jumped through, and if global demand for oil continues.
Certainly, the oil and gas industry has its eye on Sierra del Divisor. In a presentation given last year by Perupetro, it was one of just two parks in Peru identified as having oil potential - the other being Alto Purús. That presentation included a map, above, showing how “plays” and “leads” - not just “prospects” - have been identified within the park too.
Cristina López Wong, from the Peruvian NGO Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos (DAR), emphasises how important it is to ensure that Peru’s parks remain intangible, especially those like Sierra del Divisor and Bahuaja Sonene which protect not only river headwaters and “highly specialised ecosystems which have low soil fertility and can be easily degraded”, but indigenous people in “isolation” too.
“Peruvian civil society has analysed, debated and made various recommendations regarding Flores Ancachi’s bill,” López Wong tells me. “We have expressed our concern about the serious implications that the loss of intangibility would have on maintaining the environmental and cultural values of our national parks.”