Let’s build a road right to the edge of an ‘uncontacted’ tribe’s reserve!
Local authority in Peru's Amazon is proposing a new road endangering rights and lives of indigenous people in "isolation"
It’s common knowledge nowadays just how destructive building roads in the Amazon, or indeed any tropical forest, can be. But it’s even more potentially disastrous if a road runs towards or through a region inhabited by indigenous people living in “isolation”, sometimes dubbed - arguably misleadingly - “uncontacted.” A road would not only enable or encourage huge numbers of outsiders to access otherwise hard- or impossible-to-reach areas where they might start cutting down the forest which the “isolated” people depend on to survive, but contact could lead to violence, the spread of diseases and fatal epidemics.
Despite this obvious danger, a municipal authority in one of the Peruvian Amazon’s most remote corners is proposing to build a 45 km road that would stop short of the country’s oldest reserve for indigenous people in “isolation” and “initial contact” by just 160 metres. That is a really quite extraordinary move, if you consider that Peru’s rainforest extends for some 78 million hectares. Could anyone do much more to encourage the invasion of a supposedly off-limits area where many of the inhabitants are so vulnerable to contact with other people?
No wonder indigenous federations and others are outraged. While the municipal authority claims that the main aim is to support the agricultural production of certain settlements in the region as well as save lives by reducing the number of people travelling by river, opponents say it is about boosting the logging industry, cattle-ranching and the cocaine trade, whose presence in the area has been confirmed by the existence of a clandestine airstrip roughly 6 kms from the proposed road’s route. There are several timber concessions in the area, and some forest has already been cleared for pasture. According to the US-based NGO Amazon Conservation Association, more than 2,000 hectares of forest in the region have been cut down over the last 20 years.
“This road has no legitimate justification,” three indigenous federations - AIDESEP, COMARU and CORPIAA - wrote in a stinging letter to Ministry of Transport functionaries and others four days ago, “other than to facilitate the invasion of the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti and Others Reserve [KNNOR] and thereby benefitting illegal loggers and narco-traffickers who have been operating in the upper River Mishahua and in the River Dorado area in particular where a clandestine airstrip is located, as the state knows full well.”
“Far from bringing “development”, this road would only bring more invasions of the KNNOR, more illegal logging, more large-scale deforestation and more serious threats to the indigenous people living in isolation and initial contact in the reserve,” the federations continue. “We would like to express our total opposition to this appalling proposal because of the impacts it would have on our people and our territories.”
According to AIDESEP lawyer Rocío Trujillo Solís, the road would violate the “isolated” people’s rights under national and international laws, as enshrined in, inter alia, Peru’s Constitution, the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 169 and jurisprudence from the Inter-American Court on Human Rights.
“We’re very concerned about this proposal,” AIDESEP spokesperson Julio Cusurichi Palacios, a Goldman Environmental Prize winner, tells me. “There’s already illegal deforestation along the River Mishahua and an airstrip just north of the River Dorado. We’re urging the Peruvian state and Megantoni’s municipality in particular to abandon its plans to build this dangerous road immediately.”
The municipal authority proposing the road is from the Megantoni district, in the Cusco region in south-east Peru. They envisage it following the course of the River Mishahua running upstream from a small settlement called Vista Alegre towards the KNNOR, established in 1990. The Culture Ministry has recommended modifying this plan so that the reserve is not directly or indirectly affected, but to date the municipality has effectively ignored that.
For all of the Peruvian state’s failure to protect the KNNOR over the years, building this road would constitute something of a new low. For almost a quarter of a century, a gas consortium headed by Argentina’s Pluspetrol, the US’s Hunt Oil and Spain’s Repsol has operated in the centre-west of the reserve, thereby making an almost total mockery of the KNNOR’s existence and any pretensions that the government has had about protecting it. “Pathetic, if not disastrous”, was how I described the project’s impacts on indigenous people living in the region in The Guardian some years ago, despite all the billions generated.
Ironically, one of the things the “Camisea project” - as Pluspetrol et al’s operations are commonly known - prides itself on is the “inland-offshore” infrastructure model it has implemented. In other words, instead of building roads from its processing plant and operations base on the River Urubamba to its drilling platforms in the KNNOR, it has used boats, the rivers - most notably, the Camisea and Cashiriari - and helicopters instead.
Indeed, the Camisea and Cashiriari are two of only a handful of rivers that run into - or rather out of - the KNNOR. The River Mishahua is another. After years of a multi-billion dollar gas project run by an international consortium avoiding the use of roads because of concerns about who-knows-how-many-100s of people might subsequently flood into the reserve, it would be particularly tragic if the Megantoni municipality did something akin to the exact opposite.