Peru eyes huge new Amazon reserve where UK oil company operates
Long-standing proposal to protect indigenous people in "isolation" inches forward although Perenco has concessions there
10 years ago this month, July 2011, US media outlet Truthout published a 4,900+ word article of mine exposing how plans to exploit billions of dollars of oil in one of the remotest parts of the Amazon rainforest had effectively led to a cover-up of the existence of the indigenous people reportedly living in the region. The logic seems to have been simple, if never actually made explicit anywhere I’ve seen. Things could get far too complicated for the government or any company operating there if they acknowledged, concretely and publicly, that such people existed.
Titled “$35 Billion of Oil Plus an “Uncontacted” Tribe Equals Coverup”, that article was based on several years research including a visit to one of the villages nearest to the oil operations and a proposed reserve for the indigenous people in “isolation”, as Peruvian law formally terms them, between the River Napo and River Tigre in Peru’s vast Loreto region. Among other things, it emphasised how the company running one of two concessions in the area, the UK- and France-based Perenco, had contracted a consultancy, Daimi Peru, to write a report which concluded that “no information exists that demonstrates or suggests the existence of isolated indigenous people in the area under investigation”, but then showed how, after I had tracked down some of the researchers who had worked for Daimi, including one whose name had been mysteriously excluded from its report, evidence had been obtained but was subsequently omitted. The following year, as I reported in The Guardian, I was leaked a copy of an internal report sent to Daimi by the three researchers named as the lead authors of the final, publicly-available report, which included evidence of the indigenous people in “isolation” that they had identified.
In other words, Daimi’s “no information exists” claim was utter nonsense.
“We found evidence of their existence,” Teodulio Grandez, one of those three researchers, told me in 2011 in his office at the National University of the Peruvian Amazon in Iquitos, Loreto’s biggest town. “There were signs. We never said there weren't any.”
“You can’t say there isn’t any evidence for their existence,” Rosa Aguilera Ríos, another of the three researchers, told me, “because there is evidence. There are people all over that area who have seen them, who talk about them.”
So what’s going on now, exactly a decade later? Perenco not only still runs that same concession, called Lot 67, but has effectively expanded the sphere of its operations by acquiring the other, Lot 39, which used to entirely surround Lot 67 but now is located to its south and east. According to my calculations based on statistics from Perupetro, the Peruvian state agency responsible for contracting oil companies, Perenco has exploited 3.6 million barrels of oil from Lot 67 since 2013, having taken over the concession in 2008.
The proposed reserve is still just that too - proposed - although very recently there has been an encouraging development towards establishing it. After initially being suggested all the way back in 2003, and then suffering a highly controversial, Perupetro-pressured u-turn by the Ministry of Culture 10 years later, a Peruvian NGO, the Instituto del Bien Común (IBC), was contracted, in April, by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to conduct the first of the two studies that are required to create a reserve. IBC researchers are expected to travel to the Napo-Tigre region next month, pending Covid-19 restrictions. Although establishing the reserve would clearly be an important achievement, the indigenous people in “isolation” would still be at considerable risk because both Lot 67 and Lot 39 overlap a huge chunk of the currently proposed area for it. Their well-publicised lack of immunological defences means that any kind of encounter with company personnel could prove catastrophic and trigger a fatal epidemic, as has happened so many times in the Amazon in the past.
Despite all the evidence obtained over the years - not so much from those Daimi-contracted researchers, but from many, many organisations and individuals, most notably the Iquitos-based indigenous federation ORPIO - and despite all the other institutions that have accepted the existence of the indigenous people in “isolation” in the Napo-Tigre region, including Norway’s Ministry of Finance’s Council on Ethics, Perenco has refused to do so. In 2009 a company spokesperson was quoted in The Guardian describing them as “similar to the Loch Ness monster. Much talk but never any evidence”, while at the time of my 2012 article in the same newspaper on the Daimi internal report the company was claiming on its website: “There has been no evidence of non-contacted tribes.” In 2014, when I wrote an article for The Ecologist on the company’s plans to acquire Lot 39, their website still claimed “no evidence”, although ironically, as I reported for Upside Down World, the prior owner of that concession, Spain’s Repsol, sold its stake after being investigated by Norway’s Council on Ethics which had been concerned about the potential impact of its operations on the people in “isolation.” According to Norwegian sources, the Council had recommended that the Ministry divest from the company - no small matter - but Repsol pulled out before that might have happened.
In stark contrast, ORPIO’s David Freitas, who has travelled extensively across Loreto for many years, says that there is an “abundance” of evidence which his federation has documented in numerous reports.
“It’s very clear that the people in isolation are there,” he tells me. “I have no doubt.”
Freitas describes the imminent IBC research as a “great advance.”
“That is especially because we’ve been waiting so long, and the possibility of the reserve is becoming more concrete,” he says. “It’s also positive the researchers have experience with these issues. We’re confident in those who are going to do the work.”
One IBC researcher tells me that the current plan is that three teams will travel to the Napo-Tigre region, each visiting a different area.
“We’re about to start the first fieldwork,” he says. “The process should take until May next year, although things are complex now with Covid-19 and political instability.”
Lot 67 is certainly no ordinary concession. When the deposits there were declared commercially-viable 15 years ago, it was hailed as Peru’s biggest oil and gas discovery for decades, and the then president Alan García visited the region, called the oil a “miracle”, and said it would turn Peru into a net exporter. When Perenco started producing, in 2013, García’s successor, Ollanta Humala, marked the occasion by visiting too.
Lot 39 is no ordinary concession either. According to estimates from Peru’s Energy Ministry, the deposits could be even bigger than in Lot 67.
All these years later, might Perenco’s position on the existence of the indigenous people in “isolation” have shifted, especially now that the process to establish the reserve has just made such a small-but-significant advance?
“Miracle” deposits or not, shouldn’t it stop operating in the region, given that such reserves are supposed to be “intangible”?
I put those questions and others to the company but, according to its London-based PR firm, Celicourt Communications, Perenco “decline to comment.”