Peru’s ‘genocide’ bill based on sham, out-of-date report by environmental consultancy
Controversial legislative proposal due to be discussed today in Congress while a protest takes place outside
A bill is currently moving through Peru’s Congress that national indigenous federation AIDESEP says could cause “genocide” among indigenous people living in the remotest parts of the Amazon basin. It is hard to know what is most astonishing about this legislative proposal: that a Congressman could be so apparently ignorant, devious or dangerous to make it, perhaps, or that almost an entire page of the “explanatory memorandum” supposedly justifying it is dedicated to a 15 year old report that was exposed as hopelessly flawed more than a decade ago.
What the bill, proposed by Congressman Jorge Morante Figari, seeks to do is transfer the powers to establish new - and eliminate existing - reserves for indigenous people living in “isolation” from the Ministry of Culture (MINCU) in Lima to regional governments across the Amazon, as well as putting those same regional governments in charge of a MultiSector Commission responsible for the administrative process required to create such reserves. This really is, to invoke a tired cliché, like putting the fox in charge of the hen house, and it poses a severe threat to all seven of the existing reserves and six others that have been proposed - but not yet created - across Peru.
Perhaps most immediately at risk is the reserve proposed 20 years ago between the River Napo and River Tigre in the north of the country, to which the bill’s “explanatory memorandum”, just 22 pages long, somewhat bizarrely devotes eight and a half pages. Presumably intended to illustrate how MINCU has been mishandling things, one of those pages is a summary of a 2008 report written by a controversial environmental consultancy called Daimi Peru which concluded that no evidence could be found of indigenous people living in “isolation” in the Napo-Tigre region where the reserve has been proposed. Ergo, there would be no point in establishing it.
“There is no information that demonstrates or suggests the existence of isolated indigenous people,” Daimi’s report stated.
Oh really? Apart from the fact that in the intervening years all kinds of evidence for indigenous people in “isolation” in the Napo-Tigre region has been documented, mainly by regional indigenous federation ORPIO, here are five things that explode Daimi’s 2008 claim and therefore anything - including Morante Figari's bill - based on it:
1 Evidence for indigenous people in “isolation” in the Napo-Tigre region was found by researchers contracted by Daimi, but it was omitted from the company’s 2008 report. For more details, read a 2009 article in The Guardian, two 2011 articles by myself in Truthout and the New Internationalist, and a 2012 article of mine in The Guardian. Those two 2011 articles were based on a visit to the communities closest to the proposed reserve in the Napo-Tigre region as well as contacting as many of the report’s contributors as possible, including the three researchers named as its lead authors, all of whom told me they disagreed with its conclusions and that evidence had been found. The 2012 Guardian article was written after I obtained the internal, non-publicly-available report written by those same three lead authors which they had submitted to Daimi and included a list of the evidence they found, but later didn’t make it into the report that was made public: “bent branches, footprints, women bathing in the rivers and crossed spears on pathways.”
2 The name of the researcher contracted by Daimi who may have obtained more evidence of the indigenous people in “isolation” in the Napo-Tigre region than any of the other contributors - numbering more than 24 in total - was omitted from the company’s 2008 report too, as was, unsurprisingly, the evidence that she found. “There is no doubt in my mind that there are uncontacted groups there,” that researcher, Virginia Montoya, was quoted saying by The Guardian in 2009. “But it was all edited out. I was really upset when I saw the final report.”
3 The now-defunct Peruvian state agency previously responsible for indigenous people in “isolation”, called the Instituto Nacional de Desarrollo de Pueblo Andinos, Amazónicos y Afroperuanos (INDEPA), has explicitly distanced itself from Daimi’s 2008 report. In 2012, in an extremely critical response to an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) submitted by the UK- and France-based oil company Perenco, whose concession, Lot 67, sits right in the middle of the proposed Napo-Tigre reserve, INDEPA stated that although one of its functionaries accompanied Daimi researchers into the Napo-Tigre region, INDEPA itself doesn’t share Daimi’s conclusions about whether or not any evidence for the indigenous people in “isolation” exists. Two years prior to that, INDEPA’s director at the time, Mayta Capac Alatrista Herrera, was reported by one Peruvian media outlet saying that his agency had “not corroborated, confirmed nor validated the conclusions of Daimi’s report.”
4 Daimi was contracted to write the 2008 report by none other than Perenco, the oil company which earlier that year had taken over Lot 67. No doubt about it, this constitutes a glaring conflict of interest and means that the report can’t be considered independent. How can we take it seriously if it was paid for by Perenco and arrived at a conclusion that is so spectacularly convenient for them? The company has repeatedly cited that report when responding to criticism of its operations because of the potential impacts on the indigenous people in “isolation”, effectively enabling them to claim, “But there isn’t any evidence!” Probably the most public example of this was a Perenco functionary telling The Guardian in 2009: “This is similar to the Loch Ness monster. Much talk but never any evidence. We have done very detailed studies to ascertain if there are uncontacted tribes because that would be a very serious matter. The evidence is nonexistent.”
5 Another - albeit much less important - indication of the lack of seriousness anyone should attribute to Daimi’s 2008 report is the fact that a woman, Claire Kadjar, with the same surname as a top Perenco functionary, Daniel Kadjar, worked in some capacity with or for Daimi while it was researching the report. Daniel’s daughter or niece, perhaps? How can we trust a report that not only concludes in an overtly beneficial way for the company that paid for it, but appears to have had the relative of someone high-up in that very same company contributing to it too, even if in a very small way?
Ultimately, Daimi’s 2008 report was a combination of dreadful research, outright deception and clumsy public relations, and 15 years later there is no way that anyone should be citing it with a straight face. Not Perenco, not any other oil company, and certainly not Peruvian politicians like Morante Figari to back legislation that is so potentially catastrophic that indigenous federations like AIDESEP, which is holding a protest against the bill outside Peru’s Congress today, find themselves forced to sound “genocide” warnings. Basta, ya!