Peru’s Sierra del Divisor - another example of conservationists violating indigenous rights
An oil firm permitted to operate in a national park in the Amazon in 2015-16 acts as another cautionary tale for "30x30" supporters
Plans are currently afoot to formally protect and conserve 30% of our entire planet by 2030. You could be forgiven for thinking that something this significant and ambitious would be all over the mainstream media or that it is an unquestionably wonderful proposal, but it clearly isn't either. While some conservation is indeed wonderful, there is too much that is appalling and destructive in both its past and present for many people around the world not to feel deeply concerned or perhaps even terrified by the so-called “30x30” target, given the risks potentially posed to millions of indigenous peoples and other rural-living communities.
“For over a century, conservation was carried out with the aim of vacating protected areas of all human presence, leading to cultural destruction and large-scale displacements of indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands,” wrote the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples in a 2016 report. Despite a “human rights-based paradigm” being ostensibly adopted by conservationists in 2003, the Rapporteur stated that “considerable implementation gaps remain” and “new threats to human rights-based conservation are emerging.” The UN had been receiving reports of “allegations of large-scale violations of the rights of indigenous peoples in the context of conservation measures”, the Rapporteur wrote, which included evictions leading to “marginalization, poverty, loss of livelihoods, food insecurity, extrajudicial killings, disrupted links with spiritual sites and denial of access to justice.”
Six years later reports of conservation abuses continue to roll in regularly, although only rarely eliciting mainstream media coverage. Given that, it is no surprise that “30x30” - currently being advocated through the UN’s Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which has just concluded hosting a crucial six day meeting in Kenya on what is being called the “post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework” - has generated so much alarm around the world.
Here I want to provide one example, the Sierra del Divisor National Park in Peru’s Amazon, of how conservationists ignore indigenous peoples and their rights. This is a particularly worthwhile case because the park was established comparatively recently, because some of the conservation organisations involved are extremely well-known, because those organisations didn’t publicly acknowledge what was really happening, and because mainstream media’s response to the park’s establishment was so ecstatic and apparently unquestioning. No doubt “Sierra del Divisor, Peru” isn’t the first name that comes to mind when thinking of “bad conservation”, especially considering what’s going on elsewhere, like in Maasai territory in Tanzania currently, but that’s precisely why I want to draw attention to it.
The problem with the new park, established in November 2015, was that roughly 41% of it was overlapped by an oil concession, Lot 135, run by a company headquartered in Canada, Pacific Exploration and Production, previously called Pacific Rubiales Energy. That amounted to approximately 560,000 hectares, or 1.3 million acres, of the entire area. In the run-up to the park’s creation, the official administrative documents made it clear that Pacific would be able to operate and that was subsequently confirmed in the Management Plan approved the following year, with Peru’s environmental legislation effectively being cherry-picked to provide a facade of legality.
Indeed, Pacific had already explored for oil in that region a few years earlier, which ironically was when the process to establish the park made most progress again after having stalled in 2007. This made for some especially egregious timing. For example, just nine days after a government-led commission to lead that process was re-activated in July 2012, the national agency for “protected natural areas”, SERNANP, extended the period of Pacific’s deforestation license as part of the preliminary phase of its exploration, which would consist of super-intensive 2D seismic surveys. Later that year, two weeks after the commission’s fifth meeting and just a week before its sixth, María Elena Díaz, the commission’s president and director of what was then called the Sierra del Divisor Reserved Zone (SDDRZ), sent Pacific a form listing the names of the 72 people to whom she was giving permission to enter the region in order to conduct those surveys.
In other words, at the exact same time that the Peruvian state was purportedly trying to protect a huge swathe of the remote Amazon rainforest, it was permitting an oil company to enter and operate there.
“During the commission’s meetings there were various tensions among the indigenous organisations because it was SERNANP leading the commission, and yet it was also SERNANP which was giving the authorisations to enter and do the seismic,” Fatima García, working for a Peruvian NGO called the Fundación Peruana para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (“Pronaturaleza”) at the time, told me some years later.
García said that SERNANP was “seen as [playing] a double game.”
“On the one hand, they were leading the Commission, but on the other they were permitting the company to do its exploration,” she told me. “Tensions emerged because this - SERNANP’s double role - was perceived as bad.”
Permitting Pacific to operate wasn’t only so alarming because of the obvious threats that it posed to the park - the spectacular forests, the rivers and the dazzling range of flora and fauna - but the people living there too. Without a doubt the most vulnerable were indigenous peoples in “isolation” in what should have been the Yavari Tapiche Reserve, a long-hoped-for intangible area which had been proposed back in 2003 but was never established and then found itself partially overlapped by the SDDRZ in 2006, Lot 135 in 2007 and the park in 2015. In other words, by establishing the park and giving Pacific the proverbial green light, the Peruvian state was permitting an oil company to operate in an area that indigenous federations had been attempting to protect and make off-limits for more than a decade.
That this happened, potentially catastrophic as it was, shouldn’t actually have come as a big surprise. Despite persistent efforts by indigenous federations ORPIO and AIDESEP, the state had ignored the existence of the indigenous peoples in “isolation” in that part of the proposed park throughout almost the entire administrative process to protect the Sierra del Divisor. Although the 2016-approved Management Plan did at least acknowledge the “presumption” of their existence in the areas within the proposed Yavari Tapiche Reserve, as had the final report by the government-led commission in 2013, those were rare exceptions. For example, the 2015 law establishing the park, which was met with such euphoria by mainstream media and civil society, made no mention of them at all.
Similarly, Pacific’s operations also posed a considerable threat to the indigenous Matsés people, who had been speaking out vehemently against Lot 135 and issuing regular, condemnatory statements since at least 2009. Although both the park and oil concession excluded their 501,000 hectare “native community” to which they had legal title, they did include the southern extremes of what the Matsés considered to be their ancestral territory. In other words, by establishing the park and then saying yes to Pacific, the Peruvian state was permitting an oil company to operate in an area which the Matsés had been trying to keep them out of for years.
In order to justify oil operations in the part of the park overlapped by Lot 135, the entire north and north-east was zoned a “Special Use Zone” in the Management Plan. That was by far the biggest of all the park’s zones: roughly 28 times bigger than two other “Special Use Zones” combined, 33 times bigger than two “Recovery Zones”, almost twice the size of two “Wild Zones”, and 121,000 hectares, or 301,000 acres, bigger than two “Strict Protection Zones.” No wonder ORPIO filed a lawsuit against SERNANP, the Energy Ministry and Perupetro immediately after the Plan was approved, on the grounds that the rights of the indigenous peoples in “isolation” to life, physical integrity, health, a healthy environment, autonomy, equality, non-discrimination, cultural identity, giving consent, the natural resources in their territory and the possession of their ancestral territory were all being violated and/or threatened.
Did the conservation organisations involved publicly express any concern about Lot 135’s existence or the risks it posed, either several years before, in the run-up to or immediately after the park was established? There was silence among almost all the key Peruvian organisations and individuals - including Pronaturaleza and another NGO called the Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental (SPDA), which seems to have forgotten a report it wrote in 2009 which did highlight how the concession overlapped the proposed park - while the international organisations were no better. For example, the US-based Nature Conservancy - which back in the early 2000s had received a $2.4m grant from the US’s Moore Foundation to establish a park in the region and remained involved in a number of ways, including hosting meetings of the government-led commission, joining an informal civil society alliance in 2015, sitting on the Ad Hoc Commission responsible for preparing the Management Plan, and issuing a “fact sheet” calling itself “one of the main stakeholders” - said nothing about it.
“Shhhh, don’t mention the oil,” was how one Peruvian NGO employee 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.”
More obviously egregious was another US conservation organisation, Rainforest Trust, which had become involved with the park from 2012 by funding another Peruvian NGO, CEDIA, and issued a statement the day before it was established which quoted director Paul Salaman mentioning only “illegal logging and mining” as threats. A few months earlier another statement from Salaman had referred vaguely to “imminent threats from oil and mining development, road and pipeline construction, over-fishing and illegal logging”, but didn’t acknowledge that an oil concession would actually overlap 41% of the park or make clear that oil was a far bigger danger than anything else. The previous year, when asked “What threats does the area face?” in a Q and A for the Trust’s website, Salaman had talked exclusively about a proposed highway. In early 2017, when I raised this issue with him ahead of an article in The Guardian, Salaman made it clear that he had known about Lot 135 and claimed, before subsequently backtracking, that it would be “easy” to stop oil operations from going ahead. The Trust called the park’s establishment “the single largest conservation success” in its history.
“[The Trust was] very concerned about showing maps and especially satellite images [of the Sierra del Divisor region],” one employee, who worked there at the time and insisted on remaining anonymous, told me some years later. “I sometimes felt like the GIS person had the hardest job there. I think the Trust was so hesitant about sharing maps and satellite images because people could put the pieces together and see there were overlaps with concessions and other issues with the proposed park lands.”
Similarly conspicuous in its silence was the Andes Amazon Fund (AAF), yet another US conservation organisation which in mid-2015 appears to have effectively emerged out of the philanthropic, Virginia-based blue moon fund and pushed for the park in the last few months. Three statements issued in the immediate aftermath of its establishment all mentioned illegal logging, mining and coca cultivation but nothing else, while AAF’s Enrique Ortíz in particular failed to acknowledge Lot 135 time and time again in articles he wrote for Peruvian newspaper El Comercio as well as in statements attributed to him by other media. Logging, mining, coca. . . yes, all serious threats, but nothing ever about the oil. Arguably Ortíz's most spectacular fail of all was a Q and A, in El Comercio again, when he was specifically asked “Are illegal mining and logging the biggest threats to the Sierra del Divisor?”, to which he replied vaguely and somewhat bizarrely by mentioning human trafficking, but again saying nothing about Lot 135. Some years later Ortíz admitted to me via email that he had been “of course aware of the hydrocarbon concessions overlapping” and in an “ideal world we wish there were not any”, but “reality is different.” To its credit, AAF has subsequently supported the Yavari Tapiche Reserve’s establishment, which finally happened last year, and its ongoing protection.
Although ultimately Pacific abandoned Lot 135 in March 2017 before it could begin operating in the park, having foundered financially and been restructured and changing its name again to Frontera Energy Corporation, Peru’s Sierra del Divisor should act as yet another cautionary tale for any “30x30” supporters. Apparently so determined to establish a park, conservationists looked the other way as an oil company, with the Peruvian state’s permission, operated and then geared up to continue operating in one of the remotest parts of the Amazon rainforest inhabited by some of the most vulnerable indigenous peoples anywhere on the planet. That is not the kind of conservation that the vast majority of us want.