US Ambassador to Peru’s palm oil remarks are cause for embarrassment and shame
Recent visit to a plantation in the Amazon ignored the deforestation and indigenous rights scandal
Sometimes high-level diplomats really do and say the most ridiculous things. The day after going to the Peruvian Amazon’s second biggest city, Pucallpa, last month to sign yet another declaration committing to stopping deforestation and recognising the role that indigenous peoples play in doing so, the US Ambassador to Peru visited an oil palm plantation that is one of the most egregious, notorious cases of illegal deforestation and indigenous rights violations anywhere across Peru’s 78 million hectares of rainforest.
Not only that, but the Ambassador, Lisa Kenna, tweeted about it too, thereby actively promoting the plantation.
“Did you know that the biggest company in Ucayali is American?” Kenna asked. “Ochosur is the leading employer in the region, with sustainable agricultural practices avoiding deforestation. I’m proud of these ties between the USA and Peru that benefit both of our populations.”
Oh dear. The first time I heard about this plantation in any detail was in mid-to-late 2016, sitting on the verandah of a small Pucallpa-based NGO, Alianza Arkana (AA). AA had been trying to support the indigenous Shipibo community most impacted, Santa Clara de Uchunya, but there had been so much kickback they had decided to withdraw, given that it could compromise other projects. That kickback apparently included thefts from their Pucallpa office - including a camera and recordings immediately after AA had returned from Santa Clara - and volunteers fleeing the community after a group of armed, masked men had turned up, and being chased away from the plantation by 100s of workers after filming the fact that the company was ignoring orders from the Ministry of Agriculture and Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) to suspend operations. It also included a ludicrous, frankly laughable video montage shown on a regional TV station which, through plenty of slow motion and crashing music, tried to depict AA personnel as if they were among the most menacing individuals imaginable.
The key details of this case are already so well-known, the transgressions so blatant: the more than 200 “certificates of possession” converted to land title in 2008 and 2009, the sale of those certificates to a company named Plantaciones de Pucallpa (PDP) over just a few days, and then the illegal deforestation of 1000s of hectares of mostly primary forest - initially estimated at over 5000, now almost 7000 - between 2012 and 2015. Since then, the Shipibos and their allies such as indigenous federations FECONAU, ORAU and AIDESEP, as well as NGOs like the Instituto de Defensa Legal and Forest Peoples Programme (FPP), have spent years campaigning to reclaim their territories, seek justice, and stop further deforestation.
These efforts have included a lawsuit which was ultimately sent up to Peru’s highest court and declared inadmissible, appeals to the UN and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and multiple complaints to the RSPO, which subsequently condemned PDP, although by that time the company had withdrawn from it. More recently, last December, a complaint was made through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) against agricultural commodities trader Louis Dreyfus, which has apparently bought palm oil from the plantation through its post-2016 owner, the Ocho Sur Group, and then in January this year FECONAU, IDL and another Peruvian NGO, Kené, filed a lawsuit alleging Ocho Sur P was continuing to operate “despite having none of the required forestry and environmental authorizations.” No doubt about it, “Uchunya”, as it is sometimes known for short, has become one of the most emblematic indigenous rights struggles in Peru.
Fundamental to the conflict is a Peruvian state so staggeringly weak that it is hard to comprehend - not only illustrated by its failure going back more than a decade to title the full extent of Santa Clara’s land, but by the fact that over the years, despite all the Shipibos’ and others’ activism, despite all the media coverage, it has been unable to enforce its own suspension orders and the deforestation has continued. Between 2017 and 2020 there was a second spike, following the first in 2012-2015, and it now looks like 1000s more hectares have been cleared than has ever been previously reported.
“All evidence to date clarifies that the State [instead of titling Santa Clara’s land] took repeated decisions to erode the Community’s land rights by a series of titling and licensing activities culminating in a large scale palm oil production that not only deprived the Santa Clara Native Community of their right to own, use and control their lands, resources and territories, but prejudiced and continues to threaten their very physical and cultural survival, and hence other human rights,” states an amicus curiae sent to Peru’s Constitutional Court in 2018 by FPP and the US-based NGO Global Justice Centre.
No surprise, then, that Kenna’s remarks have met with such outrage from certain quarters in Peru. FECONAU, AIDESEP and ORAU accused the Ambassador of “being deceived via colonial-style sightseeing visits” and asked if the US wanted to “make a joke out of forestry and environmental norms”, while those same three federations, together with Santa Clara and 16 other organisations, issued a statement calling her tweet “propaganda for the controversial palm oil company Ocho Sur P.” PDP’s lands were transferred to Ocho Sur in 2016, according to that statement, but journalists from Peruvian media outlet Convoca have since “made public the links between the two companies” - mainly through two US-based investment firms Anholt Services and Amerra Capital Management.
“It is worth noting that the Comptroller General’s Office, the Financial Intelligence Unit, the Public Prosecutor’s Office and other specialized prosecutors in Peru are only some of the national authorities that have investigated the irregularities committed by this firm,” ran that statement from Santa Clara et al. “The InterAmerican Commission for Human Rights is also evaluating a petition presented by the community asking for its lands, which they claim were violently taken, to be given back.”
No surprise, either, that Ocho Sur has issued its own counter-response, accusing “some NGOs and related groups such as FECONAU and AIDESEP as well as the Convoca web portal” of circulating “biased and/or false information”, and claiming that Santa Clara itself “has publicly refuted these organizations.” “We do not operate on ancestral lands of any native community”, the company claimed, and “we operate in strict compliance with Peruvian environmental regulations.”
At a press conference in Pucallpa two days ago Santa Clara’s president Carlos Hoyos Soria said Ocho Sur has been lying, although he acknowledged that the community has become “very divided” over the company. He also said that he is living in a state of permanent threat and intimidation.
“The most important thing for us is our land,” Hoyos Soria told the conference. “We’ll keep on fighting for as long as I’m alive. If we have to pay for this with our lives, we’ll do so.”
Somehow Ambassador Kenna appears to have missed the human rights struggle around Ocho Sur's palm oil venture, no matter how many people it employs or what its ties to the US are. No sign so far, as has been requested, that either she or the US government will apologise.