When will a remote Amazon tribe learn source of its mercury epidemic?
Peru's government and French institute agreed to investigate years ago, but still no results
10 years ago this month an indigenous Nahua woman and her six month old baby from one of the remotest parts of the Peruvian Amazon were admitted to a private medical clinic in Peru’s capital Lima and diagnosed with “mercury intoxication.” Over the next 10 months national and regional government health authorities made a series of visits to the Amazon village where most of the Nahua live and, after taking urine samples from 41% of the population, concluded that 78% contained “high levels of mercury.”
That information should have been made public in a Health Ministry (MINSA) report about the Nahua, but publication was delayed, leading to accusations of a “cover-up” by national indigenous federation AIDESEP. A few years later in early 2018, after having obtained a copy of the as-yet-unpublished report, I wrote an article for The Guardian highlighting its main conclusions and recommendations as well as the various efforts AIDESEP and others had been making to draw attention to the Nahua’s plight.
Within hours of that article appearing, MINSA’s report was posted on its website. It was slightly different to the leaked version I had seen, with one particularly significant sentence being re-written. Whereas the version quoted in The Guardian explicitly stated that “the Peruvian state must assume the responsibility of conducting a serious and complete analysis of the mercury emissions”, the published report refused to point the finger directly at the government or charge it with any kind of “responsibility”, removed the word “must”, and said simply - and somewhat limply - that research into the mercury “shouldn’t be discarded” as a future possibility.
Despite that, a year and a half later, in September 2019, it was announced that the Ministry of Culture (MINCU), Ministry of Environment (MINAM) and the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) had agreed to write a report “identifying the sources of the mercury among the Nahua”, and in November that year several IRD researchers made their first - and to date only - visit to the Nahua’s village and a nearby town to introduce themselves and conduct some basic measurements. But since then, the Covid-19 pandemic has come and gone, as have 2022, 2023 and most of 2024, and no IRD team has returned. In May this year there was another announcement that another agreement had been signed to “continue the report determining the sources of the mercury among the Nahua”, but still nothing has happened.
In other words, exactly 10 years after the Peruvian state apparently first became aware of a mercury epidemic among one of the country’s smallest, most vulnerable indigenous populations, there is still nothing official about what is causing it - let alone anything that might mitigate those causes. This is despite the fact that mercury is one of the world’s “top 10 chemicals or groups of chemicals of major public health concern” and is a particular “threat to the development of the child in utero and early in life”, according to the World Health Organisation.
Indigenous leader and AIDESEP spokesperson Julio Cusurichi calls the delay “extremely serious.”
“Our Nahua brothers continue to suffer the grave consequences of mercury contaminating their bodies while the Peruvian state is failing to move forward with the study to identify the sources of the contamination, as well as failing to deal with the health crisis that is affecting them more generally,” Cusurichi tells me. “Even today, the Nahua don’t have access to adequate intercultural health care - another of the state’s unfulfilled obligations.”
Cusurichi says that gold-mining is unlikely to be the source of the contamination because there is no evidence of miners operating in the watersheds in which the Nahua’s territory is located. But he notes that “numerous reports” exist connecting the release of mercury to the extraction of natural gas, and that a 2017 report by researchers from the US-based Biodiversity Research Institute, as well as MINSA’s 2018 report on the Nahua and then another report that year on a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council, all acknowledged that the Camisea gas project could be responsible.
Run by a consortium of international companies including Pluspetrol, the US’s Hunt Oil and Spain’s Repsol, Camisea is a pioneering but highly controversial natural gas operation that includes a huge swathe of a reserve originally intended to protect the rights and land of the Nahua and other indigenous people living in “isolation” and “initial contact”, now called the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti and Others Reserve . The Nahua’s territory and village, Santa Rosa de Serjali, is in the north of that reserve.
“Given all this, it is possible that the study to identify the source of the contamination has been delayed for so many years, without any serious advances, because the state and the companies involved don’t want the truth to be revealed,” Cusurichi says.
According to the IRD’s Director of Research in Environmental Geochemistry, Laurence Maurice, the “reason for the delay is the release of funds by the government.”
“The project has been delayed several years due to the Covid pandemia and the successive changes of government and staff, budget restrictions etc,” Maurice tells me. “Since then, every year, we have tried to find a way to realize the second phase of the project - sampling, analytical measurements, data treatment and restitution - but in vain. We readjusted the work plan, actualizing the prices but we are still waiting for the release of funds from MINAM, in charge of the second phase. We have been waiting since 2021. We would like to go back to Santa Rosa in 2025, but we still don't know if it will be possible. I regret that this project has been delayed for years.”
Is there anything Maurice can say in advance about potential findings?
“As we haven’t been able to go back to the field to do the research we planned, we didn't “find” anything,” she says. “But I have some hypothesis which are not linked to mining or gas activities.”
The Nahua only came into sustained contact with “outsiders” in 1984, around the same time the Camisea gas deposits were discovered by Shell, which later pulled out from downstream operations before then buying back in to the upstream. Almost 50% of the Nahua population are estimated to have died in the months following contact, mainly from respiratory and infectious diseases. They subsequently recovered from that “demographic collapse”, as MINSA termed it, and now number several 100 people, but for years they have suffered from all kinds of health problems: chronic malnutrition, anaemia, severe diarrhoea, tuberculosis and hepatitis B as well as the mercury.
“Almost everyone” is contaminated, a Nahua man told me anonymously for The Guardian article six years ago.
The Nahua deserve to know why that is - as soon as possible.
MINAM refused to reply to my questions, saying MINCU is the Ministry responsible, but MINCU didn’t respond to requests for comment either.