More Information
- Camisea Gas Project
- Letter from the Ombudsman office to INDEPA (Spanish)
- AIDESEP statement (Spanish)
- National Human Rights Coordinator statement (Spanish)
Lima, Peru – Peru’s Ministry of Culture has proposed new regulations that permit oil drilling and exploration inside reserved areas created to protect some of the planet’s last “uncontacted tribes” – indigenous peoples who have chosen to avoid contact with the outside world. The proposal comes as Argentine oil company Pluspetrol begins expansion of the Camisea Gas Project inside the “Kugapakori Nahua Nanti Reserve for Isolated and Recently Contacted Peoples.”
The new “Regulations for the Supervision of Exploratory and Extractive Activities Inside Indigenous and Territorial State Reserves,” prepared by the National Institute for the Development of Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian Peoples (INDEPA), part of the Ministry of Culture, have been heavily criticized by indigenous organizations and human rights groups who say oil and gas exploration puts the lives of isolated peoples at risk and undermines their basic right to survival.
“Our autonomous brothers depend on their territory for subsistence and are extremely vulnerable to contact with outsiders due to their lack of resistance to common and otherwise easily treatable diseases,” said the national indigenous organization, AIDESEP, in a statement. “Despite being the institutions responsible for developing national policies to promote, defend and affirm indigenous rights neither INDEPA nor the Ministry of Culture have taken any action to protect these peoples. On the contrary they are promoting these new regulations.”
The Ministry of Culture recently came under heavy fire from Peru’s Ombudsman Office in a public letter that criticized the Ministry for failing to fulfill Peru’s obligations under international law to protect the rights of isolated indigenous peoples and failing to stop illegal logging and oil drilling inside isolated peoples reserves.
Meanwhile Argentine oil company Pluspetrol has started preliminary field studies in the Kugapakori Nahua Nanti Reserve for Isolated and Recently Contacted Peoples in a remote area known to be inhabited by people with virtually no contact with the outside world. These studies are part of plans to drill new wells to expand the Camisea Gas Project inside the isolated peoples reserve, despite any further expansion being expressly prohibited by supreme decree Nº 028-2003-AG in 2003.
“Peru is opening up the most remote parts of the Amazon to oil drilling with no regard for the rights and lives of some of the most vulnerable people on the planet,” said Gregor MacLennan, Peru Program Coordinator at Amazon Watch. “Pluspetrol’s expansion of the Camisea Gas Project is not only illegal but threatens the very survival of isolated peoples living inside the Reserve.”
After Shell conducted preliminary exploration in the area that is now the Reserve, over half of the Nahua people, living just to the north of the Camisea Gas Project, were wiped out by epidemics following “first contact” in 1984. Today, Pluspetrol plans to reopen these same wells. Interviews with recently contacted peoples have revealed the trauma and forced displacement suffered by isolated peoples when their territory is invaded by seismic crews and dozens of helicopter flights, and how introduced epidemics, unnoticed, can silently wipe out entire families.
Peruvian and international indigenous and human rights organizations, including Amazon Watch, have recently written letters of concern to Pluspetrol asking the company to cease operations immediately. In response, Pluspetrol have avoided responses to specific questions but simply repeat that they are complying with INDEPA’s protocols and that they have a contingency plan “that details how to act in the face of an eventual encounter with an isolated person.”
