Amazon Watch Media and Communications Manager Jessica Yurasek recently accompanied a delegation to the Marañon region of Peru, where over the last eight months, five oil spills have ravaged the region. This is what she found.
We had already missed our flight and had to catch another, and now the ATM machine in Iquitos has eaten my card. Maybe this is a sign that we’re in for a good adventure. Or maybe it’s a foreshadowing of what’s to come. Either way, there’s no time for contemplation; we have a boat to catch from Nauta, headed up the Marañon River deep into the jungle.
The purpose of our expedition is to visit two recent oil spill sites and document the devastation. Our team consists of a journalist, two documentary filmmakers, several environmental campaigners from two NGOs, plus our leader Anders, an indigenous, environmental monitor who is committed to defending the rainforest by patrolling this region for unreported oil spills.
Boating upriver for hours is like a meditation, steady and slow. The Marañon is wide, murky brown, filled with floating debris and sometimes pink river dolphins. It flows never-ending into the distance. Skies are clear and blue, rain holding off for now. This is the easy part of the journey.
Hours later, some 130 miles upriver, we stop for the night in Saramuro, a remote refinery village run by the state-owned oil company Petroperù. It is illuminated with electricity run by generators, which seems out of place so far in the jungle.
I ask Ander, the environmental monitor, why he does his work. His lashes are long and dark and although he’s seen much devastation, his demeanor is calm. He explains that the reason he patrols the rainforest for illegal, unreported environmental violations such as oil spills is for his family. He talks about growing up on the river and how he cannot bear to see it contaminated from industrial development.
He tells me the same story I’ve heard dozens of times – because freedom to life is a basic human right and it must be defended.
For thousands of years the rainforest provided indigenous peoples with all they needed for subsistence and income. It gave them everything – fresh food, water, life. Now, after decades of drilling, many of these territories are ravaged by oil contamination.
More and more, people who lived in sustainable balance with the forest are being forced into a life of poverty, another unintended consequence of the oil boom.
The two recent spills we will visit, both of which occurred in the last six months, have completely disrupted the Kukama people’s way of life. Fish have died and the river is toxic. They know they can’t survive this way, but for now they must. These communities are emblematic of dozens more in the Amazon basin.
About 845 kilometers of decaying Petroperú pipeline stretch across the Northern Peruvian Amazon, crisscrossing expanses of untamed forest. In 2014, there were five separate breaks in this pipeline alone. The first spill we visit gushed an estimated 6,000 barrels of crude into the Cuninico tributary six months ago. As far as Petroperù is concerned, this spill is officially remediated. But indigenous locals report otherwise.
The water is still contaminated, the fish are dead, the community knows that the problem has not been solved.
The next morning we wake at dawn to continue upriver. When we finally arrive at the spill site, four Petroperù security guys materialize almost immediately from the jungle to greet us and question why we are here. In our defense, the Kukama community leader who has joined as our guide explains that this is his community’s land and that he is free to take us to see the spill. The security guys are obviously worried.
Let me tell you something about what it feels like to see an oil spill disaster in the middle of the remote jungle: it is so horrific it hurts.
To be someplace this remote and to see such destruction is absolutely paralyzing. The entire thing is just so obviously wrong.
In order to view the extent of the destruction, we take to the water, which is dark and black with a sheen. Cesar, a strong, 60-something Kukama leader paddles us down a two-kilometer stretch of the spill in a dugout canoe. At some point, I realize that we are casually taking on water. Luckily there is half of a plastic two-liter soda bottle meant to solve this problem. As I bail, we stop to look at brown, mucky clumps of oil. Swimming in this toxic waste pit would be a nightmare.
We continue to canoe several kilometers along the segment of pipe that burst. We are basically floating on oil. The degrading 40-year old pipeline sits beneath us, a few meters underwater. We can’t see it, but we see a series of giant wooden structures with cranes, behemoths meant to lift the pipeline into position.
This place feels like the beginnings of a wasteland.
By now I have a headache. I ignore it, but later realize that we all have headaches. We’ve been floating on a massive pool of crude and chemicals after all. Some of the filmmakers on our team are familiar with hydrocarbon headaches given that they made a few films about fracking, but for me this is a first. Physically I feel terrible, and am relieved when it’s time to turn back.
On the slow ride out, I wonder what Cesar and his community will do. I think about how easy I have it back home in the States because I have the choice to retreat to someplace clean and safe.
These people have lost that choice.
When an oil company remediates a spill out here in the remote jungle, they hire dozens of local indigenous people to do the dirty work (remember, these are the same people who have just been poisoned by an oil spill). A worker’s main task is to make the spill invisible rather than actually clean it up.
Buckets of crude are hauled by hand and dumped into large, temporary plastic pools, which are then presumably shipped out of the area. Toxic chemicals that bond to the oil – dispersants – are sprayed on top of the water causing the whole mess to sink to the bottom. To be clear, dispersants do not reduce the amount of oil in the environment, they simply make it visually disappear. This combination chemical cocktail leaves the rainforest even more toxic than before.
Using dispersants and oil booms are standard “remediation” procedures for spills, even in modern times. Both of these practices are essentially useless.
Back in Cuninico, the community clusters around us staring as we gringos disembark from our boat with cameras. It is slightly embarrassing. I feel like we are putting on a silly little show with all our gear, which is such a contrast to where we have arrived. But the locals are eager to talk about the disaster.
One by one we interview community members on camera. Their stories are the same. They are worried and upset about the oil contamination. They are uncertain about their future. Petroperù has been delivering rations of canned tuna, rice, and bottled water for the past six months since the fish have died and people began getting sick from the river water. But since the spill is now “remediated,” deliveries have stopped. It just so happens that yesterday was the last shipment. The community, made up of some 130 families, doesn’t know what will happen next.
One man who was hired by the oil company to do cleanup shows us a Powerade bottle filled with a yellow, slightly milky substance. We open it. It smells like toxic chemical with a hint of lemon. This is the solvent Petroperù distributed to the workers in order to clean crude oil off their skin after a day’s work. It is dispersant.
Dispersant is known to cause longterm health problems such as reproductive damage (genetic mutations), endocrine disruption, and cancer. Again I am shocked, but I guess I shouldn’t be. I already know that the men weren’t given proper protective suits for their work. Many wore just rubber boots and gloves. I wonder if they understand the risk.
Now that some of them are sick, I wonder if they regret doing the work. I wonder what the executives who work at the oil company think. I wonder if they are aware of the chemical exposure they put these people through. I wonder if they would treat their own family members with such negligence. I wonder why we can’t all just be truthful about the reality of this kind of stuff. It is a basic human right.
The Kukama people want their stories told, they want others to know the truth of their reality so that something changes. They did not ask to live this way – to have their homes destroyed, to have their livelihoods and futures stolen from them. Oil did this. It continues to do this.
The wind is strong now and rain is coming. We end our interviews and climb back onto our boat. We too, leave the community filled with uncertainty, knowing all too well the wake of destruction oil companies leave behind them.
In Pictures: Journeying to the Black Heart of Oil Destruction
UPDATE! On this Amazon Watch delegation was also Fusion journalist Manuel Rueda. Fusion launched his powerful feature today: Indigenous groups fight back against oil industry after pipeline spills poison the Amazon
