Peru’s state-owned petroleum company, Perupetro, attended a giant trade show in Houston last week in hopes of attracting well-heeled foreign oil companies to buy prospecting rights in the country’s vast, still largely unexplored interior.
But the proposed sale has set off an avalanche of protest that literally followed Perupetro right into Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center, site of the NAPE Expo.
Among the visitors to the company’s booth were leaders of remote Peruvian Indian groups, wearing traditional tribal regalia and adamantly opposed to oil exploration in their lands. They were joined by Peruvian environmentalists who fear oil operations will wreak destruction in Peru’s plentiful pristine wilderness areas.
The combination of environmental and human-rights concerns is becoming an increasingly potent one, making some oil companies think twice about operating in Third World nations like Peru.
“This is historic in Peru, for indigenous people and conservation organizations to work together like this to oppose the government in an undertaking like this,” said Field Museum biologist Debra Moskovits.
Three years ago, Moskovits and her colleagues at the Field were the subject of a Tribune series on their successful efforts with a group of Peruvian environmentalists to create Cordillera Azul, a new national park in Peru the size of Connecticut.
The victory was a monumental one in environmental circles. Two weeks ago, Moskovits, the Field and another alliance of Peruvian environmentalists proposed creating another national park out of a 5,714-square-mile rain forest along Peru’s border with Brazil, called Sierra del Divisor.
Roughly 1,000 square miles of Sierra del Divisor was set aside in 1998 as an “uncontacted” reserve for a small band of indigenous nomads living there, hiding from contact with the outside world.
The rest of the region enjoyed a “protected” biological status from the government, which made the conservationists think it would be easy to increase its protective status to the national park level.
They were stunned, Moskovits said, to discover instead that Peru’s Ministry of Energy and Mines, through Perupetro, was about to open bids for oil exploration and drilling rights in Sierra del Divisor at the Houston meeting.
18 blocks planned for auction
In fact, it was just one of 18 huge blocks of Peruvian land in the auction plan. Eleven of the 18 blocks are in Peru’s environmentally sensitive Amazon rain forest frontiers, giving oil companies access to 70 percent of Peru’s vast Amazon basin.
Of the 11 Amazonian blocks, the government in 10 of them had designated protected status to portions or all of their territory, shielding rare flora and fauna and indigenous people from contact with commercial exploitation.
“The problem is the [Peruvian] government seems to have two policies for the same issue,” said Lucia Ruiz, an executive of CIMA, an environmental group. “We have one ministry trying to protect the environment, then the Ministry of Energy and Mining promoting investment and mineral exploitation in already protected areas.”
In the past, because of the big infusions of foreign capital that oil and mining interests bring in, oil and mining usually won the battles. In recent years, that has begun to change.
“There is a growing politicization of these sorts of issues that makes oil companies uneasy,” said John Parry, a senior analyst for John S. Herold Inc., an energy investment and research consulting firm.
He pointed to Venezuela, Bolivia and Russia as places that have rewritten agreements with oil companies to give their countries far more advantageous terms.
When the political future seems too uncertain, big global companies sometimes shut down operations and leave, he said, as Occidental Petroleum and Shell Oil recently left Peru.
When word got out about the Perupetro auction of new oil concessions two weeks ago, Peruvian and international environmental, conservation and human-rights groups quickly came together to protest.
A coalition of groups signed a formal protest to the government. But the big push was to make potential bidders for the oil concessions aware that they would face formidable political and social opposition inside Peru and internationally.
In Houston, the San Francisco-based environmental and human-rights group Amazon Watch helped coordinate the Peruvian delegations of protesters who flew in for the NAPE Expo.
Leila Salazar, an Amazon Watch organizer, said confronting the oil companies at an international event such as NAPE Expo was a first for the Peruvians.
“The indigenous leaders, in their traditional dress, crowns and necklaces, really stood out in a meeting like this,” she said.
The Indian representatives went to Perupetro’s display booth on Friday. Salazar said that through interpreters they pointed out to company officials and interested bidders that Perupetro’s own maps of available concession areas failed to show that many of those areas are off-limits to exploration.
They and their environmentalist colleagues met Perupetro’s chairman, Daniel Saba De Andrea, who Salazar said promised to review their concerns. Perupetro did not respond to several requests from the Tribune to comment for this story.
`Dangerous’ move, critic says
The Perupetro Web site indicates it will grant concessions to winning bidders in July. If they come to pass, said Moskovits, they likely will spell doom to the flora, fauna and people in the concession areas.
“The oil concessions are really dangerous,” she said.
Oil operations have made wastelands out of large parts of the Amazon basin in the last 50 years, she said, leaving behind destroyed environments while creating no permanent wealth for locals.
“It has been deadly for uncontacted people and indigenous people who have no immunity when they are exposed to Western diseases brought by oil workers, and who lose all of their traditional hunting and fishing grounds,” she said.
Moskovits said she is particularly concerned about the Sierra del Divisor region where Field Museum and Peruvian scientists did a biological inventory in August 2005.
“It’s an area of terrific scientific and cultural value, of the highest conservation priority imaginable,” she said.
“These are not big, important oil reserves that they find in these places, but we destroy everything in these environments to get at it. How much do we actually get for the price of destroying something forever?”
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wmullen@tribune.com
