by Michelle Chen
– USA –
“Before, we could just drink straight from the river – we could drink from any stream. But it’s not like that now.”
A man from Antioquía, an indigenous community nestled in the Peruvian Amazon, told human-rights investigators about changes his lush habitat had undergone in recent years: “We knew something was wrong, because the animals and the fish had been large before the companies got here.” Today, he said, “when we gut the fish, the petroleum floods out.”
For over thirty years the once-pristine expanse hugging the Corrientes River has been known to the oil industry as Block 1AB. But the Achuar people are now defending it as their ancestral home, and they want the US company that first opened the area to oil extraction, Occidental Petroleum, to pay for the environmental aftermath.
Speaking at a news conference on the eve of Occidental’s recent shareholder meeting in Los Angeles, Andrés Sandi Mucushua, president of the Federación de Comunidades Nativas del Río Corrientes (Federation of Native Communities of the Corrientes River) said: “We’re worried that our people, our Achuar people, are dying from the contamination… Our worry today is, ‘What do we eat? How do we get healthy? And where do we go from here?”
Though the answers to those concerns remain elusive, the spot Sandi spoke from marked a fresh step in the Achuars’ quest for redress. With a cross-border lawsuit, they have taken their struggle from the Amazon to a California court.
Toxic legacy
The legal complaint, filed in California Superior Court last month, argues that Occidental’s systematic destruction began in the early 1970s, with the discovery of oil on Block 1AB, and continues today, though another company took over the site several years ago.
The Achuar say ailing bodies and a ruined habitat provide evidence of Oxy’s moral debt.
Tomás Maynas Carijano, an Achuar spiritual leader, is the only named plaintiff; the other 24, representing several communities in Corrientes River region, are anonymous. The case of one young boy, John Doe 12, is presented through family members, who recount his death in a spasm of sickness after drinking from the river. Other John and Jane Does have displayed alarmingly high levels of lead contamination in blood tests. All say that poisoned waters and oil-stained earth are crippling their traditional way of life, based on subsistence hunting, fishing and agriculture.
A middle-aged resident of the Pampa Hermosa community recently described to investigators how the presence of the oil industry has weighed on his health. “Before Oxy came,” he said, “we lived peacefully, happily; we took water from any river or stream.” Now, even the everyday is a burden: “I cannot live like I did before; I cannot run, and my whole body is painful… I never used to feel badly from sickness, but now I cannot work or hunt.”
Lily La Torre López, executive director of the Peru-based organization Racimos de Ungurahui, said that filing suit in a US court is the Achuars’ response to the Peruvian government and multinational oil interests’ “complete lack of sensitivity regarding the major bad legacy that has been left by the companies.”
Racimos and two other human-rights groups, EarthRights International and AmazonWatch, have documented the case against Oxy in a report focusing on five Corrientes River communities. Drawing on a two-week research mission and Peruvian government studies, the groups say the evidence of past and current environmental devastation, including toxic pollution and spills, leads straight back to Oxy’s former operations.
The company pumped out up to 115,000 barrels of oil per day at peak production, and according to one government estimate, directly impacted more than 24,000 acres in the area.
The report attributes much of the contamination to the discharge of “produced waters” – a soup of chemicals and salty water churned up in the extraction process. Samples from waterways near oil-production facilities showed high levels of contaminants associated with oil and produced waters. One toxin, boron, could cause organ and brain damage if ingested in large amounts. Another detected chemical, benzo(a)pyrene, is linked to cancer.
Researchers also observed distorted vegetation and desiccated land along the riverbanks suggesting that waste from oil extraction has inflicted lasting damage to the area’s ecological balance.
Human-rights advocates say the ecological crisis ties into a fraying social fabric – a common pattern seen in other embattled native communities: Pollution has forced families to relocate farm plots and travel long distances to gather food, and industrialization has drawn outside workers into the area, displacing Achuar settlements and compounding the strain on local resources.
According to EarthRights, even in the 1970s, Oxy’s practices on Block 1AB would have violated industry standards previously established under US authorities. Moreover, the group argues that while Oxy had the approval of the Peruvian government, it never gained informed consent from the affected communities – a violation of international conventions protecting indigenous rights. Oxy’s own “Code of Business Conduct” also requires that the company address potential impacts on indigenous communities.
To Occidental, the time that has elapsed since its departure from the area safely distances the company from any ongoing troubles. Oxy contends it officially shed all responsibilities related to Block 1AB’s environment when it sold its interests there in 2000, and that its successor, Argentina-based Pluspetrol, “assumed responsibility for all past and future operations.”
Under public pressure, Pluspetrol has promised some remedial measures, such as public-health programs and better processing of produced waters. But the Achuar say Pluspetrol has not yet followed through on key commitments. And they argue that Oxy seeded the infrastructure for environmental destruction when it set up operations and began scarring the landscape with wells about thirty years ago.
Occidental spokesperson Richard Kline would not comment on specific allegations in the Achuars’ claim while litigation is pending, but said the human-rights groups’ report “contains numerous inflammatory misstatements” and “doesn’t provide the basic information necessary to determine whether oil operations in the region caused, or even contributed to, the alleged environmental and health situation.”
EarthRights Legal Director Marco Simons said the lack of comprehensive environmental-health data indicates not the weakness of the Achuars’ case but the systemic inequalities underlying it.
“Because there has been such a low level of healthcare in the communities, that’s one of the reasons perhaps that Oxy continues to deny that it is responsible for any problems, and also a reason that it took so long for the Achuar to become aware of the extent of the problems that Oxy had caused,” he said. Over three decades on, he added, “we still don’t know the full extent of the harm that the Achuar have suffered.”
A woman from the community of José Olaya warned that future generations will reveal the depth of Oxy’s legacy. “All of these injuries that they have caused – they should pay us for this,” she told researchers. “Before Oxy came, everyone grew up healthy… now, with this contamination, you cannot bring up healthy children.”
Transnational resistance
The Achuar have laid before Oxy several demands, including monetary compensation, medical monitoring and environmental remediation. Yet their claim folds into a broader movement against human-rights threats posed by corporate globalization.
In Ecuador, a similar court battle is underway against another oil giant, ChevronTexaco. Indigenous groups argue that during its years of operation in the Amazon’s Oriente region, Texaco littered their communities with over 18 billion gallons of oil-production waste.
Both cases draw inspiration from an earlier lawsuit against Unocal, which charged the California-based oil corporation with human-rights and labor abuses related to a pipeline project in Burma. Burmese villagers, aided by EarthRights, pressed their case in both state and federal courts and yielded a landmark settlement with Unocal in 2004. The case helped lay the legal groundwork for holding US corporations accountable for actions abroad.
The Achuars’ case encapsulates the growing sophistication of native resistance to multinational business interests. The Federation of Native Communities of the Corrientes River, founded in 1991 as part of a network of indigenous organizations spanning the Amazon, has unified some thirty Achuar, Kichwa and Uranina communities to defend their territories. Last October, Achuar activists scored a victory when they blockaded production facilities on Block 1AB to demand restitution from Pluspetrol.
Simeon Tegel of Amazon Watch said grassroots organizing is a crucial counterweight to corporate influence in developing countries, where poverty and anemic regulatory infrastructures usher in exploitation.
“When a transnational corporation wants to enter the ancestral land of an indigenous community and begin drilling or any other kind of extractive activity, basically, there’s a cultural imbalance,” he said. “These communities don’t know how the law protects them, and also how the law fails to protect them, in these circumstances. Whereas these companies have lots of lawyers, and they know exactly what’s going on.”
Simons of EarthRights said that when Oxy initially penetrated their territory, “the Achuar were really unfamiliar with the modern industrial economy in any form, [but] by now, they are both well acquainted with the modern economy and prepared to defend their rights.”
In Los Angeles, thousands of miles from home, Sandi said his community hopes their challenge to Oxy resonates beyond Block 1AB: “Our message here is to the oil companies – that we no longer want them in our territories, that we no longer want multinational oil companies who are killing our children, who are destroying our forests.”
About the Author
Michelle Chen works and plays in New York City. Formerly on staff at the independent, now-defunct, news publication,The NewStandard, her other recent occupations include living in Shanghai as a Fulbright research fellow, freelance writing and dish-washing. Her work has also appeared in Extra!, Legal Affairs, City Limits and Alternet, along with her self-published zine, cain.
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