On a muggy morning in mid-August, a dozen leaders from four Indigenous communities in Peru’s lower Marañón River Valley crowded into the second-floor courtroom in the small Amazonian city of Nauta. Ten years after a corroded, state-owned pipeline burst, spilling several thousand barrels of oil, the fishing on which they depended for food and livelihoods has not recovered, and court-ordered compensation for damages has not materialized.

The spill in the mostly Kukama Indigenous village of Cuninico, on the Marañón River in Peru’s northeastern Loreto region, spawned lawsuits that included demands for compensation and health care. But the government response has been slow and haphazard. The August hearing marked an effort to force Petroperú, the state-owned pipeline operator, to comply with a court order to calculate compensation for damages.

At the hearing, Petroperú maintained that the spilled oil had been contained and cleaned up quickly. The company argued that there was thus no damage to compensate, although photos and video from the time show oil in the Cuninico River, which is crossed by the pipeline route and flows into the Marañón, a major tributary of the Amazon River.

Research commissioned by the development agency Oxfam and the Lima-based nonprofit Legal Defense Institute, which has handled the Cuninico lawsuits, estimates that lost fishing income alone had totaled more than 18 million soles (US$4.86 million) by 2021 and will exceed 33 million soles (US$8.9 million) by 2029. A ruling from the judge who presided at the hearing is pending.

The Cuninico spill was one of 139 recorded along the pipeline between 1997 and May 2023, according to a report issued in August by the National Human Rights Coordinating Committee (CNDH), a grouping of Peruvian human rights nonprofits. During that time, there were 1,462 emergencies, mainly spills, in oil and gas fields in the country, according to the report, titled “Shadows of Hydrocarbons.” The report analyzes data from two government agencies responsible for overseeing oil and gas operations — the Environmental Evaluation and Monitoring Agency (Oefa) and the Supervisory Agency for Energy and Mining (Osinergmin).

According to data from the two agencies, most of the spills and most of the polluted sites in inactive oil or gas blocks are concentrated in Loreto, where the two oldest and largest Amazonian oilfields are located, and Piura, on the north coast, where production began in the 19th century. The Loreto blocks overlap dozens of Indigenous communities, while spills on the coast affect small-scale fishers who operate within a few miles of the shore.

More than half the spills—831—occurred in the Amazon basin, 609 on the Pacific coast and 22 in the highlands. While there are no active oil fields in the Andes, the Petroperú pipeline crosses the mountains. The number of reported spills has increased in recent years, from an annual average of 41 from 1997 to 2019 to an average of 146 a year from 2020 to 2023. The increase may be partly due to greater vigilance by Indigenous monitors trained by nonprofit groups and increased telephone and internet coverage, which makes reporting easier.

Nearly half the spills recorded were due to operational problems, and another 25% to corrosion, according to Oefa and Osinergmin. Slightly more than 4% were attributed to natural causes, such as shifting soil, and the remaining 23% to vandalism. The number of spills caused by corrosion has been increasing over the past decade, according to the report. Much of Peru’s pipeline infrastructure is over 40 years old.

Many of the spills have never been cleaned up, so the contamination—and communities’ exposure to pollutants—continues. The report’s authors note that if the upward trend in the number of spills per year continues, the total registered since 1997 could exceed 2,500 by the end of this decade. Peru’s regulatory agencies classify polluted areas differently, depending on whether the oil field is still operating. Contaminated sites in fields that are no longer operating are referred to as pasivos, or liabilities, and are categorized as being of high, medium or low risk to health and the environment.

Nationwide, the Ministry of Energy and Mines has registered 3,256 pasivos, of which 67 are classified as being of high risk to health and 46 of high risk to the environment. The majority, nearly 2,000, are considered to be of moderate risk to health and the environment. Nearly two-thirds of all pasivos are located in two contiguous blocks on the coast, in the Piura region, near La Brea, which was one of the world’s first commercial oilfields.

The CNDH report notes that enforcement of both closure plans for abandoning oil operations and remediation of polluted sites are deficient. It calls for greater transparency of data, community participation in monitoring and regulatory actions, and stronger efforts to prevent spills, as well as effective closure measures when operations end and remediation of damage.

“The hydrocarbon industry is leaving us greater cumulative environmental degradation and, with it, the imposition of an economic social and environmental debt that is unpayable for the private and public sectors,” the authors conclude.

For Giuliana Becerra, Peru’s former vice minister of environmental management and now director of the School of Environmental Engineering at San Marcos National University in Lima, the Shadows of Hydrocarbons report provides a much-needed analysis of data about spills and polluted sites, and about the shortcomings of Peru’s system of environmental oversight. Though the country has improved environmental- and closure-planning requirements, she says, the ongoing problems indicate a need for a greater emphasis on environmental certification and oversight.

But ultimately, Becerra says, Peru must transition away from oil and gas to other forms of energy.

“We should begin by setting priorities and a path toward the future” that includes the Indigenous communities that have been so strongly affected by oil operations, she argues. “Indigenous people can have an important role” in the country’s energy transition, she adds. “They not only are affected by climate change, but they also play a fundamental role in conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity.”

The complaints of the four Marañón communities and the country’s broader record of spills do not appear to have altered Peru’s mindset and policies when it comes to energy development. Nor are other fossil-fuel producing countries in the region in a hurry to change course.

To be sure, there are exceptions. In Colombia, for instance, President Gustavo Petro’s administration has decided to stop awarding new oil and gas exploration contracts and to boost taxes on producers. And nations are prioritizing biodiversity and climate protection over fossil-fuel extraction for specific, place-based reasons, too.

Such was the case, for instance, when Ecuadorians last year voted to dismantle a productive oilfield in the Amazon region largely because it overlaps with Yasuní National Park, a prized reserve and, scientist say, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. The build-down has been slow to start, leading to accusations of foot-dragging, but the government has pledged to carry it out and recently filed a timeline for the work with the country’s Constitutional Court. (See "A year after historic vote, timing of oilfield closure is still unclear" —EcoAméricas, August 2024.)

But from Mexico to Brazil and Argentina, hydrocarbon exploration and development is proceeding apace. (See related article—this issue.) And in Peru, policies like Petro’s do not look likely anytime soon. “There’s still that idea that exploiting oil and gas is going to save the country,” says Peruvian anthropologist Beatriz Huertas, who advises Indigenous organizations on the protection of isolated groups.

In Peru, the pursuit of that idea will likely mean continuing social conflict and concern about impacts on the environment and isolated Indigenous peoples. The Anglo-French oil company Perenco informed the government in August that it is giving up two oil concessions in the country’s northern Amazon region that overlap a reserve set aside to protect semi-nomadic Indigenous people who shun contact with the outside world. Nevertheless, the government announced it was talking with two other companies about taking over the blocks.

Perenco joins some half-dozen companies that have held rights to blocks 67 and 39 in the past three decades, and then abandoned them. The reasons for the departures have included social conflicts, concerns about impacts on isolated groups, the lack of a spur-line connecting the blocks to the pipeline to the Pacific coast, and uncertainty about the proposed reserve.

Concessions overlap reserves

In the Peruvian Amazon, current and proposed oil and gas blocks overlap about 1.6 million hectares (6,000 sq. miles) of reserves set aside to protect isolated groups, according to a new analysis by the California-based environmental group Earth Insight. Peru’s Ministry of Culture reports the existence of 25 isolated groups in six regions of the country. Their populations total about 7,000 people, with roughly 4,900 living in isolation and about 2,100 in “initial contact,” the term given to formerly isolated groups that begin to maintain sustained contact with outsiders, the ministry says.

Eight reserves totaling some 4.5 million hectares (17,000 sq. miles) have been created to protect such groups, and five are pending, including the Napo-Tigre reserve, where oil blocks 39 and 67 are located. That reserve, originally requested in 2003, has been approved and is awaiting determination of its final boundaries. Government energy agencies, businesspeople in the northeastern Loreto region and some local and regional government agencies have opposed the reserve, even though representatives of some of those groups participated in the multi-agency commission that green-lighted it.

Several Indigenous communities in or near the oil concessions have also opposed the reserve, a stance that Huertas says reflects the ambiguous relationship Indigenous communities in Loreto have with oil companies that have polluted forests and rivers, while providing some of the very few job options in the region. (See "Cleanup a challenge in low-lying Peruvian oilfield" —EcoAméricas, September 2022.)

Nevertheless, Indigenous organizations continue to press for official confirmation of the proposed reserves as protected lands. Some reserves would form a corridor on the Brazilian border near Brazil’s Javari Valley Indigenous Territory, which anthropologists say is home to the largest concentration of isolated people in the world. (See "Binational pitch for nature, semi-nomads" —EcoAméricas, January 2022.)

Pending proposals

The two most recently proposed reserves are on Peru’s border with Colombia, along the Atacuari and Pupuña watersheds. These were proposed in 2020 and 2021, reflecting new information that continues to emerge about the presence of isolated groups, Huertas says.

But even as new reserves are proposed, existing lands set aside for isolated peoples are by no means immune to threat. Though it was shelved in mid-2023, for instance, a bill in the Peruvian Congress would have undermined the system of protected reserves for isolated peoples.

Meanwhile, legal oil and gas operations and timber concessions pose a risk of accidental encounters between workers and isolated people, contact that could result in violence or in the transmission of diseases to which isolated groups have no resistance. Additional danger comes from illegal logging, mining and drug running. (See "Brazil murders highlight Javari region lawlessness" —EcoAméricas, June 2022.)

On Aug. 29, two loggers were killed and another injured by arrows shot by members of the Mashco-Piro semi-nomadic group in a timber concession in the southeastern Madre de Dios region. The Forest Stewardship Council issued an eight-month suspension of its timber certification in the concession, held by Maderera Canales Tahuamanu, beginning Sept. 11.

The Native Federation of the Madre de Dios River and Tributaries (Fenamad), which fought for creation of the reserve and has warned of the risk of violent encounters, has called the events a consequence of the government’s decision to allow extractive activities in territories of isolated Indigenous people.

Violent encounters have occurred in other reserves, as well, Huertas says, but outcomes are uncertain, because while deaths or injuries to outsiders are reported, there is virtually no information about whether members of the isolated group have been injured or killed.