Indigenous Amazonians score rare victory against oil company

It was by any measure a remarkable protest. More than 800 Achuar tribespeople from the borders of Peru and Ecuador, headed by their traditional leaders with their red and yellow feathered headdresses, arrived last month by the boatload in the twilight hours at four oil wells in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest.

Their faces streaked with paint and with some of them carrying hunting shotguns and ceremonial spears, they formed a peaceful blockade of Peru’s largest oil facility. They stayed for nearly two weeks, shutting down power to most of the region’s oil production, and its road, airport and river access.
It was a desperate attempt by the Achuar to get the Peruvian government to take notice of their plight. For decades they had been saying that their land had been heavily polluted and their waters poisoned by oil exploration, but they had been consistently ignored.

The plan worked. The loss of millions of dollars in revenue and around 40,000 barrels of oil per day forced the government and Pluspetrol — Peru’s largest oil and gas operator — to concede to most of the Achuar’s demands, including reinjecting all the contaminated waste water back into the ground within two years, and building a new hospital with enough money to run a health service for 10 years.

Taipei Times