Foes rally against Peru oil drilling

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 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 problem is the (Peruvian) government seems to have two policies for the same issue,” said Lucia Ruiz, an executive of CIMA, an environmental group, said in a telephone interview. “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.

Bradenton Herald