As dawn began to break in the Peruvian Amazon on March 5, an oil slick spread across the Puinahua River in the district of the same name, engulfing clumps of palms and reeds in a thick, black layer as it streamed down the current. The sight of the spill prompted a desperate rush among the riverside Manco Cápac community to prevent the oil from contaminating the river they depend on for their survival.
“I woke up to chaos,” Kara Fikrig, a biologist with Cornell University who studies dengue in the region, told Mongabay. “People were out on their canoes, using their bare hands, using buckets to scoop up the oil. They had buckets full of this pure-looking crude petroleum oil.”
The oil spill happened near Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, a protected area of rainforest, 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the PetroTal S.A. oil base in Lot 95 in Bretaña. Two barges belonging to Trans Fluvial Rey E.I.R.L. (known in the area as Transportes Henry or Grupo Henry) had collided while docking, causing the tanker carrying crude oil to leak.
The accident happened at around 5 a.m.; by 10 in the morning, there was a “high concentration” of oil streaming down the river, a tributary of the Amazon, an hour away from the spill site, Fikrig said. “It makes me believe it was quite a bit of that tanker had spilled.”
A representative for Trans Fluvial Rey, Carmen Raquel Nuñez Rengifo, told Mongabay that Grupo Henry was taking responsibility for the incident, including providing compensation to impacted communities. To date, it’s unclear what that final sum is.
The Manco Cápac community, made up of 582 Indigenous Kukama Kukamiria people, is one of the worst impacted by the spill, although several other communities have also been affected. These communities depend almost entirely on the river for their livelihoods, including for food and for selling fish for income. The river is also essential for fish supplies to other nearby regions: up to 80% of the fish that feeds Iquitos, the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon, comes from the river in this district, Fikrig said.
The community fears the water, fish and crops are contaminated from oil. It’s preventing them from eating anything from the river, which means they’ve been unable to catch and sell fish.
“Right now, [the community] cannot do their daily activities that they were previously doing to support their family,” Jenner Canayo, the communal president in Manco Cápac, told Mongabay. “We are not doing our fishing activities. We are not consuming the fish.
“It is worrying for us because right now we have children in school, in higher education, and there is no way to make a living to be able to cover the needs of our students,” he added.
The Indigenous Association for the Development and Conservation of the Lower Puinahua (AIDECOBAP) called the incident an “environmental crime with incalculable consequences,” in a statement published March 6 on its Facebook page. It identified nine groups, including Manco Cápac, that had been affected, and reiterated that their main source of food comes from the river.
So far, neither Trans Fluvial Rey nor government authorities have released any information about how much crude oil was spilled or about the ecological, social and economic impacts. According to the minutes of a March 23 meeting between state authorities, local oil and gas companies and the local population, which PetroTal shared with Mongabay, representatives for Trans Fluvial Rey said they have “specialists who are evaluating the impact of people, flora, fauna, fish, [and] fishing activities, to identify the extent of the impact on all sectors of the population.” They also requested “a little patience to complete the necessary studies to gather all the information and deal with the issue of compensation.” Assessments are being conducted in both the lower and upper stretches of the Puinahua, although these haven’t been completed yet.
Local communities have reached a deadlock in negotiating damage compensation with the oil transportation company and the Peruvian bureaucracy.