As global environmental delegates gather in Peru for the UN climate talks, five oil spills in the country’s Amazon jungle are causing a hidden environmental disaster
It is a disaster hidden from the environmental leaders gathered inside the walls of a military compound in Lima on a mission to fight climate change.
Over the last few months – as Peru helped guide the United Nations climate negotiations – five separate oil spills along a main oil pipeline through the Amazon have spewed thick black clots of crude across jungle and swamp and carpeted local fishing lagoons with dead fish.
Inside the climate summit fortress – as in much of the world – the oil spills in the jungle went largely unnoticed.
But for the indigenous peoples living downstream in clusters of tin-roofed and thatched houses on the banks of the Marañón river, it’s been a season of sickness and fear.
The first big breach of the pipeline occurred on 30 June, near a village known as Cuninico. “I never knew what crude oil was, and then suddenly we saw it floating down the river,” said Melita Bela Celis, who lives in the village of San Pedro, a Kukama Indian community.
