Petroperú Slicks Seep On in the Amazo

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"This isn't just about this spill, or the last one, or the next one that will happen when the pipe breaks again because it will as it always does," said Tania Ines looking out over a reflective Marañón River from the open thatched-roof house where she, her husband and their four children live in the center of San Pedro, a Kukama indigenous community deep in Peru's northern Amazon. She crossed the room with a pace indicating endless time, collecting a crying baby at the other side and returning to sit at the edge of weathered steps. She looked as though she were waiting.

"The water is ruined – we're all getting sick from it," Ines turned the fussing baby from one hand to the other. She told me he had been suffering from diarrhea, likely due to the contamination of one thing or another, as everything seemed to have been touched. "I gave him a bath in the river water and he's had stomach problems since. It's the same with this one," she pointed to the infant's sister peeking out from behind Mama's legs. "...with all the children really."

It's been weeks since a Petroperú pipeline ruptured just upriver from San Pedro – again – one of five known breaks in the region in less than six months that spewed crude into the jungle and contaminated the river and surrounding rainforest within Kukama territory and the buffer zone of the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, the largest protected area of its kind in the country. Kukama villagers, who depend on fish as a source of food and income, fear for their future as one oil mess spills into the next with increasing incidents and seasonal floods pushing contamination and dead marine life to further reaches. Nausea and skin rashes have become commonplace, especially in children, and locals worry they won't be able to eat fish from the river again.

http://amazonwatch.org/news/2015/011...-in-the-amazon


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