Cover Essay—English Version: The Achuar and 'Production Waters'

Autor: Lily la Torre López, Dora A. Napolitano
Rok vydání: 2007
Předmět:
Zdroj: EcoHealth. 4:110-114
ISSN: 1612-9210
1612-9202
DOI: 10.1007/s10393-007-0083-7
Popis: Land is life for the Achuar people: it is a supermarket, a university, a sacred place, a hospital. Therefore without land there would be no human life, nor any of the other beings who live around us. —Lucas Irar, Achuar leader, Pastaza River, Northern Peru At dawn on October 10, 2006, more than 800 Achuar men, women, and children from 31 communities along the Corrientes River occupied all of Pluspetrol’s installations in Blocks 1AB and 8 in the Northern Peruvian Amazon. Their goal was to put a stop to the dumping of ‘‘production waters’’ into their rivers and streams. More than 180 working oil wells went quiet that morning: more than half of Peru’s oil production stopped. ‘‘Production waters’’ is the term given to the ‘‘water’’ that is pumped up with subsoil fossil fuels. It is the remains of the ancient seas in which the animals lived, whose bodies turned into oil and gas. Production waters have salt concentrations six times greater than our oceans and contain oil, heavy metals, radioactive elements, and treating chemicals (pumped into the well as part of the extraction process). Along the Corrientes, they reach the surface at extremely high temperatures (90 C/194 F). More than a million barrels of production waters are dumped, untreated, into the waterways of Achuar territory each day, as they have been for 35 years. In 2006, a government health study reported that 99% of the population has cadmium blood levels over acceptable limits and 66% has excessive blood lead levels. The Achuar have said for years that their people are sickening and dying of ‘‘new’’ illnesses; they talk of stomach pains, nausea, vomiting, and skin diseases, symptoms surprisingly like the effects of petrol contamination. For years, they have lobbied the government to improve controls on company activities in their territory and to enforce existing legislation. Recent government water quality studies have not found cadmium and lead in the water. In the case of cadmium, the test used is unable to discern the low ‘‘maximum permissible levels’’ recommended by WHO guidelines so it cannot detect if these have been exceeded. This has enabled Pluspetrol and government representatives to continue to wriggle out of their responsibilities. The Achuar number some 15,000 people living in communities on both sides of the Peru–Ecuador border. They live by hunting, fishing, and keeping small cultivated gardens. Human, animal, and vegetable spirits share their land with the ancestral spirits of the Achuar and the guardians of the forest. Water is a defining element of Achuar territory. All their territory is low-lying forest, and has been recognized as a Ramsar Wetland, the Abanico del rio Pastaza. Much of it is flooded for most of the year, particularly the low-lying, palm-filled swamps called achu in Achuar. In their language, their name means ‘‘the people of the swamps.’’ These achu are a crucial part of Achuar hunting grounds; during the fruit season, the palms attract Published online: February 22, 2007 Correspondence to: Lily la Torre Lopez, e-mail: lilylatorre@ungurahui.com EcoHealth 4, 110–114, 2007 DOI: 10.1007/s10393-007-0083-7
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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