guardian.co.uk,
David Hill, Wednesday 16 May 2012
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| Spears left by an uncontacted tribe in the region where Anglo-French oil company Perenco is working in Peru. Photograph: Marek Wolodzko/AIDESEP |
An
environmental consultancy working for an oil company withheld evidence of an
"uncontacted tribe" where the company is operating in Peru's Amazon,
a leaked report obtained by the Guardian reveals.
The leak is
acutely embarrassing for Perenco, based in London and Paris, because it has
consistently claimed there is no evidence for indigenous people living without
contact with the outside world near its operations and cites research by the
consultancy, Daimi Peru, as proof.
The report
was written by three anthropologists from the National University of the
Peruvian Amazon (Unap) who were contracted by Daimi, which in turn was
contracted by Perenco. The anthropologists list the evidence they found –
"bent branches, footprints, women bathing in the rivers and crossed spears
on pathways" – all of which was reported by local people..
"We
found evidence of their existence," says Teodulio Grandez, one of the
anthropologists. "There were signs. We never said there weren't any."
But when
Daimi made its findings public, combining the anthropologists' research with
that of academics in other disciplines from another university, none of the
evidence listed by Grandez et al appeared.
"No
information exists that demonstrates or suggests the recent existence of
isolated indigenous people in the area under investigation," Daimi claimed
in a final report dated September 2008.
The report
obtained by the Guardian is a scanned version of a paper copy, with every page
bearing Unap's insignia and signed by the anthropologists. It is addressed to
Daimi's general manager, Milton Ortega.
"We
verified that this information (about the 'uncontacted' people) was in the
paper version," says Jose Moscoso, another Unap anthropologist. "But
when the digital version appeared, it wasn't there."
Daimi's
final report is now used by Perenco to defend its operations, which have come
under fire from indigenous organisations and NGOs including Survival
International. Contact between Perenco employees and the
"uncontacted" people could decimate the latter because of their lack
of immunity to diseases.
"There
has been no evidence of non-contacted tribes," Perenco claims on its
website, while its Latin American regional manager once compared them to the
Loch Ness monster. "Much talk," he said, "but never any
evidence."
The news of
the leak will not surprise some former Daimi workers who were involved in the
research and later disturbed when the final report said no evidence was found.
"This
confirms what everyone who knows anything about this region has been saying all
along," says Survival's Rebecca Spooner, who said evidence for
"uncontacted" people in this region has been collected for years.
Daimi's
Milton Ortega did not comment. "I
don't want
to talk about this by telephone. I'll give you an official answer by
email," Ortega said, from Ecuador, but no reply was forthcoming despite
several follow-ups by the Guardian.
Perenco,
which refused to say whether it had seen a copy of Unap's report, is seeking
permission from Peru's energy ministry (MEM) to begin the next stage of its
operations, in the north-east of the country near the border with Ecuador. When
MEM asked Peru's indigenous affairs department (INDEPA) for its opinion on the company's
environmental impact assessment (EIA), INDEPA accused Perenco of completely
ignoring the "uncontacted" people and endangering their lives.
Last month
an American NGO, E-Tech International, released a highly critical report on the
company's plans. "Perenco is following a 1970s-era project design that is
totally inappropriate for the Peruvian Amazon," said the report's author,
Bill Powers. "If designed and built using current best practices, the
impacts would be one-tenth what they will be with the current design."
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