On Sept. 11, 2022, Olivia Bisa Tirko received a call from a forest guard who informed her of an oil spill in the territory of the Chapra Nation in the Peruvian Amazon. The North Peruvian Pipeline operated by state-owned oil company Petroperú had ruptured, spilling 2,500 barrels of oil into the Marañón River, a major tributary of the Amazon River. “For us as a nation, it was a catastrophe,” Bisa Tirko, the president of the Indigenous nation’s autonomous government, told Mongabay in a video call. “It filled me with helplessness to see that happen to the place where you were born, grew up, walked all your life, swam, fished. It was a disaster.” To date, Petroperú hasn’t contained the environmental pollution, Bisa Tirko said. And now the company is mired in a financial crisis. In 2022, it lost its investment-grade rating from credit agencies after taking on a large amount of debt to complete its Talara refinery upgrade, estimated to have cost $6.5 billion. In 2023, Petroperú reported losses of more than $822 million. Since then, the company has received three capital injections from the government, the last one in February, totaling $1.3 billion. Oil contamination is still present at the site of Petroecuador’s North Peruvian Pipeline that ruptured in 2022, which is the home of the Chapra Indigenous peoples. Image courtesy of Olivia Bisa Tirko. A new report by the Hydrocarbon Impact Working Group (GITH) of the National Human Rights Coordination, a group of 17 civil society organizations, shows…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post Petroperú’s financial troubles could mean no oil spill remediation, communities fear first appeared on EnviroLink Network.