LONDON – Indigenous leaders of Peru’s Wampis nation are urging lawmakers in the House of Commons in London to ban international banks’ support for oil activities in the Amazon that they say are damaging their ancestral rainforests.
HSBC bank, based in the United Kingdom, JPMorgan Chase in the United States and Santander in Spain helped finance state oil company Petroperu, which wanted to upgrade a coastal refinery. The plant processes crude oil from a 1,094 kilometer long pipeline that runs through rainforest.
Dozens of leaks have occurred along the pipeline over the past ten years.
“We have been protecting our forest for more than 7,000 years,” Pamuk Teófilo Kukush Pati, a Wampis leader, told The Associated Press after meetings on Thursday. The group planned to continue their visit Friday.
Now their fishing waters are seriously polluted, he said, and “there is no guarantee of life… we are in a very serious situation.”
“The most alarming thing is the fact that we found out that several banks are financing Petroperu,” said Tsanim Evaristo Wajai Asamat, another Wampis leader. “And these things are happening all over the Amazon.”
The banks acted as bookrunners on a $1 billion bond issue for the refinery work in 2021, as first reported by the U.K. nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism. When banks act as bookrunners, they promote the bonds to their customers and use their reputation to instill confidence in investors. Financial data provider Dealogic estimates that each bank earned $583,000 in fees.
A spokeswoman for Santander Bank said via email that the company has followed all relevant environmental regulations and conducts careful analysis before supporting companies operating in the Amazon. A JPMorgan spokeswoman said Indigenous rights are a fundamental consideration across their business. A spokeswoman for HSBC said in a statement that it is imposing restrictions on backing projects in the Amazon.
In the past decade, there have been 89 spills from the pipeline, Petroperu said in an email. It said only two were caused by faulty equipment; criminals or natural forces caused the rest. Petroperu has spent more than $180 million cleaning up oil spills over the past decade, the report said.
More than 15,000 Wampis live in approximately 13,000 square kilometers of forest and swampland in northern Peru. Their territory is home to hundreds of species of fish and rare birds.
The people made headlines in 2015 when they declared an autonomous government, partly to protect their environment. The government of Peru does not recognize it.
According to Petroperu’s bond prospectus for the refinery project, which provides transparency to investors, bond buyers faced financial risks “related to the impact of oil spills on local and indigenous communities.” Protests, fines, compensation and negative publicity could follow, the report warned, and indigenous communities had “taken hostile measures against our facilities and installations on several occasions.”
The prospectus also stated that criminal investigations were being conducted by Peruvian prosecutors into oil spills involving former Petroperu executives. Petroperu has since denied that executive-level people are being investigated, saying two lower-level employees were of interest to prosecutors. The company announced by email that it is cooperating with the investigation.
The year after the bond deal, in 2022, Peruvian regulators hit Petroperu with 66 fines, including for new oil leaks along the pipeline. The three banks did business with Petroperu again last year, providing advice when the oil company tried to change the terms of its debt.
The Wampis are also dissatisfied with illegal logging and mining in their territory. They were among several delegations that also pushed for a bill on Thursday that would make it a crime for British companies to damage the environment and threaten human rights.
Delegations from Colombia, Liberia and Mexico met with a Baroness and then with senior officials from both the British Foreign Office and the Ministry of the Environment.
Jesús Javier Thomas González, from northern Mexico, spoke of a decade-long battle with a mining company listed on the London Stock Exchange that he said had illegally occupied and destroyed their land.
The company has “tremendous economic and political influence in Mexico,” he said. In Britain they are good corporate citizens, he said, “but in Mexico they behave in a different way.”
A UK government spokesperson said British businesses must always take action to prevent damage to the environment, and that the approach to companies that fail to do so is continually reviewed.
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Grattan reported from Bogota, Colombia.
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