some good news on the cheveron/ecuador case.

read about it here and also watch the trailer for crude, a really well-done documentary that goes deeper into the case:

Messages from Pachamama

Pizango back in Peru

Check out this article from BBC about his return from exile in Nicaragua.

Peru: Spanish oil giant targets "uncontacted" peoples' rainforest

Spanish-Argentine oil giant Repsol-YPF has applied to Peru's government to cut 454 kilometers of seismic lines and construct 152 heliports in its search for oil on uncontacted tribes' land in the remote Amazon rainforest. Repsol's plans were revealed in a report sent last month to Peru's Energy Ministry, which will now decide whether to approve the project. Cutting seismic lines, a key part of oil exploration, involves clearing paths through the forest and detonating explosives at regular intervals.

The area where Repsol hopes to work, known as Lot 39, is home to at least two of the world's last uncontacted tribes, who could be decimated if contact occurs between them and the company's workers. Repsol has already carried out some preliminary exploration in this area in the past, when it recommended its workers defend themselves from potential attack from the tribes by using a megaphone: "If peaceful contact and understanding can't be reached and the attack continues, try to establish communication using a megaphone."

If Repsol finds commercially-viable quantities of oil, a pipeline would be required to transport it from the remote Amazon to a terminal on Peru's Pacific coast. Plans for a pipeline have just been made public by Anglo-French company Perenco, which has already found large oil deposits in the region. Lot 39 includes large areas of a proposed reserve for uncontacted peoples, and indigenous organization AIDESEP is suing the companies for working there.

Survival International director Stephen Corry said, "What would the uncontacted Indians in this region make of seismic lines and heliports? They're likely to respond in one of two ways—either by fleeing, or by attacking people they will view as hostile invaders. Either way, the consequences will be profoundly damaging. Repsol and the Peruvian authorities should know by now that you simply can't look for oil in rainforest belonging to uncontacted Indians in a safe manner." (Survival International, April 20)

Meanwhile, Juan José Quispe, leader of Peru's independent Legal Defense Institute (IDL) issued a public statement demanding the government take measures to protect the life of Asterio Pujupat Wachapea, an imprisoned Awajun indigenous leader accused in the death of a National Police officer who disappeared in the violence at Bagua last June. The statement said that Pujupat had been "savagely beaten" by guards at the National penitentiary Institue (INPE) at Bagua. (La Primera, Lima, April 25)

via WW4 Report's blog

land rights for amazonian peoples

thank you laura for sending out this article about hernando de soto's campaign for indigenous land rights in the amazon. it features the yaguas people, whom we visited and with whom I took the above photograph of a female shaman during our filming trip last year.

News that makes me feel better.

Peruvian Amazon trees a niche market for carbon trading

By Bayly Turner (AFP) – 14 hours ago

SANTA ROSA, Peru — In a far-flung corner of the Peruvian Amazon, a multinational company aims to offset carbon dioxide emissions from its factories in France by planting thousands of trees which may also provide an income for local communities.

Amid accusations of greenwashing levelled at big firms trying to clean up their image, Nestle Waters France has hired French environmentalist Tristan Lecomte and his carbon management company, The Pure Project, to execute its plan.

Nestle wants to offset the equivalent of all the annual carbon emissions from its Vittel mineral water plants in France and Belgium -- about 115,000 tonnes of carbon a year.

In order to do this, it is investing 409,000 euros (550,000 dollars) to fund the planting of a total of 350,000 trees, mostly tropical hardwoods, in an existing project in the Bolivian Amazon and a new one in the jungle of Peru with a view to renewing the same number of trees every year.

For Lecomte it will be working with old friends -- cocoa farmers in the remote village of Santa Ana and other communities who live in the dense, high forest alongside the deep brown Huayabamba river, near the town of Juanjui, in Peru?s heavily deforested San Martin region, about 600 kilometers (375 miles) from Lima.

It's there where Lecomte already works with small cocoa farmers making fair trade and organic chocolate for Alter Eco, France's number one fair trade brand.

"These farmers are organic, they benefit from fair trade and now they plant these trees so they also fight against global warming," he told AFP standing at dusk in the riverside village of Santa Rosa.

"They are at the forefront of the fight against climate change, they see the change in the weather and they want to fight against it for themselves and their children."

His company, The Pure Project, will pay them one Peruvian Sol (around 30 US cents) for every tree seedling they plant on their farmland which can be any number between 85 to 1,111 per hectare.

Once the trees reach the minimum legal diameter to be cut, they can be harvested by the farmer and sold.

Amid the intense green and the constant thrum of living creatures, the saplings grow at an accelerated rate with dinner-plate sized leaves reaching up to the sunlit cracks in the tree canopy.

Trees grow faster in the Amazon rainforest -- the lungs of the planet -- than anywhere else in the world, and can reach between six to 12 metres (18 to 36 feet) in just one year.

"Apart from reforesting we're doing business", said Ozwaldo del Castillo, a cocoa farmer with two adult sons and an 11-year old daughter who lives in Santa Ana.

"We may be old when those trees are ready to be cut down but if you think of the next generation, our children and their children will benefit in the future."

But as well as combating climate change and providing a kind of retirement fund for the farmers, the agro-forestry project is a form of sustainable development which can revitalize deforested and unproductive land -- the result of slash and burn agriculture.

"Migrants coming from the highlands of Peru on arriving in the Amazon don't know how to cultivate without slashing and burning the plants and trees," Lecomte explained.

"This has a very bad effect on the water resources, on soil erosion, and on biodiversity of course. People's fields are slipping into the river because there are no big trees and their roots to maintain them."

Moreover, the bigger trees such as teak and cedar provide ideal conditions for the smaller cocoa trees which grow best in the shade, while the roots of the bigger trees oxygenate the soil.

The result is that these farmers can double their yield to up to 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of cocoa beans per hectare per year.

The Peruvian project is awaiting validation by the Voluntary Carbon Standard, or VCS, in July.

The Pure Project is running similar projects in 14 countries with a number of corporate clients including cosmetics firm Clarins, Hugo Boss and French retailer E. Leclerc.

It's ambitious in its vision. It plans to plant up to four million trees in the next five years, which could capture 2.3 million tonnes of carbon over the next four decades. These could be sold on the voluntary carbon market by the company to fund further tree planting.

Despite the despondency which followed December's Copenhagen climate change summit, idealists like Lecomte are undeterred.

He's convinced projects like this are the beginning of a much bigger trend and could also be an important niche market for developing nations like Peru.

"Sustainability is not an obstacle to the growth of big companies, quite the opposite it can be a strategic advantage," he maintains.

Projects like these, he says, work as a form of marketing for companies like Nestle but they also have a real impact on the farmers in the developing world.

More news (sorry I can't get the google ads to disapear)

It is reported that Anglo French oil company Perenco has revealed plans to build a pipeline deep into the heart of uncontacted tribes' land in the Amazon rainforest.

The pipeline is being built to transport an estimated three hundred million barrels of oil from the depths of the northern Peruvian Amazon. The company makes no mention of the tribes in its report detailing the potential social and environmental impacts of the pipeline, despite the fact they could be decimated by contact with Perenco's workers.

Mr Stephen Corry survival director of Perenco said that "Failing to mention that they're working on the land of isolated tribal people is just like what the British did in Australia: make the tribal people invisible so they can claim the land for themselves."

Perenco's report was recently made public on the Peruvian Energy Ministry’s website. It fails to mention that the pipeline would cut right into the heart of a proposed reserve for the uncontacted Indians.

The Ministry has responded by failing to approve Perenco's report. It has asked the company to write an 'anthropological contingency plan', given the 'possible existence' of uncontacted tribes in the region.

The pipeline is projected to be 207 kilometers long and to connect with another pipeline already built, which will transport the oil all the way to Peru’s Pacific coast. Perenco’s report says it would affect the forest for five hundreds meters on either side.

High ranking officials in Peru hope the pipeline will help transform Peru’s economy. Survival International and many other organizations are lobbying Peru’s government not to build it.

Perenco’s report says that production is expected in 2013. The company, chaired by Oxford University graduate Mr Francois Perrodo, has denied the existence of uncontacted Indians in the region, even though the previous company working in the region admitted contact with them was probable.

(Sourced from www.groundreport.com)