Japanese company targets uncontacted tribes’ land
June 23, 2010
This page was created in 2010 and may contain language which is now outdated.
A Japanese company, Inpex Corporation, has bought a 25% stake in an oil and gas concession in a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon.
The concession, known as Lot 117, is in northern Peru and includes an area inhabited by uncontacted Indians.
Inpex bought the 25% stake off Brazilian company Petrobras, which retains 50% of the concession. Inpex’s purchase was announced by Perupetro and reported by Dow Jones Newswires.
No mention was made in Dow Jones’s report that Lot 117 includes uncontacted Indians’ territory, or that only nine days ago Peru’s national Amazon Indigenous organization, AIDESEP, published a statement about three local Indigenous organizations rejecting the presence of oil and gas companies in that region.
‘We will not accept oil companies on our land,’ said a declaration signed at a recent meeting by one local organization.
Last year AIDESEP published statements from Secoya and Kichwa organizations rejecting Petrobras’s presence in Lot 117. Colombian company Ecopetrol also has a 25% stake in the lot.
Survival is urging all companies to abandon work in regions inhabited by uncontacted tribes, or any area where they do not have the free, prior and informed consent of the local people.
