“The squeaky wheel gets the grease”? The conflict imperative and the slow fight against environmental injustice in northern Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

We chronicle a four-decades-long struggle that has been taking place in the Peruvian Amazon between indigenous groups, oil companies, and the state. We provide a broad overview of the strategies of the communities in the area, juxtaposing the outcomes of different negotiating strategies. In addition to documenting what is an especially important case of socio-environmental conflict in the Peruvian Amazon, we go beyond the dominant approach in the literature, which sees dialogue as inherently desirable and conflict as necessarily unwelcome, and describe the Achuar decision to engage in open conflict with the oil company as one that testifies to the existence of a conflict imperative. In other words, the overcoming of environmental injustice in certain circumstances requires various forms of direct action that take grievance and complaint to the level of open conflict. The corollary of this hypothesis is that dialogue is sometimes neither peaceful nor useful for affected communities. This calls for a rethinking of the boundaries between conflict and negotiation. In our chronicle, conflict itself was often the antecedent to a new round of dialogue and negotiation made possible by the presence of government officials purposively and urgently dispatched to the area. Echoing Clausewitz's famous dictum concerning the continuity between war and policy, indigenous decisions to occupy, blockade, and disrupt the working of oil operations might tentatively be understood as an attempt to continue negotiating with the state and corporations by using other tools they have at their disposal.

A State‐of‐the‐Art Review of Indigenous Peoples and Environmental Pollution

“…Waste from artisanal and small‐scale Au mining in the Madre de Dios region, Peru, is known to be one of the most important sources of water contamination for Amazonian amphibians (Catenazzi and von May 2014), many of which are used in traditional medicine by Amazonian IPs such as the Yawanawa (Souto et al 2013). Videos recorded with infrared camera traps have evidenced wildlife ingestion of petroleum‐contaminated soils in areas situated within the hunting grounds of the Achuar in the Amazon (Orta‐Martínez et al 2018; Cartró‐Sabaté et al 2019). Polluting activities can also drive other forms of ecosystem degradation; for example, illegal Au mining has been implicated as a main cause of deforestation and habitat loss in areas inhabited by IPs in the Amazon and Myanmar (Swenson et al 2011; Papworth et al 2017).…”

“…There are, however, some pollution monitoring programs engaging IPs, such as the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP 1998, 2015), the Māori Cultural Health Index for Streams (Tipa and Teirney 2006), the Northern Contaminants Program in Canada (Donaldson et al 2013), or stakeholder‐driven pollution assessments with active involvement of Aleut communities in Alaska (Burger and Gochfeld 2009). For example, since 2006, the Achuar and Quechua in the Peruvian Amazon have led a community‐based monitoring program to map oil spills in their lands (Orta‐Martínez et al 2007, 2018) and to monitor their impacts (Rosell‐Melé et al 2018; Cartró‐Sabaté et al 2019). The release of this information has strengthened the role of indigenous leaders in negotiations with the oil companies and the Peruvian state agencies.…”

What justice and for whom? A political ecology of voice study into ‘senses of justice’ in Peru's Loreto Region

“…It is thus unsurprising to find high levels of social conflict and radical voice actions in Peru (Defensor ıa Del Pueblo, 2019). Orta-Mart ınez et al (2018) suggest that the recent decision by the Peruvian Achuar indigenous people to engage in open conflict shows the existence of a 'conflict imperative', in which overcoming environmental injustice, in certain circumstances, requires direct action that drives grievances to the open conflict level. The problem is that these 'desperate acts' (NSI2R1) are either ignored or the citizens placated or suppressed by the state.…”

“…The CBO sought to represent local community voices through a sense of justice that was ‘ attuned with local community issues ’ (CBO1R1) concerning environmental and human rights abuses. This long-running campaign, beginning in 2004, demanded that the government and the oil company Pluspetrol, who had controlled Blocks 8 and 1AB/192 since 1996 and 2001, respectively, reinject the heavily toxic produced water into the oil fields, thereby removing the government’s ongoing exemption of Pluspetrol’s compliance with existing Peruvian laws (Orta-Martínez et al., 2018; Vasquez, 2013).…”

Oil and Conflict in the Ecuadorian Amazon: An Exploration of Motives and Objectives

“…In fact, such a dichotomous definition can be misleading. Taking a dynamic stance, and looking at the evolution of relations over time, conflict is often a premise for dialogue (Orta-Martínez, Pellegrini, & Arsel, 2018). For example, in several cases of contentious action in our study area, be it a road block or the occupation of an oil installation, the objective of these movements was to either initiate meaningful dialogue with high-ranking state authorities, or to achieve the effective implementation of existing agreements that had been reached through previous rounds of dialogue.…”