‘I’ve seen the dark, fat grease stuck to the leaves’: oil and gas encroach on Peru’s uncontacted peoples

Workers from the Argentine company Pluspetrol clean up after an oil spill in the Amazon region of Loreto, Iquitos, Peru, in 2011. The company said about 1,100 barrels of oil were leaked into the jungle after a pipeline had been vandalised. Photograph: Reuters/Corbis

Above the canopy of the tallest trees that vie for sunlight in the depths of the Peruvian Amazon, gas flares shoot into the sky. Below, Julio Cusurichi, 53, can see the thick, dark grease that clings to the leaves and the toxins leaking into the streams.

“Oil and gas projects are coming closer and closer. They are expanding into new lands,” says Cusurichi, a member of the Shipibo-Conibo people, a Goldman prize winner and one of Peru’s foremost Indigenous leaders. “Our territory is our life, but the government is auctioning off plots. It is a great invasion with a grave impact.”