Say NO to Oil in the Amazon!

Oil companies, mostly foreign, have pumped oil from the Peruvian Amazon for more than 40 years, but none has done so without causing environmental devastation and social division. The Nanay River Basin is one of few Amazonian tributaries in Peru to be untouched by oil exploitation, but now even the Nanay is in danger.

I am Lidia Vargas Doñe, 43 years old and mother of 5, and I live along the Nanay River. Together with the Iquitos Water Committee, a united front of students, indigenous peoples, concerned citizens, and civil society groups, we are fighting to protect our source of life; one of the last, untouched, pristine watersheds in the Peruvian Amazon.

The Nanay River Basin is a tributary to the Amazon and provides 90% of the drinking water for Iquitos, a city of a half a million people. There are few, if any, reasons for residents to believe that the oil companies proposing to drill here would act any differently than they have in other parts of the Amazon, or for the government to stop them.

In 2008, the regional government declared the protection of the Nanay in the public interest, and yet did nothing to halt oil activity in the two large concessions granted to oil companies for exploration.

Over the last two years we have organized marches and protests to keep oil out of the Nanay. In 2012 we were successful in forcing oil giant ConocoPhillips out of the area, but the oil concessions have since been handed over to Gran Tierra, a Canadian company with plans to drill 51 oil wells in the watershed.
Please join our protest and tell the Peruvian government NO to oil in the Nanay. With your help, we have the chance to save one of the last clean watersheds in the Peruvian Amazon and the lives of thousands of people.

In Solidarity,

Lidia Vargas Doñe and the Iquitos Water Committee

For more information, please visit www.alianzaarkana.org.