Indigenous leaders travel to UK from Peru to draw attention to oil damage and banking

LONDON — Indigenous leaders from the Wampis Nation in Peru are urging lawmakers at the House of Commons in London to ban international banks’ support for Amazon oil activities they say harm their ancestral rainforests.

HSBC bank, based in the United Kingdom, JPMorgan Chase in the United States and Santander in Spain helped finance the state-owned oil company Petroperu as it sought to upgrade a coastal refinery. The plant processes crude oil from a 680-mile (1,094-kilometer) pipeline that runs through rainforest.

In the last decade there have been dozens of leaks along the pipeline.

After the meetings, Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick raised the issue in the House of Lords and in an interview Friday said the banks’ actions were “deplorable.”

“We’ve been conserving our forest for over 7,000 years,” Pamuk Teófilo Kukush Pati, a Wampis leader, told The Associated Press.

Now their fishing waters have been badly polluted, he said, and “there is no guarantee of life … we are in a very grave situation.”

“Most alarming is the fact we find out that various banks fund Petroperu,” said Tsanim Evaristo Wajai Asamat, another Wampis leader. “And these things are happening all across the Amazon.”

The banks acted as “bookrunners” on a $1 billion bond offering for the refinery work in 2021, first reported by the U.K. nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism. When banks act as bookrunners, they advertise the bonds to their customers and use their reputation to give investors confidence. Financial data provider Dealogic estimates each bank made $583,000 in fees.

A spokeswoman for Santander bank said via email that the company followed all relevant environmental regulations and does a careful analysis before backing companies that operate in the Amazon. A JPMorgan spokeswoman said Indigenous rights are a fundamental consideration across their business. A spokeswoman for HSBC said in a statement that it places restrictions on backing projects in the Amazon.

In the last decade, there were 89 leaks from the pipeline, Petroperu said in an email. It said only two were caused by equipment failure — criminals or natural forces caused the rest. Petroperu has spent more than $180 million cleaning up the last decade’s oil spills, it said.

More than 15,000 Wampis live on some 5,000 square miles (13,000 square kilometers) of forest and wetland in northern Peru. Their territory is home to hundreds of species of fish and rare birds.

The people made headlines in 2015 when they declared an autonomous government, in part to protect their environment. The government of Peru does not recognize it.

According to Petroperu’s bond prospectus for the refinery project, which provides transparency to investors, bond buyers faced financial risks “relating to the effects of oil leaks on local and indigenous communities.” There could be protests, fines, compensation and negative publicity, it warned, and Indigenous communities had “taken hostile measures against our facilities and installations on various occasions.”

The prospectus also said there were criminal investigations being conducted by Peruvian prosecutors over oil spills that included former Petroperu executives. Petroperu has since denied that people at its executive level are being investigated, saying that two lower-level employees were among those of interest to prosecutors. The company said via email that it’s cooperating with the investigation.

The year after the bond deal, in 2022, Peruvian regulators penalized Petroperu with 66 fines, including for new oil spills along the pipeline. The three banks did business with Petroperu again last year, providing advice as the oil company sought to change the terms of its debt.

The Wampis are unhappy about illegal logging and mining on their territory as well. They were joined in London by several delegations pressing for a proposed law that would make it a crime for British businesses to harm the environment and threaten human rights.

Delegations from Colombia, Liberia and Mexico met with Baroness Ritchie, then with senior officials at both the U.K. Foreign Office and Environment Department.

“You need the corporate law,” she said, “to ensure that this is stopped. It’s to do with respect. You should be respecting people if you are mining or doing oil exploration in their countries.”

Jesús Javier Thomas González, from northern Mexico, spoke of a ten-year battle with a mining company listed on the London Stock Exchange that he said illegally occupied and devastated their land.

The company has “economic and political influence in Mexico that is huge,” he said. It’s a good corporate citizen in the UK, he said, “but in Mexico they behave in a different way.”

A U.K. government spokesman said British firms should always act to avoid environmental harms, and its approach to tackling those that don’t is under constant review.

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Grattan reported from Bogota, Colombia.

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