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