Community-health suits create precedents in Peru

Graciela Tejada has helped propel community-health litigation in Peru. (Photo by Barbara Fraser)

In the best of times, the stream flowing past Graciela Tejada’s house stinks of sewage. During heavy rains, when the water rises, feces and hospital waste bob past her door in the same waterway where children paddle small dugout canoes. Tejada and her neighbors in Punchana, a low-income area of Iquitos, Peru’s largest Amazonian city, had become resigned to living amid sewage and effluent from a slaughterhouse and a nearby hospital. But on Jan. 9, she stood before an appeals court judge in an Iquitos courtroom and told him of the conditions she and her neighbors, including children and pregnant women, face daily. Increasingly, polluted communities in Peru’s Amazon region are asking courts to back up their demands for a clean and healthy environment. And in several recent cases in the northeastern Loreto region, judges have supported their claims, setting important new legal precedent in the country. Those decisions... Read more →