Afraid to fish close to home because of an oil spill near this tiny Kukama Indian village on the bank of the broad, muddy Marañón River, Joel Arirama took his canoe two hours up a tributary, where he thought the fish would be safe.

When his wife began cooking them, however, an odor of gasoline wafted through the room. He thought she had spilled kerosene, but the smell came from the frying fish.

Two months after a break in a 40-year-old pipeline dumped oil into the seasonally flooded forest near villages of palm-thatched, stilt-raised wooden houses, residents of the lower Marañón watershed worry about possible long-term impacts on their health and livelihoods.

César Mozambite and his wife, Flor de María Parana, used to travel downriver to Maypuco, the district capital, once or twice a week to sell fish for about a dollar a kilo.

“Now no one wants to buy our fish, not in Maypuco or anywhere else,” he says.

With that income gone for now, he and his wife wonder how they will buy school supplies for their children.

The spill and its aftermath underscore the environmental risks facing Kukama Kukamiria communities in the lower Marañón Valley, one of four watersheds affected by four decades of oil drilling that have fouled waterways and forests.

More broadly, it illustrates the potential impacts looming for indigenous communities and their supporting ecosystems in Amazonian countries, particularly Peru and Ecuador, that are seeking to expand oil operations in remote rainforest regions.

The government has declared a series of environmental and health emergencies in the Corrientes, Pastaza, Tigre and Marañón basins, but little progress has been made on remediation or distribution of safe drinking water, says Renato Pita of Puinamudt, a group that provides technical assistance to indigenous federations in the four watersheds.

In May, the government set up three dialogue groups to discuss key subjects related to oil operations: health, sanitation and cultural development; land titling and compensation for use of territories; and remediation and payment for environmental damage. So far, however, only two of the groups have even drafted agendas, Pita says.

Villagers in Cuninico raised the alarm about the pipeline leak on June 30, when they saw an oil slick and a mass of dead fish near their community, which is at the confluence of the Cuninico and Marañón rivers in Peru’s northeastern Loreto region. The rivers are the community’s only sources of water for drinking, cooking, washing and bathing.

They reported the slick to Petroperú, the state-run oil company that operates the 845-kilometer (525-mile) pipeline that pumps heavy crude from several oil fields in Peru’s northern Amazon region over the Andes to a port on the coast.

Company representatives arrived that afternoon, and by July 12, the break was patched and the pipeline was pumping again. A month later, several hundred workers were scooping oil out of the pipeline channel into metal drums.

Petroperú employees had noticed a drop in pressure in the pipeline, indicative of a leak, on June 22 and stopped pumping crude, but inspectors were unable to locate the source of the problem, a Petroperú spokesperson said in an e-mail message.

Galo Vásquez, president of the community of Cuninico, said people had noticed that fish had an oily taste three or four days before the oil slick appeared. Residents of neighboring communities said they also saw large numbers of dead fish in waterways during the last week of June, but they did not associate them with the pipeline until they heard about the spill.

That section of the pipeline, which cuts through the buffer zone of the Pacaya Samiria Natural Reserve, a sprawling wetland protected under the international Ramsar treaty, is underwater from around November, when the level of the Marañón River begins to rise, until May or June, when the water level subsides.

As the river rises, fish migrate into a web of lakes and channels in the forest, returning to the river when the water level falls again. Local residents said water in the forest near the pipeline was about 1.5 meters deep at the time the spill occurred. Two weeks later, the ground was exposed and tree trunks along the pipeline channel were stained black to a height of about half a meter (1.6 feet).

According to Petroperú, the spill amounted to about 2,358 barrels and affected 4.5 hectares on one side of the pipeline and 4.2 hectares on the other.

The company has made no official statement about what caused the break, although at a community meeting in Cuninico more than a week after the spill was reported, a Petroperú representative blamed an “outside hand.” Vásquez challenged him, saying it sounded as though the company was accusing the community of sabotage.

In a statement published in the daily La República on Aug. 8, Petroperú said tests performed at “a prestigious university” showed that the leak was due to “the deliberate removal of protection from the pipe, which exposed the metal to a localized and accelerated process of corrosion that weakened it until it broke.”

A report by an environmental prosecutor who visited the site in early June said a protective polyethylene sleeve had been cut at the point of the break. Vásquez said he was pressured to sign the report, although men from the community said that when they helped raise the pipeline out of the water, the sleeve was not cut, but appeared to have slipped out of place.

A report by Osinergmin, the government regulatory agency for energy and mining, attributed the break to corrosion, probably accelerated by deterioration of the sleeve. Other protective sleeves along the pipeline are visibly frayed and worn.

More than 250 workers are cleaning up the spill, according to Petroperú. Recovery of the oil should be completed in the first half of September and collection of other contaminated material by mid-October, according to the company’s e-mailed response.

The Environmental Oversight and Evaluation Agency (OEFA), the government regulatory body, has launched administrative proceedings against Petroperú, including an investigation that could last six months, according to María Antonieta Merino, OEFA’s assistant director of supervision.

New legislation passed in June cut fines for environmental violations to about one-third of their original levels (See “Peru stimulus raises environmental concerns”—EcoAméricas, June ’14.), but the full amount could apply if OEFA rules that the spill did harm to life and health.

In the week after the spill was reported, villagers said their eyes burned when they bathed in the Cuninico River and children broke out in rashes. Some of the men hired by Petroperú to find the leak and hoist the pipeline out of the muck with pulleys rigged on pylons also complained of skin problems.

During the first week, they worked with no protective gear, sometimes stripped down to their underwear and up to their necks in oily water, the men said. Petroperú began providing protective suits when a Peruvian TV crew appeared to film the spill site, they said.

There are more questions than answers about long-term impacts of the spill, especially once water levels begin to rise later this year. Researchers say the hydrology of seasonally flooded forests like those in and around the Pacaya Samiria reserve is complex, little studied and difficult to model.

Studies of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico are providing new information about the environmental impacts of hydrocarbons, but some compounds could behave differently in tropical wetlands like those around Cuninico.

Light and naturally occurring microbes aid remediation by breaking down spilled oil, says Edward Overton, emeritus professor of environmental chemistry at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

“Once oil gets into an environment where oxygen is around, it gets degraded pretty quickly,” he says.

The most important task, he adds, is to “stop the source and clean up the residue. You don’t want to leave oil buried, because every time you have a flood event, that oil will be released.”

But oil trapped in sediment under standing water would not be exposed to oxygen, and that could occur in Peru’s Amazonian wetlands, says Ricardo Segovia, a hydrogeologist with E-Tech International, a U.S.-based engineering firm that advises Peruvian indigenous organizations on oil issues.


In that case, a particular risk is posed by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)—chemical components of oil that are considered probable human carcinogens, are hazardous to developing fetuses, and have been linked to liver, skin and immune system problems.

“Microbes degrade all constituents [of oil], but certain components are broken down more readily,” says Olivia Mason, assistant professor of biological oceanography at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, who is studying the Deepwater Horizon spill. “PAHs are harder for microbes to degrade.”

She adds that without sufficient oxygen, those PAHs could persist as they have in some places affected by the 1989 spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker in Alaska.

Long-term effects on fish and fisheries are also unknown. Fish are the Kukama people’s main source of protein and cash income, and the lakes around Cuninico have traditionally been a rich fishing ground for various communities along that stretch of the Marañón.

Villagers are afraid to eat the fish, however, and their customers have turned to other food sources. If the fishing trade takes long to recover, some families could be forced to migrate to cities.

When E-Tech researchers visited Cuninico in mid-August, fish topped the list of people’s worries, especially among women, says Diana Papoulias, a biologist who specializes in aquatic toxicology.

When she took a dozen freshly caught fish aside to cut them open and examine their organs for signs of toxicological stress—frayed fins, pale gills or livers, enlarged spleens, dark gall bladders, foul-smelling fat—she was soon surrounded by about 50 people. When they cooked some of the fish for Papoulias, she also found that they smelled or tasted of gasoline.

Until fish are thoroughly tested, Papoulias recommended that people fillet their catch instead of cooking fish with the heads and skin on, as they usually do, and that children and women who are pregnant or of child-bearing age opt for canned fish over wild fish.

The upset to the food supply is rippling through village life. Outside vendors are selling fish in the community for the equivalent of about US$3 a kilo, when most people used to eat fish for free.

And pregnant women may be forced to choose between protein deficiency and eating fish that could cause developmental problems for their unborn children, says David Abramson, deputy director of the National Center of Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York.

Researchers called for long-term monitoring of water, soil, sediments and fish in the spill area and in the places where people fish, although they noted that studies will be hampered by a lack of pre-spill data.

OEFA’s Merino says her agency is analyzing fish caught near Cuninico, but researchers cautioned that the sample being used is too small to be representative.

Papoulias worries that without thorough studies, villagers will lack the information they need to decide whether their fish are safe.

“I’m afraid what’s going to happen [is that] people won’t hear another thing,” she says, “and people will start eating the fish again, not knowing and always concerned.”