Detail from a Perupetro May 2014 map showing how oil concessions Lot 135 and Lot 137 (black boundaries) overlap the proposed Yavari-Tapiche reserve (sky blue boundaries) for indigenous peoples living in “isolation.” The map also shows how the concessions overlap two “protected natural areas”: the Matsés national reserve and the then Sierra del Divisor reserved zone (green boundaries), now a national park. The proposed Yavari-Tapiche reserve no longer appears on Perupetro’s current publicly available concessions map. Graphic: Perupetro

By David Hill
6 October 2017
(The Guardian) – There are more indigenous peoples living in “isolation” in Peru than any country in the world except Brazil. All live in the Amazon – the majority in poorly-protected reserves, or areas where reserves have been proposed but never established, or “protected natural areas” such as national parks.
For years indigenous federations and other civil society organisations in Peru and abroad have worked for the territories of indigenous peoples in “isolation” to be made off-limits, citing Peruvian and international laws, emphasising their rights to self-determination, and stressing their vulnerability to contact because of their lack of immunological defences and the risk of epidemics and fatalities. The biggest dangers – in terms of outsiders entering their territories, exploiting resources and/or actively seeking contact – are oil and gas companies, loggers and logging roads, narco-traffickers, evangelical missionaries, Catholic priests, artisanal miners, and highways.One particular area of current controversy is in the central eastern part of Peru bordering Brazil, where the 1.1m hectare Yavari-Tapiche reserve was proposed back in 2003. And since then? In 2006 a “protected natural area” called the Sierra del Divisor reserved zone (SDRZ) was superimposed over roughly 700,000 hectares of the proposed reserve, the following year an oil concession was slapped on top of approximately 81% of it, and then in 2015 the SDRZ was converted into the Sierra del Divisor national park.Logging is a serious danger too. At least 15 concessions have overlapped the proposed reserve – mainly the central-west part – since 2004. This year, 12 further areas have been identified for future concessions, mostly in the south-west.Oil, logging, a reserved zone, now even a national park … but still no Yavari-Tapiche reserve. [more]

Peru urged to ban oil firms from isolated indigenous peoples’ land