2004 Bridges Summer Research Report Simeon Tegel Latin American Studies "An Investigation into the Social Impacts of the Camisea Gas Project on the Matsigenka People of the Peruvian Amazon"

In early August 2004, gas and natural gas liquids began flowing along two subterranean pipelines from a remote corner of the Peruvian Amazon to the Pacific coast, for consumption in Lima and export to Mexico and the United States. The hydrocarbons are expected to reduce energy bills for both residential and industrial consumers in Peru, as well as help cut the Andean nation’s enormous sovereign debt. A fanfare greeted the news, with most Peruvian media uncritically repeating the government’s assertion that the Camisea Gas Project would increase national GDP by two percentage points for around the next 30 years.

However, little attention has been focused on the devastating environmental and social costs of the project, located in the Lower Urubamba Valley, one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems and home to several indigenous peoples in differing levels of contact and engagement with Peruvian society. Funded by both the Robert and Alice Bridges Summer Field Research Travel Grant and a Summer Fellowship from UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, I traveled to the Urubamba to investigate the social impacts of the Camisea Gas Project on the Matsigenka, the largest ethnic group in and around the Urubamba, numbering some 10,000 people.

A peaceful people who have historically retreated from confrontation and, in some cases, even peaceful interaction with outsiders, the Matsigenka have only come into regular contact with Western culture during the last five decades, principally through the intervention of missionaries from the Dominican order and the evangelical Summer Institute of Linguistics, both encouraged by the Peruvian state’s policy of acculturating the Amazon’s indigenous inhabitants. Those missionaries brought the Matsigenka, who had traditionally lived as isolated families scattered in the rainforest, into “communities” numbering up to several hundred people. I stayed with three of these communities in the Lower Urubamba, as well as a fourth more traditional settlement in the Upper Urubamba, observing Matsigenka life and interviewing community leaders and members, as well as a small handful of outsiders who lived among them, including doctors, missionaries and an anthropologist.

Separating the impacts of the Camisea Gas Project from the changes triggered by the missionaries themselves, and from the presence of significant numbers of colonists in parts of the Urubamba, appeared complicated, not least given my relatively short timeframe of three weeks in the Valley, providing me with a single “snapshot” of the situation rather than a moving image over time. Nevertheless, listening to the Matsigenka, a picture did emerge of dramatic repercussions triggered by the project. These impacts included drastically depleted or damaged natural resources on which the Matsigenka depend, accelerated sociocultural change, and problematic and highly unequal interactions with the gas consortia.

Perhaps the most significant finding was that the Matsigenka complained of a drop in fishing yields of between 60 and 90 percent since the inception of the gas project at the turn of the millennium. For a riverine people who have traditionally relied on daily fishing trips by the male head-of-household for a principal source of protein, this impact appears highly significant and worrying. Similarly, the mijano, the name used by locals to refer to the annual migration of some fish species from downriver to upriver, was also said to have failed for the first time in living memory in 2002 and 2003. The causes appeared to be twofold, and both related to the activities of the gas consortia: The heavy traffic, including many massive barges, traveling along the Urubamba and Camisea Rivers; and the sediment discoloring the once transparent water, the result of massive and unnecessary erosion from the precipitous pipeline route as it crosses the Upper Urubamba, where the “foothills” of the Andes overlap with the Amazon rainforest and its fragile topsoil.

Simultaneously, hunting yields have dropped by around 50 percent, I was told, with fauna scared away by the sounds of the consortia’s heavy machinery, particularly the overhead flights of helicopters. Although, game traditionally provided a much smaller portion of protein in the Matsigenka diet than fish, the fact that both hunting and fishing have suffered such heavy apparent repercussions at the same time has left the Matsigenka without an obvious alternative and traditional source of protein. In a population thought to experience rates of malnutrition from 50 to 70 percent, the repercussions may be especially serious. The results appear to be both hunger and accelerated sociocultural change as those community members, overwhelmingly male, able to gain employment with the consortia leave their villages for periods of weeks and sometimes months on end in order to earn a cash income to purchase the Western goods that are increasingly available in the Urubamba, ranging from tinned seafish and beer to chainsaws and shotguns. With the division of work strongly gendered in Matsigenka households, many women left behind appear to have had difficulty keeping themselves and their children adequately nourished. There may also be new tensions in the communities between the haves and the have-nots as the material trappings of consumerism provide new means to social status for some Matsigenka.

Other serious impacts include the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among some Matsigenka. Syphilis appears to be present in at least one community at an unprecedented rate, a subject that neither the Camisea consortia nor the Peruvian state seems interested in acknowledging, still less addressing. One unofficial report that I heard was that 35 percent of pupils at a Matsigenka high school had tested positive for syphilis. Although the route of this disease into the communities is not clear, the timing strongly suggests that it is related to the increased contact between the Matsigenka and outsiders as a result, direct or indirect, of the gas project. One possibility is that the itinerant traders, increasingly attracted by the greater purchasing power of some Matsigenka, may have brought in the disease by exchanging Western products for sex with Matsigenka women lacking the monetary means to purchase them. Another route could be the female sex workers who have come from outside the Urubamba to service consortia employees, including Matsigenka males.

Whatever the route, the Matsigenka are now facing a grave public health crisis involving a range of issues including STDs, malnutrition, a loss of cultural identity with deep and complex implications for the collective sense of wellbeing, and alcoholism. Yet the disturbing plight of the Matsigenka is largely unknown and disregarded in the two major markets for the hydrocarbons extracted so destructively from their ancestral lands: Lima and the US West Coast. Without more awareness in these markets, the gas consortia are unlikely to change their practices, and the Matsigenka are likely to continue to suffer.