At a press conference on May 4, Indigenous communities from the Peruvian Amazon told Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) to clean up its toxic waste from their tropical rainforest or face a major lawsuit. The ultimatum, on the eve of the Westwood-based oil major’s annual general meeting for shareholders, came as a new technical report revealed that 30 years of Oxy’s polluting had left indigenous Achuar children with illegal concentrations of lead and cadmium in their blood, at levels known to cause permanent developmental problems.

The Achuar nation celebrated a historic indigenous triumph yesterday over the oil industry after blockading Peru’s largest oil facility in protest over the devastating toxic contamination of their Amazonian rainforest homeland.  More than 800 Achuar elders, women, and children joined the peaceful blockade, which lasted nearly two weeks, shutting down power to most of the region’s oil production facilities and blocking airport, river, and road access to the region. The protest came after two years of failed talks with Peruvian government officials over the daily discharge of more than one million barrels of “formation waters,” an untreated toxic by-product of the oil drilling process, directly into the rainforest.

At a workshop organized by ORAU, the regional indigenous federation for the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon, and OIRA, the indigenous organization for the Atalaya area within the Ucayali, the leaders discussed the pending oil drilling by Repsol and its partner, US-based Burlington Resources. Repsol has the oil concessions to some 1.5 million hectares of indigenous land, mostly in Amazonian rainforest, while Burlington is the minority partner in those concessions, known as Block 57 and Block 90.