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Peru tribes reach out-of-court settlement over oil contamination

Friday Mar 6, 2015

New Zealand Herald


Indigenous communities in the northern Amazon have reached a confidential out-of-court settlement over oil contamination. Photo / Bloomberg.

Indigenous communities that sued Occidental Petroleum over contamination in Peru's northern Amazon have reached an out-of-court settlement in which the U.S.-based oil company will pay them an undisclosed sum.

The amount is confidential, under a settlement that was reached in 2013 in Los Angeles federal court but not announced until Thursday.

The money is to fund community development projects.

The case was the first of its kind involving oil drilling in South America to advance in U.S. courts, said attorney Marco Simons of EarthRights International, which represented the plaintiffs.

The case was initially dismissed in 2008, with the lower-court judge ruling it should be heard in Peru instead.

The plaintiffs successfully appealed, however, and the U.S. Supreme Court let the 9th Circuit Court's decision stand.

An Achuar leader, Adolfina Garcia, told reporters on Thursday that the group could not have received a fair trial in Peru.

"We don't have any faith in Peru. There is a lot of corruption," she said.

Occidental, which was headquartered in California but moved to Texas, confirmed the settlement in a brief emailed statement but did not answer questions including whether it acknowledged responsibility for environmental damage.

The contamination occurred in the Corrientes river basin near Ecuador in a lot spanning more than 1 million acres (400,000 hectares) of virgin rainforest where Occidental drilled more than 150 wells after signing a 1971 contract with Peru's government, according to EarthRights International.

In 2001, Occidental turned over the operation to Argentina's Pluspetrol, which in 2012 and 2013 were fined a total of $17 million for contaminating the region.

Peru's government declared an emergency in 2013 over the contamination but local Achuar communities complain that the government has done nothing to clean up the contamination.

They have mounted protests in recent weeks, occupying Pluspetrol facilities

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11412923