The Vanishing Forest
The Peruvian Amazon stands as tragic evidence of humanity’s insatiable greed. In just six decades of colonization and “development,” what was once an unparalleled paradise has turned into a terrifying landscape. Fish are scarce, animals are fleeing, the polluting threat of oil extraction is spreading, and deforestation is advancing at a relentless pace.
Wood waste piled up at a sawmill on the banks of the Ucayali River, Peru.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 150 of Cáñamo magazine, June 2010.
Old Indigenous people don’t like to speak of the past. When they do, their imagination conjures up those enormous fish they used to catch with ease, the nearby game, and trees of the finest wood, all just minutes from their homes. When they think of the past, they think of abundance and peace. “There are no more fish now. Everything costs money,” laments Bernardo Agustín, 68 years old, resident of the Indigenous community of San Francisco, on the shores of Lake Yarinacocha. “Now there are a lot of Peruvians. There used to be few people.”
It was the year 1943 when everything changed forever. That was when the first milestone in the development of the Peruvian jungle occurred: the highway that, for the first time, connected the great Ucayali River—the main source of the Amazon, the artery of the Peruvian jungle—with the city of Lima. That’s how the small village called Pucallpa became the timber hub of Peru. And today…
Today the Peruvian Amazon is a lament. It is the lament of the old Indigenous people. It is the lament of the fallen trees and animals that have supported this galloping demographic growth, which has brought this natural world to the brink of collapse. Polluted rivers, uncontrolled logging, large-scale agricultural projects, colonization…
Andrés Castillo is one of the thousands of Peruvians who, from other regions of the country, arrived in the jungle in recent decades. An agroforestry engineer and researcher at the National Intercultural University of the Amazon, his experience makes him “pessimistic” about reversing this fierce destructive process. He recalls when he began working in the mid-1990s in the Alexander Von Humboldt National Forest, a protected area that then covered 640,000 hectares. Ten years later, illegal colonization had turned half of that area into agricultural land. “It’s done out of necessity, due to the social problem that population growth and migration pressure represent; but it’s misuse. Amazonian soils are not suitable for agriculture. In the first year, they plant rice, corn, cassava, banana; this lasts for two years, and then they abandon it and look for another site, and in a period of five or ten years they return to the first one, but that soil, the more it is used, the more it deteriorates. Regeneration becomes increasingly difficult because the forest is farther and farther away and the seeds no longer arrive easily.”
The ravaged territory of the Shipibo community of San Francisco de Yarinacocha, in the Peruvian Amazon.
MORE WOOD
Logging, the main economic activity in the region, is another driving force of destruction. A boat trip along any of the large or medium rivers of the Peruvian Amazon reveals devastated shores; the traveler won’t see a hundred meters of primary forest along the banks. Cedar and mahogany, species once abundant and prized for their durability and workability, have disappeared.
“You can find mahogany on the border with Brazil,” explains Mauro Scavino, manager of the Association of Timber Producers of Ucayali. “But it’s difficult because when logging took place fifty years ago, the only things extracted were mahogany and cedar. They’re gone. Now, to extract them, you need to build a lot of roads, make big investments.” Roads that stretch eighty kilometers into the interior of the jungle, with the tremendous impact they cause. Although Scavino admits that the forest is “clearly receding,” he defends his sector: “We haven’t done much to the forest, but it’s the loggers people see, because we’re the ones bringing out the wood. But people don’t see the destruction caused by migratory agriculture and cattle ranching.” He also has plans: “There’s wood in the forest that’s mature and is rotting. We need a serious study to determine how to extract more of that wood; otherwise, it will be wasted—neither industry nor the state will benefit.”
But the ancestral inhabitants of the region have their own perspective: “The loggers come in to cut down trees and the animals get scared and flee far away,” explains Margot Ramírez, Indigenous councilor of the regional government of Ucayali. “The hunter no longer finds his prey. The fisherman no longer finds fish. The pollution… The land is tired because there are no more trees, and the sun hits the ground directly and kills all the nutrients in the soil. It’s a critical situation.”
In many cases, Indigenous people themselves have actively participated in this process of deforestation. Becoming increasingly involved in the global market economy, their virtually only source of income is the sale of their natural resources (wood, fish, game). Money has become an inescapable necessity.
A boat loaded with fine wood, at the tri-border of Colombia, Brazil, and Peru, about to depart for Iquitos.
Long silent witnesses to this ruthless exploitation, Indigenous peoples are now managing to make their voices heard in government institutions. Their struggle is, above all, to regain control of their territory and establish a new model for the use of natural resources. “Fifty years ago, Indigenous people had access to a vast territory,” Ramírez continues. “There was practically no colonization. Even though we didn’t have land titles, we were the owners: we lived, inhabited, hunted, and produced.”
Although around twelve million hectares have been titled in favor of native communities in Peru (a figure representing about fifteen percent of the Amazon's total area), today the territory is fragmented and hemmed in by settler settlements, cattle ranches, and logging operations. Added to this are other problems inherent to the industrial way of life: garbage, waste, chemical products. “Native communities that live along the riverbanks drink untreated water. Children get diarrhea, intestinal infections, fevers, and some die. There was no contamination before. Nowadays, all waste, plastics, and poisons are dumped into the water.”
The pristine nature of Ramírez’s ancestors, which once gave rise to a society of abundance—without money, without chiefs, without accumulation—is a distant memory. The plundering and alienation of their territory is sparking, more than ever, a desire for self-determination and independence among the Shipibo people. For the first time in history, a congress brought together Shipibo leaders from all communities in Pucallpa, aiming to take the first step toward establishing an Indigenous government that will fight for self-determination and sovereignty over ancestral lands—something that, certainly, is not part of Peruvian President Alan García’s agenda.
First Interregional Congress of the Shipibo-Konibo People, where the need to achieve self-determination was discussed.
IT'S DEVELOPMENT
Although Peru is automatically associated with the Andes, the truth is that it is fundamentally an Amazonian country: 62% of its territory is rainforest—equivalent to 74 million hectares (an area the size of Spain and Italy combined). Given its very low population density, the jungle has become the target of the latest wave of pro-development policies.
Peruvian President Alan García does not appear very sympathetic toward a lifestyle based on self-sufficiency. Although in his first term in office (1985–1990) he claimed to be a social democrat, in this second term he has embraced neoliberalism (perhaps he underwent a metamorphosis during his stay in Paris, where he fled from the Peruvian justice system that accused him of bribery and illicit enrichment): in his speeches, industrial development, macroeconomic considerations, and foreign investment take precedence. To this end, he has signed a free trade agreement with the United States that effectively amounts to the sale of the country’s lands and resources.
The Amazon plays a central role in his plans: “There are millions of hectares of timberland lying idle. Timber forestry can be developed, but for that, ownership of five, ten, or twenty thousand hectares is required, since there’s no long-term, high-tech investment on smaller plots.” García envisions the construction of large hydroelectric plants to be undertaken by “major private or international capital, which requires very long-term security in order to invest billions and recover their investments.”
And of course, there is oil. Alan García’s government has granted large multinational corporations rights to 70% of the rainforest to exploit the oil beneath it. But this activity is demonstrably harmful to the environment, as is well known in the Corrientes River basin, where the Achuar people have been witnessing a dramatic process of environmental degradation—and, consequently, of their health—for the past four decades.
A young Achuar hunter next to an abandoned oil well in the Corrientes River basin.
“Before oil arrived, our territory was vast, clean, free, and healthy. Now it is sick, and that is why we are all sick—people, animals, and plants. When we fall ill, we can’t find a cure in nature, because nature itself is also ill.” The sentiment of the Achuar people is summed up in the words of this elder, whose blood—like that of two-thirds of the population in the Corrientes River basin—shows levels of cadmium and lead above biological tolerance. For 35 years, this remote area of the Peruvian Amazon has endured oil spills and discharges of production waters, which are highly polluting. Faced with worsening living conditions and the inaction of those responsible, on October 11, 2006, hundreds of Indigenous people occupied the facilities of the Argentine company Pluspetrol and halted the extraction of fifty thousand barrels of oil per day. Only then did the company, regional government, and national government—who receive substantial income from taxes—agree to negotiate, resulting in the historic Dorissa Accord. The agreement promised investments of twelve million euros in health and development, guaranteed fifteen million for environmental remediation, and required the reinjection of production waters into the subsoil.
However, as Indigenous organizations have repeatedly denounced, the promised investments have not materialized, and the spills continue. Something even more serious had to happen for Legislative Decree 1090—drafted by García’s government to allow transnationals to purchase forest lands, that is, primary forest or virgin jungle, for agricultural use—to be repealed. The decree had sparked months of Indigenous mobilizations without success until, on June 5 of last year, the Bagua clashes took place. Around twenty police officers and a dozen Awajún Indigenous people were killed in an episode that shocked the nation and cornered García politically. The law was withdrawn. Now the country is trying to find an answer to this puzzle. Meanwhile, the industrious human being—the ultimate predator of the jungle—continues pushing deeper into the rainforest.
