Péas Péas Ayui, Interview with an Achuar leader http://amazonwatch.org/news/2011/0504-peas-peas-ayui-interview-with-an-achuar-leader

During a recent visit to Peru, Amazon Watch Peru Program Coordinator Gregor MacLennan spoke to Péas Péas Ayui, the recently-elected president of FENAP. FENAP is the largest Achuar organization in Peru composed of 48 communities from the Pastaza and Morona river basins in the northern Peruvian Amazon. The FENAP communities live, hunt and fish in a territory that spans the majority of Oil Block 64, which Canadian oil company Talisman Energy is currently drilling in search of oil. Péas Péas explains the Achuar’s opposition to oil drilling in their land: Why do the Achuar people reject oil drilling in their territory? 

We have seen how oil drilling causes contamination and foments divisions between families, it doesn’t bring development. The Achuar people have chosen to defend our territory so that our children and future generations can live peacefully on our lands. That future is what the Achuar people have been fighting for for many years as oil companies try to drill on our land. Talisman Energy says that they only operate with the agreement of communities affected by their operation.

The company has not consulted any of the Achuar people on the Huitoyacu, Manchari or Huasaga river basins, and they do not have any agreement with us that they can enter Block 64 and our ancestral territory. But Talisman Energy says that it is not operating in your territory, and it has agreements where it is working.This is not true, and they say this without even consulting us. Talisman is working in a place that is very important for the communities on the Huitoyacu River and it belongs to them. We have hunting camps there and it is an important watershed, source of many rivers that run through our territory. Oil exploration in this area risks contaminating the whole river basin.