Thaís Brianezi
Reporter - Agência Brasil

Manaus - Indians from Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia accuse Petrobras of polluting the environment and disorganizing their way by engaging in the extraction, refining, and transport of petroleum close to their lands. "All the peoples who live in areas where petroleum companies are active bear the same witness, and it is never positive," said Antenor Karitiano, an indigenous leader from the state of Rondônia. "They mention the harm done to the rivers and the pollution of forests and croplands."

Kantiano is the president of the Indigenous Culture Center, a civil society organization that seeks to valorize the culture of the 38 ethnic groups that live in Rondônia. Last December, in Quito, Ecuador, he participated in the Pan-Amazon Coordination Encounter, together with around 30 Ecuadorean Indians and representatives from Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. The event was sponsored by three non-governmental organizations - Oilwatch, Action Aid, and the Brazilian Environmental Justice Network - for the purpose of bringing together Indians who are victims of socio-environmental violence committed by the oil industry.

In the meeting's final report, Petrobras is named as one of the companies that present the greatest threat to Indians in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. The most frequent complaints to which the document refers have to do with soil and water contamination.

One of the organizers of the meeting was Julianna Malerba, a technical worker at the Federation of Social and Educational Assistance Institutions (FASE), headquarters to the Brazilian Environmental Justice Network, which was founded in 2001 and currently congregates around 80 organizations.

Malerba informed that the group visited rural communities made up of farmers and Quechua Indians in areas where the Spanish company, Repsol, and the Ecuadorean company, Petro Ecuador, are active. "The people we visited no longer bathed in the river, because of oil spills. They had to buy water for the community," Karitiano reports.

Translation: David Silberstein