Amazon Indians Say Occidental Petroleum Corp. Should Clean Up Oil Waste

LOS ANGELES, December 6, 2006 -- Occidental Petroleum Corp. must take responsibility for cleaning up environmental toxic waste created by 30 years of drilling in the Peruvian rain forest even though it is ending oil exploration there, a group of Amazon Indians and their supporters said Wednesday.

"Occidental Petroleum still should be held responsible for the toxic legacy that they have left in the Peruvian Amazon.... We want an environmental audit done of the area where Oxy had its operations," Leila Salazar-Lopez of the group Amazon Watch said.

Los Angeles-based Occidental pumped oil in Peru's northern jungle until 1999, when its operations were bought by the Argentine-run company Pluspetrol.

In October, that company signed an agreement with the Peruvian government to stop dumping contaminated oil waste by July 2008 after two weeks of protests by an Indian group, the Native Federation of the Corrientes River, shut down jungle operations.

However, San Francisco-based Amazon Watch and some members of the Achuar people who live in the area were in town to argue Occidental should contribute to cleanup efforts.

"They need to be held accountable," Salazar-Lopez said.

Government health studies have found that Achuar Indians in the zone suffer high blood concentrations of cadmium and lead - a problem that Peruvian officials have said goes back to the 1970s when Occidental operated in the region.

Occidental spokesman Larry Meriage said the responsibility for cleanup passed to the new owners of the drilling operations.

"When we sold that operation to Pluspetrol, they assumed all liabilities," he said.

"We don't know what they've been doing in the past eight years," he added.

Meriage said those blaming Occidental had ignored the "sub-par operations of the domestic companies that were operating in the region" at the same time.

Occidental has no current oil production in Peru. It had the rights to exploration on three blocks of land and had drilled two exploratory wells but has decided to end those operations, Meriage said.

The decision has been in the works for "a number of months," Meriage said, describing it as a "mundane" business move.

Meriage denied that the company is leaving Peru because of pressure from indigenous groups.

"We had the community's OK" to drill in the area, he said.

Meriage declined to speculate on whether the company might resume exploration elsewhere in Peru at a later date.

"This decision applies to these three blocks," he said. "What the future will hold, I can't tell."

An Achuar representative applauded Occidental's decision.

"We see this as a respect for life, a respect for nature," Jorge Fachin said through a Spanish translator. "But we also realize that they have pending cleanup of the contamination that they also left."

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