Using technology, indigenous monitors in the Amazon combat environmental crime

Photo caption: At least once per month, more than 60 indigenous environmental monitors from the Achuar, Kichwa and Quechua communities traverse their territories to identify any new or old damage caused by almost 50 years of oil exploitation. Image by Vanessa Romo Espinoza. Article by Vanessa Romo on 30 June 2020 | Translated by Sarah Engel.

• For more than 10 years, Amazonian indigenous communities in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia have used technology to record environmental crimes, gather evidence, and file complaints with authorities in their countries.

• Prosecutors in these countries attempt to verify complaints, but without coordinated logistics, monitoring work done by communities is not always accepted by government entities.

• Despite this, a number of communities have used technology to win important verdicts against oil companies, while others have successfully compelled governments to evict invaders from their territories.

 

In 2006, when the first large environmental monitoring project began in the Peruvian Amazon, its objective was not to uncover new environmental crimes in the forest. Instead, the project was aimed at documenting crimes that had affected the communities living there for decades. Martí Orta-Martínez, a biologist and researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam, was involved in the initial stages of this project. The monitoring involved the use of very basic GPS equipment along the Corrientes River.

The areas surrounding the Corrientes, Tigre and Pastaza rivers are important to the indigenous Achuar, Quechua and Kichwa communities. In 1971, an area of land here was leased to oil companies, and in 2000, members of these indigenous communities began to report contamination of their main sources of water. However, according to Orta-Martínez, these complaints were easily countered by data offered by the oil company Pluspetrol. “The indigenous people’s discourse had no credibility in the meetings with the state,” he says. […]

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