DTourists held by protesting villagers in the Peruvian Amazon are free again. “It has been confirmed to me that the ships can return to the ports from which they left,” Peru’s Minister of Foreign Trade and Tourism, Roberto Sánchez, said on Friday. Holidaymakers would now be taken downstream to Nauta near the mouth of the Amazon, Energy Minister Alessandra Herrera Jara said.
In protest against the government’s inaction after an oil leak, the villagers had stopped several ships with a total of around 150 people on board on the Marañón River since Thursday and arrested the passengers. Among them was a ship with around 70 tourists from Germany and abroad, including a German vacationer on board, as a spokeswoman for the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin announced. Tourists from the USA, Spain, France, Great Britain and Switzerland should also be on the ship.
Understanding of radical measures
“Respect for life must come first. We will allow people to be taken to their destinations on the ship,” Mayor Watson Trujillo Acosta said on radio station RPP. The tourists understood why the villagers took the radical measure. “They recognize what we do and that helps us. We see them as allies because they see the reality we live in,” Trujillo Acosta said.
By arresting the vacationers, the villagers wanted to persuade the government to do something about an oil spill in the region. Most recently, oil had repeatedly leaked from a pipeline belonging to the energy company Petroperú and had polluted the Marañón river.
Petroperú announced that the pipeline had been deliberately damaged on several occasions. More than 50 cases of damage have been registered since December last year. According to its own statements, the company took care of cleaning up the affected areas and supplied the residents with drinking water and food.
“Since September, the districts hit by the oil spill have been asking to be declared an emergency area so that their needs can be attended to,” said Abel Chiroque, representative of the state ombudsman for the region. “These incidents should be investigated by the police and prosecutors.”