by Raymond Alexander Kukkee

Created on: January 29, 2008

Be Advised; North Americans may not appreciate hearing the truth.

Multinational oil companies are racing south to exploit delicate environments in countries such as Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia in the endless search for oil.
Hunt Oil is an American corporation that is operating the Camisea Gas project (*1) in the Amazon jungles of Peru with other multinational partners.

The quiet, virtually unknown indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon jungles have been beguiled by words, promises and barter. Their governments, led as sheep to the slaughter, have "licensed" their oil reserves to multinational corporations and are being exploited at unbelievable cost to the lives of their people and the environment.

The once pristine native river is now a fouled highway used for the transportation of construction goods, rusty steel pipe, and foreign workers instead of being the sole source of life, food and fish it has been for millennia.

The "glorious" allure of westernized culture, tin-roofed schools, television, the internet and temporary slave-labour jobs in exchange for environmental mayhem, and not one, not two, but no fewer than six major ruptures of the Camisea River gas pipeline since 2001 -is proving to be less than acceptable barter.
There is little doubt that a pipeline built in a hurry to exploit the huge gas reserves, using minimal standards, questionable testing, and procedures that would not be allowed for similar construction in the continental United States of America, will continue to fail in the future.

With a questionable record of several disastrous failures to date, it is virtually guaranteed to fail repeatedly in the future, but at what cost?

What will happen deep in the jungles of Peru when Hunt Oil finishes exploiting the gas and oil reserves must inevitably be distasteful, hidden, and bear much similarity to the typical North American pattern of "moving on", in which corporations leave resource-stripped sites as permanent environmental disasters.

Ecological damage, garbage, operational waste, and all repercussions thereof are left to the indigenous populations to deal with. The future of the local populations is negatively changed and affected forever but is ignored as "out of sight and out of mind".

"Out of Sight" is not out of mind merely because the projects are "imagined to be beyond criticism" deep in the dense rain forests of Peru.
By any stretch of corporate imagination or wishful thinking, a remote location is not justification for lack of environmental

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