On an iron grill, six catfish are almost ready to eat. Hilda Rodríguez crouches to move the firewood and stoke the fire. She flips over the inguiris — green bananas from the Amazon— that she is roasting next to a boiling pot of eggs. The six catfish, blackish and with thin tails, are the only fish that Rodríguez’s brother has been able to catch on the Cachiyacu Creek that morning. This will be their family’s lunch. They are all part of the Shipibo-Conibo Indigenous community, and on this hot afternoon in March, they have gathered in the native community of Canaán de Cachiyacu in the Loreto region in Peru’s eastern jungle.
“Have you tried the roast catfish?” they ask me.
“Yes, of course,” I answer.
“Before, the smell of oil was stronger when we’d cook it. Now, not so much,” says Rodríguez as she walks across the plank floor of her brother’s house.
Rodríguez’s brother takes one bite of his fish, frowns, and says that the taste of metal has not completely disappeared either. The same is true of the sábalos (Elacatinus prochilos), bocachicos (Prochilodus magdalenae), and every other food prepared using water from the creek.
A seven-hour speedboat trip on the Ucayali River separates the city of Pucallpa (in Ucayali) and the district of Contamana (in Loreto). To reach Canaán de Cachiyacu from the port in Contamana, it takes 25 minutes in a motorboat on the same river. The homes of about 150 Shipibo-Conibo families of artisans, fishermen, and farmers begin on the shores the Ucayali River and spread across an enormous forested hill. These wooden homes have electricity 24 hours a day, but no drinking water. This is why community members have always been using water from the Cachiyacu Creek, a tributary of the Ucayali River that crosses through this Shipibo community. Although this water has been their source of life, it has also damaged them.
According to the community members, the crude oil that overflowed during drilling in Block 31-B flowed into the town through the Cachiyacu Creek. The effects of this contamination, they say, have touched the lives of over 1,000 Shipibo-Conibo people so far.