For a few dollars they stained oil and finished their lives

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What is more mortal: jungle or oil?In an area where seven out of ten families are poor and where women and children get sick from malnutrition, there were those who saw in an oil spill in the jungle an opportunity to improve their lives.

If God could grant him a desire, Osman Cuñachí, child Awajún, would ask for a smartphone.Or a football ball.Or change their plastic flip flops for phosphorescent shoes.Although, if you think better, I would ask for a beautiful cement and brick house like the ones you once saw in Lima, more storm -resistant than the wooden and roof of leaves that abound in Nazareth.That is why Osman, a member of the most numerous ethnicity of the northern jungle of Peru, wants to move to the capital to study architecture, have a wife and a single child, because he knows that raising three or four or five, as usual in his village, supposes hungry and need.That has told him Dad, a retired teacher who feeds five mouths with his monthly pension of 400 soles (105 euros): not half of a minimum salary.The old man prefers that Osman be a chemical engineer to know everything about oil and so better than him.Because since a huge broken pipe spilled about 500.000 liters of this fuel here, in this piece of humid and mountainous forest of Amazon.Although now they are poisoned.

'Zero zone' of Chiriaco's spill.The workers took almost a month to seal the pipeline, installed 42 years ago.Chiriaco, Peru, February 2016.Omar Lucas

It is a rainy afternoon of June 2016, six months after it bathed in an oil full of oil, and Osman Cuñachí, eleven years, skinny like a cable, spiderman faded shirt, frown and feels strange to see his see hisface in a huge poster outside the communal house.It is the place where the Awajún usually discuss important issues about the life of the village: choose an authority, build a path, punish a thief.The sign announces a health campaign, carried by the National Human Rights Coordinator, to evaluate twenty -five children who claim to be sick for having joined oil in exchange for money.In the image, Osman, meter and a half of height, has stained black, arms, feet, the red shirt that carries the word Peru in white letters.The child smiles while loading a dirty bucket.

"They are very ugly," says a friend of standing hair, ball under his arm, Barça shirt, and Osman covers his face with his hands.

The photo that ashamed and that the country and the international press.000 inhabitants, its brown river and millions of skyscraper trees, to star in "the worst ecological disaster of the last decade".

The afternoon in which it was stained with oil, Osman Cuñachí practiced free throws with a friend when two Petroperú engineers, the most profitable state company in the country, arrived in Nazareth in a 4x4 white truck.From early an acid steam expanded from the banks of the Chiriaco River and sneaked into the wooden cabins like an invisible gasoline cloud.A fissure of eleven centimeters in a deteriorated section of the Norperuano pipeline - a steel snake of more than 800 kilometers that transports the oil of the jungle to the coast - had spilled in a creek close enough to fill almost half average Olympic pool.Natives hired by Petroperú improvised a barrier of trunks and plastic canvases.He contained the oil for a few days, but no one calculated that the violence of a storm during the early morning would overflow the crude downstream and spread it as a black and oily phlegm that swallowed insects, tree roots, canoes, banana crops, cocoa, cocoaand peanut.The animals fled from the current, the mothers lamented with their ruined farms.Fish bodies floated over dark water.Thirteen oil spills - almost one per month - took place in the Peruvian jungle in 2016 due to that steel snake that bleed.Nazareth would be the first link in a strip chain.

In his sixth grade science book, Osman Cuñachí had read that oil is a prehistoric substance, made of the same matter as dinosaur fossils.And in some episode of Tom and Jerry he had seen him sprout from the depths of the earth as a black and unstoppable stream that made the lucky to find him that he found him.He just knew that oil was worth money on the afternoon of the spill, when Petroperú engineers arrived in their SUV to announce families that would pay those who help collect the river fuel.If a banana farmer won about 20 soles (5.30 euros), for collecting raw in a bucket, he could win up to seven times more: twice the salary of a doctor from the Amazonas region.In an area where seven out of ten people are poor, where there is no drinking water or toilets, where women get sick from chronic malnutrition, where it is more frequent than a child under five dies of malaria than by the bite ofA viper, where cold windows and unexpected droughts make it harder.The engineers did not warn that it would be dangerous;They did not give special costumes or said who could do it.That afternoon there were families that by necessity went to the Chiriaco River to collect all possible oil.

When Osman Cuñachí and his three brothers arrived at the polluted river, children, pregnant mothers, grandmothers and boys submerged in the water or mounted in canoes, gathering oil in buckets and plastic bottles.The same river where they used to bathe and build mud castles on their banks, where they had learned to swim and fish Zungaros and Boquichicos, now emanated a metal smell that gave them nausea.The throat chopped.The eyes cried.Roycer, his four -year -old brother, gave up first.Then Omar, seven, and Naith, his fourteen sister.Submerged in the current, Osman decided to stay until he filled his bucket, ignoring that that flammable liquid that stuck to his hands is the one that allows cities to work.

Fotos:Omar Lucas/Revista5W

Many barely pay attention to oil, except for the acre smell that floats at the service station when we fill the car tank with diesel car.But oil is not something that we can easily separate from us, just lengthening the arm to remove the hose from the supplier and cover our nose.Thanks to oil and industries derived from it, during the last century we have built our life system based on its possession.Heat our buildings and operate our machines and vehicles - let's think in a televisions factory or the plane we take to go on vacation - consume 84% of the oil that is extracted annually in the world.The remaining 16% transforms into inputs to make millions of things.Without black gold - and that modern alchemy called petrochemical - it would be impossible asphalted, neither the tires, nor the suitcase with wheels, nor the perfumes, nor the lipstick, nor the sunglasses, nor the agricultural fertilizers, nor the oral rinse, nor the moisturizing cream, nor the dental prostheses, nor the balls nor the balls of football, neither the disposable shaving, nor the nylon socks, nor the Teflon pots, nor the hair gel, nor the nail polish, nor the solar blocker, nor the umbrella, nor the garbage bags, nor the heart valves, neither aspirin, nor drugs for cancer, nor food preservatives, nor the polystyrene cups, nor the sexual lubricant, nor the vitamins in capsules, nor the optical fiber, nor the cement, nor the brush of teeth, neither shampoo, nor bath curtains, nor m Angueras, neither laptop computers, neither photographic paper, nor soap, nor the hair dye, nor the pens, nor the ink of the books, nor the x -ray machines, nor the bottles of mineral water, nor the Artificial flowers, neither tablecloth Neither the bathtubs, nor the toilet lid, nor the false eyelashes, nor the buttons of the shirt, nor the toilet paper, nor the condoms, nor almost everything that is made of plastic: from pieces of spacecraft to a Barbie; From Barça's shirts to any of the billions of smartphones that are sold in the world, and that Osman Cuñachí, Awajún boy, planned to buy with the money that Petroperú engineers had promised him for his oil bucket.

It was night when Osman and his brothers returned to their wooden cabin.Seeing them, mom scolded them for having left without permission.They tried to remove the oil from the body with soap and water, but they could not.They used dishwasher and it was not.The face, arms and legs with a broom and detergent for clothing were restrained.But nothing.Until a cousin told them to be cleaned with motorcycle gasoline.That night Osman could not sleep well for the itching and the burning of so much having rubbed the body.The next morning, Petroperú engineers returned to Nazareth in their 4x4.The air was still stinking to gasoline.About thirty natives waited with their buckets full of oil next to the road.They had been offered 150 soles (almost 40 euros) for each container.But in the end, and despite the claims of the people, the engineers only paid about 20 soles (5.27 euros).Osman Cuñachí remembers that an engineer asked his age, scored his name in a notebook and paid 2 soles (52 euro cents) for the bucket he had gathered: the container had more water than oil, the engineer told him.Osman, whose name means "who is docile as a pigeon", did not protect like other children.When he returned home, he gave his mother a coin and with the other he left with his friends to buy a Pepsi and some animals cookies.

And one day, suddenly, you are a child turned into news.In something that interests everyone and what is almost known about.Newspapers, television channels and Comitives of Oenegés travel 23 hours by road from Lima, cross the Andes, raffle vertiginous curves and hot valleys flanked by vegetation walls until reaching Nazareth, the indigenous community where you were born.They want to meet you.They look at you, they ask you: Did you feel fear?How did you immerse yourself in the river?Where is your oil stained clothes?Can you show it to me?They seem to compete with each other to see who tells something more terrible, knowing that these tragedies interest, above all, those who have not lived them, who live in the cities addicted to plastic, relieved of not being you.Not being the oil stained with oil.

"My dad says that people only come here when ugly things happen," says Osman Cuñachí as he looks at the photo of the health campaign in his village, ".I want you to see me covering penalties, I'm good at that, I don't want you to be sorry.

It's six in the afternoon in Nazareth.A thick rain filters through the tin roof of the communal house and leaves puddles on the cement floor.As there is no electric light, the gloom covers everything inside the premises where the doctor Fernando Osores serves twenty -five children who collected oil.While parents sign authorizations, their children go to a tent.Lima's doctor efforts to collect blood and urine samples and cut a strand of hair to each child, which will then send a laboratory in Quebec, Canada, where everything will be analyzed.According to health laws, doctors of the Peruvian State had to do this work the day after the spill.Six months have passed - then more than a year will spend - and nothing."Maybe they are very busy," the doctor smiles with sarcasm.Suddenly a squalid child flees from the office, horrified by the needles.His dad shouts something in Awajún and runs to look for him.The doctor, soaked in sweat, pray that someone alumn him with the cell phone flashlight to continue his job.

Osman Cuñachí is not one of the boys waiting.A few meters from there, Jaime Cuñachí, Osman's father, spends the day sitting on a wooden bank, weaving a fishing network.Two years ago he lost his right leg due to an infection worsened by diabetes, a common disease among Awajún due to their poor diet.

"I don't have a leg, but good memory," Mr. Cuñachí says as he frightens the mosquitoes of the face with a dirty cloth.

He says that the court where his son now plays is an old cemetery of machines and pipes used in the late 1960s to build the Norperuano pipeline, the steel snake, one of the greatest engineering works in the history of Peru.The military dictatorship of General Juan Velasco Alvarado invested about 1.000 million dollars and the work of 2.000 men to carry out the project that would make Peru a first world country.

In Nazareth, some elders Awajún knew the oil from past times.Respected by their warrior character - the first chroniclers called them "head reducers" -, they were one of the many Amazonian nations that neither the Incas nor the Spanish soldiers could conquer.They remained isolated for centuries until the extractive industries and the Apach Muun, the white men, arrived with their giant machines to pierce the subsoil.

Mr. Cuñachí was a child who did not know Spanish when the pipeline arrived.Nazareth was then a handful of shots of sticks and dialing leaves between the forest and a brown river that rushed through a clay bed of huge and polished stones.The Awajún dressed in cotton brown robes and seed necklaces.They painted red face with Achiote.They took Ayahuasca to communicate with the jungle spirits.One day, engineers arrived with their families and built a camp to build a pipeline section.Mr. Cuñachí used to play with the children of those outsiders: white children.They exchanged papayas for toy carts, Cerbatanas for Jebe waves.I learned Spanish.When the construction of the pipeline began, military helicopters arrived every day carrying huge pipes.While the elder.When the works ended, the American company Williams, in charge of the construction, decided to bury all the remaining material under the football court where Osman and his friends now play, because it was cheaper than transferring it.One day the engineers left and a group of families left the mountain to settle in the abandoned camp, plagued with black ants who ate rats and scared away the vipers.There they founded their first school.Then the road, electric light, cable television, medical post and hundreds of native and outsiders attracted by that apparent prosperity would arrive.

Almost half a century later, Nazareth is a village of fishermen, farmers, retail merchants and motorcycle taxi drivers who make their life around the Chiriaco river.Right now, like any child awajún, Osman Cuñachí could be fishing or bathing there, but he can't.From the spill, the environmental authorities have banned these activities for the amount of lead and cadmium in the water and fish.Lead is a poison that, even at low levels of exposure, can affect the development of the brain in children and cause anemia, hypertension and irreversible effects on the central nervous system.Cadmium can damage the kidneys, bones and lungs, and cause cancer.

Awajún say that these toxic metals come from oil.Petroperú says that it is not true: oil has ridiculous amounts of those metals.Germán Velásquez, retirement commander of the police and business advisor, president of the company for those days, assured that they came from the drain and garbage - plastic boots, disposable diapers, used batteries, motor oil - that nearby towns throwOn the shores of the Chiriaco River.

"If someone there has the option of receiving some kind of economic compensation, he will say that oil makes him cry," Velásquez told me with a smile, ".I have investigated: For oil to contaminate you, you should have been put in a barrel of oil three or four days.I have bathed in the Chiriaco River and all good.

The official version, the business, is always optimistic.The one of science does not.

"Who says the oil is harmless, lies," the doctor Fernando Osores later told me as he took a break, after ten hours in a row attending the children of Nazareth.

Osores is an expert in environmental toxicology and tropical diseases.It has been dealing with pollution cases caused by mines and oil and oil companies in Peru for years.When a spill occurs - he says - millions of hydrocarbons molecules evaporate and expand rapidly as poisonous gases.It is enough for someone to breathe for a few minutes to suffer headaches, dizziness or discomfort in the abdomen.If someone is exposed to non -protection oil and for days, it is worse: allergies appear in the skin, throat irritation, breathing difficulties.Oil is a complex mixture of hundreds of hydrocarbons.Some of them, such as benzene and xylene, can damage the nervous system and over the years to cause cancer.Oil spilled in the current is another problem.This is divided into tiny drops that are mixed with mud particles and sediment in the river bed.Thus the chain reaction begins: contaminated particles feed bacteria.The bacteria to those hordes of tiny aquatic organisms called plankton.Plankton to fish.Fish to humans.When time passes, oil pollution is not seen with the naked eye.It has no smell or sound, it is incorporeal, as invisible atoms.The senses do not serve to perceive the damage.

The doctor Osores says that he can summarize all of the above in a phrase:

—We are facing a chemical disaster.

The last 150 years of global oil consumption are barely the present and the immediate past of a relationship as old as pre -Hispanic myths.Oil was discovered and used in many times and places, for practical, holiday, religious or magical purposes.In America the substance had at least two names with registered genealogy.The Aztecs called him Choppotli.The second name was born from the break eyes that existed on the north coast of Peru.The ancient Peruvians called those puddles of smelly pudding, lost in the confines of the desert, who went back to an era even older, at the age of the giants, characters that, according to the legend, had excavated those inexplicable wells.The historian Pablo Macera - study of the role of crude in colonial times - highlighted that superstitious vision of oil: mysterious substance, unknown, perhaps that is why evil.They called her "demon manure".

Today, several centuries and scientific wars and advances later, our oil dependence has reached such a scandalous dimension that it has become a topic of frequent debate between environmental and politicians.In 2007, during the World Energy Congress, it was announced that the Earth stores oil reserves for one or two more centuries."The world does not have to worry about the end of oil," said Saudi Aramco president, the world's largest oil company.

Despite all that optimism, the International Energy Agency, which monitors the energy reserves of the planet, has predicted: if the hunger for oil in the cities continues, the world will need the equivalent of six countries with the reserves of Saudi Arabia to cover thedemand around 2030.Fatih Birol, energy expert and executive director of the agency, implores: "We must abandon oil before he abandons us".

Peru is an example of this.It was the first country in Latin America to exploit oil commercially.In 1924, when Venezuela became an oil country, Peru was already the leader in the region;Today, Venezuela produces 3 million barrels per day, and Peru 1% of that amount.The oil available in Peru - which is extracted from the Amazon where the Awajún and other ethnicities live - is exhausted, but the population increases and with it, at full speed, fuel consumption.Peru is among the twenty "more addicted" countries to oil.And it is one of the three that will suffer more damages caused by global warming and the use of fossil fuels.

It is obvious to say that the multimillionaire oil industry is one of the most dirty that exist.The scientists insist: if for the second half of the 21st century countries do not change their energy sources for others less destructive to the planet, it is very likely that nature and the economic system collapse.

Reason goes beyond the ecological and is conditioned by the force of reality: the oil that supports us will end and we cannot do anything to avoid it.

"Maybe my children are sick.WE DO NOT KNOW"

Osman Cuñachí understands little environmental policy and has not listened to Mr. Birol, but he does know how difficult it is to get the oil from the body when you stain with him.Shortly after collecting the crude and getting it out of the skin with motorcycle gasoline, Osman passed out while marching in a school parade.His teacher told her parents that the child used to lie on the desk and slept in class.For days he had felt intense headaches and dizziness.I had rash in the arms and legs, and kept scratching.In those days social networks had viralized their photo stained with oil."The worst ecological disaster of the last decade," they said.Petroperú lamented what happened, but denied having hired children for that job.Osman's photo, however, was a test that sank Petroperú in the scandal.

One day two engineers of this company went to look at your home.With the authorization of their parents, they took Osman to a private clinic in Piura, a city on the north coast of the country, headquarters of the main refinery of Petroperú.They analyzed his blood, they took radiographs.They also took him to walk around the square, to eat grilled chicken, and they stayed at a beautiful hotel that had a computer where he could play zombies vs..Plants, one of your favorite video games.Week and a half later returned home with vitamins, a ointment for rash and a health certificate.The child said the medical part, he only had anemia.

Again in Nazareth, Osman looked for his friends, but they didn't want to play with him anymore.“Why does the company only serve you?We also gathered oil and nobody comes to look for us, ”he claimed..They have surely given you money ".Osman was sad several days.Until Yolanda, his mother, gave him some coins and he bought sweets for his friends.Thus they reamist.

Yolanda Yampis is about thirty years old, long black hair to the waist, and smiles every time he speaks, as if he were shame.Like most Awajún, Yampis's is an acute, rhythmic, contagious laugh - jijijiiiii - as if he sing or imitate the song of an unknown bird.He says that, during those days of the spill, the adults of Nazareth and other nearby communities left the farms to work in Petroperú.If a bananas farmer from the area earned $ 40 (34.4 euros) a week, for cleaning the oil river, it earned up to seven more times more.

Yolanda Yampis also worked.Petroperú engineers gave him a white plastic suit, an orange helmet, jebe boots (rubber) and a gauze mask, of those used by nurses.For a month, the contaminated earth was digging with a shovel.It started the remains of oil stained vegetation and kept them in bags.Thus won almost 4.000 soles (more than 1.000 euros), ten times the pension that her retired husband receives.With that he bought a refrigerator to sell soda and beers, school supplies for their four children, the tree trunk to build a quarter of their home and paid pawns that reaped the banana of their farm, almost half hectare.

"But the silver ends," she told me, the finite voice, the injured Castilian.

Yolanda was standing in the communal house with other parents, with her arms crossed.The laugh he had before had become a hard gesture with tight lips.He watched the doctor Osores nervous, who took blood samples to the youngest of his children.

"The spill gave me a chance, but why do you contaminate yourself?"Maybe my children are sick.Maybe me too.We do not know.

To join oil in a bucket, says his mother, Osman Cuñachí has sosks on his legs and arms.His brother Omar, the third of the four, suffers headaches and diarrhea.Like them, several Nazareth children began to feel discomfort after having collected the river oil.In an assembly convened a week after the spill, the community sent a statement to the President of the Republic and the Minister of Health claiming immediate care.It included a list with the names of the children who were sick after having collected oil.Only in that community were more than fifty.Petroperú donated tons of food and bottled water, ordered health campaigns to serve families.However, until January 2017, one year after the spill, no one in this piece of jungle had a medical certificate that prove that it had been contaminated by the contact with crude oil.The government never came to Nazareth to examine the health of families.

"It would see that the authorities are waiting for ten or twenty years to pass, until people die, so that they just come to see what happened," doctor Fernando Osores told me, while saving hair, blood and urine samples in boxeswith dry ice that would be sent by plane to a laboratory in Canada that same night.

These tests would be the first attempt to find out the level of pollution in the children of Nazareth.However, with the passing of the days what oil would affect would not only the health of the people;Also the thoughts of some.Especially from the moment in addition to fear and confusion, the money began to be around.

The damaged lands

Edith Guerrero, lover of bamboo and nutrition teacher, says he will never forget the time a Petroperú engineer tried to convince her that oil was good for the field.

She is standing in the rain, on the mouth of the ravine, where oil turned to the Chiriaco river.Until the day of the spill, Edith Guerrero had 800 bamboo seedlings here, grassing cows, plums and high laurels, and a clean creek where the natives Awajún also fished.But four months after the incident, its forty -hectare land was seen as if it had been razed by a dozen excavators.The highest trees were cut to make bridges.All their bamboo seedlings were torn in the soil cleaning process.He brought his cows to other neighboring pastures.All your rice planting plan was ruined.The water of the ravine, the one used for irrigation and drinking to its cattle, is contaminated.View from the sky, the ravine extends like a deep and oily scar in the middle of its domains.

"The natives are not the only ones affected," recalls the farmer of long legs, born in the Sierra de Cajamarca—.The workers started my bamboo without permission.They told me: "Don't worry, Petroperú pays".

Edith Guerrero says that, despite their claims, and unlike other farmers who were compensated, the company has not recognized its losses.One day in February went to Petroperú camp.But the engineer who attended her told her that she didn't know anything."Nor do you know where they are collecting oil?" He asked."Well, in the ravine and the gorge is from the state," replied the engineer.Guerrero left the camp and got on his motorcycle.Upon reaching his land, he shouted all the workers of the company.The next day she returned with her husband very early.They closed the way with barbed wires.When the workers arrived, she waited for them with a stick and branches of ortigas, long like whips.After a week, a Petroperú engineer visited her.He insisted that he signed a document where the company promised to pay all expenses, although there was no figure or date.

Now, on the ground, there are eight hundred cylinders with the oil collected from the ravine, covered with blue plastic tarps.Some men with orange boots and helmets work by collecting how little the oil is left.There is a pile of bars of land and contaminated weeds.Yellow plastic sleeves cross the channel and retain oil remains: oil films on the surface of the water.

Edith Guerrero recalls that when the environmental authorities came to see the damage, they collected samples of the soil contaminated with special gloves.They used masks because they said that the smell was toxic.It was not the first time they faced such a case.According to Osinergmin, the institution that controls energy companies, in the forty years of the Norperuano pipeline there were 61 spills: 70% of them for corrosion or lack of maintenance and 30% for alleged sabotages or robberies.

The disaster in Nazareth was followed by another twelve in the Peruvian jungle.The Minister of Environment came to denounce the fact: Petroperú continued pumping oil when it was prohibited to do so as long as it did not maintain the system."The pipeline is obsolete," criticized the national television minister.Days later, the president of Petroperú would present his resignation and a friendly balance of his management: the company had billed 5.000 million dollars in a year.In the report there was not a single line on spills.According to the expert opinion of the state office that supervises the pipeline, this has not received adequate maintenance since 1998.The company says that this is due to "austerity policies".That it is not convenient to change the entire duct because it would be very expensive.In such a scenario it is not unreasonable to think that another spill could happen.Everything is murky and it smells bad like the same oil.

The last time we saw each other, Edith Guerrero told me that Petroperú had called her on the phone to negotiate.The company needed to build a road that crossed its farm and thus be able to get the eight hundred barrels that are stored there.The natives of Yangunga, the Awajún community located in front of their lands, on the other shore of the river, tried to convince it: building the road would give them jobs, they could even sell their bananas in the city.But Edith Guerrero told them that he was not going to allow the road to pass through his land if Petroperú did not pay the 70s.000 soles (more than 18.000 euros) that he asks for everything he lost.

"Otherwise, I am able to throw the cylinders into the river, let's see if they understand these scoundrels!"

"And what did the last engineer who came to look for her told her?"-asked.

- "Don't you know, ma'am, that oil is fertilizer for your rice?".

"Look at me, I'm healthy!"

A native who lacks the left arm watches the Petroperú camp, near the inayo creek, where the spill occurred.This is a row of blue and green stores raised next to an asphalted road that leads to the center of Chiriaco, the main town.Within the tents there are operators consulting maps, a couple of engineers reviewing Excel files in their laptops, a make -up and boring doctor boiling heat in front of two electric fans to all power.It is the team that plan the cleaning of the spill.Most are not from there, they are people from Lima or other cities on the coast.

At the entrance, a huge red sign with white and capital letters warns: the hiring of minors prohibited.It is a measure of the company, they explain to me, to avoid the "talk" of the press.

—In Petroperú we do things well.

The Petroperú engineer who supervises the cleaning of the spill in Chiriaco reminds me of every twenty minutes not to cite his name in this story, because he fears to go unemployed.We travel in a van full of rice bags, beans, tuna cans and water bottles.They are donations from Petroperú for some schools in the communities that were supplied with the contaminated river waters.

It is a hot morning that causes a wet laziness, overwhelming.The engineer tells that they have done everything possible to leave everything as it was before, that the cleaning works are about to end.

—We have given work to more than 800 people, with a salary that never in their lives will find.

Sitting by my side, Yesenia Gonzales, the engineer's assistant, says it is true and tells me everything he has achieved working for Petroperú.Gonzales lives in Chiriaco, a town at ten minutes in Mototaxi de Nazareth.He was born in Piura, a city on the north coast of Peru, from which in recent decades men and women have arrived to work in the jungle.He is twenty -four years old, the slender body product of physical work and a smiling face where two black and distrustful eyes shine.

When the spill occurred, Gonzales lived in a rented room with her husband's bricklayer and her two small daughters.I worked in a juice post and earned ten soles (2.63 euros) for twelve hours of work.One day a friend told her that Petroperú was looking for workers to clean the spill.For ten days, she and her husband got up early to go to the Petroperú camp where half a hundred people, including natives and outsiders, were waiting for an opportunity.Now he has been working in the company for three months and has done everything: he has collected oil submerged in the river, has loaded bags with contaminated land, has cleaned stone by stone with water -under pressure hoses.For every work day, from seven in the morning to six in the afternoon, he wins 150 soles (almost 40 euros), and double on Sundays.Yesenia Gonzales wins more than a doctor in the area.

"No pay this way," he says, ".I am very grateful to Petroperú because working in the oil I could make my money.

Gonzales's enthusiasm reminds another older enthusiasm.When the Peruvian jungle imagined as the space where the promise of prosperity would be fulfilled thanks to the resource he hid in his guts.

The first time an oil well was exploited, the newspaper El Comercio on November 17, 1971 published on its cover: “five hundred workers who work in the Trompeteros [Loreto] region sang, danced and bathed with oil, snatched by thejoy of having made a finding of transcendental importance for the economy of our country ”.The president of Petroperú of that time, a general of the military dictatorship, swore: "The economic future of Peru is assured".

Since the mid -nineteenth century, with the bloody rise of rubber, the Peruvian jungle had not been so coveted.Indigenous societies had always produced everything they needed: they hunted, fished, collected, cultivated the land.They did not depend on the outside for their livelihood, and they could not access products that they did not produce.Years later, oil fever and the construction of the Norperuano pipeline caused a massive demand for labor in the jungle of Peru.With the salaries of the companies, the natives bought radios, shotguns, medicines.There were few who spent beer and whores.Entire native communities ceased to be self -sufficient to depend on the money earned in the oil companies.They moved to cities or camps in search of a better future.Some forgot their language and customs.In the city, they believed, they could be someone.

Four decades after that oil boom, while we walk the streets of Chiriaco, the sounds of a town in motion are heard.Collective engines looking for passengers.Chiquillas voices with adjusted bluyines selling food on the street.Reggaeton records playing in cable television stores.Praises at the door of an evangelical church.Speakers announcing every ten minutes: "Two people are needed to download the truck".Dry blows of some workers, picing stones to build a house.Babies crying in the arms of their mothers as they are queued outside a bank.From the day of the spill, Chiriaco seems like any popular district of Lima: increasingly noisy, more full of cement."Working in oil" increased the number of motorcycleaxis and shops.Filling of canteens, hotels and brothels.The work that hundreds of native and mestizos got here cleaning oil put money in everyone's pockets.

Yesenia Gonzales says that several of his friends have worked collecting oil and have solved their problems.One of them had the view.A friend took her daughter to Lima to operate her from the heart.Another, single mother, bought an apartment in Chiclayo, one of the most populated cities on the coast, famous for her postal beaches.

"Although there was damage, there are people who feel happy for what happened.

Someone might think it's opportunism.But no, Gonzales tells me: it's survive.

At noon the heat crushes everything in this piece of Amazonas jungle.The Petroperú van in which the people are going to make their latest delivery of food.We parked on the riverbank, in front of the Native Community of Wachapea, one of the ten communities that the State has indicated as those affected by the spill.The anonymous engineer tells me that all this area that we see is already clean, that there may be "slight harmless spots, as if a drop of oil fell throughout the river".On the edge of the Chiriaco river a gray -ored woman receives us with wooden crucifix.It is Rosa Villar, director of the Fe y Alegría 62 San José College, a boarding school for mestizo girls and daughters from Awajún families.Ask if your students can already bathe and play in the river.

"It's that some do it," says the religious..Imagine, they are more than five hundred girls.After lunch they are just.The river is its world.

"I can't say that, you know," says the engineer, ".A while ago I would have bathed me forty times in the river!Now, if there are still oil particles in the roots of the trees, what else can I do?Put the head creek?

After the delivery of food, while we returned along an avenue of land towards the Petroperú camp, Yesenia Gonzales, the engineer's assistant, told me a huge house of cement and ceiling to two waters.

"Look, that's my house!"People tell me that if at twenty -four I already have my own house, later I am not going to have!

In four months of work in Petroperú, Gonzales and her husband took a house.They won about 30 together.000 soles (about 7.900 euros).To win the same in the market juice post, they would have had to work ten years in a row and save every penny.With the oil salary they also paid their debts, they bought a flat screen TV, a sound equipment, a freezer, a motorcycle taxi.They bought dolls and scooters for their two daughters.Now he has his own juice store.

"I heard people who said:" Do not go to oil, there they are going to die.Wait four or five more years and you will see, they will be that they die! ”YESENIA GONZALES told me with her shy smile, the last time I saw her—.I listen to them just, but I'm not afraid.On the contrary, I'm happy.Look at me, I'm healthy!Now I have what I always dreamed.

The illusion of oil

A development paradox: that something as terrible as an oil spill and the death of a river becomes something temporarily profitable for a people.It is a detail that does not usually appear in the news, which causes short circuits, which faces our contradictions.Nazareth's story - Osman Cuñachí's home and "oil children" - is just a small mirror in which we all reflect.

“I used to do just work, and suddenly the spill arrives and turned like a miracle.He gave us opportunities.If later I do not know, ”says Abel Wanputsang, who worked in the collection and with what he won a fridge to sell beers and soft drinks."My children are now going to study.I am also building my house, I already bought the bricks, ”says Albañil Américo Taijín, who spent three months cleaning the creek.“My partner had no job but now he wins well.I just hope I do not have something genetic for being in oil all day - says nurse Janet yours, who hopes to be a mother before meeting forty—.Imagine, what if my son is born sick? ”.

Yours is a young Awajún with torn eyes and athletic figure who has lived in Nazareth for a few years.Here he arrived to do his practices in the community dispensary.The time I met her, during a vaccination round to babies and children - most of them suffer malnutrition and anemia - he told me that it was easy to recognize who had taken advantage of Petroperú's salary.While we walked along the paths, flanked by old cabins, some homes could be seen up to two floors, made with new wooden planks and tin calamines.A small cable television antenna crowned one of the roofs.In that same sector, the Minister of Housing and the Ambassador of Japan had inaugurated more than one hundred bathrooms with new toilets, showers and a network of pipes that would carry the water from the creek to each home.The comparison with the city was inevitable: the natives would not walk long distances to join their water in buckets.Now it was enough to open the tap for drinking water, washing clothes or bathing.

"We have all that, yes, but our river is practically dead," said Janet yours, with penalty, ".No one bathes or fishing there for months ... well, almost nobody.

Sometimes, when the nurse visited some mothers, they served asado Boquichico or Zungaro, who fished in the polluted river.Not being improper, the nurse lied: she promised to eat fish at home, but she really threw it in the trash.Before I begged the mothers to wait for the river to be clean again, until one of them said, something angry: "What are we going to eat then if we don't have money?".Since then Janet yours, who wins little but enough to buy fish in the town, has decided to shut up.

*Joseph Zárate, won with this chronicle the 2018 Gabo Journalism Award