Editor Note: Actually 6 types can be seen.
Paul McAuley, a British environmental activist and missionary was found dead in Peru. He used to fight against oil companies’ invasion in the Amazon.
The burnt body of Paul McAuley, a 71-year old British environmental activist and Catholic missionary, was found in the Amazon city of Iquitos on Tuesday. His body was found in a shelter house he founded for Indigenous students, "La Salle," located in the district of Bethlehem (Iquitos). Some students informed the police after finding the body. Authorities are questioning six Indigenous men who lived in the hostel.
McAuley was a Catholic brother of the De La Salle teaching order. He moved to Peru in 2000 to support the Indigenous activists and set up an association Red Ambiental Loretana.
Peru ordered his expulsion in 2010 after he helped Amazon tribes to fight against oil and gas companies invading their natural habitat. He was also a vocal critic of British companies’ presence in the rainforest. Due to his activism, he was called, “Tarzan activist”, “white terrorist” and “incendiary gringo priest.”
“More than its oil, what the west needs are the Amazon’s spiritual energy,” he said.
The police are considering this a criminal case but suicide is also not being ruled out.
"We noticed the body when we were walking around. We want to investigate because he, who has dedicated so many years to us and has given us everything, has been murdered. Yesterday we were talking together and today we see this painful scene," said one of the Indigenous students.
The Environmental Investigation Agency, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) said, “He fought peacefully for Indigenous rights and forests in Peru… his death should be investigated. Rest in peace, Brother Paul, we will continue the fight.” Peru’s Episcopal conference along with other environmental groups also paid homage to McAuley.
The skiffs arrived a few hours after sundown on September 18, a dark and moonless night in the Peruvian Amazon. They landed at several points along the broad Corrientes River, which flows south over the country’s densely forested border with Ecuador. Hundreds of indigenous Achuar men, women, and children, many carrying ceremonial spears, organized into units by clan and village. They then followed their apus, or chiefs, toward seven targets: the area’s lone paved road, a power plant, and five facilities for the pumping and processing of petroleum.
The sites were occupied, their night staff escorted peacefully outside. By morning, the Achuar of the Corrientes controlled the local infrastructure of Lot 192, the country’s largest and most notorious oil block.
Over the next two days, the occupations spread. On the neighboring Tigre and the Pastaza rivers, Kichwa and Quechua chiefs led takeovers of key roads, the only airstrip, and several oil batteries.
“This is not a symbolic action — we have completely paralyzed the country’s most important oil field,” declared a spokesperson for several of the indigenous federations backing the protest.
The takeover of Lot 192 lasted for 43 days. It was hardly the first protest to shut down the oil facilities studding the rainforests of Loreto, Peru’s biggest region and for decades the hub of its petroleum industry. Since 2006, the native people who live on the river basins where this oil is produced — a watershed of five major Amazon tributaries: the Pastaza, Tigre, Corrientes, Marañón, and Chambira — have executed at least a dozen similar uprisings. Some are just a few days; others stretch across seasons. Last autumn, indigenous communities launched a flotilla from the town of Saramurillo that blocked traffic on the Marañón River, the main artery of Lot 192’s sister block, Lot 8, for four months.
These uprisings have all demanded the same redress. For nearly a half-century, the state oil company, Petroperú, and its foreign partners have wreaked systemic contamination on the region, transforming daily life and poisoning the five rivers, whose waters fuse with the Ucayali River to become the Amazon just east of Iquitos, Loreto’s capital.
“For 45 years, the companies and the state have damaged our waters, soils, and health with impunity,” said Carlos Sandi, an Achuar chief in his early 30s who helped lead the recent protest on the Corrientes. “We will not allow them to continue extracting resources from our territory without a guarantee of prior consultation on the environmental and social impacts.”
Wings of Hope (German: Julianes Sturz in den Dschungel) is a 2000 made-for-TV documentary directed by Werner Herzog. The film explores the story of Juliane Koepcke, a German Peruvian woman who was the sole survivor of Peruvian flight LANSA Flight 508 following its mid-air disintegration after a lightning strike in 1971. Herzog was inspired to make this film as he narrowly avoided taking the same flight while he was location scouting for "Aguirre, Wrath of God." His reservation was canceled due to a last minute change in itinerary.