The 150 people, including 70 foreigners, who remained blocked on three boats will be able to resume their journey after reaching an agreement between the authorities and the protesters.
An agreement between the Peruvian authorities and indigenous people from the Amazon has allowed the release of the Spanish tourist who had been held since Thursday on a boat on the Marañón River along with 150 other people, 70 of them foreigners. The event occurred when the three boats in which the group was traveling were blocked by demonstrators protesting an oil spill in the waters of the area.
The representative of the Ombudsman’s Office in the Loreto region, Abel Chiroque, explained that the group will be able to continue their journey in another boat. “A few minutes ago, the lieutenant governor told me that they were coordinating for the transfer,” Chiroque told EFE, who stated that he expects the passengers to be transferred in the next few hours.
The president of the community of Cuninico, Watson Trujillo Acosta, had assured this Friday that the foreigners were going to be released imminently. “The right and respect for life must prevail. In this context, we are going to provide the facilities so that the people who are on the boat can move to their destinations. That will be before noon (local time) », he said in an interview with the Peruvian RPP.
The Ombudsman’s Office also explained that the communities of Cuninico had accepted their request to release the people held in the Marañón River, a measure that, according to what the agency has published on its Twitter profile, “will be carried out shortly.”
The activists, indigenous people from the Peruvian Amazon who belong to the Urarinas district in Loreto province, say that two children and a woman have died in the area due to oil spills from a 40-year-old pipeline in the Cuninico River. Those facilities, which transport crude from the Amazon region to the northwestern city of Piura, have been the scene of several leaks in recent years. The last one, of around 2,500 barrels, occurred on September 16.
As detailed by the British chain Sky News, among the 70 tourists there is a one-month-old baby, people with disabilities and pregnant women. Likewise, the German chain Deutsche Welle (DW) specified that, in addition to the Spanish, in the group there are British, French, Swiss, Brazilians and a dozen American cyclists who attended a sporting event.
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