We leave Chivancoreni, heading back upriver along the Urubamba to Chocoriari, a Machiguenga village of 300 that sits next to a worker's camp run by TGP. We've heard rumors that an oil spill occurred near the village in February. We've been told to look for a man named Cardenas because he can tell us all about the spill.

A 1997 study by the Smithsonian Institution found that the area around the Camisea region in the Lower Urubamba River Valley was one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet.

Leaving the canoe, we climb a rocky path to the village. Children play in the grass, smoke from cook fires drifts through the air. Apparently Cardenas is not around, but in our search for him we come across Chocoriari's chief, Americo Binari Piñarreal, a middle-aged man wearing a soccer shirt and a baseball cap.

The sun casts an orange glow on Chief Binari's face and on the drying clothes hanging in his hut as he recounts everything that happened on the day of the spill. One day in February, he says, he began to smell something in the air. "It stank something awful," he recalls. He remembers rising from his hut and walking to the river, where he saw a large black stain floating on the water. It smelled like gasoline.

The chief's son, Hugo Binari Sandoval, remembers that day too. He was working as an assistant at the TGP camp at the time. Hugo says that a large bladder containing several thousand gallons of diesel, which the companies use as fuel for the camp's machinery, had burst 50 yards from the river. "When the bladder burst, it rolled into the river," the son reports. "It was all downhill."

According to Hugo, who helped clean up the spill, 2,000 gallons of diesel were recovered. But the rest was lost on the land and in the water. "The engineers were worried," he recalls. Hugo says he was told by engineers on the project not to report the spill to his community. They said they would fire him if he did, he says.

"I was blackmailed," Hugo insists, as he grips the side of a rocking boat on Chocoriari's banks, his voice bristling with anger. "The company has a code of conduct that says it is only visiting... that the property is the community's. We wanted to make them respect [our land], and they blackmail us."

A Series of Diesel Spills Into the Urubamba

Chief Binari says that he went to the TGP camp after he saw the spill. He watched as workers cleaned the spill with buckets and sponges. He says he was ordered to return to his village. Since then, he says, company representatives have not said anything about the spill to him or anyone else in his community. Villagers have been unable to reach the company to arrange compensation for the spill. "They say nothing has happened," Chief Binari says.

Ronni Pinnareal says there have been multiple spills at Malvinas, but company reports mention only one. Pinarreal, who helped clean up the spill with other workers, said the fuel peeled the skin off their hands.

According to Ronni Pinnareal, another company worker, five spills occurred last year at Malvinas, the consortium plant that is a short boat ride downriver from Chocoriari. "We were taking out sawdust so we could bury the spill under it," Pinnareal reports. Pinnareal adds that much of the spill leaked into the Urubamba River. Malvinas engineers did not alert management to the spill and told workers to keep quiet about it or lose their jobs, Pinnareal says.

The spills, each from the same kind of bladder, occurred on May 15, May 17, May 20, July 20 and July 25, 2002, Pinnareal says. In a later e-mail response to the allegations, TGP representatives confirm that there was a spill on February 25. But the company officials add: "... thanks to the agile and effective response of our personnel, the spill was controlled rapidly and its impact minimized." They offer no comment on reports of the other spills nor about the community members' accusations of a cover up.

A February 2003 environmental report confirms that a 40,000-liter bladder "collapsed" at Chocoriari on February 25. That report also mentions previous spills, at Chocoriari in December 2002 and at Malvinas in May 2002, even though online reports from those months make no mention of the spills. In the most recent environmental report, inspectors question whether the bladders that the companies use to store diesel fuel are adequate for the task.

A 450-gallon spill occurred May 10 at the Malvinas camp too, according to officials at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), the bank that is considering a major loan to the Camisea Project. Environmental monitors for the bank report that both the Malvinas and Chocoriari spills were closely contained. IADB officials say they will support "corrective action" as they decide whether to approve the loan package. "Of course, we're concerned about the spills," says IADB spokesperson Daniel Drosdoff. "That's why we track them... The question is whether the controls are sufficient. We haven't made that decision yet."

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