[LINK] "Shale Oil Fuels Indigenous Conflict in Argentina"

[rfmcdonald]

The story told by the Inter Press Service's Fabiana Frayssinet, recounting the resistance of an indigenous people to the environmentally destructive extraction of fossil fuels on the claimed land, sounds quite familiar. That this news comes from Argentina, not Canada, is not a surprise to me. Neo-Europes can be all of a kind.

The boom in unconventional fossil fuels has revived indigenous conflicts in southwest Argentina. Twenty-two Mapuche communities who live on top of Vaca Muerta, the geological formation where the reserves are located, complain that they were not consulted about the use of their ancestral lands, both “above and below ground.”

Albino Campo, ”logko” or chief of the Campo Maripe Mapuche community, is critical of the term “superficiary” – one to whom a right of surface occupation is granted – which was used in the oil contracts to describe the people living on the land, with whom the oil companies are negotiating.

[. . .]

Three thousand metres below Campo Maripe lies one of the world’s biggest reserves of shale gas and oil.

The land that the community used for grazing is now part of the Loma Campana oilfield, operated by the state-run YPF oil company in partnership with U.S. oil giant Chevron.

“More or less 160 wells have been drilled here,” Campo said. “When they reach 500 wells, we won’t have any land for our animals. They stole what is ours.”