Bush, the rainforest and a gas pipeline to enrich his friends

[Aidoneus]

Bush, the rainforest and a gas pipeline to enrich his friends
Plan would enrich Bush corporate campaign contributors
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
30 July 2003

President George Bush is seeking funds for a controversial project to drive gas pipelines from pristine rainforests in the Peruvian Amazon to the coast.

The plan will enrich some of Mr Bush's closest corporate campaign contributors while risking the destruction of rainforest, threatening its indigenous peoples and endangering rare species on the coast.

Among the beneficiaries would be two Texas energy companies with close ties to the White House, Hunt Oil and Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Vice-President Dick Cheney's old company, Haliburton, which is rebuilding Iraq's oil infrastructure.

The pipeline slices through some of the most biologically diverse places on earth. Their remoteness has preserved an extraordinarily rich ecosystem in the coastal Paracas reserve, which is home to such rare species as Humboldt penguins, sea lions and green sea turtles.

The Camisea natural gas project - with reserves of 13,000 billion cubic feet of gas - has already scared off two big investors, Citigroup and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. According to an internal report by the US Export Import Bank, obtained by the lobby group Amazon Watch, proposals to mitigate the environmental impact of the project are "woefully inadequate" and will lead to mudslides, destroy habitats and spread diseases among indigenous peoples.

Friends of the Earth describes one threatened area as "one of the world's most pristine tropical rainforests", home to the Nahua, Kirineri, Nanti, Machiguenga and Yine indigenous groups. Past contact between indigenous peoples and loggers has proven disastrous - 42 per cent of the Nahua died from diseases contracted from outsiders in the 1980s.

Already, the project, which is 60 per cent complete, has run into difficulties, including the kidnapping of 60 pipeline workers last week. They were freed later by the Peruvian military.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=428887