Former Maryknoll Lay Missioner Barbara Fraser reports of recent legal victories for water defenders.
The following article was published in the May-June 2024 issue of NewsNotes.
Indigenous villagers high in Peru’s Andes Mountains and deep in the Amazon Forest, with the help of the Catholic Church and human rights lawyers, have recently won precedent-setting lawsuits that mark a turning point in the legal right to clean water and a healthy environment.
In Coata, a tiny Andean community of adobe houses on the shore of Lake Titicaca, villagers have long farmed and fished where the Coata River flows into Lake Titicaca. In recent decades, though, the nearby city of Juliaca has grown and sprawled, fouling the Coata and Torococha rivers with sewage, garbage, and waste from the local hospital.
Cows squelch through polluted mud and herons stalk amid trash that washes onto the riverbanks. Less visible but equally harmful are the toxic mine tailings that wash down the river from the hills beyond Juliaca, a legacy of centuries of unregulated or poorly regulated mining. Protests against the contamination went largely unheeded by authorities even when villagers blocked the river at a bridge in Juliaca, flooding the streets with sewage-laden water.
But a few people did listen. Maryknoll Sister Patricia Ryan and the team from the environmental rights organization she helped found, Derechos Humanos y Medio Ambiente - DHUMA (human rights and environment), worked with the community to sue the government agencies responsible for allowing the pollution to continue for decades.
In September, the court ruled in the community’s favor, ordering an end to the wastewater discharge, construction of treatment plants for sewage and hospital waste, and installation of water and sewer service in Juliaca, Coata and three neighboring districts.
“This is the first judicial case with a sentence that orders a stop to the dumping of solid waste and wastewater into a river and lake,” said lawyer Juan Carlos Ruiz of the non-profit Instituto de Defensa Legal (Legal Defense Institute) in Lima, which worked with DHUMA on the case. “That has never been achieved before. It opens a way at the national level to defend water sources. In reality, this sentence proposes a work agenda to be carried out by different state authorities, which must have oversight from civil society.”
At the other end of the country, Loreto, Peru’s largest Amazonian region, could not be more different from the Altiplano. While Coata is a small community more than two miles high in the Andes, on a mostly treeless plain, Iquitos, Loreto’s capital, is a city of 600,000 people surrounded by water and tropical forest.
Loreto is the Peruvian region with the least access to safe drinking water, according to Peru’s National Statistics Institute. Nearly eight out of 10 urban residents, but fewer than three in 10 rural dwellers, are connected to municipal water systems. In Puno the figures are only slightly better — 86.4 percent of urban residents, but only 61.6 percent in rural areas have water hookups. And most urban and rural wastewater simply flows into streams and rivers.
In 2016, Augustinian Frs. Miguel Ángel Cadenas and Manolo Berjón, whose parish included those neighborhoods, helped residents organize to sue national, regional, and local authorities to stop the wastewater flow, clean up the contaminated area, and provide safe drinking water and sanitation services, which those neighborhoods and many other like them lack.
In a case that took seven years to settle because of appeals, the Constitutional Tribunal, Peru’s highest court, ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in August 2023. As with Coata, in the Iquitos case the court ordered that the waste flow be stopped, that residents be provided with water and sewer service and health care, and that environmental damage be remediated. So far, however, implementation has been slow.
“Water is a powerful symbol in all religions and cultures, including Christianity. One of the most important rituals, baptism, has to do with water,” says Cadenas, who is now bishop of the Vicariate of Iquitos. “We have been accompanying Indigenous peoples and offering alternatives to things that have been happening. It’s not possible to accompany without noticing the structures that work against them. We had to raise our voices.”
Meanwhile, an organization of Kukama Indigenous women in the Vicariate of Iquitos filed Peru’s first rights-of-nature lawsuit, demanding that Peru recognize the Marañón River, one of the main tributaries of the Amazon, as having rights. In March, a district court ruled that the river and its tributaries have a series of rights, including the right to flow freely, maintain their ecosystem functions, be free of pollution and be represented. Indigenous organizations are to participate in safeguarding the river’s rights.
The ruling has been appealed, but lawyers at the Legal Defense Institute, which assisted with both cases, are optimistic that it will be upheld, and other rights-of-nature lawsuits are likely to follow.
Through cases like these, people of faith high in the Andes and deep in the Amazon are putting into practice Pope Francis’ call to protect the right to safe water, which he calls the most fundamental of all human rights.
Photo of Sister Pat Ryan, MM, and DHUMA attorney Jose Bayardo in Peru by Susan Gunn.