British tourists taken hostage by Amazon tribe

‘Get us out of here’, plead captives seized by group armed with bows and arrows and spears in Peru

‘They are friendly and respectful to us, but this is the only way they can find solutions for their community’

BRITISH tourists taken hostage in a remote corner of the Amazon last night pleaded with Peru’s government to “get us out of here”, although an indigenous leader later said they would be freed “in the coming hours”.

A group of around 100 people were travelling by boat earlier this week in north-eastern Peru when locals from the indigenous Kukama communities reportedly armed with spears and bows and arrows forced them to dock.

They said it was in protest over a deadly oil spill and they would not free the group until the Peruvian government and Petroperu, the state-owned oil company, address the issue.

The spill is reported to have killed two babies and a woman after poisoning the local water supply.

The group is not believed to have been harmed but two British tourists have said “conditions are starting to deteriorate” as they run out of food and clean water.

Speaking to the BBC, Charlotte Wiltshire asked for an “intervention to get us out of here”, saying there were pregnant, diabetic, elderly and sick people on the boat.

“We’re physically fine,” Angela Ramírez, a Peruvian member of the group, posted on Facebook.

“They took the boat and took the battery. They are friendly and respectful to us, but this is the only way they have to find solutions for their community.

“The sooner they are heard, the sooner they will let us go. Help me to share this.”

The group includes 23 foreigners from Germany, Great Britain, Spain and France, according to Wadson Trujillo, an indigenous leader.

“We have seen ourselves obliged to take this measure to summon the attention of a state that has not paid attention to us for eight years,” he told Associated Press by telephone. He said that the community would allow the boat to continue its trip “in the coming hours.”

A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We are in contact with the local authorities and a very small number of British nationals involved in an incident in Peru.”

The spill began on Sept 16 when a 21cm gash appeared in the Norperuano pipeline, which Petroperu uses to pump crude oil from its Amazon operations to the coast.

The firm has said the rupture looked like a deliberate act of sabotage, but did not say who it believed was responsible.

The oil has since seeped into a river on which impoverished and isolated communities rely for everything from drinking water to fishing stocks.

Three people are reported to have died as a result of poisoning from the oil, and the Kukama people have become increasingly desperate.

“The adults can still put up with the hunger, but not the kids,” Galo Vásquez, the Kukama chief, told a Peruvian radio station in September.

“No one has brought a single drop of water or food to our community.”

The tribe held talks with the authorities last month, including Aníbal Torres, Peru’s prime minister, but no action was taken.

They accuse both the government and Petroperu of abandoning them.

Peru’s government did not respond to requests for comment.

The issue of oil spills, official negligence and indigenous communities left to their fate is not new in the northern Peruvian Amazon and some environmental groups have been campaigning to raise awareness of it for decades.

But the issue has intensified since Pedro Castillo, a Left-wing populist, took office in July 2021.

Styling himself the “president of the poor,” he has raised expectations, including among marginalised communities in the Andes and the Amazon.

However, little has been done as his administration has staggered from one corruption scandal to another.