Indigenous river campaigner from Peru wins prestigious Goldman prize

An Indigenous campaigner and women’s leader from the Peruvian Amazon has been awarded the prestigious Goldman prize for environmental activists, after leading a successful legal campaign that led to the river where her people, the Kukama, live being granted legal personhood. “She is the ‘mother of rivers’, the Marañon is born in the Andes and flows downstream to become the Amazon River,” Canaquiri said. for four decades, however, the Kukama have endured scores of oil spills which destroy fish stocks, damage the ecosystem and contaminate the water with heavy metals. View image in fullscreen The village of Shapajila on the Marañon River. There have been more than 60 oil spills along the river since 1997, some of them catastrophic.