8,000 barrels of oil dumped in the Amazon after the attack of a pipeline by locals

More than 8,000 barrels of crude oil spilled into the Peruvian Amazon after members of an indigenous community broke it Tuesday night, according to state oil company Petroperu.

This spill, described as a "catastrophe" by Petroperu, is the fifteenth pipeline attack in the past two years, a sign of escalating tensions between indigenous communities and oil companies in the Amazon.

Petroperu blamed the spill on members of the Mayuriaga community, which is one of the main groups of resistance to environmental destruction by oil companies in the region. In 2016, members of the Mayuriaga community hijacked several Peruvian officials after the government failed to include them in an emergency response plan after a series of oil spills on their property. lands that have seriously polluted their water supplies.

"The townspeople prevented us from securing the pipe to prevent oil from sinking from the pipe," Petroperu spokeswoman Beatriz Alva Hart told a local radio station after Tuesday's disaster.

Hart said that the pipeline attack had "nothing to do with [Petroperu]. Instead, the company attributed sabotage to retaliation for allegations of irregularities in the recent local elections.

Read more: Indigenous protests kill oil and mining sites around the world

The Mayuriaga community is located in northeastern Peru on the border with Ecuador, where indigenous communities have also reacted against invasive oil companies. When the chief editor of the motherboard, Jason Koebler, went to meet an Ecuadorian tribe in 2014, his members told him that they were preparing to "make war" on the oil companies. This included the development of special poison darts and the planning of attacks on petroleum sites.

Since 2016, 5,600 barrels of oil have been dumped on or around the Mayuriaga territory due to corrosion or other failures. The situation is even worse in Ecuador, where Chevron has dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the rainforest over the last 25 years.