- The water of Nanay, a common good turned battlefield
- A contamination that travels up the chain of life
- The right to water as a requirement of justice, not as a concession
- A Church that embraces the worldview of the local peoples
- Leo XIV, the Amazon, and the legacy of a missionary who became pope
- A pope who knows Peru from the inside
- Pucallpa, Iquitos: two faces of the same Amazonian wound
- The Holy See's diplomacy in the face of illegal gold networks
- A theology of the threatened source
- The common good before individual interests
- What the Bible says about a secular source
- Everyone's responsibility in our common home
- Lectio divina
- ✝ Biblical references
The water flowing towards Iquitos today carries more than just Amazonian silt: it carries mercury. On August 17, the Apostolic Vicariate of Iquitos issued an unusually serious appeal, demanding the immediate cessation of all illegal mining activity in the Nanay River basin, the river that supplies drinking water to more than half a million inhabitants of the Loreto capital and the surrounding communities. This cry did not arise from nowhere: it is a continuation of a struggle begun years ago by Bishop Miguel Ángel Cadenas Cardo, the Augustinian bishop of the vicariate, and it comes at a pivotal moment, as Pope Leo XIV prepares to set foot on Peruvian soil from November 11 to 17, as part of an apostolic journey that will take him to Uruguay, Argentina, and then to the country where he carried out the majority of his missionary ministry. The fact that the issue of illegal gold mining is already among the topics discussed between Peruvian President José María Balcázar and the Holy See speaks volumes about the weight this Amazonian issue now carries on the ecclesiastical and diplomatic agenda. This is not just another environmental problem: it is a matter of survival, justice, and, ultimately, the theology of creation.
The Nanay River basin is not just any river for Iquitos. Isolated from the national road network and accessible only by river or air, this city deep in the Amazon depends almost entirely on its water for drinking, cooking, fishing, and survival. Yet, for several years, mining concessions have been granted or sought in the headwaters of the basin, despite supreme decrees supposedly prohibiting any new mining operations in the area. Last July, civil organizations, Indigenous communities, and the Vicariate itself joined forces to demand that the Peruvian Geological, Mining, and Metallurgical Institute immediately invalidate these applications, recalling that a constitutional court had already recognized an "unconstitutional situation" in Loreto in 2023 due to lack of access to water and environmental contamination. The appeal of August 17th only raises the tone of an alert that has become chronic, a few months before a papal visit that could well consecrate the Amazon as a fully-fledged theological place of the pontificate of Leo XIV.
The water of Nanay, a common good turned battlefield
A contamination that travels up the chain of life
The mercury used in artisanal and illegal gold mining does not remain confined to the riverbed. It seeps into the sediments, travels up the food chain through fish, accumulates in the bodies of riverside communities, and ultimately strikes the most vulnerable first: children, whose rates of anemia and malnutrition have reached alarming levels in the Loreto region. Fish, the nutritional staple of the Kukama people and other riverside communities, thus becomes a vector of a silent poison. Bishop Cadenas had already forcefully emphasized this point in a previous address: preserving the headwaters is not just another ecological option, but a condition for the food security of thousands of families who have no other choice but to obtain their sustenance from the river.
This reality resonates with an ancient biblical intuition, the one that runs through the Book of Ecclesiastes when it reminds us that «all streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full; to the place from which the streams flow, there they return» (Ecclesiastes 1:7). Water, in the biblical imagination, is a given cycle, a rhythm entrusted to creation, not a resource to be plundered without restraint. When humankind poisons the source, it does not merely disrupt an ecological balance: it unravels an order that the Creator intended to be fruitful and shared. Pope Francis, in Laudato si’, named this wound with words that have become familiar to Amazonian communities: the earth, our common home, «is beginning to resemble a vast heap of rubbish.» What Nanay is experiencing today illustrates, almost literally, this statement.
The right to water as a requirement of justice, not as a concession
The Vicariate of Iquitos doesn't speak only in environmental terms; it speaks in terms of fundamental human rights. This was precisely the argument that, in July 2023, led to a favorable ruling from the Peruvian Constitutional Court recognizing that the lack of access to clean water constituted a structural violation of the rights of Loreto's inhabitants. But a court ruling, however solemn, is only valid if it is enforced. Yet new applications for mining concessions continue to flood into the relevant authorities, as if the legal precedent had had no real deterrent effect. It is this dissonance between the proclaimed law and administrative reality that prompted the Vicariate to raise its voice in the summer of 2026.
There is something in this insistence that recalls the lament of the prophet Amos, when he denounces those who «sell the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals» (Amos 2:6). The parallel is not forced: what is at stake in Iquitos is indeed the balancing of a human life, of collective health, of a fundamental right, against particular economic interests, often fueled by networks of illegal extraction connected to transnational money laundering operations. The Church in the Amazon, therefore, does not merely play the role of environmental watchdog: it tirelessly reminds us of a hierarchy of goods that the market alone cannot establish. The common good, as the Second Vatican Council already stated in Gaudium et spes, refers to «the sum total of those conditions of social life which enable both groups and each of their members to reach their full potential more fully and more easily»—and drinking water constitutes its most basic foundation.
A Church that embraces the worldview of the local peoples
What distinguishes Bishop Miguel Ángel Cadenas Cardo's work is his three decades-long close relationship with the Kukama people, whose rhythms, dreams, and connection to the river he knows intimately. This experience shapes a style of bishop who doesn't simply denounce injustice from an office, but speaks from within an Amazonian culture for which the river is not merely a waterway, but a living entity, a bearer of memory and identity. This way of inhabiting the mission finds a direct echo in the apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia, published by Pope Francis, which formulated an "ecological dream" for the region: that of an Amazon that "jealously preserves the irresistible natural beauty that adorns it, the overflowing life that fills its rivers and forests.".
By joining its voice with those of Indigenous communities and civil organizations in Loreto, the Vicariate embodies what the Magisterium calls integral ecology: the idea that the environmental crisis cannot be separated from the social crisis, nor can the defense of nature be separated from the defense of the poorest. It is an explicit refusal to treat the mining issue as a mere technical dispute between regulators and operators; it is a reaffirmation that behind every contested mining concession are faces, malnourished children, fishermen without healthy fish, and families without clean water.
Leo XIV, the Amazon, and the legacy of a missionary who became pope
A pope who knows Peru from the inside
The planned visit of Leo XIV to Peru, from November 11 to 17, has a unique significance unlike any other trip of this nascent pontificate. It is not only the Pope's first return to the country where he exercised his episcopal ministry in Chiclayo, but also the return of a man who holds Peruvian citizenship, who lived there for twenty years before his election, and who knows firsthand the realities of the Andean and Amazonian peripheries. The official program, confirmed in early August by the Holy See Press Office, includes a stop in Lima, followed by Chiclayo on the coast, Cusco in the Andes Mountains, and Pucallpa, deep in the Amazon rainforest. The possibility of a stop in Iquitos, once mentioned by President Balcázar, remains in logistical evaluation, but its very mention, combined with the publication of the appeal from the vicariate a few months before the Pope's arrival, gives this cry of alarm an almost prophetic resonance: as if the Amazonian Church wanted to ensure that the voice of the Nanay reaches the ears of the Successor of Peter, wherever he sets foot.
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The choice of the Amazon as the highlight of the Peruvian trip is not insignificant in light of recent papal policy. From the very first months of his pontificate, Leo XIV demonstrated a particular focus on ecological peripheries and indigenous populations, following directly in the footsteps of his predecessor. The fact that the Vatican explicitly mentioned, after the meeting between the Pope and the Peruvian President, the fight against illegal mining as one of the points of convergence between the two parties confirms that this issue is no longer a marginal concern, confined to diocesan communiqués, but rather a matter now being addressed at the highest levels of papal diplomacy.
Pucallpa, Iquitos: two faces of the same Amazonian wound
The fact that the official itinerary favors Pucallpa over Iquitos in no way diminishes the symbolic significance of the gesture. Pucallpa, a city in the Ucayali region, is also facing deforestation, land trafficking, and illegal mining and oil incursions that threaten Indigenous peoples. By choosing to conclude his Peruvian visit in this Amazonian city rather than in the capital or on the coast, Leo XIV is sending a clear message: the final image of his time in Peru will be that of the forest, its rivers, and its most vulnerable inhabitants. Should Iquitos ultimately be added to the itinerary, it would be a resounding confirmation that the warning issued by Archbishop Cadenas has not gone unheeded.
This geography of travel echoes an intuition found in the Book of Ezekiel, when the prophet describes water gushing from the sanctuary and "purifying the waters" wherever it flows, to the point that "every living creature that moves will live wherever the stream flows" (Ezekiel 47:9). The image is striking for anyone who thinks of Nanay: what the prophet announces as an eschatological restoration is very concretely what the inhabitants of Loreto are demanding today—water restored to its original purpose, bearing life and not death. The papal visit, in this perspective, would not be a mere media event, but a way of embodying this prophetic promise in the very heart of the wounded territory.
The Holy See's diplomacy in the face of illegal gold networks
The fact that the mining issue was explicitly raised during the audience between Pope Leo XIV and President Balcázar at the Vatican last June reveals a significant shift in the Holy See's approach to these matters. It is no longer simply a matter of local pastoral appeals, but rather the inclusion of the subject on the very agenda of bilateral relations between the Peruvian state and the Vatican. This convergence between the Vicariate's local efforts and the now international attention given to the issue lends the August 17th appeal additional strategic weight: it is no longer addressed solely to INGEMMET and the Peruvian Ministry of Energy and Mines, but, indirectly, to Rome itself.
This connection between the local and universal levels is precisely what Pope Francis sought to institutionalize by creating the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network, whose Peruvian branch was chaired by Bishop Cadenas. This structure allows the voices of the Amazonian vicariates, often geographically isolated, to converge into a common message, capable of influencing national governments and international bodies. The Iquitos Appeal of August 17th is part of this dynamic: a local voice, but one relayed by a continental ecclesial network, on the eve of a major papal event.
It is also important to remember that this struggle for water and against illegal mining is not limited to Nanay: it spans the entire Amazon basin, from Brazil to Colombia, including Ecuador, where sister vicariates are waging similar battles against gold panning and deforestation. What is happening in Iquitos is therefore emblematic of a much broader structural crisis: a development model that sacrifices the headwaters of the Amazon to a global demand for gold that nothing seems able to curb. The Apostle James, in his epistle, used strikingly relevant words to denounce this logic: «Behold, the wages of the laborers who reaped your fields, which you failed to pay, cry out; and the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts» (James 5:4). The cry of the Nanay, in this sense, is not only that of a poisoned river: it is that of a dispossessed people, whose cry, according to the Christian faith, never goes unanswered by God.
A theology of the threatened source
The common good before individual interests
What the Vicariate of Iquitos tirelessly reiterates, in almost doctrinal terms, is that economic interests cannot take precedence over the well-being, health, and lives of individuals. This formulation, repeated in the August 17th communiqué, is not merely a militant slogan: it encapsulates centuries of the Church's social doctrine, from Rerum novarum to Laudato si', including Laudate Deum, the latter exhortation in which Pope Francis, symbolically published on the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, called for urgent conversion in the face of the worsening global climate crisis. This text had already served as the theological framework for a previous pronouncement by Bishop Cadenas on the Nanay River, proof that the doctrinal continuity between the two successive pontificates is very concretely evident in the Amazonian context.
What the Bible says about a secular source
There is a lesser-known story in Scripture that sheds a unique light on this situation: the story of the poisoned spring at Jericho, which the prophet Elisha restored to health. The text recounts that the city's inhabitants told him, "See, the city is well situated, as my lord sees, but the water is bad and the land is barren" (2 Kings 2:19). Elisha then threw salt into the spring and proclaimed that it would no longer cause death or barrenness. This story, often relegated to the background of the major prophetic cycles, nevertheless offers a valuable key to understanding our time: fertile land can become barren because of corrupted water, and it is the role of the prophetic word to proclaim that this situation is not inevitable. The appeal from the Vicariate of Iquitos is part of this same prophetic tradition: to denounce evil in order to open a path to healing, to refuse to resign oneself to the programmed sterility of a life-giving river.
Everyone's responsibility in our common home
It would be too easy to reduce this crisis to a strictly Peruvian problem, far removed from the daily concerns of Catholics on other continents. Yet the gold illegally extracted from the Nanay River basin fuels global, often opaque, trade networks that ultimately reach consumers far beyond the borders of the Amazon. The ecological responsibility that the Church has been calling for since Laudato si' is therefore not only that of local governments or multinational mining companies: it also involves the consumption, investment, and vigilance choices of every believer, wherever they live. Praying for the Nanay is not simply praying for a distant river: it is recognizing that our common home, as Pope Francis reminded us, admits no true borders in the face of Christian solidarity.
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«The waters are bad, and the land is barren because of them.» 2 Kings 2:19
You watch water flow by, water you believe to be pure, the water that nourishes your life without you ever truly giving it a second thought. But what if, one day, this water carried death rather than life? What would you do if the source upon which your survival depends became, before your very eyes, a silent poison? Do you dare acknowledge the rivers your indifference allows to become corrupted, far from home but so close to your soul? What within you still refuses to cry out with those who no longer have clean water to drink?
Lord, you who transformed the foul waters of Jericho into a spring of life, look upon the Nanay. You know every drop of this river, every child who drinks unknowingly. Sprinkle your healing salt upon our poisoned rivers. Grant the bishops of the Amazon the strength of the ancient prophets. Silence the greed that buys gold with the blood of the poor. May your Spirit descend like pure rain upon this wounded land.
A trickle of clear water begins to flow again between the open hands of an Amazonian child.
✝ Biblical references
4 passages · 4 books
He walked in all the ways of David his father. (2 Kings 22:2)
The fall of Samaria and then Jerusalem: exile as a consequence of infidelity.
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Let justice flow like water, righteousness like a never-failing stream. (Amos 5:24)
Prophet of social justice: condemnation of the rich who oppress the poor.
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I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. (Ezekiel 36:26)
Apocalyptic visions, oracles of judgment, and the promise of the restoration of Israel.
→ Explore the Ezekiel Codex- Ceuta, Rome, Madrid: when the word of the bishops becomes a rift between sister nations
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Faith without works is dead. (James 2:26)
Practical Christian wisdom: active faith, language, the poor, prayer and anointing of the sick.
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With over 77,130 baptized Catholics, Argentina remains one of the major Catholic countries in South America, even though regular church attendance has declined significantly. Evangelization began in the 16th century with the arrival…
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With over 76,130 Catholics, Peru is a country deeply marked by the Catholic faith, blending colonial tradition with vibrant Andean spiritualities. Evangelization began in the 16th century with the Dominicans and the Franks…
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The most secularized country in Latin America, Uruguay today has approximately 42,130 baptized Catholics, but very low regular church attendance. Evangelization began in the 17th century with the Franciscans and Dominicans…
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