Lima, Mar 5 (EFE).- U.S. oil company Occidental Petroleum, or Oxy, has agreed to compensate five Peruvian Amazon Indian communities for damage resulting from oil production activity.

Leaders of the Achuar people from the Corrientes River basin, located in the remote northern jungle region of Loreto, and representatives of their legal team who brought their case in the United States made the announcement Thursday at a press conference in Lima.

“The parties are pleased to confirm a mutual settlement of the claims in the litigation,” EarthRights International, or ERI, said, citing a statement by indigenous Achuar plaintiffs.

It said the projects will be managed “by a recently created organization called the Upper Corrientes Development Fund.

ERI, which represented the Achuar plaintiffs in the lawsuit, first filed in U.S. federal district court in Los Angeles in 2007, said the case was closed in a sealed proceeding on September 16, 2013.

An appeals court overruled the district court’s initial 2008 decision to dismiss the case on jurisdictional grounds, and the Supreme Court refused to hear Oxy’s arguments in 2013, ERI said.

Oxy, which was based in Los Angeles until moving to Houston last year, signed a contract with the Peruvian government in 1971 for oil exploration in the Corrientes River basin, an area known as Block 1AB that spanned some 400,000 hectares (1,544 sq. miles) of rainforest.

The contract included the drilling of more than 150 wells and the construction of nearly 500 kilometers (310 miles) of roads and pipelines.

In 2001, the U.S. oil company sold its operations in that region to Argentina’s Pluspetrol, which has continued to carry out drilling activity.

“The suit claimed that the company had dumped toxic by-products and spilled significant quantities of oil, contaminating Achuar territory and water and causing premature deaths, birth defects, and other health problems,” ERI said.

“A 2007 report by Amazon Watch and ERI found elevated levels of lead and cadmium in Achuar children’s blood and documented other signs of long-term oil pollution.” EFE