Peruvian activists and an environmental/human rights group filed suit Thursday against Occidental Petroleum Corp., charging that the Westwood-based oil giant has contaminated land and rivers in Peru’s Corrientes River basin.

The suit was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court by Washington D.C.-based Earth Rights International and the Venice civil rights law firm of Schonbrun DeSimone Seplow Harris & Hoffman LLP on behalf of 25 members of the indigenous Achuar community in northern Peru. The suit seeks to have Occidental clean up the contamination and compensate all of the Achuar people for allegedly dumping 9 billion barrels of toxic oil byproducts into local rivers and streams over 30 years.

Occidental Petroleum spokesman Richard Kline said that Occidental Petroleum sold its oil field holdings in Peru in 1999 to Argentinian oil company Grupo Pluspetrol. As part of that transaction, Kline said Grupo Pluspetrol “assumed responsibility for past, present and future operating conditions” in the oil field.

“Eight years after our departure from this block, we’re confronted with allegations regarding the current state of operations,” Kline said. Furthermore, he said that Grupo Pluspetrol last year committed to environmental remediation of the site. “At that time, the indigenous leaders said this achieved 98 percent of their goals.”

He added that an Amazon Watch report detailing alleged health and environmental impacts of contamination from oil field and cited by the plaintiffs “contained numerous inflammatory statements and unfounded conclusions.”

Earth Rights International and Schonbrun DeSimone had previously brought a similar lawsuit against Unocal Corp. (now a unit of Chevron Corp.), alleging that the oil company had engaged in abusive practices in Burma by cooperating with the military junta there on its Yanada gas pipeline project. In 2005, Unocal reached a settlement to compensate villagers near the pipeline; financial terms of that settlement were not disclosed.