Indigenous Peoples Go to Court to Save the Amazon From Oil Company Greed

Industrial Development vs. Indigenous People

Ecuador is one of the smallest oil producers in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) — only the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon pump less. But that has not hindered it from making big deals with oil-hungry nations. In 2009, a year after Ecuador defaulted on around billion worth of debt, then-President Rafael Correa made an oil-for-cash agreement with China. In exchange for selling his nation’s crude oil to Petrochina, China provided Ecuador with a billion loan.

Now the country seeks to attract investments totaling around 0 million to boost the production of oil, which the government maintains is critical to improving the nation’s economy. “It’s time for the private sector to invest,” said President Lenín Moreno in the 2018 televised address, arguing that public-private partnerships in the infrastructure, oil, energy, mining and telecoms sectors could generate billion of investment by 2021.

The government, as it has for decades, is yet again facing stiff opposition against untrammeled industrial development from its Indigenous population. “We are demanding that the Ecuadorian state respect our territory and self-determination,” said Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani leader and CONCONAWEP representative. “This fight didn’t grow overnight; it’s been the fight of the Waorani for years.”

Indeed, the latest legal action launched in Puyo stems from the state’s broken promise. In December 2017, following a two-week, 200-mile march by Indigenous activists from the Amazon jungle to Quito, the nation’s capital, demanding an end to extractive industry development on their territories, the Moreno administration made a commitment to the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), Ecuador’s largest Indigenous organization, to end new oil and mining concessions in regions where local Indigenous nationalities had not been consulted. However, as the current suit alleges, the Waorani were not properly consulted.

Specifically, Article 57, section 7 of the constitution guarantees “free prior informed consultation, within a reasonable period of time, on plans and programs for prospecting, producing and marketing nonrenewable resources located on their lands which could have an environmental or cultural impact on them.” The suit claims these rights were violated as the Waorani were not properly consulted prior to the announcement of the new oil concessions. In addition, the Ecuadorian government is also bound by two international agreements to consult with its Indigenous populations: Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), ratified by the nation in 1998, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted in 2007.

However, many activists and Indigenous leaders ultimately don’t want consultation at this point; they want oil development to end entirely. “We took the president at his word regarding the end of oil and mining concessions in our territories,” said Jaime Vargas, CONAIE’s president. “We don’t need more consultation, however. Given the destruction in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon and in other areas of the world at the hands of the oil industry, we already have enough information to say ‘No’ to all oil activity.”

Mitch Anderson, executive director and founder of Amazon Frontlines, which created a petition on behalf of the Waorani urging the Ecuadorian government to halt oil development on Indigenous land, told the Independent Media Institute:

“There are two different courses for the Ecuadorian government here. The first is an all-in bet on oil, and the last half-century has already shown us what that road leads to: environmental degradation, institutional corruption and further indebtedness to foreign interests, in this case China. Or they can take an urgently needed, forward-thinking path which supports forest protection, respects Indigenous rights and promotes investment in green economic alternatives that will ultimately contribute to the building of a sustainable future for the country and planet.”

“Oil has not brought development for the Waorani,” Alicia Cahuiya of the Waorani group told President Lenín Moreno at a meeting at the presidential palace in Quito in March 2018. “It has only left us with oil spills and sickness.”

A History of Pollution

The current lawsuit is the latest salvo in a protracted battle between Indigenous people across Ecuador and fossil fuel interests that has been going on since 1993, when local tribes turned to the legal system to compel Texaco—and now Chevron, its parent company since 2000 — to clean up the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest and care for the people who have been sickened by the oil operations that began in 1967, when Texaco struck oil in the country’s northeastern province of Sucumbíos.

In a 2008 Los Angeles Times op-ed about that legal battle, author and former public defender David Feige wrote that Texaco’s environmental legacy in the region “includes as many as 16 million gallons of spilled crude — 50 percent more than the Exxon Valdez dumped in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989; hundreds of toxic waste pits, many containing the chemical-laden byproducts of drilling; and an estimated 18 billion gallons of waste, or ‘produced,’ water, which some tests have shown to contain possibly cancer-causing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at levels many times higher than those permitted in the U.S. All these pollutants were discharged in one of the most sensitive ecosystems in the world — the Amazon rainforest.”

This troubling history makes the current administration’s push to auction off land to oil drilling all the more ill-advised. “When we extract oil, it has a very high price for the environment, and sometimes, it’s not paid by those who use the oil,” said Antoni Rosell-Melé, an environmental chemist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain, who co-authored a 2017 study that found that the Amazon rainforest in neighboring Peru is suffering from extensive contamination from decades of fossil fuel development.

In that study, the researchers analyzed nearly 3,000 water samples from four Amazon rivers gathered between 1987 and 2013 and found an “extremely elevated presence of chloride, chromium, barium, lead and hexavalent chromium,” industrial chemicals involved in oil drilling that are toxic to humans, wildlife and the environment. The researchers also estimate that oil extraction activities in the region have changed the overall chemical composition of the Amazon’s waters, including 30 percent more salt than is naturally present.

Destroy the Rainforests, Destroy Ourselves

The Indigenous fight in Ecuador is a fight that anyone who cares about biodiversity and the global climate should join. After all, the Ecuadorian Amazon isn’t just one of the most sensitive ecosystems in the world — it’s key for the environmental health of the entire planet. Known as the “lungs of the planet,” the Amazon rainforest “inhales” carbon dioxide and “exhales” oxygen, helping to stabilize the global climate by safely storing up to 140 billion metric tons of carbon. Deforestation by extractive and agricultural industries releases this carbon into the atmosphere, further accelerating global warming, the effects of which are felt across the world, from rising seas along U.S. coasts and melting Arctic glaciers, to wildfires in Europe and droughts in Africa.

Ecuador is also home to an astounding number of species. The nation is the eighth most biodiverse on Earth and the most biodiverse when considering the number of species by unit area. It is home to the highest number of species by area worldwide, including more than 1,500 species of birds, more than 840 species of reptiles and amphibians, and more than 300 species of mammals. Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park boasts nearly 20,000 plant species, more flora than anywhere on Earth.

But despite its high level of biodiversity, Ecuador also has a low representation of species living within its protected areas. According to a 2014 study conducted by a team of researchers from the Technological University Indoamerica in Quito, there are more than 100 vulnerable, endangered and critically endangered species in the Ecuadorian Amazon for which conservation goals have been missed. Lawyers for the Indigenous communities fighting oil development can also refer courts to the nation’s constitution, which provides “protection of ecosystems, biodiversity and the integrity of the country’s genetic assets, [as well as] the prevention of environmental damage.”

Unfortunately, the pro-drilling camp “doesn’t see the forest,” said Waorani leader Nenquimo in her keynote address at last year’s Bioneers conference in Marin, California, which gathered leaders and activists involved in environmental protection and the rights of nature around the globe. “They see oil wells where we see gardens. They see money where we see life.” Sharing her fight to protect her ancestral lands from exploitation by industrial development, Nenquimo warned that if given “a foothold in our lands,” the oil industry “will bring money, sickness and contamination. They will try to divide our families and change our way of thinking.”

“Our fight is not just a fight about oil,” she said. “This is a fight about different ways of living. One that protects life and one that destroys life.”

Penti Baihua, a leader of the Waorani village of Bameno, has seen firsthand the destruction of life that the outside world has brought to his idyllic slice of the jungle — from the oil spills that drive out local species his people rely on for sustenance to the destruction of ancient rainforest to make room for new cocoa and coffee plantations. What will happen to him, his family, and his community if extractive and agricultural industries continue the destruction of his ancestral home? Baihua said simply, “We do not want to disappear.”