BY BLOOD AND FIRE : MINING AND MILITARIZATION IN THE ECUADORIAN AMAZON

16/01/2017 - https://intercontinentalcry.org

Before dawn on the Dec. 21, 2016, dozens of police raided the headquarters of the Shuar Federation (FISCH) in the Ecuadorian Amazon and arbitrarily detained its president, Agustin Wachapá. The indigenous leader was thrown to the ground and repeatedly stamped on and ridiculed beneath the boots of police in front of his wife. The police then razed the Shuar Federation’s office—turning over furniture and carrying away computers. According to the indigenous leader's wife, her husband was taken away without any kind of explanation. An arrest warrant for Wachapá was never presented.  

Agustin Wachapá has since been accused of publicly calling for the mobilization and violent resistance of the Shuar communities against state security forces in San Juan Bosco, where the indigenous community in Nankints was evicted and had their homes demolished against their will to make way for the Chinese Explorcobres S.A. (EXSA) open-cut copper mine. In the two months since the forced eviction, members of the communities surrounding Nankints have twice ... Read More

Ecuador has begun drilling for oil in the world’s richest rainforest

14/01/2017 - http://www.vox.com/

As many of the planet's last hectares of wilderness give way to roads and towns, farms and soccer fields, gas stations and Starbucks, the Anthropocene marches on. Perhaps nowhere does the struggle between wild and manicured feel more palpable than in Ecuador, and nowhere in Ecuador is the battle for biological and cultural diversity more profound than in Yasuní National Park.

Situated on Ecuador's easternmost flank with Peru to the south and east and Colombia only a short distance north, the 6,101-square-mile park sits at the confluence of the western Amazon basin, the Andean foothills, and the equator. The park’s boundary encircles one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. A single hectare, an area roughly the size of a soccer field, might boast as many as 655 different kinds of trees, more than all native tree species in the continental US and Canada.

Some 500 fish species and 600 kinds of birds live in Yasuní’s streams and skies. Among the thousands of mammals that call this forest home are the endangered white-bellied spider monkey (Ateles belzebuth) and giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis), and the near-threatened golden-mantled tamarin monkey (Saguinus tripartitus). The park is also the ancestral home of three indigenous tribes, the Huaorani, Tagaeri, and Taromenane, who still rely almost exclusively on the rainforest’s abundance for their food, medicine, and... Read More

Ecuador Moves To Close Leading Environmental Organization as Part of Crackdown on Civil Society

     21/12/2016 - http://amazonwatch.org/

Ecuador's Environment Ministry announced yesterday its intention to shutter Acción Ecológica, the country's leading grassroots environmental organization. The move is a clear reprisal to the group's efforts to raise awareness about environmental and indigenous rights concerns over a planned mega-copper mine on the lands of the Shuar indigenous people in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon. Then yesterday evening the national police raided the offices of the Shuar federation, FICSH, detaining its president, Agustín Wachapa.

"We reject the assertion of the Ministry of the Environment that we have violated national law," said Acción Ecológica in a statement released after the announcement. "We have been scrupulous in our compliance with the law, and our actions are in full harmony with [the government's] National Plan for Good Living 2013-2017," which calls for participatory management of the country's environmental treasures like the Amazon.

Nonetheless, a government memo advocating for the closure – obtained by Acción Ecológica – cites the group's awareness-raising efforts about "the serious environmental impacts and the ecosystem that would result from the extractive activity" in the Cordillera del Condor – the location of the Chinese mining operation – "and to the violation of the rights of indigenous... Read More

Out of Amazonia: Ecuador’s Indigenous People Take Their Case Against Chevron to Canada

20/12/2016 - http://www.counterpunch.org/

With eyes red with fatigue, Pablo Fajardo stood in front of a room of activists in Toronto, Canada explaining the plight of the more than 30,000 indigenous peoples and farmers whose lands in the Ecuadorian Amazon are covered in toxic sludge. Fajardo was presenting evidence that the pollution stems from decades of oil extractions by Chevron-Texaco, one of the world’s largest oil companies. He and his clients are fighting a drawn-out legal battle that is part of a growing list of high-profile cases brought by indigenous communities against extractive industries, a list that includes the Dakota Access Pipeline project opposed by the Standing Rock Sioux Nation and the case of the Navajo Nation versus the Environmental Protection Agency over the contamination of the Animas River from the Gold King Mine.

Fajardo, an Ecuadorian lawyer representing the affected people, is not only worn out from the four days of hearings in Toronto in September, but from the 23-year legal battle that seems to have no end.

“This was not an accident like Exxon or BP in the Gulf of Mexico. This was on purpose,” says Fajardo, pointing to images of thick, sticky tar coating a Delaware-sized section of once-fertile farmland.

“We’ve won in the Supreme Court of Ecuador, the court that Chevron chose to be tried in. We won against their 2,000 lawyers. We won $9.5 billion in settlements. We want to see that judgement... Read More

4 Indigenous Women Activists on the Fight to Protect Their Lands and Cultures

31/10/2016 - http://remezcla.com/

“Inclusive and sustainable cities” were among the sexy buzz words that echoed through the UN’s conference chambers last week during its third global conference on urban development in Quito, Ecuador. Hundreds of national delegations, mayors and leading experts in architecture and urban planning from 167 countries gathered in the Andean city to formulate new cures for the all-too familiar problems of poverty and exclusion that plague a growing urban world.

To build inclusive cities, U.N. Secretary-General Ban-Ki-Moon said in his inaugural speech on October 17, means “engaging women and girls in making towns and cities safer and more productive for all.” But just a stone’s throw away from where the official raised the need to include and engage women, a protest march led by indigenous women and girls were welcomed with daunting barricades of riot police... Read More

Ecuador’s Yasuni park: where oil vies with tourism for the rainforest

23/10/2016 - www.theguardian.com

Fernando was sitting on his veranda listening to the whoops and whistles of the jungle. Our visit was a surprise, but the old man was soon answering my questions, keen to talk.

“I arrived here in about 1960,” he told me. “A group of us came to start a new life. Hunting was easy. The animals were almost tame. We just used a blowpipe, no guns.”

I looked at him. No one knew for sure how old Fernando was – probably about 80 – but he was the oldest person in this 370 sq km of Ecuadorian jungle that’s home to the Sani community. He had seen the virgin wilderness subject to a lot of change: ecotourism arrived in the early 2000s, following less benign incomers in the shape of oil companies.

“They came a few years after I did, scaring the animals away. At least in our area we chose tourism. We kept our jungle, and our community spirit.”... Read More

Yasuni Man film is an intimate portrait of a beautiful land under siege for its oil

12/10/2016 - www.theguardian.com

Watching a film-maker use tweezers to extract wriggling, inch-long Amazonian parasites from his bloody leg would normally rank among the more stomach-churning of cinematic experiences, but it is a mere sideshow in a new documentary that shows Ecuador’s most famous nature reserve faces far graver threats than it poses.

Over the past seven years, US biologist Ryan Killackey has endured bot fly larvae, dysentery, bullet ant stings and malignant melanoma in order to film an intimate and polemical account of a remote forest community under pressure from US and Chinese oil companies.

The result is Yasuni Man, a 90-minute record of a stunningly beautiful region believed to be one of the most biodiverse on the planet at a particularly troubled time in its history.

It focuses on the Yasuni biosphere reserve, which inspired hope around the world in 2007 when the Ecuadorian government announced a global... Read More

Ecuador Announces First Commercial Barrel of Oil from Yasuní's ITT Fields

07/09/2016 - http://amazonwatch.org/

From deep inside the most biodiverse part of Earth's largest rainforest, there is terrible news: Oil extraction has begun in quite possibly the worst place imaginable.

Commercial oil production has begun at Tiputini C, the first of a slated 200-plus wells inside the ITT fields (Ishpingo, Tambococha,Tiputini) underneath Ecuador's Yasuni National Park. The remote UNESCO Biosphere Reserve that borders Peru has some of the highest species of birds, mammals, amphibians, insects, and trees ever recorded. In just one hectare it has more tree species than there are in all of the United States and Canada combined, an area that is one billion times that size. Scientists believe that Yasuní's unique concentration of biodiversity and hotspot of endemic species are due to a climate that allowed species to survive the Ice Age.

The park is also home to the Tagaeri-Taromenane, two indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation. Drilling and planned expansion into the park is a virtual death sentence for them, surrounding the nomadic peoples with oil... Read More

An Isolated Tribe Emerges From The Rain Forest

08/08/2016 - http://www.newyorker.com/

Before Nicolás (Shaco) Flores was killed, deep in the Peruvian rain forest, he had spent decades reaching out to the mysterious people called the Mashco Piro. Flores lived in the Madre de Dios region—a vast jungle surrounded by an even vaster wilderness, frequented mostly by illegal loggers, miners, narco-traffickers, and a few adventurers. For more than a hundred years, the Mashco had lived in almost complete isolation; there were rare sightings, but they were often indistinguishable from backwoods folklore.

Flores, a farmer and a river guide, was a self-appointed conduit between the Mashco and the region’s other indigenous people, who lived mostly in riverside villages. He provided them with food and machetes, and tried to lure them out of the forest. But in 2011, for unclear reasons, the relationship broke down; one afternoon, when the Mashco appeared on the riverbank and beckoned to Shaco, he ignored them. A week later, as he tended his vegetable patch, a bamboo arrow flew out of the forest, piercing his heart. In Peru’s urban centers, the incident generated lurid news stories about savage natives attacking peaceable settlers. After a few days, though, the attention subsided, and life in the Amazonian backwater returned to its usual obscurity.

In the following years, small groups of Mashco began to venture out of the forest, making fleeting appearances to travellers on the Madre de Dios River. A video of one such encounter, which circulated on the Internet, shows a naked Mashco man brandishing a bow and arrow at a boatload of tourists. In another, the same man carries a plastic bottle of soda that he has just been given. Mostly, the Mashco approach outsiders with friendly, if skittish, curiosity, but at times they have raided local... Read More