Forging New Alliances in Ecuador's Amazon

Abstract

Forging New Alliances in Ecuador’s Amazon Kristina Egan (bio) Since the discovery of oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the mid-1960s, indigenous groups inhabiting the Amazon have been organizing in resistance to oil exploration and its associated adverse impacts. The dominant political and economic institutions marginalized Indians and discredited their ethnic and cultural heritage, so the Ecuadorian government largely was able to ignore their concerns. Operating in an essentially unregulated environment, oil companies dumped raw petrol, its by-products, and processing fluids into the Amazonian river systems and clearcut thousands of hectares of rain forest for roads and wells. In addition to the negative effects on the rain forest itself, such environmental degradation has impacted the health of the forest’s inhabitants and threatened their cultural and physical survival by ruining traditional lands. In response, the peoples of the Amazonian rain forest have organized themselves into indigenous organizations that have developed diverse methods of resisting the penetration of the petroleum industry into their homelands. These indigenous organizations have grabbed the imagination of Ecuadorian citizens and activists abroad with their determined efforts in the political arena. At the vanguard of Ecuador’s indigenous movement, the Amazonian Indians have transformed Ecuadorian politics in the past [End Page 123] five years. By amassing and consolidating indigenous support from the country’s diverse regions, while deftly and dramatically articulating their struggle for land and life to interested parties abroad, Ecuadorian Indians have transformed themselves into a force with which the government must contend. Ecuadorian Indians confront the state “sideways,” avoiding the frontal warfare against the state that is employed by violent guerrilla movements in other countries. Besides traditional types of protest, such as marches, sit-ins, and sabotage, the Indians have recently appealed to Northern non-governmental organizations and lawyers for help. Like the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, the Ecuadorian peoples are harnessing the power of the US and European press in the hopes of mobilizing pressure within the Northern countries to address Ecuadorian Indian grievances. This kind of pressure, originating in the jungles of Ecuador but utilizing powerful advocates outside Latin America, is a new kind of indigenous tactic for rights recognition. Such novel methods of addressing the centuries-old problems of land scarcity and rapacious resource extraction have empowered Ecuadorian Indians and encouraged the development of a multi-faceted alliance between Northern NGOs and the Ecuadorian indigenous movement. Land Scarcity and Environmental Degradation In Ecuador, most of the indigenous populations—which comprise 40–45 percent of the total population—live in the Sierra or near the coast, but between 100,000 and 250,000 make their home in the Amazonian rain forest, called the Oriente. Of the seven nations in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Shuar and the Quichua comprise the majority of the indigenous population. As little as 25 years ago, the Huaorani, Cofan, Secoya, Siona, and Ashuar peoples numbered about 20,000 each, but have since dwindled to between 700–1200 each as a result of disease and assaults on their land. 1 Although the Shuar and Quichua have not endured the same blow to their numbers, their villages have suffered similar land incursions. [End Page 124] This lack of land rights is not specific to the Amazon. Both the Oriente and the Sierra Indians have been repeatedly disappointed by the state’s land reform policies during the past four decades. In 1964, the military government viewed small parcels of land as an obstacle to modernization. With the purpose of feeding the burgeoning cities, agrarian legislation encouraged the establishment of large dairy and meat farms. The law ended debt peonage, a practice common in the Sierra, but did not distribute land to those released from peonage. 2 A trend of land concentration continued through the military’s 1973 second land reform law, which stressed efficiency and productivity through the promotion of capital intensive export crops, i.e. agroindustry. After the passage of this law, 1.2% of landholders in the Sierra controlled 66% of the arable land. 3 This scarcity of arable land in the Sierra fomented increased colonization of the Oriente. The Ecuadorian leadership’s enthusiasm for rapid modernization also opened the door to foreign oil companies in...