Ecuadorians fear “ethnocide” as oil firm moves deeper into one of world’s most biodiverse places
Petroecuador expands operations in Yasuni National Park as civil society takes legal actions to try and stop it
As this year’s United Nations climate change conference approaches, and as the importance of protecting biodiversity and stopping burning fossil fuels becomes ever more widely-understood and accepted, what is going on in the Yasuni National Park in the remote Ecuadorian Amazon? That question is worth asking not just because Yasuni, one of the most biodiverse places anywhere on Earth, has become internationally emblematic of hopes for our transition away from oil, gas and coal to a more cleaner, renewable energy era, but because peoples’ lives are at stake.
What is happening is that oil operations are expanding. Despite being a decades-old supposedly “protected area”, the fact is that over the years numerous oil concessions have been slapped on top of Yasuni. Without a doubt, the most controversial is the most remote, known as “Block 43” or “ITT”, after the Ishpingo, Tambococha and Tiputini fields lying under it.
Although many attempts have been made to stop operations in Block 43, including a move to hold a referendum and prior to that the pioneering but ultimately unsuccessful “Yasuni-ITT Initiative” intended to forgo exploitation in return for billions of dollars in compensation from international donors, the oil has begun to flow. Tiputini began to produce in 2016 and Tambococha the following year, with the latter recently accounting for two of Petroecuador’s top 10 most productive wells. According to a statement earlier this year, Petroecuador, the state-run company, was planning to expand the number of Tambococha wells in the second half of 2021 from 5 to 8.
Now it’s the turn of Ishpingo, where Petroecuador has announced it intends to drill 72 wells over the next year and a half. Satellite images released in August by the US NGO Amazon Conservation Association (ACA) revealed how forest had recently been cleared to build an access road connecting Ishpingo to the rest of Block 43’s infrastructure, and then later that month further ACA images showed how more forest had been cleared to extend the road further south as well as build one of the Ishpingo well platforms, Ishpingo A. Subsequently, just two days ago, ACA’s Matt Finer published via Twitter yet more images showing how forest has recently been cleared for Ishpingo B, even further to the south. According to ACA, work on the road began last year.
What this means is that the road and associated infrastructure have almost reached the northern boundary of the buffer area of the “Intangible Zone” established in Yasuni for indigenous peoples living there in “isolation”, most commonly known as the “Tagaeri” and “Taromenane”, and therefore a mere 10 kms or a little more from the “Intangible Zone” itself. In other words, little by little, despite the obvious human rights violations and the potentially catastrophic consequences of contact, due to the Tagaeri’s and Taromenane’s lack of immunity to outsiders’ diseases, oil operations continue to encroach on the territories of some of the most vulnerable indigenous peoples in the world.
This has happened despite the fact that president Guillermo Lasso, who took office in May, agreed in writing during his election campaign to hold a referendum on Yasuni and to protect the rights of indigenous peoples in “isolation.” Worse, in early July Lasso signed an Executive Decree intended to double the country’s oil production, and the government is also planning several new licensing rounds of concessions, the vast majority of them in the Amazon. These are apparently slated to include re-tendering some or many of the same concessions previously offered as part of the highly controversial “Ronda Suroriente”, which dates back almost a decade and has previously met with severe indigenous opposition. On Monday this week three indigenous federations - CONAIE, CONFENIAE and CONCONAWEP - filed a lawsuit against that July Decree, with 100s of indigenous people convening in the capital Quito to mark it.
“[Since Lasso took over] there has been no change at all regarding Yasuni, neither on-the-ground nor at a policy level,” Eduardo Pichilingue, from the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative, tells me. “The road continues to advance towards the buffer zone and Intangible Zone.”
According to Alexandra Almeida, from the NGO Acción Ecológica, the Ishpingo deposits lie under both the buffer area of the Intangible Zone and the Intangible Zone itself. While operating there should be prohibited because of a 2007 law and a 2013 “Declaration of National Interest” from Ecuador’s parliament, she says, a 2019 Decree partly overturned that by permitting “oil production and drilling platforms” in the buffer area.
“The plan they have [to double production] obviously includes Ishpingo,” Almeida tells me. “Ishpingo is the last that still isn’t being exploited.”
Late last month, in an attempt to put an immediate halt to work on the road and Ishpingo, 12 representatives from various civil society organisations filed a lawsuit with the Constitutional Court against the Minister of Environment Gustavo Manrique Miranda, Petroecuador’s general manager and the Secretary of Human Rights, but the Court didn’t accept it and there is no right of appeal. The lawsuit argued that operations threaten to violate the collective rights of the indigenous peoples in “isolation”, as enshrined in Ecuador’s Constitution, and that entering the buffer area “could provoke accidental contact” with them.
“The possibility of accidental contact is so serious that the Constitution itself calls violating the right to remain in isolation a possible crime of ethnocide,” the lawsuit states.
Pedro Bermeo, from the organisation YASunidos and one of the lawsuit’s signatories, tells me that the Court’s argument for rejecting it was “without any foundation” and that the judge must have got “confused” with other types of legal action.
“Basically it was rejected on the grounds there’s no current damage, but the whole point of this type of legal action - precautionary measures - is that there isn’t any damage yet because it is precisely that that we’re seeking to avoid,” Bermeo says. “What it shows is that there’s a threat.”
YASunidos recently released a short film about the road, describing Ishpingo as “the heart of Yasuni” and the park as “the most biodiverse place on the planet”, and emphasising how the dangers to the indigenous peoples in “isolation” are currently even greater because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Bermeo stresses the park’s extraordinary biodiversity - “the birds, reptiles, mammals, plants. . . more biodiversity per metre squared than anywhere else” - and how it has become “symbolic” among Ecuadorians, not only in the fight to protect the environment but as an example of citizen involvement and power.
“We’re considering now how to respond because construction of the road is still going on,” Bermeo says. “This could be devastating for the people in isolation: it could mean ethnocide or even genocide.”
Offering more hope is another lawsuit on Yasuni presented to the Constitutional Court two years ago, but for which the first audience, online, was only held last week. Filed against Ecuador’s presidency by 6 members of the all-female Colectiva de Antropólogas, that lawsuit argues that the 2019 Decree permitting operations in the Intangible Zone’s buffer area violates the rights of the indigenous peoples in “isolation” to “prior consultation” as well as a “series of Constitutional rights and dispositions”, including the “intangibility” of their territories and the state’s responsibility to “prevent the ethnocide of those peoples.” Urging the Court to declare the Decree unconstitutional, in addition to temporarily suspending it along with any environmental permits to operate in the buffer area, the lawsuit warns of “ethnocide” numerous times.
Nathalia Bonilla, from Acción Ecológica and one of the signatories, describes the government’s response at the audience as “laughable.”
“Effectively, the state argued that it didn’t comply with its obligation to do free, prior and informed consultation with the isolated peoples because they’re isolated, and therefore they couldn’t do it, and therefore because they couldn’t do it that means they didn’t need to,” Bonilla tells me. “However, the UN’s Guidelines on peoples in isolation and initial contact are clear that if it’s not possible to do consultation because they’re in isolation, then the state should understand that as a NO to whatever it is they want to consult on.”
According to Bonilla, there is considerable support for their lawsuit, as evidenced by the number of amicus curiae presented during the audience. She says that that support is not just in Ecuador but around the world too, given that indigenous peoples in “isolation” have become an issue of “international concern.”
“It’s because of the knowledge they have, their way of managing the forest, their way of being,” Bonilla tells me. “I believe we’ve demonstrated the unconstitutionality of Decree 751 and, in that sense, I’m hopeful, although, of course, we can’t predict what’ll happen given that we’re up against economic interests and the state. Ecuador has this big dilemma: oil or human life?”
Another of the signatories, Marisol Rodriguez, says that she is hopeful too and that the state’s performance at the audience suggested “either they don’t understand the law or they were using cynical arguments.”
“It’s clear that Decree 751 abolishes the Intangible Zone’s intangibility and totally changes the buffer area, and we think there is abundant proof that this is violating the Constitution and putting the Tagaeri and Taromenane at risk of ethnocide and genocide,” Rodriguez tells me. “If there is no logical verdict, we’ll resort to international legal action.”
Is president Lasso going to respect his campaign pledge on Yasuni, or simply deepen Ecuador’s decades-old dependency on oil? Attempts to contact him didn’t meet with any success, while Environment Minister Manrique didn’t respond to emails.