This is how one community in remote Ecuador defends its territory
Indigenous A'i Kofan in the Amazon have adopted numerous strategies to protect their land
Three years ago I was privileged to travel briefly up the River Aguarico in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It was a beautiful, sometimes difficult, even dangerous journey. The water, a stunning green in places, ran fast and furious, and a couple of times we had to clamber out of our canoes and haul them with long ropes through boulders and other rocks.
My companions, most of them wearing dark green tunics, kerchiefs and life-jackets, were indigenous A’i Kofan men. Their mission was clear: to visit a gold-mining site in a recently-established concession an hour or so upriver and find out if the miners there were using mercury, which could have catastrophic impacts on their village downstream.
I reported at length on that journey for The Guardian. Among other things, my article drew attention to the myriad ways in which the A’i Kofan from one particular community, Sinangoe, were defending their territory - not just from miners operating in a supposedly legal, government-granted concession upstream, but from more obviously illegal, smaller-scale miners, loggers, hunters, fishermen and assorted others actually invading Sinangoe land. Their strategies included conducting systematic monitoring via mapping and GPS, drones, camera traps and conventional film and photography, as well as promulgating and publicising their own law, partnering with two NGOs called the Alianza Ceibo and Amazon Frontlines, contacting national and international media, lobbying government and state authorities, and even forming a “guardia indígena” to make land patrols and the kind of river trips that I was on to confront those miners. Ironically, they had found themselves forced to do all this despite the fact that their territory had been included in the Cayambe Coca National Park - an already supposedly “protected area” which was reported to be the most important water reserve in all of northern Ecuador.
One of the A’i Kofan I remember best from that journey was Nixon Andy Narvaez, a young man who had been receiving communications training from the Alianza Ceibo and spent much of the time taking photographs. As I reported in The Guardian, he described what we found as “a little horrific” and the riverbank as “literally” being destroyed - not an exaggeration.
What Narvaez - like so many other A’i Kofan whom I met on that trip, and like so many other indigenous people whom I’ve spoken to over the years - emphasised to me was how important the river was to his community. “We live along [its] banks,” he said. “It is fundamental to our lives. We drink the water, we bathe in it, we fish. Maybe the fish are being contaminated [by the mining] and our health will be endangered. It’d be better if the concession was cancelled.”
Today, Sinangoe’s fight continues. Earlier this month on 5 June, to mark the United Nations’s World Environment Day, Narvaez issued a rousing statement that was circulated by Amazon Frontlines in which he claimed that threats to his community had recently “intensified” - not only from the usual suspects like “illegal mining, logging, poaching, fishing”, but also from the Covid-19 pandemic and “now a new President”, Guillermo Lasso, “who has pledged to double down on oil and mineral extraction to prioritize the economy.”
“I am a young Indigenous land defender and filmmaker,” Narvaez’s statement ran. “I was born in the A’i Kofan community of Sinangoe, where I live surrounded by nature and where the majestic Aguarico River is born. . . My dream is for my people to live in peace like our ancestors once did. We know that the forest and rivers are essential for our survival as humans. . . Guided by the wisdom of our elders and the forest, we continue to unite and fight.”
Narvaez’s statement also referred to the fruits of another of Sinangoe’s strategies to defend its territory: a “historic” judge’s ruling issued in 2018 after the community, together with the national ombudsman, took legal action. That ruling found that the A’i Kofan’s rights under Ecuador’s Constitution and the International Labour Organisation’s legally-binding Convention 169 had been violated by the establishment of the mining concession we visited and many others upriver, and suspended them. After it was immediately appealed by the government, another ruling by another judge went even further and annulled the concessions altogether, thereby protecting more than 79,000 acres of rainforest from mining. The following year, Sinangoe’s case was selected by the country’s Constitutional Court as part of a process to set national jurisprudence on indigenous peoples’ rights - described by Amazon Frontlines (AF) as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” with the “power to shape how long-term conservation decisions over Indigenous territories are made and halt the expansion of the extractive frontier in the Amazon and beyond.” According to AF, over the next few months the A’i Kofan, together with the Waorani and other indigenous peoples, “will be ramping up their efforts to ensure the Court rules on Indigenous people’s right to decide over their territories and launching a global digital campaign calling on the world to stand in solidarity.”
“In 2018, we won a historic victory against gold mining,” Narvaez said in his 5 June statement, “setting a key legal precedent for Indigenous Rights across the region and protecting 32,000 hectares of pristine, mega-biodiverse rainforest along one of the country’s most important Amazonian headwaters. Now, our case sits before the country's highest court and should set a landmark precedent on Indigenous rights nationwide. In alliance with other Indigenous nations, we are fighting to ensure that our right to decide over our territories is respected.”
When will the Constitutional Court take action? It has been more than a year and a half since it announced that it would involve Sinangoe, but no date for a hearing has been given yet.