Paying the price

Coca / DPA

In earlier times, the water here used to sing. “Not anymore,” says Silvia Shiguangi from Ecuador’s Huaorani tribe. Bananas and cassava no longer grow well and the fish catch has sunk dramatically.
“We used to live from what the forest gave us,” says the young mother, who left her village in the Yasuni National Park, home to pristine rainforest and one of the world’s most sensitive ecosystems, to live in Coca, a gloomy and neglected oil town on the park’s edges.
The hotels there are now mostly empty.
Only the 4.5-million-dollar Museo Cultural, funded by oil wealth, stands out. It informs visitors about the Kichwa and the Huaorani people and their culture; many of the exhibits, figurines and ceramics were only recently found in the rain forest.
Whole communities once left the forest to come and live in Coca, on the River Napo, in the hope of getting work and education, and the town grew bigger and bigger. Shiguango, who often feels like a foreigner in the town, was one of them. “Earlier we used to plant and harvest everything ourselves,” she says.
But for two years now, the town has been rapidly leaking its once 50,000-strong population. As the world oil price has sunk, Coca has lost its “El Dorado” reputation and left many people unemployed. It’s the second time the oil curse has struck Shiguango, after first taking away her home.
“There’s a lot more crime than a couple of years ago,” says Catholic missionary Juan Carlos Andueza, who originates from the Basque Country in northern Spain and came here with a special mission.He’s is carrying out a wish of Pope Francis, implementing his call to protect the environment in the “Laudato Si” papal
encyclical published in June last year. With
the help of a relief organization, Adveniat,
the Panamazonian church network REPAM
is working to protect indigenous communities and provide them with legal aid. REPAM
president Brazilian cardinal Claudio Hummes is a close confidante of the pope. Referring
to oil extraction, illegal gold mining and
forest clearing to make way for soya production, he talks about the “terrible destruction of the environment.”
“Oil production has to be cut down,” he says. Yasuni, one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world, has been an international bone of contention for years. Despite protests about the effect of oil production on the park, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa can
point to a track record of at least investing
the profits well.
In just a few years, the country’s entire road network has been modernized, asphalted roads link the major cities and new airports and waterworks have been built. A generous system of grants allows the children of poorer families to, for example, study medicine in Kiev. Those who return to Ecuador don’t need to pay for their education.
Correa, an economist, visits a new town every Saturday to hear his people’s woes and desires directly from their own mouths. “Neo-extractivism”, a left-wing school of thought which decrees that a country’s natural resources should be used to help its development and fund social programmes to tackle poverty, is a popular concept all over South America.
But the flip side of it is the damage it does to indigenous communities, which are often forced to leave their ancestral lands. Pipelines run all along Yasuni’s border, and burning flares are often seen. Ecuador produces around 540,000 barrels of oil a day, including from the ITT field, in the Yasuni park itself.
With around 920 million barrels, the field is thought to contain around 20 per cent of the country’s reserves.
Its exploitation has attracted condemnation from conservationists.
There are now thought to be only seven uncontacted tribes living in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, and the continual encroachment on their lands has led to repeated incidents of violence and the kidnapping of oil workers.
Shiguango, 29, carrying her son Joel in her arms, is now standing on the spot where Bishop Alejandro Labaka and a nun, Ines Arango, set off in 1987 to warn one of the uncontacted peoples, the Tagaeri, about an advance party from an oil firm.
But the Tagaero took them for enemies and killed them both. Labaka was found with 80 stab wounds and 17 spears sticking out of him when his body was picked up later by a helicopter expedition.
Oil production never took off in the area. Labaka, whom missionary Andueza calls a martyr and who is now in the process of being beatified in Rome, was at least successful in his work. “The death was a warning, a shock,”
he says. The oil company later sent helicopters to throw leaflets down to the advance party, warning them to turn around. Andueza wants to help protect the forest and support the
indigenous peoples in their David versus Goliath fight against oil.
“Thirty years ago, companies didn’t even ask for permission,” he says. Today oil production is controlled by the state and firms like Petroamazonas are responsible for it. “But if we weight it up, the negative consequences are far heavier,” says the missionary.
The price for indigenous people like Shiguango is also a cultural one. “We hardly speak our language in the city any more,” she says. “The children only speak Spanish. We’re losing our traditions.”