ibes; and the park’s forest and soil provides a massive carbon sink. However, Yasuni National Park also sits on wealth of a different kind: one billion barrels of oil remain locked under the pristine rainforest.
(09/13/2009) The documentary Crude opened this weekend in New York, while the film shows the direct impact of the oil industry on indigenous groups a new study proves that the presence of oil companies can have subtler, but still major impacts, on indigenous groups and the ecosystems in which they live. In Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park—comprising 982,000 hectares of what the researchers call “one of the most species diverse forests in the world”—the presence of an oil company has disrupted the lives of the Waorani and the Kichwa peoples, and the rich abundance of wildlife living within the forest.
(09/03/2009) The promotional efforts ahead of the upcoming release of the film Crude have helped raise awareness of the plight of thousands of Ecuadorians who have suffered from environmental damages wrought by oil companies. But while Crude focuses on the relatively recent history of oil development in the Ecuadorean Amazon (specifically the fallout from Texaco’s operations during 1968-1992), conflict between oil companies and indigenous forest dwellers dates back to the 1940s.
But Correa, who issued lime-green posters emblazoned with the slogan “citizen revolution” during his first run for the presidency, and who has renamed the oil ministry the “ministry of non-renewable resources,” is busily pitching ITT-Yasuní to European governments instead of moving ahead with sensitive oil exploration. In exchange for preserving Yasuní, Correa wants $350 million a year from the Global North for the next ten years.
In the run-up to the climate conference in Copenhagen, Correa and Ecuadoran officials have been circling the globe to attract support for ITT-Yasuní. So far Spain, France and Italy have expressed interest in canceling Ecuador’s debts. But when Correa sought to set up a meeting with British MP’s about Yasuní-ITT, he was rebuffed and told that parliamentarians were too busy with other matters. To date, only Germany has agreed to pay Ecuador $50 million annually for 13 years.
Inaction in the Global North has allowed Correa to take the moral high ground. In London he declared that rich countries were primarily responsible for climate change and it was they who should pay Ecuador not to release carbon into the atmosphere as “compensation for the damages caused by the out-of-proportion amount of historical and current emissions of greenhouse gases.” But while Correa’s fiery denunciations are certainly on target it would be a mistake to view the controversy over Amazonian resources as a simple struggle between the Ecuadoran government and wealthier, more polluting countries.
According to Alberto Acosta, Ecuador’s former Minister of Energy and Mines, the President has been an ambivalent environmentalist. An economist, Acosta left his post due to disagreements with other government officials about oil development in Yasuní. When I was in Quito doing research for my book Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008), I spoke with Acosta and he struck me as a dynamic and principled man. During our discussion he animatedly quoted Bertolt Brecht at length on the need for greater citizen engagement in politics.
In an interesting interview posted on the website Rebelión Acosta remarked that it was civil society and not Rafael Correa which originally pushed the ITT-Yasuní idea. For years, he says, Indians who witnessed the destruction wreaked by Texaco had called for a moratorium on oil exploration in the Amazon. Indigenous peoples were joined by a group of dedicated activists working with a non-governmental organization (or NGO) called Acción Ecológica.
When I was in Ecuador in the 1990s researching some stories about oil exploration in the Amazon I recall interviewing environmentalists working with Acción Ecológica including an insightful woman named Esperanza Martínez. Even before Acosta arrived