March 4

Ecuador news:

Many, maybe around 1,500 indigenous Ecuadorians, have been displaced from the northeastern border area with Colombia in Sucumbios province. APDH (Asamblea Permanente de Derechos Humanos, a Quito-based human rights organization) told me they were displaced by Colombian paramilitaries who have made bases on the Ecuadorian side. The Colombians have apparently threatened the indigenous people. They are afraid to say who threatened them—it may be paramilitaries, guerrillas, or even troops of the Colombian government. An Ecuadorian columnist said that whoever they are, they’re “not in Ecuador for vacation,” and it’s becoming something like an occupation.

Meanwhile many Colombians have fled in the last half year or so into Ecuador, and are now living in refugee shelters in Lago Agrio, capital of Sucumbios province. This is a direct result of Plan Colombia, the U.S. program that supports the Colombian government in its fight against the guerrillas. Last year Congress approved $1.3 billion in aid to Colombia, making it the third largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world (after Israel and Egypt), and the largest outside of the Middle East.

Most of this aid is going to the military. This is our new Vietnam, and we’ll be hearing a lot more about this in the next few years. Vietnam was ostensibly to fight communism, and our new enemy here is drugs. But this war will not hurt the drug cartels, which know how to move their operations around as needed. But it will create many more refugees and impoverished people.

The war also has a possibility of becoming regionalized. For example, the main U.S. base in the region is in Ecuador, and people don’t want it here. Ecuadorians are angry about it, and the Colombian guerrillas have threatened to extend their operations into Ecuador because of it.

Another problem related to Plan Colombia is the spraying of herbicides. The herbicides kill the cocaine crops and all the other crops around them, and they make the farmers sick, and take away their livelihood. And the herbicides sprayed in southern Colombia waft across the border, hurting Ecuadorian crops.

I went up to Lago Agrio to visit the Amazon Defense Front (FDA), a regional coalition that works with CDES (Centro de Derechos Economicos y Sociales -- Center for Economic and Social Rights), and represents campesinos and indigenous organizations in that area. They formed in 1994 to help people who were suing Texaco. Why Texaco? This is the story of the destruction of the Amazon by international oil companies. Oil was discovered in the Amazon in the late 1960s, and international companies have been punching roads into the jungle ever since.

Texaco, for example, uses exploration and extraction techniques that it would never be allowed to use in the United States. It detonates bombs to take sonar readings for oil deposits. Then it drills a well, digs a “pool” nearby the well, and pours the waste byproducts of the oil into this surface pool. The poisonous byproducts go into the groundwater. When the pools—there are hundreds of them—fill up, the wastes are siphoned off and poured into the lakes and rivers. Some of them are spread onto the dirt roads “to keep the dust down.” 

With the water ruined, people have nowhere to fish or to clean themselves. They go hunting instead of fishing, and deplete the forests of game. Kids without shoes play on the contaminated roads. Cattle fall in the waste pools. People get rashes, boils, and eventually more serious diseases. To escape these things, young indigenous people leave for the city, and the indigenous population dwindles. Several tribes are now threatened with extinction.

In response to all this, people organized and started a suit against Texaco in 1993. Texaco has managed to stall the suit so far. CDES, the Amazon Defense Front, and other organizations are working on these problems.

Texaco pulled out of Ecuador in the early 1990s, but is still responsible for what it did. The Ecuadorian government or indigenous communities are negotiating with Texaco to clean up their mess. On occasion they will come in and cover up some of the waste pools with dirt, and call it cleaned.

The plaintiffs in the suit want a billion dollars for repair of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

*

The bus we took to Lago Agrio was a solid but ancient one. The brake pedal squeaked every time it was used. The bus smelled of sweaty people before anyone even got on. We crammed into our seats and leaned back, trying to go to sleep, but with little success. It was after 10:00 p.m. when we left. We couldn’t see any scenery, but we were going down, down down down towards the Oriente, the eastern/jungle part of Ecuador. A Mexican telenovela played on the television at the front of the bus. It was a rude ride.

At 5:30 a.m. we stopped at a military checkpoint. The soldiers looked at our passports in a perfunctory way and thanked us, and we were off. It got light, and we followed a rusty pipeline with election slogans painted on it, north towards Lago Agrio. We passed some banana fields, went through another checkpoint, and arrived.

A man guided us towards the hotel where we thought we would sleep the night. Upon leaving us he said, “Tengan un poco de cuidado—Be a little bit careful.” We passed dusty worn-out asphalt roads, cinderblock stores with rusty corrugated roofing, dogs with nothing to do, and people with not much more to do. Mostly men.

Lago Agrio is a town of about 30,000 that grew in the early 1970s with the oil boom. It was named for “Sour Lake,” a place in Texas where Texaco made its first big strike.

I went to meet the people of the Amazon Defense Front. They had a busy schedule but we managed to talk to them for an hour or so, and they graciously told us the history of their organization, who they work with, and what’s happening in the northeastern region of Ecuador. It was a preliminary meeting, and I will have to go back there if I am to pursue that line of research.

*

Sunday, March 11

Thursday I headed south to Puyo. The bus ride through the Andes, along the “Avenue of the Volcanoes,” was a magnificent if economy-style trip. Full of distant views of tall misty green peaks piercing the sky at 4,000 to 5,000 meters. Vertical farming, with some of the mountains seemingly cultivated or at least hedged off for pasture, clear to the ridges.

At Ambato we hung a left, heading down the eastern slope of the range. The mountains became tighter, a thousand or so meters tall. As we descended nature became wilder, and more foliage appeared. Along a gorge I looked down a thousand feet to the river below, a river ending up in the Amazon. There was no guardrail. Nothing to do about it but enjoy the beautiful ride and think good thoughts.

As we came down along the unpaved road, clouds edged between the tight mountains around and below us. Further down the foliage became lush and frondy, frilly, ferny, fluffy sometimes. Tropical. Banana trees and twenty other kinds of palms. The clouds were back above us where they belonged. We were in the jungle, which reaches all the way to Brazil.

The next morning I got up and went directly to Union Base, an indigenous settlement about a 20-minute bumpy taxi ride into the jungle. The taxi driver told me that he wanted to go to the United States. He had a couple of uncles there but couldn’t remember in which city they lived. He told me that it costs $10,000 to go there illegally.

We traveled along a dirt road past palm-thatched houses, kids going to school, and women carrying machetes. At Union Base I met with CONFENIAE, a confederation of 13 indigenous groups covering most of the central and southern part of the Amazon. CONFENIAE, a prominent leader of the indigenous movement to protect the environment and traditional lifestyle, is similar to the Amazon Defense Front up north.

I had hoped to learn about the background and work of CONFENIAE, but they were more focused on explaining to me what they needed: an internet connection, a fax machine, and a way to communicate among settlements that have no phone, let alone electricity, and require a several-day hike or a trip in a small airplane in order to reach them. This is an obstacle to organizing indigenous resistance in the Amazon.

After the meeting Juan Enomenga showed me his media center. This included a 15-year-old computer that doesn’t work, about 40 feet of manila folders, archives left over from a previous staff worker. Juan is Huaorani, and speaks Spanish and a little English, French, and German, as well as his own language. He showed me some photographs of his community, including a man about 50 years old wearing very little and holding a spear that was taller than him. Juan told me, “We still make our own weapons, and are the best hunters.”

Back in Puyo, I had the rest of the weekend to cool my heels. Puyo is a simple place without mystery. A few blocks wide and a couple kilometers long, surrounded by jungle, it is composed of sooty cinderblock buildings and a few made of brick and wood. Nothing taller than 4 stories. A couple of concrete buildings with modern glass fronts. But new paint jobs here are rarer than a chicken with bifocals.

Puyo has the air of a frontier town that never grew or got ambitious, and never will. Unprepossessing would be an appropriate word. The only reason a tourist would stay here would be to leave. But the atmosphere is genuine and the people don’t stare at me, in spite of my gringo skin. They are perfectly friendly and courteous. No one has warned me to be careful here, so I’m happy to be here, whether I have something to do or not.

I expected the town to be dead on Sunday, but it turned out to be market day. Kids and families everywhere, everyone out on the sidewalk selling something. Clumps of bananas. Wheelbarrows, a couple of cows’ forelegs, chicken carcasses lined up on a crate. Women in simple modern dress, some in plain woven skirts held on by a sash wrapped around the waist. Gold or coral necklaces. Most people have the indigenous face, a handsome and dignified one, with a slightly dour, proud look. Unlike in Quito, there are no beggars. Maybe because everyone is too poor?

I walked over to the Ethno-botanical Park, along the River Puyo, and was shown around by Benica, a Quichua guide. Benica, from a Quichua community off in the jungle, points out numerous native plants and their uses. Leaves from a sensitive plant, when used in a bath, will calm down a baby and help it go to sleep. Likewise it is good for heart problems, but only a couple of leaves in the tea, as it is strong. A particular kind of orchid flower is good for bone pain. Tea from the bark of the balsa tree helps a woman give birth more easily. Tea from the canela (cinnamon) flower is good for a stomach ache.

The juice of the Caña Agria (bitter cane) plant is good for the kidneys, also people who have cancer use it. The bark and fruit of the guayava tree are good for diarrhea. Lalu sap alleviates a scorpion’s sting, and a certain bromeliad fiber is good for making fishing nets.

We stopped at a model thatched-roof house built in the Huaorani style. There hanging by the wall were some arrows and some bark that Benica showed me, which I handled until she told me it was curare, the poison that paralyzes the hunter’s prey.

In another hut, we sat on stools made by the Shuar. Benica told me they used to shrink the heads of their enemies, but have discontinued that practice. However, some of the men still marry as many as five wives. Thinking of the Muslim practice, I asked if these are the richer men. She said, “No, they are the stronger hunters.” She told me that traditionally only men can sit on those stools, because if a woman sits on them, this will steal the strength from a man. And when a man is about to go out hunting, he will not sleep with a woman beforehand, for the same reason.

As we walked back I asked if the villages have electricity. Benica said no, that they make light with beeswax or the sap from trees. With the tears from the trees, the “lagrimas,” she said.

There were some parrots and a few baby turtles. Other than that I saw nothing wilder than Benica’s two little kids who are tagging along with us. Near the end of the trail there was a tiny but full-grown monkey sitting on a tree at eye’s length. No bigger than a squirrel. A “mono de pocket,” I would call it, a pocket monkey. So small and fuzzy, fidgety but not afraid, and still so humanesque.

We sat at the hut of a curandero and Benica told me this is the place where the shaman comes to get strength from the spirits of the mountains and the trees and the wind. Then they can better cure people. She asked me if I believe that, and I say I don’t see why not, those people have the knowledge of thousands of years. Benica wanted to be a curandero but said that living in the city, she could not eat the right kind of pure food necessary to train for this knowledge.

All this knowledge and reverence for the forest reveals to me a hint of the antidote to our fear of scorpions and snakes, to our ignorance about the richest biosphere in the world. It also reminds me of the explorer Francisco de Orellana who traveled from Quito all the way to the mouth of the Amazon in 1542. He started with 5,000 men and arrived with 80. How arrogant, how unimaginative to think you have to know the beginning and end of everything, without looking at the how and why in between. When Orellana tried again four years later, he was never heard from. Probably he has been reincarnated as an oil developer.

*

I spent the rest of last week in Puyo interviewing members of various organizations. These are organizations that represent different indigenous communities of Pastaza province, of which Puyo is the capital. Pastaza is a large province right in the center of the Oriente, Ecuador’s Amazon. Organizations based in Puyo represent the Huaorani, the Zapara, the Achuar, the various Quichua groups, the Shuar, and the Shiwiar, among others.

But these communities are located in the undeveloped interior of Pastaza province, a jungle reaching to the border with Peru and then beyond. A couple of roads go a few dozen miles into the jungle, that’s all. From there it can be a day’s walk to the nearer communities, or four days’ walk to the Zapara and Achuar communities down by the Peruvian border. An alternative way to get to the interior is an expensive plane ride (over $200) to one of 70 airfields. Some communities are reachable by a slow canoe ride along one of several rivers.

Pastaza is relatively undeveloped, especially as compared to the area in the north around Lago Agrio where Texaco started prospecting in the late 1960s. So the story of oil development in Pastaza is quite different from that of the north. The communities of Pastaza had a chance to see the destruction of the north before it happened to them, and have to some extent been able to organize against it. This is what I was there to find out about—how people are resisting the destruction of their environment and ancient lifestyle in Pastaza.

The answer is, they are resisting in various ways, and with varying effectiveness. Some people told me that they don’t want any oil companies present on their territory. Others told me they will negotiate with the companies after they have cleaned up messes they already made. The organizations seem to be relatively united and militant, although there are some communities that have broken off from the organizations and allowed the oil companies entrance, in return for the modern equivalent of trinkets and beads: solar panels, free airplane flights, some bags of food.

It is a formidable task to take on the oil companies and tell them no, you can’t pump the oil out of our ground, no matter how carefully you do it. To do so is to stand up not just to an oil company and not just to your own government, but to the whole worldwide globalizing fossil-fuel imperative. Bad luck to anyone, anywhere, who has oil under their ground. But these spear-carrying people are saying “No, we don’t want your development, we don’t even want ‘colonos’ from the west coming in here with their cattle to ruin our forests. We want sustainable development without roads. We want to preserve our traditional, environmentally sound culture.”

Among all these exceptional people I met who had the nerve to want to survive and preserve a gentle way of walking, the most exceptional were the Zapara. This is a once numerous tribe, that they say numbered 200,000 a century ago. In recent years anthropologists declared the Zaparas extinct. But a couple of years ago the Zaparas, now numbering around 200 people and inhabiting four villages, formed an organization to defend its territory and acquire the rights of a legally-recognized Ecuadorian nationality. I visited with them in Puyo.

The Zapara, somewhere along the way, were almost assimilated into the Quichua. That’s the language they speak now, except for a handful of their elders. One of the things they want to do is revive their own language in their schools.

The people I spoke with impressed me with their reverence for their shamans. The word in Spanish is “chaman” or “curandero,” in Zapara/Quichua, “shimano.” The Zapara shamans were also the political leaders of the tribe. I was told that the shamans were able to protect nature and ward off evil spirits. The last Zapara shaman in Ecuador died five years ago. 

One of the reasons that the Zapara’s numbers were depleted was that their neighbors, the Quichua and the Shuar, coveted their land. The Zapara shamans were believed to be the most powerful in the region, so somewhere in the 19^th century, I was told, invading neighbors came into the Zapara communities and tried to kill all of the elders. Some of them survived by hiding in the forests.

But not all the Zapara shamans are gone, and there are more than 200 Zapara after all. The rest, maybe around 400 more, live across the border in Peru. There has been a border conflict between Ecuador and Peru for the last couple of centuries, and it flared up in 1941. When people here speak of the “war of 1941,” they don’t mean World War II. For most of the next 60 years families were divided, just like in Korea, as territory and tribes were cut in two by a forbidden border. People at the Zapara office told me they had cousins they had never met.

How petty, to have a war about a border between Ecuador and Peru. Why bother, I would ask? But you have to realize it’s just as smart, and as good for the politicians, as any other war anywhere else. Fortunately for the Achuar and the Zapara, the issue was finally settled a couple of years ago. Now the Zapara are finding their relatives.

When I was at the Zapara office, a Zapara shaman from Peru was there visiting his Ecuadorian family for the first time. The Zapara organization hopes to create a training program for the young Zapara in the Ecuadorian communities, so that they can revive this part of their culture. I met the shaman briefly. He had a very busy schedule. He seemed a modest man, with one leg of his jeans tucked into his rubber boot, and the other on the outside. He didn’t speak much Spanish and he couldn’t make out what I was doing there. But I could recognize the presence of a holy man.

In the office of the Zapara organization I noticed a large, poster-sized photograph of a middle-aged woman with long straight black hair, holding a big snake in her hands. While I was waiting for an interview, Gloria Ushigua, director of eco-tourism projects for the Zapara, came up and started talking to me. I noticed that she resembled the woman in the poster, only she seemed younger.

It turned out that Gloria was the woman in the poster. She pulled out some more photos of her with the snake, which she told me was a boa. She told me that when she goes out walking in the forest, the snake comes looking for her to play. She plays with the snake for as much as three hours. She showed me pictures of her dragging the snake along a river bed, holding the snake above her head, the snake wrapped up around a stick.

This is not a garter snake. I asked how long the snake was. Gloria pointed to a spear leaning in a corner of the room and said it was about as long as that spear. The spear was about ten feet long. I asked if it was dangerous to play with a boa. Gloria said, “I know how. I don’t know how to drive a car. That can be dangerous, too.” 

*

Visit with the Federacion de Barrios Populares del Noroccidente de Quito

Marco and Luis, staff members of the Federation of the People’s Barrios of Northwest Quito, came to my hotel and picked me up in their truck. I had made an arrangement to meet them and learn about their work in the very poor northwest area of Quito. They drove me out to the Federation office, about 5 miles into that part of town. Along the way they pointed out the rich and poor neighborhoods of Quito. The poor sections of the northwest are higher up in the hills.

We picked up Mauro Quingalombo, president of the Federation, and headed further out towards the hills. As we entered one of the barrios where the Federation is doing its work, Mauro explained that there has been a disorderly kind of growth in the area. Some of the neighborhoods are as much as 100 years old, but most of them are under 25 years old. There is a dense population in this area amounting to around 80,000 poor people, and thus a concentration of problems. 

We drove up into the barrio, on a crumbling macadam road. We passed a shop that sells only bananas, huge bunches of them on benches and all over the floor. A scruffy dog lounged in front of the shop. We passed a woods that Mauro pointed out is controlled by the army. He urged me to get out and photograph a sign that says the woods are mined. Mauro is not sure he believes the woods are mined, and thinks that the sign may have been put there to prevent people from expanding their neighborhood into those woods.

The first large neighborhood we drove into is called Cooperativa Jaime Roldos, named after the president who died in an airplane accident in 1981. There is a mixed population of people from all over Ecuador: blacks, whites, indigenous. Luis pointed to an old woman wearing a red sweater, a pink skirt, an orange apron, and a white fedora hat and says, “For example, that woman is from Cuenca.”

There is election graffiti on the walls. Most of the houses are made of bare cinderblocks—we’re in cinderblock heaven. We climbed higher into the hills along dirt roads with great ruts in the middle of them. A few houses are made of bricks or wood. There are fences made of everything all together: rusty corrugated metal roofing, sticks, boards, and plywood that’s delaminating. We passed through Barrio La Paz and Barrio Primavera.

Further up, the houses have no water. A few have cisterns. “Tanquero” trucks deliver water, or people collect rainwater. Soon we were driving on an ancient road made of reddish stones, past a cinderblock church named “La Biblia Dice,” The Bible Says. There are a few nice-looking houses that extended families have pooled their resources to build. Still, there are no services: no garbage, water, or electricity.

We arrived at a high and lonesome community kitchen for children, the Comedor Comunitario La Paz. It felt like we were no longer in Quito, but truly in the Andes. We were easily 10,000 feet above sea level. I pointed at a peak looming in the distance and asked Mauro if it was a volcano. He said, “No, es un cerro.” It’s a hill. There are woods nearby and a vegetable garden next to the modest two-room building. This center serves about 50 children. Although there is no electricity or water, the staff cooks lunch five days a week on a gas stove. If they could rent out the view of Quito and the surrounding mountains, they would be rich.

I commented to Mauro that in the United States the poor people live concentrated in the city centers, because the rich want such views for themselves. Mauro says that the city tried to evict people from these upper neighborhoods and make parks there, but the people resisted as they had nowhere else to go. We drove further up the hill to the edge of the settled area, and parked to look at the view. Mauro said that in another ten years, all this upper section will be settled. He pointed out fences that are already plotted out, owned by people who have started gardens there.

I yawned for oxygen. The upper roads are lined with Eucalyptus trees. We passed through Barrio Rancho and Mauro noted that transportation is a problem. There are buses, but no direct line to the center of the city. Down the slope we looked at the neighborhoods of Quito. There are rich ones right next to poor ones. A rich neighborhood has a wall around it. There is a cornfield between it and a poor neighborhood, which Mauro said has no telephone service.

Mauro pointed at the rich section and then the rest of the barrios, and said, “Here there are many possibilities, and there, hundreds of problems.”   Behind us was a large heap of sawdust, and a mother and three small children were sifting through it, taking out small scraps of wood to use for kindling. 

Marco gave me a ride back to my hotel. On the way back he talked about Plan Colombia: “The United States has given us a war that we don’t want. They are fumigating plantations in Colombia and the poison reaches over into Ecuador. There is more violence in our city than before. Colombians are perpetrating kidnappings here. There was a bombing recently of one of the pipelines. Because of the U.S. air base at Manta, the guerrillas think that Ecuador is supporting Plan Colombia.”

*

With the Frente to San Carlos and Pompeya

I took a plane to Coca with Luis Yanza of the Amazon Defense Front (FDA). However, at the time we should have been landing in Coca, we found ourselves in Lago Agrio. Bad weather gave us a detour. We sat in the Lago Agrio airport for three hours until Coca’s weather improved. This was good, as it gave me the opportunity to interview Luis about the work of the FDA.

Luis goes to the United States occasionally, to New York and Washington D.C. He told me that he dislikes the country and always wants to go back home when he gets there. I told him that sometimes I feel that way too. He said, “It is a dehumanized society.”

It was still drizzling when we arrived in Coca. The town literally smelled of oil. I was told this smell is stronger after a rain. Coca reminded me of Lago Agrio and Puyo. Another flat and blocky cinderblock town, with plenty of life in the streets. These tacky but genuine towns are starting to grow on me. They all seem to have been developed to a minimum functional level 20 or so years ago, and then left to decay.

We went directly to the local FDA office, on a main street, to meet our driver Richard. The office was lined with posters calling for protection of the rain forest. In one corner a poster protested the U.S. airbase: “Gringos out, no base at Manta!”

We took a pick-up truck to the small community of San Carlos, about an hour out of Coca on one long rutted road. We passed banana farms, coconut palms, red and yellow heliconia flowers, and little settlements of wooden hovels, tarpaper shacks minus the tarpaper. Thatched cabanas raised up on stilts to keep down the insects. We crossed the Rio Coca and other smaller streams where families were washing their clothes in water of questionable purity. The rain let up and it became muggy.

Luis and his colleagues began a meeting in San Carlos and Richard took me for a look around the area. There was a large Petroecuador refinery a couple of miles from the town. A complex about a square kilometer in size, with big pillbox refineries, two smokestacks with great gas flames coming out of them, and a fence around the perimeter. Richard cautioned me to be careful about taking photographs.

We drove around the back of the complex and got out of the truck, and there I saw my first waste pool. How can I describe it? It is a big pit, about 20 meters by 40, of black smelly liquid, water and oil waste together, and nothing lives in it. It is surrounded by grass and some birds are foraging nearby. There’s a clearing not far away, and a banana farm. This is not a “pool,” but an oil swamp that just stays there, a crime against the environment. No wonder the local people are outraged.

In a half hour’s time Richard showed me four such oil swamps. We went back to San Carlos and waited for the meeting to end. We sat at a very modest general store called “Tienda Nairoby” and took a cold drink. A few feet in front of us, the pipeline follows the main road through the middle of town. It goes up to Lago Agrio and then to the Pacific Coast, to Esmeraldas.

Richard is a business administration student in Lago Agrio. He tells me that in that area both Colombian paramilitaries and guerrillas are operating. They have been coming to Ecuador for some years to rest from the war. Now they are attacking indigenous communities in Ecuador, and the Quichua people who live by the border are fleeing. Some have returned, says Richard, at their own risk. “They kill whole families and don’t care, “ he says. Now Colombian civilians, driven out of the area across the border by fumigation, are buying property in Lago Agrio and setting up businesses. Some are involved in drug trafficking.

Luis and his

colleagues were meeting with people from San Carlos who want to set up an eco-tourism cooperative on a farm on the nearby river Napo. They met in the shade of a half-built house, and the people of the Frente gave them advice about how to register their organization. San Carlos is the area with the highest incidence of cancer, assumed to be the result of oil waste contamination. In the last ten years around 15 people have died.

Hugo, a member of the San Carlos association, told me that they own land on the river, and just need assistance in developing it into a place for tourists to visit. They are trying to create a source of income as an alternative to the work offered by the oil industry. Hugo says that a botanical expert came to the area and in a two by four meter area, he found 39 species of medicinal plants.

After the meeting we drove on to Pompeya, a couple of hours further down dirt roads along the Napo river. We were going to meet with representatives of some local Quichua communities there. Luis warned me, “If they offer you chicha, you can’t refuse it.” Chicha is a catch-all word for a lightly fermented drink that can be made from various local plants.

As we drove on a dirt road through some woods, Pablo turned to me and said, “This is where they kidnapped those petroleros.” Everyone laughed. Later I found out it was in a more remote area, but at the time I didn’t think this was very funny. I hoped that I was different enough from an oil worker to be safe. I reasoned that probably the $13 million that the kidnappers -- whoever they were -- earned in March should tide them over for a couple of months.

The road to Pompeya took many turns, ever deeper into the jungle. But the trappings of oil development were everywhere. Pipelines followed every road, sometimes four or five pipes of varying diameter. They would come out of the ground unexpectedly, assorted colors, with meter boxes and valve wheels. 

We passed more refineries, oil company offices, storage yards for tractors, all surrounded by cyclone fencing. All this amidst life: cows and horses grazing, palm plantations, a half dozen kids swimming in a brook, egrets gliding overhead, a boy in a bright yellow t-shirt sitting on a dingy gray pony.

At the entrance to Block 15 we passed through a private security checkpoint where a young man with a shotgun took down our names. When we got to Pompeya it was dark. The meeting was to take place the next morning at this place that must be a monastery. Two nuns and Father Jose Miguel greeted us there, and we had a meal of beans and chicken. You could hear a chorus of exotic-sounding frogs and above the Milky Way, “La Via Lactia” in Spanish or “Huagra Nambi” in Quichua, was clear overhead. The Quichua name means the “Route of the Tapir.” The Quichua legend says that when you die, your soul goes to heaven over that road.

That evening there was not enough room for all of us to sleep at the monastery, so Richard and I went to a hotel in Shushufindi. I love the place just for the name. The hotel boasted an assortment of stuffed tropical animals and a large snakeskin mounted on the wall. The hotel keeper charged me the gringo price for a room with a mosquito net, but there were no mosquitoes. Perhaps a few fleas.

Richard and I shared a cool drink downstairs on the sidewalk. There was much street activity this night. Later, after we left Shushufindi the next morning, Pablo told me that the criminals from Guayaquil, a notoriously dangerous city on the coast, go to Shushufindi when things get too hot for them. I was advised retroactively not to wander away from the hotel at night.

The Frente in Action

Luis and his colleagues Pablo and Natacha met with people from the villages near Pompeya. They are in fact not so near—an hour and a half’s walk from one, a couple of hours by canoe from another. A dozen men and women, with a couple of babies and kids running in and out, sat in a classroom with the FDA.

Pablo and Luis explained to them what they had to do to protect their communities from damage caused by the oil company. Pablo had told me that the oil companies are required to sign an agreement with the communities affected by oil development. This is apparently debatable, but at the least, the companies would like to have an agreement that shows they bothered to negotiate. Pablo talked about the price an oil company should pay per square meter of damaged land, and what compensation a community should demand for repair of damages to plants and animals.

Luis weighed the leverage of the company versus that of the communities. The company has money, technicians, lawyers, and the ability to mobilize resources on its behalf. The community only has power if it is united.

“Don’t sign anything fast,” Luis said. “You must be united and get all the information, and then talk to the companies. Money must go to the communities. You need to develop a code of conduct before proceeding. You need to talk about who participates in the talks. There should be international observers.”

*

I spoke with Santiago, a member of one of the communities participating in the meeting: “We are four communities. In San Roque there are 162 people. We have no electricity, but we have generators. San Roque is a three-hour ride from here by canoe.  We came here by boat. This is the fourth time we have met with the FDA. They are helping us to improve our proposal, and to know what is fair. If we were working alone, we would not know. We are developing our association.

“The oil companies have threatened us. But the law prohibits their drilling without negotiating an agreement with us. They have to pay. The companies don’t want to accept our proposal, they don’t want to know anything. They want to give us $30,000. This is very little to put a pipeline through our communities. It’s going to hurt our trees and our medicinal plants. This is our life, we don’t have pharmacies. We have always used the plants.”

*

Padre Jose Miguel has been in the area 29 years. He wears a plaid shirt and black beret, a button with a picture of the Virgin Mary. I asked, “Are you a priest?” He said, “It doesn’t show, does it?”

He said, “The road came here six years ago. It is 130 km to Yasuni Park. The oil companies are still making pools. There used to be many more. There is not much fishing or hunting around here anymore. These were people of their word. Now there has been much contact with the whites. There are schools, but they are only in Spanish. The people don’t learn to read very well. The rivers are contaminated and the people are not getting much protein.”

After the meeting the representatives of the communities held a ceremonial celebration. Two of the men brought out a guitar and a home-made violin with three-strings and started playing songs in a pentatonic scale. One of the women carried a large kettle of chicha around to share with each participant. This chicha was made from yucca root. It looked like a thin yogurt drink, and tasted sour like yogurt too. The woman ladled chicha from the kettle with a small bowl into a larger one. She moved back and forth around the circle of people, gradually sharing the chicha with each of us and returning. She brought it to me three times. Each time she held the bowl with one hand, and I held it with two as I drank out of it. The two men sang a song as the chicha went around.