Political Report # 1371 Indigenous Communities Reject Oil Drilling in Block 10

by Moira Birss and Carlos Mazabanda, NACLA

Unknown assailants attacked Salomé Aranda’s home on May 13, hurling rocks at her house and threatening her family. Aranda is a Kichwa leader in the Ecuadorian Amazon and an outspoken critic of Italian oil giant ENI, which has operated in the region for 28 years and plans to expand drilling into new fields in the so-called “Block 10” oil concession. There is nothing circumstantial about the attack against Aranda. She belongs to the Mujeres Amazónicas Defensoras De La Selva De Las Bases Frente Al Extractivismo (Women Defenders of the Amazon Rainforest Against Natural Resource Extraction collective), and was one of the representatives who met with Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno on March 22 after ongoing protests against the new concession. In that meeting, Aranda highlighted the social and environmental impacts of the “Block 10” oil drilling concessions, located in the Amazon rainforest 160 miles southeast of the capital city Quito. Among other demands, she and her fellow environmental defenders called on the government to cancel resource concessions in the south-central Amazon to free Indigenous lands of oil, mining, logging, and other extractive industries. Soon after the meeting, the Italian nonprofit organization A Sud confronted ENI at its annual shareholder meeting in Italy in early May over the lack of community consent for its drilling operations in Ecuador. Days later, Aranda’s home was attacked.

Political Report # 1191 Ecuador's Legal Battle With Chevron Foreshadows Global Corporate Coup D'état

A hand covered in crude oil from one of the hundreds of open toxic pits Chevron abandoned in the Ecuadorean Amazon rainforest, near Lago Agrio, in a photo taken on April 15, 2010. (Photo: Rainforest Action Network) By Kyla Sankey, Truthout

In the past 50 years, the lives of Indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazon have been completely transformed. Since the arrival of Texaco in 1964, extensive environmental damage wrought by the extraction of oil and dumping of toxic waste has devastated the land, water and natural resources on which the Indigenous tribes of these regions have depended for more than 8,000 years. Today, two of these tribes have ceased to exist due to the deaths of all their members, and others are at risk of being wiped out soon. In the remaining tribes, community members have suffered extensive and irreversible health problems: toxic exposure has generated a health crisis involving cancer, birth defects, miscarriages and leukemia. Texaco's operations included drilling and systematically dumping crude in the Amazon. During its operations between 1964 and 1990, it left 880 pits of solid waste, poured 60 billion gallons of toxic water into local water sources and spilled 650,000 barrels of crude oil in the jungles and pathways. Perhaps the most striking feature in the case of Texaco is that the damage caused was not accidental but deliberate, a result of cutting costs on safety regulations and environmental technologies in order to maximize profits.

Political Report # 1139 Drilling Towards Disaster: Ecuador's Aggressive Amazonian Oil Push

(Photo: AmazonWatch.org) By Kevin Koenig, Amazon Watch

Last week, the Ecuadorian government announced that it had begun constructing the first of a planned 276 wells, ten drilling platforms, and multiple related pipelines and production facilities in the ITT (Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini) oil field, known as Block 43, which overlaps Yasuní National Park in Ecuador's Amazon rainforest. Coupled with the recent signing of two new oil concessions on the southern border of Yasuní and plans to launch another oil lease auction for additional blocks in the country's southern Amazon in late 2016, the slated drilling frenzy is part of a larger, aggressive move for new oil exploration as the country faces daunting oil-backed loan payments to China, its largest creditor. Yasuní National Park is widely considered one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. It has more species per hectare of trees, shrubs, insects, birds, amphibians, and mammals than anywhere else in the world. It was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1989, and it is home to the Tagaeri-Taromenane, Ecuador's last indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation.