- Petroamazonas’s entry into the region in 2013 divided the community, with some saying it brought opportunities, while others say it destroyed the environment and way of life, and failed to deliver on promised jobs.
- Many expect ecotourism to be their only hope for economic salvation as the oil industry expands in the Amazon rainforest. Particularly among indigenous communities here, It is an increasingly common perspective.
- While the idea of turning to ecotourism is an increasingly common view among indigenous communities here, experts say the industry is complicated, and that to work it must be managed by the community itself, with conservation in mind.
LLANCHAMA, Ecuador — A long passenger boat floats abandoned outside Andres Machoa’s house, along the Tiputini River in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest. The community bought the boat more than five years ago when the state-owned oil company, Petroamazonas, moved into the area and promised everyone stable jobs, including as water taxi conductors to transport their staff along the Tiputini and Napo rivers.
In the end, the company only contracted five people to drive the water taxis, who rotated every two or three months. Less than two years later, the company stopped hiring them entirely. With no passengers, nobody in the community can afford the gasoline to even move the boat. It sits on the riverside as a symbol of unfulfilled promises.
“What they offered us was work, they said they would give work for everyone … they bought us with that,” Machoa tells Mongabay, adding, “but it only lasted two or three months.”
Machoa is one of several people in the community of Llanchama who expresses regret over signing a deal with the oil company in 2014. Apart from the lack of work, the construction of the oil platforms and the ongoing noise of the drilling operations have disrupted the once abundant wildlife in the area, he says. The company also gave rise to divisions in the community, as some families were able to profit directly from its presence and others weren’t.
Despite these divisions, most people in Llanachama agree that the solution lies in ecotourism, a growing trend among Amazonian communities seeking autonomy and an alternative to oil or mining income. As the government continues to expand oil production in Yasuní National Park, these are the two choices indigenous communities here are increasingly left with.
Oil and Llanchama
Llanchama is a small indigenous Kichwa community of some 65 families that lies on two important frontiers. It sits on the edge of Yasuní National Park, an area rich in biodiversity, surrounded by towering ceibo and mahogany trees, as well as hundreds of endemic birds, mammals and amphibians. It’s also on the border between what the government calls oil blocks 31 and 43, the latter also known as the controversial ITT (Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini) project.
The ITT block was once a beacon of hope for conservationists worldwide. In 2007, then-president Rafael Correa launched the ITT initiative, in which he asked the international community to donate $3.6 billion in return for keeping oil in the ground in the ITT field. Correa extended the deadline twice, but the project finally failed in 2013 with less than 10 percent of the target figure raised.
That same year, PetroAmazonas began putting pressure on the community of Llanchama to sign contracts that would permit the oil company to extract oil in their territory. This was the beginning of the first ITT field, Tiputini, whose operations began in 2016. The government has since opened Tambococha, in 2018, and approved the opening of the third and final field, Ishpingo, in 2019.
Llanchama resisted these initial approaches by Petroamazonas in 2013, but over time many residents became convinced by its promises of jobs, infrastructure and other rewards. This included a one-off payment of $230,000 that Petroamazonas gave the president of the community, according to local media reports. The compensation was for access to territory, where Petroamazonas planned to perform the 3D seismic testing necessary before extraction can begin. In this process, explosives are put into the ground every 100 to 250 meters (330 to 820 feet), and detonated. Machines then read the vibrations of the earth to decipher where the oil is located in the ground.
The company also promised to hire people from Llanchama to perform the seismic tests themselves. The Ecuadoran government agreed to pay the community workers $20 for every 11,500 hectares (28,400 acres), while Petroamazonas promised an extra $20 per hectare (2.5 acres) to be paid in the form of infrastructure for Llanchama, reports local newspaper Plan V. Given these promises of money and stability, in 2014 the majority of the community voted in favor of oil.
After these jobs failed to materialize, and the money was spent on things like boats and personal electricity generators, residents of Llanchama were forced to find other forms of income. Today, most people here make money from selling cacao for about 77 U.S. cents a kilogram (35 cents per pound), residents told Mongabay, which they grow in their nearby community gardens.
But since the price of gasoline for the boats is so high, at nearly $1 per liter ($3.50/gallon), many say the cost of taking the cacao to the nearest market in the town of Tiputini, two hours downriver that uses 5.5 liters (1.5 gallons) of gasoline, doesn’t result in much profit. They also say the option of hunting is less feasible than before, since the animals have been chased away by the noise of the construction and drilling. Many of the families live off yucca and plantains that they also grow in their community gardens.
Llanchama resident Holmer Machoa, Andres’s son, has been leading the fight against the extractive industry in his community. He says neither the oil company nor the government informed the residents of the environmental impacts that seismic testing and the resulting oil extraction could have on the environment. Most of the community now regrets voting in favor of oil extraction, he adds.
The Ministry of Energy and Non-renewable Natural Resources, the government body that manages Petroamazonas, did not respond to Mongabay’s various requests for comment.
But both the government and Petroamazonas have several times given assurances that oil extraction activities in the ITT fields would be undertaken using the best technologies, with “minimal environmental impact,” according to media reports.
Kelly Swing, director and founder of the Tiputini Biodiversity Station with the University of San Francisco of Quito, agrees that oil extraction technologies have changed drastically since the 1960s and 1970s, when they were catastrophic for the environment. They no longer use gas flares that emit toxins into the atmosphere, for example, while leaks and spills have decreased (but not stopped).
But the blast from the seismic testing alone is enough to have dire impacts on the environment, he says. Things like the construction of the oil platforms and the creation of roads also involve deforestation and cause chain reactions, like paving the way for agribusiness to enter the region. Increased boat transportation also leads to higher gasoline emissions that contaminate the forest and river biodiversity, Swing says.
The Tiputini research station has been able to document more than 600 species of fish, 150 species of amphibians, 120 species of reptiles, more than 600 species of birds, and 200 species of mammals in Yasuní National Park, Swing says. Other studies have found more than 100,000 species of insects per hectare in the park.
“So, when you open a road, or cut down a part of the forest, you’re essentially trampling or eliminating more than 100,000 species per hectare. I think most people would say, maybe we should think twice about that,” Swing says.
Not everyone in Llanchama agrees that the oil industry has been the cause of the changes to the environment around the community. Alexandra Aviles, Andres’s daughter-in-law, and her family say the environmental impacts in the region have been caused by the influx of people moving into neighboring communities, not because of the oil.
But rumors also circulate through Llanchama that Aviles’s family profited directly from the oil industry when Aviles was president of the community. She denies this, saying she supports Petroamazonas because it built the town’s only school, and that the nearby oil platform provides an option for work. Because of these rumors and political divisions, the Machoa and Aviles families rarely speak.
These kinds of divisions have had a strong impact on the whole community that once did everything collectively, Machoa says. This includes daily tasks and fighting for their territory.
Machoa cites the indigenous march of 1994, when hundreds of indigenous peoples from the Amazon traveled to the city of Coca to protest the government’s Agrarian Development Policy. The policy proposed to kick communities off their land if they couldn’t pay for it. The protest turned violent, with one person being killed, and the community of Llanchama was there fighting together, Machoa says.
“We were one united force,” he says. “But not everyone is united today, because of the problems the oil company brings.”
Machoa says that since 2013, Llanchama has even stopped the practice of working in mingas, a Kichwa tradition where everyone in the community works together to farm, build houses, and more.
Can the future be tourism?
Regardless of the residents’ position on the oil company, many have turned their hopes to the idea of ecotourism for their economic salvation and their ability to be more autonomous. Even Aviles and others who are pro-oil say ecotourism is more reliable, since the Tiputini oil field has an end date, but tourism can last forever.
Oil and tourism are the two big economic powers in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, and many of the communities here have had to choose between them.
Studies suggest that ecotourism is the best conservation mechanism, as it provides an economic alternative to oil and mining extraction in rich, biodiverse areas. Along the Napo River, several Kichwa and Waorani communities have developed their own ecotourism projects, with the Napo Wildlife Center and the Sani Lodge being some examples of economic success stories.
Carlos Mazabanda, Ecuador field coordinator with the NGO Amazon Watch, says ecotourism can be a good way for communities to generate their own income and build autonomy from oil companies, if managed right. They are the ones that have the best knowledge of the forest, and therefore are the best equipped to teach tourists about local biodiversity, he adds.
But, he warns, it’s also hard to create a tourism industry in a community that has already been divided by the oil company. These conflicts can often last for generations.
“If a company generated a division in the community, it’s a really difficult wound to heal,” Mazabanda says. “To hear ‘our fathers, our grandfathers were wrong’ is really heavy in the indigenous worldview.”
Despite the divisions, many question whether ecotourism really is the best way forward for the environment or indigenous communities.
Gunter Reck, director of the Institute of Applied Ecology at the University of San Fransisco of Quito, says he’s not convinced that engaging indigenous communities further in market-based capitalism is necessarily a good thing. The larger and more successful ecotourism sites are run by outside organizations, and their business model can alter the community culture, its way of organizing, and its horizontal power structure, he says. In Llanchama, this was compromised when income from the oil industry was introduced into the community.
Outside organizations
The involvement of outside organizations also creates a new form of dependency, and leaves the community vulnerable to outside interests taking advantage of them, Reck says.
In Llanchama, two international organizations, from Germany and Canada, have approached the community over the past two years, proposing to help them start up a tourism economy, residents told Mongabay. In both cases, the details of the business have been confusing for them, yet they’ve been swayed by the idea and remain hopeful that tourist dollars will someday come. Nothing has yet materialized with either organization.
To really make ecotourism beneficial for the community and the environment, Reck says, residents needs to be involved in all levels of planning from the beginning. Its members also need to believe in the importance of conservation, not just the potential income, in order to properly manage and monitor the environmental impacts, he adds.
“The economic activity in and of itself is not the solution to the problem, but rather behind that is a tremendous social, educational and awareness work, of principles and solidarity,” Reck says, adding that environmental and social planning are more important than economic planning to building long-term sustainable ecotourism.
Building a tourism industry in Llanchama would be a challenge since the community sits in a remote location, at least eight hours by boat from Coca, the nearest Amazon city. The high price of gasoline would make it an expensive trip. Some also think the lack of animals would be a deterrent for tourists eager to see the monkeys, toucans and wild boar that are more common in other, more pristine areas of the rainforest.
Yet the residents of Llanchama remain hopeful. They don’t claim to be poor, as they are surrounded by a rich rainforest and tropical fruits, and have relative freedom. Yet they also know the oil industry surrounds them, and this lifestyle, without money or power, may not last forever.
Banner image: The passenger boat that sits empty and unused outside of Andres Machoa’s home in Llanchama, a symbol of unfulfilled promises by the oil industry. Photo by Kimberley Brown for Mongabay.
About the reporter: Kimberley Brown is a Quito, Ecuador-based freelance multimedia journalist. You can find her on Twitter at @KimberleyJBrown.
FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message to the editor of this article. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
Credits
