- In Ecuador’s Intag Valley, the women’s artisan collective Mujer y Medio Ambiente (Women and the Environment) has developed an innovative way to dye and stitch fibers from the cabuya plant, an agave-like shrub.
- The women use environmentally friendly techniques, such as natural dyes from native plants and insects, and agroecological farming practices to cultivate cabuya as a complementary crop to their primary harvests.
- Being part of the collective has empowered the women economically and personally, enabling them to contribute to their children’s education, gain autonomy, and become community leaders in the nearly 30-year struggle to keep mining companies out of their forests.
- In March 2023, the community’s resistance paid off when a provincial court recognized that mining companies had violated the communities’ constitutional rights and canceled their permits, setting an important precedent for protecting constitutional and environmental rights in Ecuador.
INTAG VALLEY, Ecuador — In Ecuador’s lush tropical Andes, Silvia Vetancourt multitasks, her hands maneuvering crochet needles with swift precision as she navigates the rocky path to the old town of Plaza Gutierrez.
“We like this craft because it’s mobile,” she says, holding out a piece of a small coin purse she’s been working on on the trail. “It makes us free.”
Vetancourt is the secretary of Mujer y Medio Ambiente (Women and the Environment), or MYMA, the oldest women’s group in Intag Valley, Ecuador. Founded in 1995, the artisan collective developed an innovative way to dye and stitch fibers from the cabuya plant (Furcraea andina) into products ranging from mats to hats.
Members of the group told Mongabay that being part of MYMA has given them confidence, camaraderie, and more control over their choices. It has also kept them organized during Intag Valley’s famed resistance movement, a nearly 30-year struggle to keep mining companies out of their forests.
“We have been the first women’s organization and have been in every moment of the resistance,” says Vetancourt, who is also president of Mujeres Intag, which oversees at least a dozen women’s entrepreneurial groups in the region.
An agroecological haven
Intag Valley sits in the heart of the tropical Andes, the most biodiverse of the world’s 36 terrestrial biodiversity hotspots. Nearly half the species here exist nowhere else on Earth.
A short walk reveals the audaciously red Andean cock-of-the-rock (Rupicola peruvianus), and the golden tanager (Tangara arthus). A Blackburnian warbler (Setophaga fusca), a migratory bird that comes to hang out in the neotropics, trills its high-pitched song from the canopy. Underfoot, lizards with bright blue tails (Holcosus orcesi) scurry in the brush.
After government-encouraged deforestation starting in the 1960s, only an estimated 15% of Ecuador’s original cloud forests and 4% of all northwestern Ecuador’s forests remain.
The landscape reflects this, a patchwork of pasture, forest, crops and cattle on the walking path between the small towns of Santa Rosa and Plaza Gutierrez, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Quito.
Still, more intact forest persists here than in surrounding areas. In the forested parts, the air is cooler and moist, filled with the calls of birds. High up, the trees capture moisture from clouds, feeding the streams that flow down to the river.
Many of these patches of forest remain thanks to the environmental group Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag (DECOIN), a local organization that supports communities to restore watersheds, resist mining, and sustain eco-friendly livelihoods such as tourism and shade-grown coffee.
The Association of Small Coffee Growers Rio Intag (AACRI as it’s known in Spanish), for example, helps small coffee farmers. AACRI gives these farmers a way to earn money and encourages them to plant more trees to provide shade for the coffee plants.
The environmental ethos fostered in Intag means more farmers are applying ecological principles to farming, a method known as agroecology, like planting a diversity of crops, keeping trees on farms, and using organic methods that avoid synthetic pesticides and herbicides.
Cabuya, it turns out, is the perfect addition to these farms. The large, spiky plant, which resembles agave, does best in full sun, but grows well in the margins of their land, along fence lines, roads and steep slopes. Growing on the margins allows farmers to maximize their land use while keeping the bulk of their property for other crops like coffee, corn and beans.
The crop doesn’t require any pesticides or herbicides to grow; its tough leaves are their own defense. Since cabuya requires no chemical inputs, it complements organic farming practices. Conventional farmers can also easily cultivate cabuya as a secondary crop without diverting resources or labor from their primary harvests. And as a perennial, it provides long-term benefits without the need for yearly replanting.
“Farming this way, it’s a different mentality,” Vetancourt says. “This product is very friendly and compatible with the environment. Since its inception, we have had nothing that is influenced by chemicals or industrial machinery.”
Cabuya flanks the path as we emerge into the quiet and colorful town of Plaza Gutierrez. Along the main street, nestled next to a small storefront, is the Centro de Interpretación de la Cabuya, a whitewashed concrete building with bars on the windows.
Five local women, each with a broad smile, lead the way into the small museum and demonstration center. Inside, under the low popcorn ceiling, fluorescent lights illuminate displays on the history and importance of the craft.
Traditionally, cabuya fibers were woven into sacks and textiles on a loom. “Mountain men used it as a blanket or for ropes,” says Gloria Hidalgo, a member of MYMA since it began in the early ’90s.
The women of MYMA began refining this craft and using crochet needles instead of a loom around 30 years ago after Sandy Statz, an artist from the U.S. who still lives in Intag, encouraged some of them to make smaller goods that could be sold to tourists.
Another of the women, Lorena Bolaños, says it was her mother who had the idea of dyeing the fibers with natural pigments, based on her knowledge of dyeing wool.
Now, because of the women’s ingenuity and entrepreneurship, Plaza Gutierrez is one of the only towns still producing this natural fiber. Although the business alone isn’t enough to support a family, especially when tourism takes a hit as it did during the COVID-19 pandemic, when times are good, it’s a solid side hustle.
A processed ball of dyed fiber sells for $6, while a purse can sell for up to $30. In a region where $20 a day is a living wage; this counts. Still, the process from plant to purse is labor-intensive.
“It’s a lot of work,” Hidalgo says. “So much that we can’t really charge the full price for our time, but we make a lot more money selling finished goods than raw materials.”
To make the fiber, the women and their families cut the long spiny leaves from the plant base then use a small machine to press the liquid and pulp away from the fibers of each leaf, one at a time. The fibers are then washed and dried in the sun, where they’re flipped over every hour. Finally, dried fibers are dyed, waxed, combed and spun into yarn. The process takes days.
Each cabuya plant can provide around 30 leaves per year. It takes about 10 leaves to make a pound of fiber, enough to crochet a large purse.
At Adriana Moquinche’s house, overlooking the town, she demonstrates brushing the fiber and spinning it into yarn. The women admire some of the colors in Moquinche’s stock, and Vetancourt buys a pink spool for $5 (reduced price for friends and family.)
All of the colors are extracted from the forest. The sap and bark from dragon’s blood (Croton lechleri) and Andean walnut (Juglans neotropica) trees provide reddish-orange and brown hues respectively. The native shrub shanshi (Coriaria ruscifolia) creates grays and blues, while chilca (Baccharis latifolia) gives green tones. A small cochineal insect, Dactylopius coccus, when crushed, produces a distinctive pink.
The women learned they could change the hue and intensity of the dyes by using either aluminum or iron pots and by adding baking soda or salt, creating a wider palette for their products.
Experimenting with different combinations of plants, vessels and mordants is among MYMA member Norma Bolaños’s favorite pastimes. “I love the creative, inventive aspect,” she says. “I feel like an explorer.”
In the back room of the Centro de Interpretación de la Cabuya, a muted rainbow of mats, toys, ornaments, keychains and coasters overflow the shelves. Purses and bags hang on every wall, boasting a spectrum of colors that reflect the surrounding biodiversity.
“We conserve nature,” Lorena Bolaños says. “We never cut down a tree even if we could use it for dye, and we only take what we need.”
For the artisans, cabuya is about more than environmentalism, though; it’s also about empowerment.
“Mothers and grandmothers used to need permission to leave the house and were very submissive,” Vetancourt recalls. She says the income, confidence and connections gained through the group have changed that, a slow but steady shift in the power dynamics of their households and community.
“It’s been helpful for me to be part of this organization because it’s contributed to my kids’ education,” says MYMA member Mercedes Sánchez. “I can help my husband with money and I feel happy about that. It’s nice to have autonomy and to be able to help my kids.”
Now, young people are interested in learning, Lorena Bolaños says. Her daughter, who started crocheting at 10, learned to look up patterns on YouTube and created her own designs.
“If you make stuff, you have money,” says MYMA member Lupe Sánchez. “It’s a beautiful thing that we share … I just feel free. I can go outside and clear my head and not just be doing household chores.”
This economic independence has had a profound personal impact. In the past, women here had little say over their health and reproduction, but that’s changing.
“The money, confidence and education have helped them to take control of their health (e.g. pain control) and family planning,” Vetancourt says. “The women have money to buy medicine,” she adds, as well as the confidence and information to advocate for reproductive choice.
“At first, the group was about economic need and felt like an obligation, and then it was about getting out of the house and learning, and then it felt like an opportunity,” Hidalgo says. For some, this opportunity has included traveling as far as Japan to promote their products.
The group, whose membership oscillates between 20 and 40 members, has hosted and attended workshops and trainings to learn about their health, rights and environment. And, increasingly, women are becoming official community leaders: “Even around the most political issues, we are leading in public spaces, in parish meetings, [participating] in the formation of parish councils,” Vetancourt says.
The fight to preserve nature
Conservation projects that involve women and those that address gender from the planning and design stages have better outcomes, according to a 2017 report on gender and sustainable forest management. In Intag, this isn’t just a statistic but a lived reality. Women have been a vital part of the environmental resistance movement in Intag Valley for decades.
“Women are more affected where there are mining projects,” says Marcia Ramirez, a community leader in the nearby town of Junin, who joined the resistance in its early days, when she was just 12. She says women are often the first to feel the impacts of pollution as they manage water and households.
As global demand for commodities like copper and gold soars, mining companies are pushing into Ecuador. In Intag, the most recent fight centered on a proposed copper mine to be developed by Chilean state-owned Codelco and Ecuador’s ENAMI. The Llurimagua mining concession would be built in the Junin community forest reserve, an area that’s home to dozens of threatened and endemic species, including two near-extinct frog species, Atelopus longirostris and Atelopus coynei.
In 2014, Ramirez was present when the community stood their ground and blocked the entrance to the Junin forest reserve as police and private security tried to force their way in on behalf of the mining companies. “I went forward to ask who they were and who their boss was, and that’s when they started shooting at us,” Ramirez recalls.
“In the marches, in the difficulties, in the events that occurred due to the Junín invasion … women have been present at all times,” Vetancourt says. “We have had to be in the front row, because sometimes men are more violent, so they want to respond with violence. We, however, do not. That is why we have had to take the lead.”
“Women put themselves on the frontlines, and it was their choice to be there,” Carlos Zorrilla, president of DECOIN and a leader in the anti-mining movement, tells Mongabay.
Zorrilla says women have been indispensable to the movement. He also credits two members of Mujer y Medio Ambiente with saving his life, or at least his freedom. He recounts how, during this period, he hid in the forest as men with machine guns (allegedly police hired by the Canadian mining company Copper Mesa Corporation) raided his home.
His neighbor, Norma Bolaños, a local leader in the MYMA, tells Mongabay she saw them on the road with their guns headed toward Zorrilla’s house. She called his house phone.
“It was a miracle his phone rang, and he was near it,” she says. “He only had a few minutes to get away.”
“Those women literally saved my life,” he says. “They warned me that the men were on the way … An insider later told me that they wanted to arrest me and pay someone to kill me in jail.”
In March 2023, the decades of community resistance paid off. A provincial court recognized that the mining companies had violated the communities’ constitutional right to consultation and the rights of nature guaranteed by Ecuador’s Constitution since 2008. It canceled their permits in an landmark legal victory. The decision was a significant win for Intag communities and set an important precedent for protecting constitutional and environmental rights.
“It really seemed impossible to me to be able to achieve this,” Ramirez says. “However, I knew that we were demanding what was fair and that we were telling the truth.”
Despite the victory, community members say they will remain vigilant as long as there are minerals under the ground. Vetancourt says they’re also concerned about ongoing deforestation and pesticide use, especially on crops like beans, tomate de árbol (Solanum betaceum), granadilla (Passiflora ligularis) and naranjilla (Solanum quitoense).
“We want to show that there are alternatives,” Vetancourt says. “That we can generate income and improve our quality of life without destroying our environment, our home.
“A lot of the work that women do is holding community together,” she says. “But generally, we don’t want to be in the spotlight. It’s better, when you write about us, not to say ‘she did it,’ but to say ‘we did it.'”
Additional reporting by María José Arias.
Banner image by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay.
Liz Kimbrough is a staff writer for Mongabay and holds a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Tulane University, where she studied the microbiomes of trees. View more of her reporting here.
How to ‘stop mining before it starts’: Interview with community organizer Carlos Zorrilla
Podcast: Moths vs. mines in Ecuador’s astounding biodiversity hotspot
FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message directly to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
