- Randy Borman, a leader of the Cofan people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, died on February 17th.
- Born to American missionaries in the Amazon, he was raised among the Cofán people and became a lifelong advocate for their land and rights.
- Borman led efforts to gain legal recognition for over a million acres of Cofán territory, ensuring long-term Indigenous control of a vast stretch of rainforest.
- Randy coordinated and helped lead four Rapid Biological Inventories with Chicago Field Museum biologists and local scientists to establish protected areas.
Randy Borman was never meant to be Cofán. And yet, from the moment he was born in 1955, deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, he belonged to them. His parents, American missionaries, had come to translate the Bible into the Cofán language, but their eldest son took to the forest as though it were written into his bones. While his parents pored over scripture, Randy learned to track tapirs, fish with a harpoon, and wield a blowgun with quiet precision. He spoke A’ingae, the language of the Cofán, before he spoke English. The rainforest was his cradle, his school, and in the end, his charge.
It was a world already slipping away. When Randy was a boy, the Cofán still lived as they had for centuries, hunting and fishing along the Aguarico River, moving lightly through a landscape they understood with an intimacy that few outsiders could fathom. By the time he reached adolescence, the first seismic thuds of an oil-rig drill had shattered the silence. The arrival of Texaco in the late 1960s, and the roads and colonists that followed, turned the Cofán homeland into a wasteland of blackened rivers and felled trees. Randy, shuttled between his village and missionary school in Quito, found himself straddling two irreconcilable worlds: one vanishing, the other indifferent.
At 18, he left for Michigan State University, a brief attempt at a life in the land of his ancestors. It did not take. Everything felt regulated, fenced in, he later recalled. I needed the forest.
He returned to Ecuador, determined to fight for the people who had raised him, the people whose land was being siphoned away, one oil well at a time.
The Cofán were not legal owners of their own territory. As a people who had always lived with the land, the very concept of land ownership was foreign to them. Randy, realizing that the only language the Ecuadorian state understood was bureaucracy, set out to win formal land titles for the Cofán. He learned the law, navigated the corridors of power in Quito, and pushed for Indigenous land rights in meetings where he was often the only Cofán present. By 1992, after years of lobbying, he secured the first legal recognition of Cofán territory, an expanse of nearly 200,000 acres. In the years that followed, he helped expand Cofán-controlled land to over a million acres, ensuring that one of the most biodiverse forests on Earth would endure.
His strategy was simple: if the state could not protect the land, the Cofán would do it themselves. He helped establish the Cofán Ranger Program, training Indigenous guardians to patrol the forests, expel illegal loggers and miners, and monitor biodiversity. It was a triumph. While deforestation surged elsewhere in Ecuador, Cofán lands stood as a testament to resilience—verdant and life-sustaining. The program became a model for Indigenous-led conservation, studied and admired far beyond the Amazon.
Randy had a far-reaching vision for Cofán land, stretching from the Andean piedmont to the Amazon lowlands. He worked closely with the Ecuadorian government to establish protected areas, helping to create the Reserva Ecologica Cofán Bermejo, safeguard the water conservation area of Cofanes-Chingual, and integrate Zabalo into the zoning and management plan of the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve. These efforts ensured not only territorial security but also a framework for conservation that would endure for generations.
To walk with Randy through the forest was to witness a rare synthesis of Indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge. He could read the landscape with an uncanny fluency, tracing the stories written in tree bark and animal tracks, linking Cofán traditions to Western ecological science. His ability to bridge these worlds made him a formidable force for both conservation and Indigenous rights, ensuring that Cofán ways of life remained central to the future of their land.
It was not without cost. Randy was threatened more times than he could count. In 2012, his son Felipe was kidnapped by armed men linked to the gold mining trade; for 40 days, he was held in chains in the jungle. The Borman family never paid a ransom. Instead, Felipe, using skills his father had taught him, escaped by himself, slipping through the undergrowth until he found safety. Randy had raised his children the way he had been raised—to understand the forest as both home and refuge.
His body bore the weight of his battles. A near-fatal bout of encephalitis in his 40s left him reliant on hormone therapy. Years of relentless exposure to the equatorial sun—compounded, he believed, by oil contamination—led to multiple rounds of surgery to remove squamous cell carcinoma. He was not alone in his suffering; many in his Cofan community had succumbed to the disease. In the end, while they had fought fiercely to shield their land from deforestation, they could not stop the insidious spread of oil’s pollution—an invisible enemy that seeped into their bodies, claiming them from within. And in the end, it killed him too.
And yet, the forest he fought for still stands. The Cofán, once a people on the brink, are now some of the most successful Indigenous land managers in the Amazon. The rivers Randy navigated as a boy remain clean, the trees still hum with the calls of macaws and howler monkeys. His son Felipe, now a leader in his own right, continues the fight.
Indigenous people know that we need the forest to survive, Randy often said. The question is whether the rest of the world will wake up to that fact.
He did not live to see the world fully awaken. But thanks to him, one corner of it, at least, still breathes.
Español: Randy Borman, el hombre que se convirtió en Cofán (1955-2025)
Update (February 24, 2025): Added further context about Randy’s cancer in the 4th to last sentence.
Update (February 25, 2025): Formal obituary added below
The Life and Death of Randy Borman
By Michael L. Cepek, Ph.D.
President of the Board, Cofán Survival Fund
Randall (Randy) Bruce Borman was one of the world’s most innovative and effective activists working at the intersection of Indigenous Rights and environmental conservation. He was born on September 29th, 1955, and died on February 17th, 2025.
Borman’s parents were missionary-linguists who worked with the Indigenous Cofán Nation of Amazonian Ecuador. Between stints at missionary schools, Borman grew up with the Cofán, hunting with a blowgun and developing a deep love for the forest. Soon, Cofán people realized that despite his Euro-American heritage, Borman was one of them.
Instead of finishing a college degree, Borman chose to live as a Cofán community member. He married Amelia Quenamá and had four children: Felipe, Federico, Joshua, and Jeremiah. Appreciating Borman’s mastery of English, Spanish, and the Cofán language, the Cofán Nation elected him to numerous positions, including president of their ethnic federation.
In the 1960’s, the company Texaco began extracting crude from Amazonian Ecuador. Over the next 30 years, they dumped billions of gallons of toxic wastes onto Cofán lands. Colonists followed the oil roads, expropriated Cofán territory, and cleared the forest for cattle and cash crops. To escape the destruction, Borman moved far outside the oil production zone to found and lead the community of Zábalo. Over the next 40 years, he directed the Cofán’s struggle to regain, legalize, and protect more than a million acres of their homeland.
To fight the relentless threats to Cofán forests, Borman founded two nonprofits: the U.S.-based Cofán Survival Fund (CSF) and the Ecuador-based Fundación Sobrevivencia Cofán (FSC). The CSF raises the funds that the FSC uses to implement land rights, conservation, healthcare, and education projects in Cofán territory. One of their central initiatives, the Cofán Park Guard Program, gives the Cofán the power to protect their lands from forest destroyers. From 2003 to 2013, territory bordering Cofán lands suffered some of Latin America’s worst deforestation; Cofán guards prevented the deforestation of their own lands entirely.
Borman’s vision was ambitious. Rather than let his people remain the objects of state governance, Western conservation programs, and academic investigation, he helped them become the directors of these activities. Cofán people have replaced state park guards on their lands. They have formed the world’s most successful community-based conservation systems. And they are earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in Ecuador and the United States.
Borman’s message to the world was clear: with the right resources, the Cofán and other Indigenous Peoples can be the best caretakers of lands they protect for everyone, not just themselves. In return, they deserve credit and compensation. Borman knew that intact Indigenous lands are key to mitigating climate change at a global level. He urged the world to view the Cofán as sophisticated custodians of the earth and its ecological services.
Borman won important accolades, including the Field Museum’s Parker/Gentry Award (1998) and the MacArthur Foundation’s Award for Effective and Creative Institutions (for the FSC, 2013). He also faced death threats and suffered numerous injuries and tropical diseases. The ultimate cause of his death was cancer, which is killing many Cofán of his generation. Like his compatriots, he believed the cancer’s virulence was the direct result of oil contamination.
Though Borman has passed, his son Felipe has taken over his father’s work. If the world continues to recognize their importance and supply them with funding, the CSF and FSC will remain exceptional defenders of Cofán people and territory—and Borman’s legacy will live on to assure the future not only of the Cofán but of us all.
If you would like to support the work that Randy began, visit Cofán Survival Fund.
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