Cartoon by Khalil Bendib, Corpwatch

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared Yasuni a biosphere reserve in 1989, after biologists found that a mere 2.5 acres of this forest contained as many tree species as in the United States and Canada combined. It is also home to jaguars, woolly and spider monkeys, and harpy eagles -- the most powerful bird of prey in the world. Some of the species in Yasuni, however, live on the brink of extinction: including more than 20 globally threatened mammal species such as the white-bellied spider monkey and the rare golden-mantled tamarin.

The animals, birds and plants are not the only species whose numbers are shrinking rapidly. At the time of her birth, Omari Ima, who is now in her mid-thirties and is chair of Amwae, the Waorani women’s organization, says that there were some 16,000 Waorani. “Today, there are no more than about a thousand of us left,” says Omari Ima. “It is, simply, a struggle for survival.”

One of the key reasons for this, she says, was the arrival of multinational oil companies in the latter part of the 20th century, which represented her tribe’s first and forced contact with industrial civilization. Soon displaced to a controlled existence in a reservation, Omari Ima’s family and tribe was divided, just as the rainforest itself soon became divided by roads and oil fields.

A new plan, yet to be funded, could bring a halt to this exploration, but some damage has already been done.

Petrobras Wins Yasuni Contract

Yasuni sprawls over two countries -- Ecuador and Peru -- both of whom see the Amazon as a potentially lucrative source of income. In August 2004, when Brazilian president Lula da Silva came on a state visit, the Ecuadorian government granted an environmental license for Petrobras, the Brazilian state-owned corporation, to drill for oil in Block 31. Also known as the Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini (ITT) oilfields, ITT is believed to hold up to a billion barrels of oil, almost a quarter of the country’s total known reserves. At today’s oil prices, this could mean revenue of over $700 million a year. (The Peruvian government has just approved environmental impact studies for two areas -- known as Blocks 67 and 39, that have been acquired by U.S.-based Barrett Resources and Repsol of Spain.)

Armed with these new contracts from Quito, Ecuador’s capital, the  companies have attempted to win over the people of the forest. Alicia Cahuiya, another Waorani woman who lives in the town of Pujo, says the companies offered the indigenous villagers items such as soccer clothes and candy in return for permission to drill for oil on their land.

“The companies have often bought villagers off with small gifts, because the villagers have not understood what was going on when the company representatives came calling,” she says. “Later, when people have become sick from contamination caused by the oil extraction and begun to protest, the military have rushed in to  support the companies.”

Exploration Begins

With the tacit permission of the villagers, Petrobras started to set up the infrastructure for oil exploration on the outer edges of  Yasuni, such as the construction of a harbor along the edge of the Napo River in March of 2005. They hired a Swedish construction company named Skanska, which has numerous similar contracts in the region such as in Brazil and Bolivia, to do the work. Skanska currently works in Ecuador with Tecpecuador and Petrobras in Block 18, and in Bolivia it continues to do controversial work with Repsol.

Local authorities soon started to complain about Skanska’s work in the area. Environmental inspector Marcos Baños, head of the environmental authority for the Amazonian province of Orellana, says that Skanska behaved in a suspicious manner. Baños says that company representatives have visited the authority to offer to perform “projects.” “I considered it extortion,” says Baños.

And Raul Vega, an official in the provincial environmental office in the oil town of Coca, says that the company refused to cooperate with them. “The Skanska boss Oswaldo Contreras was the first Skanska person we contacted,” Vega explains, “and he refused to give us the information we required. If they had only shown us they’d done an environmental study, we would have given them a permit, but it was not until a subsequent occasion that Skanska submitted any information. That information, however, turned out to be false. The company claimed it had conducted an environmental study, which was a complete and utter lie.”

The construction was halted after a few months. Petrobras’ permit was revoked and the company was asked to conduct an environmental feasibility study.

Local Complaints

Skanska and Petrobras’ joint operations were also sharply criticized by environmental groups and local communities in Ecuador for the initial exploration work conducted in 2005.

Acción Ecológica, a Quito-based environmental group that opposes oil exploration in the Amazon, says that they conducted an on-the-ground inspection in Chiru Isla, a Quichua indigenous village inside Yasuni and along the Napo river. The inspection revealed that five families out of 20 experienced poisoning due to dumped diesel and oil in the watercourse from where the villagers got their drinking water. All the members of these families became seriously ill, suffering from headaches and vomiting.

The investigation by Acción Ecológica also revealed that waste from latrines on Skanska’s construction site had been dumped in the surrounding water courses. This is in violation of Ecuador’s health laws, and causes a major hazard for the local population.