The Amazonian people of Sarayaku have brought the Ecuadorian state to trial for human rights violations during the conflict with the oil company CGC, which they managed to expel from their territory in 2004.
Most of the attendees had never seen a trial before, much less one broadcast live on the internet. Crowded into a communal house with wooden walls and palm-thatched roofs, a quarter of the population of Sarayaku followed their neighbors' testimony before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica on July 6 and 7.
The accused: the State of Ecuador. The charges: allowing the oil company CGC to enter the country in 2002 without consulting the population and being responsible for human rights violations. Even today, one and a half tons of explosives buried by the oil company remain in its territories.
Sarayaku representatives asked the Court to have the government declare the area a petroleum-free zone and remove the explosives. "They should not let those who are exploiting the land enter," said Sabino Gualinga, an 89-year-old spiritual leader of Sarayaku, when asked what he expected from the sentence, which should be handed down before the end of the year.
Most of Sarayaku's 1,200 inhabitants live from subsistence farming, hunting and fishing. To reach their territory, 135,000 hectares of virgin Amazonian forest, you have to travel by canoe or by plane. Something that has helped to keep the most negative effects of modernity at bay until now. But it has been their character as a "warrior people", in the words of José Santi, one of the young people who led the fight against the oil company, that has allowed the preservation of their ancestral way of life.
Sarayaku's history is full of episodes of resistance. Between the 1940s and 1960s, the population forced the Church and the army to abandon their territories. In 1989, it was the turn of the oil company Arco-Agip. Not in vain is Sarayaku known as the "town of the midday, which will never fall, and, if it falls, it will be the last to fall," says José Gualinga, president of the community.
But it was not until 1996 that the community really began to be in danger. That year, the state awarded block 23 to the Argentine oil company CGC, which covers 200,000 hectares of forest, 601% of which are within Sarayaku territory. The company hired a public relations company and people from neighbouring villages to “divide and pit the communities against each other,” according to Gualinga. And it partly succeeded. The divisions even occurred within families. According to Patricia Gualinga, head of the Women and Family area in Sarayaku, “if the men had doubts, the women said no from the beginning. When the company representatives arrived, the women had already made up their minds: not to allow the oil company to enter.”
Poisoned fish
The experience of the communities in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon, where Texaco-Gulf entered in 1967, was decisive. “In Lago Agrio, the fish are poisoned, you can’t drink the water from the river and the oil sticks to your hands,” says José Santi, who traveled to the area with 20 other young people from Sarayaku to see first-hand the effects of the oil companies. “They helped us a lot there: they told us not to let the company in, because then it’s too late,” he says.
At the end of 2002, the CGC company, protected by the army, entered the village for the first time. At a general meeting, the village declared a state of emergency. Around 25 "peace and life" camps were set up on the borders of the territory. In tents made of sticks and palm leaves, around 600 people resisted for more than four months.
Equipped with radios, different patrols guarded the boundaries of the territory. When the company workers tried to enter, they raised the alarm and went out with spears in hand and their faces painted to meet the invaders. The patrols, always with women in front, ambushed them and forced them to retreat.
In early 2003, an advance party of workers guarded by heavily armed soldiers was intercepted inside Sarayaku territory. The women surrounded the soldiers and took their weapons. Images of the women returning the heavy machine guns to the army officers a few days later were broadcast around the world. In exchange for the weapons, four indigenous people who had been detained and tortured by the army and the company were released, as witnesses recounted in court.
Irreparable damage
In 2004, after several court rulings, the company decided to withdraw. But the damage caused to the community was irreparable. For months, classes were suspended and crops abandoned. Explosives were buried and divisions between the different communities led to numerous clashes, with dozens of people injured.
During the trial at the Inter-American Court, two opposing views of the meaning of development were revealed. One of the main arguments of the State's lawyers was that the right to prior consultation, recognized in the Ecuadorian Constitution, "cannot be turned into a right of veto that threatens the development of the entire country."
For the president of Sarayaku, José Gualinga, wealth "is having wildlife, an uncontaminated forest, a united family, knowledge of agricultural and medicinal practices, our own education system... Without that, we are poor."
It seems clear that the government's plans do not coincide with those of Sarayaku. According to Alexandra Almeida, from the organization Acción Ecológica, a new round of oil bidding planned for October this year once again puts the territory of this Quechua people and the entire Amazon region in serious danger.
Narcisa Santi, 66, leans on her cedar cane. She sums up the people's struggle this way: "Money is running out. The land will never run out if it is not contaminated. It is the inheritance for our children."
Fountain: http://www.publico.es/internacional/391109/los-guardianes-de-la-selva
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