A year on from the referendum in which Ecuador voted to stop oil extraction in Block 43 of Yasuní National Park, oil drilling continues. In response, the Waorani Nationality of Ecuador organised a summit to create a roadmap towards a future free from fossil fuels in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
An oil spill welcomes you to Block 16, a section of wells for oil drilling in Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon. For four months, the spill has been slipping towards the Amazon’s rivers, staining the rainforest of one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. Ene Nenquimo feels the presence of the spill some metres before reaching it. The air becomes heavier here, says the vice president of the Waorani Nationality of Ecuador (NAWE).
She already knows this feeling by heart. 50 years ago the oil industry reached her home. The Waorani are one of the 11 Indigenous nationalities that live in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Their territory covers 800,000 hectares across the Napo, Orellana, and Pastaza provinces. These latter two also house the Yasuní National Park.
Although Ene has lived with the smell of oil for more than three decades, she refuses to get used to this situation. ‘We are going to take a new step away from oil,’ she says.
A year ago, the leader celebrated when 59 per cent of Ecuadorians voted to stop oil drilling in Yasuni’s Block 43 oil platform, also known as ITT (abbreviation of the oil fields Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini) which covers approximately 2,000m2 of the national park. And yet, there are still no clear signs that the State will close ITT’s operation. Far from losing hope, Ene and the Waorani community have organised themselves to demand that the referendum result from August 2023 is fulfilled.
Together with an international delegation and a group of Waorani communities that live in the area, Ene visited Block 16 on 27 August, 2024. The block is just one of five that operate within the protected area, where there is a high concentration of abandoned wells. The idea for the visit was to show the effects of the oil industry on their territory and to demonstrate what can happen in the ITT if there is not an adequate remediation and abandonment process.
This visit marked the beginning of the International Summit for Yasuní, a space created by the Waorani in order to design a roadmap that will allow them to reach a future free from fossil fuel extraction in their home.
A summit concerning the energy transition
The day after that visit, a group of Waorani women welcomed more than 400 attendees to the International Summit for Yasuní in Puyo, the capital of the Amazonian province of Pastaza. ‘Our territory stretches from where the sun rises to where it sets,’ the women sang in their native tongue, referring to Yasuní which, much more than just a national park, is considered the ancestral territory of the Waorani and the home of Indigenous communities in voluntary isolation.
Representatives of the 87 communities that are part of the NAWE attended the summit to learn more about the closure process for Block 43. Participants listened to talks about the technical dismantling of the platforms, the legal implications, and the environmental and social impacts.
One of the roundtables focused on the results of the 2023 referendum. ‘We call upon the people of Ecuador to demand that their sovereign will on Yasuní is obeyed. It is one of the most important historical landmarks for the ecological transition both worldwide and for the Amazon rainforest, upon which the planet’s harmony depends,’ said Juan Bay, president of NAWE, at the event’s inauguration.
The Waorani’s demands concern the deadlines established by the constitutional court. The judicial body decrees ‘an ordered and continual withdrawal of all activity related to oil extraction within a period of no more than a year from the announcement of the official result.’ The referendum took place on 20 August, 2023 and the results were announced on the last day of the same month.
A year after the results, the Government announced that it shut off one of ITT’s 247 wells. According to oil and environmental consultant Fernando Reyes, this event doesn’t indicate progress in the block’s closure; this well was in fact already unproductive as it was converted into a water producer, like 54 other wells in that block, he clarifies. On average, at the ITT, he says, for every 100 barrels in the ground, only eight are extracted.
Reyes attended the summit to explain how the closure process can be carried out and he confirmed that it is possible to do so within the established timeframe. On the other hand, President Daniel Noboa sent a request to the constitutional court to give a public hearing on the matter. The government recommends that a timeframe of five years and five months be defined for the closure and withdrawal of infrastructure from the ITT.
‘What we are discussing today should have been discussed the day after the results were announced,’ explains environmental lawyer Hugo Echeverría. The specialist clarifies that the court must meet the requests of the government just as much as those of the enquiry claimants and the Indigenous nationalities and peoples. The discussion hopes to clarify key themes such as the deadline for the suspension, closure, and abandonment of ITT. It should also determine if there was non-compliance or not, to what extent and, based on this, to identify the parties responsible.
Waorani representatives also criticise the committee in charge of the referendum’s execution. Created in May 2024, it does not include Indigenous nationalities and peoples. The committee was created by the national government and comprises representatives of the Ministries of Mines and Energy, Environment, Finance and Economy, Women and Human Rights, and the state-owned crude oil industry corporation Petroecuador.
‘The government took a long time to show signs of progress. For this reason, the summit is important because it clearly demonstrates that community organisations are preparing themselves,’ says Esperanza Martínez, who is co-founder of the foundation Acción Ecológica (Ecological Action) and has participated in the defence of Yasuní for more than 30 years.
As part of the key actions that were established in working groups during the summit, organisations in Yasuní demand their inclusion in the decision-making process concerning the closure and reparation of the area.
Development with the oil industry
Another of the points analysed during the summit was the impact of the oil industry on the health, education, and quality of life of populations who live in the areas where crude oil is extracted.
For three months, the Waorani nationality has been preparing a census in order to identify these indicators. Some of the data that was previewed at the summit reveals that 43 per cent of the Waorani population does not have basic services in their communities.
‘It is the most biodiverse area of Ecuador and of the world and it has the worst social indicators in the country, with water contamination and illnesses, etc. It’s tragic,’ says Martínez, of Acción Ecológica, who participated in the discussion groups.
Data from the National Institute of Statistics and Census demonstrates that 66 of every 100 inhabitants of Orellana are considered to live in poverty. That is to say, they survive on fewer than $3 per day. In Pastaza, the figure climbs to 70 per cent and in Napo it reaches 74 per cent, which makes it the province with the highest rates of poverty in the country.
Contamination is also a recurring problem. According to figures from the Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition, between 2018 and 2022, 1,503 oil spills were recorded in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This equates to around six incidents per week. The spill in Block 16, for example, was noted on 11 June, 2023. At the time of the visit on 27 August, the area had still not been cleaned.
Age Omene Ima, inhabitant of the Waorani community of Guiyero, where Block 16 is located, says that these incidents are frequent and that they affect the rivers, which were previously their primary source of water. Now her community collects rainwater. Age worries about her children swimming in this river as already one of her children, aged 15, has died as a result of intoxication from drinking this water.
Something similar happened to Ogay Ima Wao in the Tiwino community, located in the Amazonian province of Pastaza. This woman lost her 18-month-old child. ‘He died from lack of medical attention following sickness and diarrhoea. Even though the company was there, they were unable to help us take him to hospital,’ says Ogay. Her son would now be 25 years old.
One of the aims of the summit was to request an audit to gauge where the resources obtained by these territories go. According to statistics from the Central Bank of Ecuador, total oil exports in 2023 were worth $7,823.37 million USD.
A future away from fossil fuels
One of the main announcements on the summit’s final day was that the NAWE has joined the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. As a result, the Waorani has become the 10th Indigenous group to support this initiative which calls for international cooperation to end the development of new fossil fuels.
So far, the treaty comprises nine Peruvian Indigenous nations and 13 countries: Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Niua, East Timor, Antigua and Barbuda, Palau, Samoa, Nauru, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and Colombia.
‘It’s essential to think of the Yasuní process as a pioneer on a global level; NAWE joining the treaty and the work carried out during the summit to produce an action plan are part of a globally unprecedented process,’ explains Andrés González, Head of Latin America and the Caribbean for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The next step, he says, is to support the Waorani so that what the constitutional court has outlined is obeyed. For González, it’s essential to focus on the appropriate remediation of the area.
Another of the treaty’s objectives is to encourage Indigenous nationalities to participate in its development and continuation. ‘Support for the treaty plays an important role in building an alternative post-extraction development model for the protection of Yasuní and the Waorani people,’ says Juan Bay, NAWE’s President. Their decision to join the treaty also ties in with the regional Amazonian agenda at the UN Conference of Parties (COP30) in Belén, Brazil, in 2025.
The Waorani nationality submitted the plan of action for Yasuní at the constitutional court on 30 August 2024. Now they wait for a response that will define the path towards an extraction-free Amazon.
This article was produced with the support of Climate Tracker Latin America and was translated for LAB by Harriet Gilbert Savage.
