In March 2025, the rivers of Esmeraldas, an Ecuadorian province that for decades has suffered from the social and environmental impacts of the petrochemical industry, were heavily polluted by a 25,000-barrel crude oil spill. In the first few days, ministers and first responders promised clean-up and recovery. Government officials arrived quickly, but departed even faster, leaving behind promises that, like the oil itself, were soon forgotten.
Today, while the state-owned oil company Petroecuador and the Ministry of Environment pile up reports without offering any clear solutions, it is left to Afro-descendant communities, environmental defenders organized in solidarity networks, and local universities to continue agitating the murky waters of a disaster the country would prefer had sunk into oblivion.
This article was translated by Piotr Kozak.
First they were hit by the smell, like a bad omen no one wants to recognize. Alejandro Bone, a community leader in El Roto, Esmeraldas, was playing football when Franklin Obando and a neighbour from the village of Chucaple roared up on a motorbike. ‘Can’t you smell the diesel?’ they yelled.
It was around 8:30 in the evening, as they made their way down to the Caple River and suddenly froze at the sight: the water was black, utterly black. They jumped back on the motorbike, flashlight cutting through the darkness, and followed the river’s path. As they passed the El Achiote settlement, they suspected where it had all come from: an old sinkhole, well known for its landslides. When they reached it, there was no doubt – the spill had begun here.
The owner of a nearby farm stood in silence, eyes locked on the scene before him. From the ruptured pipeline, ‘a geyser of oil nearly 17 metres high shot into the sky,’ Bone recalls. It was March 2025.
News of the spill quickly spread. Just 15 minutes from the epicentre in the Quinindé district, the first reports began to reach people. María José Pacho, an environmental activist and defender, learned of it not only through social media, but also by the sudden arrival of numerous alarmed families.
People were coming from El Roto, where the river ran black. That same watercourse, along with the Viche and Caple tributaries, would soon turn anoxic – completely devoid of oxygen – leading to the immediate death of fish and other aquatic life. ‘We felt a burning sensation in our chests,’ they recalled, ‘and we quickly got up to see what was happening.’
Around 10 families arrived in Quinindé that same night. They carried only their backpacks and their faces were marked by fear and the gnawing uncertainty of whether the water they relied on for everything – washing, cooking, drinking – was still safe to use.
Their uncertainty reflected the scale of the spill: the slick flowed downstream for more than 80 km until reaching the Pacific Ocean, where it heavily polluted at least nine beaches, three of them needing to be closed to the public due to the sheer volume of crude oil. ‘They had never seen anything like it before,’ remarks María José. And uncertainty, like the oil itself, spread fast.
For more than 50 years, the pipeline that slices across Ecuador has left deep scars on Esmeraldas. In total, excluding the spill of 13 March 2025, more than 138,000 barrels of crude have been accidentally discharged within the province.
So this certainly wasn’t the first such incident. In 1998, the Balao Maritime Terminal – the port in Esmeraldas from where part of Ecuador’s oil is exported – witnessed one of the country’s worst environmental disasters, when almost 44,000 barrels spilled into the surrounding coastal waters. Just one barrel contains almost 160 litres of oil.
Yet once again, this year the true figures were slow to surface. The Minister of Energy first announced that 4,000 barrels had been spilled. Petroecuador then admitted it had been closer to 25,000. The official numbers were readjusted, but distrust had already been sown. The scale of the disaster – and the delay in acknowledging it – cemented Esmeraldas’ place as the third most affected province for pipeline ruptures.
A later United Nations report acknowledged that more than 300 hectares of farmland had been affected, with around 60 lost completely, and that over 4,500 fishers saw their main source of income vanish.
At a public meeting held to discuss the spillage, community leader Alejandro Bone insisted that there had clearly been a landslide, which was later confirmed by Petroecuador.
Two days after the incident, on the 15 of March, President Daniel Noboa made a reference to the oil spill on his X account, stating that he would order the state oil company to take full responsibility in terms of an environmental clean-up and compensation for affected families.
SOS Esmeraldas, an Afro-descendent network
A local network of environmental defenders made every effort in their response to the disaster. SOS Esmeraldas had been formed just a few months earlier, in December 2024, following one of the most shocking crimes in recent years. This concerned four young Afro-Ecuadorians, who had last been seen in the Las Malvinas neighbourhood, south of Guayaquil, where they were detained by an armed-forces patrol. This incident took place within the context of the ‘state of internal armed conflict’ declared during Daniel Noboa’s first term in office (he was re-elected as president earlier this year).
Just over three weeks later, the incinerated corpses of the teenagers were found, showing clear signs of torture. Outrage swept the country, but in Esmeraldas it was felt much deeper: these were youngsters who could have been their own children, their own loved ones.
Impunity sparked a sense of urgency. In response, four groups – Esmeraldas Libre, the Somos Foundation, Cofesme, and Afrored – began forming a non-hierarchical alliance, without any funding, but driven by an accumulated feeling of exhaustion and a deep affection for a land constantly under siege.
When the oil spill occurred on 13 March, the network didn’t hang around for official confirmation: they opened seven collection hubs in cities including Riobamba, Cuenca, Esmeraldas, Quinindé, and Quito. Riobamba witnessed the most striking contribution: a 24-tonne truck set off from there, loaded with water, supplies, and filters, as Geovanna Pozo, an environmental defender and coordinator of the Esmeraldas Libre (Free Esmeraldas) collective, recalls.
Each truckload was the result of bonds woven long before; teachers, translators, cultural administrators, and neighbours offered their homes, energy, and time to help those who needed it most. Their efforts not only supported displaced families but also defended an essential community asset under serious threat: water.
‘We’re young people doing the best we can with few resources,’ Geovanna Pozo Lugo explains.
One of these networks sprang into action in the town of Quinindé, where environmental defender María José Pacho, who identifies as Afro-descendent, transformed her arts centre into a vibrant hub of resistance and collective solidarity.
There she received donations and, together with other volunteers, coordinated their distribution. Two trucks packed with bottled water, loo rolls, rice, salt, and toiletry kits, rumbled off towards the affected areas, where many communities were still waiting for government assistance.
‘The river was no longer fit for washing or cooking. It was dead,’ recalls Pacho, her words reflecting a concern that environmental activists may not often mention but feel deeply: to defend the land is to defend life itself.
The aid went way beyond basic supplies: water dispensers were installed in rural schools, serving as shared lifelines for children, adults, and the elderly alike.
The work was undertaken without any fanfare, but on a remarkable scale. In total, five major consignments were sent to the disaster zone, with multiple deliveries across Esmeraldas and Quinindé, Pacho and Pozo tell LAB. Every effort was guided by an attitude of concern and unity, the activists agree. This was no act of charity: it was a political intervention rooted in community; quotidian environmental resistance.
The active response of local science
Eduardo Rebolledo, a researcher, teacher, and environmental defender, was in Quito attending a forum on river quality when his phone rang. ‘Eduardo, there’s been a massive spill: what shall we do?’
The next morning, Eduardo and his students were already taking unauthorized samples. He knew that if they waited for official permission, the oil would have outpaced the Ministry of Environment’s sluggish bureaucracy. ‘You have to ask for authorization just to comb your hair before heading into the field,’ he comments sarcastically.
Thanks to prior experience, Rebolledo was well aware of what to look for. In 2016 and 2023, he responded to oil spills in Esmeraldas, advising citizen watchdog groups and gathering biological samples. But this time, the preliminary findings were much more serious: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, such as phenanthrene and anthracene – highly toxic chemical compounds – were trapped in the still waters of isolated estuaries.
The threat extended beyond freshwater sources. At the Esmeraldas River Estuary Mangrove Wildlife Refuge, a 242-hectare protected area at the river’s mouth, crude oil coated the channels, suffocating the vegetation, poisoning aquatic life, and contaminating the sediments.
The refuge is home to three different species of mangrove trees, alongside hundreds of species of fish, birds, and mammals, including the South American coati (Nasua nasua), a member of the raccoon family, and the blue land crab (Cardisoma crissum), both of which hold significant cultural and economic value for the region.
While the Catholic University had freshly-gathered evidence to work on, the late arrival of the authorities meant the opposite. Petroecuador hired the LABCESTTA laboratory, whose analyses, carried out on samples gathered more than 10 days after the spill, found no traces of contamination.
For Rebolledo, the problem is that water sampling tests are error-prone and tend to produce false negatives, as Ecuador doesn’t have the laboratory resources able to detect such compounds within fish or sediments. What troubles him most, however, is institutional silence: neither the Ministry of Environment nor its Health counterpart issued sanitary alerts, despite the toxic risks still floating in the water.
That silence stands in stark contrast with scientific projections which anticipate that in small rivers, the effects could linger on for up to three years, even if rains help dilute the crude oil.
Environmental defender Víctor Arroyo faced the same silence. Arroyo is a forestry engineer and the president of Esmeraldas’ Natural Resource Professionals Association (COPRENA). Based at the Luis Vargas Torres Technical University, he led the on-the-ground response, visiting riverside areas while oil still floated on the water.
Here, investigators documented what the Government refused to acknowledge: there were more than a hundred affected families in Chucaple alone, along with damaged crops and livestock, a decimated local fishing industry, and whole communities brought to a standstill.
Arroyo also underlined how these were not barren lands: the precise spot where the pipeline ruptured and oil surged out lay in the middle of a cacao plantation – a vital cash crop on which many families depend for their main income.
This was far from being an isolated incident. Through COPRENA, Arroyo had heard reports from colleagues working at the Balao oil terminal confirming that in recent years other spills had taken place, many concealed from public scrutiny. Some were contained before leading to major impacts, but others surpassed such measures and reached beaches including those of Las Palmas, Camarones, and Tonsupa, leaving behind dead fish and coastlines saturated with oil.
When the Ministry of Environment opened a public tender to clean up the Esmeraldas River Estuary Mangrove Wildlife Refuge, Arroyo’s university responded without hesitation. Dozens of students and teachers signed up on the official website. Yet after the initial enthusiasm, silence returned. The university received no response. No one explained who had carried out the clean-up, or what methods were used.
Bureaucratic language as impenetrable as an oil slick
From their offices in Quito, Petroecuador confirmed what people on the ground already knew: the pipeline rupture had been caused by a landslide. Yet they presented no publicly available technical report. They also admitted that events such as El Vergel, deemed ‘small-scale’ and occurring outside of the pipeline’s right of way, are not detectable by their regular monitoring systems.
An interview with an institutional spokesperson was requested, but Petroecuador chose to respond in writing. The reply took three weeks to arrive. By then, the disaster had dragged on for almost three months without any clear explanations for the affected communities, despite the fact that on 26 March, the Provincial Emergency Operations Committee of Esmeraldas had declared a state of disaster due to environmental contamination.
In its written response, the state oil company reported that it had used biodegradable surfactants and oil-absorbing materials for the clean-up, which would later be transported and disposed of as hazardous waste. However, no final destination was specified, nor was the information shared with local communities. The data was handed only to the workers hired to carry out the operation.
Regarding compensation, Petroecuador referred to the Organic Environmental Code and spoke of an investment of more than US$4 million, without specifying how many people or communities would actually be assisted, or how the funds were going to be distributed.
It may well have been the same frustration that Víctor Arroyo felt when, in good faith, he and his colleagues answered the Ministry of Environment’s public tender to help clean the Mangrove Wildlife Refuge at the Esmeraldas River Estuary. Their enthusiasm was quickly snuffed out: the Ministry later admitted that participation was low, but never explained why those who did respond, like the Technical University of Esmeraldas, were excluded from the process.
When the State’s environmental emergency fund was activated, only US$5,000 were actually allocated. After that, financial responsibility was shifted to Petroecuador under the ‘polluter pays’ principle. But what remains unacknowledged is the social participation itself: to this day, students and faculty members still don’t know who actually cleaned up the mangrove, or what was left buried, given the institutional silence.
This lack of information and resources not only ignores their social contribution; it also prevents the local population from implementing any long-term monitoring or environmental protection, as they lack both technical supplies and reliable knowledge of the ecosystem’s true condition.
What the territory tells us, beyond the numbers
It wasn’t the official reports that revealed the true state of the river, but the patient fieldwork of environmental defender Alexandra Almeida and her team. A biochemist with more than 30 years’ experience, working with the Quito-based environmental NGO Acción Ecológica, she retraced the same 80 km stretch of river that Petroecuador had divided into ‘intervention zones’.
Doubts also linger about the chemicals used in the clean-up: rather than removing the crude, they may simply have sunk it deeper and out of sight. To this day, those and other questions remain unanswered.
At El Vergel, ground zero of the spill, they found what no report had disclosed: the presence of abandoned pipes, overturned earth, and oil deposits that the rains continued to wash downstream.
The communities, Almeida stresses, insist that the water is still unfit for drinking or fishing; that banana, cassava, cacao, and coffee crops have been lost; and that livestock has died after drinking the deadly water.
The promised compensation – the US$4 million announced by Petroecuador – never reached all those affected. Some complained of favouritism; others that they were handed cheques that bounced. Doubts also linger about the chemicals used in the clean-up: rather than removing the crude, they may simply have sunk it deeper and out of sight. To this day, those and other questions remain unanswered.
It’s not surprising then that since last May, local residents and communities have come together to form the Union of People Affected by Oil and Diesel Spills in Esmeraldas, an organization that now represents more than 2,000 people from districts such as Quinindé and Esmeraldas.
The Union was set up as a response to repeated neglect: spills in 2008, 2018, 2023, and now 2025. Its legal director, Joselito Ceballos, argues that Petroecuador has failed both to fully clean-up the territory and to deliver on community compensation or individual reparations. What they are demanding is comprehensive reparation: not only cleaning the river, but also community interventions and long-term measures. The damage, he warns, will not be washed away in just a few months.
Anticipating they won’t get a response, the Union is already preparing a criminal complaint against Petroecuador for environmental crimes and damage to nature.
For Ceballos, such abandonment is cyclical: while electoral and media pressure was high in March during campaigns for the second round of presidential elections, the authorities showed up; when it eased, the territory was once more forsaken.
As Geovanna Pozo points out, in Esmeraldas it is not only oil that spills – there is deeply entrenched environmental racism.
That absence is also familiar to Alejandro Bone, the community leader from El Roto, who recalls how, in the first days of the disaster, the area was swarming with ministers and government officials, summoned by the emergency and by presidential orders.
But the electoral calendar also set the timing of the response: after April 9 – on the eve of the presidential runoff – the State withdrew. No more medical emergency teams; no more potable water; no more food distribution. In Chirigüile, Bone pointed out, a community just two and a half kilometres across the river, about sixty families were left stranded, with no shops nearby and no boat to cross waters that remain contaminated to the present day.
And it’s not just neglect, there are also structural issues. As Geovanna Pozo points out, in Esmeraldas it is not only oil that spills – there is deeply entrenched environmental racism. For had the disaster struck in Quito or Guayaquil, the response would have been very different: faster, more visible, much more effective. But it happened here, in a territory historically impoverished and racially segregated, where life is of far less importance in terms of government priorities.
The spill is no longer merely ecological. It is social, economic, and racial. And it continues seeping on – not only through the rivers, but through the silence of institutions, and through decisions that criminally neglect both people and the natural environment.
