The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is a unique pyramid-shaped mountain on the northern tip of the Andes in northern Colombia. On its slopes live four separate but related peoples: the Arhuaco (or Ika), Wiwa, Kogi, and Kankuamo. Together they number more than 30,000.
The mountain’s peak is over 5,000m high. Rising from the shores of the Caribbean, the lower plains are clad in tropical forest, turning to open savannah and cloud forest higher up.
To the Indians, the Sierra Nevada is the heart of the world. It is surrounded by an invisible ‘black-line’ that encompasses the sacred sites of their ancestors and demarcates their territory.
Yoryanis Isabel Bernal Varela, 43, was a leader of the Wiwa tribe and a campaigner for both indigenous and women’s rights.
The Wiwa are one of four tribes that live on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a unique pyramid-shaped mountain in northern Colombia. The Sierra Nevada Indians believe it is their responsibility to maintain the balance of the universe.
Bernal Varela is the latest victim in a long line of attacks against Sierra Nevada leaders, who have been at the forefront of the indigenous movement in South America. Many Indians have been killed by drug gangs, left-wing guerrillas and the army.
José Gregorio Rodríguez, secretary of the Wiwa Golkuche organization, stated: “Indigenous people are being threatened and intimidated. Today they murdered our comrade and violated our rights. Our other leaders must be protected.”
The problem is not limited to Colombia. Indigenous activists throughout Latin America are being murdered for campaigning against the theft of their lands and resources. The murderers are seldom brought to justice.
“Na Sam” is a documentary film that sheds light on the modern Chorote way of life.
After being subjugated into a group of insecure land occupiers on their own land, the Chorote have arrived at a desperate pass.
Located in the central-western Chaco region of Argentina, the Chorote are witnessing the desertification of their homeland, widespread soil impoverishment and a loss of biodiversity stemming from indiscriminate felling of native forest and extensive cattle rearing enterprises
Industrial harm to the Pilcomayo River–a crucial source of fresh water and fish–has caused even more damage. The river now presents high levels of mercury contamination and other heavy metals due to spillages in the mining areas of neighboring countries.
Various other development plans, implemented on Chorote lands without consultation, have caused further alteration and degradation to areas of traditional use, leading to increased malnutrition and poverty and reduced access to fresh water.
Beneath this surface of harm, the Chorote are struggling now more than ever to maintain their language and traditions, and their cultural heritage, while adapting to this changing world.
Theirs is culture that is dueling to exist after generations of invisibility and oppression.
Featured image: A Yukpa woman tends laundry high in the clouds of the Yukpa lands, which rise over 3000 meters in the Sierra Perijá on the border of Colombia and Venezuela.
A community of indigenous Yukpa saw their land reduced to a third of what it once was due to violence and intimidation. Now Colombia’s Land Restitution Unit is helping the community return to their lands.
The spiritual equilibrium essential to the Yukpa community is off balance. Ancestral burial grounds have been desecrated by invaders; the trees that house the spirits are being cut down; and the wild game that Yukpa men once hunted with zeal is no longer available. The same limitations preventing the community from practicing its culture are preventing Yukpa parents from passing these activities, words, and stories down to new generations.
“The loss of culture is very real. Our children won’t know anything about the Yukpa if we aren’t rescued from extinction. If we don’t have space to preserve our culture, I guarantee that in thirty years, our culture will disappear,” says Andrés Vence, council leader of a Yukpa community consisting of 120 families living on 300 hectares in the Sierra Perijá on the border of Venezuela and Colombia.
“Culture’s longevity depends on territory.”
The yukpa believe that land is the key to allowing their culture, customs and beliefs to flourish.
There are an estimated 6,000 Yukpa remaining in Colombia, and the majority live on autonomous lands known asresguardos.Over the past thirty years, the Yukpa community living in La Laguna has been victim to abuse and intimidation stemming from the armed conflict. The community has also seen its ancestral lands become increasingly occupied by “outsiders,” whom they refer to as colonists. Now, the community is pushing back by launching an ethnic restitution claim that seeks to recover 964 hectares of land and allow the community the space it needs to flourish.
HUMILIATION AND ABUSE
In 1982, the guerrilla group known as the FARC came to Yukpa territory to recruit. Andrés Vence was abducted for eight days to be indoctrinated. He and the Yukpa resisted, but then another guerrilla group known as ELN arrived the following year. After the ELN abducted several young men, Vence and his men–armed with just bows and arrows–marched into the guerrilla camp and took their children back, saying the Yukpa would not participate in any war.
A Yukpa security guard, still armed with bow and arrow.
When the Colombian military entered the scene in the mid-1990s, the situation turned for the worst. Yukpa families could no longer move freely from house to house, leading to the systematic abandonment of more than 900 hectares of land. For years, military checkpoints restricted the flow of food between families. As if that wasn’t bad enough, paramilitary groups—who were often the same members of the military—came to the Yukpa villages at night to terrorize the community.
“They abused and humiliated us,” says Vence. “I think it was all in the hopes that we would open our mouths and say something that gave them the right to murder us.”
Andrés Vence, mayor and leader of the Yukpa community making the restitution claim.
DOCUMENTED HISTORY
In 2015, the regional Land Restitution Unit (LRU) in Cesar focused on “characterization studies,” an essential piece of evidentiary material that documents the background, victimization, and suffering of indigenous communities who wish to reclaim their land. Characterization is a critical step in substantiating an ethnic restitution claim. The USAID-funded Land and Rural Development Program* partnered with the LRU to expedite the process.
Over the course of six months, researchers visited the Yukpa, where they interviewed individual members and held focus groups. They also collected materials from the government, non-governmental organizations, academic texts, and the media. The end result was nearly 200 pages of history, mapping, experience, and evidence presenting how the armed conflict contributed to the decimation of the Yukpa’s culture, livelihood, and overall prosperity.
In addition to carrying out the characterization studies, USAID helped regional restitution offices improve coordination with partner members of the Victims Assistance and Comprehensive Reparations System and municipal officials.
“The partnership gave us operating capacity. Without this support, we would have taken another one or two years to get to this case,” says Jorge Chávez, Director of the Land Restitution Unit in Cesar.
The document will be filed as part of the Yukpa community’s land restitution claim, which will go before a restitution judge before the end of the year. By law, judges must issue a ruling within six months after a restitution claim is filed in the court. In Cesar, the Yukpa case will be the third ethnic restitution case to reach the courts, making the department an important player in the nationwide effort to heal the historic rift between the government and Indigenous Peoples.
Colombia’s indigenous communities are often the country’s most vulnerable. Over the past five years, Colombian restitution judges have issued three ethnic restitution sentences, delivering over 124,000 hectares of land back to indigenous communities.
There are currently over 24 ethnic restitution cases in the characterization phase that stand to affect over 10,000 families in Colombia.
“All over the country, there are ethnic restitution cases reaching judges. The LRU is in its fifth year and these cases are becoming more and more important to resolve. This particular case is very important because the Yukpa are losing their cultural identity, and we recognize that,” according to Chávez.
In its five years, restitution judges have issued three ethnic restitution sentences, delivering over 124,000 hectares of land back to indigenous communities.
As the Yukpa wait on the judge’s ruling, the case’s progress has emboldened Vence to mobilize the community—including the older citizens known asYimayjas—to transmit the collective memory and cultural skills like weavingmochilas, practicing spiritual rites, and crafting shields to fend off malignant spirits.
Every Wednesday and Friday, Yukpa children attend “Yukpa studies” at the only school in the resguardo.
A favorable ruling will be key to restoring Yukpa faith in the Colombian government. “We’ve put pressure on the government for many years to do this, so our hope is temporary. We watch television, and indigenous culture is never part of the conversation. Indigenous communities are the most vulnerable,” explains Vence.
* Nicholas Parkinson works for the Land and Rural Development Program.
Nicholas is an NGO writer currently based in Bogota, Colombia and working on a large land tenure program that sets out to strengthen government land administration agencies to better serve millions of victims displaced by the violence. Over the past six years, he has worked mainly on agriculture-focused projects in Ethiopia, Liberia, Uganda and Somalia, among others. He specializes in NGO documentation and teaches local writers how to create attention-grabbing stories for their NGOs. On hisweblogyou can find stories from his immigrant life, some thoughts on development aid, and a strong dose of rock climbing and adventure.
From somewhere in the Cordillera del Cóndor, January 4th2017
To my Shuar brothers and sisters, to the indigenous peoples of the Amazon and Andes, to the men and women of Ecuador and the World.
As many of you know,recent days have been very dangerous for our people. These days have not yet ended and are, indeed, probably only the beginning of a great territorial dispute initiated by the National Government against the Shuar Arutam People.
Our jungle has been stained with tears, anguish and blood. The paths and trails that we used to travel in peace have now become unsafe and dangerous. Almost 30 years have passed since Ecuadorians spoke of us as the Warriors of Cenepa, the defenders of Ecuador, the country to which we belong.
But now it is necessary for people to know us through our own voice. No one has asked us but many have spoken on our behalf, including the Government and social and political leaders, some with good and some with bad intentions.
We were born here in this immense jungle of the Cordillera del Cóndor and on the banks of the Zamora and Santiago rivers. We did not know barbed wire or private property. The State declared that these were uncultivated lands and organized the colonization of our territory with the same conviction and self-legitimacy of any colonizer. When the settlers came to this land we received them well, because we knew that these were poor and hardworking people looking for an opportunity in their lives. From one day to another, large tracts of land no longer belonged to us because they had been sold to people we had never even met.
In the 1960s, we had to create the Interprovincial Federation of Shuar Centers (FICSH), which even today we refer to as our Mother, so that the State would recognize what has always been ours: the territory, our living spaces and our culture. It was only in the 1980s that we began to legalize our lands with community deeds. We began to be recognized, not only for the Cenepa war, but because we have taken care of these immense millennial forests in peace, protecting the borders.
In 2000, a group of Shuar leaders toured these lands and founded the Shuar Arutam Territorial Area, as provided for in the Constitution. This was not a simple process; there were hundreds of meetings and discussions that allowed 6 associations to unite their 48 centers (communities) and establish a continuous territory of 230,000 hectares in the Province of Morona Santiago on the border with Peru.
FICSH declared us its pilot plan, to test a new form of indigenous government within the Ecuadorian State, like a special regime government in a Shuar territory. In 2003 we wrote our Life Plan, which forms the axis of our organization. This is the guide which tells us which areas we can pass through, for we must navigate rivers, and the areas where we should not even walk. Our Life Plan addresses fundamental issues such as health, education, the economy, conservation and the good management and control of the forest and its resources. We are almost the only group in the country to organize our territory in categories of sustainable use and we leave more than 120,000 hectares under strict conservation, for the benefit of all Ecuadorians.
In 2006 we were legalized by the Development Council of the Nationalities & Peoples of Ecuador (CODENPE) as Shuar Arutam People. Two years later we signed an agreement with the Government to maintain the forest in perfect condition for 20 years and receive contributions that allow us to develop and implement our Life Plan. This agreement is calledSocio Bosque(Forest Partner).
In 2014 we updated our Life Plan. Once again our Ordinary General Assembly pronounced against medium-scale and mega-mining within our territory.
Because, as we said to President Correa, do not tell us that you undertake mining projects to get us out of poverty because we, with our way of life, do not feel poor. Instead, tell us how you will protect us as a people and our culture.
In the context of this history comes the conflict in Nankints. Since 2008 we have been requesting an institutionalized dialogue with the national Government but, despite our efforts, we have been unable to establish a serious, sincere, honest and equal conversation within the framework of the Plurinational State. This is the reason for the lack of interpretation and understanding of the requirements of the Shuar people.
In the name of ‘national interest’ and by describing the situation in Nankints as an isolated case, the Government ignores other rights and issues that are also of national interest and enshrined within the Constitution: multiculturalism and conservation. In Nankints the ‘revolutionary’ Government acts like any colonizing government, forgetting even the international agreements it has signed.
The problem is not the piece of land in Nankints that we share with settlers; people think that this never belonged to the Shuar. We never imagined that a mining company would buy our ancestral heritage land from the State and a few settlers. The Government forgets and, with its many methods of making itself heard, imposes its own truth. Our territory is not only Nankints.
In fact, more than 38 percent of our territory has been concessioned to large-scale mining. All the riverbanks of the Zamora and Santiago basins have been concessioned to small-scale mining. A gigantic hydroelectric dam is about to be built. So our question is:where do they want us to live?
That is why, nine years ago, we told the company to leave and we reclaimed Nankints. Nine years later, someone manipulates the President and convinces him to forcibly evict us before the end of his term. We did not leave, so violence came. We have been blamed for the tragedy of our murdered comrade, the police officer, but we have not given any orders to kill anyone. Instead of dialogue, the Government puts thousands of policemen and soldiers into our homes, on our land, to terrorize and threaten our children. As far as I know, no inhabitant of our land is a sniper, nor does anyone possess weapons that can pierce a police helmet. Why not investigate thoroughly before persecuting us and issuing orders to capture the heads of our families? Instead of talking to us to investigate and prevent violence, why condemn us to live in a State of Exception? It is reminiscent of the terrible dictatorships of Operation Condor which, according to the President, is being planned again.
Why do they enter our homes? Why do they not let us live in peace? And the answer we have is that, in the name of the ‘national interest’, we have become a handful of folkloric Indians and terrorists who do not understand what good living is, neither Sumak Kawsay* or, even worse, the project of the Citizen Revolution.**
I do not want to dwell on the details of the President’s weekly public addresses. Instead, let us try to look at the big picture in which we find ourselves, avoiding provocation and primitive discussions that lead nowhere.
With this first communiqué from the forests of the Cordillera del Cóndor, we say to the thousand families that we will not, under any circumstance, allow the violence and force of the Government to destroy our house, your house, the World’s house.
President Rafael Correa must create a climate of peace, withdraw his troops, suspend the State of Exception in our province and cancel the arrest warrants of our leaders and relatives. The only true way to end this path of destruction – which provokes Shuar inhabitants into acts of individual resistance to reclaim their territory – is through conversation, respect and mutual understanding.
All inhabitants of Ecuador and Morona Santiago must join our demand for peace, the end of violence and a serious dialogue with the Government that respects our life as an original people.
—Governing Council of THE SHUAR ARUTAM PEOPLE
Translated directly byChakana Chroniclesfroman open letterpublished by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE) on behalf of the Governing Council of the Shuar Arutam People.
*Translating literally as ‘good living’, the Quechua term ‘Sumak Kawsay’ refers to the indigenous cosmovision of living in harmony with our communities, ourselves, and most importantly, our natural environment.
**The so-called ‘Citizen Revolution’ is the political and socioeconomic project of Alianza Pais, Ecuador’s current ruling party
Before dawn on December 21, 2016, dozens of police raided the headquarters of the Shuar Federation (FISCH) in the Ecuadorian Amazon and arbitrarily detained its president, Agustin Wachapá. The indigenous leader was thrown to the ground and repeatedly stamped on and ridiculed beneath the boots of police in front of his wife. The police then razed the Shuar Federation’s office—turning over furniture and carrying away computers. According to the indigenous leader’s wife, her husband was taken away without any kind of explanation. An arrest warrant for Wachapá was never presented.
Agustin Wachapá has since been accused of publicly calling for the mobilization and violent resistance of the Shuar communities against state security forces in San Juan Bosco, where the indigenous community in Nankints was evicted and had their homes demolished against their will to make way for the Chinese Explorcobres S.A. (EXSA) open-cut copper mine. In the two months since the forced eviction, members of the communities surrounding Nankints have twice attempted to retake the land that was confiscated from them. On Dec. 14, the second attempt to storm the mine resulted in the death of a policeman and wounded seven other members of the state security forces.
The Ecuadorian government also declared a State of Emergency suspending basic rights such as freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, and due process under law, as well as granting the military the exceptional power to enter private residences and arbitrarily detain people without warrants or evidence.
An overwhelming military presence was then deployed across the Amazonian province to bolster security around the Chinese mine and quell all dissent, prompting Domingo Ankuash, the historical leader of the Shuar to call upon the United Nations and other international human rights organizations to monitor the militarization of his people’s ancestral lands, in which he estimates 8,000 high-ranking members of the military—marine, air and land troops—as well as 4 war-tanks, surveillance drones, aerostatic balloons, mobile satellites, and helicopter gunships, have been deployed.
The region—known as the Cordillera of the Condor—is where the cloud forests on the eastern slopes of the Andes drops off into the vast rainforests of the Amazon basin. It contains some of the most richly biodiverse ecosystems in the world. Once operational, the Explorcobres S.A. (EXSA) mine—a joint venture of Tongling and China Railway Construction—will be the second largest copper mine on the planet. It will make an estimated $1.2bn in annual royalties for the Ecuadorian government. It will also consume 41,769 hectares of rainforest and rural agricultural land, much of it belonging to the Shuar Peoples.
Now, almost a month after his arbitrary detention, Agustin Wachupá is being kept in a maximum security prison on the other side of the country near the capital Quito, despite a call from Amnesty International to respect his judicial rights. The State of Emergency within Morona Santiago has been extended for another 30 days, and a media blackout has been imposed, forcing 15 community radio stations to broadcast the state-run Radio Publico.
Meanwhile, the government stepped up its manhunt for the “illegal armed group” involved in the violent incursions onto Explorcobres S.A., but community leaders are claiming a witch-hunt has begun in order to capture and detain people of influence such as teachers or leaders who belong to local committees opposed to the mine, as well as the heads of households whose homes were bulldozed in Nankints. All of these people have one thing in common: they are predominantly indigenous males of military age.
“The government of Rafael Correa is pushing the Armed Forces to play a role that we have never seen before, not even in times of dictatorship,” said Jorge Herrera, an indigenous leader of the Kichwa Peoples from the neighbouring Andes highlands. As president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), Herrera has expressed his increasing alarm at the military buildup inside of the Condor Cordillera on behalf of the 14 other indigenous nations of Ecuador that belong to the confederation. “The military is not defending the security of the population, but rather the transnational corporations that have purchased licenses [to exploit] large hectares of Ecuadorian territory as private property.”
From Dayuma to Sarayuku, President Correa’s government has deployed its overwhelming military might against rural and indigenous communities that oppose the nation’s booming mining industry before; but the current mobilization of state security forces inside Morona Santiago is unprecedented in terms of scale and scope in the country’s modern history. Not since 1995, during the Cenepa War between Ecuador and Peru, has their been such a massive build-up of armed forces along the Peruvian border on the western ridges of the Condor Cordillera, but back in 1995, in a complete reversal of roles, former president Sixto Duran commended the Shuar for working with the military to defend the Ecuadorian homeland from an invading foreign army.
“We will not yield a millimetre more”
The War of the Cenepa was the third military confrontation between Ecuador and Peru since 1941, and Ecuador had already suffered two embarrassing military defeats in both its previous battles with Peru along with the annexation of almost a third of the country’s former territory—hundreds of thousands of kilometres of oil and mineral rich land in the Amazon rainforest. Until its resolution in 1998, the border dispute between the two nation states had become the longest-running international armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere—and back in 1995, when the Amazon rainforest had turned into a theatre of modern warfare—this ancient people known as the Shuar were joining the Ecuadorian military en-masse.
A military anthem called “We will not yield a millimetre more” was being broadcast into television sets across the country to recruit men in their prime to join the Ecuadorian army and defend the nation’s borders against the Peruvians. The televised anthem featured clips of patriotic crowds waving Ecuadorian flags, coffins of the fallen being carried from army-helicopters, as well as soldiers in motorized canoes with mounted machine guns, scanning the thick vegetation on the river banks for Peruvian invaders. The speech of former-President Sixto Durán invokes patriotic fervour, uniting the Ecuadorian people to defend the motherland against a common enemy. The chorus, “Heroes of the Cenepa, we are all heroes” is chanted as an indigenous leader speaks to the Ecuadorian media, his traditional feather-headress proudly flashed across the screen.
The Shuar have always been a proud and fierce nation of warriors—long-feared for their practice of shrinking and mummifying the heads of enemies killed in combat in the days before contact—and they were respected and admired by their military comrades. In the Cenepa War, they were charged with transporting food and munitions over inhospitable jungle terrain, running reconnaissance missions around enemy camps and fighting on the Amazonian frontline—a mineral-rich basin by the river Cenepa within the mountainous Condor Cordillera. While the ancient tradition of head-hunting is no longer practiced by the Shuar, the feats on the Amazonian battlefield of an elite unit of Special Forces made up indigenous Shuar, and their ethnic cousins the Achuar, had captured the imagination of the Ecuadorian people. They were known as the Arútam Brigade, or the Iwia—the Demons of the Jungle—and they had become the pride of the nation. They were the Heroes of the Cenepa.
As night fell over the Condor Cordillera, legend goes that when possessed by the sacred spirit of Arútam, these indigenous commandos could enter the enemy camp with the stealth of the jaguar and the cunning of the anaconda, and then, disappear into the night as silently as they came without alerting the lookouts. When the Peruvian military woke at dawn the next day they discovered evidence of the incursion when members of their regiment would not move—they were still sleeping, lifeless without heads.
These mythical war-stories of the Arútam Brigade on the Amazonian battlefield not only canonized the Shuar as defenders of the motherland at a time when the Ecuadorian people’s confidence in their own military had been shaken by their two previous military defeats—they struck fear into the heart of the invading Peruvian army. The Shuar Peoples helped the Ecuadorian government and its military win the War of the Cenepa. Ecuador did not yield a millimeter more of its territory to its much larger neighbor Peru—and the Shuar were proud to have served for their military and for their country in a time of need.
Ecuador’s Presidential Elections and Backlash to the Mining Boom
The conflict in Nankints could not have come at a worse time for President Correa and his ruling party Alianza Pais. As the incumbent government closes ranks around Correa’s anointed successor—former Vice-President Lenin Moreno—in the upcoming February presidential elections, the Shuar uprising in the Condor Cordillera has again illuminated the dark underbelly of President Correa’s so-called socialist “Citizens Revolution”. The outgoing president has spent unprecedented sums of money on infrastructure projects and social programs on his ambitious socialist agenda, but a perfect storm of plummeting oil prices, economic mismanagement, and numerous corruption scandals, have almost bankrupted the country.
It took multiple billion-dollar loans from China to artificially prop up the Ecuadorian economy – and with it President Correa’s popularity. It will take generations for Ecuador to pay back this debt, and in the last few years the cash-strapped administration of President Correa has sold mining concessions to the Chinese that span a third of the country’s vast Amazon rainforest, as well as opened up large sections of pristine Andes wetlands and cloud-forests for mining in fragile ecosystems such as Intag and Quimsacocha.
These mines have become even more invasive and destructive to Ecuador’s richly biodiverse ecosystems and rural communities, exposing President Correa’s brand of socialism for what it is: militarized neoliberalism where anyone who is unfortunate enough to live above an oil or mineral deposit is stripped of their rights at the point of a gun.
As the leader of the Shuar federation Agustin Wachupa sits in prison, his thoughts have no doubt called upon the memory of Jose Isidro Tendetza Antun – another Shuar leader who fought against another open-cut copper mine along the Condor Cordillera. El Mirador was the first open-cut mine in the country and was widely viewed as establishing a precedent for the nation’s booming mining industry. For years, Tendetza had organized community opposition to the mine, protesting the contamination of the region’s rivers as well as the eviction of rural and indigenous people who lived on the lands now being consumed by El Mirador.
For his opposition against the mine, the late Shuar leader received constant harassment and death threats against him—including in 2012, when his house and crops were set on fire by men his family claimed were employees of the Chinese mine. Tendetza filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. In 2014, as the Shuar leader prepared to leave for Lima, Peru, to give a speech at the 2014 Climate Change Conference, he went missing. After a tip-off, the son of Tendetza found his father in a grave marked “no name”. There were strangulation marks around his father’s throat, as well as broken bones and other signs of torture that marked the Shuar leaders body. His arms and legs were also trussed with a blue rope.
Tendetza was the third Shuar leader to be violently murdered for opposing the mining industry since Bosco Wisum in 2009 and Freddy Taish in 2013.
As is the case with many other large scale mining projects across Ecuador, a process of Free and Informed Prior Consent and Consultation was not carried out with the Shuar community over the exploration and exploitation of the minerals beneath the land in Nankints. This means Explorcobres S.A. (EXSA) is now in direct violation of Section 7 Article 57 of the Ecuadorian Constitution, as well as the rights enshrined in Articles 6 and 15.2 of Convention 169 of the ILO, and Article 19 of the U.N. Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
“Our territory is not only Nankints,” the Shuar Peoples stated in a letter. “In fact, more than 38 percent of our territory has been concessioned to large-scale mining. All the riverbanks of the Zamora and Santiago basins have been concessioned to small-scale mining. A gigantic hydroelectric dam is about to be built. So our question is: where do they want us to live?”
“The invasion of oil and mining companies, now Chinese and Canadian and others, are accomplices with this regime and their military police and followers,” said Domingo Ankuash, the historic leader of the Shuar. “The constitution, conventions and international declarations of human rights as well as the United Nations are worthless with no coercive power to stop this aggression. The Shuar Peoples are suffering at this time.”
