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The Tiputini River runs right next to Guiyero.
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"It's one of those things where, early on, you can say 'it's different here,' but it's absolutely the same thing," Swing said. "If you're on the receiving end of an arriving oil company, you really are at some level an innocent, naïve person who is interacting with a very sophisticated machine that's there to make money and elbow you out of the way."The oil companies came to Guiyero 20 years ago. Today, the community is having a party to celebrate the occasion.
The author and Cogui
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Guiyero's main plaza.
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Despite the village's remoteness, Guiyero teens have learned about American culture through YouTube and television.
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Pichilingue has helped organized protests all over the country and has been tangentially involved in a petition trying to organize a public referendum on whether to start drilling in the ITT, a petition that the Ecuadorian government rejected last month.
Soon after Correa announced that drilling would start in the ITT, thousands of protesters hit the streets of Quito. Police shot paintballs at them as they marched.The people have reason to be angry. In 2008, Correa helped rewrite Ecuador's constitution, its 20th. It became the first constitution to note "the right of the population to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment" and noted that "environmental conservation, the protection of ecosystems, biodiversity … [and] the prevention of environmental damage are declared matters of public interest."Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it recognized that "the territories of the people living in voluntary isolation are an irreducible and intangible ancestral possession and all forms of extractive activities shall be forbidden there … the violation of these rights shall constitute a crime of ethnocide."Correa has said the oil buried underneath the ITT is worth $15 billion in today's economy, and he needs it to help the poor. The Ecuadorian constitution also states that all of the country's buried natural resources belong to the state.In recent interviews, Correa has said there are no uncontacted tribes living in the ITT. Pichilingue can produce government documentation proving that the government itself believes otherwise.
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"This is the same president who once said we have to take care of the uncontacted indigenous people," Pichilingue said. "When he wanted to get money from other countries, the story was, 'we have to protect this place because it's the land of the indigenous people.' Now, when the priority is extracting oil, all of a sudden they don't exist."Pichilingue, Swing, the people in Guiyero, and thousands of Ecuadorian activists believe that if Ecuador starts drilling in the ITT, the Taromenane will be forced into closer contact with modernized Huaorani, like the Guiyero. And the Taromenane and the Huaorani have already shown a propensity for violence when they meet.To prove it, Pichilingue pulls up a YouTube video of an elderly Huaorani man named Ompore Omeway talking about his encounter with the Taromenane and shows it to me.In the video, Ompore, nearly 70, recounts coming across a group of young Taromenane not far from Guiyero. The men were tall and strong, and hadn't shaved. They told him that they were scared to cross the road near Guiyero, that they were afraid of cars. Rather than cross the 20-foot-wide gravel expanse, they told him that they walked five days around the edge of the road instead of crossing it.The men were friendly, Ompore said, but they told him that they wanted the Huaorani's help in expelling the oil crews that operate close to Guiyero."We're brave, we aren't scared of outsiders. We'll come back to visit you," they said. "If you have problems with outsiders, tell us and we'll help you kill them. We're very fast. We attack and then we disappear."
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Ompore told them he would. He told them he hoped they'd come back.Less than a year later, on March 5, they did, but the oil companies, obviously, hadn't left. On their second run-in, the Taromenane killed him, with 12 spears. They put five more through his wife, Bogueney.A statement released by the Huaorani Nationality Organization of Orellana after their deaths said the Taromenane "expressed their anger to Ompore and Bogueney about the noise, unknown crop planting, too many non Huaorani, trees being cut down, and the oil platform. They wanted Ompore and Bogueney to stop all of this. Evidently, Ompore and Bogueney could not help."President Correa has called the murder, and any violence between the two groups, a "complicated issue."
Rare animals are commonplace throughout Yasuni, except where drilling has taken hold.
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At any given time, a couple dozen researchers from around the world might be studying. While I was there, there was a University of Maryland botanist and his doctoral student looking for a suitable spot to study plant diversity; one of the world's foremost botanists studying insect predation on Inga, a genus of shrubs and trees; a Spaniard studying monkey behavior (10 different species live in Yasuni); and Diego Mosquera, the station's current manager, an expert on jaguars.Yasuni has a third of the planet's bird and reptile species. One hectare of the park has more insect species than Canada and the United States combined. It has a higher density of jaguars than anywhere else on Earth. More than 200 plant species are endemic to the park. Untold numbers of undiscovered species of animals and plants and fungi and insects live there.Ann Curry once went for a walk with Swing in Tiputini, and they discovered a new species of tarantula, just walking along a trail. When people talk about "pristine" stretches of the Amazon, they're talking about Tiputini, and they're talking about the ITT, where, thus far, there hasn't been any significant human development.If you walk around Tiputini for any length of time, you will see monkeys, and you will see parrots, and you will see frogs and you will see toucans and kingfishers and macaws. You will see insects you never knew existed and you will see spiders larger than any you've ever seen in your life.
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If you're quiet and have a good eye for the sort of thing, you'll see a peccary or a capybara. If you're lucky, you'll see a jaguar or an anaconda or a wild cat. If you listen, you will hear frogs' mating calls and crickets chirping and you won't be able to sleep at night until the sounds of the jungle cease to amaze or freak you out. And if you listen really closely, you'll hear the oil rigs.The idea of drilling for oil in the Amazon is not new. Shell first tried to drill in Ecuador in 1937, and various companies have been doing it ever since. The Ecuadorian government has created and owned several oil companies itself, and now operates PetroAmazonas in the region.Regardless of whose fault it is, the country has not had a whole lot of environmental success when it comes to the endeavor. In 2011, Chevron lost the biggest lawsuit in world history, with Ecuador asking it to pay $8 billion in reparations for subsidiary Texaco's role in spilling as much as 16 million gallons of crude oil in the Amazon in the Lago Agrio oil field, 100 miles northwest of Yasuni. The area remains a toxic wasteland.Drilling in Yasuni itself (but not in the ITT) has been going on for at least 20 years, starting first with the Texas-based Maxus company, which built the so-called Maxus road that runs next to Guiyero. Today, much of the drilling in Yasuni is dominated by PetroAmazonas, the Spanish-owned Repsol, and several Chinese companies. But there is plenty more oil left to be exploited.
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While a plan to drill for oil in the Amazon is far from novel, the idea floated by Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa in 2007 was. He called it the ITT Initiative, and asked the world for $3.6 billion dollars in donations in return for not extracting oil from the ITT, which is believed to hold roughly 846 million barrels of oil. Analysts suggested that by not drilling for oil in the area, more than 410 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions would be prevented.The plan was initially hailed by people such as the United Nations' Ban Ki-moon, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Edward Norton. But when Correa took office in 2006, he announced that Ecuador would default on much of its debt, undermining the country's credibility. The donations didn't come in as quickly as Correa would have hoped—most countries, including the United States, declined to contribute. After six years, just $116 million had been pledged. Correa announced that the initiative would be abandoned and that oil drilling, the so-called "Plan B," would be instituted."The world has failed us," Correa said at the time.
The "agricultural area" of Guiyero includes four man-made fishing holes, because the nearby Tiputini River is too polluted to fish in.
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On their third, they found who they were looking for. They slaughtered as few as 10 or as many as 40 Taromenane men, women, and children. Most reports put the number at around 30 dead. Two Taromenane girls, aged two and five, were kidnapped or spared, however you want to look at it. It's unknown whether anyone escaped. The girls were brought back to Huaorani villages to prove that the warriors had in fact avenged Ompore.Ecuador launched an "official investigation," but has not charged any Huaorani people. A Newsweek article detailing the events published earlier this year sparked a response from Nathalie Cely, Ecuador's ambassador to the United States, who wrote that "while the President too was frustrated at the pace of the investigation, given the remote location of the incident, no tangible evidence has been found aside from the two girls and an unattributed photograph, which has slowed the process."In the months that followed, the United Nations demanded that Ecuador "adopt measures necessary to prevent further violence between the indigenous Taromenane and Huaorani peoples.""If [oil drilling in the Amazon] did not exist," an official group of Huaorani said in a statement following the incident, "Isolated families would remain free and those violent encounters would be reduced."The Huaorani I spoke to said that the environmental impacts of oil drilling have forced them to venture further into the jungle to hunt, leading to increased encounters with the Taromenane.
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Luis Ahua (right) and his uncle.
Heavy machinery brought in by oil companies has become commonplace in Guiyero.
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But also, thank Repsol for the four pools that are stocked with fish because the Tiputini River is so polluted that the piranhas caught in it aren't safe to eat. Thank Repsol that Huaorani teenagers listen to Psy and J. Cole. Thank Repsol for the tractors that maintain the road that stretches through the most important part of the most important rainforest on Earth, thank them for the pipelines that run next to it. But don't thank Repsol for the giant billboard that says "oil improves your community," that was put up by the Ecuadorian government.Sometime after the first round of dancing but before the Miss Guiyero pageant, Armando Boya, a representative from Repsol, grabs a microphone on the stage and tells 200 Huaorani people that they "feel like family."Later on, I ask Boya about how the relationship between Repsol and the Huaorani works."The business helps them. We have programs. We give them education, we give them a lot of things. We teach them how to speak Spanish," he said. "We respect the jungle and we respect the environment and we respect the Huaorani people."The feeling isn't mutual. The next morning, an hour before I am set to leave Guiyero, Luis Ahua, and a group of older Huaorani pull me aside."You wanted to know about the violence?" he asks. "I'm ready to talk about the violence. I'm ready to talk about war."For months, he tells me, he and others in his tribe have been stockpiling spears and ammunition. They have been stockpiling oil. They've worked on a new formula for their blow darts that can kill a person in a matter of minutes. They are, he says, waiting for a time to use it."An attack," he says. "On an oil rig."Earlier in the day, a Huoarani woman named Weya Cahuiya, who is a representative with one of the tribe's few organized groups, the Nacionalidad Waorani de Ecuador, leaned against a concrete house and, with reggaeton blasting in the background, told me they're fed up."We live in the jungle. We don't need concrete houses, we need typical Huaorani houses. The government tells us we need education, but we need Huaorani education," she said. "Before, we lived with clean trees, with clean air to breathe, with clean water. This is not our music, this is not our dance, this is not our language, this is not our food.""Every time the oil companies expand, they divide us," she added. "There are fights between families because some people get things and others don't. We're meeting and the government needs to pay us. All of us. They need to respect us and ask us what they want and if they want to come in they have to pay us or we'll kill them."Ahua asks me how many people I think they can kill if they douse an oil site with gasoline and light it on fire. He asks me how many people I think they can kill if, when the workers run out, they shoot them with guns and with blowdarts and throw spears at them.Ahua asks me if I think it's a good plan. He knows I'm a reporter and says he wants the oil companies to be scared"Aren't you worried the government will come in with helicopters and kill you?" I ask."What else do we have to live for?" he says.