An alliance of Indigenous, environmental and social campaigners are fighting to uphold a historic referendum that would protect part of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
By Adem Ay
Environmental activists rarely get to celebrate a major win for the planet, but that’s what happened in Ecuador last year. After a decade-long struggle between activists and the government, a referendum was held in August 2023 on whether to continue drilling for oil in a protected part of the Amazon. The people voted to kick the oil industry out.
The government and the state oil company, Petroecuador, had tried every trick in the book to get a different result. There was a disinformation campaign, threats of austerity, even an attempt to void hundreds of thousands of signatures that were collected for the referendum to happen.
But the vote eventually went ahead, and 60 percent chose to champion biodiversity and keep more than a billion barrels of oil in the ground. Ecuador’s Constitutional Court gave the government a year to dismantle the infrastructure of three oil fields under Yasuní national park, both a biodiversity hotspot and a home to Indigenous communities, some still living in isolation.
Here was a glorious example of how democracy, not disruptive protest, could deliver the policies needed to overcome capitalism’s drive for profit. For the first time, a nation had decided to forego billions of dollars to preserve its nature. Activists around the world eagerly started planning referendums of their own.
But even as they celebrated, the activists in Ecuador knew they had to remain vigilant. The alliance of Indigenous, environmental and social campaigners had battled three consecutive governments to get this far, and the country was still reeling from a series of political, economic and social crises. Nothing could be taken for granted.
They were right to be wary. This August marked the first anniversary of the referendum, and the passing of the court-set deadline to stop the oil. Yet nothing in the Ecuadorian Amazon has changed. Petroecuador is still extracting around 60,000 barrels of oil a day from Yasuní national park. The Indigenous communities who live there are still fighting for their survival. And activists around the country are still campaigning alongside them to try and push the oil industry out.
How could this happen? How could Ecuador’s largest democratic mandate since its return to democracy in the 1970s be simply ignored? And why weren’t the millions of disenfranchised voters out on the streets?
Mafia wars
Back in May 2021, as the world was emerging from the COVID pandemic, Ecuador’s first right-wing president in two decades was being sworn into office. Guillermo Lasso, a mild-mannered former bank CEO, vowed to make COVID vaccinations more widespread, to privatize the economy and to expand oil production in the Amazon.
His success with the first pledge only helped to fuel the mass protests against the other two. His economic reforms caused fuel and food prices to rise, while his oil plans threatened to destroy the Indigenous communities who lived around the wells. As thousands of people marched through the capital Quito, a major prison riot in Guayaquil triggered an unprecedented nationwide turf war among four drug gangs. The murder rate started to soar.
Unable to contain the chaos, Lasso turned to authoritarianism. He suspended social media and civil liberties, let police use deadly force, deployed soldiers on the streets, even pushed civilians to arm themselves. But then he became entwined in a major corruption scandal which tied his brother-in-law to an Albanian cocaine trafficker.
In a desperate bid to escape impeachment and calm the country, Lasso dissolved congress and called a snap election in which he would not stand, scheduling the Yasuní oil referendum for the same day. But the chaos continued. During the election campaign a presidential candidate who, as an investigative journalist, had made many powerful enemies including Lasso, was assassinated by Colombian hitmen.
The eventual winner, the telegenic 35-year-old Daniel Noboa, promised to wage a war against the drug gangs and respect the referendum result. But he was also the son of a billionaire banana exporter, and more staunchly to the right than Lasso. Could he really be trusted to put planet before profit? Lasso, for his part, was recorded days after the vote saying that abandoning Yasuní’s oil was “not possible.”
And so it has proven. Since his inauguration, President Noboa has simply played for time as his administration lurches from one major scandal to another, prices keep rising and Ecuador’s streets continue to be plagued by violence. Noboa has even claimed that Yasuní’s oil revenues are sustaining his endless war on the drug gangs.
In June of this year, eight months after the referendum result, his government unveiled a special committee to finally implement it. The team included the CEO of Petroecuador, three government ministers, and nobody from civil society, Indigenous or otherwise. Of the ministers involved, one voiced support for a repeat of the referendum, another said that winding down oil production could take 14 years. So far, the committee has achieved nothing of note.
The Waorani strike back
The alliance of activists who fought so long and hard for the referendum to happen are understandably angry about this betrayal. But leading the response to it are the Waorani activists, the Indigenous people who have lived in the Yasuní rainforests for millennia.
Waorani communities were forced into contact with the outside world in the 1970s when American missionaries were helicoptered into the region by the American oil company Texaco, looking to clear the “savages” from potential drill sites. There are still two Indigenous groups who remain uncontacted in Yasuní, and the Waorani activists campaign on their behalf.
Oil operations have expanded across the region ever since Texaco’s arrival, with hundreds of wells installed throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon in the name of “national interest.” Each well is a source of immense, near continuous pollution that is lethal to all life around it. Gas flaring contaminates the air, while dumped waste and oil spillages contaminates the groundwater. What results is disease, especially cancers, and premature death.
“Since the oil companies came to our territories, our people have suffered from sickness, air contamination, poisoned water supply. Our whole culture has been effected,” said Juan Bay, the president of the Waorani Nation of Ecuador, or NAWE. “The forest is being devastated, and our wisdom is being lost. The government and oil companies have no knowledge of nature. We struggle on with our uncontacted brothers, and we are determined not to leave.”
On Aug. 20, the first anniversary of the referendum, NAWE led a modest but spectacular march of around 150 activists through the streets of Quito. The Waorani were delivering a letter to the Ministry of Energy and Mining that demanded their inclusion in the recently announced committee that would shut down the oil.
The Minister of Energy and Mining had agreed to invite Bay and other NAWE representatives into the building. But on the day of the meeting he changed his mind, blaming a busy schedule, and banned them from entering the ministry. Insulted by the sudden snub, the activists moved on to a local park, where they held a seminar on renewable energy.
A week later, NAWE held a three-day international summit in Puyo, the city closest to Yasuní. There, along with representatives from 300 other groups, they drew up an action plan to ensure the referendum was respected and Yasuní territory would be restored. On Aug. 30, the day Noboa’s government was legally required to stop the oil, Bay and other NAWE representatives presented their action plan to the Constitutional Court in Quito, the only institution involved in this saga to have kept its reputation intact.
Blue ink not black
Another group fighting to see the referendum respected is the small organization that officially proposed it back in 2013, then campaigned for it for the next decade. Yasunidos was formed by a dozen young activists after then-president Rafael Correa abandoned his own initiative to keep Yasuní’s oil in the ground, and green-lit its extraction.
Back in 2007, Correa had gone to the U.N. and made an audacious yet generous offer to the world: Pay Ecuador half the oil’s worth, and he’d ensure this precious part of the Amazon remained untouched. But six years later, only a fraction of the funds had been raised. When it came to protecting one of the world’s most biodiverse and vital carbon sinks, rich nations did not put their money where their mouth is.
Yasunidos quickly set about bringing together all the groups interested in preserving Yasuní to focus on one goal: collecting signatures. According to Ecuador’s new constitution (ratified itself by a referendum in 2008), a referendum could be held on the issue if half a million Ecuadorians signed up for it. Indigenous, ecological, feminist, Catholic and social groups unified under the Yasunidos banner and started collecting names.
After just three months, despite police infiltration and the appearance of mysterious decoy groups collecting names for similar but opposing referendums, the Yasunidos coalition had collected a stunning 736,000 signatures. Unbeknown to the activists, the state was determined to invalidate as many of them as possible.
No stipulation was too petty. The signature was written in black ink, not blue? Invalid. It didn’t exactly match the signature in the citizens’ registry? Invalid. Even the paper they were written on could be judged too thick or too thin by the meddling bureaucrats. After a 10-year legal battle between Yasunidos and the government, the Constitutional Court eventually ruled that the thrown out signatures were valid, and the referendum had to proceed.
“We knew even if we won this referendum, it wouldn’t be the end,” explained Sofía Caiza, one of the small team of determined Yasunidos coordinators. “We had to fight three different governments — two to the left, one to the right. And there were differences between them, but not when it came to supporting extractivism.”
Yasunidos are now fighting their fourth government on two fronts. Firstly, like NAWE, they are pushing for an audience with the Constitutional Court, where they will pursue not just a resolution to force the government into action, but also the dismissal of those politicians responsible for the inertia, with criminal charges also a possibility.
Secondly, the group is forcing the government to reveal its actual efforts to respect the referendum by working with a state institution that can oblige ministries to hand over internal paperwork. Eight months into the process, Yasunidos is still reviewing the first tranche of submitted documents, but it’s clear that the government has been dragging its heels to a ridiculous degree. Caiza summarises their approach as “not serious.”
Power cuts
Because of the way former President Lasso dissolved his government back in 2023, the current one has a mandate of just 18 months. President Noboa will be looking to win a full four-year term in elections scheduled for February next year.
“Noboa has made big promises but hasn’t delivered,” said José Suing, a coordinator of Extinction Rebellion Ecuador, which was founded during the protest movement’s global surge in 2019. “He puts out a lot of propaganda, but on the street he is unpopular, and so is González, the left-wing candidate who lost last time. It is really not clear who will win this election.”
“The left in Ecuador is fractured,” added Amparo Ri, another coordinator of Extinction Rebellion, “and has a history of persecuting Indigenous people and nature. We don’t believe in them. Politics is just lying.” When it comes to the election, and politics in general, hope is severely lacking among activists. “Right now, we do not have hope, hope is not what we need. We have anger,” Suing said.
Suing is speaking to me having just experienced a new crisis in his country — a spontaneous power cut that lasted the whole morning. Ecuador is suffering from an increasingly long dry season due to climate change, and in a country reliant on hydroelectricity, that means water and power are in increasingly short supply. Power cuts are now being scheduled once a week. Suing believes the government is letting this crisis worsen, so the sector can be more easily privatized.
The anger that Suing speaks of is permeating Ecuadorian society, especially among young people, and it is benefiting his movement. Extinction Rebellion Ecuador has notably grown in size and popularity since the referendum failed to bear fruit. But its central tactic, mass nonviolent protest, is still not in the cards.
Instead, members are planning an education drive in public squares and schools, holding seminars that explicitly link climate change to Ecuadorians’ lived experience of worsening droughts, forest fires and now power cuts.
There’s also a keen desire for more people outside Ecuador to know about and join this struggle to save Yasuní — to “Yasuníse the world” as Suing puts it. Bay, the president of NAWE, has already “Yasunísed” New York Climate Week, and will be travelling to Azerbaijan in November to attend COP29. Tired of that conference’s periodic capitulation to (and hosting by) fossil fuel lobbyists, Extinction Rebellion Ecuador will be heading to a week-long Anti-COP in Oaxaca, Mexico, instead.
People are disappearing
As to why activists are not trying to organize the kind of mass street protests that the country saw back in 2021, Caiza explained: “Military forces are still out on the streets. There is still violence from the drug gangs, from the police, from soldiers, and people, ordinary young people, are disappearing, especially in cities outside Quito. People are afraid to go out.”
Despite this continued lack of security, she still sees mass protest as inevitable. “People are in shock right now, but I feel it can’t last much longer,” she said. “The economic crisis is making it harder for people to live each day. We have no rains, forest fires, and I am working from home today because of the power cuts. Right now, many people say this could all change once we have the election. They are waiting. But without that, it will be unsustainable. People will go back out on the streets.”
Despite this gloomy prognosis, Caiza ended on a note of genuine hope. She referenced philosopher Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism,” the widespread sense that capitalism is the only way our civilization can work, and imagining a coherent alternative is impossible.
“I think this story proves something different,” she said. “Despite all the crises, all the poverty and violence and corruption, the people of Ecuador showed that they still cared about the planet. I do think that is a seed of hope. More extraction and exploitation doesn’t have to be our collective future.”
Whether these activists find justice through the courts or on the streets, whether the next Ecuadorian government grants the people their wish or not, those people did wish to put planet over profit, and by a margin unrivaled in the country’s modern history. That is an inspiring story indeed, however it ends.
This article is co-published with ZNetwork.org.
Adem Ay is a writer and activist based in London. He spent five years working for Extinction Rebellion, where he helped coordinate the global media team and edit a global newsletter that connected him to activists all over the world. He wants to spread their inspiring stories as far and wide as possible.
