A group of indigenous Waorani women give a war cry warning that environmentalists are not welcome in their part of the Ecuadoran Amazon, where an oil field operates partly on a protected reserve.
“We will not allow kowori [strangers] ... to enter,” said Waorani leader Felipe Ima, translating the belligerent words of a group of seven women from the Kawymeno community that supports oil extraction at the nearby Ishpingo field.
The community is pitted in a battle of wills against environmental group Yasunidos, which has been fighting for a decade for a referendum on leaving the oil underground.
Photo: EPA-EFE
In May, the Ecuadoran Constitutional Court allowed the request, and a plebiscite has been scheduled for next month.
Escorted by a warrior wielding a spear, the women from Kawymeno hold hands and dance in little clothing and feather crowns at the entrance to Ishpingo A platform.
They demand that any consultation should be with “the owners” of the land, and not with anyone that is “not even from the territory,” Ima said.
In Ecuador, the constitution recognizes indigenous people’s “collective ownership of land as an ancestral form of territorial organization.”
However, the state maintains control over anything under the soil. Ishpingo, together with the nearby fields of Tiputini and Tambococha, form the so-called ITT block, or block 43, which holds an estimated 282 million of the South American country’s proven crude reserves of 1.2 billion barrels.
Extraction at Tiputini and Tambococha started in 2016 after years of fraught debate over whether to drill inside the Yasuni National Park. This came after the government of then-Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa failed to persuade the international community to pay former OPEC member Ecuador US$3.6 billion not to exploit the ITT block to protect the Amazon and help curb climate change.
In April last year, the government announced pumping had also started at Ishpingo.
At the site protected by women in the dense, green jungle, stands one of 12 platforms of the ITT block that contributed 57,000 barrels per day to Ecuador’s total production of 464,000 barrels per day from January to April.
It is in the Yasuni National Park, a biosphere reserve that houses about 2,000 tree, 610 bird, 204 mammal, 150 amphibian and more than 120 reptile species, the San Francisco University of Quito said.
The Waorani community of Kawymeno, a journey of about four hours by foot and canoe from Ishpingo, is near the border with Peru.
Its 400 inhabitants have declared themselves defenders of the oil activity and its windfalls they say make up for the absence of government services.
“If there were no oil industry, we would not ... have had education, health, family welfare,” said Panenky Huabe, leader of the village where many work in the oil sector.
Aside from being among the most biodiverse areas on Earth, the 1 million hectare Yasuni park is home to two of the world’s last uncontacted indigenous populations. It also holds oil fields that started operating before the ITT block.
“We see how extraction has been besieging the Yasuni for many years, since the 1970s when exploitation began,” Yasunidos lawyer and spokesman Pedro Bermeo said.
“Basically, the [block] 43 is the only one with a part [of jungle] that remains to be saved,” he said.
However, the referendum has generated deep divisions even among the Waorani, whose 4,800 members own about 800,000 hectares of jungle in the provinces of Orellana, Pastaza and Napo.
In 2019, the Waorani of Pastaza won a historic court ruling that prevents the entry of oil companies on 180,000 hectares on their territory, but at Ishpingo A in Orellana, oil worker Akao Yetebe — also a Waorani — said “we will continue working,” because “black gold benefits big cities, teachers, education, health, everything.”
State-owned EP Petroecuador is authorized to operate on about 300 hectares of the Yasuni for its ITT block. So far it has used about 80 hectares, generating US$4.2 billion for the state — about US$1.2 billion last year alone.
If the “yes” wins in next month’s referendum, “losses will be substantial” — about US$16.4 billion in projected income, as well as jobs and investments already made, Petroecuador manager Ramon Correa said.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
NATIONAL SECURITY: Intel’s testing of ACM tools despite US government control ‘highlights egregious gaps in US technology protection policies,’ a former official said Chipmaker Intel Corp has tested chipmaking tools this year from a toolmaker with deep roots in China and two overseas units that were targeted by US sanctions, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Intel, which fended off calls for its CEO’s resignation from US President Donald Trump in August over his alleged ties to China, got the tools from ACM Research Inc, a Fremont, California-based producer of chipmaking equipment. Two of ACM’s units, based in Shanghai and South Korea, were among a number of firms barred last year from receiving US technology over claims they have
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
France is developing domestic production of electric vehicle (EV) batteries with an eye on industrial independence, but Asian experts are proving key in launching operations. In the Verkor factory outside the northern city of Dunkirk, which was inaugurated on Thursday, foreign specialists, notably from South Korea and Malaysia, are training the local staff. Verkor is the third battery gigafactory to open in northern France in a region that has become known as “Battery Valley.” At the Automotive Energy Supply Corp (AESC) factory near the city of Douai, where production has been under way for several months, Chinese engineers and technicians supervise French recruits. “They
RSS