More than one hundred activists and storytellers from all over America gathered in the center of the Ecuadorian Amazon to forge an alliance opposed to extractivism and illegal mining.
“Yes, we’re here to have fun, but that’s about it. We are also here to publicize our struggles abroad,” says Nelly Shiguango, a women’s leader with the Federation of Indigenous Organizations in the province of Napo, in the Ecuadorian Amazon. “We need them to see how our forests are being destroyed, how our lives are being destroyed, how our rivers are disappearing. »
Nelly leads an organization of indigenous and Afro-descendant activists on the Jatunyacu River on one of the exciting rafting trips that the waterway is known for. The Jatunyacu is one of the main tributaries of the Amazon and originates from a glacier fed by the Cotopaxi volcano. Yellow-tailed Yapu birds cross the water, returning to their low-basket nests, and giant blue morpho butterflies explore its shores.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, rafting has also been an effective way to detect the myriad of legal and illegal gold mining sites that are choking the river and most of the Kichwa indigenous communities whose livelihoods depend on it.
Activists from 22 countries representing indigenous and Afro-descendant media organizations and collectives traveled from their territories (spanning Suriname, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Argentina, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and many others) to attend a compelling assembly last month in reaction. to the harmful accumulation of illegal mining in the province of Napo and throughout the region. They were invited through Leo Cerda, leader of a local network and co-founder of the Black and Indigenous Liberation Movement of the Americas (BILM), to create a coalition. “A movement is built through many, through one. We want to start thinking about local methods with global impact,” Leo says in an interview.
Arriving first in Quito on a hot October morning, the delegates descended more than 2,000 meters in altitude to Tena, a small city at the gates of the Amazon, before entering Talag lands in a convoy of buses. Crossing the Jatunyacu River From their wobbly steel bridges, participants were greeted with a sign that read: “The Kichwa community of Serena says: No to mining! We are exercising our right to self-determination. “
The organization comes into view, letting the miners know that all eyes are on Serena.
Overlapping environmental and security crises
Ecuador’s recent surge in violent crime dominated this year’s turbulent general election, in which anti-corruption candidate Fernando Villavencio was assassinated in the streets of Quito just days before the first voting circular. The wonderful center-right winner, Daniel Noboa, heir to a banana empire, has pledged to address the security crisis as the centerpiece of his truncated 18-month presidency, with plans to deploy the army to port cities and hold a popular consultation on the issue. term.
But drug trafficking groups have gained a greater presence in Ecuador and the wider region, and are now present in 69. 5% of Amazonian border municipalities in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. As the value of gold reaches an all-time high, criminal groups are increasingly turning to gold mining to fund their illicit activities, and illegal mining operations are expanding throughout the Amazon.
The Ecuadorian Amazon has a battleground. Its coasts have been devastated by legal and illegal gold mining, with 152 legal mining concessions registered in Napo province alone, Leo state, in 2020. Mining exports increased by 86% between 2008 and 2018, making gold Ecuador’s fourth-largest export. As of 2016, more than three-quarters of Ecuador’s gold was mined illegally, most commonly in the Amazon. When the pandemic began, those numbers increased even more. In May 2023, the Ministry of the Interior became aware of the illegal mining camps. in 21 of the country’s 24 provinces.
In some areas, such as Yutzupino, downstream of Serena, riverbeds have been completely diverted due to mining. Small tributaries of the Napo River have been destroyed, devastating biodiversity and polluting or eliminating local communities’ water sources.
“They leave our forests destroyed, our river destroyed, our way of life destroyed. How are we going to do it? We count on the water. We’re out of the river,” Leo says.
This is not the only explanation for why Ecuador is well-positioned to host BILM’s anti-mining camp. The country made headlines around the world with the recent environmental referendum on extractivism, the first of its kind in the world, in which citizens voted to prevent oil extraction in the Yasuni National Park in the Amazon and a ban on mining in the Andean Chocó region. These victories mean Ecuadorians are heeding calls from activists and indigenous peoples to end the country’s half-century of dependence on oil and extractive industries. The referfinishum presented grassroots teams with a rare opportunity to promote anti-extractivist agfinishes, which made this gathering of activists more timely than ever.
Anti-mining camp in Serena
The week-long mine action camp organized through the BILM team was divided into two branches: the second BILM Congress, designed to promote solidarity among indigenous and Afro-descendant communities and scale up critical methods to curb mining; and the first BILM Climate Storytelling Lab, organised through the British Film Institute’s Doc Society to build the capacities of local networks and media.
“We are here in solidarity, but also to strategize and create our own narratives opposed to extractivism,” Leo said in his opening remarks. “We are here to call for climate justice and racial justice. And the theme of this camp is mining. “, because we need to create a strategy and alliances to fight this challenge as a whole. The challenge is simply local, it is regional.
Activists fill their strength each morning with sacred Wayusa herbal water, tobacco poured through the nose for cleansing, fermented plantain chicha for abdominal health, and a nutritious breakfast. Food is brought through Yuturi Warmi, the first female-led territorial guard in Ecuador, led by Kichwa women from Serena. Its call is encouraged by the non-violent fire ant which, when its territory is threatened, defends itself with its bite. Yuturi Warmi oversees this 800- to 1,000-hectare territory and boosts the local economy through craft and tourism projects that they hope will convince their neighbors to move away from illegal mining and the deep network divisions this can create. Their designs are sold worldwide under the fashion logo of the Hakhu Amazon Design network.
Lucía Ixchíu, indigenous coordinator of the Movement, thanks the women of Yuturi Warmi, who prepare impeccable food for the delegates based on brand new tilapia, cassava and banana puree, and roasted chontacuro insects from the jungle. “It is the people, the women,” she said, “who feed the resistance. »
Concrete solutions
BILM’s core confidence is that there can be no climate justice without racial justice. Appropriately, Congress is addressing three priority areas: racial justice, climate justice, and counter-extractivism, and the subcommittees contemplate methods for each. These ambitious proposals revolve around the desire to reclaim important territories: directly, where mining activity has invaded the network and public lands, and indirectly, in terms of research, education and justice.
Intercultural activist groups emphasize the desire to form regional study groups composed of sociologists, anthropologists, social scientists, and ecologists. These interdisciplinary groups will gather information on new surveillance technologies, effective sanctions, and choice of justice approaches, and expand methods on how to integrate them. in policies. Research groups in each of the networks must devise “life plans” to outline the communities’ desires with NGOs that are able to respond to them. This will inspire foreign organizations to channel the task. money directly to communities rather than through NGOs operating in the country. The groups are also guilty of building the content of the courses taught in the intergenerational education centers that will be established in each territory as a component of the BILM Regional School.
BILM School’s education courses, recently presented virtually, are designed to cover anti-extractivist theory, anti-mining tactics, identity politics, multimedia storytelling, and ancestral wisdom with express courses on literary traditions, e. g. challenge the hegemonic narratives of colonial literature that led to the loss of oral traditions. In networked information centres and online spaces, participants will be informed about their rights and the rights of nature, enshrined in the UN-sponsored Ezcazú Regional Agreement.
The most important proposal that will emerge from the assembly is the International Court of Climate Justice, which BILM organizations hope to identify, prosecute, condemn and seek reparations from extractive corporations throughout the Americas. It would serve as an option. court, separate from national legal institutions, and would legalize pluralism through a council of elders from diverse cultures. “We are fighting against the megacorporations that play that role on a transnational level, so why not create methods of resistance on a transterritorial level? Lucía asks: referring to the proposal, for now the concept is just a seed.
The groups are also devising methods that will be implemented immediately, such as the creation of Yuturi Warmi-inspired territorial guards that not only oversee security measures but also promote unity, safeguard culture, and breathe life into the local economy. They inspire representatives to reclaim their territories. lose out on mining through symptoms and the media. Sustainable community-based tourism is touted as a key source of income, demonstrating to the government that “new markets” don’t have to rely exclusively on extractivism and demonstrating to locals that they don’t want to turn to mining for income.
Juanita Francis Bone, director of Mujeres de Asfalto, a women’s collective in Esmeraldas, on the Ecuadorian coast, told delegates: “Moving away from rhetoric and seeking practical answers allowed us to recognize the demanding situations each of us face. is confronted. Not to sink us into despair, but to accompany each other in our struggles.
Lucía invites difference and debate as a key detail of the collective process: “The Congress is a very ambitious initiative. . . It’s intense,” she says. This meeting of varied teams is also a level for disagreements and debates, other conceptions of history. and identity, and other tactics of being in the world, bringing together diverse narratives of trauma into a single collective space. Lucía points out that “this exchange of stories is important for the creation of collective strategies. “
“A lot of communities facing disorders here in the Amazon think they’re the only ones facing those disorders,” Leo says. “I think seeing all those other people facing reports makes us more powerful because we’re coming together. “
Rosa Gaba, a Waorani woman, echoes Leo: “We are here to provide coverage and fight for our territories and their conservation, hand in hand with our brothers and sisters. Rosa traveled for more than six hours from the Yasuní National Park, along with her companions, to register for the congress. They brought with them songs, dances, crafts, sustainable clothing and a fierce anti-extraction message.
Climate Narratives and the Power of Storytelling
The Waorani and Kichwa communities are fighting head-to-head to push extractivism out of their forests. Young people from both groups collaborated on audiovisual materials for their campaigns through the production company Mullu TV and the Hahku Amazon Foundation. Weya Alicia Cahuiya, a Waorani leader, explains that “BILM empowers our young people to manage our own communications and share our stories with the rest of the world. “
Strategic storytelling is key to convincing the electorate to keep oil in the ground as part of the #SíAlYasuní campaign. “Here in Ecuador, most people from the coast have never been to the Amazon. So we brought them the Amazon,” Leo explains about the campaign.
Weya recounts how she and other Waorani women traveled in caravans from Yasuni to the Sierra, along the coast and into the southern Ecuadorian Amazon, “walking, singing, spreading our message, explaining why we were looking for other people to vote Yes for Yasuní, counting. More women, more brothers and sisters in our struggle.
President-elect Daniel Noboa, who took office on Nov. 23, will have the final say on the prestige of the two Yasuni oil blocks. He said he would respect the will of the voters. In November, the CEO of Ecuador’s national oil company, Petroecuador, announced plans to phase out a mammoth drilling task at Yasuni starting next August. Time will tell, and local teams such as Napo Ama La Vida and Napo Resiste will continue to denounce illegal extractivism in their territories, alerting local governments through videos and media.
Communications and data sharing are key pieces of equipment for those communities, along with technical data, studies, and legal support. To harness this potential, a programme of Climate Story Lab workshops will be presented throughout the BILM conference, led through the global non-profit documentary organisation Doc Society. The workshops explore the most necessary and effective stories to tackle the climate crisis, with themes of journalism, podcasting, and film.
The Doc Society has expertise in the impact of Indigenous storytelling. They produced the National Geographic film on the El Territorio campaign, which promoted the active role of indigenous peoples in environmental policy and cinema in Brazil. The Doc Society team provided the Uru Eu Wau Wau Wau Indigenous Territorial Guard with GoPro cameras so they could better document invasions of their territory in the Brazilian Amazon. A screening of the film in Brussels in front of members of the European Parliament led to the adoption of the December 2022 Anti-Deforestation Law, which requires companies that trade commodities on the EU market to ensure that their products are not linked to recent deforestation, forest degradation or violations of local environmental laws.
On the last night, short films about identity and resistance are screened, adding “No Pride in Genocide” through the Caribbean Freedom Project. Hakhu Amazon Design’s sustainable fashion is presented through BILM members representing other cultures, followed by classical dances and then music through Esmeraldan. hip-hop singer Black Mama and Brazilian DJ Eric Terena.
Black and Indigenous Liberation Day
The camp is a wonderful success: cross-border links are formed between activists fighting against similar processes of dispossession and insecurity. Serena’s tourism capacity is strengthened thanks to the organization of this week of activities. “I feel very revered because other people visit my territory and I think that strengthens my community,” Leo says. A wealth of content is being created and shared, catapulting foreign visibility of the mining emergency in Napo and beyond.
The camp culminates with a passionate march through Tena on October 12. Widely celebrated as “Columbus Day,” marking the “discovery of America,” the date is revived here as Black and Indigenous Liberation Day. Some delegates march in classic costumes, strategic messages such as “Why are we destroying what helps keep us alive?”Members of a youth rafting company raise their oars in protest. “Strength strength, guard guard!” Yuturi Warmi’s signature call and response can be heard roaring through the streets.
“It’s a day of remembrance. It’s a day of movement building,” Leo says.
While the stakes are high and extractive capitalism will not be dismantled by a simple gathering of activists and allies, the collective strength drawn from those reports and injustices is palpable. It’s rare to see an area where each and every voice is heard and leveraged to create concrete goals that confront intersectional struggles. These teams know what they’re capable of, especially in the context of a foreign alliance, and seeing them work together gives a rare glimmer of hope for humanity’s future. As Christio Wijnhard of Suriname tells us, “I think what I’ve noticed here is the way humans are. “
Rebecca Wilson is a journalist and translator in Bogotá, Colombia. Es editor-in-chief of the Latin America Bureau, who has reported on social and environmental issues in Latin America since the 1970s.
Eliana Lafone is a British-Uruguayan documentary filmmaker and journalist in Colombia. His painting focuses on human rights, mining and the environment, and he has painted for media outlets and NGOs, including: BBC, Channel 4, WWF, Red Muqui, Children Change. Colombia.
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