By Julia Woods, Communications Specialist
Update: On July 11, 2019, the Waorani defeated the Ecuadorian government on the appeal phase, blocking the sale of 500,000 acres of their ancestral lands from oil drilling.
On April 26, 2019, the Waorani, an Indigenous tribe who call the Ecuadorian Amazon home, celebrated a major victory against big oil.
The court ruled in favor of the Waorani, indefinitely blocking the entry of oil companies onto ancestral Amazonian land for oil exploration activities. The verdict effectively protects half a million acres of precious rainforest from being auctioned off for oil activity, and it sets a critical and historic precedent for Free, Prior and Informed Consent for other Indigenous groups across Ecuador. The ruling is also a major setback in the Ecuadorian government’s plans to extract oil across the southcentral Amazon.
The Waorani have lived on the fringes of Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park—one of the most biodiverse places on the planet—for thousands of years. Their ancestral territory overlaps significantly with the park, and until recent decades this land was a pristine expanse of life-giving trees and clean-flowing rivers.
Today, Waorani communities are physically wedged between two bustling oil fields, Cononaco and Armadillo, where the Ecuadorian government has pushed to expand oil production into their ancestral territory. For years, they have used community organizing, high-tech territorial mapping, legal actions, alliance-building, and storytelling protect their land from government-led oil auctioning.
Global Greengrants Fund is a proud supporter of this resistance movement: since 2013, our organization has awarded six grants to grassroots Waorani groups.
And now, the years of hard work and resistance have paid off.
One of our most recent grants provided $5,000 to the Coordinating Council for the Waorani Nation of Pastaza Ecuador, which covered the travel costs of the Waorani delegations to travel to Puyo for a hearing in their lawsuit against the Ecuadorian government just last week.
We are proud of the persistence of the Waorani People, and this recent victory. Yet, the struggle is far from over. The Ecuadorian government announced shortly after the news broke that they would appeal the ruling, continuing the fight over the Amazon.
The Amazon Rainforest is one of the world’s greatest natural resources, also known as “the lungs of the earth.” For Indigenous Peoples who call the Amazon home, it is also their source of food, medicine, and shelter. At Global Greengrants Fund, we stand in solidarity with the Waorani people in their fight to protect their ancestral land, and will continue to support their efforts to protect their homeland. Stand with us.
Photo credit: Caroline Bennett