Rituals for dispossession. Indigenous Peoples, oil and negotiations in the Peruvian Northern Amazon basin (original) (raw)
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Third World Quarterly, 2017
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Geoforum, 2023
This paper examines the relationships between extractive infrastructure, changing territorial strategies, and contemporary processes of subject formation among the Urarina, an indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon. We first introduce the uneven and combined character of oil extraction in the Loreto region in north-eastern Peru, and how its racialised spatial contradictions are expressed in the ethnopolitical field that gives political form to regional extractive operations. The paper goes on to analyse the case of the Urarina people in the Chambira river basin, their particular place in the geography of extraction, and the case of the community of Nueva Union. We examine contemporary processes of subject formation in the community, which combine radical transformations in the role of money, territorial strategies, use and valuation of the environment, and changes in political structure, in non-linear ways. The paper closes by examining how the case of the community of Nueva Union sheds light on broader dynamics of subject formation, localised relations to the environment, and extraction as they play out in contemporary indigenous Amazonia.
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In April 2019, Waorani people in Amazonian Ecuador won a key legal battle against plans to sell oil concessions on their indigenous territory. I analyze their engagements with oil as part of an emerging eco-political “middle ground” characterized by Waorani men working for oil companies and new alliances against oil extraction.Waorani activists lament not the violation of a pristine natural environment separate from themselves and in need of conservation, but instead threats to the qualities of Waorani land (wao öme) that allow people and other beings to “live well.” In the context of generational changes, their engagement in environmental politics involves translating and moving between different conceptions of indigenous land. While becoming environmental citizens evokes discourses of nature, culture, and stereotypes of Amazonian people as natural conservationists, current eco-political alliances are based as much on close working relationships with outsiders as symbolic politics....
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Marcb 1994. Sitting side by side around a conference table, Indian leaders, oilmen, and environmental advocates talked well into the night. They discussed native land claims, health care, and the lack of adequate schools throughout the Oriente, Ecuador's Amazon region. At midnight they reached a decision: They would pursue a dialogue to resolve tbe issues surrounding Pu:co's proposed development of the Villano oJ field. Located deep within LheOriente, in a region of Pastaza province Imown as Block 10, tl~e Villano field had become a baltleoround in the often difficult and contentious relationship between Arco and Ecuador's indigenous Indian communities. This agreement represented a major turning point. A few years eariier, the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza (OPIP), one of Ecuador's most powerful Indian federations, had demanded a IS-year moratorium all. all petroleum exploration in Pastaza province. Yet ,that night in Plano, OPIP representatives promised to work with Axeo. This alticle outlines the process by whid~that agreement was reached and where it has led since 1994, assessing what larger lessons Axeo's unique experience holds for hydrocarbon companies worl"ing to buJd relationships witb indigenous peoples elsewhere. To build such relationships in Ecuador, the com
The Entanglements of Oil Extraction and Sustainability in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Environment and Sustainability in a Globalizing World, Routledge, 2019
Oil extraction is a useful optic for thinking and writing about the future of sustainable resource use. While concerns over the burdens of oil extraction tend to be of a planetary scale (e.g. discussions around fossil-fuel addiction, energy security, and climate change), in this chapter we zoom in to the case of the Ecuadorian Amazon, where indigenous peoples have raised profound questions about oil extraction practices and outcomes. Amazonian peoples’ refusal to oil extraction, in particular, has received significant global attention and is considered emblematic of indigenous peoples’ sustainability thinking. At the same time, this common narrative about indigenous political action hides the complex ways that Amazonian peoples relate to oil extraction. We focus on the case of Playas del Cuyabeno (Playas hereafter), a Kichwa community located in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon to illustrate how “sustainability” is not an abstract concept that can be applied worldwide seamlessly, but that thinking and acting sustainably emerges from locally-rooted visions of the past, present and future. In this chapter, we introduce the dominant ways in which sustainability and oil extraction are currently discussed in Ecuador, and how debates around oil extraction tend to reproduce a particular way of thinking about sustainability. Next, we lay out our conceptual framework for examining sustainability in Playas. Then, we briefly trace the experiences that shaped how Playas residents see themselves in relation to oil, first resisting and then acquiescing to oil extraction within their territory. In the subsequent section, we examine the conditions and subjectivities through which people of Playas came to position themselves not only as supporters of oil extraction, but as potential oil producers themselves, despite popular narratives that associate indigenous peoples with anti-oil politics. We interrogate concepts of sustainability by tracing the conditions that made it possible for Playas’ population to imagine an indigenous oil company as a vehicle of sustainability, noting that sustainable development planning is not the exclusive practice of elite state, non-governmental, and multilateral institutions. We highlight the intersectional dimensions of the decisions of indigenous leaders to embrace oil extraction in the name of social and environmental sustainability. There is no single relation that explains positioning vis-à-vis oil in local contexts, but multiple relations and complex histories that construct ways of seeing and acting.
Habitat as Human Rights: Indigenous Huaorani in the Amazon Rainforest, Oil, and Ome Yasuni
AARN: Social Justice & Human Rights (Sub-Topic), 2016
This Article is based on a presentation to the Vermont Law Review Symposium, "Habitat for Human Rights: Environmental Degradation and Human Rights." It begins by highlighting three general scenarios where environmental and human rights laws intersect, and then examines the experience of Indigenous Huaorani (also spelled "Waorani" and "Waodani") in the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador with environmental and human rights law and litigation. It includes a discussion of oil extraction operations by Texaco (now part of Chevron) in Ecuador, and the ongoing litigation that has come to be known as "the Chevron Ecuador litigation." It also includes a discussion of Ome Yasuni, an alliance of affected grassroots Huaorani communities who have organized themselves to defend their habitat as human rights in the area now known as Yasuni National Park and Biosphere Reserve.
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In March 2014, a US court proclaimed a major oil corporation the victim of racketeering, thus nullifying its legal obligation to clean up contamination wrought by its extractive activities in Ecuador. Drawing on long-term anthropological research, we examine how that decision and a series of derivative legal actions have codified the "truth of fraud" so as to exacerbate inequities pervading oil extraction and relinquish the corporation from addressing harm. We argue that the use of legal technique by the corporation congealed a specific temporality of legal time - what we call the recurrent past - that trapped its opponents in an inexorable vortex and foreclosed any possibility to interrupt the 2014 ruling. This temporal trajectory obscures a different temporality of reckoning presently unfolding in Ecuador. There, local collectives are imbricated in an expansive present that allows for a pragmatic orientation toward the future and ongoing reconceptualization of the work of decolonization.
Repairing Environmental Politics: Multispecies Healing in Ecuador's Oil Frontier
Anthropology and Environment Society Engagement Blog, 2022
In the absence of legal remedy, Indigenous and campesino communities in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon are advancing a new initiative to address oil contamination in their backyards. Building on innovations in the life sciences, they have formed environmental reparations committees that inexpensively make use of the digestive systems of fungi, bacteria, and plants to break down hydrocarbons and sequester heavy metals. Whereas oil corporations, and the governmental agencies that monitor them, have relied on chemical dispersants to reduce toxins in soil and water to levels deemed to be of negligible risk to humans, the reparations committees critique such utilitarian logic for promoting a solution deadlier than the disease. Drawing on ethnographic research at sites of oil clean-up, this paper examines how the dominant technocratic approach reproduces inequalities that the extractive sector depends on. Following the reparations committees as they stage their response, I explore how they ally with different species to promote a reconfiguring of relations between the Ecuadorian state, the transnational corporation, and the many forms of life to which the Amazon is home. In this context, I consider repair as a holistic process of re-pairing: a re-partnering or re-membering that widens the scope of who, and what, is accounted for in discerning conditions of wellbeing. Although the affected communities do not claim to be able to reverse environmental harm all by themselves, their work expresses a form of hope that I identify as weaving together, in the present tense, a decolonial ethics of multispecies care in a world relationally ruptured by oil development.
2011
This article examines the Amazonian countries of Peru and Ecuador, their differing policy directions on petroleum extraction and the impact these continue to have on the environment and the Indians of the Amazon Basin. It begins by analysing the international laws in place to safeguard indigenous communities, followed by a discussion on Peru, which reveals how successive Lima governments have ridden roughshod over the legitimate rights of the native population. This has culminated in the gravest risk yet; a ‘mega concession’ for extraction that covers over 10 million acres of rainforest, threatening numerous communities. The environmental and societal repercussions this would have will be highlighted through a study of the Achuar tribe in the Corrientes River Basin, who have suffered thirty years of oil extraction on their land. This is followed by a critique of Ecuador, a country that trod a similar policy path to Peru, but isnow taking a bold environmental approach to petroleum extraction through the Yasuni ITT Initiative. This enterprise will be explored alongside the possible motives behind it leading to a theoretical argument; that the scheme could provide Peru with a credible alternative to petroleum extraction which would not only safeguard the indigenous tribes and their rights, but also protect the Peruvian Amazonian Basin from further damage.