Ecuador’s historic vote to halt oil exploitation in Yasuní National Park, one of the planet’s most biodiverse areas, is under threat as the government looks to renege on the result of the 20 August referendum.
A clear majority of the population – nearly 59% – voted ‘yes to Yasuní’, choosing to protect the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador from fossil fuel drilling and leave the park’s oil reserves underground indefinitely. The result was a huge victory for environmental activists seeking to usher in a post-oil economy.
But both the outgoing president, Guillermo Lasso, and the frontrunner to win the presidential run-off in October, Luisa González, look set to disregard the referendum’s result.
“We don’t want the production of Block 43 [an oil field] to end. We don’t want to and we are not going to support or rush any procedure,” Lasso said in a meeting on 5 September with delegates from local Indigenous communities, many of whom fear the economic effects of halting the drilling and voted ‘no’ in the referendum.
As a result of the vote, the government has a year to stop operations in Block 43-ITT – short for Ishpingo, Tambococha and Tiputini – an oil field that covers nearly 2,000 hectares within the park. The area is home to the Waorani, Kichwa and Shuar Indigenous peoples and borders the land of other ‘uncontacted’ groups. The authorities are also prohibited from signing new oil contracts for Yasuní.
In the 5 September meeting, footage of which was leaked online, the president said that the government’s strategy to avoid implementing the referendum result will be to argue that it is “unenforceable”.
Lasso said: “Technically, it's not possible to shut down an oil well overnight. We are heading down the path of this referendum being unenforceable. It's not feasible, please understand that it's not possible, and we will maintain this position for as long as possible.”
In a press conference the day after the referendum, members of the groups that led the ‘yes’ campaign, surrounded by the flags of Ecuadorian Indigenous peoples, announced they will closely watch the authorities’ compliance with the popular mandate.
Now, activists are regrouping to resist attacks on the popular will. “It is common sense among all social organisations [in Ecuador] that what you achieve at the ballot box, you must defend in the streets,” Alejandra Santillana, a member of Yasunidos, the environmental collective that spearheaded the ‘yes’ campaign, told openDemocracy.
“As always, they violate collective decisions and rights. We think anything can happen. That's why we will be very vigilant,” Zenaida Yasacama, the vice-president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), told openDemocracy.
Activists are also demanding a comprehensive recovery plan for Yasuní that takes into account existing damage to human health and the environment, and provides strong protection for the park and its communities.
Yasuní, which encompasses more than one million hectares of tropical rainforest in the heart of the Amazon, was declared a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1989. It is home to more than 1,500 animal species and several Indigenous peoples, including the uncontacted Tagaeri and Taromenane peoples, who live in voluntary isolation.
For half a century, oil operations have threatened the survival of this rainforest. Block 43-ITT is the most recently opened oil field, with state-owned oil company Petroecuador operating there since 2016.
Government response
President Lasso, whose term ends on 25 November, says Ecuador will lose $1.2bn per year if oil drilling in Yasuní is halted. Yasunidos challenges this figure, claiming a more accurate figure is $148m per year, based on estimates of oil reserves given by Petroecuador to the country’s Constitutional Court.
Francesc Badia i Dalmases
Mines and energy minister Fernando Santos has queried the referendum’s binding nature, arguing that according to the country’s constitution, the final decision on oil exploration rests on the affected population.
He has suggested that the residents of Orellana province – where Block 43-ITT is situated and where nearly 58% voted ‘no’ to keeping the oil underground – hold the decisive authority. Santos stated on 24 August that the Constitutional Court would need to issue a final ruling and that, in the interim, oil drilling would persist.
González, the presidential candidate for the centre-left Citizen Revolution party, who is likely to become Ecuador's next leader after the runoff on October 15th, echoed Santos’ argument. She remarked: “Local authorities in Orellana will need to assert their rights in the legal process. We will have to allow this to unfold in the courts.”
However, activists caution that both Santos and González are “conflating prior informed consultation [with the local Indigenous populations], which should have been conducted before exploring the block, with a national popular referendum”. Both of these democratic mechanisms were established in Ecuador’s 2008 constitution.
Yasunidos denounced the way that the government and oil companies are promoting “uncertainty and fear among the local populations” affected by the oil drilling in the provinces of Orellana and Sucumbíos, and how state neglect has led to a “relationship of dependency and blackmail” between those communities and the oil companies.
Other governmental institutions have warned of potential problems. The Central Bank announced that unemployment would rise if drilling was halted, while the minister of environment, water and ecological transition, José Dávalos, warned it would be “impossible” to halt operations within the one-year time frame.
At first, Lasso rowed back from this stance, saying his government would comply with the popular will. But his latest’s comments contradict this – despite the fact that Ecuador’s 2008 constitution made the country the first in the world to recognise that nature (or Pachamama) has rights.
“There was an idea [in 2008] that with the incorporation of nature as a subject of rights in the constitution, there would be a change. But over the years, we have seen there’s no change. No government has shown interest in protecting nature,” said Yasacama from CONAIE.
González has also shown little regard for Pachamama, arguing that oil revenues benefit the people and suggesting environmentalists provide alternative options to drilling.
Yasacama, CONAIE’s vice-president, countered González’s claim: “That is false. When there was an oil boom, we did not receive attention – we were abandoned. Not even animals could survive in the sites that supposedly are our schools and health facilities.”
The long fight for a referendum
Back in 2007, then president Rafael Correa – who still leads González’s Citizen Revolution party – asked the international community to provide Ecuador with $3.6bn in exchange for not extracting oil from Yasuní. Correa said this would have honoured the Indigenous precept of sumak kawsay (‘good living’), which was enshrined in the new constitution the following year, as “a new form of citizen coexistence in diversity and harmony with nature”.
A UN-supervised initiative was launched following Correa’s plea, but failed to win the expected support. It was scrapped by the Ecuadorian government in 2013, having only raised $13.3m in seven years. “The world has failed us,” Correa said, announcing that Block 43-ITT was now open for drilling.
At the time, protests broke out across Ecuador. It was then that Yasunidos was born, as a non-partisan movement of mostly young people, followed later by other groups, including the influential CONAIE. Their strategy was to call for a national referendum to ask Ecuadorians whether or not they wanted to keep the oil reserves of Block 43-ITT underground for ever.
In the six months to April 2014, these groups collected 757,623 signatures (far exceeding the minimum requirement for a referendum – 5% of the electoral roll) despite, Yasunidos say, being subjected to threats, illegal surveillance and persecution by the government.
But the following month, after a swift two-week review, the National Electoral Council (CNE) invalidated more than 50% of the signatures and denied authorisation to hold a referendum.
Four years later, an independent commission found “serious indications of arbitrariness” in the CNE’s counting and review of signatures. This led Yasunidos to appeal the decision, fighting several legal battles against the governments of Correa and his successor, Lenin Moreno, as well as the current Lasso administration, for violations of political rights and obstruction of justice.
Finally, in April this year, a hearing was held before the Constitutional Court.
“In the hearing, we were able to present all the arguments explaining why the referendum was still valid,” said Santillana, who appeared before the court on behalf of Yasunidos.
The government asked the court to shelve the referendum because it would break the country's oil contracts but, according to Santillana, facts provided by the authorities themselves ended up in support of having a referendum.
“It was quite impressive to see how the state itself was giving us the arguments. The Ministry of Women and Human Rights, for example, submitted reports on water pollution. In other words, the state itself was saying the water [in Yasuní] was not safe to drink because it was highly polluted,” she said.
As evidence, Yasunidos introduced a case from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on Ecuador's alleged international responsibility for violating the rights of the Tagaeri and Taromenane peoples. In 2007, their land, which borders Block 43-ITT, was declared ‘intangible’, a status that “prohibits in perpetuity all kinds of extractive operations”.
On 9 May, the Constitutional Court ruled in favour of Yasunidos, authorised the referendum and reprimanded the authorities for “a set of state actions that obstructed the full exercise of the rights of participation of the applicants”.
Santillana told openDemocracy: “The Yasuní referendum is the first national and binding one, but for years the Ecuadorian people have been voting against extractivism. The question here is why no government has taken this massive pronouncement seriously.”
