Oil-rich region of Amazon off limits

Oil-rich region of Amazon off limits





    
January 2007  - To protect indigenous 
groups who voluntarily isolate themselves from the modern 
world, the Ecuadorian government has declared a two million 
acre zone in an oil-rich region of the Amazon off limits to 
oil development and logging. 
The Presidential Decree signed last week by outgoing President 
Alfredo Palacio is intended to protect the core territory of 
the last two groups of indigenous peoples in Ecuador known to 
live in isolation. 
Both the Tagaeri and Taromenane are renowned for their giant 
spears and regarded as among the fiercest tribes on Earth. 
There is a bloody history of encounters between these two 
groups and invading oil company workers, loggers, and 
colonists. 
A member of the seldom seen, voluntarily isolated Tagaeri 
tribe (Photo by Milagros Aguirre courtesy Amazonia)
The Presidential Decree defines the boundaries of the 
so-called Intangible Zone, an area larger than the state of 
Delaware. 
Located in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Intangible 
Zone overlaps the southern part of Yasuni National Park, which 
despite its park status is open to oil development. 
The Yasuni National Park region is widely recognized by 
scientists as one of the most biodiverse on Earth. 
President Palacio signed the long-awaited Presidential Decree 
less than two weeks before President-elect Rafael Correa comes 
to power. The Ecuadorian Environment Minister Anita Alban, who 
will remain in this post in the Correa administration, and 
Energy Minister Ivan Rodriguez also both signed off on the 
Decree. 
“President Palacio’s signing of this Presidential Decree was a 
brave move on his part. Hopefully the new government will 
build upon this to create an area that will truly protect the 
Tagaeri and Taromenani people by prohibiting oil extraction in 
the buffer zone,” said Brian Keane, director of the 
international indigenous peoples rights organization Land is 
Life. 
“The signing of this Decree is a hard-fought victory in favor 
of the protection of peoples in voluntary isolation,” said 
Eduardo Pichilingue of the Ecuadorian NGO EcoCiencia, 
referring to the long, difficult process of finalizing the 
Intangible Zone. 
The Intangible Zone was initially created in 1999, but it took 
eight years to define the zone’s controversial boundaries, 
which are surrounded by untapped oil fields. 
A stretch of the Tiguino River in Yasuni National Park (Photo 
by Erich Lehenbauer courtesy Ecuador-Travel.Net) 
In addition to prohibiting the extraction of oil within the 
Intangible Zone, the Presidential Decree establishes a 10 
kilometer surrounding buffer zone where the construction of 
oil access roads is prohibited, but oil extraction is 
permitted. 
No logging is allowed within the Intangible Zone. Illegal 
logging in the region has escalated in recent years, leading 
to deadly confrontations between loggers and the 
Tagaeri-Taromenane. 
The government was recently warned by human rights advocates 
that illegal logging camps were operating within four 
kilometers of Taromenane houses spotted from aerial flights. 
A logger was speared to death by the Taromenane as recently as 
April 2006, and in 2005 another logger was found dead with 
over 30 spears through his body. 
“Putting such a massive area off limits to oil extraction and 
roads in a potentially oil-rich area is a major step towards 
protecting the Tagaeri-Taromenane and the extraordinary 
biodiversity of Yasuni,” said Dr. Matt Finer of Save America’s 
Forests, a conservation group based in Washington, DC. 
“The problem is that the northern part of the park is still 
getting hammered by oil projects," said Finer, an ecologist 
who worked for years in the Ecuador's Yasuni Park area. 
A pair of butterflies mate in Yasuni National Park. Scientists 
estimate that 60,000 species of insects exist in a single 
hectare of rainforest at Yasuni. (Photo by Scott Suarez 
courtesy NYU) 
The Brazilian national oil company Petrobras as well as Andes 
Petroleum, a partnership between two Chinese state oil 
companies, CNPC and Sinopec, have active concessions within 
Yasuni National Park, which lies just north of the Intangible 
Zone. 
Moreover, the largest untapped oil reserve in the country - 
over a billion barrels located in an area known as the ITT 
Block - also lie within Yasuni National Park just north of the 
Intangible Zone, Finer says. 
One of the most significant details of the Decree is that it 
includes a large oil field, known as Awant, within the 
boundaries of the Intangible Zone. This field is now 
off-limits to extraction. 
Andes Petroleum, which earlier in 2006 purchased the oil 
rights to develop the block that contains Awant, had been 
pressuring the government to alter the limits of the Zone to 
allow extraction of this field. 
International and Ecuadorian nongovernmental organizations 
successfully pressured the government to maintain Awant within 
the Zone’s boundaries, citing evidence that the Taromenane 
were living very close to this area. 
Of the five known oil fields of the southern Yasuni region, 
two were included within the Intangible Zone, although three 
remain just outside the limits of the Zone, within the buffer 
area. 
“Given the realities of Ecuador - that is, the government’s 
drive to open up the entire Amazon to oil—the Intangible Zone 
could be the only true refuge for the Tagaeri and Taromenane” 
said Fernando Ponce of the Ecuadorian watchdog group, Citizens 
for Democracy. 
“However, to fully protect the isolated peoples, Ecuador needs 
to develop economic alternatives and stop oil exploitation in 
all of Yasuni National Park and Huaorani Territory.” 
CONAIE, the powerful indigenous organization that represents 
all of Ecuador’s indigenous nationalities, opposed the 
delimitation of the Intangible Zone because it leaves the 
northern part of Yasuni National Park open to oil development. 

CONAIE President Luis Macas addresses a rally in Quito. March 
2006. (Photo courtesy CONAIE)
In a letter to President Palacio in September, CONAIE argued 
that there should be a “moratorium on oil exploitation in all 
five million acres of ancestral Huaorani Territory.” 
The Huaorani have previously called for a 10 year moratorium 
on new oil activities within their ancestral territory, which 
includes all of Yasuni National Park. 
In September, the Ecuadorian Environment Ministry, led by 
Subsecretary for Natural Capital Alfredo Carrasco, presented 
the details of the Intangible Zone in front of over 150 
Huaorani community leaders, assembled in the rainforest town 
of Coca. 
Huaorani leaders were split on the issue. Some leaders 
supported the Presidential Decree as a means to finally crack 
down on logging and stop new oil projects. Others were much 
more worried about the loss of their territory to increased 
government control. 
Subsecretary Carrasco repeatedly stressed that the Intangible 
Zone does not interfere with Huaorani activities or movements, 
and is simply a means to outlaw logging and oil extraction. 
The Tagaeri and Taromenane maintain no peaceful contact with 
the outside world and are completely dependent on the 
surrounding rainforest for survival. 
The Tagaeri are directly related to the Huaorani, the 
contacted indigenous peoples of this region, and the 
Taromenane are believed to be more distantly related. 
Although no one knows with any accuracy, it is estimated there 
are 150 to 300 Taromenane and perhaps only 20 to 30 surviving 
Tagaeri. 
In a 2004 report to the Ecuadorian government, a group of over 
40 scientists with research experience in Yasuni, dubbed the 
Scientists Concerned for Yasuni, documented that the region is 
one of the most biodiverse in the world for plants, trees, 
amphibians, birds, insects, and mammals.