After thirty years of development and exploitation, oil remains the most important component of Ecuador’s economy, and its most controversial environmental issue. The widespread penetration of roads into the jungle has made vast tracts of formerly inaccessible areas open to human colonization and destruction. As significant, frequent oil spills from the pipelines carrying oil across Ecuador, to the refineries along the coast, and the widespread contamination from oil waste products and drilling sites, have created ecological hazards of massive proportions. Large-scale oil exploitation began in Ecuador with Texaco in the Amazon Basin—“el Oriente” or Ecuador east of the Andes—with Texaco in the 1970s. Since then, more oil has contaminated the Amazon Basin Ecuador than two Exxon Valdez spills—over 20 million gallons of oil.

Poverty rates have more than tripled in the country. Cancer rates have grown steadily in the region among local people. According to Miguel San Sebastian, a public health expert who has studied cancer rates in the Amazon for 13 years, “Oil exploitation in the Amazon Basin is a public health emergency.” Indigenous women, for example, suffer 2.5 times the number of miscarriages in their river communities. The incidence of cancer is some 2.56 times higher in the oil zones of the Amazon compared to other areas. In some areas, the concentration of hydrocarbons is 300 times over the limit for potable water. Yet the indigenous and colonist communities have always depended on, virtually lived in, the rivers.

The heart of our Student-Faculty Research Project is a journey by canoe through oil country in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador. With Luis Francisco Yanza, the Legal Coordinator for “Frente para la Defensa de la Amazonian,” we will travel from Lago Agrio, down the Río Aguarico, through several indigenous communities in Ecuador’s oil country. Lago Agrio (a city in northern Amazon Basin of Ecuador) is the epicenter of oil exploitation in Ecuador. Along the Río Aguarico, we will pass through several indigenous communities—Siona, Secoya, and Quichua. We will also travel to Shushufundi and Coca, boom towns in the oil frontier. We will rent a car and travel down the Vía Auca, through the expanding “colono” or colonist communities that have migrated into the area along the roads in the jungle. The Vía Auca leads through oil pits deep into Haorani territory. Auca is an older name for Haorani, still one of the most traditional of indigenous peoples in the Amazon.

In this journey, we will see oil wells, waste pits, and pipelines. We will study the consequences of oil development to the environment and interview local people on health issues as a result of working in fields and living areas contaminated by oil. We will also conduct several interviews in Quito.

Charles Bergman, Professor of English, has been living in Ecuador as a Fulbright Senior Scholar during Fall Semester 2006. He has numerous contacts in the environmental community in Ecuador. He visited the site of a major oil spill near Aguarico in August 2006, documenting its environmental and public health consequences. He also traveled in Haorani territory, seeing oil wells and pipelines and areas scheduled for new oil exploration—and talking extensively with the people of the areas.

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