Stuff from paradigm wars ch 10

Stuff from paradigm wars ch 10
Chapter title: Infrastructure Development in the South American Amazon by Janet Lloyd, Atossa Soltani, and Kevin Koenig
Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization Edited by Jerry Mander and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz
Sierra Club books San Francisco 2006


The Achuar in Ecuador and Peru “are rejecting the interventions of economic globalization while demanding basic and universal rights: self-determination, land preservation, cultural integrity, and respect for the earth” shouldn’t Earth be capatilized?
The Achuar are working to always be able to exercise the rights stated in the International Labor Organization (ILO) and in international documents including documents like the UN Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. These documents include the right to “maintain their ways of life; to own, control and manage ancestral communal lands; to fully participate in decision-making; and to “free and informed consent” on projects that affect indigenous lives, culture and lands”. Although Ecuador has ratified the ILO convention, the rights expressed in the ILO convention are often not enforced and deliberately not supported in the form of governmental forces, especially security forces in the form of military forces, being used to intimidate people to give away their rights or force actions on them that violate their rights especially with transnational companies such as oil and mining companies that are seen by the non-indigenous as companies that bring needed development to the region.
The Achuar territory is one of the last isolated virgin rainforests where indigenous groups still live and the people there receive more damage from industrial activities than people who are not isolated because when activities such as oil exploration and logging occur, they bring non-indigenous people to operate some or all of that activity; these non-indigenous people can cause disease epidemics that can kill anywhere from ten to sixty percent of the population. In addition, the non-indigenous people usually continue practicing their non-indigenous culture
These sentences are from Ethnopolitics in Ecuador
In the past during some disease epidemics that kill above fifty percent of the population, the population becomes so low that the few people that make up the population after the disease epidemic occurs move to another place outside of their ancestral indigenous lands and the indigenous culture dies. For example, in Peru in the 1980s ?gr?,? Shell Oil did investigations for oil and gas reserves. The infrastructure for these investigations made it appealing for other resource explorers to come in and loggers took advantage of this. The indigenous people living there at the time, the Nahua, began dying from whooping cough, smallpox and influenza. It is estimated that fifty percent of the Nahua population died and the rest of the indigenous people fled the area.
The ?gr?E?cuadorian Achuar recognize that even if the initial toxic byproducts of the resource extraction activity are chemically treated, this does not always mean that the byproducts of the resource extraction activity have become healthy for humans and nature; they don’t want the land that they depend on to have a good chance of being contaminated like they have seen within their own country and neighboring countries. For example, in the South American Amazon the release of chemically cleaned byproducts of resource extraction have still been toxic because they have caused widespread and permanent environmental degradation and pollution. The toxic waste from resource extraction activities, recently oil and mining, can contaminate the water as well as the air. For example, after thirty years of Texaco oil operations in the northern Amazon of Ecuador?,? oil production wastes which include toxic air contamination have resulted and are still resulting in the corrosion of terrestrial and aquatic bionetworks. Another example is an oil spill that happened to the Cocamas-Cocamillas people in Peru in October ?gr?of? 2000. The oil spill contaminated Peru’s largest protected area, the Pacaya Samiria Reserve. The food and water supply that existed before the oil spill was severely reduced because of the toxic pollution that the oil spill caused; the oil company provided food but this didn’t even meet the basic needs of the Cocamas-Cocamillas people. The oil company promised to deliver medicines to the Cocamas-Cocamillas people but many of these medicines never reached the people that were most ?e?ffected by the spill. In addition to these environmental impacts from the ?company, should be company’s? that does the resource extraction there are also many negative social and other environmental impacts.
Two recent examples of this of the countless number of examples of this in South America show some of the environmental and social impacts that the ?E?cuadorian Achuar don’t want to happen in their communities. The first example is when there was the construction of the Bolivia-Cuiaba gas pipeline there were many impacts on the people in the area and the resources that the people depend on using from that area. Some of the social impacts were the workers being drunk and negatively interacting with the native people in the area as well as alcohol abuse. Some of the environmental impacts were illegal hunting, bioprospecting, logging, erosion, solid and liquid waste pollution and destruction of drinking water supplies. The second example the negative social impacts Shell Oil left behind after the investigations for oil and gas reserves in Peru in the 1980s were finished. During the investigations the workers sexually harassed and assaulted indigenous women as well as participated in child prostitution. After the Shell Oil workers left, a great amount of teenage mothers were abandoned to rear the workers’ kids (usually alone?)gr?.
In the Ecuadorian government signed a with ARCO (dream people of amazon + ). The Achuar have been expressing their outrage ever since in a variety of ways including writing to the company (dream people of amazon + paradigm wars ). In 1998 the Achuar organization FINAE wrote a letter to the general manager of ARCO Ecuador and it included this exercpt:
“[Our] decision … is to not permit the penetration of oil, mining, or logging companies in our territory… The Achuar have taken this radical decision because we have observed the environmental and social impact of twenty years of irrational oil exploitation in the north of our Amazon, and because we believe in the options for sustainable development” ( ).