After a decade of fighting to save Yasuní National Park, Ecuador will end oil production in this protected area. This was decided by 58.9% of the more than 10.2 million Ecuadorians who voted in Sunday’s referendum to halt oil production in Block 43 of the ITT (which spans the Ishpingo, Tiputini and Tambococha areas). This is a historic consultation because of its importance for the environmental movement and because it is the first time that a popular initiative consultation has been held in this Latin American country. With the victory of Yes, current oil production will be suspended and no new contracts can be signed to exploit this resource.
According to the ruling of the Constitutional Court, which allowed the referendum to be held, the state has a maximum of 18 months “from the announcement of the official results” to implement “the results of the consultation”. In addition, with the Yes victory, the state will not be able to establish “new contractual relationships to continue the exploitation,” the statement said. Ramiro Ávila, a lawyer for the Yasunidos collective, explains that this means that in a year and a half “not a drop of oil can come out, let alone expand the oil block” 43-ITT.
However, Ávila counters that there are technical issues related to existing assets such as drilling, pipelines and built roads that could delay the full recovery of the area. The dismantling must be “progressive and orderly” and is carried out by the state. Ávila also points out that this is the beginning of a transition to a different development model, not based on the aggressive exploitation of natural resources, but “on conservation and recognition, so that the peoples who live in these places have self-determination and not. “Dependence on resource companies”.
“With this consultation, we have shown that the Ecuadorian people, today and ten years ago, have always been in favor of keeping the oil underground. “If there is no nature, you cannot eat, you cannot take money, eat, breathe… What Yasuní gives us is more important than this supposed progress that never comes,” Pedro Bermeo, spokesman for the Yasunidos, told EL excitedly PAÍS collective that directed the legal defense of this protected area.
Bermeo attributes this victory to the support of a hundred organizations, social movements and, in particular, indigenous peoples and nationalities. “They are the ones who have experienced the extractivism and know what mining, oil, pollution-related disease, cancer rates three times higher are… It’s those people who ran this campaign.”
a decade of struggle
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Yasuní National Park – located in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the provinces of Napo and Orellana – was declared a biosphere reserve in 1989. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), it is one of the areas with the greatest biodiversity per square meter on the planet. Spread over more than a million hectares, it is home to more than 300 species of amphibians and reptiles, almost 400 species of mammals and 600 species of birds. It is also home to indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation: the Tagaeri and Taromenane.
For a decade, saving the Yasuní was the work of a group of environmentalists: the Yasunidos. They were founded in 2013 when President Rafael Correa put an end to the campaign to keep oil underground: the Yasuní ITT initiative. A project that tried to prevent oil production in exchange for $3.6 billion in compensation from the international community. $13 million was raised, barely 0.37% of what was expected. “What we were asking for was not handouts, but shared responsibility in the fight against climate change. “The world has failed us,” Correa said on a radio and television station at the time.
Social sectors came together to collect signatures and promote a referendum so that Ecuadorians can decide whether or not to exploit this area. In April 2014, more than 757,623 signatures were collected, but the then National Electoral Council (CNE) authorities responsible for verifying the authenticity of the signatures canceled half of them. And the query was blocked. And in 2016, the state-owned company Petroecuador started oil production from the Tiputini and Tambococha fields.
In 2018, the new CNE authorities reviewed the process and ensured that the required signatures were provided. Two years later, the electoral body issued a certificate of legitimacy required to conduct the consultation. And this May, the Constitutional Court ruled in favor of a referendum, agreeing to the proposed question, which read, “Do you agree that the Ecuadorian government should keep the ITT oil reserves, known as Block 43, underground indefinitely?” “
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