Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

In December 2002, oil company representatives accused an indigenous community of taking a team of its workers hostage; they suggested that the warriors involved were members of a terrorist group, with implications of possible ties to al-Qaeda. It was an issue made especially complicated because the oil company had not received government permission to begin drilling. However, the company claimed its workers had the right to perform preliminary, non-drilling investigations—a claim vehemently disputed by the indigenous groups a few days later, when they shared their side of the story.

The oil workers, tribal representatives insisted, had trespassed on lands where they were not allowed; the warriors had carried no weapons, nor had they threatened the oil workers with violence of any sort. In fact, they had escorted the workers to their village, where they offered them food and chicha, a local beer. While their visitors feasted, the warriors persuaded the workers’ guides to paddle away. However, the tribe claimed, the workers were never held against their will; they were free to go wherever they pleased.³

Driving down that road, I remembered what the Shuars had told me in 1990 when, after selling IPS, I returned to offer to help them save their forests. “The world is as you dream it,” they had said, and then pointed out that we in the North had dreamed of huge industries, lots of cars, and gigantic skyscrapers. Now we had discovered that our vision had in fact been a nightmare that would ultimately destroy us all.

“Change that dream,” the Shuars had advised me. Yet here it was, more than a decade later, and despite the work of many people and nonprofit organizations, including the ones I had worked with, the nightmare had reached new and horrifying proportions.

When my Outback finally pulled into the jungle town of Shell, I was hustled off to a meeting. The men and women who attended represented many tribes: Kichwa, Shuar, Achuar, Shiwiar, and Zaparo. Some had walked for days through the jungle, others had flown in on small planes, funded by nonprofits. A few wore their traditional kilts, face paint, and feathered headbands, though most attempted to emulate the townspeople, wearing slacks, T-shirts, and shoes.

Representatives from the community accused of taking hostages spoke first. They told us that shortly after the workers returned to the oil company, over a hundred Ecuadorian soldiers arrived in their small community. They reminded us that this was at the beginning of a special season in the rain forests, the fruiting of the chonta. A tree sacred to indigenous cultures, its fruit comes but once a year and signals the start of the mating season for many of the region’s birds, including rare and endangered species. As they flock to it, the birds are extremely vulnerable. The tribes enforce strict policies forbidding the hunting of these birds during chonta season.

“The timing of the soldiers couldn’t have been worse,” a woman explained. I felt her pain and that of her companions as they told their tragic stories about how the soldiers ignored the prohibitions. They shot down the birds for sport and for food. In addition, they raided family gardens, banana groves, and manioc fields, often irreparably destroying the sparse topsoil. They used explosives in the rivers for fishing, and they ate family pets. They confiscated the local hunters’ guns and blowguns, dug improper latrines, polluted the rivers with fuel oil and solvents, sexually molested women, and neglected to properly dispose of garbage, which attracted insects and vermin.

“We had two choices,” a man said. “We could fight, or we could swallow our pride and do our best to repair the damage. We decided it was not yet the time to fight.” He described how they had attempted to compensate for the military’s abuses by encouraging their own people to go without food. He called it a fast, but in fact it sounded closer to voluntary starvation. Old people and children became malnourished and grew sick.

They spoke about threats and bribes. “My son,” a woman said, “speaks English as well as Spanish and several indigenous dialects. He worked as a guide and translator for an ecotourist company. They paid him a decent salary. The oil company offered him ten times as much. What could he do? Now he writes letters denouncing his old company and all the others who come to help us, and in his letters calls the oil companies our friends.” She shook her body, like a dog shaking off water. “He is no longer one of us. My son…”

An elderly man wearing the traditional toucan-feather headdress of a shaman stood up. “You know about those three we elected to represent us against the oil companies, who died in that plane crash? Well, I’m not going to stand here and tell you what so many say, that the oil companies caused the crash. But I can tell you that those three deaths dug a big hole in our organization. The oil companies lost no time filling that hole with their people.”