Patricia Widener Florida Atlantic University - Oil Injustice: Resisting and Conceding a Pipeline in Ecuador

Preface

In January 2001, Jessica, an Ecuadorian oil tanker, struck a reef dumping 144,000 gallons of oil near the Galapagos Islands. At the time, the Jessica disaster warranted a sliver of newsprint. Tanker collisions, pipeline breaks, and oil spills are increasingly commonplace, but that one in particular was an opportune collision when I was a graduate student.

My masters thesis examined recovery following the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and I saw the chance to bridge from Alaska to the Galapagos a research project. I called a few contacts whom I knew to be knowledgeable on Ecuador to see how feasible such a comparison would be. At the time, one of them told me that the real oil story in Ecuador was with the persistent oil spills and leaks in the Amazon, which was flush with multinationals and debatable oil reserves. Over the course of the conversation, I also learned that a heavy crude pipeline, the Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados, or OCP, was going to be built from the edge of the Amazon rainforest, over the Andes Mountain range, to the Pacific Coast. I learned that the owners were multinationals, and that conflicts were beginning between environmental organizations, landowners, and communities along the proposed route and the Ecuadorian government and oil companies.

In 2001, with a misplaced sense of understanding, I went to Ecuador in anticipation that grassroots activism, particularly among the organized Indigenous communities, would delay, if not stop, the pipelines construction. Though I had never been an activist, and perhaps because I had never been an activist, I idealized confrontational, streetwise, ecojustice activism. Perhaps I just wanted to investigate something as tangible and newsworthy as a pipeline, in a place as conflicted as South America.

I went back six more times for short periods over nine years. In the first two years, I felt a great deal of respect and admiration for the groups struggling against the lack of transparency and accountability in the oil process. But in the next two years, I experienced more dismay and confusion at the concurrent, counterproductive infighting and slipperiness of their agendas. The more insidious impact of the oil project was its destructive impact on the communities and organizations and their scramble over each other for oil or international tokens.

At that time, I switched my attention from the activist-oriented, anti-oil environmental groups in two Andean towns, Mindo and Quito, and from the moderate, professional, conservation organizations in the capital Quito to the more somber community leaders in the oil hubs of Lago Agrio in the Amazon and Esmeraldas on the Pacific Coast. The oil-impacted communities were fighting a much longer environmental justice and community rights battle on the ground with the state as their primary target, rather than the individual oil companies.

I returned in 2007 and discovered that the crosscutting factions in Quito and Mindo had abated and both sites had been transformed over the years. Mindos activists, in particular, became national environmental leaders in large part due to their antipipeline activities, while the affected communities in the Amazon and on the coast continued to demand greater and greater degrees of autonomy from the state and in oil revenue decisions. The conservation groups in Quito had also realized an environmental fund by this time.

The oil sector and oil executives warrant no compassion or leeway for providing jobs and a minimum number of basic projects to oil-affected communities. The vast majority are an exclusionary group, operating and living in nation-clubsjust a whisker beneath the authority of the state. Given the sectors wealth, the oil industry continues to divide and conquer from campesinos to state officials, and to treat the local population and ecosystems with a nonlocal disregard, which borders on wanton carelessness.

BPs oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 encapsulates the industrys perception of the rest of us: with eleven workers killed; an ecosystem and coastal livelihoods ruined for perhaps decades; an audacity to discount the governments demand to stop using chemical dispersants; an overriding preference for deregulation, rapid production, and high profits; and a blatant indifference to contingency plans and disaster strategies even though breaks, spills, leaks, and explosions are inherent in the operating system.

In Ecuador, individuals and organizations spoke of being threatened, of having their phone lines tapped and their homes and workplaces videotaped. The police were called out, arrests were made, and international activists were deported. I believe the ubiquity of power and force that is held by the state and the oil industry, whether real or simply perceived, infiltrated my interviews with environmental and social rights organizationsand my own writing of their wordsespecially during the months of peak construction and peak confrontation.