Oil Injustice: Resisting and Conceding a Pipeline in Ecuador

389 Pages·2011·2.021 MB·English

by  Patricia Widener

Oil Injustice
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Another World Is Necessary:
Human Rights, Environmental Justice, and Popular Democracy
Series Editor: Kenneth Gould
A better world is necessary, but also possible. A point of departure is that
neoliberalism is imperiling humans, their societies, and the environments
upon which they depend. Yet there are powerful countervailing forces.
They include human rights and environmental movements, as well as
movements for fair trade, a world parliament, redistribution of land and
resources, alternative energy sources, sustainability, and many others. An-
other development has been the proliferation of forms of popular democ-
racy, including social forums, e-governance, direct democracy, and worker
self-management.
Books in this series will go beyond critique to analyze and propose alterna-
tives, particularly focusing on either human rights, environmental justice,
collective goods, or popular democracy.
Oil Injustice
Patricia Widener
Global Obligations for the Right to Food
Edited by George Kent
Latin America after the Neoliberal Debacle
Ximena de la Barra and Richard A. Dello Buono
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Oil Injustice
Resisting and Conceding a
Pipeline in Ecuador
Patricia Widener
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham (cid:129) Boulder (cid:129) New York (cid:129) Toronto (cid:129) Plymouth, UK
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Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2011 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
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systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who
may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Widener, Patricia, 1966–
Oil injustice : resisting and conceding a pipeline in Ecuador / Patricia Widener.
p. cm. — (Another world is necessary: human rights, environmental justice, and
popular democracy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-0861-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-0863-6
(electronic)
1. Petroleum pipelines—Ecuador—Case studies. 2. Environmental policy—
Ecuador—Citizen participation—Case studies. I. Title.
HD9580.E2.W532 2011
388.5'509866—dc22 2011013489
™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Preface vii
1 Oil Disasters and Conflicts 1
2 Lago Agrio: Community-Driven Oil Justice 38
3 Quito’s NGOs: Realizing an Environmental Fund 70
4 Mindo: Oil and Tourism May Mix 125
5 Esmeraldas: Finding Dignity 178
6 Transnational Responses: Evidence for a Southern-Led
Global Democracy 205
7 Post-OCP: Governing and Contesting Correa and China in
the Amazon 254
Appendix: Data Collection and Researcher Participation 283
Notes 297
References 351
Index 371
About the Author 375
v
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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 di-
saster warranted a sliver of newsprint. Tanker collisions, pipeline breaks, and
oil spills are increasingly commonplace, but that one in particular was an op-
portune collision when I was a graduate student.
My master’s 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 debat-
able 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 In-
digenous communities, would delay, if not stop, the pipeline’s 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 pipe-
line, 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 strug-
gling against the lack of transparency and accountability in the oil process.
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viii Preface
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 envi-
ronmental groups in two Andean towns, Mindo and Quito, and from the mod-
erate, 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.
Mindo’s activists, in particular, became national environmental leaders in
large part due to their antipipeline activities, while the affected commu-
nities 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 com-
munities. The vast majority are an exclusionary group, operating and living in
nation-clubs—just a whisker beneath the authority of the state. Given the sec-
tor’s wealth, the oil industry continues to “divide and conquer” from campesi-
nos to state officials, and to treat the local population and ecosystems with a
nonlocal disregard, which borders on wanton carelessness.
BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 encapsulates the industry’s per-
ception of the rest of us: with eleven workers killed; an ecosystem and coastal
livelihoods ruined for perhaps decades; an audacity to discount the govern-
ment’s 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 organizations—and my own writing
of their words—especially during the months of peak construction and peak
confrontation.
But by and large, there were no individual villains or heroes in this conflict.
There were grassroots leaders, environmentalists, and oil representatives with
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Preface ix
whom I would want to share a cup of Ecuadorian coffee—and oil executives,
conservationists, and local activists with whom I would not. They would
probably say the same about me. The rogue in this story is the global political
economy that feeds upon the world’s natural resources and the world’s poor.
This structure was never threatened by any campaign or mobilization effort
during my research, and it is still not being questioned after the BP disaster.
I recall the experience as a time of observing tremendous transnational col-
laboration and courageous community-level protests, and absurd and defeat-
ing squabbles over scraps. Although layers of domestic motives were not easily
revealed and were often ignored by international organizations working on
global campaigns, transnational networks attempted to challenge the status
quo of oil dominance in Ecuador and the global indifference of financiers and
multinationals on impacted ecosystems and affected communities. The tally
was two steps forward, one step back—resembling a racehorse at the starting
gate, restrained by an eager, but inexperienced, jockey and held at a venue
where the principal outcome was already predetermined. Nevertheless, I saw
hope over and over again among the Ecuadorian activists and organizations.
That’s why they stood together, initially, and said, “Basta, enough is enough,
I want to be heard now.” But it is the wife of one activist whom I remember
more than the arrested tree sitters, beaten-up landowners, or well-known in-
ternational activists, such as Bianca Jagger and Julia Hill, who flew to Ecuador
to support two different anti-oil campaigns. In 2002, at the peak of activism
when people were being arrested and community activists were receiving
threatening phone calls, this woman was perpetually on the verge of tears
when people talked about the construction of the pipeline and “the fight.”
Though I never interviewed her, I read on her face: “I married my husband,
not this activist.” And once when I was interviewing her husband, she cor-
rected him when he chose to use the word pelear, which, and I am oversimpli-
fying, means to fight, to scuffle, or to brawl. She told him to use luchar, which
means to fight for something or with someone about something. He corrected
himself.
The day when I asked if she was going to participate in the next day’s “ac-
tion” against OCP, she said, “No”—directly, and clearly. Her husband said,
“She’s not sure.” She responded to him: “Our children?” He said, “Rosa can
watch them.” I empathized with her. At this action, some of the activists had
no children, many others were just beyond childhood themselves, and I was
a nonlocal researcher visiting for a few months each year. She just looked at
me. I believe she wanted to say: “You don’t understand. It’s not okay now. You
should leave.” But she was too polite.
I dedicate much of my work to community residents who never wanted to
be politically active but who were left little choice—by the actions and inac-
tions of their government, by oil companies whether they are private or state
owned, by oil demand in the United States, by global capitalism that treats
people as disposable faceless liabilities and that treats the natural environment
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