Photo courtesy of Dallas Krentzel via Flickr. The Ecuadorian Amazon Rainforest.
By Lily Nemirovsky ’24
Staff Writer
August 20, 2023, may be a monumental date for Ecuador’s foreseeable future. For one, presidential and legislative elections will be held on this day, having been pushed forward from 2025 to this year.
U.S. News reported that this rescheduling is a result of President Guillermo Lasso’s dissolvement of Ecuador’s National Assembly by decree in May. According to the news outlet, Lasso dissolved the National Assembly amidst lawmakers’ attempts to impeach him, as many of the politician’s opponents perceive the fact that he allowed a deal between a state-owned oil tanker company and a private tanker company to be a case of embezzlement. The president can dissolve the National Assembly constitutionally if new elections for both the president and the assembly are conducted within 90 days, according to Reuters.
The Rio Times also reported that the potential presidential and assembly seat changes are not the only issues on the agenda for Aug. 20. A proposal to ban oil drilling in Yasuní, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in the Amazon, is also up for a vote. There have been ongoing conversations about drilling in the area since 2007, when former President Rafael Correa launched the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini initiative.
At first, President Correa asked the international community to raise $3.6 billion in exchange for leaving the oil reserves untouched. Advocates of this proposal saw it as an opportunity for the country to be compensated for supplying America and Europe with oil since 1972, fueling their economies while becoming more and more indebted itself, the New York Times reported. However, Mongabay reported that over the course of six years, less than ten percent of the goal was raised and so Block 43-ITT opened for extraction. In 2016, the state oil company Petroecuador established the first oil field, located in Tiputini, followed by one in Tambococha two years later.
Mongabay also reported that, in April 2019, the government announced its plans to start drilling in the third section of Block 43-ITT, Ishpingo, hoping to increase production by 23,732 barrels a day. The idea of drilling in Ishpingo has caused immense controversy, as it includes territory which serves as home to two indigenous communities living in voluntary isolation. Their land is dubbed the “Intangible Zone” and includes a 10-km buffer zone where oil extraction is not permitted. Mongabay also reported that many community members who voted in favor of the 2019 referendum that expanded the Intangible Zone have expressed lingering feelings of deception, as the decree also included a covert clause that made oil platform construction legal within the buffer zone.
In addition to encroaching on land constitutionally recognized as collectively owned by Indigenous people, as noted by Channel News Asia, drilling operations would disrupt and destroy some of the most bio-diverse habitats on planet Earth. According to Reuters, some 2,000 tree and bush species, 610 bird species, 204 mammal species, 121 reptile species, 150 amphibian species, and 250 fish species have been documented in the territory.
In 2021, the China National Petroleum Corp was awarded the first contract for drilling in Ishpingo, according to Reuters. However, Amazon Watch reports that just a year later, the Ecuadorian election court overturned a decision which had previously rejected the signatures on a 2014 referendum, led by the environmental collective Yasunidos, which asked, “Do you agree that the Ecuadorian government should keep the ITT oil fields, known as Block 43, indefinitely in the ground?”
Now that the signatures are considered valid, the referendum will be brought to the ballot on the national level this August. If a majority votes “yes”, production throughout the ITT block will be completely halted.
Cuenca High Life reported that severe economic repercussions would certainly be felt if drilling were halted, as 15 percent of Ecuador’s oil production would suddenly be discontinued. This would lead to an estimated annual loss of $1.2 billion, according to figures from the state oil company, La Prensa Latina reported. Based on data from the World Bank, this is around 1 percent of the country’s 2022 GDP.
Representatives from Yasunidos have argued that the revenue generated from oil exportation over the past 50 years has not been of significant benefit to locals. Provinces in the Amazon are Ecuador’s poorest, and about one-third of the country’s overall population lives below the poverty line, according to INEC, Cuenca High Life reported.
The Rio Times reported that to mitigate the revenue loss, Leonidas Iza, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, has suggested increasing income taxes on Ecuador’s wealthiest citizens, which, according to iCalculator, currently stands at 35 percent for those earning $ 115,338.01 and above.