The fate of the central Ecuadorian Amazon – one of the most beautiful and diverse regions in the world - may rest in the hands of a just a few families. The Santis, Viteris and Gualingas are three of the 10 or so extended Kichwa families that comprise the community of Sarayaku in Ecuador’s Pastaza Province. These families, with their long tradition of great shamans and political leadership, have decided to resist what has destroyed many other communities in the region: oil development.

To its residents, Sarayaku is mother earth, and includes thousands of acres of exuberant forests, rivers and wildlife that sustain their families. But to oil companies, this area is known not as “mother earth” but as Block 23, an oil concession operated granted by the Ecuadorean Government. The operator of the concession is the Argentinean company Compañia General de Combustibles (CGC), with stakes also from Burlington Resources (Houston) and more recently, Perenco, a French company. Being part of Block 23 is a grave threat to the Santis, Viteris and Gualingas.

These families are local, but their efforts have implications that are global, because the Amazon is not only the largest rainforest but also one of the earth’s hedges against global warming. Remember the name Sarayaku, because it may become the Waterloo of the oil industry in the Amazon, the battleground where someone finally said “enough, let’s leave something for our children.”

So far, Sarayaku is holding their own. But there is a price to pay for their resistance.

Sarayaku is actually a group of six closely knit communities, with a population of about 2,000, on the Bobonaza River, about 100 kilometers from the Provincial capital of Puyo. Visitors can get to Sarayaku in 40 minutes by bush plane from the town called, appropriately, Shell, just down the road from Puyo. But for the average Sarayuqueño, it takes a full days walk plus two in canoe to reach Puyo. These days, even that journey is impossible, because oil workers from neighboring communities have blocked the river with chains and threatened Sarayaku’s leaders with rifles if they try to pass.

This is part of the price of resistance to oil development in the Amazon rainforest.

Sarayaku is a friendly and prosperous community. On your average day the children are swimming under the bridge and laughing, old friends are greeted warmly, and the chicha, traditional yuca-based beer, flows freely. The roosters are huge, the fish plentiful, the farms productive. The school has solar cells for electricity and the two shops have goods. Even the women and children greet strangers in Spanish, in contrast to the shyness of many other similar communities.

But medicines are not arriving to Sarayaku. Last month, an old man, bitten by a poisonous snake and bleeding slowly to death, waited four days for an ambulance plane to take him to a hospital in Puyo. He almost died for lack of simple medicines.

This is part of the price of resistance to oil development.

Sarayaku is isolated and remote, yet cosmopolitan. At least two European women have lived here with Kichwa husbands for substantial amounts of time, a Danish film crew has visited recently, and Spanish professors are teaching college level courses in a hut near the airstrip. One son of Sarayaku is working in Washington, D.C. for the Inter-American Development Bank; another lives New York with his wife from Guayaquil. Many have relatives working in mainstream mestizo society, which accounts for some of the cash economy at work here. They have plastic ponchos, rubber boots, crackers, a few toys. The Santis, Gualingas and Viteris live in the jungle but they know about the IMF, the World Bank and the politics of development.

Sarayaquenios are proud of their community and anxious to keep their traditions. They sit around drinking chicha for long periods, walk for hours barefoot in the forest, cook in pots balanced on three logs, and fish with poison extracted from a root found in the area. Some families have just come back from two months in their “tambo,” which is something like summer camp. The tambos are in areas much more remote, with hardly any people, teeming with wildlife, where the children learn to hunt, fish and navigate, and the parents can “get away from it all.”

“Without nature, we don’t exist,” says Mario Santi, the brother of the community’s current President, Marlon. Yet Mario lives most of the time in Puyo, the better to coordinate Sarayaku’s Kapari Campaign. Kapari means a cry out, and Sarayaku has decided to cry out for help against the threat to its existence.

That campaign is a problem for CGC and Burlington. Sarayaku’s position is crystal clear: It will not give permission for oil activities to take place in their territories, and it will not negotiate this point with the companies. Their position has led the companies to declare “force majeure” in order to cancel or extend their concessions contracts.

Nevertheless, the companies are maneuvering to isolate Sarayaku and begin activities. They claim to have permission from 26 of 28 communities in Block 23. In fact, their contracts are with individuals that do not represent Sarayaku. They depict Sarayaku as a small oval of land in the Block, when it actually comprises 60% of the Block’s territory. Ecuador’s President Colonel Lucio Gutierrez has gone along with this pretense of indigneous community consultation, saying, “We have spoken with Sarayaku and are reaching an agreement.”

The President of Sarayaku, Marlon Santi, bluntly denies this. In a written response to newspaper reports in late September saying that CGC will begin operations in December, Santi said, “Sarayaku will never negotiate its territory, because it is the last living space for our people. The land is not for sale because it is our mother.”

But CGC has found allies in the upstream communities of Canelos and Pacayaku, where community members working for the oil company are closing the river and intimidating anyone from Sarayaku who tries to pass. Several hours by canoe in the other direction, oil company workers cleared primary forest in a sacred area was cleared to build helipads.

These violations, and the lack of government action to correct them, is one of the complaints in a case that Sarayaku has brought to the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights. On May 5th of this year, the Commission ordered the Government of Ecuador to take precautionary measures to ensure the safety of Sarayaku’s leaders. Sarayaku’s leaders, ordinarily suspicious of outsiders, are relying on Quito-based lawyers and allies from the U.S. to help them bring this case and to help them win their campaign for existence. While the case might bring attention to Sarayaku’s plight internationally, the Government of Ecuador remains unmoved. In fact President Gutierrez, far from taking measures for the safety of Sarayaku, declared in September that his government will “guarantee the safety of the oil companies.” Sarayaku’s leaders see this as a direct threat to use armed force against them should they try to prevent unauthorized incursions into their territory.

Sarayaquenios have seen the impact of oil in the other parts of the Amazon. They’ve seen the gross contamination caused by Texaco in the north. They’ve seen the roads through primary forest, the diseases, the whorehouses, and the cultural destruction that comes along with the deforestation and loss of animal life. They’ve seen neighboring Napo province, where Kichwa-run ecotourism is threatened by oil pipelines running through the area. After all, not many ecotourists want to see tractors, backhoes, pipelines and oil spills on their way to a remote, traditional community on the banks of an Amazon tributary.

The head of a Kichwa ecotourism project in Napo Province, Emilio Grefa, says that “when people hear the word ‘oil,’ around here, they just give up” trying to resist. Indeed, many indigenous communities are so economically desperate, or so resigned in the face of the oil undsutry’s power, that they sign agreements to allow oil exploration in exchange for trinkets and a few months of day labor. And so you have pipelines crossing areas that are supposed to attract tourists.

Start looking at the issues in Sarayaku and you quickly sees the maze of globalization, debt and development politics that define its struggle. Behind the determination of the government and oil companies to enter Sarayaku territory is the IMF, which has instructed Ecuador to open up the Amazon to oil in order to pay the interest on its foreign debt. (A debt that will never be paid, and that Sarayaku had nothing to do with incurring.)

Sarayaku is tranquil for the moment. During a visit in August, I spent time with members of the Santi and Gualinga families. On a typical day, I watched the children run off to school as the cooking fires burned in every hut. I was able to walk – always accompanied, due to fears of outsiders - through some of the lushest forests in the world. But even there we felt the shadow of the Ecuadorian government, the IMF and World Bank and three multinational oil companies.

Most of the people running these institutions have never heard of Sarayaku, but Sarayaqueños have heard of them.

The Santis, Viteris and Gualingas do not show any fear of the future. They believe they will win, through campaigns for their legally recognized rights, through building coalitions nationally and internationally.

For the sake of all of us, let’s help make sure they are right.

“…There is not a single Kichwa from Sarayaku in Argentina destroying parks, temples and monuments in the city of Buenos Aires, let alone threatening and offending its citizens; but here the representatives of this company [CGC] are breaking laws and destabilizing the tranquil life of a people that want to live in peace…” – Marlon Santi, President of the Sarayacu Association