As American oil companies continue to exploit indigenous communities in the Amazon, local filmmakers are helping to capture the transforming landscape through a native lens.

Forty years have passed since Texaco began drilling crude oil from the rainforests of the Amazon. And since 1967, numerous oil companies have followed its slick entry into the lush Amazonian jungles in pursuit of the steaming resource, building a labyrinth of roads that lay routes for trailing lumber companies and relocating communities, mainly mestizos, looking to escape the urban poverty of South America’s larger cities. This development and the exploitation of natural resources have had a profound impact upon the region’s indigenous communities, people like the Huaorani of the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Shipibo-Conibo across the border on the Peruvian side.

While the U.S. media and entertainment industry have paid some attention to this profiteering — mostly in Brazil and mostly to the politics surrounding deforestation, though oftentimes portraying the Indians as sanguineous savages — the increasing environmental degradation along the northwestern Amazon goes mostly unnoticed in the U.S. outside of academic journals and nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. In the oil business, after all, the Amazon is no Middle East — or Venezuela for that matter. In the U.S., the amount of oil drilled from the Amazon is counted in usage by days, not years. Yet the environmental destruction and ecological disruption of the rainforest are no less devastating.

In November of last year, Fort Collins-based nonprofit Village Earth was hired by Tribal Link Foundation, another NGO, to facilitate the development and production of a video with Ecuador’s indigenous Zapara communities. A team of three, David Bartecchi, Ralf Kracke-Berndorff and Raul Paz Pastrana, as well as Joseph Calderone from Tribal Link, landed in Quito, Ecuador on November 12, 2006 to begin an eleven-day trek across the Peruvian border and along an Amazonian tributary called the Rio Tigre, which eventually crosses back into Ecuador. Although they had been charged with interviewing the Zapara, particularly the Zapara-speaking elders, to undertake “the transmission of their ancestral knowledge, including preserving Zapara language, recording oral history and myths and documenting traditional medicine, to younger members of the communities,” the communities themselves relayed stories of cultural survival in the face of corporate invasion. At the same time, they were careful not to attract negative repercussions.

“There was a great deal of fear among communities along the river to speak out against the oil companies,” Bartecchi says.

What follows is a photo essay of the Village Earth team’s experience along the Amazon during the making of Los Zapara del Rio Tigre. The narrative and photos are braided with strands of research and observations from additional sources, most notably scholars Judith Kimerling, author of Amazon Crude and associate professor of law at the City University of New York and political science at Queens College, and George Stetson, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Colorado State University and a Village Earth volunteer. Kimerling is a leading scholar of environmental law and the exploitation of natural resources in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and Stetson’s analysis of Los Zapara del Rio Tigre was delivered to the Congress of the Latin American Studies Association in Montreal, Canada in September.  — V.M.




Our official guides, Rosa and Gloria, on a bus in Iquitos, Peru. The plan was to gather supplies and charter a boat up the Amazon to the mouth of the Rio Tigre, a tributary that forms from Ecuadorian rivers at the Peruvian border.

Village Earth offers some background on the region at villageearth.org: “The Amazon basin stretches from the foothills of the Andes to the shores of Brazil, making it the largest watershed in the world, and contains nearly one-fifth of all the freshwater on Earth. It is home to almost sixty percent of the world’s remaining tropical rainforests but is also experiencing the world’s highest deforestation rate. Peru is one of the world’s twelve ‘megadiversity’ countries, claiming some of the highest levels of species, especially endemic species, on the planet. However, it is estimated that nearly one species goes into extinction every hour. And these majestic rivers and forests sustain the livelihoods of the many indigenous people that call this area home.”

An orphan, who cared for himself, helped the boat driver on our five-day ride along the Rio Tigre. His nickname is Sesenta (Sixty), because he is so mature and wise for his young age. He seemed to know more about the river — the distances, the locations of the lakes, etc. — than anyone on the boat. For his guiding services, Ralf gave him a Gerber knife.

Raul, Ralf and I facilitate a storyboarding workshop in Vente y Ocho de Julio. The idea is to create a cohesive narrative of the community: what it was, what it is and what it could be. An example might look or sound like this: “In the past, our rivers were clean and full of fish. Today, because of the oil companies drilling upstream, our rivers are contaminated, and there are no more fish. However, we plan to organize with other communities along the river to make our voices heard and let the world know what these companies are doing.”

Once the groups have come together on the most important threads, the next step is creating a storyboard. Once they are satisfied with their scenes, they create a list of shots, where they will do them and who will be responsible to get it done. Finally, we give a brief explanation of how to use the cameras and then let them go out with their teams to start working on their lists.

In a report delivered during this year’s Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, CSU’s Stetson discussed the resulting video, Los Zapara del Rio Tigre: “The overarching concern seems to be the contamination of water and land and how it relates to the health of the Zapara and other indigenous communities along the Rio Tigre. However, the video also provides images of how this very contamination not only is disrupting culture but, in a sense, is creating the conditions in which old ways are unable to respond to this new crisis.”

Gloria sleeps in a hammock on the five-day boat ride between Vente y Ocho de Julio and Doce de Octubre. More than twenty others were transported on this small riverboat, which travels at an average speed of eight kilometers per hour.

In Los Zapara del Rio Tigre, Gloria shares her insights into life along the Amazon and her own vision for the future. Stetson calls Gloria “one of the best examples” of the community’s transformation, “who wants Zapara youth to prepare for the future — to succeed in the Western world — but not to forget their language and culture.”

“We must live like before, but not without clothes,” Gloria jokes on camera.

Like our first boat adventure, we ate very little. The first day we barely ate anything at all. The second day, around sunset, we stopped. Some of us started hiking the shortcut to the village Paiche Playa to get rice, while the others took the boat around the river’s oxbow. After, a family took us into their home and prepared some fish for us while Rosa cooked some of our rice. I was so hungry, I remember feeling like an animal, tearing apart the fish with my hands and spitting out the bones through the floorboards to the dogs and chickens below.

According to Village Earth, “Close to eighty percent of the nine million indigenous people in Peru (forty percent of the total population of Peru is considered indigenous) are deprived of access to the most basic resources such as clean drinking water and economic opportunity.”



 

Cesar, the Zapara shaman who helped us cross into Ecuador from Peru, stands in front of a plane that Ralf and Gloria took into Shell, Ecuador, named for the oil company. Cesar patiently waited for his payment at the airstrip.

In Los Zapara del Rio Tigre, Cesar talks about how, before the oil companies set up shop, shamans could cure whatever illnesses struck, using natural materials from the forests. But, as Stetson noted during his presentation to the Congress of Latin American Studies Association, “the Zapara shamans have been blamed for not being able to cure the sicknesses caused by the polluted river and, even more striking, that many shamans, especially in Ecuador, have been murdered.”

A Zapara man in Doce de Octubre showed us how to hunt with a blowgun and poisoned darts. Many people told us that animals have become harder and harder to find, most likely because of the increased mestizo settlements and resulting deforestation.

“The culture and well-being of indigenous peoples are intimately linked to the preservation of renewable natural resources that support local subsistence economies,” wrote author and scholar Judith Kimerling.

“Oil and gas exploration and production is an industrial activity that, among other environmental impacts, typically generates large quantities of wastes with toxic constituents; presents risks of oil and chemical spills; and destroys and degrades ecosystems that people depend on for their sustenance and well-being. These outcomes have had and continue to have tragic consequences for those who live in the region.”

A sign identifies the exterior of the office of the Zapara Nation.

According to Environment News Service, “As recently as December 2004, less than fifteen percent of the Peruvian Amazon was open to oil companies. In 2005 and 2006, the government signed contracts for the exploration of 26 new blocks, shattering previous leasing records. … The launching of the 2007 bid-round highlights the Peruvian government’s unrelenting effort to promote oil and gas exploration.”

Matt Finer, an ecologist with Save America’s Forests, tells ENS, “The new blocks mean that approximately seventy percent of the megadiverse Peruvian Amazon is now carved into oil concessions. That’s a massive chunk of primary rainforest, around 120 million acres, much greater than the size of California.”

Photo courtesy of Ralf Kracke-Berndorff

The Village Earth filmmaking team: Ralf Kracke-Berndorff (above), Raul Paz Pastrana and myself (right), traveling along the Rio Tigre. It was a surreal journey through the jungle, over muddy roads, with oil infrastructure snaking all around. Some pipes had flames shooting out of the top. We passed two military bases and several small oil company outposts. Big, new American trucks were everywhere, as if we had just landed at the Home Depot in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

The struggles and isolation faced by the communities along the Rio Tigre are worse than I had imagined.