In Ecuador’s Amazon, Big Oil exploits Indigenous communities in the absence of the state

This story is published in partnership with the Ecuadorian independent media outlet GK.

Sitting in a small gray motorboat, Rosa Aranda dips her fingers in the Villano River as she lists the communities she plans to visit over the coming days: Piwiri, Kamunwi and Yutzuyaku. Aranda, 45 years old with long, thick black hair, is the president of Moretecocha, a commune or Indigenous governing body formed of eight Kichwa communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Part of her work, like the visits she will undertake over the next three days on this river that flows along 100 kilometers (60 miles) in this hot, humid region, is checking that Pluspetrol is abiding by the agreements it has signed with different communities since it began operating her in 2019. An Argentinian company with headquarters in the Netherlands, Pluspetrol calls these disputed territories Block 10; for Aranda, they are her home.

To get to the village of Piwiri, you have to go via Paparawa, a port at the end of a road built between 2006 and 2012 by Agip Oil, the Italian oil company that operated here from February 2000 until 2019, when its operations were bought out by Pluspetrol. From the port, you take a peque peque, a type of boat named after the rhythmic sound of its engine, and navigate the meandering Villano River for up to four hours, depending on how much it has rained recently.

On a muggy and overcast morning in October 2024, Rosa Aranda arrives in Piwiri, a community of which she is also president, and where her siblings and other family members live. Piwiri is situated in Pastaza, one of the six provinces of the Ecuadorian Amazon. It’s also located inside Block 10, one of 77 pieces of land across Ecuador’s Amazonian and coastal regions allocated for oil exploration in the last five decades.

According to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, Ecuador has granted 16% of its land to public and private oil companies. In Latin America, it is the country with most Indigenous lands affected by extraction: almost half — 207 of 437 territories — are overlappedby oil blocks, representing a total area of 21,000 square kilometers (about 8,100 square miles).

This analysis is part of the cross-border project Every Last Drop, a reporting initiative that brings together four media outlets from Amazonian countries to investigate the impacts of the oil industry in the region.

Oil has been a constant in Ecuador for more than a century. The first well was drilled in the coastal region in 1911, but it was not until 1972 that the industry became the centerpiece of the economy. For more than 50 years, oil has remained among the country’s primary exports.

While it has been an engine for the economy, it has also had devastating impacts, the Chevron case being the most emblematic due to the scale of damage and the international litigation it provoked. Between 1964 and the early 1990s, the U.S. company, formerly Texaco, dumped more than 61 billion liters (16 billion gallons) of toxic waste in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon. But this was no isolated incident, and the problem isn’t confined to a single region: between 2012 and 2022, there were 1,584 oil spills in the country. The main cause, according to the Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition, was poor pipeline maintenance.

Ecuador currently experiences at least two spills a week.

Despite this, both of the last two governments, led by Guillermo Lasso and Daniel Noboa, made proposals to expand the oil frontier. The country’s reserves, what’s left in the more than 7,000 wells currently exploited, are limited, says Fernando Santos Alvite, an oil expert and former minister of energy and mines under the Lasso government. According to Santos, some estimates suggest only 2 billion barrels remain, enough to last 10 to 12 more years. This could be extended to 15 or 20 years if production is optimized.

In response to the depletion of existing reserves, the current government has proposed extending the oil frontier into the southeastern Amazon, specifically in the territories around Block 10. In October 2024, a team from GK traveled to the block, where exploration is going ahead despite opposition from Indigenous groups.

Block 10 encompasses an area of 2,000 km2 (772 mi2) and produces 8,100 barrels of oil a day, according to the Ministry of Energy and Mines. Each block comprises several fields, the areas containing the wells from which oil is extracted with giant machines. Block 10, a nondescript geometric shape with 20 corners and contains 33 perforated wells; of these, only 21 are active, and all are and will be operated by Pluspetrol until Dec. 31, 2033, when the service agreement expires. The company is owned by the Rey Rodríguez family, the seventh-richest in Argentina, according to Forbes, but based in the Netherlands.

Pluspetrol is the third oil company that Rosa Aranda and other leaders of the area have had to contend with. Block 10 was first tendered out by the Ecuadorian state in 1987. In 1988, the U.S. company Arco-Oriente began exploration in the Villano field. This is the stage prior to extraction, which simulates earthquakes and helps to determine the quantity and quality of the underground oil reserves.

Over 35 years, the expansion by the three oil companies, and opposition from the people who have lived there for centuries, have led to tensions, family feuds and divisions among communities. These complex relationships, in a region where access to health care, education and employment is extremely limited, have for decades been the topic of investigations by academics like Marisol Rodríguez.

Rodríguez has a master’s degree in anthropology from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) and has studied Block 10 for more than seven years. Sitting in a reading room of FLACSO’s library, she says that when Arco-Oriente first arrived in the region, its staff tried to corrupt Indigenous leaders by offering them money that was supposed to benefit the entire community. According to Rodríguez, the more reluctant leaders were offered trips to the coastal city of Guayaquil, the largest in Ecuador, or taken to the beach. Thus began, Rodríguez says, “the rupture of the communities’ social fabric from within.”

Leonardo Viteri is also familiar with these practices. He’s been the leader of various Indigenous organizations for almost four decades and participated in negotiations with the oil companies. His recollection of the arrival of Arco-Oriente at the end of the 1980s was that “it was done without any kind of consultation process, without any kind of agreement.”

To voice their discontent, in 1989, the now defunct Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza (OPIP) called a meeting with delegates from Arco-Oriente, the Rodrigo Borja government and what was then the Ecuadorian Petroleum State Corporation (CEPE, now Petroecuador). The negotiations went on for eight days and resulted in a document known as the Sarayaku Agreement, in honor of the Kichwa community that hosted the meeting. Viteri says the document listed four key points: the suspension of exploratory operations, the legalization of territories, the remediation of damages caused by exploration, and the establishment of a dialogue between the state, the company and the Kichwa people of Pastaza.

At the time, Arco-Oriente had only carried out one year of seismic exploration and perforation of exploratory wells. But soon after the company arrived, a conflict arose with the communities that became “very political” because it coincided with the beginning of the Amazon for Life campaign, promoted by local NGOs and supported internationally. The communities in Pastaza were aware of the impact of oil in the neighboring province of Napo thanks to a report that documented inadequate treatment of toxic waste, noise pollution caused by explosive detonations, and an increase in skin diseases, among other issues. They didn’t want history to be repeated.

“But when the officials left, the state failed to honor the agreement, and the company went ahead with exploration,” Viteri recalls. In 1990, to prevent the company from operating, the community organized a march to Villano, near the oil field that had been established there. According to Viteri, approximately 600 people attended the march, but when they arrived, they saw that the state had militarized the area, and they noticed that several of Villano’s leaders had been co-opted by the company and had signed agreements allowing them to continue operating. GK consulted Pluspetrol, which had absorbed Agip Oil’s operations, about these accusations, but received no response.

Antonio Vargas, with graying hair and eyebrows and dark brown eyes, is a prominent Indigenous leader and two-time president of OPIP. Sitting in a restaurant in the city of Puyo, he says that in the early 1990s OPIP incorporated the entire Kichwa population. However, after the arrival of Arco-Oriente, the communities of Santa Cecilia de Villano, Paparawa and Pitacocha separated from the organization, choosing to negotiate directly with the company in exchange for education and health care services. This, he says soberly, marked the beginning of the “oil age” for the Kichwa of Pastaza.

Almost a decade later, at the end of 1999, Arco-Oriente left the country and the following year, Agip Oil, its partner in the country, took over Block 10. The company adopted similar tactics to divide communities; for example, it signed agreements to improve access to health care with organizations like the Association for the Indigenous Development of the Amazon Region (ASODIRA).

ASODIRA was established in the early 2000s by 20 residents to create a legal entity through which to channel funds from the oil company to the communities. Ector Mayancha, one of ASODIRA’s founders, says its function was purely administrative. It dissolved in 2009 when the communities decided they wanted to negotiate with the company directly.

In the 2000s, when Agip Oil assumed operations, tensions deepened. The divisions between the associations and communities that formed OPIP, Vargas recalls, weakened the organization over the following years, to the point that it disintegrated.

Arco-Oriente and Agip Oil have been using these tactics in communities for three decades. To understand how they work, Rosa Aranda has studied them closely, with the hope that this will help the communities in negotiations with the current concession holder, Pluspetrol. In the community of Piwiri, where passersby stop to greet her, residents say they’re still waiting for Pluspetrol to transfer the funds it had promised for building new peque peques, maintaining the airstrip, and buying construction material.

Aranda says that while she might want the company to leave, the best she can do is make sure that it upholds existing agreements. She says if the company opens new wells or fields in Block 10, it must respect the principle of free, prior and informed consent guaranteed to Indigenous peoples by Ecuador’s Constitution. This means that the state must inform the communities and seek their approval before allowing extractive projects on their land; however, experts such as lawyer Verónica Potes note that this hardly ever happens.

Oil companies in the role of the state

Under a clear blue sky, the peque peque carrying Rosa Aranda stops on a bank of the Villano River where, only a few weeks earlier, amid dense green foliage, the community of Yutzuyaku was established.

The 21 people who founded it used to live in nearby Lipuno. Marcelo Cuji says they left because of a scarcity of land in the village and because his brother Ricardo, president of the community, negotiated directly with Pluspetrol and was making decisions that impacted negatively on him and his eight children.

Cuji says Pluspetrol offers the communities jobs, which it calls “line work.” These primarily consist of clearing the area around pipelines of weeds and other obstacles.

He says the president of each community chooses the men who will work in the oil fields. The company hires seven men from eight communities within the block, appointed by their respective presidents, to work a 15-day shift. When they leave, another seven men from other communities take over. For these 15 days they’re paid the equivalent of $500 to $575.

But Cuji says his children were excluded by his brother, meaning they didn’t have access to this source of income.

In a worn-out yellow T-shirt and dark trousers, Cuji takes a sip of chicha, a traditional fermented drink made from cassava, and says his brother Ricardo had also begun to distance himself, which is why they decided to leave Lipuno for good.

Over the phone, Ricardo Cuji says his brother Marcelo and his family were expelled from Lipuno for “inciting division and provoking acts of violence,” and that he informed Pluspetrol about this decision in November 2024. He says he now gets on well with his brother and hopes that he and his family will come to an agreement with the oil company.

Gabriel Cuji, president of the newly founded Yutzuyaku, says they plan to approach Pluspetrol to negotiate a new agreement and secure work for the community.

As they share chicha, Aranda listens to Gabriel and Marcelo and says that, as president of Moretecocha, she will begin the process of integrating Yutzuyaku into the commune, which currently consists of eight communities, seven of which have signed an agreement with Pluspetrol.

The division of families and communities due to conflicts involving oil companies in Block 10, as in the case of the Cuji family, is the focus of a study by academic Guillaume Fontaine. Fontaine notes that there had been reports of irregularities in the consultation process with the communities of Villano Norte, in Block 10, during the negotiation of a community support agreement, and that this had led to conflicts between communities.

Alexandra Almeida, who has also worked with the communities of Block 10 alongside the NGO Acción Ecológica, says that in the Amazon, successive governments have failed to meet the basic needs of Indigenous peoples, including providing health care, education, housing and sanitation, and that the oil companies are stepping in where the state is absent.

The role adopted by the oil companies in education is apparent in the high school of the remote community of Piwiri. Dilapidated wooden walls with peeling paint hold classrooms where students sit at rusty yellow desks, all bearing the Agip Oil logo. The green-and-blue backpacks hanging on the backs of chairs, the pens and notebooks the students use, and even their snacks, are provided by Pluspetrol. The students’ uniforms are paid for by their parents.

GK asked the Ministry of Education for information about the lack of access to education in these communities, but didn’t receive any response to our request for an interview.

The Ministry of Education pays the salary of the school’s only teacher. Leonidas Vargas, a well-built member of the Achuar people who wears his hair in a long plait, teaches 16 students between the ages of 13 and 20. He has been in Piwiri for a year and a half and says he teaches maths, Spanish, literature, natural sciences, social studies and English. To accommodate all students, on Mondays and Wednesdays he teaches the lower three years, on Tuesdays and Thursdays the upper years, and on Fridays they do physical education, art and revision together.

Vargas, who is from Copataza, an Achuar community, says the work isn’t easy: “The young ones coming out of elementary school struggle with the transition and I have students who are 19, 20 years old who can’t read or count.”

Sitting on a bench in the Piwiri community center, Vargas says parents must pay a monthly fee of $5. When they can’t pay, the school closes. Vargas says this happened in Piwiri in 2024.

The situation is similar in Kamunwi, a community 15 minutes by boat from Piwiri. Irma Andy is the only teacher there. “It’s impossible,” she complains. She says her students have no learning materials, and when she travels home to Arajuno, a city in the north of the province of Pastaza, she prints them out herself. In Kamunwi, the Ministry of Education provides textbooks, but these alone aren’t enough.

As the only teacher, Andy divides the room into three groups. The desks are arranged to face three different walls, each with their own blackboard. She teaches aesthetic culture, physical education, maths, Spanish and literature, natural sciences, social studies, Kichwa and English.

Andy and other residents of Kamunwi receive Aranda in the community center, a spacious, open-air structure with high ceilings and a palm-thatch roof. As they gather around a wooden table, Aranda greets people, alternates between Kichwa and Spanish, drinks the chicha offered to her, and asks whether they’ve had any encounters with the oil company.

The president of the community, Camilo Tapui, who has short black hair and is wearing a long-sleeved shirt, tells Aranda that they have yet to receive any of the $10,000 promised by Pluspetrol to build a peque peque and buy clothes and building materials.

In Kamunwi, the children walking past the community center also carry blue-and-green backpacks sporting the Pluspetrol logo. In communities with a single toilet, rotting school furniture, a subsistence economy and scarce jobs, a new backpack is an object that hardly goes unnoticed.

Health care in the hands of oil companies

Backpacks and school supplies are not the only thing Pluspetrol supplies to the residents of Block 10. In another community that Aranda visits there’s a health worker, who speaks on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The woman doesn’t work directly for Pluspetrol but for Hanaska, a subcontractor for the oil company.

The health worker has basic knowledge of nursing, but her main task is visiting households to talk to them about the prevention of chronic child malnutrition, alcoholism and suicide. She also advises residents on hygiene and water quality to prevent the spread of diseases. Hanaska sends her printouts of the presentations she must give to the communities.

The health worker says she advises mothers to remind their children to wash their hands before eating and to bathe. The children do this with untreated water, collected from a stream and distributed via hosepipes. They can also bathe in the river, but mothers say that in recent years they’ve noticed the children develop blisters, which turn into itchy white patches, and they believe this is due to pollution from the oil fields. There aren’t enough studies to confirm or deny this contamination, and the marks on the children’s skin could have many possible causes, such as a fungal infection resulting from the hot, humid climate.

The health worker tends to people almost every day in her clinic, a concrete structure equipped with a stretcher, an aging desk and a shelf with an old oxygen mask. Neither she nor any of the 19 other health workers assigned to the communities of Block 10 are authorized by the Ministry of Health to prescribe medication. She says her supplies were confiscated three years ago.

Since she can only make recommendations and not prescribe medication, she spends most of her time filling out forms, all of which bear the Pluspetrol logo. If there’s an emergency, she calls Hanaska to request that the patient be taken to the nearest health center, at least an hour away by boat. The patient pays for transportation, and if they can’t be treated at the health center, they must go to the public hospital in Puyo, which is two to three hours away by car.

“That’s why I tell them, ‘You have to take good care of yourself because we’re so remote,’” the health worker says. She’s paid a monthly salary that’s the equivalent of $470, the minimum wage in Ecuador in 2025.

Pluspetrol says that each year the company employs 552 individuals from the communities of Block 10, who work on rotation. Alongside Hanaska, another one of the companies contracted by Pluspetrol is the environmental consultancy Asiyá, which also employs people from local communities. According to one of its employees, who asked to remain anonymous, the contracts last three years and applicants must undergo a selection process.

Part of his work, he says, involves training communities on topics such as waste management and wildlife conservation. Besides producing reports on their visits and presentations, he says they attend meetings with Pluspetrol every two weeks, where they’re asked for feedback about the communities’ perceptions of the company.

GK asked the Ministry of Health for information about the lack of access in these communities, but didn’t receive a response.

In addition to medium-sized companies, Pluspetrol also hires community associations. For example, it contracted Asovillano for the maintenance and clearing of the road between Villano and Pandanuque. Doris Gualinga, a round-faced woman with long hair and a broad smile, is the former president of Asovillano. She says that 95% of the association’s members are women and that they were contracted to maintain a section of the road from 2022 to July 2025.

The 46 km (29 mi) of road they service crosses through 28 communities. Every day, they clear away undergrowth with machetes. Like the “line work” carried out by the men in the oil field, the women contracted by Asovillano belong to 26 communities that signed an agreement with Pluspetrol in 2021, and the president of each community decides which of them will work on rotation.

An analysis carried out for the Every Last Drop project, using data from the University of Maryland’s Global Forest Watch, reveals that there has been deforestation around the roads leading to oil wells in Block 10. This was especially significant in 2022, when 563 km2 (217 mi2 miles) of forest was cleared within the block. Between 2001 and 2023, deforestation in the block amounted to 3,622 km2 (1,398 mi2).

Aranda says she knows Gualinga, but when she asked to meet with her to talk about Asovillano’s relationship with the oil company, Gualinga refused. Gualinga denies refusing to speak with Aranda, saying there are tensions in the commune she presides over, and that Asovillano “cannot interfere with the communities.”

While Aranda says she isn’t interested in working for the larger companies and community associations affiliated with Pluspetrol, she’s critical of the unequal distribution of opportunities, citing the example of the Cuji brothers who left Lipuno to found Yutzuyaku when their uncle wouldn’t give them positions.

In 2023, Aranda obtained a document from November 2022, signed by a Pluspetrol employee, regarding an agreement between the oil company and the prefecture of Pastaza. In it, her name appears on a list of professionals barred from the selection process.

Aranda says she believes this is in retaliation to her criticism of the oil industry; she’s seen the same tactic employed in the past. Her family had already faced reprisals on the part of an oil company. In 2018, a group of Amazonian women held a protest in Quito to demand prior consultation and an end to oil exploration in their territories. At the time, Agip Oil was still operating Block 10.

The group that went to Quito included Salomé Aranda, Rosa’s sister, and Noemí Andy, the wife of her brother, Armando Aranda.

Lying in a hammock in his wooden house in Piwiri, Armando says that in 2018 he was a health worker for the company Entris, a subcontractor for Agip Oil. After the march in Quito, the oil company pressured him to resign due to his sister and wife’s participation in the protest, but he refused. “I was a good worker, so they had no grounds to dismiss me, and I didn’t want to resign either,” Armando says. He says the women had the right to protest and he “didn’t get involved.”

Agip Oil, Armando says, carried out a “voluntary liquidation” to terminate the contracts of all the health workers in Block 10. Many were rehired days later, but he wasn’t. Agip Oil’s operations were acquired by Pluspetrol in 2019. Pluspetrol didn’t respond to our request for a response to this allegation.

This is why now, when the communities sign agreements with the oil companies, in this case Pluspetrol, they always include clauses on employment protection.

Pluspetrol says it currently has “a general contract that contemplates 17 specific agreements” with the 28 communities affected by the Villano oil field.

One of the agreements to which we had access is with the Indigenous Huito people. It stipulates that at least 70% of the workforce must be local.

Another of these agreements is from July 2021 with the Moretecocha commune, of which Rosa Aranda is president. The first clause is titled “Work and employment” and guarantees the community roles in health care, maintenance and cleaning of community spaces, among other things.

“They have provided jobs in certain areas, such as environmental outreach and health care, but not in others, due to a territorial dispute with the community of Villano, who took our places saying that the pipeline doesn’t pass through our land,” Aranda says. Without continuous oversight, she says, the company will not follow through on its commitments, and those who are contracted don’t always tell her what’s going on. “They need to be better informed.”

Regarding the alleged direct negotiations between Pluspetrol and leaders who support exploration, which have generated conflicts between communities, the company said in a written communication that it respects the communities’ “organizational structure” and recognizes their “right to autonomy in choosing leaders to represent them in spaces of dialogue.” It also said its hiring process was “open and transparent, providing opportunities to all residents of communities impacted by the Villano field.”

Exploration of new fields is pending

While the Indigenous organization OPIP was disbanded in 2008, in 2022, the Coordinating Council of the Kichwa People of Pastaza voted to change its name to Pakkiru.

Today, Pakkiru represents 16 Kichwa communes, villages and associations in Pastaza. Its president, Luis Canelos, has tattoos on his hands and face, and wears a headdress of red, turquoise, yellow and green feathers. He says the organization hopes to unite the communities in opposition to the oil industry.

The 37-year-old leader acknowledges that not all communities in the area have joined the organization, because some of them are in favor of extraction. The problem, he says, is that when people ask what you can offer them in exchange for resistance, “we don’t have the capacity to provide for their unmet needs,” whereas the oil companies do.

** [TIMELINE COMPANIES AND ORGANIZATIONS] **

Pakkiru is not the only organization in Pastaza dealing with internal divisions. For decades, the Association of Indigenous Communities of Arajuno (ACIA) unanimously rejected the presence of oil companies on its land, also within Block 10. In 2023, ACIA was superseded by AKAT and now represents 27 communities in the area around the Oglán oil field, which is currently inactive.

Diana Tanguila is the former president of AKAT and the only female leader in the association’s history. While she occupied this position, between 2021 and 2023, she faced pressure to sign an agreement with Pluspetrol, but she refused.

When she left AKAT in 2023, the new leader, Patricio Vargas, signed an agreement with the company. Tanguila says most AKAT members believe that reopening the field is the best option for the communities. She says, with hesitation, that if another consultation takes place, the project will likely be approved. We contacted Vargas at least 10 times for this report but he wouldn’t grant us an interview.

Oglán isn’t the only field that could be reopened in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the coming years. Given the interest of the Noboa administration in launching a new round of oil licensing, the industry could expand into the southeast Amazon, as María Cristina Mogollón, then deputy minister of energy and mines, announced at the Annual Oil and Gas Meeting, held in Quito on Oct. 2, 2024.

Specifically, Pluspetrol plans to activate the Siccha field, also in Block 10. The project’s environmental impact assessment and environmental management plan indicate severe impacts in the construction phase, including landscape alteration, soil compaction, elevated noise levels and increased turbidity in nearby waterways. It also anticipates moderate impacts such as diminished air quality and increased erosion.

The same study also identified potential social impacts, including conflicts of interest between members of different communities. The description of the impact mentions “conflict and fragmentation within the community’s organizational structure and social organizations due to difference in opinions concerning activities carried out in the project’s area of influence.”

Leonardo Viteri, the longtime Indigenous leader, says that between 1967, when Texaco drilled the first commercial well in the northern Amazon, and today, companies haven’t promoted projects that generate work or help communities become self-sufficient. Their strategies have instead focused on creating dependence, offering short-term benefits.

When the oil runs out, Viteri says, “the people will have no alternative.” The risk, he warns, is that extraction will continue to destroy the forest, which will make practices such as hunting and fishing disappear, and “the communities will be forced into poverty.”

Rosa Aranda says she refuses to let this happen. One day after returning from her visit to the three communities on the banks of the Villano River, she’s sitting in the room of an old house she uses as an office, in the small jungle city of Shell. Wearing white boots, a striped shirt and trousers, Aranda says she needs to check how much money the oil company owes Kamunwi, see how she can include the newly established community of Yutzuyaku in the agreement and attend to a seemingly never-ending to-do list.

This story was first published here on April 23, 2025, as part of the special Every Last Drop, a collaboration between Infoamazonía, GK, Ojo Público and Rutas del Conflicto. It was produced with the support of the Global Commons Alliance, a project sponsored by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.