ABSTRACT
Oil has been a mainstay of Ecuador’s national development for more than 40 years, with oil revenues constituting a major share of government revenues. As the oil frontier continues to expand in indigenous territories and in protected areas, oil has become a source of conflict. Since the early 1990s, there have been conflicts in the Amazon region over extraction, with the opening, for instance, of new fields in Canelo Kichwa, Shuar and Achuar territories (Maldonado and Almeida 2006; Varea and Ortiz 1995); over transport, in particular with the construction of the Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados (OCP, Heavy Crude Oils) pipeline (Sawyer 2004); and over waste and pollution, with the best-known case being the ongoing class action lawsuit against Texaco-Chevron (Kimerling 2006). At the same time, contradictions in current policy agendas promoting both biodiversity conservation and oil development on the same lands have deepened (Finer et al. 2008a, 2008b, 2009a; Finer and Orta-Martínez 2010), indicating that local resistance movements to hydrocarbon projects are increasingly mobilized around the basic demand that the expansion of oil development in new parts of the Amazon rain forest be halted. In Ecuador, the conflict between those who favour and those who oppose the further expansion of the oil frontier has led to a national policy debate, with political ramifications at the very core of the government.
