Indigenous people say no to oil co.

• Author: Pfeiffer, Bryan
• Position: Ecuador - Occidental Petroleum Corp. - Brief Article

San Pablo, Ecuador

From their small settlements in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Secoya traveled by foot, dugout canoe, or horseback to a hot schoolhouse on the Aguarico River. They were gathering for an unusual community meeting about "the company"--Occidental Petroleum Corp., based in Los Angeles--which plans to pump barrels of crude oil from the Secoyas' ancestral homeland.

When the meeting was over, the Secoya, an indigenous people who number no more than 400 in Ecuador, had voted 87 to 3 to annul a one-year contract allowing Occidental to explore for oil in Secoya territory.

"Petroleum is a swordsman and a hatchet of rock that kills all the living beings in nature and the humans who live in nature," said Celestino Piaguaje, a Secoya, to more than 100 people at the March meeting.

"The annulment was... a very powerful step," says Jim Oldham of the Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies, a non-governmental organization based in Amherst, Massachusetts, that is working with the Secoya. "But the Secoya are still the weaker of the two parties, and they're still faced with some very, very difficult choices out of a fairly limited set of options."

Under Ecuadorean law, the Secoya and other indigenous groups own title to their land. But the government holds rights to everything below the surface. The Secoya have little say over the oil drilling.

In 1997, a group of Secoya leaders signed an agreement with the company allowing oil exploration in a 100,000-acre territory. That territory is co-owned by the Secoya and the Siona, another indigenous group that refused to negotiate. The Secoya leaders signed without the benefit of legal or technical advice and without the authorization of the entire community. They say they believed Occidental's promises of jobs, school supplies, building materials, and other goods. They also feared the loss of their land if they did not sign.

For the right to dig for oil, Occidental, which had sales and operating revenue of $8 billion last year, paid $40,000 per meter of seismic lines and gave the Secoya zinc roofing, cooking pots, nails, barbed wire, and cheap outboard motors.

Before the vote to annul...