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Nine:
Sarayacu, Ecuador
“Once, there were many sabios here. They were very pure. They were able to transform into snakes and tigers. They knew everything—sickness, healing, they understood it all.” Atanacio Sabino Gualinga Cuji, a shaman himself, is giving me a crash course on three and a half centuries of Sarayacu history. His gaze is piercing, unbending from eyes blued by cataracts, eyebrows riotous as the jungle floor. “Then the Christians came to convert us. Then the companies came to drill for oil.” He shakes his head. “In ’35 Shell came and put a pipeline in. Before, there were lots of fish, turtles, alligators. After, nothing was left. Everything died from oil.”
Atanacio is tiny, earnest, serene. His hair is oiled and neatly combed, his goatee white-filamented, his checkered shirt clean and pressed. We are sitting in his yard on two well-worn stump-stools, beneath the cool relief of palm-thatch. He looks beyond me to where Mario, my host here, sits with his wife, chatting in tempered tones, sipping homemade chicha. “I saw it. Everything died.” He considers the sweat-polished wood of his walking stick, propped scepterlike beside him. “There is money. But here there are marvels. Here we have pure air. Here women can walk freely.” He giggles, now a mischievous six-year-old dropping a punch line. “We only have to watch out for the snakes.” Then he’s abruptly somber again, with all the burden of his seventy-odd years. “The oil corporations—they want to kill everything here. They don’t understand. They live apart from real knowledge. We wouldn’t want that kind of knowledge.” Atanacio pauses as a tame toucan—the family pet—dashes boldly at us, formidable beak parted in an ear-splitting screech. He tosses it a nut. “We want to maintain our culture and identity. My role is to maintain the consciousness.” He looks past me, past the palm fronds, into the legendary mar verde of Amazonia. Quietly, now: “The earth is our mother and father. We can’t sell our mother and father.”
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I see 2003 as a year of endless transition, always setting out, never quite reaching my destination. In July, I quit my job at Tikkun, exhausted and emotionally drained. I take some time off, spending a week backpacking solo in the Sierras, a week on a silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock, and a week working with one of my mentors, Sharif Abdullah, on a project exploring issues of race and class in the Portland Department of Transportation. We interview sewage workers, engineers, and upper management on topics ranging from homophobia to gun control to abortion to the environment. I then take a half-time job with a tiny local nonprofit running a satyagraha campaign. Our target is Clear Channel communications, a corporate (and politically conservative) media behemoth. Our small staff begins exploring models for bringing spiritually grounded principles of interconnection and nonviolence to bear upon our own organizing, and upon a corporate target. The work is good and meaningful, but I still feel somehow at sea.
Since my time in Phoolchatty, the question of meditation versus action has wedged itself, burrlike, into my brain. I have maintained a daily meditation practice, complemented by attending teachings and retreats at Spirit Rock and self-retreating on solo backpacking trips. And while it is my nature to hurl myself at life like a besotted puppy, I can’t shake the nagging feeling that my activism—not to mention my psyche—would ultimately be most benefited by devoting myself fully to inner work. I go to a day-long at Spirit Rock with renowned Buddhist activist and teacher Joanna Macy. When we break for lunch I approach her with this question. Later she addresses the entire group. “So today I was asked the same question I hear over and over. ‘Is my time better spent working on the world or working on myself? On social change or practice?’” She scans the group, arms wide in petition. “Isn’t the answer clear?”
Well, to be honest, no. I’ve been chewing this over distractedly for a good year and a half. Pray enlighten me.
Macy looks expectantly around the silent room. “Both, of course!” People are smiling and nodding as if to say, Naturally, clear as day. “The world needs us too much right now to just work on ourselves. And we need the world too much to only work on it. Without practice, we lack the kind of awareness necessary to discern what is inspiring our actions, and whether they are truly constructive.”
Both. Got it. Nice one.
In December, the nonprofit unexpectedly runs out of funding for our campaign. For the first time in two years, I find myself at a loss. What to do? The mere thought of taking on another full-time organizing position—another round of being overworked and underpaid—is exhausting. I cast about half-heartedly through the want ads. Nothing appeals. I have no idea, I tell people when they ask me what I’m doing next. But this isn’t quite the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I have an irksome feeling that I know exactly what to do next. That niggling suspicion is even more terrifying than not knowing.
Write. I want to write. Over the past couple of years I have continued freelancing whenever I’ve had the time and opportunity, largely focusing on issues related to globalization. But pay from most of the publications I’ve written for has been scant at best. Writing makes absolutely no sense. Unless I marry rich, which at this point strikes me as an idea worth considering. Since immigrating, my family has struggled financially; in college I relied entirely on scholarships and part-time work, and since then I’ve mostly earned what my grandmother called bupkes—“beans”—at my jobs. I’m already used to counting pennies, and shabby chic, I reason with myself. But perhaps even more daunting than assured poverty is the idea of investing myself in an endeavor with no established path or guidance and certainly no guaranteed success or even work. No, writing makes not a whit of sense.
On the other hand, since when have I chosen to do anything because it’s sensible? If I’d been making choices based on prudence, I would’ve snapped up the job I was offered in management consulting fresh out of college. Instead I called them back to tell them I wanted to sing. I am still singing, still writing songs and experimenting with different collaborations—jazz, electronic, folk—but that’s not going to earn me two nickels to rub together unless I sing covers at weddings and bar mitzvahs, which I can’t find it within myself to do. No, I’ve been a stark-raving romantic for too long to stop now. Writing may not be a particularly practical choice, but I have seen through my journalism how powerful a tool it can be, how it can amplify issues and voices that too often go ignored. That, and I can’t deny I thoroughly relish seeing my name in print.
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Although my life feels like a rickety mess, I am starting to see where my work lies. My time at Tikkun showed me that I don’t always have to pick a side, that speaking exactly what I believe is risky but ultimately strengthening. I also met many people who were listening, like I am, to hear the quietest of their own inner voices echoed, to be affirmed in their understanding that the way we change the world needs to reflect the world we wish to create. My time in the global justice movement has shown me the power that we have as individuals and communities, and has positioned me so I am directly facing the dragon’s lair. I pick up my pen, and begin with a couple of essays examining the role of nonviolence within the context of corporate globalization. But without guarantee of publication—and the accompanying deadlines—I find it hard to locate the motivation and discipline to sit down and do the work I feel I need to do. Partly out of desperation, partly because the travel bug has been champing with increasing boldness, I decide it’s time for another solo jaunt. The destination finds me.
I first hear of the Sarayacu from an acquaintance who works at Amazon Watch, an NGO with offices in San Francisco.
“They’re amazing,” says Leila. We are sitting at her desk, sipping maté. “What they’ve achieved so far is hard to believe. They’ve managed to resist some very powerful oil corporations backed by the government of Ecuador.”
The Sarayacu, she tells me, are an indigenous community of Quichua in Ecuador’s southern Amazon. She walks over to a large map of South America pinned on the wall and points to a bright green scrap. “They’re being called the gateway to the south. Ecuador’s northern Amazon has been devastated by decades of exploitation, but the south is pristine, untouched. The Sarayacu are on the front lines. And everyone is watching: other indigenous communities, the government, the oil companies.” She pulls out articles and photos. I stare at the broad features, the squat bodies, the knotted backdrop of jungle. The faces are clear, resolute. Somewhere in the vicinity of my belly something tugs. And again. I ask Leila if she can put me in touch with them.
“Yeah. We’ve been working with them for the past couple of years. I can connect you with Mario Santi, their lead organizer.”
“Great. I definitely want to write about this. I’m going to read up and start pitching today.”
I tell my boyfriend Jonathan, whom I have been with for the past five months, that I’m going to South America, that I’ve found my next project. I tell him I’ll be gone for four months, but I’m hoping he can visit for a couple of weeks. Jonathan is over a decade older than me, and pushing for more commitment, not less. He stares at me, hazel eyes wide, and I feel hideously guilty. “I can’t believe you’re going to do this.”
“I’m sorry.” I am a callous, evil woman. I must be, to hurt someone I love this much. “I just have to.” It’ll be a good few years before I’ll consider putting the needs of a relationship before my own and those of my work. Today I have no regrets about this. I’ve been fortunate to have dated wonderful and devoted men, but none of them fit quite right, and somewhere inside me—although I push it away frantically at the time—I’m aware of this.
“Why? Why do you have to do this?” He offers to support me, which I consider for a delusional half-second before adamantly rejecting.
“I want to see South America,” I say miserably. “You know how much I love traveling.” I’ve always had the ability to adapt rapidly to new places. There’s a sublimely lonely part of me that feels most at home traveling, that discovers itself and the world and the bridges between when the rest of me gets lost in a foreign place. I think of my great-grandfather Max. Perhaps it’s as simple as a matter of believing in possibilities.
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“Also I want to write this story.”
Miami left me wondering: Where does the endemic violence of corporate globalization end? How do we defend what is precious to us? How do we protect our cultures and communities? How do we preserve what remains of this planet’s biological richness and diversity— those places upon whose preservation our own health and survival ultimately depend? I had gone to talk to Leila because it occurred to me that those who live in close contact with the earth, with their own resources and culture and spirituality, must have a great deal to teach us. It is time, again, for me to listen.
I look at Jonathan, who appears far from convinced. “These are voices that need to be heard. I know you don’t want me to go, but I’ve got to write about this. About how globalization is affecting indigenous communities in the Amazon.” There. I said it. That’s how I’ll say it when I tell my parents, too. I pause, considering. “And about how they’re affecting globalization.”
Three weeks later, I leave for South America.
The children stare at me. Unblinking. Wary. Their faces laced with geometric designs, painted in traditional black wituk dye. Warriors already. Welcome to Sarayacu.
I arrive in Ecuador in early March 2004. I spend a week in Quito reviving my Spanish through an intensive, then take a bus to Puyo, the nearest city to Sarayacu. There, I meet with a couple of the community’s leaders, to discuss the risks and convince them to let me visit. For good reason, the Sarayacu are very careful about letting outsiders in right now.
Mario, Leila’s contact, is my traveling companion on the flight from Puyo to Sarayacu. When we climb out of the tiny plane, he is instantly surrounded, shaking hands, laughing uproariously. He vanishes into the small crowd. I stay put, somewhat shaken after our bumpy landing. I hang back from the children’s gaze, looking elsewhere, embarrassed by my sunglasses and backpack, by my gringa-ness. Some of the younger boys play behind the plane, dancing in the tail winds as the engine ebbs. The makeshift runway lies in the middle of a large cleared grassy area, with a few low-lying buildings on the edges. “The high school,” Mario pointed out as we descended. “And that, there, is the elementary school.” Beyond, on all sides: the mar verde of the Amazon basin. Sprawling, dogged. Simmering, ticking, throbbing. Alive.
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“Venga,” says Mario, emerging from the knot, reaching toward me. I take his hand and he leads me through the bodies. He is greeting friends and relatives, pulling bread, jam, and other urban goodies from his sack and handing them out. His face is lambent, transformed. He’s a different person from the one I met three days ago in Puyo, where the Sarayacu office is located. The office, the nexus of their global campaign, is home to two desks, one desktop and one laptop computer, one printer, and one fax machine. Posters condemning oil exploitation are pinned to the walls. “Our land is our future,” reads one. Mario wore jeans and a T-shirt, his long black hair pulled neatly back into a ponytail. “We are a warrior people,” he told me, his face grim, composed. “If they try to come drill on our land, we will hold them off with our bodies. We’ll form a wall with our lances.”
That’s precisely what they did the last time.
In 1996 Ecuador auctioned off a number of concessions for oil exploitation. Block 23, a 494,200-acre quadrangle of rainforest in the south-central province of Pastaza, was purchased by the Argentine-based corporation Compañía General de Combustibles (CGC). The CGC later sold a quarter of its shares to Texas-based Burlington Resources and another quarter to Paris-based Perenco. Roughly half of Block 23 is Sarayacu tribal land. But Ecuador’s constitution retains the antiquated Spanish edict that regardless of ownership, the resources underground belong to the state. Faced with major political resistance, the CGC didn’t enter Block 23 before 2000—which was when their legal right to conduct seismic exploration expired. Nonetheless, in late 2002 the CGC announced that it would be entering Sarayacu territory with the aid of the Ecuadorean military. In response, the Sarayacu declared a state of emergency. They chopped paths through the dense jungle, lugged out massive supply sacks, and built twenty-five Peace and Life camps along the boundaries of their territory. When the oil workers and soldiers arrived, the Sarayacu were ready. They interlocked their traditional chonta lances and bodily held them off. Every member of the tribe age ten and older participated. Most were at the borders for fifteen days at a time. Some stayed in Sarayacu Center organizing the resistance and communicating with local allies. Others, like Mario, worked from the Puyo office to mobilize an international campaign, coordinating with NGO partners in the U.S. and Europe and speaking with the media.
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For three and a half months, this community of one thousand remained on their borders nonviolently defending their land and heritage. Eventually the CGC decided it was time to change tack. “Now things are normal,” Mario said. “But when the oil workers come, everything will be paralyzed. We’ll go into a state of emergency.”
I am here writing a feature for Orion Magazine and a news piece for the San Francisco Chronicle. Over the course of my scheduled ten-day visit, I aim to conduct a broad range of interviews, to pull together a detailed anatomy of the Sarayacu’s resistance. For the feature, I’ll also need generous helpings of “vivid color, rich context, and telling details,” as my editor put it. In other words, there’s no time to waste.
“Take, take. Por favor.” A woman is thrusting a bowl, the shell from some species of gargantuan jungle fruit, toward me. I eye the murky contents charily.
“What is it?” I turn to Mario. She is a cousin of his—it seems everyone in Sarayacu is a cousin, or an uncle, or an uncle’s cousin— and we are pausing en route to Mario’s home, waiting for his wife Marcia to meet us.
“Chicha. Made from yucca. Boiled, pounded, chewed, then fermented. It’s a bit like beer.”
“Chewed?”
“Yes. The saliva helps it ferment.” He smiles—accustomed, I am sure, to this gringo squeamishness. “The Sarayacu women work hard to make our chicha. It’s delicious. Have some.”
“No, thank you. I mean, thanks very much, but no thanks.” I smile up at her feebly.
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She smiles back, shifts the child on her hip, and moves to the next in the circle—her husband, who accepts it without relinquishing the reins of conversation. He takes a lengthy draft, smacks his lips, hands her the emptied bowl. She returns to an urn in one corner, dips from the larger into the smaller, runs a hand through to sieve the excess fibers, and tosses them in the dirt. The child jogs about uncomplaining on her hip. He stares at me until he tires of my strangeness, then resumes the consolation of her nipple.
The adults continue talking quietly in Quichua, laughing at intervals, our hostess periodically circling with the bowl. We sit on logs, under a roof of palm fronds. Chickens cluck through self-importantly. Several of the scrawny breed of mutt distinctive to Sarayacu snuffle and whine at the edges. Beyond the small circle a few children play, giggling and hopping about manically, still giddy with excitement over the bread and jam. And then there is the heat, heavy and wet as a tongue.
I am left out of their conversation, but I do not mind. I am overjoyed simply to be here—in the Amazon and among this community, which has occupied my imagination for over a month. I try to envision these tranquil people at their borders. But it’s near impossible to picture them any other way than they are right now. This is how the Sarayacu lived two hundred years ago, and this is how I see them living two hundred years from now, molding to place and task like jungle mud to my feet. The land itself possesses a timelessness, a peace so self-assured that it is palpable. The peace of earth unviolated, of an essence inviolable. The languid coil of the Bobonaza River, the rhythmic ticking of insects, the shrills of birds and children: all a mantle over a much older silence. Like the silences that gird a long and fecund marriage. The people know the land and the land knows the people. Conversation eases into comfortable redundancies: bridges between stillnesses. I cannot understand what they are saying, but I can understand the gaps in between, the flow of words natural as rain. “It must be hard to leave, Mario,” I’d said as we trudged through the sucking mud. “Yes, it is.” He’d turned to me, exultant. “We’re safe here.” There is of course a constant metallic undercurrent of tension: the CGC could try to enter again at any point, with the government’s declared support. But there is more to Mario’s assertion than that: the land actually somehow feels safe, as if in gentle collusion with its people.
“Marcia!” The conversation breaks off as Mario rises. His wife is emerging from the jungle path into the clearing, barefoot, arms filled with books. Marcia is in the teacher-training program at Sarayacu’s university. They greet each other quietly, casually joyful. Mario has been living in Puyo working on the campaign, and it’s been a full month since they last saw each other. He introduces me and she takes my hand.
“Un gusto.” A wide, gap-toothed smile. Marcia is tiny, self-possessed, very much at ease. She greets the circle briefly. “All right, let’s go home. It’s just about time for dinner. Fidel! Ligia!” Out of the jungle skip their two children: Fidel, already a sturdy model of his father at eight, and Ligia, a bewitchingly dreamy-eyed six-year-old. They hang behind their mother and titter over me at the other children. “Bueno, we’re off.”
I follow the family out into the jungle. They are all marvelously nimble in the stubborn mud. I scuffle along awkwardly behind, my gumboots sinking half a foot deep with each step. Next comes the rain. It is light at first, then more insistent, and then the sky unbolts and buckets down on us. By the time we reach home we are all drenched. Their wasi is a generous oval of around forty by twenty feet, sheltered with a dense weave of palm fronds and enclosed by a four-foot-high bamboo fence. The kitchen occupies one end. The other end comprises the sleeping quarters. The family sleeps on the ground and unrolls their bedding nightly; I, as their guest, am given the single raised wooden bed. I will spend the next nine nights on this bed, switching sides religiously every half hour on complaining hips.
We gather soap and towels and head down to a nearby tributary of the Bobonaza to bathe, Mario veering off to give Marcia and me some privacy. The water is cool, glassy, agile. Perfect. Marcia scrubs away industriously with a washcloth, while I recline languorously, limbs settling into the rocks’ toothy embrace, velvet river-sand sifting between prune-puckered fingers. Greeting the odd fish jaunting by in a stutter of silver. Daydreaming, staring soft into a supple ceiling of green. Buoyantly, absurdly happy.
Dinner is fried yucca and bananas, with sugary decaf Nescafé and packaged cookies for dessert. The transmitter radio blares a constant stream of Quichua and Spanish, pop hits jangling against the bluster of news updates and the purr of community announcements. Mi amor, how you make me suffer. Gutierrez alienating his indigenous allies. Rosa sends kisses to Eduardo in Puyo. Fidel and Ligia long forgot to be shy, and they hang about me, sharing jokes and games, exploring the unfathomable contents of my bag, instructing me patiently in beginner Quichua. Mario and Marcia unroll their bedding. I hang my mosquito net.
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“Buenas noches,” calls Mario from the other side of the wasi.
“Buenas noches,” shrieks Ligia, giggling.
“Buenas noches, amigos.” And then I am asleep, lulled by the pulse and swoon of jungle night, by the mellifluous rise and fall of conversation that is their reunion.
On the flight to Ecuador, I had plenty of time to think about the Sarayacu, to review my preparatory research and consider my fascination with them. Digging through newspapers and surfing the Internet in San Francisco, I had learned that partly owing to their geographic remoteness, and partly because the people have made a series of decisions not to barter their heritage for western accoutrements, the Sarayacu’s indigenous culture remains largely intact. “Of all the Qui-chua communities, the Sarayacu are the most traditional, and rooted in their territory,” Kevin Koenig, who has worked with the Sarayacu for two years as the Amazon Oil Campaign Coordinator at Amazon Watch, told me in San Francisco. “They present their own vision of the future, and pick and choose what of the world out there they want to incorporate.” The Sarayacu live, as they have for centuries, off what the land provides: they fish in the Bobonaza, and hunt wild game in their territory. They farm yucca and banana in small fields, and collect fruits and nuts from the jungle. The community still relies primarily on age-old shamanic wisdom for medicine; the sabios cultivate gardens of traditional healing plants, including the famous ayahuasca, a potent hallucinogenic used for entering spiritual trances.
The Sarayacu move slowly. They laugh a lot. They do the work they need to do, and then they sit back and relax. The CGC could enter at any time, and they’d be ready, but you’d never guess it by watching them. I think of my life back home: constantly rushing to meetings and appointments, constantly feeling pulled between activism and music and social obligations and every other essential thing on my endless list. I have to pencil in “nothing” when I want an evening off. Every activist I know is similarly overburdened and stressed, staggering around like Atlas beneath a world only we can save. It can’t be helping our work.
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In Quito, I conducted a series of interviews with outsiders who have worked with the Sarayacu. When I asked them what sets the Sarayacu apart, how they have succeeded where so many others have been overcome, I heard the same answer again and again. They are rooted in their culture, land, and, most importantly, their spirituality. “The Sarayacu are a center of spirituality for the Amazon,” said Mario Melo, a legal advisor to the Sarayacu from the Quito-based Center for Economic and Social Rights. “They are very powerful. They have no money to confront the corporations, but they do have their spirituality and a very long tradition of battling.”
On the bus ride to Puyo, watching the Andes unfurl into the Amazon, I thought about how the Sarayacu found the courage to defend themselves. In 1989 they used civil disobedience to prevent ARCO from completing drilling in Block 10, a chunk of which falls in their territory. Their opposition led to the Sarayacu Accord, which pledged to the tribes communal title to all indigenous land in Pastaza, and halted oil operations until environmental measures could be put in place. A year later the government renounced the accord. In 1990, along with tens of thousands of others, the Sarayacu demonstrated in the first of several massive nonviolent indigenous uprisings. In 1992, following a mass march to Quito, President Rodrigo Borja acquiesced, granting title deeds to Quichua, Achuar, Shuar, Shiwiar, and Zapara tribes for three million acres of land—about 70 percent of the province of Pastaza. Excellent, except for that tricky old clause under which the government retained rights to subterranean resources. But as the CGC discovered, a clause does not a conquest make. By the time I get to Sarayacu, the CGC has hauled out virtually every tried-and-true tactic in the oil industry’s bag: threats and intimidation, bribing other indigenous communities in Block 23, attempting to bribe individuals within Sarayacu, and finally—when that fails— offering the whole community $60,000. “That’s a lot of money being offered to very poor people,” says Esperanza Martínez, founder of the Ecuadorean NGO Acción Ecológica. No, said the Sarayacu.
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For the crowning oily feather in their cap, the CGC neglected to file an environmental impact report on the seismic testing it tried to conduct in 2002. “That’s required by the constitution,” says Mario. “They broke the law.” Nonetheless, in March 2003, following the CGC’s abortive attempts to enter Sarayacu territory, the Ecuadorean government extended their contract. In February 2004, just weeks before I arrive in Sarayacu, Minister of Energy Carlos Arboleda states that the government “is prepared to provide all security guarantees to the CGC so that it can continue operations in Block 23.”
I spend my first full day in Sarayacu interviewing, interviewing, and interviewing some more. I start with Atanacio in Sarayacu Pista, then Mario leads me across the river to Sarayacu Center to speak with Romel Cisneros, one of the youth directors.
“We went in groups to the borders, ten to fifteen of us, aged fifteen to eighteen,” Cisneros says. “We tried to resolve the conflict with our words.” He is twenty-two and looks younger. He sits opposite me bare-chested, cross-legged, nervous. “We just want to protect our land. Our grandparents tell us that the trees have a spiritual life, and the land too. Before, we knew this.” A toothy grin. “Now we are getting back to it.” I recall Atanacio’s words an hour earlier. “Once,” said the sabio, “we talked to the moon, the stars, the sun. We can return to the way of the wise.”
The Sarayacu are making a concerted effort to recoup the aspects of their indigenous spirituality and culture that have been displaced by the icons of Christ and capital. Attendance at the local church— built decades earlier by missionaries—is steadily dwindling, according to Mario (and to the consternation of the devout Christian elders in the tribe). The sabios are training a select few in the art of shamanic horticulture and practice. Many of the young men are again wearing their hair long, as is traditional. Later in the day I interview Johnny Dahua, a twenty-three-year-old who worked out of the Puyo office during the resistance. “What’s important is that we don’t forget our culture,” he says. “Our elders tell us to preserve the land because it’s our life, because we are interrelated with the jungle. It fortifies us, this idea.” I nod. My heart is with him, but I have to admit I’m losing steam, and my pen is dragging on the page. Dahua is approximately my fourteenth interview so far. It must be at least 105 degrees, and I’m drenched in a layer of sweat that stubbornly refuses to evaporate, plastered with mosquito bites, and dog-tired from trailing my indefatigable host through the vile, odious, godawful jungle mud.
I’m trying to be inspired by his words but having a little difficulty. Is this really what I want to do with my life?
“Money comes and goes,” Dahua continues, finger wagging. Schoolmarmish despite the bare chest, galoshes, and loose, waist-length hair. “But if you guard the jungle, it will be here a thousand years.”
“Uh-huh. Lungs of the earth and all that.” I glance over to Mario, who is schmoozing with Dahua’s mother and young wife. Lunchtime, anyone?
But Johnny remains on target. He keeps talking, and I automatically keep scribbling. At some point his daughter, a winsome two-year-old in a frilly dress, toddles over. He picks her up and deposits her on his lap, where she engages in the hands-down favorite pastime of Sarayacu’s below-seven constituency: staring at the gringa. I smile and give a few feeble coos. I ask Johnny if he thinks it’s possible his children will want different things—money, material goods.
“No. We’re not going to lose our traditions and our way of life for things, for material things. I’m totally sure that the next generation will be aware.”
It occurs to me that culture, spirituality, and nature are inseparable here. In the west, we divide them into three categories, and I struggle conscientiously to make time to engage with each.
I thank Dahua and close my notebook. Despite my exhaustion, I feel somehow lighter than I have in months—since Miami, probably. Every interview I’ve conducted so far has moved me, given me hope. Dahua calls over to his mother to bring the chicha, and politely inquires whether I’d like some. Mario looks up at my face and snorts. “Virginia’s chicha is delicious,” he sings. “Don’t miss out.”
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This must be the twentieth time I’ve been offered chicha in under twenty-four hours. “Bueno. Hand it over.” Virginia comes, smiling as she proffers the bowl. I grimace and take a sip. Okay. Okay. Not bad, really. Sake with sass.
Later in the week, I will help Marcia as she makes the family chicha. I will take large handfuls of boiled, mashed yucca and fill my mouth, chewing and chewing and then simply sitting with engorged cheeks —as instructed—trying my best not to gag. And Marcia will laugh and laugh at the squirrel-cheeked gringa, laugh until I can’t take it anymore and yucca is coming out my mouth, out my nose, yucca all over their floor, half-choking, the two of us rolling around in hysterics.
“What do you think?” asks Mario. “Do you like it?”
“Claro. Es muy rica.” I reach for the bowl.
The next morning Mario is taciturn, brooding. “Are you okay?” I ask, as we sit down to breakfast. The wasi is unusually quiet: Marcia has gone off to classes, Fidel and Ligia to school.
“I had a bad dream.” Terse. He spears a few slices of the fried plantain Marcia has left on the table. Spoons coffee into hot water. And then sugar. One, two, three.
“I’m sorry. Do you want to talk about it?” I help myself to some plantain. Outside, the Bobonaza ambles at a steady gait. The sun has shouldered its way through the clouds, and everything dazzles, every last leaf is cluttered with the costume jewelry of daybreak. It’s the kind of morning that makes me want to belt out an aria.
Mario takes a swig of coffee and clears his throat. “I was working in a factory.” His voice is low. “A huge factory, with people in long lines. All the other workers were wearing ear protectors. But not me.” He considers the plantain, lays down his fork, scowls. “My ears were deafened by the noise. I walked outside and came to a river.” Shaking his head. “But not a clean river, like the Bobonaza. It was a river of chemicals, red and black. I walked through it and it burned my feet.” Now he looks at me, fierce, so fierce that I am struggling to hold his gaze. Mario is a man of great dignity and composure. That was evident within two minutes of meeting him. He’s the kind of person who leads by nature. I’m learning just by watching. But this morning Mario is like I have not yet seen him: hard, smoldering. He turns away now, to the jungle, to the river. “My heroes are Gandhi and Mandela.” Resolute. “We will not sink to violence.”
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A gargantuan butterfly flits into the wasi, drifts casually across to the other side and then, with a single languid beat of stained-glass wings, out into the sunlight.
Mario’s hands are clenched around his mug. “If they come with weapons, they’ll have to kill us to get in here.” Quietly: “Then the world will see that there has been a massacre, and there will be an outcry.”
The massacre in Ecuador’s northern Amazon has been slow and skulking, shape-shifting into all kinds of macabre perversities: neurological disorders, spontaneous abortions, extraordinarily high rates of cancer; vanishing game and ruined soil. And the banshees of cultural genocide: displacement, alcoholism, prostitution.
In 1971 Texaco entered Block 1. In 1991, carpetbags dripping dollars, they departed, and Ecuador’s state oil company took over the operations. “People in Block 1 are sick,” says Luis Yanza, who works at the Ecuadorean NGO Frente de Defensa de la Amazonia, which is coordinating a historic $1.5 billion class-action lawsuit against Chevron-Texaco. I met with him in Quito before coming to Sarayacu. “They are still drinking contaminated water. Their animals are dying. They can’t cultivate the land.”
The more I learn, the more horrified I am. Three decades of drilling have produced 18,000 miles of seismic trails (set with explosives every hundred yards to sound for oil), 339 wells, 300 miles of roads, and 600 toxic waste pits. Yet thanks to the work of some very dedicated activists, this disaster has also become a powerful educational tool. Acción Ecológica and the Center for Economic and Social Rights have organized visits between indigenous communities in the north and south. Leaders from the north discuss the many impacts of oil exploitation, and speak about how the oil companies have deceived them regarding these impacts. Those from the south witness for themselves the fallout from the worst oil disaster in the western hemisphere.
Every indigenous person I talk with in Ecuador knows about the disaster in its northern Amazon. The Sarayacu’s resistance has everything to do with Block 1. And when it comes to the future of Ecuador’s southern Amazon, all eyes are on Sarayacu.
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Day Five.
The army helicopter hovers like a holdover from the Mesozoic era, massive, small-brained, coolly surveying its prey. It lowers and settles into the runway clearing, the long grasses flattening in frenetic undulations as the blades ease into visibility, the engine drones toward silence. It seems as if all of Sarayacu is gathered here. What is going on? Why are they coming? I ask around me, pad and pen at the ready, but no one knows.
The belly snaps open. The community hangs back, anxiety skittering about like something feral and trapped. My heart gallops at a manic pace. Will they come out shooting? I move forward shakily, conscious of my status as a gringa and a journalist.
First emerge civilians, waving and shouting in greeting. Then come the soldiers, uniformed but unarmed. A few of Sarayacu’s leaders walk toward them, Mario included, and I follow.
“Colonel Marco Rentería,” says one of them, giving a gap-toothed grin, shaking hands. Mario and the others introduce themselves, wary, waiting to hear what this is about. Mario gestures toward me. “A journalist from the United States.”
“Mucho gusto, mucho gusto.” He pumps my hand vigorously. “I very much look forward to visiting your country myself one day.” Rentería is thickset, red-faced beneath the brim of his cap. He puts his arm around me and addresses everyone else as I squirm. “This is a federally funded medical visit,” he declares. “We are here in response to your invitation.”
The doctors, as it turns out, were indeed invited, although months earlier. The military, of course, were not. One of the soldiers is strolling around filming everything. When asked to put the camera away, he protests, then complies when Rentería orders him to.
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The visitors are escorted across the river to a palm-roofed gathering spot atop the bluff adjoining Sarayacu Center. A circle of chairs is arranged: Rentería and the soldiers on one side, Sarayacu representatives on the other. The Sarayacu officially welcome the visitors. Then: “It’s uncomfortable for us that you are in uniform,” says David Malaver Santi, a Sarayacu leader. “As a community, our experience with uniforms has been frightening.”
Rentería listens, nodding, the radio at his belt sputtering intermittently with unintelligible directives. When it is his turn, he stares at the ground for a while, apparently lost in weighty contemplation. Letting the apprehension blossom. “I have worked IN THE AMAZON for twenty-three years,” he finally begins, voice booming. It isn’t an oratorical affectation, I realize after a minute; it’s just the way he speaks. He looks at the faces around him, arms flailing emphatically. “We have NO INTENTION of dividing this territory. You are OUR BROTHERS. We are FILLED WITH HAPPINESS to bring and distribute WHAT YOU NEED.”
I do not trust him. I turn to look at Mario. He is standing with his arms crossed, sturdy body tense. Mouth compressed. Eyes vacant, looking nowhere and beyond nowhere.
I think of the burning red-black river, and of the butterfly.
“Why was the soldier filming?”
“We film LIKE TOURISTS DO. It’s routine, just a graphic reference.”
By this point I’ve had a good deal more practice asking difficult questions. And it’s definitely easier when I don’t like the person I’m interviewing. “Will the video be used to assist the army in escorting the CGC?”
Rentería’s flushed face flushes deeper. “No, OF COURSE NOT.” He’s angry, now, at the gringa journalist with her spotless principles, her holier-than-thou politics. It’s easy to be virtuous when you live in gringo-land. “We are here to HELP THEM DEVELOP. Nothing more. NOTHING MORE. Look around. Don’t you think there can be MORE PROGRESS here?”
We are sitting on two stools outside Sarayacu’s dilapidated clinic. The line of mothers stretches well out the door. Mothers with babies in their arms, children hanging on their thighs. They are coughing and whimpering, or pale and quiet with exhaustion, these children. Blank-eyed and bloated, with the species of stolid endurance largely unknown to children of the industrialized world. Inside, I watched for over an hour as the pediatrician handed out drugs for parasites. “They still drink the river water,” she told me, shaking her head.
Rentería leans forward until his face is inches away, small black eyes beating into mine. He’s liking me less and less. “There are TWO TYPES of invasions,” he rasps coldly. The back of his shirt is dark with sweat. “VIOLENT and peaceful. This is a PEACEFUL invasion. NOT like the U.S. in Iraq. Now that was terrible. Your government DID NOT CARE AT ALL what the people of the world thought.”
If he’s trying to piss me off, this is definitely the wrong tack. In fact I’m starting to develop a moderate affinity for the Colonel.
“Look, Maritza”—leaning back now, hands off—“government is government. It changes.” And forward again, eyes rapt. “But THE ARMY IS PERMANENT. Our role is in the constitution. What we do is serve our country. Nothing more. NOTHING MORE.” His arms are outstretched and thrashing. This man has missed his calling. He belongs in the pulpit, not the barracks. Give yourself to Christ. Nothing more. NOTHING MORE. All that fire and brimstone, wasted. “And so”—the denouement, now, with a rapid flourish of palms—“we JEALOUSLY GUARD OUR BORDERS to keep our own people safe.”
I wait. I have a feeling he’s not done yet. With most people I interview, I need to actually pose questions. Others, however, multitask.
Rentería inhales sharply, lifts an index finger. “You see, Ecuador is a DEVELOPING country. Our MAIN PROBLEM is our POVERTY. But you know what the REAL PROBLEM is?”
“Tell me, Colonel.”
Rentería smiles, visibly more relaxed. He’s liking me again, now that I’m not picking fights. Maybe the gringa isn’t quite as naive as he’d thought. “The MOST serious problem, OF COURSE, is GLOBALIZATION.” He is gesticulating again, arms waving in an interpretive dance. Taking in more than this country, more even than this continent. “You see, señorita, we are LOSING the concept of BOUNDARIES.” Those arms are taking in the whole world now, all seven of the Continents Formerly Known as Pangaea, the whole GOING-TO-HELL-IN-A-HANDBASKET planet with its EVERY-COLOR-IN-THE-RAINBOW races, its grab bag of religions and cargo of cultures, so intricately and fabulously diverse that EVEN the MOST INVENTIVE human brain would FAIL ABYSMALLY to grasp its proportions.
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He’s got me there. I lay down my pen and smile broadly at the colonel. And Rentería—soldier, preacher, citizen of the world—steps down from his pulpit and smiles back.
The Colonel has a point. Ecuador owes $14 billion to international creditors, who refuse to forgive the debt, citing the nation’s oil reserves as assets to be liquidated. The International Monetary Fund is pressing Ecuador to pry open its southern Amazon, in order to continue making interest payments and receiving loans. “Oil,” says Martínez of Acción Ecológica, “is at the heart of all the social and environmental crises here.” Oil accounts for close to half of Ecuador’s national income (its chief customer is the U.S.). But 70 to 80 percent of the nation’s oil revenues go directly to servicing the interest on its debt. In thirty-five years of drilling, Ecuador’s debt has only increased. So, for that matter, has its poverty rate: from 47 percent of the population in 1967 to 70 percent in 2000.
“Globalization,” said Rentería, and when globalization meets oil, it’s no holds barred. If Ecuador isn’t proof enough, we need only look to a more contentious corner of the globe. Less than a week after invading Iraq, the Bush administration began handing out contracts for the “reconstruction.” Dick Cheney’s former employer Halliburton won the largest initial prize: overseeing repair work to Iraq’s oil infrastructure. In late May 2003, Bush signed Executive Order 13303, granting complete legal immunity to any U.S. company that produces, ships, or distributes Iraqi oil. Spills, explosions, labor debacles, impacts upon communities and the environment: all were exempted from any form of accountability. Chevron-Texaco began transporting oil out of Iraq as early as June. (“Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas,” said Ken Derr, CEO of Chevron-Texaco, in 1998, “reserves I would love Chevron to have access to.”) British Petroleum followed in July 2003, and eight other oil giants hastily queued up to claim their spoils.
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Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Ecuadorean government continues to promise that oil exploitation will bring development. “Development?” scoffs Mario. “The word development is a lie. It only means poverty for the indigenous. The ‘developers’ have wreaked five hundred years of barbarism in our world.” I ask him about the line at the clinic. Yes, he concedes, there is value in some western medicine. “Development itself is not the problem. We have our own alternative development; the difference is that it is sustainable.”
As I learn over the course of enough interviews that my hand starts cramping up, Sarayacu is home to a number of groundbreaking programs. In collaboration with a German university, the community has developed a sophisticated plan for natural resources management. The community has also created an indigenous education system, extending from preschool to university. And the women of Sarayacu run a microlending bank, the Caja Ahorro y Crédito, which began with fifteen members and currently offers assistance to seventy-two. Marcia is the elected director of the Caja—a task she juggles along with mothering, studying, and the numerous household demands of a Sarayacu wife. Traditionally, Sarayacu’s women have been conscribed to the domestic sphere. But the active role women played in the resistance offered the community a memorable lesson in feminism, and conceptions of gender roles have adjusted accordingly. As Marcia puts it, when I interview her in the Caja office: “During the resistance, the men saw that the women were stronger and more courageous. Not only were the women confronting the workers, they were also making the food and chicha for the camps.”
“How did you confront the workers?” I certainly wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of this woman. I’d place bets on her over Rentería any day.
“We would challenge them, shouting that this is our territory, and we wouldn’t let them pass.”
These women could have taught us a thing or two back in Womyn Aloud. I ask Marcia if she was afraid, and she pins me with the same look she gives her children when they say something particularly obtuse. “No, of course not.” Impatient with my questions now, ready to get on with the work at hand. “The company officials and workers are people, just like us. Why would we be afraid?”
Mario steers the canoe expertly downriver, standing straight-backed at the rear. I squat low in the middle and cling to the sides. I have not an iota of balance in this vessel, and get nervous even rising to clamber onto the banks—a source of high merriment for Fidel and Ligia, who relish rocking it and hearing me screech. We are headed to Sarayacu Pista, where the runway lies. My visit to Sarayacu is drawing to a close, but my leave-taking depends on the next plane to arrive from Puyo, and we’re not sure whether it’s coming today or tomorrow. I sit with Atanacio in amiable silence, chewing on the leathery jungle peanuts, while Mario goes to check.
“No plane today,” he announces, upon return. I try to hide my disappointment. The more I’ve seen of Sarayacu, the more of its people I’ve met, the more I am in awe of this incredible community. My time here has been revelatory, and so I’m rather ashamed to discover how much I’m itching to return to showers and mattresses. But then I’m also eager to get back to write my stories. By now, I’ve collected enough material for a dissertation.
Mario watches me. “Want to go to a party?”
“A party?” I conjure up visions of icy cocktails with miniature hot-pink umbrellas and stuffed olives. Women in slithery satin dresses and stiletto heels, floating above the mud. Dapper-clad men lining up to buy me drinks. I smooth the bedraggled nest atop my head self-consciously. By this point I must have at least two respectable dreadlocks.
“Why yes, I’d love to. What kind of a party?”
“A graduation party for one of the high school seniors.”
“I see. Is that what the racket is all about?” Strains of pop music are drifting tinny from somewhere across the river.
“Sí. Vámonos.”
The party is in a palm-covered yard adjoining a wasi, and our arrival is greeted with shouts of welcome—barely audible, however, over the bleating of the giant speakers. Mi corazón, I would give everything I own to kiss your sweet lips. As with other social gatherings I’ve attended here, the women are sitting in one corner, murmuring quietly together over babies and the chicha urn. I, as usual, follow Mario into the ring of men. The women are friendly, but I seldom have anything to contribute to their conversation. It takes me all of about three minutes to run out of interesting things to say about babies or chicha.
“Marisa, Ramiro.” Mario leads me to a young man in a button-down shirt. His hair has been coaxed into a towering wave with a good half-bottle of pomade. “Ramiro is the graduate.”
Ramiro is also thoroughly smashed. “Mucho gusto.” He smiles, revealing two rows of oversized and blindingly perfect teeth. He sways, steadies himself, and bows gallantly. “Care to dance?”
“No thanks. I’ll just sit over here.” I scurry over to an available spot on a bench. Ramiro follows. Mario, curse him, sees a friend and deserts me.
“You are the journalist from California, right?”
“That’s me.”
“Welcome to Sarayacu.” Again, that smile. I squint back at him. “Thanks.”
“Would you like to dance?” The hostess arrives just then, bowl of chicha at the ready. I accept it and drain half the contents. The stuff is growing on me. Ramiro asks again, scooting toward me a couple of inches. I scoot away a few more. “No, thank you.”
“Please.”
“I really don’t feel like it.”
“Please, please, please.” The boy is begging.
“No. Maybe later.” I invoke the unyielding tone of voice used for dog training. “Not now.”
“But why not?” Guileless as a five-year-old.
Hmm. Let’s see. Because I already said no twice, obviously am not remotely interested, and feel sufficiently self-conscious without prancing about gawkily in the middle of the circle. Because the men on the other side of you who are prattling away in Quichua keep looking over here and hooting. Because if your hair comes within inches of my face, I’m going to break out. Because your teeth scare me. “I—I’m just not in the mood.”
“But dancing feels so good.” Ramiro gets up and proceeds to energetically shake what his mama gave him. Which isn’t, at least from this vantage point, a whole lot, although he scores extra credit for enthusiasm. The men in the circle cheer boisterously. “Dance with him! Come on, dance!” I shake my head, unmoved. A new contender materializes in my peripheral vision. Gray and paunchy, but no less tenacious. Ah, men. It makes not a whit of difference where you are on the planet.
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“Corazón, let’s dance.” He’s missing a few teeth, but that giant rhinestone belt buckle just about compensates. Gracious me, here comes the hostess again, thank the lord, with the chicha. I suck it down like water. “I do declare, this chicha is no less than exquisite.” Handing back the bowl. “The crème de la crème of chichas. You simply must give me the recipe. What’s your secret?” She stares down at me, smiles, heads back to the urn. Gramps leans in, breath ripe. “Come on, just a little salsa.”
“Not now. I’ve got a headache. Maybe tomorrow.” I leap up, scuttle across the circle to where Mario is sitting, and plop down awkwardly next to him.
“Why won’t you dance?” Mario is chuckling.
“I don’t feel like it. Why don’t they ask any of the other women?”
“They know they have no chance.”
Mario is sitting next to Franco, another leader type in his early thirties. I met Franco a few days ago and liked him instantly; he is candid, thoughtful, needle-sharp. The local philosopher. With a splendid mullet in the bargain.
“We were just talking about another recent graduate, who left and went to Quito.”
“We think he may be a… a… ” Franco is reluctant. “I think there’s a good chance he is a… homosexual.” Grave.
“Uh-huh. And?”
“Well, that’s rather serious. To be a homosexual is… it’s wrong.”
“Wrong?” I can feel my hackles rising, pricking to attention like well-regimented foot soldiers. Mario is silent, listening. “I’m the wrong person to have this conversation with, Franco. I’m from the Gay Fiefdom.” Blank faces. “San Francisco. You know, heaps upon heaps of happy queens and glowering dykes.”
“Perdón?”
“I come from a place where there are a lot of homosexuals. I don’t think it’s wrong.” Where’s the chicha? I spy the hostess, playing hooky in the womenfolk corner. “Amiga, por favor, más chicha!” She laughs at me.
“Well, it’s definitely not natural.” Franco is distressed. “God didn’t make us this way for no reason.”
“Did God make women to be warriors?”
“God made women to be mothers, to raise children.” This is a line so hackneyed it’s threadbare. He knows it, and he knows what’s coming next.
“That’s not what you were saying during the resistance.” I glance over at the women in the corner, hoping faintly that one will leap up with a mutinous howl. And then bring over the chicha.
“True.” His head is lowered, his palms face upward. “We men learned a good lesson. But that was different. That was protecting the community. This is dangerous to the community.” A few nods from the men around us, who have quieted to listen in on the debate. “What if he forced his homosexuality on others?” Franco is getting riled, gesturing sharply. “What if he turned normal people into homosexuals? That would be a menace to Sarayacu.” Franco’s left hand is missing two fingers. He sits back, now, delicately unruffling his feathers. Taking his left hand into his right, he massages the stubs of knuckle.
I ask him if he is attracted to men, which elicits yelps of mirth from those around us.
“Of course not!” He is incensed again.
“If a man came on to you, would that change?” He regards me silently. Waiting. I’m not telling him anything he hasn’t figured out. But I’m going to say it anyway, partly because I still haven’t learned to keep my mouth shut, but mostly because Sarayacu has been an amazement to me, and I know it is capable of this too. I tell him that if homosexuality was accepted here, it may turn out that there are a few more homosexuals than he’d thought, but that would be because they were already there. And they would no longer feel the need to leave. The men around us shake their heads and mutter, but Franco has his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, examining the ground. Quiet.
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The hostess rolls up with the chicha. Franco takes a swallow, passes it to me. I sip daintily. I’m detecting the inauspicious beginnings of a fearsome headache.
Then he looks up, cocks his head coyly. He’s rather attractive, once you get past the mullet. “Care to dance, amiga?”
“I’d like nothing better.”
And then we are up and whirling around the dance floor, ay mi amor, how you tease me, Franco firmly in the lead, very serious as I giggle helplessly, surrendering without grace to my assigned role as the muddy, stinking, flea-bitten belle of the ball.
I have only a few hours left in Sarayacu and I have come here, to the banks of the Bobonaza. I lay out my poncho and settle down on it, journal and a book of poetry beside me. Then I sit, meditating on the sound of the river, its many conversations, the sweep and song and scour of it. I open my eyes to circus tents of green far across the wide brown scrawl, and closer, to the bobbing dugout, the spongy red earth before me. To the leaves dead and dying, the reeds sprouting resilient from the chaotic necropolis. And closer still, to a flock of tiny fungi, polished snowy lollipops atop stems so slender it’s unfathomable they do not collapse. Then insight coasts, bursts, splashes soft in the back of my eyes.
Marcia’s fearlessness. Atanacio’s “real knowledge.”
They have it, the Sarayacu.
They are it.
When the CGC announced it would enter Sarayacu in 2002, the matter went to the Consejo Gobierno, the democratic council that handles the logistics of running Sarayacu. But before any decisions were made, the question of organizing the Peace and Life camps was debated by the entire community at a lengthy people’s assembly. Every major decision the Sarayacu have made has been through a thorough and open process of consensus.
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They took their battle to the Organization of American States, and they won. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights found in favor of the Sarayacu over the state of Ecuador, commanding the government to “comply strictly and immediately… in order to effectively protect the life, personal integrity and free movement of all members of the indigenous people of Sarayacu.” But the Sarayacu didn’t stop there. “This is a battle of all the peoples of Amazonia,” Mario told me minutes after I met him. The community played a key role in organizing a two-day summit with representatives from all five indigenous groups in Ecuador’s southern Amazon; out of the summit emerged an alliance of 100,000 people and an unprecedented mutual-defense pact against oil exploitation. “This isn’t happening anywhere else in the Amazon,” says Koenig of Amazon Watch. “These are historic adversaries. But there is a common threat now, with the Sarayacu thrust to the forefront.”
There is no doubt in my mind that the Sarayacu will win this battle, no matter how much the government blusters or the corporations cudgel. They have it. They are it. Gandhi’s satyagraha, his way of truth and love. Martin Luther King’s love that does justice. This is what a spiritually grounded campaign guided by life-centered principles looks like. This is the community rendered powerful through the empowered individual. This is where life encounters the struggle, laughing, and the struggle encounters life, and it is all simply the work at hand. This is direct democracy, feet firmly planted in the same soil on which we all stand.
“We are ‘saved’ through our own spirituality,” said Mario, in conversation with Rentería. “Through our original knowledge that we are one, indivisible from the earth. Our ancestors, our knowledge, our programs: therein lies our salvation.”
Amen.
I sit dazed, barely able to comprehend the magnitude of what I’ve been given. Much less hold it, or the gratitude that comes next, blazing like a flash flood, exploding clean and brilliant as lightning out of the dense jungle sky.