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  • The Homelands Blog

    Life in Oil

    Last year, Homelands’ Bear Guerra spent two weeks in the Ecuadorian Amazon making images to accompany anthropologist Mike Cepek’s upcoming ethnography about the impacts that oil has had on the life of the indigenous Cofán. The …

  • The Homelands Blog

    Bear Guerra wins photo award

    The photo above, from a 2015 story by Bear Guerra and Ruxandra Guidi published in Americas Quarterly, has won a prestigious American Photography award. The piece, “Indigenous Residents of Lima’s Cantagallo Shantytown Confront an Uncertain Future,” describes how …

  • The Homelands Blog

    Ecuador judge rules against Chevron

    Back in the early 1990s, Homelands Productions reported on the contamination of portions of the Ecuadorean Amazon by the American oil giant Texaco. Today a judge in Ecuador ordered Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 2001, …

  • Alan Weisman

    Worlds of Difference

    Resurrecting the Zápara

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    Alan Weisman

    Worlds of Difference

    Resurrecting the Zápara

    The Zápara once ranged far across the western Amazon. By the 1970s, anthropologists concluded that their culture was extinct. But a handful of native speakers survived. Now they’re trying to resuscitate their language and culture. But a new danger looms.

    Bartolo Ushigua, leader of Ecuador’s Zápara Indians, was terrified. Not of New York’s massive buildings that towered far beyond the tallest tree in his native Amazon, not of the oily urban stench and stupendous traffic, not of the Babel of people constantly snapping his picture as though he were some exotic zoo mammal. What shook him so deeply was that for the first time ever, he couldn’t dream.

    To the Zápara, a dream is a rendezvous with guiding spirits. It was in a dream that Bartolo’s shaman father saw that his people, down to just a few dozen, weren’t supposed to vanish after all, as prophecy had foretold. It was in dreams that this same father, now dead, kept returning to instruct Bartolo how to lead. Bartolo Ushigua was barely twenty when he assumed his indigenous nation’s helm; within three years he had brought the Zápara practically from extinction to designation by UNESCO as a world cultural treasure.

    The path to recognition had been treacherous, filled not just with old enemies but also new friends whose helpful intentions portended to be equally deadly, should the Zápara come to depend on them too much. Mostly, though, the path was strewn with cash – not a lot, but enough to be tempting and disruptive.

    After a dreamless week at the UN, one afternoon an exhausted Bartolo Ushigua napped. Suddenly images formed in his sleeping mind. “In my dream,” he recalled, “there was a man with two faces, one bloody, one smiling. When the smile showed, people became happy. When the blood showed, their strength waned. Then the face said something intriguing: In time, money could gain a soul.”

    When we met Bartolo, he admitted that he didn’t entirely understand this dream. From our perspective, with the hunter-gatherer Zápara paradoxically now needing money to defend a way of life in which money had never been necessary, it was easy to attribute the dream to wishful thinking.

    After all, we were in Ecuador to document a community facing seemingly impossible odds. The Zápara, once the most numerous people of Ecuador’s Amazon region, had been all but wiped out. Then, in 1998, a 60-year border war ended, and a few Zápara were discovered living in Peru. All had lost their language, but one was a shaman. On the Ecuadoran side, the last shaman had recently died, but a handful of elderly native speakers remained. Each group had what the other lacked, yet could so few people possibly resuscitate a culture? Especially with a new threat hanging over their heads?

    That new threat is oil. The surviving Zápara owe their existence in no small part to the fact that theirs was, until recently, the last sector of Ecuador’s jungle without an oil concession. Bartolo and his siblings and cousins, now responsible for their people’s future, told us that they have just a few years to learn to defend themselves before the road and the drilling rigs arrive.

    It seems impossible – until you meet them. We came away from the Zápara recalling that there’s a name for those people who occasionally confound probability and accomplish the impossible.

    They’re called dreamers.

    – Alan Weisman and Nancy Hand

    Date

    July 30, 2004

    Other Contributor(s)

    Nancy Hand

    Outlets

    Living on Earth

    Tags

    Themes: Culture, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio, Text
    Other Contributors: Alan Weisman
    Other Tags: Amazon, Ecuador, Oil development, language revitalization, Zápara, UNESCO, indigenous

  • Sandy Tolan

    Worlds of Difference

    Camisea: A Light in the Jungle

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    Sandy Tolan

    Worlds of Difference

    Camisea: A Light in the Jungle

    For the native peoples of the Amazon, petroleum development has often been an environmental and cultural nightmare. But in Camisea, a huge natural gas deposit in eastern Peru, the oil companies say they’re committed to getting it right. The Machiguenga people aren’t yet convinced.

    Long ago, in the hot, moist folds of the Amazon, a people walked and walked to keep the sun from setting. According to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, the Machiguenga believed if they ever stopped walking, the sun would fall from the sky. Then the missionaries came with new beliefs. Soon after, settlers arrived from the coast and the highlands. And now another wave, this time of businessmen who tell of a new kind of sun, below the ground, waiting to be transformed into light and money.

    For a consortium of seven energy companies, including Hunt Oil of Texas, the vast natural gas deposit at Camisea represents potentially large profits through exports to the U.S., where demand is rising, and the conversion of vehicles and factories in Peru to natural gas. Officials in Peru say the Camisea field, one of the largest in the Americas, could mean energy independence for the nation. For the 10,000 Machiguenga navigating their way along the “River of the Moon,” the Camisea gas project means change, and the unknown.

    Environmentalists and human rights organizations warn of irreparable damage to the Amazon and its people if the project moves forward as planned. They cite previous petroleum projects in Peru and Ecuador as reason to proceed with extreme caution, if at all, in Camisea. The energy companies respond that they have learned from the mistakes of the past, and that Camisea can be a model of how to do things right. It’s a debate that could affect the future of rainforest oil development around the world. And the Machiguenga are caught in the middle.

    Date

    August 1, 2003

    Other Contributor(s)

    Jason Felch, Chris Raphael

    Outlets

    Morning Edition

    Tags

    Themes: Economy, Culture, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan
    Other Tags: Amazon, Peru, gas development, Machiguenga

  • Sandy Tolan, Nancy Postero

    Vanishing Homelands

    Ecuador’s Golden Cities

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    Sandy Tolan, Nancy Postero

    Vanishing Homelands

    Ecuador’s Golden Cities

    During the 16th century, the hills of southern Ecuador were a center of gold production for the Spanish. Today the region booms anew, its mines worked by thousands of desperate peasants.

    One November day in 1532, Spanish general Francisco Pizarro began the conquest of the Incan empire in South America. In the first attack, thousands of Indians were slaughtered, and their king, Atahualpa, was captured.

    To spare his life, Atahualpa proposed a ransom: an entire room filled with gold.

    Soon, fine gold vases and figurines began appearing, brought by his subjects throughout the Andes. To make room for more gold, the Spaniards smashed the objects into small pieces. When the room was full, they melted down the gold, shipped it to Spain, and killed Atahualpa.

    Today, centuries after the quest for El Dorado, poor peasants, struggling to survive, have taken up the search for gold. They fill the pit mines of Brazil, the rivers of Peru, the hills of Bolivia.

    In Ecuador, thousands of people have rediscovered old mines of the Spanish crown. Armed with picks, dynamite, and mercury, they revisit a legacy that began with the death of King Atahualpa.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    April 18, 1992

    Outlets

    Weekend Edition

    Tags

    Themes: Economy, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan
    Other Tags: Amazon, Ecuador, gold mining

  • Sandy Tolan, Nancy Postero

    Vanishing Homelands

    Quichua Indians and Oil

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    Sandy Tolan, Nancy Postero

    Vanishing Homelands

    Quichua Indians and Oil

    In the Amazon of Ecuador, two native villages have radically different attitudes toward oil development.

    Government officials, industrialists, and Indian activists are staking out turf in a battle over the future of Ecuador’s Amazon.

    In this story, Sandy Tolan and Nancy Postero visit two Quichua Indian towns with radically different attitudes toward oil development. At the center of the dispute is an ARCO oil rig in the heart of the jungle.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    1992

    Outlets

    Morning Edition

    Tags

    Themes: Economy, Culture, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan
    Other Tags: Amazon, Ecuador, Oil development

  • Sandy Tolan, Nancy Postero

    Vanishing Homelands

    Ecuador’s Amazon

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    Sandy Tolan, Nancy Postero

    Vanishing Homelands

    Ecuador’s Amazon

    Faced with crushing debt and pressure from lenders, Ecuador is rushing to open its section of the Amazon to oil development. But spills and dumping threaten settlers, indigenous people, and the land itself.

    In the 1970s, large deposits of oil were discovered in Ecuador’s Amazon. The country’s leaders turned to Texaco to build an oil industry in the jungle and help pull the country out of poverty.

    Now oil provides for more than half of the country’s national budget and foreign debt payments. But the ecological costs have been huge. And now many Ecuadoreans are beginning to question whether the benefits of the industry have been worth the price.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    January 1992

    Outlets

    Morning Edition

    Tags

    Themes: Economy, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan
    Other Tags: Amazon, Ecuador, Oil development

  • Sandy Tolan, Nancy Postero

    Vanishing Homelands

    Saving Jungle Souls

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    Sandy Tolan, Nancy Postero

    Vanishing Homelands

    Saving Jungle Souls

    The story of Bolivia’s nomadic Yuqui Indians and the American Evangelical Christians who coaxed them out of the jungle. The first story in the Vanishing Homelands series.

    On Friday, October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus wrote in his journal: “At dawn we saw naked people.”

    It was the day Columbus and his men walked upon a new world for the first time. They planted flags with crosses on a small island in the Bahamas. He gave the natives red hats and glass beads. These Indians, he wrote, “ought to make good and skilled servants… They can easily be made into Christians.”

    Today, just as in the time of Columbus, Christian missionaries bearing gifts and promises of salvation venture into the last of these hidden outposts to try to save the lost souls of the jungle.

    Sandy Tolan and Nancy Postero bring us the story of the Yuqui Indians, 130 forest-dwelling nomads in Bolivia, and the Evangelical Christians who coaxed them out of the jungle.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    November 4, 1991

    Outlets

    All Things Considered

    Tags

    Themes: Culture, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan
    Other Tags: Amazon, Bolivia, Evangelical Christianity, missionaries

  • Sandy Tolan, Nancy Postero

    Vanishing Homelands

    Oil in Ecuador’s Amazon

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    Sandy Tolan, Nancy Postero

    Vanishing Homelands

    Oil in Ecuador’s Amazon

    A U.S. oil company has a controversial plan to build a new road and oil pipeline into some of the most remote Indian lands in the Amazon.

    Deep in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, across the Andes from the Pacific Coast, an American oil company has discovered billions of gallons of oil.

    The oil lies beneath an Indian reserve and a national park in one of the richest areas of biological diversity in all of the Amazon. The government of Ecuador, poor and deeply in debt, says the oil must be developed.

    Recently, government officials granted a concession to Conoco to build a road an pipeline to extract the vast new deposits.

    Conoco promised to take extraordinary precautions to protect the environment, saying this would be a model for rainforest development. Opponents of the plan point to the legacy of 25 years of oil development in Ecuador: Scores of poisoned rivers and epidemic disease for the Indians living in the country’s Amazon.

    Rainforest activists in the U.S. threatened a boycott of the Dupont Corporation, which owns Conoco, if the oil company went forward with the plan.

    In this report, Sandy Tolan and Nancy Postero go on a journey through the oil and Indian country of Ecuador to see what oil development has meant, and what this new plan might hold, for the people who liver there. The story begins at the edge of the jungle, near the headwaters of the Amazon.

    Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

    Date

    1991

    Outlets

    All Things Considered

    Tags

    Themes: Culture, Environment
    Regions: South America
    Media: Audio
    Other Contributors: Sandy Tolan
    Other Tags: Amazon, Ecuador, Oil development