Oil Pipeline History

The oil pipeline weaves through the village and can be traced all the way back to its source—a Chinese drilling rig at the end of a newly-cleared road. When the rig is pumping during the night, the pipeline runs scalding hot, impossible to touch. In the morning, however, it is a great place to dry laundry. That is the ostensible benefit of the pipeline for members of the Waorani (also Huaorani) tribe, an indigenous population that inhabits the tropical rainforests of eastern Ecuador. Three indigenous groups, the Waorani, Kichwa, and Shuar, are known to live in the country’s Amazon lowlands (“About the Yasuni”), and a recent drilling push by the Ecuadorian government has led to new tensions with these groups in addition to increased concerns

Since before written history, the Waorani people and their neighbors, the Kichwa and Shuar, have inhabited the Amazon Rainforest as highly mobile, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer-horticulturalists (Finer, “Ecuador’s Yasuni…” 3). Rolf Blomberg, a Swedish explorer, first made an attempt to contact the Kichwa tribe in 1947 which later unfolded into a bloody ambush (Davis 256). Shell, a large oil company that was prospecting in eastern Ecuador, abruptly abandoned operations in the region in 1950 because of the death of many of its employees, most often by spear (Finer, “Ecuador’s Yasuni…” 6). In 1954, however, a total of twenty-five evangelical Christian missionaries from the United States were stationed in Ecuador and were able to reach out to an indigenous girl who led them back to her village (Davis 257). For the Waorani in particular, the first peaceful, sustained contacts between themselves and outsiders were with these evangelical missionaries in 1958 (Kimerling, “Huaorani Land…” 236). It is believed that the Waorani had yet to adopt metal tools before this contact as well. They perceived themselves as people of the forest in this life and next, utilizing wood and plant matter to create anything they needed (Davis 272). Through the back and forth interactions with the tribes in the 1950s, a negative

A consortium of foreign companies (mostly Texaco and Gulf, now both part of ChevronTexaco) made the find, heralded as the salvation of Ecuador’s economy (Kimerling, “Indigenous Peoples…” 414). Ecuadorians looked towards oil as a way to pull the nation out of chronic poverty and underdevelopment. After Texaco completed the construction of a 313-mile pipeline to transport this crude oil from the remote Amazon region, across the Andes Mountain in central Ecuador, and then to the Pacific Coast, exports of Amazon crude began in 1972 (Kimerling, “Indigenous Peoples…” 417). In a matter of five years, Ecuador’s Gross National Product (GNP) had increased from $2.2 billion to $5.9