Indigenous Organizations

In the early 90s, those same 22 Huaorani communities fighting transnational oil companies, which also had military protection of the Ecuadorian State and, at that time, the Huaorani in Ecuador (…) managed to mobilize national environmental organizations and international anti-planned oil exploration of the DuPont-Conoco Oil Company in Indian territory. The Huaorani organizing campaign, had the support of the international indigenous Meso (Oakland, California) and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (USA), was successful and the oil company canceled operations in Indian territory. The Peruvian Amazonian indigenous organizations achieved similar success with the announcement of the cancellation, September 1991 the contract of Texas Crude Oil Company, Houston, Texas, with the Peruvian government for the exploitation of the region in the Amazon Pacaya Samiria Indian (Varese, 1991) All this complex web of conflicting interests was captured by indigenous organized around the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA). In its resolutions declare: “Faced with the incursion of extractive industries on indigenous ancestral territories, COICA declares peace and development space for the survival of indigenous peoples.”

Requires governments to reinforce the demarcation and legalization of these territories, which states some of the untouched areas, to review the contracts with these companies develop policies and strategies that respect the collective rights of indigenous peoples “(COICA, 2003) . Another dispute is already beginning to see is the ownership and control of water, which has been accentuated in recent years, precisely, in the second half of the 90s. If we take both “Our Common Future, Brundtland Commission report, as well as the various documents and treaties that emerged from the Rio-92 meeting, including the Agenda XXI and the Earth Charter as the most important references in the environmental field in the last twenty years, become so timid amazing treatment it deserves the water, when compared with the highlight has been the subject over the past decade, about to be put as one of the possible generation of future wars The about 8 million square kilometers of tropical forest relatively continuous, largely closed, in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Surinam and Venezuela, are holders of 460 tons of biomass per hectare on average, are 70 % water, becoming a true “green ocean” whose evapotranspiration depends on the weather, life and the towns of large areas of Central and South America, Caribbean, North America and around the world.