It's Wednesday and everyone has come. Betty and Nelly stand at the edge of the forest with rubber boots on their feet and machetes in their hands and fight through the bushes with bush knives. The two sisters are cleaning the ground because they want to create a chakra, a traditional forest garden in which they grow cassava, cocoa, bananas and medicinal plants.
A few meters away, Betty's husband and her brother are repairing an old wooden canoe, while right next to them a group of women and men are sitting around a pile of earth on tree stumps and are planting tree seedlings in a piecemeal manner that will later be taken to the forest. The children also work together, only the very little ones have climbed onto a pile of sand from which they repeatedly tumble down, cheering.
The mood is relaxed, the women tease the men and when one of the group makes a lewd joke, the women laugh out loud, while the men just grin quietly to themselves. Here the women call the shots, even if the men would never admit it.
Every Wednesday the Sinchi Warmi, an indigenous community organization of 24 people and their relatives, meet for Minga. It is the day when not everyone works for themselves, but everyone works together for a common project. For the Kichwa people in the Ecuadorian Amazon region, community work in the Minga is a firm tradition; only those who have an important reason stay away. Everyone then works together in the field, covering a house roof or repairing a fence. But the Sinchi Warmi prefer to spend the Minga, like today, working in their own forest: 35 hectares of tropical secondary rainforest that has belonged only to them for a year.
For the Sinchi Warmi, this forest is much more than just a piece of densely vegetated land. It is their habitat, their source of food and water, a bridge to the past and at the same time to the future. The Kichwa in the Amazon region have always lived in, with and from the forest; it is the repository of their culture and their spirituality, and when Betty, one of the founders of Sinchi Warmi, says that she would give her life for the forest, it is not empty pathos.
The forest is essential for the survival of the community. And it is threatened like never before since illegal gold mines spread along the banks of the Río Napos and eat into the rainforest from the water like a swarm of termites into a wooden beam, leaving behind so much irreparable destruction. These swathes of reddish-brown earth that the gold prospectors have cut into the green vegetation can be seen in many places along the river. They have already come dangerously close to the Sinchi Warmi forest.
So that it doesn't face the same fate, so that someone else doesn't start digging for gold in their forest or hunting wild animals, it's fenced in - and we have to unlock a gate to enter it. A sign states that the forest is “under indigenous guard 24 hours a day”. It seems bizarre that a piece of rainforest that can only be reached via a bumpy track is secured like a gated community on the edge of a big city, but it just shows how fiercely contested every piece of nature in this region has become.
After passing through the gate, we stand at the edge of the forest under a sleeping owl, but we only go inside after becoming a part of the forest. Anyone who invades nature must first show their respect, that's what tradition says. Nelly picks a few leaves from the toquilla palm, twists them into a green wreath for each of us and paints our cheeks the crimson color of a flower and says a few words in Kichwa. Only then are we ready to go. Nelly is 55 years old, has given birth to 12 children and has seen how this region has changed in her lifetime.
When she was born, she lived here in a wilderness hardly touched by humans; next to the indigenous settlements there was a single road and a church. Nelly grew up with her grandfather, a hunter, who shared his knowledge of nature with her and introduced her to the community's rites.
Walking through the rainforest with her is like walking through her front yard. She can tell something about every plant and every tree and knows which leaf, when boiled, helps against menstrual problems and which against fever. She knows that termites, when rubbed on the skin, protect against mosquito bites, and which tree to take shelter in if you encounter a cougar. When the men discover a cougar track, we immediately want to apply our new knowledge, but they just laugh and say that the biggest danger in this forest is being bitten by a giant ant, that would really hurt.
It is a centuries-old treasure of knowledge that is in danger of disappearing as the deforestation of the rainforest progresses, because it is a living knowledge that is not found in books or on the Internet, but in everyday interactions in nature, and that is passed on from the old to the young - at least that is how it was for centuries.
But there was a break in Nelly's generation. Her children know much less about nature than she and her siblings, she says. Their hope that the culture and knowledge survive rests on the grandchildren, who will now again have the opportunity to grow up in and with the forest that the community purchased with the support of the non-profit V Social Foundation. There is no lack of enthusiasm: the grandchildren go into the wilderness with just as much pride and confidence as their grandparents. When you walk in the forest with the different generations, you get the impression that people have returned to their homeland after years in the diaspora.
The biographical break that Nelly and her siblings experienced has to do with the displacement of the indigenous people from their traditional habitat on the Napo River in recent decades. Oil deposits were discovered in the Ecuadorian Amazon region in the 1960s. This meant that the region, which until then no politician in the capital Quito had really cared about, became economically interesting almost overnight.
With the oil rush, settlers came from other parts of the country and displaced the indigenous people. The wilderness became a resource, the forest a commodity, and the original inhabitants suddenly became second-class citizens. Some peoples withdrew further into the wilderness, but the Kichwa adopted the Catholic faith and came to terms with the new situation, even if they continue to speak of the "colonos", the settlers, in contrast to their own communities - and the visitor also quickly notices in which villages the newcomers live and in which the indigenous population lives.
About twenty years ago, a group of women led by sisters Nelly and Betty founded the community organization Sinchi Warmi, which translates as “Strong Women”. With the help of donations, they built a lodge that became a popular destination for ecotourists from all over the world. The lodge and the attached restaurant are intended to secure the income of the next generation - so that they do not have as difficult a time as their parents, who often suffered from hunger because their access to the forest was also blocked to the animals they hunted and the plants they picked. Today, when Nelly talks about her years as a young mother, in which she could hardly feed her twelve children and fed them almost exclusively with chicha, a porridge made from boiled and fermented cassava roots, tears still well up in her eyes.
In the last five years, the destruction of nature around the Napo and its tributaries has accelerated again and is thus also questioning the livelihood of the Sinchi Warmi, whose lodge is only booked as long as the guests experience intact nature around it and not an ecological desert. Illegal gold mines are responsible for this devastation, and their widespread expansion in the region is in turn part of a fatal development throughout South America. Since the drug cartels increasingly shifted their activities from Mexico and Colombia to Ecuador a few years ago, a wave of violence has swept across the country.
The drug cartels, which are in reality diversified crime syndicates, have penetrated into the Amazon region. There they encountered a vacuum that they filled with illegal gold mining, arms trafficking, prostitution and violence. The gap arose because foreign tourists initially stayed away because of the pandemic and then stopped returning to Ecuador after it ended for fear of crime. Many men who once worked as taxi drivers or waiters now work in the mines - or for the cartels.
At the same time, the price of gold has skyrocketed during the same period. While a troy ounce cost an average of $1,800 on the world market in 2021, in January of this year it was three times as much at $5,400. Thanks to these price jumps, searching for gold beyond the rivers in soils with a relatively low concentration of the precious metal is suddenly worthwhile. The lower the gold content in the ground, the more area has to be moved and searched and the greater the destruction.
With Juan we follow in the footsteps of the gold prospectors. He is an employee of the V Social Foundation, which supports the Sinchi Warmi in sustainably reforesting the forest and setting up a seed bank and tree nursery, which will later provide them with additional income. He warns us to be careful and to pose as tourists looking for a lodge and not as journalists. Anyone who stands in the way of the gold mines lives dangerously. Critics are repeatedly threatened or even murdered.
The operators don't even make any effort to hide their illegal activities. Most of the mines that are located along the rivers are hidden behind dense vegetation. “If you see several scooters parked in front of a forest path, you know there is a mine behind them,” says Juan. The scooters belong to the miners, mostly locals, who, for lack of alternatives, carry out this dangerous work, where accidents often occur. As we drive, we constantly pass collections of scooters on the side of the road.
Other mines are quite open: along a side road in the middle of the forest we see large cleared areas where excavators are driving back and forth. It looks like a major construction site, but appearances are deceiving. Nothing is being built here, only destroyed. The upper layers of soil are removed and placed in a washing plant in order to filter out the gold from the earth using mercury.
When the area has been grazed, the excavators move on. What remains is devastated areas and heavy metals, which not only pollute the soil but increasingly also the rivers. The poison is in the fish that the men catch, in the cassava roots that the women use to cook chicha, and in the chicken eggs that the children eat for breakfast.
We drive through a village whose entire male population was picked up by the police in a raid a few months ago because everyone was allegedly involved in illegal mining. Apart from such spectacular, media-hitting actions, politicians tend to turn a blind eye. “Most of them are paid here anyway and earn money,” says Juan, disillusioned.
However, a deep rift runs through most indigenous communities. Those who want to make money from the gold mines and those who resist the destruction of their homeland are increasingly irreconcilable. Sometimes this rift even runs through families. It's the same with Nelly. One of her sons works in a gold mine, while she and her daughter are on the front lines fighting to protect the rainforest.
Nelly and her colleagues from the Sinchi Warmi would be happy if their own forest could also show the neighboring indigenous communities that there is an alternative to destruction. If their plan succeeds and the forest also provides them with an income in the future by selling seeds and tree saplings and offering guided tours for guests, then they hope that others will follow them on this path.
We take a break in Puerto Misahuallí, where the Río Misahuallí flows into the Río Napo, which in turn flows into the Amazon hundreds of kilometers further southeast. Tourists used to flock here, take boat trips on the river and go into the forests equipped with cameras and binoculars to watch birds and monkeys. Now the colorful canoes lie unused on the river beach. There used to be a bridge over the river here, which Sinchi Warmi children crossed every morning to go to school in Puerto Mishuallí. But seven years ago it was destroyed, supposedly to build a better one. But the new bridge never came, and now the children have to cross by boat if they want to go to school.
We sit on the bank and watch a few children bathing. It is a painful picture because, on the one hand, the children feel so much joy in repeatedly jumping from a stone into the water, but on the other hand, we also suspect what long-term consequences the frequent bathing in this river full of mercury will have on the health of those happily splashing about. The Sinchi Warmi have banned their children from swimming and fishing in the Río Napo because of the pollution. This means they are denied something that has shaped the childhood of all previous generations.
