This was the first time that I shared a mission with my photographer companion, Francisco Ipanaqué: to travel during 10 days to the province of Sucumbíos, close to the Colombian border, within a zone well known for the presence of FARC partisans, in search of areas that could attract domestic and international tourism.

Tourism opportunities in Sucumbíos? The idea kept ringing in my head as a great deal of ominous news kept pouring in about armed violence exactly in that region.

We left Quito, Ecuador’s capital, some 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) to the south of the Equator that divides the planet’s hemispheres. We then descended from the eastern mountain range, passing at the foot of the Reventador volcano, an active one, mind you, that has more than once covered Ecuador’s capital with ashes in the last decade.

Both in the urban areas as in the outskirts or, in other words, in the heart of settler zones in Sucumbíos and immediate neighboring areas, the effects of oil exploitation were quite plain: black, viscous pools, metallic towers from which enormous flames belched into the sky, vegetation reduced to dried up yellowed shrubs and rusty pipes running over the green covering as far as the eye could see.

Leaving this scenario behind, we advanced to a port in the Cuyabeno River. We rented a small speedboat which would carry us for the next four hours into the river in search of waterlogged areas.

Right when the dull drone of the speedboat’s engine was about to put us to sleep, our guide began to knock on the vessel’s sides with his right hand, moving about unsteadily in its center, while we looked on uncomprehendingly and half dazed. Some fifteen seconds later, which seemed like hours to us in that otherwise unbroken and infinite silence, the dorsal fin of a pink river dolphin surfaced timidly accompanied by a slight squeal just to submerge once again.

The sudden change in pace took us altogether by surprise: a freshwater cetacean!

It was like awakening from the boredom of an uneventful trip. Around us, however, we could no longer discern the riverbanks, for the flood had all but reached the trees’ canopy. We had arrived at the Cuyabeno Reserve, the closest neighbor and younger sister, so to speak, of the Yasuní National Park, the location of nothing less than one of the largest and most complete biosphere reserves in the world.

But what has the Cuyabeno Reserve to do with this Yasuní region, the goal of our trip to begin with?

A great deal actually: the Cuyabeno Reserve suffers under an over exploitation of tourism, while Yasuní warranted an intervention by the UNESCO in order to declare it a fully protected zone. Moreover and concerning the latter, the Ecuadorian government stirred up a great deal of expectation with the announcement of a financial compensation system in exchange for environmental services, in other words, to refrain from exploiting the greatest oil reservoirs ever to be found in the country in order to preserve this natural haven.

A historical relationship.

Visualizar Yasuni - Equador em um mapa maior

Ecuador’s relationship with the Amazon region is as old as its own existence... Historians attribute to this country the initiative to form the expedition (see box) that took a handful of Spaniards and natives to discover the Amazon River, the lengthiest and the one with the largest surface area in the world; a forest icon of the west of Ecuador, Peru and Brazil.

But then why did this forest region recover its leading role which was once considered almost mythical?

This came to be thanks to an initiative called Yasuní ITT. The governmental proposal known as Yasuní Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini – ITT is an attempt to leave 846 million barrels of untapped oil just where they are: under the earth, in exchange for receiving at least 50% of its exploitation value - if exploited by Ecuador itself - from the international community. The proposal was conceived in 2007 and already counts on foreign interest that has put up some US$3.5 million for the cause.

All this oil is located mostly beneath the Yasuní National Park, an ecological reservation that protects a place that supports the largest biodiversity on the planet, in proportional terms. We are looking at a 9.8 thousand km2 of land declared as protected by the government of Ecuador in 1979 and a decade later by UNESCO who considered the entire zone a Biosphere Reservation, including it in the list of humanity’s natural heritage regions.

Biodiversity

“According to data analysis conducted by researchers from the US, Ecuador, the UK and Germany in Yasuní, the park is home to 150 species of amphibians, 596 species of birds, 200 species of mammals and an estimated 100 thousand species of insects. Scientists also confirmed that within a single hectare in Yasuní there are more species of trees, about 655, than all native species in the United States and Canada together. Numbers exceed 1,100 species of trees within an area of 25 hectares”. This quote was taken from a study published in January in the scientific journal, PLoS ONE, that can be freely accessed.

For Ecuadorian botanist Gorky Villa, who belongs to the Finding Species organization and one of the authors of the study, “Within a single hectare of Yasuní there are more trees, bushes and lianas than anywhere else in the world.”

To leave the oil where it is also means to prevent the liberation of 400 million cubic tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Dissensions

In the beginning of his mandate, the government of President Rafael Correa created a commission in charge of negotiating the Yasuní ITT project, over which several countries had demonstrated an interest in donating resources in exchange for environmental services rendered. Germany headed the list with more than 50 million Euros a year.

The commission had two leaders who were considered influential for environmental subjects in the government of the self-proclaimed Citizen’s Revolution: Fánder Falconi and Roque Sevilla.

Falconi headed the Foreign Ministry/Chancellery and Sevilla had been a chief administrator of the capital city of Quito. Both headed the delegation that would sign the first agreements with the donating countries, more precisely, during the World Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December 2009.

However, the signing of a document that created the figure of the fund to manage the resources that would be donated was barred by President Rafael Correa himself, who considered such negotiations detrimental to the interests of his country.

The bottom line was that Correa was opposed to have the international community decide over the final destination of those funds that would be handed over to the country in exchange of oil exploitation. The argument was actually a matter of sovereignty.

This decision stirred Ecuador’s political scene last January because the two strong men in environmental issues renounced their commission that was then quickly restructured.

Local press, such as the El Universo newspaper (www.eluniverso.com), with the largest circulation in the country, has doubted the government’s intention to preserve the oil where it lies underground and denounced the presence of machines on the limits of the vast biosphere reserve.

“It has been over a year now that the state-owned company Petroamazonas, began activities in the more remote sectors of the ITT. Today, machines are building a new pipeline up to the Edén Yuturi field, with a goal to extract crude oil from Yasuní”, stated El Universo newspaper in its investigation.

In early February, the government began again negotiations of a proposal and by mid February received an offer from Egypt.

Meanwhile, Yasuní continues to surprise the world: according to Ecuador´s Pontifícia Universidade Católica, in a public bulletin, five new species of frog were discovered in the reserve.

Any hope for the Yasuní biosphere now rests on the shoulders of politics.

Ricardo Tello is a free-lance journalist. He was editor of El Universo newspaper in Guayaquil and of El Tempo in Cuenca. Ricardo has won many awards, such as the Jorge Matilla Ortega, in Ecuador, and received the first of Avina´s Investigative Journalism Grants. Currently he also teaches at university.