Brazilians Denounce Dirty Belo Monte-Euro Connections

May 1, 2013 | Christian Poirier

The social and environmental disaster currently being triggered by Brazil's Belo Monte dam on the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon has generated worldwide outrage, with its mounting polemic justifiably centered upon the mega-dam's Brazilian proponents, including the reckless government of President Dilma Rousseff. Yet little is known about the project's international benefactors, which are providing critical financial, logistical, and indeed political support to Belo Monte and Brazil's extensive dam-building agenda for the Amazon.

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Damocracy: The Movie

April 30, 2013

Damocracy is a powerful new documentary that debunks the myth of large-scale dams as clean energy and a solution to climate change. It records the priceless cultural and natural heritage the world would lose in the Amazon and Mesopotamia if two planned large-scale dams are built – the Belo Monte dam in Brazil, and Ilisu dam in Turkey. Damocracy is a story of resistance by the thousands of people who will be displaced, and a call to the world to support their struggle.

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Visiting Yawepare and Clean Water for the Amazon

April 25, 2013 | Alex Goff

It's a long trip from the Amazonian city of Coca to the Waorani community of Yawepare on the edge of Yasuní National Park in Ecuador, much longer than the actual distance would seem to indicate. After almost an hour at high speeds along a paved portion of the Via Auca, the first road in the region built by Texaco when the company initially began operating in the area, you turn off onto the Via Pindo. From there, it's another hour or more on a rocky, unpaved road that snakes through the jungle passing oil stations, platforms, gas flares, and mestizo, Kichwa, Shuar, and Waorani communities. Out here you're a long way from Coca. It was in this area, specifically in the mestizo community of Los Reyes, where, in 2009, a woman and her family were attacked and killed by the Tagaeri, one of the two Waorani subgroups living in voluntary isolation in the Ecuadorian Amazon. When you're out here it's almost unfathomable to look around and imagine these uncontacted indigenous groups, people of an ancient culture still living in the most traditional ways, in such close proximity to modernized communities and large-scale oil activity. That's the reality of uncontacted groups in Ecuador today. There is very little space left in the forest to roam, and every day it gets smaller.

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Ecuador Delays 11th Oil Round Deadline

April 22, 2013

In a bit of an Earth Day reprieve, Ecuador has extended the deadline for companies to offer bids for the 16 oil blocks up for sale in the country's southeastern Amazon rainforests. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the Ministry of Non Renewable Resources pushed the date for interested companies to submit bids from May 30 to July 16, stating that the extension would give companies more time to "review the geology of the oil blocks and to complete legal paperwork necessary."

Sounds to us like no one is interested in Ecuador's dirty oil!

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Idle No More Goes Up Against Ecuador's 11th Round

April 19, 2013 | Adam Zuckerman

Award-winning actress and aboriginal activist Michelle Thrush is no stranger to public speaking. But her latest brilliant performance was not on a set; it was in a recent meeting between the Ecuadorian government and Canadian oil investors conducted in Calgary as Ecuador peddles the 11th Oil Round around the globe.

Introducing herself by her native name of Goodfeathers Woman, Michelle demanded to know why the Ecuadorian government is "auctioning off over three million hectares of indigenous land in the Amazon without the consent of the people who live there." Striding to the front of the room, she presented the government with a declaration of opposition from five indigenous nationalities whose rainforest communities would be devastated by the oil round. Amazon Watch community liaison Mike Byerley and three other activists who strategically entered the meeting filmed the encounter, holding up a banner that read ¡Basta de Contaminación Petrolera! (Enough with Oil Contamination!)

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