The Kichwa First People of Sarayaku, the organizations CONAIE, CONFENIAE, ECUARUNARI, NEA, FENASH-P, NASE, and the indigenous peoples and communities of the Bobonaza river basin (Pakayaku, Teresa Mama, and Boveras), gathered on August 12th, 2012, in celebratory act about the sentence, in the assembly house of the Sarayaku people, state the following:
We, as the legitimate authorities and governors of our territories, reaffirm the full exercise of our constitutional collective rights that guarantee the continuity of our identity and the territorial life spaces of the Selva Viviente (Living Jungle).
The actions and industrial-scale projects being promoted by the current State regime are systematically violating the life and rights of indigenous peoples and nations, pushing us toward ecocide and genocide.
The unilateral decision of the State to permit the exploitation by oil and mining companies is not in compliance with the right to free, prior, and informed consultation, established in the Constitution. For example, the expansion of Block 10, operated by the company called AGIP, affects the territories of the Kichwa, Achuar, Sápara, and Shuar nationalities in the province of Pastaza. In the Amazon, we roundly reject any activity of the company AGIP in our territories.
We denounce the illegal intromission of the Sub-secretariat of Hydrocarbons in the territory of the Sápara Nation and other nationalities of Pastaza, Napo, and Morona Santiago, with the desire of imposing the illegal Presidential Decree 1247 of July 19th, 2012, which intends to delete consultation, replacing it with a simple procedure of socialization or information, ignoring the sentence of the Inter-American Court in the Sarayaku case.
We declare ourselves in a state of maximum emergency and alert within all indigenous territories in the provinces of Napo, Pastaza, and Morona Santiago where they want to implement the 11th Round oil auction.
We will stand firm and will apply our own norms, statutes, and laws to anyone who tries to invade our territories.
The Kichwa People of Sarayaku and other nationalities have taken care of and administered our territories for millennia, strengthening step by step our socio-organizational systems which are based in our ancestral knowledge and practices, of a true Life in Harmony with the Living Jungle (Kawsak Sacha, Iwaku Ikiam, Kamputin Iwiaku, Naku Ikichaka in the Kichwa, Shuar, Achuar, and Sápara languages respectively). As such, we firmly reject all the accusations of President Rafael Correa, in relation to the supposed manipulations of NGOs.
We consider those declarations to be racist and they tend toward misinforming the Ecuadorian population and the citizenship in general, delegitimizing our processes of denunciation to international organisms that have concluded that the rights of the people of Sarayaku have been violated in Ecuador.
Signing this document:
José Gualinga
President of the People of Sarayaku
Humberto Cholango
President of CONAIE
Franco Viteri
President of CONFENIAE
Manuel Castro
Director of International Relations of ECUARUNARI
Jaime Vargas
President of NAE
Cristóbal Jimpikit
President of FENASH-P
Marco Montawano
Representative of the Sápara Nation
Jhonny Dahua
President of CITAKIB
Zenaida Yasacama
President of the People of Pakayaku
Delfa Malaver
President of the People of Boveras
