Protect an Acre of Rainforest in Ecuador

Cofan member Carlos Descanse reports that his home community of Chandia Na’e is facing a tremendous threat. Recently, illegal gold miners have invaded the land bordering Carlos’s community. You can see one of the pits they excavated in the above photo, which Carlos took. His village is one of four Cofan settlements inside the Cofan-Bermejo Ecological Reserve (RECB), a 140,000-acre protected area the CSF helped to establish in 2002. The reserve is unique in that Cofan people have the legal right to co-manage and co-administer it alongside Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment and Water. Unfortunately, the integrity of the RECB is now in danger because of the Ecuadorian government’s inability—or unwillingness—to protect it and its Cofan inhabitants.

The RECB was created with the expectation that Cofan people would be the ones to care for it. While our Cofan Park Guard Program was in full force, Cofan rangers regularly patrolled the reserve and kept miners, loggers, commercial hunters, and settlers out. After the gradual loss of funding for the program, however, the only people left to protect the RECB are a government-appointed manager and his small team of rangers. Rather than put Cofan people into these positions, the government has given them to non-Indigenous city dwellers, who have neither the capacity nor the motivation to confront the miners, destroy their camps, and confiscate their equipment, all of which the Cofan Park Guards once did on a regular basis. Instead, the government employees spend nearly all their time at the RECB “headquarters,” a small office many miles away in a non-Indigenous town.

With your increased support, we can work with our Cofan partners in Ecuador to pressure the government to return control of the RECB to the Cofan themselves and give them the positions and resources to protect their land. Even with a group of willing and capable Cofan candidates, however, convincing Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment and Water to give them the jobs will take tremendous political lobbying. And even if we do secure these positions for Cofan people, our real goal is to reestablish the Cofan Park Guard Program, which could protect not only the RECB but the Cofan’s entire legalized territory, which amounts to more than one million acres.