Divided by Gold
YEAR
2020.
Soccer, beers, barbecue,
shared sweat, teamwork. Laughter. Nine people
with yellow rubber boots and machetes in their
hands smile at the camera. Others, as if it were
choreographed, weed a section of jungle with
their bare hands to set up the field. In the
background, a machine turns and cement covers
the bricks that will support the construction of
a communal house. The roof is made of zinc.
Several men raise a wooden pole on which they
install an electricity box. All the
photographs speak of the joy of shared labor and
community.
“Those were our social
events, which took place before the Chinese
company poisoned the conscience of some
residents,” says Patricio Villamil three years
later while sending photos through WhatsApp.
Villamil is the president of the community of
Shiguacocha, a village of 50 families in the
rural area of the Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola
canton in the province of Napo in the Ecuadorian
Amazon.
The
company, Terraearth
Resources, specializes in gold mining and
has a 4,077-acre, small-scale mining concession
in the region. Mineral extraction in Napo began
more than 25 years ago. But between 2015 and
2023 it expanded by 300
percent.
“If we look back, the
first mining companies came to settle in rural
areas inhabited by Indigenous communities that
did not know what they were coming to do and, in
addition, had no education. Some of them did not
even speak Spanish,” says Andres Rojas,
Ombudsman of Napo.
“The companies
arrived offering work, favors, and money. They
made the elders put their fingerprints on
permits, documents, and contracts, or they
bought the land from them at ridiculous prices.
The people began to divide between those who
benefited from the newly arrived companies and
those who witnessed the painful destruction of
their land, their water, their habitat.”
This
feature is the first of a three-part series
(translated from Spanish) by journalist Gabriela
Verdezoto Landívar that investigates and offers
different points of view on gold mining in the
Ecuadorian Amazon’s Napo province, where mining
grew 907 percent between 2011 and
2021.
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