Imagine oil workers appearing in your backyard and drilling without warning. Think of constant noise, noxious odors, and routine spills that contaminate your air and water. Then consider all this lasting for decades, with no end in sight and the wealth from the oil sales flowing to people in far-off places.
That is a rough picture of what Ecuador’s Indigenous Waorani people have been living with since the 1970s, when U.S. oil company Texaco arrived and joined a campaign of American missionaries to force contact on families and remove them to evangelical encampments.
As oil operations expanded, so too did the nation’s gross domestic product. Crude has powered the economy ever since. Resistance to the industry’s growth was long seen as an impediment to national progress.
But one year ago, Ecuadorians did something extraordinary. In a nationwide referendum, nearly 59 percent of voters chose to leave billions of dollars worth of heavy crude oil in the ground.
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