The Cofán people in Ecuador watch over the forest to defend it from invaders. After studying in the U.S., Hugo Lucitante returned home to help.
A Cofán canoeist paddles in Ecuador’s Zábalo River wetlands. Over a few decades, the government designated areas from lowland Amazonia to the base of the Andes as Cofán territory. Our history, like that of so many other Indigenous nations, includes defiant adaptation for survival purposes. The remote little village where I spent my early years exists only because during the 1980s about a dozen families, including my parents, began moving away from the oil-contaminated upriver town where they had lived. The new settlement of homes was named Zábalo, for the smaller river nearby.
At age 10, Hugo Lucitante was sent to Seattle for a U.S. education. Now 37, he is back in his homeland, building a lab where researchers and Cofán will work together.What of our forest guardians program? It cost about $400,000 a year to run, with roughly half dedicated to guardians’ wages, and around a decade ago, the funding ran out. We’d been supported by foreign donors.
On Cofán-managed land, the Bermeja River winds around a patchwork of polluted open pits made by trespassers who exploit these ancestral lands to illegally mine gold.
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