Letter to be sent to:
Dr Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador
rafael.correa@presidencia.gob.ec
Ministro de Ambiente
walter.garcia@ambiente.gob.ec, wgarcia@ambiente.gob.ec,
Ministro Interior
fuentesd@outlook.com
C/C presidencia@accionecologica.org
TO THE ECUADORIAN GOVERNMENT: AGAINST THE DOUBLE EXTRACTIVIST HUNTING
December 21, 2016
Dr Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador,
We would like to express our concern about the progress of mega-mining in Amazonian indigenous Shuar territory, where the community of Nankints in the Morona Santiago province was evicted in August 2016 to give way to the construction of a mining camp by the Chinese company Explorcobres SA.
It is known that this mining project is progressing without the mandatory prior consultation or consent from the affected communities, and that the Shuar communities have filed different legal actions without being heard by their government.
In recent days, in the light of the claims of the Shuar community, the levels of conflict with the transnational mining company have escalated in such a way that there is already one dead and several injured. In your weekly TV show Enlace Ciudadano of December 17, you disqualified the Amazonian indigenous people saying that "it is already about paramilitary and semi-criminal groups ..." This criminalization discourse was accompanied by the decree of State of Exception and immediate militarization of the Shuar territories, for which your government launched a real hunt against community leaders and members, in a clear illustration of extractivist violence.
In this context of violation of human rights, your government has just launched a second hunt, attacking the NGO Acción Ecológica, known nationally and internationally for its defense of the collective rights of peoples and the rights of nature, threatening with shutting down and dissolving this organization, giving in to pressure from the Chinese transnationals because Acción Ecológica supports the Shuar people.
We repudiate the extractivist violence of the Ecuadorian government and express our solidarity with the struggle of the Shuar people and with the defense of human rights carried out by Ecological Action, demanding that your government immediately stops this double hunt.
