This is the website for the Ecos del Yasuní newsletter, which features interviews, news, and updated analysis on the impact of the decision to leave the oil in the ground and how to move forward with it.

Available in Spanish, English, and translated interviews with audio in Wao Tededo, it seeks to provide information and multidisciplinary reflections on the challenges and opportunities arising from this historic decision, addressing topics such as the dismantling of oil infrastructure and the comprehensive restoration of the territory in its legal, ecological, social, philosophical, and technical dimensions.

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Este número aborda la disputa geopolítica por el Yasuní, donde convergen intereses petroleros de China, que busca asegurar suministros energéticos en la Amazonía ecuatoriana, y de Estados Unidos, que propone instalar bases militares en Ecuador. A dos años del referéndum histórico donde el 57% de ecuatorianos votó por dejar el petróleo bajo tierra, el gobierno ha cerrado apenas 10 de 247 pozos activos, incumpliendo el mandato popular. La edición presenta una entrevista con el activista nigeriano Nnimmo Bassey, quien vincula extractivismo con colonialismo y propone que la reparación territorial debe incluir auditorías independientes, descontaminación, restauración ecológica-cultural y justicia epistémica, promoviendo la «Yasunización del mundo» como estrategia global anticolonial. Finalmente, denuncia la represión militar contra la comunidad Waorani de Mintaro en septiembre de 2025, con detenciones arbitrarias durante protestas, evidenciando la criminalización de la resistencia indígena en defensa de sus territorios ancestrales.

We analyze the worrying pace of oil decommissioning in the Yasuní region, where only 10 of 247 wells have been closed since the 2023 Popular Consultation, while the government signs new drilling contracts that threaten the territories of the Tagaeri and Taromenane peoples in voluntary isolation, in contradiction to the popular mandate and the recent landmark ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Interview with Eduardo Góes Neves, archaeologist and professor at the University of São Paulo, who reveals how archaeological evidence demonstrates that Amazonian Indigenous peoples not only inhabited these territories for millennia but also created the forest we know today, challenging the narratives of scarcity that underpin extractivism and offering keys to imagining regenerative infrastructure in the face of the climate crisis.

NAWE denounced the serious violations of the rights of uncontacted peoples by a U.S. foundation attempting to establish direct contact, highlighting how the lack of territorial control allows for outside interference that jeopardizes the survival of these peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

We explore the tensions between Ecuador's electoral processes and the systematic silencing of the Yasuní issue in public debate, while analyzing the historic impact of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights' ruling on Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and its implications for the closure of Block 43.

Interview with Daniel Vázquez, a UNAM researcher specializing in macrocrime networks, who offers an in-depth analysis of the relationship between extractivism and violence in Amazonian contexts, examining methodologies for understanding the criminal dynamics that emerge in megaproject territories.

We investigate the silenced pattern of Amazonian crime in the context of the oil closure, documenting the alarming 180% increase in homicides in Orellana and the 350% increase in environmental crimes, while local communities begin processes of surveillance and planting of farms for forest regeneration in a context of increasing structural violence.

In this edition, we analyze the impact of the permanent change in the water cycle on a global scale and examine the results of the recent COP in Baku, whose development has become a symbol of the lack of decisive responses to the climate crisis, drawing parallels with the Yasuní case.

Interview with Tom Mitro, an oil exploitation expert with more than four decades of experience, who offers a detailed analysis of the report published by the CEVP-ITT (Yasuní Popular Will Execution Committee – ITT).

Larry Lohman, of the Corner House organization, shares a story that narrates how capital metaphorically roams the world's forests, while we address the worrying situation of recent threats against Indigenous leaders of the Yasuní peoples.

After the referendum

The campaign for the “Yes to Yasuní” referendum emerged from diversity and multiplicity. It was not a homogeneous national campaign, but rather a mosaic of youth organizations across different territories of the country, where multiple organizations and social struggles converged with their own strategies and graphic expressions, united by the joy and hope of building a different future. This diversity of efforts crystallized on August 20, 2023, when nearly 60% of Ecuadorians decided to halt oil exploitation and begin the comprehensive restoration of the Yasuní and its peoples, marking an unprecedented moment in global history. No candidate enjoyed as much support as Yasuní, and this fact must be decisive when thinking about how we should act politically in the future.

This historic decision expressed hope in its two fundamental dimensions: as confidence in achieving something concrete (the effective protection of Yasuní) and as a state of mind that makes the possible visible (the imagination of a post-extractive Ecuador). The unprecedented events of 2023 opened a crack in what seemed like an inevitable destiny of extraction, redefining the scope of what can be thought not only in Ecuador but also in other territories dependent on extractivism.

Yasuní’s victory transcends the challenge to extractivism as an economic practice to question the entire conceptual architecture that sustains it. When a population democratically decides to keep oil underground, it challenges the linear notion of progress, the separation between nature and culture, the supremacy of monetary value, profit and accumulation, and the short-term conception of time. This epistemic challenge is connected to Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing, whose relationship with nature has historically resisted extractivism.

As an ethical horizon, Yasuní proposes a profound reformulation of values: it calls for a radical inversion where the highest value lies in the recognition and care of the multiple forms of life and their interrelations; it establishes an ethical temporality that prioritizes the future over immediate benefit; it tangibly expands the circle of moral consideration towards the non-human; it democratizes ethical decisions about the future; and it proposes an ethics of limits in contrast to infinite growth.

Today, the challenge lies in transforming this historic crack into a walkable path: building an economy not dependent on exploitation, translating that historic “Yes” into new ways of relating to nature, and turning this unprecedented moment into a new common sense. Voices and expertise from different territories have joined this challenge—their analyses, reflections, and contributions are Echoes of the Yasuní.

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