Standing beside a stream stained dark with oil in Ecuador’s northern Amazon, an Indigenous woman shook her head in disbelief as she stared at the oily sheen drifting across the water and broken pipes cutting through the forest. Nearby, gas flares burned above the treetops.
Julia Catalina Chumbi, a 76-year-old leader from the Shuar ethnic group in the southern Amazon province of Pastaza, had traveled hundreds of miles to see the damage for herself — the legacy of decades of oil and gas production in the northeastern province of Sucumbios.
