The Amazonian Community That Beat Big Oil Is Sharing Its Secrets

SARAYAKU, Ecuador—The canoe motor rattled against the current as Guisel Marworno and Wagner Karipuna traveled down the Bobonaza River. The Brazilian Indigenous leaders had come seeking help.

Last year, state-owned Petrobras began exploring for offshore oil near their coastal territories. The prospect of an oil boom is already reshaping the nearby city of Oiapoque, where new settlers are ratcheting up pressure on Indigenous lands also facing threats from pollution and climate change.

Across the Amazon basin, such forces are bearing down upon Indigenous territories, with governments imposing oil and gas concessions over some 31 million hectares of those lands, an area roughly the size of Poland. 

Projects like these—fundamentally at odds with many Indigenous communities’ cultures and spiritual philosophies—often arrive as foregone conclusions. Companies arrive armed with high-powered lawyers, investment dollars and promises of economic growth. Communities, with far fewer resources, are forced to navigate unfamiliar legal systems while trying to hold their communities together under mounting pressure.  

Guisel Marworno’s and Wagner Karipuna’s peoples, the Galibi Marworno and Karipuna, have spent generations defending their territories—home to Amazon rainforest, belts of massive mangroves and mudflats—against small-scale invasions from hunters, loggers and wildlife traffickers. But they had never faced a project of this scale and speed, or backed by the full force of the Brazilian government.  

That’s why they were en route to Sarayaku.

The Kichwa people of Sarayaku had confronted an oil company in the early 2000s—and forced it out. Their resistance also helped pioneer the global rights of nature movement, the idea that ecosystems are living beings with inherent legal rights, such as to exist and flourish. 

The Brazilian chiefs weren’t traveling alone. The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, which organized the delegation, had brought together about two dozen people from across the Amazon and beyond, including lawyers and Indigenous leaders working to advance government recognition of nature’s rights. For Natalia Greene, the alliance’s global director, Sarayaku is the heart of the movement—a community whose victories have shown what rights of nature can mean in practice.

In a canoe just behind them were two winners of the Goldman Prize, a major environmental-advocacy award: Colombian anti-fracking activist Yuvelis Morales Blanco and Mari Luz Cañaquiri Murayari, whose Kukama community in Peru won a landmark rights-of-nature case for the Marañón River in 2024. They had come to exchange strategies and study Sarayaku’s victories. 

On the riverbank ahead, Sarayaku’s leaders were waiting for them.

“Companies Never Lose”

Patricia Gualinga, 57, stood at the edge of the Bobonaza in a long blue-and-white dress, the forest humming behind her. Her black hair fell to the small of her back, tied in a low ponytail. She studied the visitors, then broke into a wide, generous smile. One of the community’s best-known defenders, the Kichwa leader has spent decades fighting to protect her territory and empower its women. For Patricia, those struggles are inseparable. 

She believes the Earth has a feminine energy that is harmed when extractive industries contaminate the land. She has also witnessed how resource extraction can fuel division, alcoholism and violence against women in Indigenous communities. Her own relatives have told her stories of sexual violence by oil workers.

Stepping lightly on the land, Patricia led Guisel Marworno, Wagner Karipuna and the others toward Sarayaku’s center, a sandy oval clearing surrounded by wooden homes and communal buildings. Inside a long wooden structure, photographs covered the walls, displaying images of Sarayaku’s governing council, known as Tayjasaruta.

Long before adapting to Ecuadorian-imposed legal structures, Sarayaku people lived largely as a collection of family clans that self-governed with traditional leaders. As pressure from extractive industries mounted, they formed a council to engage with the state while preserving traditional decision-making processes and cultural values. 

Central to those values is the belief that the territory is an interconnected living system, encompassing visible and invisible beings. Sarayaku calls its reciprocal relationship with that system Sumak Kawsay, or living in harmony.

Vice President Abigail Gualinga welcomed the visitors, followed by Sarayaku’s directors of health, education, economy, transportation and other departments. Then Patricia took the floor.

She began with a key document: the legal title to Sarayaku’s territory. Members of Sarayaku’s seven communities demanded recognition and traveled to the capital in 1992 to collect the papers, assuming they meant security. Four years later, the government, which owns subsurface rights, gave an Argentine oil company the go-ahead to drill in the territory. On government maps, the communities’ homelands became Oil Block 23.

Guisel Marworno and Wagner Karipuna sat on wooden benches at the front, listening closely through an interpreter. They, too, have legal titles to their territories, but in their case, it’s the current and potential future impacts of nearby drilling that are at issue. 

Sarayaku was long known as fiercely independent. So much so, Patricia said, that the military marked it as a red dot on its maps. In 2002, the oil company entered the territory escorted by the Ecuadorian military. 

Sarayaku organized. People blocked operations where they could, launched an international campaign and refused attempts to divide the community. Their peaceful resistance was met with a violent crackdown. Women and children were not spared. Four leaders were allegedly tortured, according to court documents. 

Neither Ecuador’s ministries of environment and foreign affairs nor its attorney general’s office responded to requests for comment.

After months of Sarayaku’s resistance, the oil company pulled out in 2003. But it left tons of explosives buried across the territory, remnants of its search for oil. Sarayaku was left to deal with the consequences.

“Companies never lose,” Patricia said. Throughout the audience, heads nodded. 

As Sarayaku fought to have the explosives removed, the government portrayed the people as an obstacle to development, a poor community standing in the way of progress, Patricia said. 

“We were not rejecting development,” she added. “We were defending our way of life.” 

When Ecuador’s courts failed to provide a remedy, Sarayaku took its case to the Inter-American human rights system. In 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that Ecuador had violated the community’s rights by allowing oil exploration on its territory without consultation. Sarayaku’s land rights were an important part of that decision. The court ordered the government to provide financial and other reparations, and to remove the explosives.

The case has become larger than Sarayaku. Its victory established a landmark precedent for Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior and informed consultation about projects affecting their territories. It also prompted the court to acknowledge the special relationship between Indigenous peoples and their territories, and order the government to respect that. Communities that once had little chance of countering governments or oil companies could look to Sarayaku and see another possibility.

Guisel Marworno and Wagner Karipuna took in every detail. Their communities, along with two other Indigenous peoples in their area—the Palikur-Arukwayene and Galibi Kali’na—filed a lawsuit in 2025 in Brazil, challenging the government’s drilling plans. 

Standing at the front of the hall, Patricia told the room that persevering through protracted struggles was worth it. 

For Sarayaku, Patricia said, the Inter-American Court ruling marked a moment of dignity. Ecuador sent ministers to apologize, fulfilling part of the court order. But much remains unfinished. The explosives are still there. And Sarayaku wants the government’s reparations to include recognition of its forest as a living being and rights-holder. 

In August, the community took that request to the Inter-American Court as part of the still-open case against the government. 

“We can fight,” Patricia told the visitors, meaning all of them.

Kawsak Sacha, the Living Forest

At 4 a.m. the next morning, two hours before the sun would light the sky, José Gualinga, 62, claimed his place by the fire in an open-sided thatched-roof shelter near the riverbank. A giant pot of guayusa tea simmered before him.

Sarayaku people have traditionally used the plant, rich in antioxidants and caffeine, as a medicine for the lungs, to prepare hunters and to interpret dreams. 

Smoke drifted around José, Patricia’s brother, as he told stories about the 2002 invasion and Sarayaku’s history. He was fully awake but unhurried. The firelight caught his dark shoulder-length hair and the tea-filled gourd in his hands.   

José has staked his life, and the future of his people, on knowledge passed down from his ancestors, the Tayak. That knowledge helped Sarayaku do more than force an oil company out of its territory. It also gave the community a language to explain why.

At the center is Sarayaku’s Kawsak Sacha—“Living Forest”—declaration, which José proposed in 2004 after 18 years of studying and codifying ancestral teachings, seeking wisdom to confront increasing pressure from oil interests. At its heart is an explanation of how Sarayaku people have always understood their Amazonian territory: as a living, intelligent forest—not a collection of resources for humans to exploit.

The idea helped inspire Ecuadorians to recognize nature’s rights in their 2008 constitution. Court cases followed: In Ecuador’s Intag Valley, endangered frogs became central to a lawsuit over copper mining, and in 2021 the Constitutional Court ruled that mining permits violated the rights of the Los Cedros cloud forest, citing threats to biodiversity, ecosystems, water and local communities. Those and other victories have shaken the mining and oil industries, whose rights have long prevailed. 

Now, José lifted his gourd and drank. Around the world, he noted, legal systems were beginning to recognize individual elements of nature—rivers, mountains and lagoons—as subjects with rights. He welcomed those efforts but said Kawsak Sacha is broader. It does not separate a river from the forest around it or the invisible beings throughout.

“For us, Kawsak Sacha is everything,” José said. “The whole living territory.”

That understanding also shapes how Sarayaku’s people live in the forest. 

“Some people ask why we still hunt monkeys,” José said. “They say monkeys have rights. I agree that we must protect the living system. But people also need to eat.”

Hunting, he explained, has never been only about taking an animal from the forest. It involves knowledge, discipline and a relationship between the hunter and the animal. The hunter would not simply enter the forest and fire a weapon. One must approach the animal through dreams and visions, connecting with it and obtaining its consent so that people can feed themselves while maintaining the forest’s natural balance.

“You have to be in communion with the monkey,” José said. “The monkey must transfer its energy to you.” 

Many humans have lost a deep connection to other life, in José’s view. Now they have little or no feelings toward other beings, seeing them as spiritless objects.  

In Sarayaku, where that’s not the case, the community monitors plants and animals it harvests, ensuring all beings can repopulate. If populations dip, Sarayaku imposes hunting, fishing and harvesting moratoriums. 

A prophecy passed down by the Tayek said Sarayaku’s residents were the people of midday—the ones who would remain standing after the others had fallen. Many Sarayaku people drew strength from that idea. 

“But resisting is very tiring,” he said.

His voice changed when he spoke about the cost. The struggle had affected people psychologically. There had been illness, fear and trauma. Women and children bore the consequences alongside men, and the harm often persisted long after conflicts ended. 

But the forest restored them. Walking beneath the trees, listening to the river and taking part in communal life, José said, helped people recover their energy.

“The jungle always gives strength and balance back,” he said. 

With everyone’s gourd freshly filled with tea, José addressed a core question for Sarayaku and other Indigenous communities: What does it mean to develop?

Sarayaku did not reject development, he said. The community wants better water systems, communications, health care and other modern conveniences. But development could not mean accepting someone else’s definition of progress.

“People say development means a road, an oil company or a mining company,” he said. “They call deforestation and extraction development.”

Sarayaku people imagine something different: following the principles of the Living Forest declaration and Sumak Kawsay. Improving life without destroying the forest that makes life possible. The community’s minga system—collective work done for the benefit of the community—is one expression of that. Every two months, people work together to clear and maintain the trails. The work is both practical and a way of maintaining the bonds that hold the community together. 

Sarayaku’s people do not want to replicate the cities beyond their borders, where houses have gathered along roads and settlements gradually replace the forest.

“We want our own way of living,” José said. 

This is how Sarayaku measures wealth and happiness, he said: abundant forests, clean rivers, fertile land, thriving wildlife, a united community and healthy, strong people.  

The early morning sun now streamed through slivers of canopy. José lifted his gourd again.

The greatest threat to the people of midday, he said, was not only the companies that came for the oil or minerals. It was the philosophy that they had to become someone else in order to progress.  

Alternative Societies Already Exist

Over a dinner of fish and yucca that evening, food drawn from the river or Sarayaku’s gardens, Guisel Marworno and Wagner Karipuna sat at a long wooden table with their lawyer, Rodrigo Leitão, a Brazilian jujitsu black belt whose law practice specializes in defending Indigenous peoples and other communities against extractive industries. The chiefs explained how their communities, like Sarayaku, had built societies based on ancestral wisdom. 

Land isn’t just physical space, they said; it is alive and inhabited by invisible beings with whom humans must maintain a relationship of reciprocity and balance. The Karuanas, for example, are understood as sentinels of sacred places. Shamans mediate between worlds, interpreting signs and identifying imbalances that need healing. But environmental degradation can compromise that work.

This understanding of the natural world as living can ground a society and its laws just as any other worldview. Guisel Marworno’s and Wagner Karipuna’s communities have organized around it, developing a governance system based on “bioeconomies” that include sustainable açaí harvesting, tourism and fishing. Those systems ensure food security and communities’ autonomy while protecting nature, Leitão said. 

He framed the Brazilian government’s planned drilling in the name of “economic development” as grossly overlooking the alternative economies already in place in the region. An oil spill could erase generations of effort.

“We are not dealing with an empty area, nor with a socially disorganized space waiting for an external project to give it economic meaning,” Leitão said over the chatter of cross-cutting conversations in Portuguese, Spanish and English. “There is no economic vacuum.” 

Yet for defending their way of life, Guisel Marworno and Wagner Karipuna increasingly feel targeted. As the men traveled through the city of Oiapoque in recent months, people sometimes pointed at and mocked them as “anti-development” for opposing the government’s drilling plans. That type of rhetoric, also used against Sarayaku, is a common tactic to discredit environmental defenders and is sometimes a precursor to violence, according to researchers.   

The risks facing Brazilian environmental defenders are growing. Last year, the country recorded twice as many killings of environmental defenders as the year before, making it the world’s second-deadliest country for people peacefully protecting nature. 

While Brazil’s leftist president has taken steps to curb deforestation and strengthen environmental protections, the country’s extractive-based economy endures. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s backing of state oil giant Petrobras’ plans to drill off the coast of Oiapoque is only the latest iteration.

Brazil’s environment ministry referred questions to the Indigenous affairs ministry, which did not respond. Petrobras’ press team said in a written statement to Inside Climate News that it held public meetings before drilling began and maintains channels for dialogue with the public. Responding to concerns about pressures on the environment and Indigenous peoples in the area, the company said many factors beyond oil are playing a role, including the 2017 opening of a bridge connecting French Guiana and Brazil.

As Guisel Marworno and Wagner Karipuna finished dinner, they spoke about unnerving changes across their territories driven by political decisions, both domestic and foreign. Intensifying heat. Shifting rainfall patterns. Failing crops. Faster-moving fires. They had documented these over time with traditional recordkeeping. Climate change, they said, threatened their peoples’ continued existence. 

“Our territory is an extension of who we are, as are our spirituality and our economy,” Wagner Karipuna said, “and it is our duty to care for nature so that it continues to care for us.” 

A Way of Understanding

Later that evening, the visitors settled into a communal residential building near the river. The open-air, wooden structure stood above the riverbank, its second floor catching the breeze off the water.

Aimee Roberson, executive director of Cultural Survival, stretched out in a hammock, watching the river through the railings. She had spent the past two days processing how Sarayaku translated its ancestral values into a governance system that could confront governments and corporations on their own terms.

Roberson, a New Mexico-based member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and a descendant of the Chickasaw Nation, has both a global and hyperlocal perspective on the myriad issues facing Indigenous peoples. Cultural Survival works with communities worldwide, maintaining close connections to grassroots organizations. Unlike Guisel Marworno and Wagner Karipuna, she came to Sarayaku with an unsettled view of the rights of nature. She wasn’t sure what it might mean for Indigenous peoples. But now she feels the community’s approach would resonate far beyond its own territory.

“What Sarayaku is doing gives allies—people who aren’t Indigenous—a way to understand it,” she said, looking out at the trees. She sat in near darkness, in a world wracked by environmental crises, feeling hopeful. 

“We need to find a way to move into the future that is better than the trajectory we’re currently on. Sarayaku is showing us that another way may be possible.”