“We must not confuse ‘living in’ with ‘living for’ capitalism.” — Bolívar Echeverría1
We live in difficult times. The tragedy of war, fires, floods, and the violence of organized crime saturate the media and seem to impose themselves as the only reality. Yet, in the midst of these bleak scenarios, signs of resistance and life also emerge: peoples defending their territories, communities caring for water and forests, youth raising their voices for the climate, women sustaining hope in the midst of pain. Where everything seems to collapse, concrete utopias emerge that remind us that it is still possible to choose life and rebuild the future.
For more than a decade, Yasuní has become a place where utopia is lived in many ways. It was the seed of transformative narratives, inclusive agendas, and diverse forms of activism that pushed forward a radical slogan: leave crude oil underground. That idea—once considered unthinkable in a country whose identity has long been tied to oil—ended up crystallizing in a historic victory: a national referendum in which citizens chose to protect the forest over the “wealth” of exploitation.
On August 20, 2023, the campaign to defend Yasuní went to the ballot box. The popular consultation allowed Ecuadorian society to directly contrast the wealth of nature against economic wealth. The vote to halt oil exploitation in an Amazonian field was like a lightning bolt that lit up the horizon: it showed that another narrative is possible and opened a crack in the seemingly unbreakable script of extractivism.
Background
In Ecuador, we know well the impacts of oil activity, especially from Chevron-Texaco’s operations in the northern Amazon. Over the decades, there have been multiple local resistances, though not always victorious. In the case of Yasuní—specifically Block 43, known as ITT (Ishpingo, Tambococha, Tiputini), where the country’s most important oil reserves are located—a different proposal arose: to launch a national and international campaign that would connect citizens—mostly urban and far removed from the Amazon—with a little-known territory, inviting them to sign a petition to demand a referendum.
Reaching that referendum was a long road that took more than ten years. It included the collection of signatures, an electoral fraud that disqualified them, and the subsequent demonstration of that fraud. Several institutions—the Ombudsman’s Office2, the Constitutional Court3, and the Electoral Tribunal4 itself—had to corroborate the case before the process could move forward. However, victory at the ballot box did not automatically solve the problem: Yasuní remains a contested field.
On August 20, 2025, the second anniversary of the referendum was celebrated. There were reasons to rejoice: more than five million Ecuadorians said “yes,” and the expansion of the oil frontier in Ishpingo was halted. But there were also plenty of reasons to protest: the government declared it had closed only ten wells, when 247 should already have been shut down, and requested more time to comply with the popular mandate. It even created an Executive Committee for the Implementation of the People’s Will (CEVP), which in practice does not exist. For this reason, the commemoration was a “protest party”: a mix of sit-in and concert, celebration and demand.
In 2014, Ecuador’s National Electoral Council (CNE) invalidated just over 400,000 signatures in two weeks from the referendum petition proposed by the Yasunidos collective, which sought to leave the oil in the ITT block in Yasuní National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon underground.
Between What Has Been Achieved and What Remains to Be Done
The result of the referendum was clear: not only must oil activity in the Yasuní-ITT block be halted, but the already-installed infrastructure—metal structures, pipelines, wires, stone material, camps, and roads—must also be dismantled, and steps must be taken toward repairing nature and the rights of Indigenous peoples.
The Yasuní-ITT is a large-scale field. In 2019, it reached production of 80,000 barrels of crude oil per day, with the goal of reaching 100,000. In this block, 247 wells were drilled for the extraction of heavy crude, and eight additional platforms with dozens of new wells were planned, though ultimately never built.
Today, there are solid reasons to declare non-compliance with the popular mandate. However, a new path has also opened to demand its enforcement, with new elements and obligations. In the case Indigenous Peoples Tagaeri and Taromenane vs. Ecuador, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) ordered the State, within one year, to adopt “all legislative, administrative, and any other measures necessary to effectively implement this decision and prohibit oil exploitation in Block 43. (…) In addition, the State must ensure the effective participation of the affected population, in particular Indigenous peoples, throughout the process of implementing the outcome of this referendum” (para. 504).
The ruling recognizes that within the ecological fabric of the Amazon live peoples whose existence depends materially and existentially on the forest. They are not simply peoples who inhabit the forest: they are part of the forest, ecosystemic peoples whose lives are interwoven with the cycles of life, its rhythms and silences, its abundance and its limits. Through ancestral practices—such as seed dispersal, hunting-area rotation, or species selection—they have shaped and enriched the ecosystems that sustain them.
In 2025, moreover, the IACHR issued Advisory Opinion OC-32/25, in which it declared the climate emergency, recognized the rights of nature, and highlighted the importance of community knowledge as an essential part of the best available knowledge to confront the climate crisis. The Court stressed that, alongside scientific knowledge, local, traditional, and Indigenous forms of knowledge coexist and constitute the basis of their own decision-making systems (para. 476). It also established that the State not only has the obligation to consult but also the duty to obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of affected communities, in accordance with their customs and traditions (para. 608).
Consent, in these cases, acts as a fundamental guarantee for sustaining life in the face of the climate emergency. And this emergency is no longer abstract: this year has been dramatic worldwide and also in Ecuador, where hundreds of critical events—the so-called “natural disasters”—were recorded, leaving destroyed homes, lost crops, isolated communities, illnesses, extreme rains and severe droughts, along with multiple spills caused by pipeline ruptures.5
Between Utopias and Heterotopias
Yasuní has become an emblematic place and moment where the multiple crises of our time converge: climatic, ecological, economic, and political. It is a historical knot that concentrates the global contradictions between extractivism and sustainability, between capital expansion and the defense of life. The 2023 referendum, in which Ecuadorian society voted to keep crude oil underground, showed how a utopia—protecting the forest from capital—can take political and institutional form. For many young people, Yasuní became a laboratory of concrete utopias, an inspiring horizon that demonstrated that the impossible can also become reality.
In this new stage, the debates focus on dismantling the oil field. And this is not only about shutting down wells: it also involves the repair of wounded territories, historical reparation to peoples subjected to a violent process of dependency, and the conversion of economies addicted to oil. This debate is essential for all areas already sacrificed to extractivism, marked by abandoned infrastructure, toxic contamination, disease, and poverty. They are true heterotopias of sacrifice. Foucault described them as “other” spaces where the tensions of society are condensed. Having once been the place of utopia, Yasuní is now also the place of heterotopia: a territory that starkly reflects the complexity and the many facets of our era.
The narrative of Yasuní is also circular. Extraction had to be stopped, among other reasons, because of its direct link to the climate crisis—a point that is now unquestionable. To exploit that heavy crude, energy was needed, and to provide it, the Coca Codo Sinclair megadam was built, in what was an open secret. It ended up being the country’s worst environmental disaster, unleashing regressive erosion of the Coca River. That erosion has destroyed roads and pipelines built in parallel, repeatedly forcing the suspension of pumping and reducing crude extraction itself. A perverse circle of cause and effect that lays bare the contradictions of capitalism.
Other impacts must also be considered: these projects accumulate the greatest evidence of corruption and are located in the area with the country’s greatest biodiversity, while simultaneously showing the worst poverty indicators. In this sense, Yasuní is a mirror of capitalism: wealth and devastation, abundance and dispossession, coexisting in the same territory. And yet, Yasuní is also a mirror of social struggles. It has managed to mobilize not only social movements but society as a whole, becoming one of the causes that has most heavily impacted successive governments. That is why, even under a far-right government, Yasuní continues to be an unavoidable issue on the political agenda.
Echeverria Bolivar (2013). Vuelta del Siglo. Ediciones Era, México (p. 211).
Ecuador ‘s Ombudsman office. “La defensoría del Pueblo emitió “disculpas públicas” al colectivo Yasunidos.” available at: Defensoría del Pueblo emitió “disculpas públicas” a Colectivo YASunidos – Defensoría del Pueblo (dpe.gob.ec)
Ecuadorian Constitutional Court. Sentence No. 348-20-EP/21.
TCE, Sentence 888-2019-TCE, September 5th, 2022
Available at: https://www.unisdr.org/files/43291_spanishsendaiframeworkfordisasterri.pdf
Teaser image credit: Author supplied.