Precious woods are being exploited in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. I went to Ecuador to follow its cut and smuggling.
A deep, complete stillness in the stickiness and the green. A tiring and frightening silence. A silence which is only disturbed by the muffled noise of footsteps on rottening trunks. Here Nature reigns like a powerful queen and reminds it every minute. Nature is here actually but it doesn’t welcome you, doesn’t love you! To the ears some buzzings indicate the presence of mosquitoes and its consequences: the ceaseless stinging activity of those blood sucking insects. Often we are running the risk of stumbling over the slippery green Hell, and then there is a branch which gives man a helping hand. A branch which by this makes the colony of ants fall and bites deeply the intruder. At last the song we have been waiting for so long arises. This song makes the walker forget his role of martyr of the forest: the purring of an engine. And as we advanced further in the inside of the forest (“adentro”), the noise of the engine which throbs, coughs and races, is our sonorous horizon, though it’s difficult to locate precisely. For nearly one hour the engine seems to practices scales, then stops.
There are three men, about 30 years old. None of them would tell his name. For two months the three madereros (wood workers: from Madera, wood in Spanish) make every effort to cut and shape beams of more than 2 meters long out of five red cedars (Cedrela odorata), trees of 25 meters. The Amazonian cedar is a valuable wood forbidden to be exploited because it’s an endangered species. One of the men is Colombian. He bought the uncut cedars for the derisory sum of 150 dollars each, wood he will bring back to his country through secret roads. These cedars have been sold by one of the two ecuadorians madederos who are cutting wood without breathing a word. The later are inhabitants of the neighboring village, a community of 400 dwellers, who have settled down for about 50 years owing to an Ecuadorian law still in force, which gives a land title deed to any person who, on the surface of the 50 Ha he is granted, deforest half of it. An incenting for deforestation in a country where Amazon is seen as a source of development.
In the next village, Rosario Manonga, is one of the founders of the colony “El Bonbon”, the name of tree. Her hands kept busy either shelling beans or caressing her grandson, in a weak voice, she tells the founding of the colony. Without knowing the purpose of the visit of her interlocutor, she speaks on her own initiative of the removal of a big tree, a cedar, a few meters away from the doorstep of her house, at the very place where she is sitting now. « There were a lot of trees before, yes ». This happy past reminds to her the loss of her husband. Amid her these intermingled feelings, a few tears run down her nice wrinkles. Today a big plot of land completely bare spread in front of the house. The children are doing sport. It’s the “concha”, one of those sporting grounds the State offers to each community. The biggest communities have the right to have their sporting ground covered with sheet steel. A few nominal or symbolic details of a “modern” way of life that make those men, yesterday small country people of the Andes Cordillera, today Amazonian settlers, fierce opponents of the forest.
A few steps away from the house open large meadows with vague boundaries. The activity the most profitable is the production of milk, the “ganaderia”, from the verb ganar, “earn” in spanish. Depleting spaces, the raising of cattle, which trample and eat nature all day long, gives no chance to the forest to spread across the land. If the “ganaderia” is more done on the slopes of the forest, further down, agriculture is prefered: cocoa, beans, manioc, bananas and rice. A few years before, coffee was also grown but its sale price being bound up with “fluctuating” international market, coffee growing was given up because it was not profitable. Agriculture allows families to feed themselves and get a few incomes each year. And, to earn more, and also to own goods that society show them as essentials, families don’t hesitate to “fell” trees.
Openly and publicly each week illegal wood markets take place. On the Arujuno, the river which the bridge of the hamlet of San Pedro spans, a market takes place every Friday. Jose Vicente, 20 years old, came to sell the planks cut in two trees this week. The threes are always sold separately in tablon (from tabla, “boards” in Spanish), this way in order to ease the transport of illegal goods. This work is tedious and dangerous because the chain saws used are normally used for cutting trunks but not to cut of planks, the cut which forces the chain of the saw to work with the grain of the wood. Each time it hits a knot, the sharp chair saw jumps out of gears, leap and slash the hand of these temporary improvised loggers.
Four days of hard work in the forest, followed by two days of transport on the river bring only 200 dollars, once gasoil and work force are paid. A derisory sum, but since the death of his father, Vicente has nine children in his care. He knows he cannot discuss the sale price. “What can I do?” He called out, fatalist, to conclude. The middle man who will load the planks take advantages of the fact that he is the sole buyer for all the communities living up the river Arajuno. The transport of the illegal good to the next town would force the villagers to prohibitive investments. Not all the species of wood that Vicente works are forbidden. Though their exploitation requires the approval of a forest engineer on oath (to the state), but paid by the logger. Another investment that the young man cannot consider doing. So the middle man will take care of getting the certificate by bribing the government officials of the Ministry of the Environment.
Once the deal is concluded, Vicente goes to the shop of the hamlet and buy a bottle of American soda. His father got drowned one day he was drunk. Vicente doesn’t let himself be tempted like his companions in misfortune by the “Veinticinco”, an alcoholic drink made of cane sugar, “strongly effective”, able to make fall like flies these tough natives. On the Arajuno live mostly natives, the Kichwa and a few mixed race settlers. All of them are trafficking.
Everywhere is the sorry, regrettable sight of this business “that everybody is aware of but against which nobody is doing anything, claims Milagros Aguirre, a former journalist of the national paper “El Comercio” who has been devoting herself for a few years to writing books denouncing deforestation (“A quien les importa esas vidas”, Cicame, 2006, not translated yet). This choice was not without running risks, as can be seen from that extremely cautiously way she walks in the streets of Francisco de Orella, this town bears the name of the first Spanish explorer who undertook to go up the river Amazon from the year 1535. An expedition which, to reach the river Napo, an affluent of Amazon river, flowing down from the Andes mountains and which surrounds the town, cost the lives of 140 out of 220 Spanish explorers and the lives of 3000 out of 4000 Indians involved in the adventure.
But rather than calling the town “Francisco de Orellana”, the Ecuadorians prefer to call it “El Coca”, from the name of the plant which before its elimination grew abundantly in this swampy area. El Coca is the biggest town of the “Oriente” (“East”), nickname of the Ecuadorian Amazonia, an Eldorado for the settlers coming everyday to populate this lush empire as green as easily damaged. “Twenty years ago, Coca didn’t extend further than the second road” witnesses Juan Carlos, a spanish Father of the Capuchin Mission, settled here since the 80’s. How many inhabitants? How many streets? Nobody knows. The name of the recent outer district, “the invasions” shows perfectly the present growing process of colonization of Amazonia.
“Invasions”. Whether they come from another region looking for a job on one of the numerous oil wells of the area, or they leave their village to go to the big town, or whether they can’t pay any longer their rent in town or they come to speculate on land, the candidates settle here in the dozen, then in the hundreds, get possession of a plot, then clear it. It’s theirs. Of these small plots taken from forest, little by little, form an outskirt then the town. It is in the middle of this atmosphere of wet Wild West that gets organized the illegal business of Spanish cedar (Cedro Rojo, Cedrela odorata). It’s not a matter of chance if Milagros took up residence here!
Three hours away by road from South of Coca, sometimes running along oil pipelines, sometimes bordering scattered meadows, lays the National Park of Yasuni. Big trees open up the way to the Rain Forest, the mythical and phantasmagorical Amazonia. The Yasuni park is said provide a habitat for the largest biodiversity in the world according to scientists. The Smithsonian Institut would even speak of « Megadiversity », when it took an inventory of a plot of 25 Ha, and found 1104 different species. In the Yasumi, they have ever numbered 644 different species on a plot of only one hectare. That is about the amount of the specific richness in trees of the whole North America! The region remains widely unexplored by botanists, for whom the Yasuni represents a vast enigma.
The bridge that spans the Shiripuno River, one of the main waterways, allows once more illegal loggers to put on the road their treasures of fiber. Those Ecuadorian and Columbian settlers set up at Coca have made this bridge their outer harbor for their shipping. Four men prepare a shipping: chainsaws, donkeys, rice bags, cartridges, guns. What are they going off to face in such a peaceful place? The forest.
Carlos, Luis, Santiago and Darwin sit down in a huge rusty craft. Heading for “adentro”, the inside of the forest, in order to get back the planks they have cut the month before. Planks loaded up donkeys, on the bases of two wood pieces of 50 kilos each per donkey and journey from the inside of the forest to the riverbank, where they will be taken over by the boat. Men and animals sweat and stumble. Of courses nobody likes this hard work. But the youngest illegal logger says “we are in the fresh air” without knowing that “this good air” is produced by the trees they are cutting into pieces. Each of them agrees to his assignment: the demand for exotic wood is so strong that its exploitation is a sure means to earn money.
The leader of the expedition Santiago, 35 years old, confides that he wants to stop. He would like “to build huts to welcome tourists” he claims, without obviously imagining that nobody, not even a tourist, is allowed in this protected area called “inviolable zone”. (Zona Intagible) The Yasuni is a reservation where Indians « sin contactos » or those without contact to the outside world and cut from the outside world on their free will,. Their encounter with madereros is always violent. Each year, one of these makeshift woodcutters is mortally injured by the spear of an indigenous furious at seeing his vital space dwindle. The illegal loggers take revenge so far as to organize the slaughter of these unsubdued people. In 2005, 26 Tagaeri, a “sin-contactos” tribe were slaughtered. The Waorani, a nature tribe in contact with the modern man for about 30 years had been hired by the loggers to kill their old enemies Tagaeri. Proclaiming themselves “owners” of some areas in the south of Coca, the Wao work with the smugglers. They get a commission on each boat going up the Shiripuno River to make up for it the Waorani ensure the safety and drive out anybody who would like to impede them from trafficking: fast disappearing primitive people, policemen, journalists, etc. The warriors “Wao” look at it as a means to get money easily and teach a lesson to a state which has not set up anything to help them to their violent adaptation to the capitalist civilization.
More inside, seven madereros work a bit further downstream, very near the « sin-contactos » tribes. The spanish cedar reserves are diminishing in the Yasuni. They have to go farther and take more risks, pushing back the limits of this hostile jungle. Fear is obvious behind those fatalist smiles. Pedro is 22, he knows well the Park, its birds and how to catch them. A bullet is fired, then another one, a colored flight fly away from a tree with noises. A papagayo, a parrot, drops straight on the ground. The bird is alive. “You know why he is not dead? Because I fired into the wings and the bullet went through the bird. It is going to survive. Four men run and pick up the bird. The parrot with a 40 cm wingspan with blue and bright yellow feathers screams to death. The young man will dress the wound of the bird and will resell the bird at Coca for a hundred dollars. Just like the wood, the takers will fight to get it and pay a small fortune for it once in big cities.
The pieces of spanish cedar will pass in transit slowly up to Coca, to one of the many warehouses where they will be sawdusted to smooth out the knocks received during the transport as well as the hollows that the chainsaw did. This process of illegal exploitation causes a big waste. A team of Ecuadorian forest engineers has calculated that only 30% to 40% of a tree is used (Kallari association data). But before getting to one of the sawmills of the capital of the area, the illegal loggers have to go through three police stations and one garrison of the national army.
Abounding in oil, crossing point of cocaine dealers and border zone with Peru, a country which was an enemy of Ecuador at the end of the 90’s, the region is extremely monitored. An Ecuadorian logger, who spent nearly 4 months in the forest tells that for a load of 25 cubic meters of precious wood, traffickers give 50 dollars to each two police stations, 100 dollars to the main police station located on the road to “El Coca”, then 200 dollars to the soldiers of the bridge at the entrance of the dusty capital of the region. The young Columbian, a former farm worker in the fields of coca in Columbia, speaks straight of the traffic since he won’t go back to it. Four months of hard work haven’t been paid to him. In spite of high risks, the small cedar cutters are paid with delay, or even never paid when wood is not sold at a good price, or that the “commissions” were risen. In this vicious circle which turns into “slavery”, the worker won’t be able to feed himself in town. Then he will go back to the forest when his boss will offer him a place at his table. Back to “Coca”, Johnny the brother of a maderero killed by the Indian gives an interview, but discreetly because the former men behind his brother advised him to shut up. Though he cannot remain silent faced with the death of this brother who liked to go into the forest though he was not always paid. This sentence sums up the tragedy of the business: whereas the inhabitants of the “Oriente” by destroying their environment are cutting off at present the branch they are standing on, nothing or little of the fruits of this trade will come to them. The wood of Vicente, Santiago, and of this Columbian who is as nice as he is threatening, will go to the U.S.A. or Europe to make the most valuable objects. On the way the price will be multiplied by 10 at each stage. A traffic in the most intense silence.
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