While the whole world was looking the other way amid the COVID-19 pandemic, extractive companies have increased their exploitation of Indigenous territories in the Amazon.
In Ecuador, for example, the indiscriminate logging of balsa wood has begun, exerting great pressure on the middle and lower basin of the Pastaza river in the territory of the Achuar nationality, as well as that of other nationalities, such as the Kichwa, Shuar and Waorani. The situation highlights the disastrous extent of the impacts of extractivism in the Amazon region.
What’s more, amid a global health emergency, the effects on the local population are even greater. In the Ecuadorian Amazon, the so-called ‘balsa fever’, which has seen the arrival of hundreds of loggers seeking to fell this precious Amazonian wood, became the fatal focus of the coronavirus contagion in Amazonian Indigenous communities that would otherwise have been cut off from the world.
