Pots & Pans for the environment

Last Thursday the National Assembly of Environment met in the Prometeo Theatre at the Casa de la Cultura in Quito, where about 80 people heard testimony from leaders of 20 organizations in the country regarding mining and oil extraction.

Everyone went to the table located in the center of the theater and from there they exposed stories of their people and proposed solutions:

• Domingo Ankuash, representing the Assembly of the Peoples of the South, encouraged his followers to plan along with communities nationwide, a march to “send the Government home” since according to him, in these seven years they have committed genocide and ethnocide in some communities in the Amazon.
• Alicia Cahuilla, Huaorani leader, said the priority on protecting the Amazon is to avoid conflicts between Taromenane and Huaorani nationalities. “When they open more roads to exploit the oil (from the ITT block of the Yasuni National Park), people are going to fight for territory, which will produce more dead.”

Having developed a manifesto to reject mining activity across the country, members of the assembly joined YASunidos’s pots & pans protest organized by the environmental group against the Ministry of Environment (MAE) in the Floresta sector, and later they moved to the square of the Ministry of Agriculture and organized a big party for the environment.

Members of YASunidos organized a Pots & Pans protest.