“No creemos que sea posible una evolución transformadora de las realidades locales desde los tradicionales esquemas de intervención planificada para el desarrollo. […] Así nuestro grupo traduce miradas y culturas hacia el posicionamiento por la vida apostando por diálogos más visibles y encarnados, desde una afirmación colectiva, crítica y política” 

(Colectivo Miradas Críticas desde el Feminismo 2014, 8)

"We do not believe that a transformative evolution of local realities is possible through the traditional frameworks of planned development interventions. […] Thus, our group translates perspectives and cultures into a stance for life, advocating for more visible and embodied dialogues grounded in collective, critical, and political affirmation" (Colectivo Miradas Críticas desde el Feminismo 2014, 8)

"Development" againts indigeous populations in Ecuador

The reality of my country compels me to speak about the people, territory, and a context marked by violence, dispossession, and the marginalization of subaltern groups. Among the many issues facing Ecuador, I focus on the processes of resistance led by Indigenous women of the Ecuadorian Amazon against oil-extractive companies, as a decolonial feminist project.

First, it is necessary to highlight that in Ecuador, oil extractivist processes began in the 1960s (Cevallos 2024). At the state level, the country started to adopt legislation, practices, and narratives associated with promoting the oil-based development model as the foundation for achieving economic and social progress (Cevallos 2024; Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo 2014; Ulloa 2021; Marotta 2021; Franz 2025). By the early 1990s, ancestral cultures were already showing signs of social and environmental destruction and began demanding recognition of their rights (Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo 2014).

Yasuní, declared a National Park and recognized as the most biodiverse area on the planet in 1979, is part of the territory of the Waorani people and others in voluntary isolation, such as the Tagaeri and Taromenane (Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo 2014). In the mid-1980s, oil activities began in this protected area under the U.S. company Texaco. The inhabitants of the region made visible how extractive companies were responsible for multiple social problems, including generalized violence, increased gender-based violence in public and private spaces, corruption, the fragmentation of communitarian networks, environmental impacts, health problems, and impoverishment (Cevallos 2024; Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo 2014; Ulloa 2021; Marotta 2021; Franz 2025).

In response to this reality, Indigenous women have created political strategies that have profoundly transformed the anti-extractivist movement in Ecuador by introducing a distinctive form of doing politics. This form links public resistance with the concrete practices of reproducing life in the Amazon (Cevallos 2024). These are known as hacer-selva practices. Such practices include everyday activities such as cultivating the land (chakra), sharing dreams, or singing with purpose, as well as preparing chicha, cooking, and producing crafts and ceramics (Cevallos 2024; Sampertegui 2022). Through their collective organization, they have emphasized that their struggle is rooted in the cuerpo-territorio-tierra nexus, establishing a parallel between attacks on their territories (through the extractivist model) and attacks on their own bodies.

This has been possible because Indigenous women have played a fundamental role within the broader Indigenous movement, both nationally and regionally (Sampertegui 2022). They have assumed key leadership and administrative positions within their communities, serving as presidents, vice-presidents, or commission leaders in Pakayaku, and have also participated in regional and national political arenas (Sampertegui 2022). These leaders have established alliances and solidarities with women from other nations, creating national and transnational spaces of action. One example is the alliance of women from different Indigenous peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon (Waorani, Shuar, Achuar, Kichwa, Sapara, Andoa, Shiwiar) known as Mujeres Indígenas Defensoras de la Selva, aimed at strengthening their capacity for struggle and constructing narratives that reveal the other side of the extractivist model (Sampertegui 2022).

Additionally, Amazonian women have raised their voices to denounce how extractive activities have violated their rights and affected their communities (Sampertegui 2022; Ulloa 2021; Franz 2025; Marotta 2021). They emphasize that the establishment of oil companies intensifies physical, psychological, and sexual violence that primarily affects women and girls. They denounce that the massive influx of external actors (mostly men workers, officials and military personnel) creates harassment and insecurity, intensifying domestic violence and sexual abuse, often linked to alcohol consumption (Sampertegui 2022). In their testimonies, they address violence from a relational and collective dimension, understanding individual harm as part of a broader violence against Indigenous peoples and territories (Sampertegui 2022).

In line with Ramirez et al. (2024), the actions of Waorani women can be seen as a concrete expression of decolonial feminism, since their political action dismantles the power systems sustaining patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial domination over Amazonian territories. Similar to the Wayúu women analyzed by Ramirez and co-authors, the Waorani confront the logics of “green development,” which perpetuate new forms of colonialism under the discourse of sustainability and modernization, proposing instead a political praxis grounded in reciprocity, interdependence, and the defense of territory as a living space (Ramirez et al. 2024). This resistance seeks to redefine the relations among nature, community, and the state, breaking with colonial imaginaries that have reduced the Amazon to a space of resources or passive conservation (Cevallos 2024).

Similarly, Lanza (2012), through the framework of Buen Vivir, offers a profound critique of capitalist and patriarchal models of development, arguing that Indigenous women have upheld civilizational alternatives based on complementarity, care, and community. From this perspective, the political action of Waorani women can be understood as part of a reconstruction of life through decolonization and depatriarchalization, aimed at restoring harmony between humans and nature. Their political action thus seeks to decolonize the imaginaries that conceive the Amazon only as an inert territory to be exploited or as a paradise that must be preserved untouched, instead affirming it as a vital space where human and more-than-human life is reproduced (Cevallos 2024).

Reflecting on why it is important to understand this reality through the lens of development theories, I think that the very notion of development is political and, for that reason, has been constructed from a Eurocentric colonial stance that does not necessarily correspond to the needs and realities of people in Latin American contexts such as Ecuador. In this case, extractive companies serve as sources of capital accumulation and benefit for certain countries and elites. At the same time, those who bear the physical and environmental costs of exploitation receive no benefits. On the contrary, nature and the people who live in closest relationship with it and who have assumed the task of protecting it, become targets of criminalization, discrimination, violence, and marginalization.

Understanding the processes of struggle and resistance experienced by Indigenous women through these frameworks allows us to return the voice and agency to those who know firsthand what it means to live in and protect the territory, recognizing its connection to their communities. Unlike other perspectives within the WID paradigm that aim to “include” Indigenous women in certain public spaces as a way of fulfilling gender-equality quotas, providing English lessons so they can attend foreign tourists visiting the Amazon, or offering tuition discounts in private universities, or birth-control campaigns targeted exclusively at Indigenous women. By itself, these actions do not produce deep structural change and, therefore, do not transform the social reality of these people. For this reason, I consider it essential to rescue the actions and agency of communities to seek to transform their social reality in order to achieve better living conditions and support these processes in academia and activism. 

References

Cevallos Vivar, Sofía. 2024. “Mujeres Kichwa de la Amazonía ecuatoriana frente al extractivismo: testimonios y perspectivas en la lucha colectiva por los derechos.” Anuario del Conflicto Social 15: e-47089. https://doi.org/10.1344/ACS2024.15.9

Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo. 2014. La vida en el centro y el crudo bajo tierra: El Yasuní en clave feminista. Quito, Ecuador: Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo. Disponible en: www.territorioyfeminismos.org

  

Franz, Tobias. 2025. “Towards Transitions Rooted in Decolonial, Ecological and Feminist Practices: Lessons from the Northern Colombian Pacific.” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography (published online April 11, 2025). https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2025.2489452

Lanza, E. Rossana. 2012. El Buen Vivir y la descolonización en Bolivia: Una lectura desde el feminismo comunitario. La Paz: Coordinadora de la Mujer / Fundación Colectivo Cabildeo.

Marotta, Ramona. 2021. “La lucha de las mujeres indígenas de la Amazonía ecuatoriana por la defensa de sus cuerpos-territorios.” Perifèria: Revista de recerca i formació en antropologia 26 (2): 70–95. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/periferia.852

Ramirez, Jacobo, Claudia Patricia Vélez-Zapata, y Rajiv Maher. 2024. “Green Colonialism and Decolonial Feminism: A Study of Wayúu Women’s Resistance in La Guajira.” Human Relations 77 (7): 937–964. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267231189610

Sempértegui, Andrea. 2022. “La selva viviente como selva política: prácticas de hacer-selva en la lucha de las mujeres amazónicas en Ecuador.” Revista Antropologías del Sur 9 (17): 147–16. https://doi.org/10.25074/0719-5532.2022.9.17.147.

Ulloa, Astrid. 2021. “Transformaciones radicales socioambientales frente a la destrucción renovada y verde, La Guajira, Colombia.” Revista de Geografía Norte Grande 80: 13–34. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-34022021000300013