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Introduction Ignoring the devastating toll thirty years of reckless oil development has taken on the country - particularly on the Amazon and its people- a consortium of multinational oil companies are near completion on a controversial new oil pipeline project known as the OCP (Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados). The project was delayed for over a decade due to opposition, and the pipeline's construction over the last two years has been the target of intense on the ground resistance-from tree sits to mass mobilizations-and an international campaign targeting the project's financiers.
Set to go online in October 2003, the pipeline will transport heavy crude from the country's Amazon rainforest region to the Pacific Coast, placing fragile ecosystems and dozens of communities along the 300-mile route in jeopardy.
The damaging impacts of the new pipeline will be felt far beyond the immediate pipeline route. To fill the OCP, Ecuador must double current oil production by embarking on an unprecedented wave of new oil exploitation in vast areas of Amazon frontier forest. Plans are already underway for dozens of new oil wells, roads, flow lines, and associated processing plants that will litter some of the country's last remaining old growth rainforests and territories of isolated indigenous peoples.
Prominent Ecuadorian and international environmental and indigenous rights organizations denounce the pipeline as the first stage of a wider onslaught by the oil industry on isolated indigenous peoples in the Amazon forest frontiers of Ecuador.
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