Fragile Lands of Latin America Strategies for ... - PART - USAID

James D. Nations and Flavio Coello Hinojosa
Human Populations
The Cuyabeno area is not devoid of human populations. The same
factors that draw our interest to the reserve today have in the past
drawn both indigenous people and colonist populations to settle there.
The Cuyabeno Reserve forms part of the traditional territory of the
Siona-Secoya Indians, and a dozen families of this group hold legal
title to 744 hectares located precisely in the center of the reserve. The
Siona-Secoya see the reserve as providing them with a buffer zone
between their traditional territory and the outside world, and as an
opportunity to control the impact of Western society on their cultural
traditions. Another group of 400 Siona-Secoya live in a legal reserve
that shares a border with the Cuyabeno Reserve (Vickers 1983).
The Siona-Secoya are not the only group attracted by Cuyabeno's
resources. Cuyabeno also has a half-dozen producing oil wells of Texaco
and CEPE, the Ecuadorian State Oil Corporation. During the early
1980s, before the reserve had a full-time manager and park guards,
these oil companies bulldozed roads into the extreme western region
of the reserve, and several hundred colonist families from other parts
of Ecuador moved down these roads into the edge of the reserve (Coello
Hinojosa 1985; Hiraoka and Yamamoto 1980; Rude1 1983). They
promptly began clearing 50 hectare plots for coffee, maize, cacao, and
plantain production. Today, more than 1,000 people strain at the edges
of the Cuyabeno Reserve, peering across the newly-cut border at the
abundant wildlife and forest resources inside. The reserve's most press-
ing problem is these families' competing desire for the land the reserve
occupies.
In a move designed to flow with, rather than violently confront, this
wave of colonization, the Departamento de Areas Naturales worked
out a compromise. The colonizing families were given legal title to
their plots on two conditions: First, that they help physically delineate
the reserve's revised boundaries by cutting a 3-meter wide path (brecha)
around it, and second, that they sign a contract which states that if
new colonists come in behind them, they themselves lose their right
to the land. Needless to say, the fiercest defenders of the reserve's
borders are now the colonists who once threatened to over-run it.
To compensate for the land ceded to these colonists, the Patrim6nio
Foresta, the National Forestry Institute of Ecuador, gave the Cuyabeno
Reserve an additional 60,000 hectares of unpopulated rainforest and
wetlands on the reserve's eastern border. This act increased the size of
the reserve beyond what it had been before the wave of colonization.