- The Chocó rainforest in northwestern Ecuador has experienced some of the worst deforestation in the world, with only around 3% tree cover remaining in the western lowlands.
- A lot of the deforestation can be traced to an influx of loggers in the 1990s and the many roads and trails that they created in the process, which are now being used by new settlers.
- In an effort to save a part of the Chocó, the Jocotoco Conservation Foundation has been building a reserve by buying up parcels of land, one at a time. Its Canandé Reserve has grown to roughly 19,000 hectares (47,000 acres) but still faces pressure from roads and trails built by expanding communities.
- Residents respect the need to conserve the forest but also express a desire to improve connectivity, with the ability to travel within the area and to nearby cities.
HOJA BLANCO, Ecuador — Some parts of the rainforest in northwestern Ecuador used to be so dense and impenetrable that only a few hundred people were believed to live there. Even when loggers moved into the area in the 1980s and 1990s, setting up the first roads, it would take hours to travel only a few miles. It’s one of the rainiest regions on the planet, and the terrain rises sharply into the western Andes before dropping off into rivers and valleys.
Because it was so inaccessible, the area remained one of the most biodiverse on the planet, with thousands of endemic plant species and hundreds of birds and amphibians. But in recent decades, much of that biodiversity has been lost. The region, known as the Chocó, has experienced historic deforestation, with only around 3% of its lower-elevation forest — below 900 meters (3,000 feet) — still remaining.
In one area of the Chocó, in Esmeraldas province, the rise in deforestation coincided with the arrival of timber companies like Endesa-Botrosa, which built some of the first roads while logging the forest. Even when the companies reduced their work in the area a few years ago, deforestation continued to pose a major threat — largely because the companies left behind roads that people want to extend, conservation groups in the area say.
Today, many of the roads that used to take hours to navigate are relatively clean and patched up, allowing people from other parts of the country to move in. Communities are expanding the road network as their populations grow, clearing the forest to make room for cacao farming and cattle ranching. The area now has dozens of communities, each with a few hundred people. In some cases, the communities are only a few kilometers apart.
“People take advantage of the trails that are left over from Botrosa, a remnant of the work it did,” Efraín Cepeda, land manager at the Jocotoco Conservation Foundation, told Mongabay. “Then people use those same roads to clear again.”
Roads are often overlooked as a driver of deforestation, Cepeda said. But they usually serve as the “first cut” into an ecosystem before widespread deforestation takes hold, a study in the journal Communications Earth & Environment found. Deforestation also tends to occur near roads and can accelerate land-use change.
With this in mind, the Jocotoco Conservation Foundation has focused on purchasing land from private owners for conservation in the Chocó, often right before a new road is about to cut through it. The parcels it buys are added to the Canandé Reserve, an approximately 19,000-hectare (47,000-acre) private protected area.
The process isn’t always smooth, though. Some residents refuse to sell, and community leaders argue that they’ll only survive with better connectivity. Others want to cut through the forest, not realizing that it’s protected.
“I’m not against development,” said Jocotoco CEO Martin Schaefer. “The roads will be paved over in 20 or 30 years — that’s fine. What I would like to safeguard is that [by that time], there will still be some tracts of forests of our reserve standing.”
Cut, cash and run
Endesa S.A. and Botrosa S.A. produced plywood and wood products in Ecuador from the 1990s until 2021. Then Botrosa ceased operations, and Endesa continued to work there on its own. The companies have held certifications to harvest numerous trees species, including Calophyllum brasiliense, Brosimum utile and Gmelina arborea.
Harvesting the wood required clearing main roads into the Chocó, then building smaller offshoots to reach deeper parts of the forest. The work created jobs for locals and new arrivals, who operated the machinery and helped transport the wood. But workers also needed a place to live and stores to shop at. Endesa-Botrosa helped develop the area with education, road maintenance and nutrition programs, locals told Mongabay.
The companies’ presence in the area, and the many roads that resulted, helped create local economies throughout the rainforest, observers said.
“With the road, everything was easier,” said Alcides Zambrano, head park ranger of the Canandé Reserve, who has lived in the area for more than 30 years. “People started opening small markets and businesses for buying cacao, and everything started to change.”
At the same time, Endesa-Botrosa maintained strict control over the area, according to multiple reports. Company representatives sometimes used violence to obtain land and silence dissent about environmental damage, external evaluations suggest.
A 2005 Forest Stewardship Council evaluation of the company said that it was taking a “cut, cash and run” approach to harvesting timber, in which it would clear entire sections of forest without regard for tree life cycles that allow for natural regeneration. It also cited numerous roads that had been built without environmental impact studies, and timber shipments that had been moved without the proper permits.
In 2021, Endesa-Botrosa was also tied to a sustainable-logging controversy involving Home Depot. The U.S. retailer was allegedly sourcing plywood logged by Endesa-Botrosa in the Chocó without a sustainability plan.
At the time of the controversy, an Endesa-Botrosa spokesperson told Mongabay the company was dedicated to sustainable logging. For this story, it also maintains that the accusations of violence and social pressure are unsubstantiated, and that none of the complaints resulted in legal repercussions against the company.
“They weren’t real and were simply malicious and ill-intentioned,” Endesa sales manager Sebastian Guarderas told Mongabay.
Guarderas also denied that it was Endesa-Botrosa that first opened up the Chocó to outside pressure, saying that most communities were already present when the company arrived, thanks to the advancing agricultural frontier.
In 2024, Endesa stopped logging the forest, opting instead to harvest exclusively on plantations. Critics say this change was driven by the depletion of accessible timber, forcing workers to travel farther into increasingly remote areas, which made logging uneconomical.
“The wood they had to extract was farther and farther away,” Cespedes said. “Before, in a day, one truck could make two trips. After a while, in one day, a truck could make only one trip. So their operating costs were also rising a lot.”
When the company made the switch, social responsibility programs remained but local employment dropped and other support for communities, including infrastructure maintenance, started to wane, locals said. The company argued that it was the government’s responsibility to maintain schools, water systems and other local infrastructure.
With the company’s presence diminished, what remained were former logging communities and a network of roads — and more rainforest for the taking.
‘We’re survivors’
Many residents near the Canandé Reserve have learned that, when it comes to basic infrastructure and community development, they’re largely on their own. Endesa has stopped maintaining many of the roads, and the government is virtually absent. Local offices are hours away by car, and officials in Quito, the capital, are nearly a full day’s drive away. Several residents told Mongabay that visits from government representatives are rare.
Most growth in the communities comes from the hard work of residents, who harvest wood to build homes and stores, and rely on cattle ranching and cacao cultivation for income. Some food and medicine arrive on transport trucks, but residents said they largely fend for themselves.
“After they win the votes, they forget us like always,” said Marcos Tapullo, an Indigenous Chachi leader from Chontaduro, a village of approximately 250 people. “That’s typical of politicians. We don’t have support from any level of government, neither national nor local. We’re just survivors.”
Tapullo oversees Chontaduro’s road committee, responsible for maintaining and expanding the roads. Without help from the government or Endesa, the committee relies on mingas, or community workdays, to make progress. At the mingas, everyone brings food to share while widening old logging trails and laying gravel.
Residents are also asked to contribute funds for construction materials. Those who don’t pay are sometimes barred from using the road, in some cases by withholding a copy of the key to a gate.
“No car or motorcycle could get through, not even a donkey could pass,” Tapullo said of the quality of the roads around Chontaduro, “so we saw the need to organize ourselves.”
The current roads give residents better access to the capital and thus a wider range of buyers for their beef and cacao. In medical emergencies, such as a woman going into labor, they no longer have to travel four hours by boat to the nearest facility, residents told Mongabay.
But roads don’t create access in just one direction. They also allow outsiders to enter the area. In recent years, Ecuador’s security crisis — marked by gang violence, drug trafficking and illegal mining — has led some residents to worry about whether the violence will reach their remote part of the country.
“Before we had a road, we didn’t have any problems,” María Brisita de la Cruz, founder of the Pueblo Nuevo community, told Mongabay. “Now there’s a road, and we have problems. Sicarios come in, thieves — because of the road. Anyone who wants to can come on a motorcycle or on foot.”
Many of the outsiders come to log, Brisita de la Cruz said. Because there’s no environmental oversight, they’ve left little quality timber for everyone else. More people have begun building their houses with concrete, she said, because wood is rarely available.
Private landowners have most of the good timber these days. Every seven years, loggers for hire clear the properties so the wood can be sold.
Maximiliano Rivera, a logger, told Mongabay that logging on plantations is the main economic activity in the area, and that it likely won’t go away anytime soon.
“Of course [there will be more work in the future],” Rivera said. “There are people who are dedicated specifically to reforesting this type of wood species.”
A ring of defense
The Jocotoco Conservation Foundation began purchasing plots of land for conservation in the 2000s, when logging by Endesa-Botrosa was well established. In 2000, it founded the Canandé Reserve, at the time measuring only 440 hectares (1,087 acres).
Over the next two decades, the foundation continued acquiring forest a few plots at a time, expanding the reserve to more than 19,000 hectares today to improve connectivity between Pambilar Wildlife Refuge, Cotacachi–Cayapas National Park, and other protected areas. Together, the foundation says, these areas can serve as a “ring of defense” for the Chocó.
Since its founding, the foundation has witnessed the recovery of endemic magnolia species like Magnolia canandeana and Magnolia dixonii. Its camera traps also identified 11 jaguars (Panthera onca), along with great curassows (Crax rubra) and 143 brown-headed spider monkeys (Ateles fusciceps) — more than half of the total global population of this endangered species.
Purchasing land for the reserve requires some strategy. Jocotoco members analyze satellite mapping data but also maintain strong relationships with communities, where discussions about expansion are always going on. Ideally, the foundation targets plots that fill “gaps” in the reserve or are adjacent to existing protected areas, helping create one large, contiguous forest corridor rather than a network of patches with development in between.
Cepeda and his colleagues spend a lot of their time driving around the area, making calls about land sales and meeting with property owners to negotiate prices. In urgent cases, the foundation will even offer an advance to a property owner if it means speeding up the purchasing process and stopping someone from clearing a new road.
“It’s possible to lose the money, of course,” Cepeda said, of one property it purchased with an advance. “But we had to do it because otherwise, one way or another, we were going to lose that forest.”
In another case, satellite imagery revealed a road opened by Endesa-Botrosa years before. At first, the foundation was excited to buy it for the reserve because of its strategic location next to other protected forests, making it a perfect biological corridor. But after visiting the area on foot, they discovered the forest was too fragmented. Some of it was intact but other parts had been cleared for cacao.
They purchased it anyway, but for a separate forest regeneration project.
Survival vs. conservation
Many residents near the Canandé Reserve said they agree with the Jocotoco foundation’s conservation goals and respect the forest that it’s protecting. In some areas, there’s a clear line where private property ends and protected areas begin, making it easy to avoid any confusion.
But not everyone is so understanding. Tensions sometimes arise between the foundation and communities, who want to expand roads for better access to their properties.
A map of the reserve shows exactly where the friction lies. Just east of Chontaduro, one road continues straight before suddenly veering north around a section of forest owned by the foundation. Farther south, two roads branch out from Simón Platatorres but can’t continue — they’re blocked by the reserve.
“We bought these properties because the route of the road had already been laid out,” Cepeda explained. Many of the roads reaching dead ends would eventually connect if the reserve wasn’t there, he added.
Last September, landowners approached Cepeda and asked if it would be possible to extend a trail through part of the reserve. They argued that one small road wouldn’t do much damage and could allow them to travel to other communities with their crops. Cepeda said he would consult his colleagues, already knowing the answer was no.
“Opening a road there, for us, is a huge problem,” he said, “because it allows people to get in for hunting, to go in and take out wood, and it’s a headache.”
Communities have also asked the foundation to contribute thousands of dollars to road construction, arguing its members use the roads as much as anyone else. This put the foundation in a difficult position, Cepeda said. Clearing the land is against their mission as an organization, but it’s also important to maintain a good relationship with locals.
In the end, they opted not to contribute to the road construction, albeit while paying a different kind of price. Several roads around the reserve are now blocked by gates, and some locals refuse to let members of the foundation through.
“Obviously, we’ve been buying properties in several places to prevent new roads from being opened,” Cepeda said, “and it would be quite contradictory for us to be supporting a road.”
Despite these challenges, Cepeda and other members of the foundation are optimistic about the work they’ve done, and say it will ultimately achieve long-term protection for the area.
To bolster that work, the foundation set up the first scientific lab in the Chocó lowlands, with space for research labs and plant nurseries. The hope is not just to save the rainforest but also to understand its recovery and biodiversity.
“Conservation organizations such as Jocotoco need to ensure that some of the most irreplaceable regions in the world still have a chance of surviving,” said Schaefer, the foundation’s CEO. “We can save some very important chunks of forest. We can secure the buffer zones of national parks to increase their chances of protecting large ecosystems.”
Banner image: A road through the Chocó. Image by Efraín Cepeda
Citations:
Pérez-Escobar, O. A., Lucas, E., Jaramillo, C., Monro, A., Morris, S. K., Bogarín, D., … Antonelli, A. (2019). The origin and diversification of the hyperdiverse flora in the Chocó biogeographic region. Frontiers in Plant Science, 10. doi:10.3389/fpls.2019.01328
Myers, N., Mittermeier, R. A., Mittermeier, C. G., Da Fonseca, G. A., & Kent, J. (2000). Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature, 403(6772), 853-858. doi:10.1038/35002501
Zheng, X., Chen, J., Zou, Z., Zhen, S., Liu, S., Li, J., … Hu, X. (2025). Sprawling roads enhanced tropical forest loss during the period 2001-2020. Communications Earth & Environment, 6(1). doi:10.1038/s43247-025-02158-8
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