- Twenty months after a landmark court ruling granted the Siekopai Nation land rights within a protected Amazon area, the Ecuadorian government has yet to issue the official title, with sources citing legal issues, government hesitancy and intercommunity conflicts.
- Tensions have escalated between the Siekopai and the Kichwa de Zancudo Cocha communities, which both claim ancestral ties to the land, with reported incidents of violence and a lack of compromise.
- Some critics say the conflict stems from improper agreements made by the state without adequate consultation and that or a growing scarcity of land in the Amazon.
- Indigenous leaders and experts call for greater government accountability, improved mediation and potentially a jointly managed protected area to resolve the dispute and prevent similar conflicts in other regions of the country.
This is Part 4 of a four-part series on Indigenous land rights in Ecuador. Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
Twenty months after a landmark court ruling in Ecuador recognized the rights of the Indigenous Siekopai Nation to land within a protected Amazonian area, the government has yet to issue the required title.
According to sources, the delay is due to hesitation by ministry officials and a tense conflict between two Indigenous communities over the land.
In 2023, a court ordered the delivery of a land title for a parcel of 42,360 hectares (104,674 acres) known as Lagartococha in the Cuyabeno Reserve to the Siekopai Nation. The land is part of a larger area covered by a 2008 agreement, or convenio, between the Kichwa de Zancudo Cocha community and Ecuador’s environment ministry. The Kichwa use the overlapping land for subsistence and conservation, while for the Siekopai, Pë’këya — their name for Lagartococha — is the sacred home to spirits they say are central to their existence.
The ruling was the first in Ecuador to award a land title within a protected area. But some observers say it also aggravated the conflict and could encourage communities in Ecuador’s Amazon to use legal action to wrest control of ancestral lands in protected areas from one another.
Currently, the Zancudo Cocha community is actively resisting the ruling — reportedly resorting to violent measures to prevent the Siekopai from coming onto Lagartococha. Enrique Moya Tangoy, the Zancudo Cocha leader, says they put armed self-defense measures in place after some Siekopai people entered the territory “in an aggressive manner,” an assertion that Justino Piaguaje, leader of the Siekopai, denies. “We have never acted violently against them and have not responded to their actions with violence,” he tells Mongabay.
The Zancudo Cocha have exhausted all legal measures to maintain their claim to Lagartococha, says Freddy Espinosa, the community’s lawyer. The Zancudo Cocha are also unable to appeal the ruling because the community was a third party in the court case.
Piaguaje says his community could share some parts of the territory, while still keeping it under Siekopai governance, but Moya, who has refused this proposal, says he has lost trust in the Siekopai leadership because, by going to court, they didn’t follow a past 2007 dialogue about the land, which he thought was final.
“Like all communities living within the protected areas of Ecuador, we have a land use and conservation agreement,” Moya tells Mongabay. “We are the legitimate inhabitants and protectors of the place, as duly recognized [by the ministry of environment].”
The ministry of environment has not yet given a title to the Siekopai, and lawyers for the Zancudo Cocha state that there is no formal legal procedure to have a property title inside a protected area and that officials fear the environmental impacts of losing control of these lands. However, Indigenous land titles remain a right protected by Ecuador’s Constitution.
The delay has prompted one judge to threaten to fine the environment minister and demand urgent action from the ministry, including the amendment or nullification of the government’s agreement with the Zancudo Cocha on the land in question by March 20. The judge also ordered the ministry to submit the land title by April 11.
The ministry has yet to comply and has not responded to Mongabay’s questions by the time of publication.
Luis Borbor Laínez, the director of the Cuyabeno Reserve, is calling for “a mediation process to happen with all the communities that live on the reserve” to allow their opinions to be heard. Additionally, to solve the problem, he and several colleagues have proposed the creation of an Indigenous rights commission to investigate rights violations and encouraged free, prior and informed consultation with Indigenous communities before activities that affect lands.
But Piaguaje, the Siekopai leader, says the ministry is the main actor that generated this problem, should assume responsibility and facilitate its resolution by complying with the sentence, as required by national and international law. Verónica Potes, a lawyer who wrote an independent analysis called an amicus brief for the case, agrees. So far, the ministry only treated it as an internal Indigenous conflict, she says.
“The heart of the problem — and it’s currently being presented as if it’s a problem between communities — is that the Ecuadorian state went and entered agreements [convenios] in ways it shouldn’t have, which then caused these types of issues,” Potes says.
Amazon Frontlines, an Indigenous rights NGO that legally supported the Siekopai Nation in its campaign, says the government’s failure to comply fuels ambiguity and stokes tensions. “To prevent further conflicts, the Ecuadorian government must uphold the law, implement court rulings, and end its track record of non-compliance,” Mitch Anderson, co-founder and executive director of Amazon Frontlines, tells Mongabay in a written statement.
CONAIE, the organization representing Ecuador’s Indigenous nationalities, is trying to mediate the conflict. Both leaders of the communities tell Mongabay they are ready to talk, but they weren’t able to come to a resolution in 2024. They have agreed to meet again sometime in 2025, though the date is not yet set.
“We don’t take any sides,” Leonidas Iza, president of CONAIE, says during a local radio interview in October 2024. “We know that this has always been a place where all Indigenous nationalities have shared lands with no borders … and benefited from what Mother Earth provides. We [also] know that the Siekopai have a final court ruling to implement.”
Iza has also issued a warning.
“If we don’t solve this problem, it can lead to more conflicts in the territory. And it’s not just a problem in this land… but one with a wider scope,” he adds. “We’re going to look at all the possibilities to resolve the conflict, like the brothers that we are.”
Other Indigenous leaders in the region tell Mongabay they are worried about violence spilling over, as they are already dealing with invasions and loss of land rights to armed groups, illegal miners and extractive industries. Many Indigenous communities in the Amazon have overlapping ancestral ties to the same lands, and some have signed convenios with the ministry as a form of ancestral land claim.
Anthropologists say cases of land disputes may be an increasing problem in the Amazon. Past colonial invasions into the area that took up vast swaths of territory used by nomadic Indigenous peoples set the stage for these conflicts, and ongoing incursions by extractive industries continue to tighten the squeeze.
Space is limited in the Amazon, says Angus Lyall, a geographer at the University of San Francisco, Quito, and that’s an issue that requires attention to avoid further conflict.
Indigenous leaders emphasized the need for better coordination in the government to prevent land conflict and improved consultation with all Indigenous peoples involved before signing agreements over lands with the government. But some have also suggested working through Indigenous-led solutions to resolve the conflict and prevent it from being replicated in other regions.
For the Zancudo Cocha and Siekopai, some say a jointly managed protected area could be an optimal solution and potentially a model for similar situations. In addition, neighboring Indigenous peoples should review all the anthropological evidence and do their own investigation to see how they’ll share the land, says Nivaldo Yiyoguaje, president of the A’i Cofán organization NOA’IKE and a local leader concerned about the conflict.
“We all need to sit down with cool heads and talk,” he says, “and improve the situation together.”
Banner image: Butterflies in the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve in Ecuador’s Amazon. Image by Ranil Wijeyratne via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Additional reporting by Aimee Gabay.
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