The Ecuadorean government’s decision to allow oil drilling in the Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse areas of the planet, has caused alarm among environmentalists and indigenous people, who are calling for a referendum on the issue.
Reports of another massacre in an isolated indigenous community in Ecuador's Amazon region cast doubt on the state's compliance with precautionary measures imposed in favour of uncontacted peoples in 2006 by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Ecuador's President Rafael Correa secured yesterday his third term in office by a landslide, after vowing to radically deepen his project of citizens' revolution by making the changes achieved thus far "irreversible", fully achieving the goals of eradicating poverty, transforming the model of production and consolidating the "rule of the people”.
In 2007 Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, sponsored the Yasuni Initiative to end oil prospecting in the vast Yasuni National Park, thereby preventing some 400 million tonnes of carbon emissions, if the international community or the United Nations would compensate Ecuador for half of the unrealised oil revenues (an estimated 13 billion dollars over 13 years).
The leaders of South America's Mercosur trade bloc decided to set up a committee to facilitate the incorporation of new members, adopt a mechanism to defend democracy in case of a coup, and ban vessels from the Malvinas/Falkland Islands from docking in member countries' ports.