Sangay cut in pieces

Spanish Version

The recently planned Guamote-Macas road, linking the high Andean plateau with the Amazonian lowlands in central Ecuador, is being cut through Sangay National Park, one of the two World Natural Heritage Sites of Ecuador. Despite the devastating effects on the enourmously biodiverse pristine environments of the Park, nothing is practically done by local and international involved institutions to the point of hindering the road construction - presumably the only acceptable goal. The Guamote-Macas road violates international conventions undersigned by 161 countries, amongst them Ecuador.

Sangay National Park in central Ecuador is a region of extraordinary beauty and richness, in terms of variety of landscapes and living beings. Its northern 271,925 ha (of a total 517,765 ha area) have been declared by UNESCO a World Natural Heritage Site in 1983, still a unique status for a protected area in the continental Ecuador.

We are writing indeed about one of the most biorich ecosystems on Earth. That is the case given its extremely rugged topography (dominated by three five-thousander volcanoes, Tungurahua, Altar and Sangay), its location at the Equator, its thick elfin, cloud, rain forests, its 5-km-drop transitional climatical zones, from icy peaks to humid lowlands in the Amazon Basin.

Biodiversity is estimated to reach staggering levels, with some 500 species of birds (amongst them notable populations of Andean condors) and 3,000 species of plants - in the Andean forests of Ecuador, only in the region above 2,400 m, 93 families, 292 genera and 1,566 species have been so far catalogued, and most of these genera are found in Sangay Park. Amongst mammals: mountain tapir, puma, guinea pig, Andean fox, spectacle bear, jaguar, ocelot, margay, white-tailed deer, brocket deer, pudu, and many others are found.

That being said, Sangay Park is aggressively threatened by human encroachment, as many other valuable pristine environments on earth.

At the beginning of the '90s, national policies decided the opening of a road from the altiplano to the Amazon basin, cutting transversally Sangay Park. This is the sadly known Guamote-Macas road. UNESCO promptly reacted enlisting Sangay Park as a WNHS in Danger. This didn't stop the road construction.

Despite the concern of national NGOs and INEFAN officers (now Ministerio de Ambiente), the construction of the Guamote-Macas road has been carried out without major outcries, probably due to the remoteness of that segment of the Park. No international grassroots clamour, no local uproar. Its construction should have been implemented and supervised according to the most sound ecological recommendations, but, almost unheard, that didn't happen at all. Our concern is that no one actually illustrated, in any persuasive actionable way, both nationally and internationally, such recommendations to the persons who mattered to the point of hindering the road construction - presumably the only acceptable goal.

The Upano river, a once-upon-a-time magnificent white-water clear river, has its source at the upper lip of the caldera containing the beautiful Laguna Negra in Atillo, nearby the rugged Ayapungo massif, Sangay National Park. When we were there for the first time in 1996, it was still possible to see how destruction occurred in the middle of a pre-human world. To open the Guamote-Macas road, caterpillars raped the inner slopes of the Laguna Negra, dropping the surplus of rocks and mud into the waters (instead of retrieving them backward as recommended). Someone mentioned us that the greenish-blackish deep shades of the Laguna waters turned a nasty ash-gray dull depressing colour for two years, but the original colors never resumed.

Past the Laguna, the slopes of the mountains were being blown up employing dynamite, and from seventy meters high above the road level, landslides occured regularly, and continued, by their own or pushed down, their race towards the deep Upano canyon. A road, planned to be few meters wide, was deeply carving the mountain on a hundreds-of-meters wide front. And all that was happening in the very middle of the most beautifully pristine cloud forests, in one of the most rainy spots on Earth. People living in Zuńac, down river, fervorous supporters of the road construction, later told us that the Upano had once beautiful white waters, that could be drunk. Meanwhile, the riparian ecosystem is likely already gone.

In a similar fashion, it is unclear how the management of the road will be undertaken in the future. Radiative spreading of encroachments from the very road's cut are likely indeed, thus targeting the core area of the Park. To control them to any meaningful degree lot of facilities and resources are needed, not certainly at the moment available to the chronically short-of-funds Ministerio de Ambiente.

In summary, the effects exerted on the future evolutionary capability of the Amazon as a whole risk to be dramatic. Simply, animals won't be in the condition to migrate as smoothly as before along the important sub-alpine corridor at intermediate elevations, which is being lost. That is why, amongst other reasons, the planned Guamote-Macas road and alike is so preposterous from the global conservation point of view.

To date, caterpillars need to devour the last six kilometers of rain forest to complete the road construction. The questions are: Is there any legal margin to stop this? If not, which parties should contribute for restraining the negative impacts due to such an unplanned and ecologically devastating bulldozing? for impeding illegal colonization, further pollution, poaching, indiscriminate logging? Unfortunately, by the way, the latter activities are not exclusive to the Upano valley.

The Guamote-Macas road clearly violates the Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage undersigned, as of October 1, 2000, by 161 countries, amongst them Ecuador. Convention's Article 4 reports: ``Each State Party to this Convention recognizes that the duty of ensuring the identification, protection, conservation, presentation and transmission to future generations of the cultural and natural heritage referred to in Articles 1 and 2 and situated on its territory, belongs primarily to that State. It will do all it can to this end, to the utmost of its own resources and, where appropriate, with any international assistance and co-operation, in particular, financial, artistic, scientific and technical, which it may be able to obtain.'' All it can to that end?

The Guamote-Macas road is one of few roads of its kind planned by Ecuatorian developers. Guamote is a small village of Puruhá natives in the highlands, and Macas is a Shuar town in the Andean foothills. Neither settlements are by their own central in the country's economy. Rather, they are accidentally located at the two ends of the Upano valley, which strategically links the Andean altiplano and the Amazon basin. It is through roads like the Guamote-Macas that in the coming decades the Amazon will bleed its biodiversity: Open veins of Latin America.

Pilot tractor opening the Guamote-Macas road, Huapachi sector, Sangay National Park (1996). Photo © 1996 Paolo Catelan.