LAGO AGRIO, ECUADOR – Fourteen-year-old Leonela Moncayo gets angry when she talks about the gas flares burning near her home. She grew up on the outskirts of Lago Agrio, a city on the edge of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, at the heart of its oil industry, where patches of tropical forest canopy are interspersed with oil wells spewing huge flames of fossil gas.
For Moncayo, these gas flares have meant disease and death for many in her community, which is why she and other schoolgirls have been leading the fight to have them turned off.
“As young girls, we are fighting for our future because we want our future to be better – to not live with the danger that just by breathing the air we are being contaminated,” says Moncayo.
More than 400 flares are scattered across Ecuador’s northern Amazon, burning the fossil gas that escapes while extracting crude oil from below ground. Oil production accounts for nearly one-third of Ecuador’s GDP, and most of it is extracted from the Amazon.
Local activists as well as Indigenous and campesino (farmer) communities have long warned of the harmful impacts of the industry. Between 1964 and 1990, billions of litres of toxic water were released into the environment in an incident called the “Amazon Chernobyl”.
In 2021, Moncayo and eight other schoolgirls from the region won a historic lawsuit against the state after they sued the ministries of energy and environment for permitting flares to burn for so many years. The girls argued that it violated their constitutional right to a healthy environment.
“There is no drinking water here,” says Moncayo. “All the rivers are polluted. There is not one healthy river. They are all completely destroyed.”
The court gave the energy ministry 18 months to close the gas flares near inhabited areas in Ecuador’s northern Amazon. The flares farther from populated areas have until 2030 to be shut down.
Kimberley Michelle Brown 