A year after winning a landmark legal battle that made history at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the uncontacted Tagaeri, Taromenane, and Dugakaeri peoples of Ecuador’s Yasuní rainforest are still waiting for Ecuador to close the oil wells that are threatening their existence, as Human Rights Watch accuses the government of defying both an international court order and its own people’s democratic vote
Twelve months ago, the uncontacted Indigenous peoples of Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park won one of the most significant human rights rulings in Latin American legal history.
Today, the oil is still flowing.
Ecuador has failed to comply with key provisions of an Inter-American Court of Human Rights order to protect the Tagaeri and Taromenane Indigenous peoples from oil facilities in Yasuní National Park, Human Rights Watch said in a report published Monday, March 17, 2026, calling for the immediate halt to drilling activities and full compliance with the court’s ruling.
“Ecuador continues to allow extraction from Block 43, putting oil production above the rights of Indigenous communities,” said José Rodríguez Orúe, practitioner-in-residence at Human Rights Watch.
“Ecuador should take immediate steps to suspend oil extraction in Block 43 and fully comply with the court’s ruling to respect the rights of Indigenous peoples in the national park.”
Juan Bay, president of the Waorani Nation of Ecuador, traveled to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York this week to denounce the lack of progress and express his frustrations with the Ecuadorian state, telling Mongabay that of the 247 wells the government is obligated to close, only 10 have been shut down.
“On August 20, 2023, a popular referendum was held in which the Ecuadorian people democratically showed their solidarity in saving Yasuní National Park, recognized as one of the lungs of the world,” Bay said.
“With 58% of the vote, the Ecuadorian people decided that the oil in Block 43 should remain underground. Now, almost three years later, the government has simply presented a report on the 247 wells, with 10 wells closed. This demonstrates that the government has not acted in accordance with the will of the people.”
The Ruling Changed International Law
On March 13, 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights handed down a historic decision ruling that the Ecuadorian government had violated the rights of uncontacted Indigenous communities in the Amazon by permitting oil drilling in their territory, marking the first time an international tribunal had directly ruled on the rights of Indigenous groups living in voluntary isolation.
The court ordered Ecuador to prevent any future oil activity that could threaten the lives, lands, or culture of the Tagaeri, Taromenane, and Dugakaeri peoples, who inhabit parts of Yasuní National Park.
The judges emphasized the need for strict protections under the “precautionary principle,” even in cases where impacts from oil development are uncertain.
Importantly, the court also instructed the government to fully implement the outcome of Ecuador’s 2023 national referendum, in which voters called for a halt to oil operations in the protected area.
The Costa Rica-based court ordered the Ecuadorian government to ensure any future expansion or renewal of oil operations does not impact Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation, and directed the government to enact measures to prevent third parties, including illegal loggers, from invading uncontacted peoples’ lands and jeopardizing their right to remain uncontacted.
Who Are the Tagaeri, Taromenane, and Dugakaeri?
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights defined uncontacted Indigenous peoples as: “Peoples or segments of peoples who do not maintain regular contact with the majority population and who, in addition, tend to avoid any type of contact with persons outside their group.
They may also include peoples or segments of peoples who were previously contacted but who decide to return to a situation of isolation, breaking off contact relations.”
The Tagaeri, Taromenane, and Dugakaeri are a subset of Waorani peoples, sharing the same language and culture with recently contacted Waorani communities whose ancestral territory overlaps with the Intangible Zone inside Yasuní National Park.
The United Nations estimates that approximately 200 Indigenous communities live in voluntary isolation across at least nine countries, including Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Peru, and Venezuela.
In recent years, oil operations have expanded into the buffer area surrounding the Intangible Zone. The ruling noted that there have been multiple sightings of uncontacted groups traveling outside the designated off-limits area, suggesting that their traditional territory is significantly larger than what official maps have acknowledged.
How Ecuador Cheated the Map
The legal case that produced last year’s ruling has its roots in a deliberate act of cartographic fraud committed by the Ecuadorian government in 2013.
In 2013, the Ecuadorian government quietly adjusted official maps designating where uncontacted groups were known to travel. The new maps indicated, without justification, that uncontacted groups no longer traveled through an oil-rich area known as the Ishpingo, Tambococha, and Tiputini oil fields. The government then announced it would open up drilling in those fields.
That same year, two more violent attacks involving uncontacted groups took place, including a massacre of around 30 uncontacted people. Two surviving girls referred to in the ruling, then aged about 2 and 6, now live in different parts of the Ecuadorian Amazon region.
The court said the Ecuadorian government violated the rights of those two girls, finding them subject to multiple rights violations including to their personal integrity, cultural identity, appropriate healthcare, and participation in decisions affecting their lives. The court concluded that “the State was responsible for failing to prevent these events, thus violating the right to life of the PIAV members who died in those attacks.”
In 2020, the Inter-American Commission referred the case to the court. The March 2025 ruling was the culmination of that five-year process.
Sixty Years of Oil. Nothing Left But Damage.
Juan Bay, speaking at the United Nations this week, offered a devastating summary of what six decades of oil extraction have actually delivered to his people.
“To put things in context, 60 years ago, destruction began in the Ecuadorian Amazon, through lies and deception. The authorities and governments at the time claimed that the only way to advance the country’s development, and the development of the Indigenous people, was to destroy the Amazon and exploit its oil.
Today, 60 years have passed, and all the oil companies have left behind is environmental damage, disease and social problems such as alcoholism and betrayal, which have led to the death of the Waorani people.”
All Waorani people lived uncontacted in the Ecuadorian Amazon until the late 1950s, when American Christian missionaries began to force contact on Waorani groups to evangelize them.
A few years later, the US oil company Texaco worked with the missionaries to accelerate their forced contact campaign and remove Waorani people from their oil-rich lands.
Ever since, the oil industry’s operations have expanded deeper into Waorani groups’ territories, displacing some communities and driving uncontacted and recently contacted communities into a smaller and smaller area of shared rainforest.
Pollution from drilling operations has poisoned waterways, deforestation has accelerated, and entire communities have been displaced. For Indigenous leaders and environmental advocates, the ruling was a rare win in the fight to keep oil in the ground, but only if Ecuador actually complies with it.
Ecuador Is Choosing Oil Over Its Own Democratic Vote
The dimension of Ecuador’s non-compliance that is hardest to explain away is not the failure to implement an international court order, difficult though that is to defend. It is the failure to implement the outcome of its own democratic referendum.
Before the 2025 ruling, Ecuador’s government had been bound by a 2023 national referendum to stop oil production in Block 43. On August 20, 2023, the public voted to ban oil extraction and halt all drilling in the Ishpingo, Tambococha, and Tiputini blocks of Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse sections remaining in the Amazon River Basin. Despite the vote, only four of 247 wells had been shut down by the time of the court ruling in March 2025.
Richard Pearshouse, environment and human rights director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The Ecuadorian government’s decision to maintain oil production for the next five years in Yasuní National Park ignores the 2023 referendum result, which directly impacts the rights of the peoples who live in the park.”
Bay told Mongabay that the court’s 2025 ruling had ratified the immediate closure of Block 43 to guarantee the territorial rights and the right to existence of the isolated Tagaeri and Taromenane peoples, but that the government has simply presented a report on the 247 wells, with 10 wells closed, as proof of compliance.
A Precedent That Could Reshape Indigenous Rights Across the Continent
Despite Ecuador’s non-compliance, the legal significance of the March 2025 ruling extends well beyond the Yasuní.
The ruling upholds Indigenous sovereignty and marks a significant shift in the legal recognition of the threats posed by extractive industries to communities living in voluntary isolation.
It sets a precedent that could influence similar legal battles across Latin America and beyond, in countries including Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia, all of which have uncontacted communities living in territories coveted by oil, gas, and mining companies.
The court’s ruling was the first time an international tribunal had directly ruled on the rights of Indigenous groups living in voluntary isolation, establishing a legal framework that advocates are already applying in other jurisdictions across the continent.
The court suggested that to fully protect the rights of the Tagaeri, Taromenane, and Dugakaeri, the government may need to expand a Delaware-sized area of rainforest and its six-mile buffer zone that are supposed to be off-limits to extractive activity, acknowledging that the current Intangible Zone is not large enough to contain the full range of these communities’ movements through the forest.
The Tagaeri, Taromenane, and Dugakaeri did not ask to be part of this story.
They did not choose contact with the outside world.
They did not vote in the 2023 referendum, file a case at the Inter-American Court, or travel to the United Nations in New York.
Other people did all of that on their behalf.
And Ecuador is still drilling.
Sources: JURIST: Ecuador Failing to Protect Indigenous Groups | Mongabay: Ecuador Failing to End Yasuní Oil Drilling | Inside Climate News: Landmark Ruling Strikes at Oil Industry | Amazon Research & Conservation Center: Court Orders Ecuador to Protect Uncontacted Peoples | Environment & Health News: Ecuador Ordered to Protect Uncontacted Groups | Business & Human Rights Resource Centre: IACHR Ruling | Yahoo News: Ruling Strikes at Oil Industry | The Wild Hunt: Historic Human Rights Ruling
