Dear Cofan Survival Fund Supporters,
Hello, everyone! I just returned from my annual trip to Ecuador and Cofan territory. It’s always great to see friends, collaborators, and ritual relatives. (See the picture above!) But it’s also a reminder of how many challenges remain for the Cofan Nation—a point my recent visit drove home. So many people are sick, impoverished, and struggling to protect their lands with the few resources they have. As always, the CSF is doing everything it can to help them fight for survival.
Rather than write about the challenges, however, I want to share an EXTREMELY positive development. In the last newsletter I sent, I noted that the support the Betty Louise Smith Fund has supplied for our Cofan Higher Education Program was coming to an end. Without the fund’s generosity, we wouldn’t have the strong group of young, highly educated, and quickly developing Cofan leaders we do. They’re the ones who will carry the work of the CSF into the future. Without them, everything we’ve fought for could disappear.
Once in a blue moon, something I write in a newsletter catches the eye of just the right person. It just so happens that one of our supporters recently began working for the Leopold Bachmann Foundation (LBF) in Switzerland, a donor institution that focuses on education. When she read my short comment about our higher education program losing its funding, she wrote and said she might be able to help.
After a series of meetings and emails between this supporter and myself, Randy Borman, and Felipe Borman, the LBF decided to provide the CSF a grant that will fund the ENTIRETY of the Cofan Higher Education Program for at least the next four years! The students who have just started their degree programs will finish, and a new cohort is getting ready to enter. We’re looking especially for young Cofan men and women who want degrees in communications (digital or otherwise), accounting, and education, three fields that are essential to the work of the CSF and Cofan political struggles more generally.
Even better, the LBF suggested that if the first two years of the program go well, they might be interested in bringing an additional cohort of students on board. This kind of institutional support—from a like-minded organization that is very familiar with the challenges facing students like the Cofan—comes around once a decade, if we’re lucky. We can’t let you know how happy we are that the LBF sees the value in our vision and is willing to help us reach our goals of protecting the lands and lives of the Cofan Nation.
In an additional sign of their commitment, the LBF also decided to fund shorter-term education programs. With the LBF’s support, we’ll provide extensive training in GIS technology to a large group of Cofan leaders. With the knowledge of how to use GPS units to map their lands and fight their territorial battles, these leaders will have a tremendous new weapon at their disposal.
We’re still working on projects involving primary and secondary education, but the Cofan Higher Education Project has been one of our core priorities for years. Now, the LBF has committed nearly half a million dollars—and potentially more—to fund this essential effort. And you know what that means: no more annoying pleas from me asking for money to support our Cofan college students! It’s a win-win-win situation for us all. Learning that the LBF had decided to support the Cofan Higher Education Project was one of the happiest days of my life.
Of course, Cofan higher education is only one of our initiatives. We’re still in the midst of serious struggles to protect Cofan territory. Recently, the Azimuth World Foundation and the Houser Foundation stepped in to fund the Cofan Park Guard Force on a series of field-based projects to secure some of the most threatened Cofan lands along the Bermejo River and Cofanes River. But we need to expand this work to cover the entirety of the Cofan Nation’s legalized homeland, which includes more than a million acres of the most biodiverse, climate-change-mitigating forests in the world.
When our Cofan Park Guard Force was at full strength a little more than a decade ago, it achieved a rate of zero deforestation in legalized Cofan territories. The surrounding region, in contrast, suffered some of the most extreme deforestation rates in the world. The program has continued at a smaller scale, but we want to return it to full strength as one of the world’s most innovative and effective conservation efforts.
In our next newsletter, two of our board members—Vince McElhinny and Serena Himmelfarb—will describe the past and present of the Cofan Park Guard Force, how successful it has been, and how promising it can become again if the right resources are available. Though our projects in education, healthcare, and sustainable development are central to our mission, protecting Cofan territory is the basis of everything we do. As dozens of Cofan people have told me over the years, “If we lose our forests, we will no longer be Cofan.” It’s a deep principle at the heart of Cofan history, identity, and hopes for the future.
Illegal mining and logging are bigger threats than ever, as are invasions of the Cofan homeland by illegal settlers. The CSF is committed to helping the Cofan Nation hold onto land it already has, but we also want to expand that territory so Cofan people can inhabit and protect even more of their ancestral homeland. Just recently, Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment approached the Cofan about taking control of nearly 100,000 acres of the western Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve and making it into a Cofan territory and community. Why would the Ecuadorian government want to do this? Because they know the Cofan will protect the land in a way no one else can, including the Ecuadorian state. To secure this new land, we will need more resources, and the Cofan Park Guard Force will have to be at full strength. Illegal settlers have already occupied parts of this supposedly “protected” area. We need to stop the invasion before any more forest is destroyed.
As always, my visit to Cofan territory served as a reminder of how beautiful and important the Cofan homeland is as well as how kind, committed, and capable Cofan people are. (They’re also some of the funniest people I’ve ever met, but I’ll leave that for another newsletter.) With higher education covered thanks to the LBF, please consider expanding your support of the CSF. The Cofan Park Guard Force needs you, as do Randy and our Rapid Response Team in Quito. Without them, nothing we do would be possible.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at michael.cepek@utsa.edu.
Sincerely,
Michael L. Cepek, CSF President
CSF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent allowed by law. For gifts of $250 and larger, you will receive a receipt for tax purposes.