‘Financial Strangulation’: How Ecuador Is Silencing Environmental Defenders

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It was a sweltering January afternoon in the Amazonian town of Puyo when Andrés Tapia realized his daughter’s public school fees were due. Like many Ecuadorians, he reached for his phone to make a mobile transfer.

Carrying cash is too risky these days. Ecuador is in the grip of an ongoing security crisis, with transnational criminal organizations spilling in from neighboring Colombia and Peru. But when Tapia tried to log into the Banco Pichincha mobile banking app, a message flashed on the screen: There was a problem with his account, and he should visit the nearest branch.

Dread quickly gave way to anger. Tapia, a member of the Indigenous Kichwa community and former communications director for the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, knew exactly what the message meant.

“Financial strangulation,” as he put it, is the latest weapon in the government’s escalating effort to clear the way for expanded mining and oil development in one of the world’s most biodiverse countries.

Months earlier, officials had temporarily frozen the accounts of several of Ecuador’s most prominent environmental defenders, including Tapia, citing investigations into “unjust private enrichment” and “financing terrorism.” When authorities failed to substantiate the allegations against him, a court lifted the freeze. 

Even so, prosecutors continued to pursue the charges, and Tapia believes those pending accusations ultimately triggered Banco Pichincha’s internal compliance flags, leading to the permanent closure of his account in January. Tapia said he is one of at least 10 activists that Ecuador’s largest financial institution has “debanked,” a term used to describe the closing or denial of bank accounts absent any proven legal violations.

Tapia said he was able to withdraw what little money he had in his account, but the impacts on him and other affected environmental defenders have been paralyzing. Without access to banking services, they say it has become nearly impossible to receive donations, run their organizations, hire staff, pay taxes or sustain advocacy work.

Banco Pichincha, whose app is like the Ecuadorian equivalent of Venmo, did not respond to requests for comment on the account closures or the justification for terminating them.

Banking law experts say that financial institutions generally have broad discretion to choose their customers, particularly when complying with anti-money laundering and counterterrorism rules. At the same time, those experts note that governments can exert influence over banks in ways that are rarely made public, creating a system in which customers may never learn why their accounts were terminated.

“When banks are told by a government to do or not do something, that’s generally between the bank and the government,” said Julie Andersen Hill, a banking regulation specialist and the dean at the University of Wyoming College of Law. Hill was speaking of debanking in general, not about the Ecuadorian situation specifically. 

“There is no way for a customer to find out if it’s a situation where the government is potentially leaning on a bank in a way that has nothing to do with money laundering but has to do with other political ends,” Hill said. 

Neither Ecuador’s consulate nor embassy in Washington, D.C., responded to requests for comment about the debanking of environmentalists. 

Last fall, federal prosecutors in the country opened investigations into more than 60 environmental or Indigenous leaders and organizations, though Tapia said he believes that number has now grown to more than 100, based on conversations he’s had with other targeted individuals. 

Patricio Meza Saltos, an Indigenous environmental activist from Ecuador’s Amazon region whose Banco Pichincha account was also closed, sees the attempted prosecution of so many environmentalists and Indigenous leaders as evidence of a coordinated campaign to silence opposition to the government’s pro-extractive policies. 

Many of the people being investigated or prosecuted, he said, “are directly involved in defending water, life, collective memory and food sovereignty.”

Among them is Nayra Chalán, former vice president of the Confederation of the Kichwa Nationality of Ecuador. Chalán lives near one of Ecuador’s most critical “water mountains,” a high-altitude wetland known as the Fierro Urco páramo. Her work has focused on educating locals about mining impacts. 

She discovered that a freeze was placed on her Banco Pichincha account in mid-September. Eight days later, federal organized crime prosecutors notified her that she was the subject of a preliminary investigation into “unjustified private enrichment.” While the initial freeze was eventually lifted, the investigation remains open. In February, Banco Pichincha permanently deactivated her account, citing its “right to freedom of contract.” 

“Financial harassment and criminalization have limited my ability to do my job,” Chalán said in Spanish. Like Tapia, she relied on the account to receive payments for consultancy and contract work. 

“Organizations prefer to hire people who do not have legal proceedings against them,” she added. 

Other activists facing similar investigations also said the unproven claims have stigmatized them and the organizations they represent, prompting donors — including those in the United States — to pull back. With anti-money laundering and counterterrorism laws embedded in financial systems around the world, international transfers linked to individuals under investigation can trigger scrutiny or automatic freezes, regardless of whether the accusations hold up in court.

“They are successfully cutting off international funds to organizations that were defending areas the government wants to open to mining and oil,” Tapia said. 

Human rights experts say attacking activists financially can have a pervasive chilling effect — people will censor themselves to prevent being targeted. Environmental activist José Cueva said he learned his Banco Pichincha account had been permanently closed on Friday — three days after he posted a widely circulated video on social media expressing solidarity with environmental defenders who had been debanked. 

Cueva, who is also being investigated for alleged “unjust private enrichment,” said the bank acted unilaterally in closing his account, as it did when closing the accounts of Tapia, Chalán and Meza Saltos. 

While debanking affects individuals across the political spectrum, its impact on environmentalists represents a new frontier in state repression, allowing officials to isolate, stigmatize and ultimately incapacitate green groups. What’s happening in Ecuador comes as an increasing number of leaders — from the United States, to China, to Hungary — label nonprofit groups and environmentalists as radicals or terrorists. 

Tapia said the tactics he sees in Ecuador echo trends unfolding in the United States, such as government monitoring of immigrant rights activists. Whether Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa is drawing inspiration from President Donald Trump or vice versa, he said, the erosion of civil liberties follows a familiar script.

“It’s public knowledge that Ecuador’s president is a Trump fan — and that there’s a shared playbook being used by them both,” Tapia said. 

He also pointed to an announcement by the climate group Extinction Rebellion, which said it was under federal investigation in the United States. 

“A lot of people may think this won’t touch them, that it’s happening to someone else,” Tapia said. “But it’s spreading around the world and anyone could be next.” 

The stakes for environmental defenders in the Global South are intensifying as more wealthy countries seek out critical minerals and metals to fuel their militaries, data centers and energy transitions. In February, the United States signed agreements on critical minerals with several countries, including Ecuador.

Many of the Ecuadorians affected by account freezes and cancellations carry out territorial defense, helping Indigenous and rural communities monitor their lands for illegal logging, mining and other incursions — work that depends on money for practical expenses such as fuel, drones and cellphone plans. Other affected people focus on legal education in remote areas where the state’s presence is limited, ensuring communities can make informed decisions about their futures rather than accept extractive projects out of economic desperation.

“Communities in need of money or services are incentivized to cooperate with extractive industries that supply basic goods, wages or services,” said Angélica María Bernal, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has conducted extensive fieldwork in Ecuador.

Meza Saltos said the financial and legal pressures have sown fear and uncertainty, weakening the country’s formidable social, Indigenous and environmental movements. 

“We are defenseless,” he said, speaking about groups who have lost access to banking.

For Tapia, the toll is also deeply personal.

A trained biologist, he supplemented his income with consulting work. That has largely dried up. Without a bank account, he cannot receive payments from the institutions that previously hired him. He has resorted to carrying cash, a workaround that is more complicated than it sounds. Amid the security crisis, many businesses no longer keep significant cash on hand. Routine purchases may be impossible without exact change.

“I have a wife and children — two young children,” Tapia said. “They ask me what’s wrong, if they can do something — it’s very emotional.”

Environmental imagination

Ecuador is one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth, a Nebraska-sized nation that holds more tree species per square mile than the entirety of North America. Straddling the equator, it stretches across three distinct worlds: the Galápagos archipelago and coastal lowlands to the west, the snowcapped Andes at its spine and the upper Amazon River Basin to the east.

Its misty cloud forests, montane wetlands, marine ecosystems and lowland jungles house a staggering share of global life: about 5% of Earth’s reptiles, 8% of its amphibians and mammals and 16% of its birds — while species new to science continue to be discovered there. 

That ecological complexity is mirrored by its cultural richness. A self-described “plurinational” state, Ecuador is home to 1.3 million Indigenous people, including groups living in voluntary isolation from the outside world. That Indigenous heritage includes at least a dozen distinct languages, along with unique territorial traditions, spiritual cosmologies and forms of self-governance.

In 2008, these communities and allied groups pioneered a world-changing idea, successfully pushing the government to recognize the rights of nature in Ecuador’s Constitution, alongside mechanisms for popular referendums and a reaffirmation of Indigenous peoples’ right to be consulted on any project affecting their territories. 

Since then, grassroots groups have drawn on those legal tools to rack up historic wins. Frogs have defeated an industrial mining company in court. The multitrillion-dollar oil industry has lost out on new concessions because the government didn’t properly consult the Indigenous people whose lands hold the crude. And when Ecuadorians held a referendum on whether they wanted to end oil operations in an especially sensitive part of the rainforest known as the Yasuní ITT fields, the vast majority of voters said yes. 

But winning in court and at the ballot box hasn’t been enough. 

The Ecuadorian government has often failed to comply with court rulings and the will of voters, such as the 2023 Yasuní ITT referendum. Oil continues to flow from those fields and the government is doubling down on an economic model based on extraction for export. 

The impacts of that model fall largely on Indigenous and rural communities. The people pushing back have faced repressive tactics across political regimes, not only that of the current president. Under leftist Rafael Correa, activists were branded “infantile environmentalists” and charged with sabotage or terrorism for blocking roads to protest oil pollution.

But Ecuadorian civil society groups and international experts say the work of land defenders in the country has entered its most perilous era yet. The government has used military force to suppress protests, at times with deadly consequences. Environmental defenders have been killed under other circumstances, too, such as when Indigenous A’i Cofán leader and oil opponent Eduardo Mendúa, 40, was gunned down in his garden at point-blank range in 2023. 

The global rush for “critical minerals” has helped trigger a surge of state-led lawfare — the strategic wielding of the law — to paralyze dissent and weaken environmental protections. And for rural defenders, a new front has emerged as the armed criminal groups flooding into the country illegally mine throughout the Amazon, poisoning Indigenous territories with mercury and turning pristine ecosystems into scarred industrial zones.

“Indigenous people are caught in the middle of a weak state that’s losing control and narco-groups that are taking over,” said Bernal, the professor at the University of Massachusetts.

Ecuadorian officials have attempted to link defenders to the very narco-traffickers threatening them, Bernal said. The bank account freezes and pending prosecutions and investigations are carried out through laws passed last year that the government says will address that trafficking. 

Last week, the United States and Ecuador began joint military operations to target what the Pentagon said are “designated terrorist organizations” in Ecuador, an expansion of the U.S. military’s presence on the continent under Trump. On Friday, the U.S. and Ecuador bombed alleged drug traffickers’ training camps near the border with Colombia in what officials called ⁠Operation Total Extermination. 

“The operations are a powerful example of the commitment of partners in Latin America and the Caribbean to combat the scourge of narco-terrorism,” the Pentagon’s U.S. Southern Command said in a social media post last week about the new Ecuadorian operations. 

Since Trump regained office, his administration has invaded Venezuela and carried out lethal strikes against alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 151 people. Human rights experts have said the strikes are extrajudicial killings and that some of the victims were small fishing vessels wrongly labeled as narco-terrorists.