Extractive Expansion and Constitutional Risk in Ecuador

Echoes of the Pink Amazon Dolphin

Extractive Expansion and Constitutional Risk in Ecuador

24/02/2026

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A Humming Bird named Vida

&

Selva

The Jaguar Who Walks Through Time

A Moment Taking Shape

There are moments when extraction does not announce itself with force, but with ease. No law proclaims it. No speech names it openly. Instead, decisions begin to move faster than landscapes can respond. Permits shorten. Oversight thins. Trade corridors widen. What was once debated becomes procedural, and what was once exceptional becomes normal.

This is what is meant here by an extractive moment: not an isolated undertaking or an articulated ideology, but a convergence of legal reforms, trade incentives, and administrative practices that together tilt a country toward accelerated conversion of territory into economic value.

In Ecuador, the pressure to convert territory into income is no longer expressed only through activity on the ground, but through legal reform, trade negotiation, and administrative design. The Amazon and the highlands do not appear in these processes as places, but as categories — zones of potential, reserves of value, variables in growth. The consequences, however, remain stubbornly physical: water altered, soils disturbed, communities repositioned, time compressed.

What follows is an examination of how this moment takes shape — not through one decision, but across institutions that rarely speak to one another, yet move in the same direction.

Ecuador’s 2026 Mining Reforms under President Daniel Noboa

In January 2026, the government of President Daniel Noboa introduced a set of reforms to Ecuador’s mining framework, presented as measures to accelerate investment, reduce administrative delay, and modernise the national economy. The reforms modify environmental licensing procedures, compress timelines for hydrological evaluation, extend exploration periods, and introduce mechanisms through which administrative silence may be interpreted as approval.

These changes are presented as technical adjustments. In practice, they reshape the institutional environment in which extraction occurs. The reforms do not strengthen environmental control; they retain it formally while redesigning it to operate under conditions that prioritise speed, administrative default, and investment certainty over ecological evaluation.

Replacing environmental licences with faster environmental authorisations lowers the depth of baseline study and cumulative impact assessment. The introduction of administrative silence converts institutional capacity limitations into legal consent. Compressed timelines for water-impact review align environmental evaluation with investment schedules rather than ecological processes. Extended exploration periods reduce moments of reassessment, allowing cumulative disturbance to become normalised. The creation of mining clusters and security-designated zones signals territorial prioritisation of extractive infrastructure.

Each measure can be understood as procedural efficiency. Together, they reorganise environmental governance in ways that systematically favour extractive expansion.

Trade, extraction, and the constitutional line that cannot be crossed

Ecuador’s approach to trade with the United States is unfolding at a moment when economic urgency, geopolitical alignment, and ecological fragility are converging. Negotiations toward an Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) have been described by both governments as substantially concluded, with public indications that signature is imminent. The agreement is framed in the language of competitiveness: tariff relief, predictability, access to markets. Yet trade is never neutral. It arrives carrying assumptions about what must move faster, and what must stand aside.

The United States with which Ecuador is negotiating today is a country whose political leadership has openly rejected the scientific consensus on climate change, withdrawn from multilateral climate commitments, and systematically dismantled elements of its environmental regulatory system. Environmental oversight and climate policy have been publicly recast as impediments to growth and strategic autonomy. This posture has translated into concrete regulatory rollbacks and institutional weakening, generating sustained legal conflict and international concern. In such a negotiating climate, environmental restraint is not a shared baseline. It is treated as a negotiable cost.

This context matters because Ecuador’s commercial relationship with the United States is already deeply extractive in material terms. In 2024, the United States received roughly one fifth of Ecuador’s total exports. Among those flows were approximately USD 3.7 billion in crude oil and petroleum products, alongside mineral exports such as gold.

These are not abstract categories of commerce. They correspond to extraction processes with well-documented impacts on water systems, soils, and biodiversity, particularly in Amazonian territories. Gold extraction has already contaminated rivers with mercury and cyanide. Oil extraction carries a long legacy of polluted soils, compromised watersheds, and cumulative ecological harm that does not disappear with improved accounting or contractual language.

Against this backdrop, the ART cannot be treated as environmentally neutral. Even if presented as a market-access instrument, any agreement that improves conditions for the export of oil or minerals strengthens incentives for extraction. Tariff reductions, improved predictability, and strategic alignment do not merely move goods. They reorder priorities on the ground. Rivers, aquifers, and forests absorb the consequences long after negotiations conclude.

At precisely the same moment, Ecuador’s domestic legal trajectory has shifted. The Executive has advanced reforms to mining and environmental governance that replace environmental licences with faster authorisations, compress evaluation timelines, and elevate administrative silence into a mechanism of approval. These changes are presented as technical modernisation. Yet efficiency is never neutral. It redistributes power away from precaution and toward speed.

This convergence between external trade incentives and internal deregulatory reform is not incidental. It reflects a broader regional pattern. Across Latin America, governments pursuing closer economic alignment with the United States have quietly downgraded climate and environmental commitments. In Argentina, climate policy has been subordinated to extractive expansion. In El Salvador, environmental safeguards have been weakened in the name of investment acceleration. In Chile, once a regional reference point for climate policy, extractive pragmatism has increasingly displaced precaution.

These shifts have rarely required formal denunciation of environmental treaties. More often, they occur through recalibration: climate is acknowledged, but no longer allowed to delay extraction.

Under Ecuador’s constitutional order, this trajectory raises a non-negotiable legal question.

Nature itself is recognised as a subject of rights. Mining and hydrocarbons are not ordinary economic sectors; they are the principal sites through which large-scale ecological harm occurs, above all through water.

Where an international agreement has the practical effect of conditioning, accelerating, or consolidating extractive activity in mining or oil, it necessarily engages the Rights of Nature. In such circumstances, Ecuador’s Constitution requires that the agreement be subject to prior review and authorisation by the Constitutional Court. This requirement does not depend on how an agreement is labelled. It arises from effect, not form.

The ART is being advanced as a technical trade instrument, a form that does not automatically invite constitutional scrutiny. Its extractive consequences are instead displaced into domestic legal reform, where they appear as sovereign legislative choices rather than as international obligations. This procedural manoeuvre is familiar in contemporary governance. It is also constitutionally dangerous.

Where constitutional review does not occur in advance, and extractive effects are realised through weakened domestic safeguards, the legality of the agreement’s domestic application becomes contestable. The issue is not merely procedural. It concerns whether constitutionally protected ecological rights can be lawfully exposed to risk without the scrutiny those rights demand.

The constitutional problem is compounded by Ecuador’s international obligations. Ecuador is a State Party to binding treaties that reinforce its constitutional duties, including the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, ILO Convention 169, and the Escazú Agreement. Taken together, these instruments oblige the State to regulate extractive activity, protect biodiversity and freshwater systems, guarantee Indigenous consultation, and ensure public participation in environmental decision-making.

These obligations are not abstract. They apply directly to Amazonian ancestral communities, whose territories coincide with the most biodiverse and hydrologically sensitive regions of the country, and to Indigenous populations of the Sierra, where mining expansion increasingly affects páramo ecosystems that sustain national water supplies. In both regions, extractive acceleration has immediate consequences for water, food systems, cultural continuity, and territorial integrity.

Under international law, a State cannot invoke a later trade agreement to justify non-compliance with earlier ratified environmental or rights treaties, nor can it rely on domestic law to excuse such a breach. If the implementation of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade, whether directly or through domestic mining reforms, places Ecuador in conflict with these commitments, the responsibility rests with the Ecuadorian State. Domestically, implementing measures become vulnerable to constitutional challenge. Internationally, Ecuador risks reputational damage, adverse findings in treaty monitoring bodies, and exposure to legal proceedings.

This is not a theoretical concern. It is the precise situation the Rights of Nature were designed to confront: not when extraction is politically inconvenient, but when it is profitable, strategic, and externally encouraged. Trade may move quickly. Rivers do not recover on the same timetable. The forest does not attend negotiations. It answers later.

In practice, extractive economics rarely presents itself as doctrine. It appears through policy environments that make extraction easier, faster, and institutionally preferred. Over time, these environments shape development strategy by directing investment, infrastructure, and administrative attention toward the conversion of natural systems into revenue.

In this sense, the mining reforms do not simply regulate extraction. They reinforce a development model in which extractive expansion is treated as the primary path to modernisation.

The Ecuadorian economist Alberto Acosta has long warned that extractivism often promises development while transferring ecological costs to society and future generations. What appears as growth in national accounts may coincide with the depletion of water systems, forests, and territorial autonomy. The language of modernisation can obscure the slow erosion of the systems that sustain life. This debate carries particular weight in Ecuador, whose Constitution recognises the Rights of Nature as a foundation of national life.

It is in this context that policies seeking to accelerate extractive activity are frequently presented as development strategies. Within this framing, opposition by environmental organisations, Indigenous communities, and civil-society actors is increasingly characterised in official discourse as resistance to development or progress, rather than as engagement in a substantive debate about economic models and long-term national interest. In practice, this framing conflates the rapid conversion of natural systems into short-term revenue with economic progress.

We believe that this conflation lies at the core of the extractivist problem. Extractivism is opposed not on ideological grounds, but because its environmental, social, and institutional consequences in Ecuador have been repeatedly documented. Oil extraction and illegal mining have produced long-term ecological damage, public-health impacts, and territorial disruption that persist long after fiscal gains have been recorded. Development defined in this manner collapses once cumulative costs and delayed impacts are taken into account. Institutional degradation only accelerates that collapse.

This institutional perspective is not recent. Since the early 1990s, the organisation has monitored, documented, and acted on the environmental impacts of oil extraction and illegal mining in Ecuador’s northern Amazon, including legal actions concerning operations involving Maxus, Andrade Gutierrez, and extractive activities linked to the Municipality of Shushufindi. This work unfolded largely outside public visibility, through field documentation, legal processes, and sustained territorial engagement rather than media advocacy. That institutional experience, accumulated across successive administrations and regulatory frameworks, underpins the organisation’s assessment of extractive governance today.

Framed as technical measures intended to modernise regulation, reduce administrative delay, and stimulate investment, the 2026 mining reforms operate within a legal order that remains formally intact. They do not eliminate Ecuador’s environmental legislation or constitutional protections. On the contrary, they function within a dense and formally robust legal framework that includes environmental law, sectoral regulation, and the constitutional recognition of the Rights of Nature. The issue raised by this experience is therefore not the absence of law, but how law functions in practice under conditions of institutional fragility.

Recent scholarship published through Wageningen University & Research has examined how extractivism operates in constitutional contexts where environmental law remains formally intact. Rather than suspending or repealing protections, extractive expansion increasingly advances through procedural reconfiguration: timelines are tightened, decisions are nudged toward administrative default, and evidentiary demands are thinned until investment certainty quietly outweighs ecological evaluation.

In contexts where judicial independence is weak and regulatory enforcement uneven, the existence of law alone does not guarantee protection. Environmental regulation without enforcement becomes procedural theatre; oversight without accountability becomes camouflage. Measures framed as regulatory “streamlining” may, under such conditions, operate not as efficiency but as acceleration, shifting risk away from extractive actors and onto ecosystems, communities, and the public interest.

The persistent failure of extractive governance in Ecuador cannot therefore be explained solely by legislative gaps. It reflects a structural pattern in which formally intact legal frameworks are substantively neutralised by corruption, political pressure, and institutional capture.

They emerge from a pattern in which law remains present, visible, and formally correct, while its capacity to intervene is quietly hollowed out.

Judicial Governance, Institutional Credibility, and the Enforcement Contradiction

The mining reforms introduced in Ecuador in 2026 operate within a legal framework that remains intact on paper. Environmental law has not been repealed. Judicial institutions continue to function. Fiscal enforcement mechanisms remain in place. The question raised by recent developments is therefore not the absence of law, but the conditions under which law is applied and enforced.

This enforcement contradiction is not abstract. It has become visible in recent administrative practice. In the Napo province, mining operations within several concessions held by Terraearth Resources S.A. were formally suspended by the competent authorities on environmental grounds. The suspension did not revoke concession titles, but halted authorised activity pending compliance. Yet reports of continued extractive activity within the same territorial zones have persisted.

The significance of such cases lies not in the conduct of any single operator, but in what they reveal about institutional configuration: where licensing authority, environmental oversight, and enforcement responsibility circulate within the same administrative chain, suspension decisions may exist on paper while extractive activity continues on the ground through procedural delay, delegated operation, or enforcement fatigue. Law remains present and formally correct, even as its restraining capacity is weakened in practice.

Here, extractive governance intersects directly with judicial governance. Accelerating extraction in territories already affected by illegal mining, armed groups, and narcotics economies places decisive weight on enforcement institutions. Where enforcement credibility is weakened, regulatory reform does not merely fail; it becomes an accelerant.

In early 2026, Ecuador’s system of judicial governance entered a period of heightened public scrutiny. The President of the Consejo de la Judicatura, Mario Godoy, requested a temporary leave of absence while facing political oversight proceedings in the National Assembly. These proceedings centred on sworn testimony and documentation concerning alleged interference in sensitive criminal cases.

As this article was being finalised, further developments sharpened the institutional contradictions already under examination. Daniel Noboa, who had appointed Mario Godoy as President of the Consejo de la Judicatura, initially signalled political reluctance to allow legislative scrutiny of Godoy’s tenure. That position shifted only after sworn testimony before the National Assembly drew attention to alleged interference in a case involving narcotics-related charges, in which a presiding judge reportedly resisted pressure to alter a ruling concerning a defendant represented by a law firm linked to Godoy’s immediate family. The judge subsequently brought these concerns before the Assembly and later resigned from his position, publicly citing security fears and threats to his personal safety.

Godoy’s subsequent departure preserved the formal continuity of judicial governance but did not resolve the questions raised by the episode. The interim appointment process itself became part of the story. His replacement, designated through executive-linked channels, had previously served within the national tax authority during a period in which substantial tax liabilities owed by companies linked to the President’s own economic group were cancelled — a decision that was publicly reported and widely debated at the time. In a national context defined by escalating narcotics violence and an executive discourse centred on security and anti-cartel resolve, the sequence carried an unavoidable resonance.

The process through which an interim successor was appointed underscored this vulnerability. Formal continuity was preserved, yet the episode reinforced a broader pattern in which judicial governance remains present, visible, and legally constituted, while its capacity to operate independently is placed under strain. In such contexts, enforcement does not collapse; it becomes uncertain, contingent, and increasingly shaped by political alignment rather than institutional authority.

These institutional tensions also extend into Ecuador’s wider media environment. Expreso and its sister publication Extra, produced by the private company Gráficos Nacionales S.A., have been subjected to a series of regulatory inquiries and administrative measures by state authorities, including intervention by the Superintendencia de Compañías and scrutiny by fiscal and corporate regulators, in contexts where both outlets have maintained critical coverage of government policy. Press-freedom organisations such as the Inter-American Press Association (SIP) have publicly expressed concern that the use of state institutions to investigate or intervene in the operations of independent media can constitute indirect reprisals that undermine editorial independence and the resilience of institutional arenas for scrutiny.

Additional reporting by monitoring groups notes a broader climate in which state rhetoric, regulatory action, and exclusions from official events have been interpreted as contributing to a hostile environment for independent journalism.

Whatever the outcome of these disputes, their significance lies in the broader signal they send: when judicial oversight and independent commentary become politically contested terrain, the capacity of institutions to absorb criticism without fracture is put to the test. Within that space, the contributions of commentators such as Martín Pallares and Roberto Aguilar — recognised for their independent analysis and sustained engagement with national debates — illustrate the democratic value of independent media platforms.

That test soon acquired concrete form within the judiciary itself. It did so when a sitting judge broke silence and described pressure exerted from within the judicial system itself.

During those hearings, anti-corruption judge Carlos Serrano Lucero testified before the Assembly that he had been pressured by senior judicial authorities to rule in favour of a defendant in a high-profile criminal case reported in the press as linked to narcotics trafficking networks. Pressure exerted by state authorities on a sitting judge would be incompatible with Ecuadorian legal safeguards for judicial independence.

According to Serrano’s sworn testimony, after refusing to absolve the defendant, he received direct threats against his life. Shortly thereafter, his state security protection was withdrawn. In December 2025, he resigned from the judiciary and left the country. These facts have not been adjudicated as criminal findings, but they are part of an ongoing institutional and political review.

Following Godoy’s leave, President Daniel Noboa nominated and designated an interim replacement to preside over the Consejo de la Judicatura — the body responsible for the appointment, evaluation, discipline, and protection of judges nationwide. The appointee, Damián Larco Guamán, had previously served as Director General of the Servicio de Rentas Internas (SRI) between November 2023 and September 2025 and was, at the time of his judicial designation, a student of law.

Larco’s prior role as head of the SRI attracted public attention because it coincided with the implementation of a remission regime enacted under the Noboa administration. This regime allowed taxpayers to extinguish accumulated interest, fines, and surcharges upon payment of principal. Public reporting placed the long-standing tax liability of Exportadora Bananera Noboa S.A, a flagship company of the President’s family group, at approximately USD 90–98 million prior to remission. Following application of the regime, the liability was drastically reduced. Fact-checking outlets have correctly noted that this reduction occurred through legal mechanisms. The institutional concern lies not in formal legality, but in the perception of enforcement neutrality under such conditions.

That perception was further complicated when President Noboa nominated Alexandra Verónica Navarrete Ricaurte as Director General of the SRI in September 2025. Navarrete had previously served as Gerente Tributaria of Exportadora Bananera Noboa, a role involving direct management of tax compliance and disputes with the very institution she would later lead. Again, these appointments may comply with formal legal requirements. Their significance lies in the institutional signal they send.

Taken together, these overlapping nominations — by the President — of senior figures in judicial governance and fiscal enforcement, in contexts directly touching the economic interests of the President’s own corporate group, create a condition of institutional fragility. The issue is not that the law has been suspended, but that the separation between political power, private economic interest, and enforcement authority appears increasingly compressed.

This fragility is not peripheral to extractive governance. Here, weakened enforcement allows extractive disorder to be met not by regulation, but by force. In territories where illegal gold mining, armed groups, and narcotics economies intersect, judicial independence and fiscal enforcement constitute the primary barriers preventing extractive illegality from consolidating into territorial control. When those barriers erode, the State increasingly turns to militarisation as a substitute for governance.

This represents a marked departure from the nationalist and territorial doctrine that historically defined the role of Ecuador’s Armed Forces. Under that earlier conception, the military was oriented toward the defence of sovereignty and territory, including strategic national assets such as ecosystems and Indigenous lands, rather than toward routine involvement in civilian law enforcement.

Under President Daniel Noboa’s current security framework, that orientation has shifted. In recent years, and with particular intensity under the present administration, the Armed Forces have been deployed to manage narcotics-related and extractive violence within civilian territories. This shift does not reflect an institutional failure, but a displacement of function. Ecuador’s Constitution draws a clear distinction between military defence and civilian public security precisely to safeguard fundamental rights and democratic accountability. The Armed Forces are trained and organised for territorial protection and combat operations governed by rules of engagement fundamentally different from those applicable to civilian policing.

When soldiers are tasked with policing functions for which they are neither doctrinally nor institutionally designed, the risks are neither abstract nor exceptional. In Ecuador, the killing and torture of four children during a military operation in Esmeraldas stands as a grave illustration of the human cost that can arise when military force is inserted into civilian security contexts. That case has since joined a wider series of incidents — including fatal shootings of civilians and the deaths of non-combatants during security operations — that have entered public consciousness precisely because they contradict the promise of protection such deployments are meant to deliver.

Such outcomes are not unique to Ecuador. Comparative experience demonstrates that the militarisation of civilian space produces similar tragedies even within consolidated democracies, as illustrated by lethal law-enforcement failures in cities such as Minneapolis. The common factor is not political culture or intent, but the application of force calibrated for confrontation rather than civilian protection.

In this context, militarisation functions less as a solution to violence than as a substitute for governance. Where extractive expansion, institutional fragility, and weakened civilian enforcement converge, force is asked to manage outcomes that law and regulation have failed to prevent. Violence generated by structural disorder is thus reframed as a security problem, while the policies that produce that disorder remain intact.

Read in this light, recent communications issued by the High Command of the Armed Forces are better understood as expressions of institutional defensiveness than as signals of authoritarian intent. When an institution trained for territorial defence is placed at the centre of sustained internal security operations shaped by extractive illegality and narcotics economies, it becomes exposed to outcomes it cannot fully control and for which it will nevertheless be held responsible. Under such conditions, public criticism may be perceived less as democratic accountability than as a threat to institutional legitimacy.

The risk lies not in civil-society scrutiny, but in misdiagnosing its source. Efforts to restrict or discredit critique do not address the underlying tension created by the redefinition of the Armed Forces’ role under the current security framework. They divert attention away from the central constitutional question: whether this evolving configuration of internal security is clearly grounded in the Constitution and supported by an adequate doctrinal and institutional framework. Until that question is confronted directly, pressure will continue to fall on the Armed Forces themselves, while the structural conditions that generate violence remain unchanged.

The events at Alto Punino, in Ecuador’s northern Amazon, illustrate this dynamic. Illegal gold extraction had been active in the area for an extended period, documented repeatedly within the broader Napo–Aguarico basin. Regulatory intervention was intermittent and procedural. Armed groups identified in public reporting as Guardianes de la Frontera, widely described as narcotics-linked formations, operated in the zone. When the military entered the territory, it did so not into a space governed by law, but into one already structured by extractive illegality. On 9 May 2025, eleven Ecuadorian soldiers were killed in an ambush. The violence did not emerge suddenly; it marked the point at which long-standing institutional failure turned lethal.

In such contexts, force manages symptoms rather than causes. Gold continues to flow outward through formal export channels. Ecological damage, fiscal loss, and social disruption remain at the source.

It is against this background that the recent communications issued by the High Command of the Armed Forces must be read. Historically, Ecuador’s Armed Forces — under figures such as General Guillermo Rodríguez Lara (President of the Republic, 1972–1976), General Miguel Iturralde Almeida (Commander of the Armed Forces), and General Paco Moncayo Gallegos (Commander of the Armed Forces; later Mayor of Quito) — articulated a nationalist doctrine that linked sovereignty to the protection of territory, national parks, Indigenous populations, and strategic ecosystems. Under that doctrine, nature was treated as a national asset, not an extractive frontier. We worked within this understanding in the defence of Amazonian national parks against uncontrolled oil and mining expansion.

The recent shift toward institutional defensiveness — including internal directives conditioning media accreditation on whether coverage is deemed harmful to institutional image — reflects a departure from that earlier conception. When criticism is framed as a threat, rather than as an element of democratic accountability, it signals a narrowing of institutional legitimacy.

The contradiction is therefore not rhetorical but structural. An economic model that accelerates extraction in fragile territories depends on enforcement institutions capable of acting independently against illegality. Where those institutions are weakened — even through actions that remain formally legal — violence is treated as an external criminal phenomenon rather than as an outcome of policy. Militarisation manages disorder. Extractivism remains intact.

This is the enforcement contradiction at the heart of Ecuador’s 2026 mining reforms. And it is now written not in theory, but in institutional strain, territorial violence, and lives lost on the ground.

At a certain point, the accumulation of formally legal acts begins to feel less like governance than like fable. Authority circulates through appointments, debts dissolve into procedure, and institutions exchange roles with a fluidity that once belonged to allegory. Nothing here requires illegality to appear. It is enough that legality itself ceases to resemble justice. In such moments, reality acquires the texture of the unreal — not because it has been invented, but because it no longer conforms to the expectations through which societies recognise order.

Development, Legality, and the Misreading of Progress

In this context, appeals to “development” function less as descriptions of social transformation than as justifications for policy direction. What is presented as progress is rarely examined as a concept; it is assumed.

The Hungarian economist Tamás Szentes argued that development cannot be reduced to growth, capital inflow, or industrial expansion. Archie Mafeje similarly warned that models presented as universal frequently reflect the historical experience of Western societies.

Earlier in the twentieth century, these models were described more directly as Westernisation, followed by modernisation — processes through which societies were expected to reorganise their economies, institutions, and cultures along industrial and European or North American lines. As these concepts came under criticism, the language of development gradually replaced them, offering a broader and more flexible term while often preserving similar economic assumptions.

Today, the concept of development itself is increasingly questioned, particularly where ecological limits and cultural continuity are at stake. For countries rich in natural resources, the idea that extractive expansion represents the natural path toward modernity remains deeply embedded in public policy.

In A Story Waiting to Pierce You, Peter Kingsley reflects on how land-rooted traditions of knowledge often disappear quietly when societies reorganise themselves around administration, doctrine, and resource control. Much of this knowledge was never written down; it lived in practice, memory, and relationship to place. When those relationships are broken, “it is not only traditions that vanish, but ways of seeing the world.

Kingsley is not writing about the Amazon, but about a wider historical pattern in which land-based forms of knowledge disappear as societies reorganise themselves around administration, doctrine, and resource control. In that sense, his reflection speaks directly to Amazonian realities, where knowledge has long been carried through territory, practice, and continuity rather than through written systems or institutional record.

Among the Cofán, history has long existed in similar form — carried in stories, ritual, territory, and the living forest rather than in written archives. During decades of work together in the Amazon, Cofán shaman Aurelio Quenamá often described the forest as memory itself: a living continuity through which people learned who they were and how to live. As oil roads entered the forest, mining advanced upstream, and missionary and linguistic programmes accompanied processes of territorial integration promoted in the name of national development, that continuity became more fragile. Knowledge that had once moved easily between generations required new effort to sustain.

For Aurelio, the danger of extraction was never limited to contamination or deforestation. It lay in the gradual weakening of the relationships through which culture, territory, and knowledge remained connected. The forest, he would explain, still speaks — but fewer people grow up knowing how to listen.

We question the assumption that extractive expansion is an inevitable expression of development.

The mining reforms introduced by President Daniel Noboa in 2026 appear to proceed from precisely that assumption — that accelerating extraction is the most direct path to modernisation, and that environmental oversight must adapt to that priority. In doing so, they transform a contested economic model into administrative practice.

For those of us whose work unfolds in the Amazon where rivers begin and ecological continuity remains possible, development cannot be defined only by what is extracted from the earth, but by what remains capable of sustaining life through time.

Intact Ecosystems as Economic Systems

We suggest that the debate about development and extractivism is grounded not in abstract theory but in sustained work in the Amazon, where ecological continuity can be observed across time. Forests regulate water when they remain standing. Biodiversity stabilises climate and soil systems. Rivers maintain their cycles when headwaters are protected. These processes were long understood in ecological, cultural, and territorial terms — but not yet expressed in economic ones.

That translation became possible through collaboration with Giles Jackson and his colleagues Jason Doedderlein and Martin Mulyadi. Their peer-reviewed research, Valuing Ecosystem Services in the Ecuadorian Amazon (Journal of Applied Business & Economics, 2025), provided the methodological tools to express the environmental services generated by intact ecosystems — water regulation, climate stability, biodiversity resilience, and the avoidance of remediation and disaster costs — in monetary terms.

This contribution was decisive. By assigning economic value to environmental services that had previously been recognised primarily through ecological observation and territorial experience, Jackson and his co-authors made it possible to understand intact ecosystems not only as ecological systems, but as economic producers whose value unfolds through time.

From this convergence — long-term Amazon practice, ecological specificity, and rigorous economic valuation — we developed the Theory of Intact Ecosystems (TIES). This approach is consistent with established ecosystem services valuation frameworks that quantify regulating services and avoided long-term costs. TIES recognises intact ecosystems as continuous economic producers whose productive capacity depends on ecological continuity rather than extraction.

Seen from this perspective, the discussion surrounding Ecuador’s mining reforms becomes clearer. The question is not simply whether extraction should occur, but which form of production the country chooses to prioritise: one that converts ecosystems into short-term revenue through depletion, or one that generates sustained value through the protection of living systems.

Mining Expansion and Environmental Risk

The mining reforms introduced in 2026 accelerate exploration and extraction in regions where ecological systems remain fragile and interconnected. In the Amazon and Andean headwaters, environmental processes operate across long temporal scales that do not align easily with shortened licensing procedures or compressed hydrological evaluations.

Water systems are particularly sensitive to disturbance. Headwater ecosystems regulate downstream river cycles that sustain agriculture, communities, and biodiversity across large territories. When mining infrastructure alters these systems, the consequences may extend far beyond the immediate extraction zone. Contamination, sedimentation, and hydrological disruption often emerge gradually, becoming visible only after ecological thresholds have been crossed.

From the perspective of TIES, such risks are not only environmental. They represent the degradation of productive ecological capital. When intact ecosystems are weakened, the environmental services they generate — water regulation, climate stability, and biodiversity resilience — decline. The result is not simply ecological loss, but economic loss expressed through remediation costs, reduced productivity, and increased vulnerability to climate-related events.

These same ecosystems sustain other sectors of the national economy. Tourism, sustainable agriculture, and renewable energy systems depend on stable water cycles, intact landscapes, and biodiversity continuity. These sectors contribute directly to national income and employment, while international climate and biodiversity finance increasingly favour countries capable of maintaining intact ecosystems. In this sense, ecological continuity supports economic diversification.

Extractive economics records the value of minerals removed from the earth. It rarely records the value of ecological production that sustains multiple sectors of the economy.

This imbalance is particularly significant in countries such as Ecuador, where intact ecosystems continue to regulate water systems that extend from Andean highlands to Amazonian lowlands. Decisions affecting these ecosystems therefore shape not only local environments, but national ecological stability and economic resilience.

We believe that the protection of Amazon headwaters and forest reserves reflects an economic logic grounded in ecological continuity. Under the framework of the Theory of Intact Ecosystems, the preservation of intact ecosystems is not opposed to development. It is a form of development whose value grows rather than being exhausted.

As Ecuador debates the future of its mining policy, the choice is not between environment and economy. It is between economic models: one organised around extraction and depletion, and another grounded in the continuity of living systems whose value grows across generations.

Illegal Gold as System: From Amazonian Rivers to Global Markets

“The lie made into the rule of the world.”— Franz Kafka

Illegal gold extraction in Ecuador no longer operates at the margins. Here, mining law shapes the conditions under which intensified extraction is absorbed into global circuits when enforcement and traceability fail. Over the past decade it has consolidated into a system that moves through formal export channels, licensed traders, and international markets. Its persistence does not depend on concealment. It depends on the capacity to convert gold of uncertain origin into legally declared exports.

In 2023, Ecuador officially exported approximately USD 1.3–1.4 billion in non-monetary gold. The principal destinations were the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, the United States, and India. These figures reflect declared trade flows. They do not, in themselves, explain how or where the gold was extracted. That question arises where export volumes exceed what can plausibly be attributed to documented domestic production.

A substantial share of this export surge was concentrated in a small group of exporters. In 2023, companies including Rockgolden, Rocadorada, and Soul Metals together exported gold valued at approximately USD 260–270 million, primarily to the United Arab Emirates and India. This represented an increase of around 2,000 percent compared with their combined exports the previous year.

Company-level records illustrate the scale of this escalation. Rockgolden reported exports of approximately USD 70–75 million, largely to Dubai-based buyers such as MHGS Trading DMCC, compared with exports close to USD 1 million the year before. Rocadorada reported exports in the order of USD 100–110 million, again primarily to Dubai, with buyers including Al Hamra Overseas Trading LLC, representing a sharp increase over its 2022 figures. Soul Metals, which had no recorded exports the previous year, reported exports ranging between USD 80–105 million within a matter of months, largely to AJ Refinery Private Limited in India.

Across investigations, minor variations appear depending on reporting windows and datasets, but the pattern remains consistent: rapid escalation, high concentration among a small number of exporters, and little correspondence with any visible expansion of production capacity on the ground.

The fiscal record deepens the contradiction. Companies exporting gold valued in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars declared public payments measured not in millions, but in hundreds of thousands. In several documented cases, exporters reporting USD 70–100 million in gold sales declared combined tax and royalty payments in the range of USD 200,000–500,000, figures falling well below one percent of declared export value. Even allowing for deductions, incentives, and differing fiscal regimes, this disparity cannot be dismissed as a technical irregularity. At this scale, persistent under-declaration becomes a defining feature.

Exports move through Ecuador’s principal ports, notably Guayaquil and Puerto Bolívar, cleared on the basis of documentation rather than independent verification of origin. Investigations have repeatedly found that concessions cited in export paperwork show little or no evidence of mining activity consistent with the volumes declared. On paper, the gold has a birthplace. On the ground, that birthplace often cannot be located.

Once exported, the metal enters global refining and trading hubs in the United Arab Emirates, India, Switzerland, and the United States, where provenance is effectively erased. Amazonian rivers disappear from the chain of custody. What remains is bullion.

The prominence of the United Arab Emirates as a destination is not incidental. Dubai has developed into one of the world’s principal physical gold trading hubs, characterised by high volumes, rapid turnover, and a regulatory emphasis historically centred on purity and liquidity rather than upstream traceability. International monitoring bodies have repeatedly noted that such environments are particularly attractive to gold whose origin is difficult to verify, especially where extraction occurs in remote or weakly regulated territories. Once refined and aggregated, gold entering these circuits becomes detached from its environmental, territorial, and social history. In this sense, the Emirates function not simply as a destination, but as a point of transformation, where contested origin is converted into marketable neutrality.

It is also notable that, during the same period in which gold exports to the Emirates expanded sharply, Ecuadorian state engagement with the region intensified. Senior officials, including the current president, made repeated visits to Dubai as part of broader diplomatic and economic outreach. Such travel, in itself, is neither unusual nor improper. Set alongside the rapid growth of gold exports to the same jurisdiction, however, it forms part of a wider pattern in which extractive flows, trade destinations, and diplomatic attention increasingly converge.

Regulatory practice has been central to this process. For decades, We have documented illegal mining activity in Amazonian territories using photographs, georeferenced field reports, satellite imagery, and drone footage. This evidence was formally submitted to the mining authority on numerous occasions, accompanied by written requests for official inspections. In every case, the documentation showed active extraction and heavy machinery operating in areas where no mining licences existed when activity began.

These submissions were repeatedly dismissed on procedural grounds. Mining was considered illegal only if officials personally witnessed extraction during an on-site inspection. By the time inspections took place, extraction machinery was no longer present at the reported sites. Official reports therefore concluded that no activity had been observed. Within days, in several documented cases, extraction resumed at the same locations, using the same equipment. This pattern — temporary withdrawal in anticipation of inspection, followed by rapid reactivation — was repeatedly observed across different territories and over extended periods.

In several cases, operations that had functioned for long periods without licences later received formal authorisation following inspections that reported no activity. What began as unlicensed extraction was not halted. It was absorbed into procedure.

At this scale, illegality is not an exception that escapes regulation. It is the condition under which extraction occurs. Mining begins without licence, proceeds through environmental and territorial violation, and is later subject to administrative recognition that does not undo what has already taken place. Permits do not legalise extraction retroactively; they mark the moment at which illegality is normalised.

The consequences are territorial. In regions such as the Napo basin — including Yutzupino and Alto Punino — rivers have been reshaped, communities displaced, and control enforced through violence. Gold extracted under these conditions moves outward through formal channels, while ecological damage, social disruption, and fiscal loss remain at the source.

At a certain point, the question arises whether gold mining and extractivism appear unreal because they are exaggerated — or because reality itself is being misread as illusion. The figures seem implausible. The procedures appear detached from outcomes. The violence feels disproportionate. And yet, this is precisely what is occurring.

As Gabriel García Márquez once observed:

“The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”

Alto Punino

The events at Alto Punino, in Ecuador’s northern Amazon, did not unfold in isolation. By the time the military entered the area, illegal gold mining had been active for an extended period. Extraction sites had expanded along riverbanks and access routes, machinery had moved in and out of the zone, and the surrounding territory had already been reshaped by unregulated activity.

llegal mining in the Punino area had been documented repeatedly over time, within the broader Napo–Aguarico basin—a territory subject to long-term observation and accumulated record. The absence did not lie in knowledge, nor in warning signs, but in effective intervention. Regulatory presence appeared intermittently, episodic and procedural rather than sustained. What persisted on the ground was not legality enforced, but illegality normalised.

On 9 May 2025, a military patrol operating in this context was ambushed. Eleven Ecuadorian soldiers were killed. The attack was attributed by the authorities to a criminal group identified as Guardianes de la Frontera.

Guardianes de la Frontera are widely reported to operate along Ecuador’s northern border region, particularly in areas connected to the Putumayo basin, including zones near the San Miguel River in the vicinity of Puerto del Carmen. They are commonly described as active in territories where illegal mining, narcotics trafficking, and fuel diversion intersect.

A key element of this overlap is the diversion of white gasoline from Ecuadorian oil infrastructure. This fuel, extracted illicitly from pipelines and distribution networks, is widely recognised as a precursor in the processing of cocaine and has long been smuggled across the border into Colombia. Mining zones and border corridors in northern Ecuador have repeatedly been identified as transit and staging areas for this trade, linking extractive illegality directly to narcotics production chains.

Within this geography, border settlements function less as front lines than as logistical nodes. Their location beyond the immediate reach of Colombian military operations, combined with access to river routes and supply networks, has made them suitable for rest, resupply, medical treatment, and cross-border coordination by armed actors operating on both sides of the frontier. The border operates, in practice, as shelter rather than sanctuary.

Groups such as Guardianes de la Frontera are widely characterised as dissident splinters of the former FARC, emerging after the peace process without a political programme. Analysts consistently note that these formations are driven not by ideology but by revenue: control over drugs, fuel, illegal mining, and territorial access. In this sense, they function less as insurgents than as armed managers of illicit economies.

In extractive zones governed by illegality, armed protection does not require formal contracts to become integral to mining operations. Territorial control alone determines who can operate, who pays, and who does not. Where illegal gold extraction reaches scale, armed presence becomes a functional requirement: securing access routes, deterring interference, and enforcing exclusion. In Alto Punino, the presence of Guardianes de la Frontera coincided with precisely such conditions.

When soldiers were deployed to the area, they entered a territory in which regulation had already failed. Law had receded. Economic activity was organised around illegal extraction and its associated flows. The task assigned to the military was therefore not to enforce existing legality, but to impose order where legality no longer structured daily life.

The ambush and the deaths that followed were not the result of a sudden breakdown. They marked the point at which a long-standing extractive disorder turned lethal. Force entered a space shaped by illegality, and illegality responded with violence. The human cost was immediate and irreversible.

What emerges is a circular dynamic in which extractive expansion generates territorial disorder, that disorder becomes intertwined with narcotics economies and armed control, institutional weakness prevents effective enforcement, and the resulting violence is then cited to justify further extractive acceleration.

Closing the Loop

What is striking is how absent this reality remains from official discourse. Public explanations of violence in Ecuador overwhelmingly isolate narcotics trafficking as the primary cause, while leaving unexamined the extractive economies that generate the territorial disorder in which drug networks operate. This omission becomes especially consequential as new mining laws accelerate extractive expansion under the promise of control and development. By treating violence as an external criminal phenomenon rather than as an outcome of policies that deepen extractivism in already fragile territories, the discussion narrows, responsibility is displaced, and the structural links between mining, drugs, and armed control remain unaddressed.

Alto Punino closes the circle. An economic model that generates illegality is enforced with force. Violence produced by extractive disorder is then cited to justify further militarisation, while the underlying model is reinforced rather than questioned. What is presented as a war against crime becomes, in practice, an attempt to contain the consequences of policy.

This is the contradiction at the heart of Ecuador’s new mining framework. It is now written, not in theory, but in lives lost on the ground. The consequences of these legal changes do not remain confined to institutions; they become visible where law meets the movement of commodities, capital and power.

When Law Accelerates and Flows Converge

The reforms examined in this article are presented as legal and administrative adjustments intended to modernise Ecuador’s mining sector. These flows are not separate from law; they emerge where regulatory reform favours extraction while leaving circulation and oversight largely unchanged. Their stated purpose is to accelerate investment, reduce procedural friction, and expand extractive activity as a development strategy. Law, however, does not operate in isolation. It interacts with existing economic structures, logistical infrastructures, and global trade routes in ways that can be observed empirically.

When law is configured to favour extractive expansion, it reshapes the conditions under which production, circulation, and enforcement begin to align.

Those interactions are visible.

The Nobis economic group states publicly that it is a strategic partner of the Deepwater Port of Posorja, Ecuador’s principal deep-water export terminal, operated under a fifty-year concession by DP World. The same corporate disclosures state that Nobis has entered mining exploration alliances through Adventus Mining Corporation, and that its participation includes board-level representation. Following a C$12.1 million private placement led by Unionar S.A., a subsidiary of Consorcio Nobis, Adventus appointed Melissa Romero Noboa to its board in 2021 as the Nobis nominee, later replaced in 2022 by David Darquea Schettini, thereby maintaining institutional representation within the company.

In the energy and fuels chain, Ecuadorian media have reported that Petroecuador, the state oil company, awarded 21 million litres of ethanol, valued at USD 18.9 million, to Codana S.A., as part of a broader procurement totalling USD 90.468 million, under process PE-PP-2024-002. The Office of the Comptroller General of the State announced a preliminary verification of that procurement. The reporting identifies Codana S.A. as operating within the business structure administered by Consorcio Nobis. These are recorded procurement values within the supply chain of the state petroleum company.

Logistics form the third axis. Posorja was conceived precisely to accelerate Ecuador’s export economy: larger vessels, higher volumes, and faster container turnover. It has achieved that objective. It has also, according to European port authorities and investigative reporting, featured repeatedly as a point of origin in record cocaine seizures. In 2024, more than six tonnes were seized in Rotterdam from Posorja-linked shipments, while Antwerp reported over 14.6 tonnes across twenty-seven seizures, with Posorja-origin cocaine reported to have tripled between 2021 and 2024. These figures do not allege complicity by the port operator. They document scale, flow, and the limits of enforcement when throughput expands faster than oversight.

European interdictions underscore the scale at which narcotics can move through the same formal container system used for food exports. On 13 July 2023, Dutch customs and the Rotterdam prosecutor’s office reported a record seizure of 8,064 kg of cocaine concealed in a banana container shipped from Ecuador via Panama. On 26 March 2024, Bulgarian prosecutors reported the seizure of approximately 170 kg of cocaine hidden in a banana container aboard the cargo ship Madison 2 at the port of Burgas. And on 14 October 2024, Spanish National Police seized 13 metric tons of cocaine hidden in a banana shipment from Ecuador at the port of Algeciras, the largest cocaine seizure recorded in Spain. These cases are emblematic rather than exhaustive. They do not allege complicity by carriers or terminal operators; they document repeated interception within high-throughput, formal logistics where concealment can travel inside ordinary commerce.

Taken together, they illustrate how scale and speed transform ordinary commerce into a point of systemic vulnerability.

Within this same export ecosystem, banana shipments historically associated with the Noboa business group also move through these formal logistics channels. Investigative reporting by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project documents cocaine concealed in containers exported by Noboa Trading, while stating explicitly that there is no evidence the company was aware. The relevance is structural rather than personal. Containers, once sealed and cleared, move through formal logistics systems. The banana vessel and the cocaine shipment depart through the same gates.

Those gates are being widened by law.

At the export end of the extractive chain, trade data completes the picture. In 2023, Ecuador exported approximately USD 1.39 billion in non-monetary unwrought gold. Of that total, roughly USD 458–470 million, representing over eight tonnes, was destined for the United Arab Emirates. Dubai, through sovereign entities, is both a principal global hub for gold aggregation and refining—where origin is transformed into market neutrality—and the ultimate owner of DP World, the operator of Posorja.

The coincidence is documentary.

Mining law reform accelerates extraction at source. Fuels contracting proceeds within the state petroleum supply chain. A Dubai-owned logistics operator manages the country’s principal export port. Cocaine is seized in Europe from containers departing that port. Gold flows in the opposite direction, from Ecuador to the Emirates, where origin dissolves into purity and price. None of these facts establishes illegality. Together, they establish alignment.

This alignment matters because it coincides with a political narrative of uncompromising opposition to organised crime and narcotics, even as violence associated with trafficking and illegal extraction claims lives on the ground, including at Alto Punino. Militarisation confronts the consequences. Law accelerates the flows.

In this configuration, the Armed Forces are drawn into a redefinition of their constitutional role, tasked with compensating for regulatory and governance failures, while their deployment inadvertently stabilises the territorial conditions upon which extractive and illicit economies—including illegal mining and narcotics trafficking—depend.

The system remains formally intact. The paperwork is correct. The ports are efficient. The markets are supplied.

What this configuration ultimately reveals is not the failure of law, but its displacement. Ecuador’s legal order remains formally intact; its Constitution continues to recognise the Rights of Nature; its international commitments remain binding. The question is whether, under the pressure of accelerated extraction and geopolitical alignment, those guarantees are allowed to operate as limits, or are quietly reframed as procedural background.

Alto Punino is not an aberration. It is what becomes visible when constitutional restraint gives way to administrative speed, and when force is asked to manage consequences that law was meant to prevent. The extractive moment now taking shape will be judged not by what it promises to deliver, but by what it allows to pass without review.

And the forest, upstream, continues to pay the price.

As Gabriel García Márquez once observed:

“The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”

Annex 1 —

Technical and Constitutional Review of the 2026 Mining Law and Regulatory Reforms Introduced by the Executive under President Daniel Noboa

Purpose and scope

This Annex is provided for reference and technical clarity. It documents the legal and constitutional provisions that underpin the analysis developed in the article, reviewing the mining law and regulatory reforms introduced by the Executive under President Daniel Noboa in 2026 through executive decrees, regulatory amendments, and related ministerial and administrative instruments.

The Annex proceeds through a clause-by-clause analysis of the principal provisions governing mining authorisation, environmental licensing, and oversight, and concludes with a consolidated constitutional assessment of their environmental, economic, and legal implications.

I. Clause-by-clause analysis of the 2026 mining reforms

1. Acceleration of mining authorisation and approval timelines

Clause and regulatory effect

The reforms establish shortened and fixed deadlines for the approval of mining activities, particularly during exploration phases, with the stated objective of increasing administrative efficiency and investment certainty.

Operational consequences

Environmental baseline studies, technical review, and inter-institutional coordination are required to be completed within compressed timeframes, regardless of ecosystem complexity or territorial sensitivity.

Environmental and economic risk

Reduced evaluation time increases the likelihood that cumulative impacts, site-specific vulnerabilities, and long-term ecological processes will be inadequately assessed prior to approval, particularly in biodiverse and hydrologically sensitive regions.

2. Expansion of administrative silence as a mechanism of approval

Clause and regulatory effect

The reforms reinforce the principle of administrative silence, whereby the failure of the competent authority to issue a decision within prescribed deadlines may be treated as implicit authorisation.

Operational consequences

In contexts of limited institutional capacity, administrative silence functions as a procedural default rather than as an informed regulatory determination.

Environmental and economic risk

This mechanism transfers risk away from applicants and regulatory institutions and onto ecosystems, permitting projects to advance without an affirmative finding that environmental safeguards have been satisfied.

3. Simplification of environmental licensing and authorisation

Clause and regulatory effect

Certain mining activities are authorised through simplified environmental procedures, declarations, or reduced documentation requirements, replacing comprehensive environmental licensing.

Operational consequences

Baseline data collection is narrowed, and the scope of environmental variables assessed prior to approval is reduced.

Environmental and economic risk

Simplified procedures limit the capacity to identify indirect, cumulative, and long-term impacts, particularly in ecosystems characterised by interconnected processes and delayed ecological responses.

4. Extension and intensification of exploration phases

Clause and regulatory effect

The reforms allow for extended exploration periods, often subject to lighter environmental obligations during early stages.

Operational consequences

Exploration activities may intensify over prolonged periods, increasing access development, physical disturbance, and environmental pressure before full environmental evaluation occurs.

Environmental and economic risk

Early-stage degradation may accumulate beyond thresholds that can be effectively mitigated or attributed during later licensing phases.

5. Continued reliance on project-by-project environmental assessment

Clause and regulatory effect

Environmental evaluation continues to be conducted primarily on an individual project basis, rather than through mandatory territorial, watershed, or ecosystem-level assessment.

Operational consequences

Each concession is reviewed in isolation, without systematic consideration of overlapping or sequential activities within shared ecological systems.

Environmental and economic risk

Incremental approvals may collectively generate large-scale ecosystem degradation without triggering regulatory intervention at the individual project level.

6. Limited mandatory assessment of hydrological connectivity

Clause and regulatory effect

Hydrological evaluation is largely confined to immediate project areas, with limited obligation to assess basin-wide or downstream impacts.

Operational consequences

Water systems are treated administratively as discrete units despite functioning as integrated networks. In gold-mining contexts, hydrological disruption is frequently accompanied by chemical contamination from processing inputs and fuel residues, effects that are cumulative, mobile, and often detectable only after ecological thresholds have been crossed.

Environmental and economic risk

Disturbance in headwater or upper-basin areas may affect water quality, sedimentation, and flow regimes across entire watersheds, with consequences for agriculture, energy generation, and human consumption.

7. Compression of public participation and institutional review

Clause and regulatory effect

Accelerated procedures reduce the time available for public consultation and inter-institutional review.

Operational consequences

Stakeholders and oversight bodies have fewer opportunities to access information, raise concerns, or contribute technical input.

Environmental and economic risk

Reduced participation increases the likelihood that environmental and social impacts are identified only after project implementation, when remedial options are limited and costs are higher.

8. Externalisation of long-term economic costs

Clause and regulatory effect

The reforms prioritise procedural speed and legal certainty for extractive activity.

Operational consequences

Environmental degradation and the loss of ecosystem services are not incorporated into approval decisions or extractive accounting.

Environmental and economic risk

Long-term costs — including remediation, reduced ecosystem productivity, and impacts on tourism, agriculture, water supply, and renewable energy — are externalised to the wider economy.

II. Consolidated constitutional assessment

Mining is constitutionally designated a strategic sector. This designation imposes heightened constitutional duties on the State, including the obligation to regulate extraction in the long-term public interest, to guarantee the Rights of Nature, to apply the precautionary principle, and to ensure effective public participation in environmental decision-making.

Taken together, the mining law and regulatory reforms introduced by the Executive under President Daniel Noboa in 2026 give rise to identifiable constitutional tensions. The cumulative effect of accelerated approvals, reliance on administrative silence, simplified environmental licensing, and the absence of mandatory cumulative and territorial assessment may constitute grounds for a declaration of constitutional incompatibility.

Specifically, the current regulatory framework may be in tension with:

·       the Rights of Nature (Articles 71–74), which require the State to protect ecological integrity, life cycles, and regenerative processes;

·       the constitutional duty to apply the precautionary principle, particularly where scientific uncertainty and irreversible environmental harm are plausible;

·       the obligation to protect ecosystems as integrated systems rather than as isolated project sites;

·       the guarantee of effective public participation and informed environmental decision-making, which depends on adequate time and access to information;

·       the duty to regulate strategic sectors in the long-term public interest, including environmental sustainability and intergenerational equity.

These observations do not pre-empt judicial determination. They establish that the mining law and regulatory reforms introduced in 2026 introduce structural legal tensions that may reasonably warrant constitutional review to determine their compatibility with Ecuador’s constitutional mandates.

 

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