Dear Cofan Survival Fund Supporters,
I write with unsettling news. Last weekend, Randy Borman, the Executive Director of the Fundación Sobrevivencia Cofan (FSC), our Ecuadorian counterpart, suffered a heart attack. After the insertion of two stents and a short stay in the hospital, he returned to his house near Quito. I spoke with Randy on Friday via Zoom. To my great relief, he seemed fine. The doctors say his prognosis is good. Thankfully, he got treatment just in time. If he were in his rainforest community of Zábalo, I’d probably be writing a very different kind of letter
I hesitated to share this news with you, but I know how close many of you are with Randy. And the fact is that the CSF would not exist without him. He worked with U.S. allies to found our organization in the late 1990s to have a nonprofit vehicle for his fight to save the Cofan homeland and way of life. Randy has been leading this fight since the 1970s.
For those of you unfamiliar with Randy’s story, he was born in Amazonian Ecuador to North American missionary-linguists. He grew up in the Cofan community of Dureno, speaking the Cofan language and hunting with a blowgun. Despite his Euro-American heritage, Cofan people accepted him as one of their own. He married a Cofan woman and had three beautiful Cofan children. He was one of Dureno’s first elected leaders. With other Cofan activists, he secured the community’s land title in the late 1970s, just as the oil industry began to show the Cofan how destructive it would be. By the mid-1980s, Randy and his Cofan allies left Dureno in search of forests and rivers unaltered by oil. They found them on the land that became Zábalo. Randy was Zábalo’s first elected president and remained so for many years; currently, he’s the community’s vice-president. In the 1990s, Ecuador’s Cofan population elected Randy as president of their ethnic federation, which represents them all.
I’ve known Randy since 1994. That year, I interviewed him about his leadership of Zábalo’s struggle to eject an oil company from its territory. Randy and other community members kidnapped oil workers, burned their heliports, and took over an exploratory drilling rig. After a tense standoff with the Ecuadorian military, Randy and the Cofan won. The company left. To the best of my knowledge, it was the first time an Indigenous community had successfully removed an oil company from its land. As a 20-year-old anthropology student and environmental activist, I wanted to figure out how Randy and the people of Zábalo did it. At a time when I was deeply pessimistic, Randy and the Cofan gave me real hope for the future of the world’s biological and cultural diversity.
With Randy’s leadership, the Cofan have accomplished so much. People thought the Cofan would disappear after the oil industry invaded their territory in the 1960s. Instead, over the next four decades Randy led the Cofan’s struggle to achieve legal control of over one million acres of their rainforest homeland, the most biodiverse place on earth. On newly titled lands, Randy created models for community ecotourism and conservation programs that became essential to Cofan lifeways. Randy also created the Cofan Park Guard Program, which ensured a rate of zero deforestation in legalized Cofan territory. It’s no exaggeration to say that Randy and the CSF have been essential to the survival of the Cofan as a thriving Indigenous People with a homeland that, for the moment, is secure.
Randy’s accomplishments have come at a price. Over the decades, he’s faced death threats from actors who want to profit from Cofan territory’s natural resources. While doing conservation work in 2002, Randy developed a near-fatal case of equine encephalitis. As a leader of the Cofan Park Guard Program, Randy’s oldest son Felipe was kidnapped in 2012. (Luckily, he escaped after 40 days in captivity.) There are still parts of Ecuador where Randy cannot travel because the Cofan’s enemies are determined to stop his activism by any means necessary. And now, the years of constant threats, stress, and grueling treks to protect Cofan territory have culminated in the heart attack that nearly took Randy’s life.
Randy will continue to be part of the Cofan’s fight for their territory and way of life until the day he dies. But no one knows when that will happen. That’s why the CSF has been supporting Cofan education projects since its inception. The Cofan know that without leaders like Randy and organizations like the CSF, their future is far too uncertain. As a Cofan man from Zábalo once said to me in his native language, “Vendi pa’nin’jan, ma’caen ingi canse’faya?” (If Randy dies, how will we survive?).
Reproducing Randy’s political skills in the next generation of Cofan leaders has always been a primary CSF objective. The Cofan need leaders who can speak English, Spanish, and the Cofan language; leaders who are just as comfortable hunting tapirs in Amazonian forests as they are confronting government officials and oil-company executives in contentious urban meetings; leaders who know Ecuador’s legal and political system well enough to secure Cofan land titles and advocate for laws and policies that benefit all Indigenous Peoples; and leaders capable of attracting the aid of international allies—allies like you—to sustain the Cofan struggle.
With years of your support, the Cofan have developed an incredibly promising group of young scholars and activists who are almost ready to take over Randy’s work. As you’ve seen in previous newsletters, Gissela Yumbo now has an engineering degree with a focus on health. Carlos Descanse is in university studying tourism, an essential, ecologically benign income-generator for Cofan communities. Felipe Borman will finish his MA in rural territorial development, and Raúl Quieta will complete his own MA in intercultural justice and the rights of nature. Finally, Hugo and Sadie Lucitante are pursuing doctoral degrees in anthropology here at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where I’m advising them. They plan to return to Cofan territory and use their Ph.D.’s to protect the traditional knowledge, cultural heritage, and economic livelihoods of their people.
I once heard an old friend of Randy’s call him “Randy ‘Lazarus’ Borman.” He’ll bounce back from his heart attack as he has from all his other near-death experiences. But he won’t be here forever. That’s why I’m urging you to continue supporting the CSF. Our near-term goal is to protect Cofan territory; our longer-term goal is to help produce new Cofan leaders who will carry Randy’s and the Cofan’s struggles forward. Randy has been essential to what the Cofan have accomplished so far; future Cofan activists will produce achievements of their own. With our support, I have no doubt they will be successful.
So please keep giving to the CSF, and if possible, increase your level of support. Your contributions are more important now than ever. Let’s help Randy do all he can while the world can still benefit from his efforts. And let’s help equip the Cofan youths who will take his place with the best training available. Nearly five centuries ago, the Cofan survived the Spanish Conquest. Not long before that, they withstood the Inka’s attempted takeover of their homeland. I’m convinced that with the support of each and every one of us, Cofan people—with their language, their culture, and their precious rainforest territory intact—will be here for another 500 years. With climate change intensifying, all our lives depend on Indigenous Peoples’ protection of their forests. The Cofan are on the frontlines, but the rest of us are right behind them.
While our fundraising has been substantial in 2021, we are not even halfway to our goal of securing the $250,000 that the FSC needs to cover its core projects each year. We need more funds to maximize the effectiveness of Randy’s “Rapid Response Team,” whose political and legal work from Quito to the farthest corners of Cofan territory is never-ending. We need more funds to give additional Cofan students the opportunity to get undergraduate and graduate degrees in Ecuador’s best universities. And we need more funds for our “smaller” projects: enrolling more Cofan families in Ecuador’s “Seguro Campesino” healthcare system, creating a new reserve in the Andean foothills near the town of Cuyuja, starting a program to ensure the effective transmission of cultural knowledge from elder Cofan women to young Cofan girls, and sustaining the success of our Charapa Project, which has brought endangered river turtles back from the brink of local extinction while providing income to impoverished Cofan households. Finally, our long-term dream is to revive the Cofan Park Guard Program, which at one point had 50 Cofan rangers patrolling the entirety of Cofan territory to stop the illegal activities of miners, loggers, and other forest destroyers. Unfortunately, the money simply isn’t there. One day, we believe the world will pay Indigenous Peoples the money they deserve--and need--for their time-, energy-, and resource-consuming work to maintain the ecosystems on which our planet’s health depends. But we’re not there yet. Until that day arrives, people like me and you need to help the Cofan as much as we can.
You can join the fight by contributing to the CSF online by clicking the “donate” button below or going to our website: www.cofan.org. Or you can mail a check to: Cofan Survival Fund, 53 Washington Boulevard, Oak Park, IL 60302. Another way to give, if you shop at amazon.com, is to go to smile.amazon.com and select the Cofan Survival Fund as your designated charity. Then, Amazon will donate 0.5% of the price of every one of your purchases to the CSF.
The CSF is a completely volunteer-run organization. We have no overhead. All your donations go directly to the initiatives, programs, and projects Randy and his Cofan allies lead. If you have any questions about our work, or if you'd like to discuss the possibility of making a larger commitment, feel free to contact me directly 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.