Jorge A. Rodriguez Tossas

I was born in Puerto Rico (PR), where I spent my childhood and teen years until 18 when I went to the Continental USA for College. My undergraduate studies were completed at Mercer University in Macon Georgia with a degree in Physics. I returned to PR to work for 5 years until 1988 to pursue a Master of Business Administration in 1990. After graduation, I started working directly with the Treasurer of Otis Elevator, a division of United Technologies, a Fortune 100 industrial conglomerate where I ended up working directly Latin American Licensees of Otis Elevator. In 1995 I started a career in tourism with United Airlines where I joined the Latin American and Caribbean team in the wake of a Latin American expansion due to the acquisition of the Pan American Airlines South American routes. After 5 years at United, I started my own consulting business focusing on ecotourism. A 25+ year professional background in ecotourism which started with a focus in Southern Patagonia and eventually migrated to other areas in South America including the Peruvian and Ecuadorean Amazon allowed me to see firsthand how outside global financial forces shaped the region with neoliberal extraction intent, settler state patterns and coloniality. As a financial manager for a US multinational in 1992, a business trip extension took me crossing from the Andean city of Quito into the Napo River, a journey that takes you through petroleum pipelines traversing Ecuador’s principal oil producing provinces of Sucumbíos, Orellana and Napo in the Western Ecuadorean Amazon where important Indigenous groups like Kichwa, Shuar, Huaroni, Secoya and Ai Cofan among others make a living. On my way to one of a Napo River’s first ecotourism lodge in Ecuador, it dawned me why such conflicting businesses and philosophies can persist and exist so close to each other. These local groups did not need either the petroleum or the tourists to survive as they have managed to sustain themselves with neither for many thousands of years. Twenty years later, Ecuador have experienced over 1000 oil spillage incidents with an estimated 130,000 barrels of crude oil released into landscapes where many of these groups reside. Oil and ecotourism are relatively new industries in the region and represent a new wave of exploitative forces entering the Amazon basin. In my view my positionality as a former tourist professional experiencing the Amazon destination with an industry widely considered a better option but nonetheless imposing, and a traveler perspective offers me a unique opportunity for this research project. During my last year in FIU’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies graduate program in 2022, I did fieldwork in a community that experienced different exploitative practices and engaged in a Protected Area agreement. About 50 miles south of Iquitos, where two of the most important Amazon Basin tributaries confluence, and giving birth to the mighty Amazon River, the Ucayali and Marañon Rivers come downstream carrying carbon rich sediment from millenary glaciers in the Peruvian Andes and effectively supplying rich sources of food to many riverine communities along its shores in addition to being their principal transportation system. I documented one Amazonian riverine community with a focus on habits and practices of environmental protection and preservation. The community of El Chino is located on the shores of the Tahuayo River, a tributary of the Amazon River, not far from the Ucayali, in the Peruvian Department of Loreto. Although this community does not have a long history in the region, using ethnographic methodologies, I documented the history of the community from the time of its inception in the mid-1970s until the present.