Traveling some stretches on foot and others by bus, more than 500 members of Ecuador’s Awá indigenous community trekked this month from their villages near the country’s northern border with Colombia to this high-altitude capital, spears symbolically in hand. Their objective was to protest a recent government land-management measure that the Awá claim would give timber and oil-palm plantation operators access to a portion of their territory in coastal Esmeraldas province, jeopardizing their internationally recognized efforts to practice sustainable forestry there. On July 11—two days after the Awá arrived in Quito—Environment Minister Ana Albán produced what they wanted: nullification of the land-management measure. The government also pledged to review the status of a 14,800-acre (6,000-ha) area of... [Log in to read more]