Oriente & Amazon historical timeline

The Oriente’s history is one of a region repeatedly entered from outside and never controlled.

Before the Spanish

Amazonian peoples had lived here for thousands of years in settlements considerably larger and more organised than the ‘untouched wilderness’ framing allows, with managed forest gardens, earthworks and long-distance trade with the highlands.

Spanish expeditions

Gonzalo Pizarro led an expedition east from Quito in 1541 looking for cinnamon and gold. It ended in starvation, and his lieutenant Francisco de Orellana, sent ahead for supplies, was carried downstream and became the first European to descend the Amazon to the Atlantic — an unintended eight-month voyage. The chronicler with him described populous riverside towns, which later travellers did not find, and which archaeology now suggests were real and destroyed by introduced disease.

Missions

Jesuit and later Franciscan and Dominican missions worked the rivers from the seventeenth century, with the usual consequences for population.

Rubber

The boom from the 1870s brought debt bondage and violence across the western Amazon, and the effects on the smaller nations here were severe.

The Waorani and the missionaries

In 1956 five American evangelical missionaries were killed on a Napo sandbar during a first attempt at contact with the Waorani. The relatives of two of them made contact successfully soon afterwards, and the episode became famous in the United States. Its consequences on the ground were more ambiguous: sustained contact brought disease, relocation to a reserve, and the opening of Waorani land to the oil companies that followed.

Oil

Texaco struck commercial oil at Lago Agrio in 1967, and the pipeline and the roads that followed transformed the region — bringing colonists, money, deforestation and a contamination case that ran through courts for thirty years.