The heat on Ecuador

Marcelo Sevillano guns the motor of his small tourist boat and guides it out onto the lagoon's smooth surface. It's a trip he's been making for over 20 years, since he was 15. His family has led sightseeing trips at the lake for three generations.

When he reaches the islands in the center, he lets the boat idle, so the travelers can observe the bubbles of gas rising through the water from the active volcano below. After a moment of silence, he begins in the deep, deliberate voice of a practiced storyteller to explain the lake's history.

"This site, because of its majesty, was a sanctuary for our ancestors," he tells his audience. "Many rituals were celebrated here -- some pleasant, others cruel."

Legend has it, he continues, that the Incas tossed infants overboard into the lake as human sacrifices to appease the wrath of their gods. Later they would release guinea pigs -- both a sacred animal and a delicacy in the Inca culture -- on the islands. The rodents housed the spirits of the martyred children and gave the lagoon its name, Cuicocha, or "lake of the guinea pigs" in Quichua, the Inca language.

These days, Quichua-speaking indigenas still flock to the lagoon's shores every June for Inti Raymi, the festival of the Sun God. They pray, dance and bathe in the frigid waters to cleanse themselves of sin. The lake also anchors the county's ecotourism strategy, an ambitious effort launched by Cotacachi's first indigenous mayor as an alternative to less environmentally friendly industries like the flower plantations that are proliferating in the region. Fausto Garces, Ecuador's former minister of tourism, has transformed the lagoon into a destination that draws 56,000 visitors to Cotacachi each year. He employs 25 families, with benefits, and likes to say that while tourism isn't yet the most lucrative industry in the area, it is the one that distributes its income most evenly among the population.

Sevillano tells me that the water level in the lagoon has fallen more than 10 feet in the last 10 years, a change that troubles the owners of the boat company. On the shore, three docks range like steppingstones from a lakeside hotel down to the water; each was built and quickly had to be replaced as the water fell even further.

Zapata sees this decline as proof of his theory that rainwater cannot sustain the lagoon. When he first learned of the glacier's disappearance, he set up instruments to measure water levels and streamflow. At first, he was slow to believe the hotel workers who told of the changes in the lake. "I said to myself, five meters in 10 years? That's not possible." But Zapata's own measurements over two years showed the same rate of change.

"The lake is the star attraction of the county," Garces says. "In the short term, it can drop a little and it won't be a problem. But in the long term, we don't really know what will happen."

The changes worry a local government that has staked its future on alternative models of development. Mayor Auki Tituaña took office in 1996 and promptly shifted 80 percent of the county's budget from the richer urban areas to the resource-starved villages. The government taught townspeople to read using methods imported from Cuba, triumphantly declaring Cotacachi free of illiteracy last year. Posters of Che Guevara decorate the municipal building, and Tituaña has become so popular that he's said to be considering a run for president.

In 2001, the county's General Assembly declared Cotacachi to be an "ecological county," partly in response to an unpopular bid by a Canadian corporation to open a copper mine in the area. Everywhere in Cotacachi, there are signs and graffiti exhorting people not to litter, to conserve water, to take care of nature.

But the water shortage has proven more intractable than some of Cotacachi's other ills. Along with the glacier's inexorable retreat, local people report that the rain comes more irregularly than it did a generation ago, a view in line with international climatologists' predictions for Latin America. Then there are the constant challenges of mismanagement and the lack of resources. Residents break the meters on their faucets to avoid paying fees, leaving little money to repair the system. The city's environmental director, Francisco Grijalva, has focused on the things he can control, vowing to plant thousands of trees near springs in order to trap more moisture and increase streamflow.

"We can no longer just sit around and wait for the ice to melt in order to capture water," he says. "Unfortunately, we are suffering the consequences of environmental problems that other countries are producing. We in Cotacachi can pass a resolution to use our resources more sustainably, but other countries have yet to do that."

Back at the lake, Sevillano's brother Elio, who runs a restaurant overlooking the lake, takes a more personal view: "Since we've known this area since we were kids, there's no other place for us. I can't tell you what we'd do if this lake wasn't here. We'd try to adapt, but it would be extremely difficult."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

One day last December, snow fell on Cotacachi. Though it only lasted for a few days, Rosita Ramos ran around excitedly to others in the village, crying, "Look at Mama Cotacachi, how beautiful she is." The neighbors just looked at her strangely. Ramos took it as a sign of how much her culture has changed in only a generation. For her, the glacier's disappearance symbolizes the loss of her community's relationship with nature.

Ramos wears the traditional glass-bead jewelry of Quichua women -- several gold strands around the neck and brilliant red bracelets on each arm. Sitting on a couch in her three-room house, she describes how in the past, when people didn't have enough water, they would go to a sacred spot on the mountain, bury grains and a fermented drink made from corn as an offering, and ask Cotacachi for help.

"When I tell my older children these stories, they just laugh," she says. The ceremony is no longer performed in her community, she says, and people have stopped taking care of the water sources. "They come in cars from the city and they dump trash in our creeks," she says. "And the creeks have now been dry for six or seven years."

Married at 14 in an arranged match, Ramos straddles the divide between traditional and modern life. She works outside the home -- rare among Quichua women -- and in her spare time helps anthropologists from SANREM document her community's legends.

In the last few years, new stories have evolved alongside old ones, stories that hint at Mama Cotacachi's changing fortunes. One has Imbabura leaving Cotacachi for Cayambe, a taller, snow-covered mountain nearby. He takes all of Cotacachi's grain and gives it to Cayambe, leaving Cotacachi barren. Some people say the mountain is withholding water to punish them for their sins. During times of drought, a local midwife organizes groups of children to pray to Cotacachi for more rain.

Spiritual leaders, who listen for the earth's rhythms, sense the changes most acutely. Jose Maria Montalvo's wife says that when he was a baby, he startled his mother by crying when he was still in her womb, and his mother knew that he was going to be a yacha, or shaman. Today Montalvo receives patients on reed mats in the patio of his tile-roof house, mixing potions of herbs intended to bring luck, vanquish enemies or aid in finding a wife. When we visit him, he shows me a clear glass ball marked with latitude and longitude signs, through which we can see the dirt-stained creases on his hand.

"This ball is the ice from the mountain, and I carry it everywhere," he says. "In it I can see the world turning."

In the Quichua tradition, each shaman draws his power from an element of nature. Montalvo says he can communicate with the mountains and harnesses their energy to cure. But lately, he says, he can feel their energy waning. After farmers burned a field of grass to clear it, he had a vision of Mama Cotacachi.

"Before, when people respected nature, Cotacachi was untouchable. And I had more energy, too. Then she came to me in a dream and told me that they had burnt her. Since then, the water level has been falling, and her energy is also decreasing. I used to communicate with her, and she would come right inside the house," he says, gesturing behind him to the darkened doorway. "Now she stays only at the gate."

Read other articles in the Early Signs: Reports from a Warming Planet directory.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)