Shuar

Ecuador's Shuar Arutam indigenous people said on Friday they will not allow mining on their territory, threatening a large copper mining operation in the Andean country, after a court ruled their rights to prior consultation were violated.

Ecuador's Constitutional Court in September ruled the environmental permit granted in 2011 for the major San Carlos Panantza copper project required a consultation with the Shuar Arutam community, but this was not carried out.

The September ruling ordered the government to carry out a consultation with the Shuar people within six months, and that the country's environment ministry make a public apology for granting the environmental permit.

“I think people don’t realize how much that bleeds into how we understand behavior,” said Dorsa Amir, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who collected recordings from the Shuar in Ecuador for the new study.

But Mr Carillo, in a news conference on Wednesday, said the violence had been caused by "radical" members of the Kichwa and Shuar indigenous communities, who had begun attacking police in an "absolutely irrational" manner.