Real life copies fiction in the Amazon

There was a cartoon in Spanish going around the internet before Christmas 2016 saying that the Ecuadorian army was fighting with the Ecuadorian tribe called the Shuar in the Amazon. This Ecuadorian on Ecuadorian conflict was all at the behest of Chinese corporations who had bought extraction rights in the Amazon.

The great Eduardo Gudynas, who is one of my heroes in terms of saying the right thing on all social and development issues, tweeted with a comment saying it was a bit like Avatar. It was and is Avatar. The parallel of the government/Shuar conflict to real life wanted to come out of the cartoon, when look what I magically found, a hacked version of the original cartoon which says what was always intended:

So why are the tribesman and the soldier in the picture living out a script? I am not going to go through all the parallels between the "unobtanium" being extracted in the forest in Avatar and the oil extraction going on now with Chinese (& U.S. and European) money. The magic of the film is about the use of a virtual reality technology by a soldier to see and understand the magical connectedness of the forest, it's humanoid inhabitants, plants and creatures. The movie Avatar is itself a simulacrum of the virtual reality it shows. It enables you to judge the merits of a) being connected and at one with the universe and b) a technology that allows a brief peep behind the curtain into that world of oneness and connection. Put it another way, it is like comparing the Matrix plugged and unplugged. Of course most people continue to choose the matrix and would also rather destroy the rainforest in order to have the gasoline to have the electricity to continue to watch DVDs on the couch with ice cream.

#Amazon #rainforest #Shuar #Ecuador #Avatar #Matrix #hermeneutics