Groundhog Day

Landing in Miami around four in the afternoon, the clock back home was nearing midnight. In Quito it was again approaching midnight, but this time locally. At home it was seven and alarm clocks were getting ready to ring. We had been on the road for more than 24 hours.

In Miami, a large hall had been filled with a tightly winding queue. After half an hour of inching forward at a snail’s pace, passengers for international flights were gathered into their own slowly moving line. Fortunately, the Finns had flown an hour faster than scheduled, so the situation did not become very tense. The border guard’s main interest was fingerprints and a facial photo; there was no ideological screening. To get the boarding pass, you had to go to an assisting agent. International connections here are handled manually. According to home time, one o’clock at night seemed like a suitable moment to have a beer and a sandwich, though the latter materialized in the form of a burger. Signs are in Spanish and English.

It is raining in nighttime Quito. A man with a sign is waiting for us, and we drive toward the city center along the Pan-American Highway. At one end of this road is Chile and at the other Alaska, with a break in Panama in between. In the darkness we can see unfamiliar trees and a strip of grass between the lanes. Does even the grass here consist of something other than Poa annum?

In 2008, Ecuador’s president declared that if the oil beneath the Yasuní rainforest was to remain underground, the international community should compensate Ecuadorians half of the expected oil revenue. The international community fumbled for its purse, but didn’t seem particularly eager to hand over the money. So now the rug is slowly being pulled out from under the rainforest’s roots. The wrangling over a legal mess and damage claims has mainly served the greed of lawyers—but that’s just the icing on the mud pie. Although Texaco/Chevron has also caused plenty of trouble, the control has largely been in the hands of the Ecuadorian government. On August 20, 2023, Ecuadorians voted in a referendum to leave the oil beneath Yasuní National Park in the ground and to ban mining in the Andean Chocó forest. Ironically, the presence of oil in the country has left Ecuador with poverty, debt, corruption, and damaged environment. The government and the state-owned Petroecuador are ignoring the referendum result and continuing to drill.

In any case, we came to deliver our share.