Between 2009 and 2019, an average of 22.7 million people were displaced each year due to weather-related issues and disasters, which is nearly triple the number of people displaced by violence and political conflict during the same period, according to a report by the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement. These numbers are expected to rise in the coming years as a consequence of the adverse effects of global warming. Additionally, the World Health Organization indicated that environmental degradation and pollution have resulted in more than one quarter of deaths among children under the age of five worldwide. The World Health Organization also reported that air pollution kills 7 million people annually, of which 4.3 million cases are individuals who are exposed to pollution at home, particularly women and young children in the Global South.
Environmental degradation and climate change are two of today’s defining issues, and their negative impacts on health and life expectancy are not equally distributed among the world population. These issues have compounded the hardship and devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has brought several vectors of inequality into sharp relief, including access to quality health care, racial health disparities, and access to remote work. As vaccination campaigns are underway in wealthier and more “developed” countries, their newly vaccinated populations are beginning to see a glimmer of a post-pandemic future. This is not the case in much of the Global South, where vaccines are not yet available for large sections of the population, and where second or even third waves of infection continue to pressure health-care systems and renew the need for quarantine restrictions.
Pandemic-related global inequalities are not restricted to vaccine access; they also include the material conditions under which marginalized populations in the Global South have had to quarantine and their reliance on informal work to make ends meet. One out of four Latin Americans live in underserved, poor, and legally precarious informal settlements that have come to be characteristic building blocks of Latin American cities (Fischer 2014). Residents of these informal neighborhoods face stark problems caused by overcrowding, lack of access to services, and generalized material precarity. However, many of them also face the less obvious issue of disproportionate toxic exposures and the respiratory conditions that are pervasive in contaminated, informal settlements in the Global South.
Environmental justice studies have documented that clean and healthy living spaces are available to those who can afford to protect themselves and their families from toxicity by minimizing their exposure to contamination and who have at their disposal a variety of tools that are inaccessible to impoverished populations. People living in informal settlements are a rapidly growing population in the Global South, and they do not breathe the same air, drink the same water, or have the same access to clean recreational spaces as those who can afford to live in neighborhoods with access to basic services and infrastructure. Prefaced by our knowledge of mounting environmental concerns, I illustrate this issue through the case of one such contaminated informal settlement.
Contaminated Informal Living
50 Casas is a contaminated, informal neighborhood in the majority Afro-descendent city of Esmeraldas, Ecuador. Between 2014 and 2020, I conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in 50 Casas, where I focused on the local impacts of the petrochemical industry in a country where the economy is heavily dependent on oil revenue. The city of Esmeraldas is not only the capital of the province of Esmeraldas, which has been federally recognized as the ancestral land of Afro-Ecuadorians, but since 1979, it has also served as the host of the largest petrochemical complex in the country, which includes a refinery and an electrical power plant.
50 Casas, one of the most socioeconomically marginalized neighborhoods in the city of Esmeraldas, sits in close proximity to the refining complex, just meters away from smokestacks and industrial structures. The neighborhood was established in 1998 through a relocation program for people who had lost their homes in landslides caused by the El Niño climatic phenomenon. The neighborhood came into existence as an emergency solution for people who had been displaced by a weather-related disaster, and who, out of necessity, moved into an area that they knew was contaminated. The initial resettlement program for disaster victims was soon followed by a series of land invasions, wherein groups of people in need of a place to live occupied privately owned land with the intention of building homes there, contributing to the rapid growth of the neighborhood. The relocation program included only 50 donated palm and cane homes—hence the name of the neighborhood—but by 2020, the neighborhood was home to more than 500 families.
Esmeraldeñas and Esmeraldeños have long denounced the environmental injustice of having to live with a poisonous industry that, upon its inception, was lauded as the economic boost that the remote and underfunded city so desperately needed. But the promised abundance of jobs did not materialize, and those that did, for the most part, did not benefit local laborers. The bulk of the local population lacked technical training, so the refining complex had to import much of its labor force from other cities and from abroad to fill the better-paid, permanent positions. As the petrochemical industry descended upon the city, it brought with it a greyish curtain of smoke and a variety of environmental and health issues. The arrival of the industry also caused additional and unprecedented population growth in the 1980s, as many rural-to-urban migrants came to the city in search of refinery jobs and the opportunity to build an urban life. The city was unable to absorb the newcomers, who often ended up living in barriadas (informal communities) at its margins.
50 Casas is one of these contaminated communities, and its residents have slowly carved out a space for themselves and their families through years of struggle and hard work. Moreover, the majority of residents of the neighborhood hold derechos de posesión, documents granting them permission to live on the land, but not making them the legal owners of it. The legal precarity that characterizes the lives of the residents in the area has often put them at odds with individuals who have claimed to legally own the land. Over the years, the residents have successfully organized and demanded basic services and infrastructure. It is precisely these victories that have helped to build up the area, making it more desirable for those who claim legal ownership of the land. At the same time, the resources, time, and energy the community has committed to building the area has further rooted them there, making it unlikely that they will leave, even when they are aware of the negative impact of contamination on their health.
Bodily Manifestations of Toxicity
The petrochemical complex has proven to be a risky industry, in which workers are in danger of deadly accidents and whose ongoing dispersion of toxicity makes the residents sick. There are some reliable, but dated, studies measuring contaminants in Esmeraldas. An environmental audit commissioned by Petroecuador in 2001 found inadequate control of chemical effluents that were being discharged into the Teaone and Esmeraldas rivers (Ecuambiente 2001). The European Union published a more complete study in 2006. This study found that air quality had deteriorated in neighborhoods surrounding the refinery, with a concentration of 1,443.2 micrograms of particulate matter pollution over the 150 micrograms permitted standard (Jurado 2006). There has not been another scientific study documenting the air quality in Esmeraldas since 2006, but there is no evidence to suggest improvement. Notably, a 2004 medical study that included a sample of 1,554 students from public schools in neighborhoods surrounding the refinery, including 50 Casas, found a high presence of respiratory ailments, including 25 percent prevalence of permanent asthma and 36.6 percent prevalence of wheezing in the previous six months (Harari 2004). Asthma and wheezing are serious underlying conditions that increase the likelihood of becoming severely ill from COVID-19, and this is in a marginal neighborhood within a city that has approximately 25 respirators available for its entire population.
While official air quality reports and medical studies measuring morbidity and mortality at the neighborhood level are either unavailable or inaccurate—due to both the neighborhood’s informal status and its population’s socioeconomic marginality—the experiences of those who live there tell a poignant story of embodied manifestations of living with toxicity. In every interview, I asked children’s primary caretakers, usually mothers, about the most prevalent health issues in their homes. Answers most commonly included allergies that cause persistent cold-like symptoms in children, trouble breathing, and skin rashes from swimming in the contaminated river. The trend we have seen play out in the U.S., where minorities and impoverished populations with lack of access to health care have been the most vulnerable to becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, is only magnified when we consider inequalities at a global scale.
Throughout the pandemic, the environmental and social injustices that the residents faced have increased, making them not only vulnerable to the social and financial crises caused by the pandemic, but also the embodied aspect of being “contaminated citizens,” as they refer to themselves. The COVID-19 pandemic hit Ecuador especially hard in May 2020, leading to major lockdowns and restrictions. As of March 2021, there were approximately 4,000 documented cases of COVID-19 infections in the city of Esmeraldas. Testing capacities are severely limited in the area, so the actual number is likely higher.
One potentially positive consequence of how remote Esmeraldas is from major centers of political and economic power is that COVID-19 positivity rates have been relatively low as a result of lockdowns, although cases of severe illness are very common due to the previously discussed underlying conditions. A more severe consequence of the pandemic has been the stagnation of local economies and the near disappearance of informal work opportunities. Poverty has become more entrenched in the community, highlighting acute differences between households. This situation essentially grouped people into those who had some savings or were able to keep working to feed their families and those who had no savings and could not work. In phone conversations with residents, I heard that hunger was, for the first time, a real problem in the neighborhood. As the lockdown in the city began to ease in August 2020, people have slowly resumed their lives. However, the long-term effects of poverty entrenchment as a result of the pandemic and quarantine are yet to be seen.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the authors and not the American Sociological Association.
