Few people in Europe and North America will remember what Bill Clinton called "the end of the last and longest running source of armed international conflict in the Western hemisphere", when in May 1999 Ecuador and Peru formally put an end to a centuries-old dispute over huge swathes of rainforest territory; around half of what Ecuador thought was Ecuadorian. As late as summer 1998 the Peruvian army looked set to reinvade, and when I was in Ecuador in 2005 all but the most recent guidebooks showed the border as several dotted lines rather than one solid one. But as the 20th Century drew to a close those lines coalesced, the disputed territory became undisputed, and the West breathed a sigh of relief - because getting oil contracts in disputed territory can be a bit tiresome.

The Amazon rainforest is still a hotbed of violent disputes, although you wouldn't know it from the news. As Peak Oil becomes more and more of a reality, the oil reserves hidden beneath the Amazonian soils become more and more important, but they are a long way from rivaling the black oceans under the Middle East. The indigenous peoples of the region have finally had enough of exploitation at the hands of oil companies and are fighting back, but they are few in number and poor in resources. If, in the Middle East, the war between corporate imperialism and their subject unpeoples has to be blown up into a dramatic "clash of civilizations" between Islam and all-that-is-holy, in Amazonia it can still be quite successfully brushed under the carpet.

That carpet has covered quite a lot already. Since oil was discovered there in the 1960s, more has been spilled into the rainforest than two Exxon Valdez disasters. The pollution caused by this oil and by the heavy machinery of drilling has caused immense damage to the fragile and unique environment, as has the land cleared to make way for pipelines, roads and bases. This cancer in the lungs of the planet is of course bad news for us all, but for the people who live there it's a catastrophe. Losing their forest means losing their way of life, their identity, and their social structures. When the Huarani resisted the invasion of the oil companies in Northern Ecuador, the latter and their mercenaries had many of them killed. Now, the Huarani can hardly be said to exist as a people.

As peace with Peru makes exploitation of Southern Ecuador more feasible, tribes who live there, such as the Shuar, are hoping to put up more of a fight.

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