Polivio Pérez’s home is a majestic cloud forest in a remote corner of northern Ecuador, a tropical region of stunning natural beauty. More than 15,000 people live in the Intag Valley, flanked by the towering Andes and surrounded by pristine forests, mountain streams that carry clean drinking water, rare orchids and dozens of species of wild animals. Like Pérez, most residents are subsistence farmers growing maize, vegetables and fruits like papayas and pineapples, in one of the most ecologically diverse frontiers on earth.
But beneath this lush paradise are rich copper deposits that have lit up the eyes of foreign mining companies.
