I have been living with the people you casually toss off as being exploited by my imperialist ways for 25 years.I built and own La Selva Jungle Lodge.I consider myself to be a thoughtful man and have spent most of my adult life trying to fathom the issues you touch the surface of and many ideas much more profound that an outsider could never understand on a gut level. I still have a ways to go but I believe I am closer to some kind of truth than a whiney blog.

You should go to my website to see some of the awards we have won for sustainable rainforest projects and for the scientific studies we have completed. I do not believe I have deculturated these people in any way and not having visited them or not knowing how they lived when I found them it is unfair for you to pronounce my activities differently.The cleanliness issue, to an outsider like you, might have appeared myopic or worse and I thank you for pointing it out–but my neighbors and friends who work in the spa , like everyone in the community , suffer constantly from waterborne illnesses. Now that we have irradicated malaria in our area, we will work harder on the bacteria , amoebas, shigelosis, worms and other gastric horrors that I am sure you would not want touching you. The two lovely women in the picture Noemi and berta wipe their asses without toilet paper . Wouldn’t you like to know they are immaculately clean? Perhaps not.

Your Right Maegan, It was wrong for me to throw stones at your blog.The hyperbole of our press release reached no new heights and no new lows in its category and was done with the intention to grab a headline and it succeeded in doing that.There is no shortage of bad taste on Gawker which in its instructions tells you to write something nasty if you want a chance at glory and in hard economic times I wrote what you and some others outside my industry consider to be an insensititive Press Release.

But the world trades on embellishment and in a recession and in a world I am rarely part of( I have only recently learned of a Paris Hilton and have no idea why people pay so much attention to her)I made some bad bait and probably caught a lot of bad fish. Time will tell.

Now as to your agenda. I am not reifying these people.In fact the upper Amazon Basin Kichwa culture does not exist save a very few similar(surely ancient) but non-cultural acts common with all the riverine peoples of the Amazon. My friends and neighbors have been proselytized to by a number of Christian sects but practice no religion or regular tribal activities of discernable faith Christian or otherwise. They do celebrate Mother’s Day for which we slaughter a pig from our pig farm and bake enormous cakes.

In fact our wriiten contract with these people includes a large cash payment every month to their comuna, a term left over from when comunist Basque Separtist Priests held sway in the area. Thankfully, they are long gone.The money is so that our guests can walk on their land as some of my trails go beyond the boundaries of my reserve.

So lets talk about exoticism and exotification which seems to be implied in your piece. if you can accept as a definition of exoticism as the charm of the unfamiliar and not as a move towards objectifying a people because of their racial background in the hopes of exotification of the other, in short,racism, in which the poor are taken advantage of, in which I take and give nothing substantial in return then you can begin to understand what I am doing. I pay for everything and everywhere I can. I beg borrow and use my life’s savings to make sure everyone I told I would take care of is taken care of during this recession.

My employees earn on average 8 times minimum wage plus tips,plus private health insurance.Although Ecuador has its own system of insurance for workers I did not think it was good enough for the sixty people who work for me. Our neighbors practically have health insurance in that we bring in at least 6 medical missions a year and the health of the community from which the women in the spa comes from is now so good, we now have to take the doctors, hours away in our launches to visit distant communities to “share the wealth”and to keep the doctors coming. Through our foundation we keep health records of every person in the community so that when doctors come in they actually have a history to look at.
We have built many schools and rebuilt them over our 25 year association and we even run a motorized canoe “School Bus” twice a day.

In short these people, to paraphrase Ghandi, do not live in my house as interlopers, beggars or slaves. They are shown the joy of self-empowerment and personal achievement. I do not trot out the natives to be seen by the tourists and while cultural ecotourism is all the rage right now with NGO’s seemingly dropping in by helicopters to “guide” Indigenous groups to economic freedom at the price of whatever is left of their cultural coil, I hold no truck with them, but unlike Paris hilton I am keenyly aware of the activity, the trend, the actual acts of it in Ecuador and elsewhere in the Amazon and I find them reprehensible , reifying, and evidence that a new colonialism has reared its head in the guise of a so-called indigenous run operation, or as equally bad but at least less subtle and more easily detectable:a supposedly anthropologically sensitive establishment where they do indeed trot out the natives for a dance or two and a blowgun shot from a grass skirted Amerindian, drunk on pure cane alcohol, who can still put the dart into a putrid papaya at 20 paces.

The issue is complex and something I have been thinking about and working on for 25 years. Half the people in this country live below the poverty level I would guess.Everyone in the Amazon Basin does except for the people I can reach through my foundation of which I am the principal benefactor and the works I provide them with and the contracts which I do little to negotiate and end with 10 for them for every one for me which is how it should be.

I hope I have answered your questions.