Patricia Gualinga Montalvo

Patricia Gualinga Motalvo is a Kichwa of Sarayaku, an indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon. She graduated in Human Rights and Environmental Management. She is the International Relations Director for the Kichwa First People of Sarayaku and she has been working to protect her  community of Sarayaku from human rights violations resulting from oil extraction projects by Chinese companies on their land.  In 2012, she was one of the representatives in a case presented to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in which the government was found guilty of rights violations and of authorizing oil exploration and militarization of Sarayaku lands without consulting the community. Patricia is actively involved with Women Defenders of the Amazon against Extraction and the Pan-Amazon Ecclesial Network. She has received a number of human rights prizes for her work including the Olof Palme Prize in 2022, the Alnoba Leadership Awards in 2021 and the environmental activism prize at the International Festival of Environmental Films in the Canary Islands in 2019.