Randy Borman was never meant to be Cofán. And yet, from the moment he was born in 1955, deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, he belonged to them. His parents, American missionaries, had come to translate the Bible into the Cofán language, but their eldest son took to the forest as though it were written into his bones. While his parents pored over scripture, Randy learned to track tapirs, fish with a harpoon, and wield a blowgun with quiet precision. He spoke A’ingae, the language of the Cofán, before he spoke English. The rainforest was his cradle, his school, and in the end, his charge.
It was a world already slipping away. When Randy was a boy, the Cofán still lived as they had for centuries, hunting and fishing along the Aguarico River, moving lightly through a landscape they understood with an intimacy that few outsiders could fathom. By the time he reached adolescence, the first seismic thuds of an oil-rig drill had shattered the silence. The arrival of Texaco in the late 1960s, and the roads and colonists that followed, turned the Cofán homeland into a wasteland of blackened rivers and felled trees. Randy, shuttled between his village and missionary school in Quito, found himself straddling two irreconcilable worlds: one vanishing, the other indifferent.
At 18, he left for Michigan State University, a brief attempt at a life in the land of his ancestors. It did not take. “Everything felt regulated, fenced in,” he later recalled. “I needed the forest.” He returned to Ecuador, determined to fight for the people who had raised him, the people whose land was being siphoned away, one oil well at a time.
The Cofán were not legal owners of their own territory. As a people who had always lived with the land, the very concept of land ownership was foreign to them. Randy, realizing that the only language the Ecuadorian state understood was bureaucracy, set out to win formal land titles for the Cofán. He learned the law, navigated the corridors of power in Quito, and pushed for Indigenous land rights in meetings where he was often the only Cofán present. By 1992, after years of lobbying, he secured the first legal recognition of Cofán territory, an expanse of nearly 200,000 acres. In the years that followed, he helped expand Cofán-controlled land to over a million acres, ensuring that one of the most biodiverse forests on Earth would endure.
His strategy was simple: if the state could not protect the land, the Cofán would do it themselves. He helped establish the Cofán Ranger Program, training Indigenous guardians to patrol the forests, expel illegal loggers and miners, and monitor biodiversity. It was a triumph. While deforestation surged elsewhere in Ecuador, Cofán lands stood as a testament to resilience—verdant and life-sustaining. The program became a model for Indigenous-led conservation, studied and admired far beyond the Amazon.
It was not without cost. Randy was threatened more times than he could count. In 2012, his son Felipe was kidnapped by armed men linked to the gold mining trade; for 40 days, he was held in chains in the jungle. The Borman family never paid a ransom. Instead, Felipe, using skills his father had taught him, escaped by himself, slipping through the undergrowth until he found safety. Randy had raised his children the way he had been raised—to understand the forest as both home and refuge.
His body bore the weight of his battles. A near-fatal bout of encephalitis in his 40s left him reliant on hormone therapy. Years of relentless exposure to the equatorial sun—compounded, he believed, by oil contamination—led to multiple rounds of surgery to remove squamous cell carcinoma. He was not alone in his suffering; many in his Cofan community had succumbed to the disease. In the end, while they had fought fiercely to shield their land from deforestation, they could not stop the insidious spread of oil’s pollution—an invisible enemy that seeped into their bodies, claiming them from within. And in the end, it killed him too.
And yet, the forest he fought for still stands. The Cofán, once a people on the brink, are now some of the most successful Indigenous land managers in the Amazon. The rivers Randy navigated as a boy remain clean, the trees still hum with the calls of macaws and howler monkeys. His son Felipe, now a leader in his own right, continues the fight.
Indigenous people know that we need the forest to survive, Randy often said. The question is whether the rest of the world will wake up to that fact.
He did not live to see the world fully awaken. But thanks to him, one corner of it, at least, still breathes.
