Padre Rafael Ferrer, a successful Jesuit missionary who arrived in 1602, was chased out only after soldiers and colonists sought to follow his lead.

Occasional visits from outsiders seeking gold, land, trade, and converts occurred over the next few centuries as European diseases caused a population crash.

[1] Randy Borman describes the Cofan response to this traumatic history as follows: an attitude "which can be best termed stoic acceptance of the incomprehensible ways of the outsiders as a survival strategy.

"[2] A Cofan Foundation has been formed to help preserve the culture, restore traditional foods in the rivers and to raise money to send children to Quito for education.

Bub and Bobbie Borman, a husband and wife team of missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, were among the few outsiders to stay.

[2] In 1964, Geodetic Survey, Inc. cleared seismic trails and detonated underground explosives to locate petroleum deposits for a Texaco-Gulf consortium, which were finally drilled in 1967.

In 1994 a group of Peruvian citizens living downstream from the Oriente region also filed a class action lawsuit against Texaco in US federal court.

An oil industry waste water dumping pit was dug in the Sucumbíos Province of Ecuador's Amazon in 2005 to the locals' disgust.

[3][4][5] Two Ecuadoran born Cofán activists, Luis Yanza and Pablo Fajardo, who are demanding that the Chevron Corporation clean up a major toxic waste spills in the Ecuadorian part of the Amazon rainforest received the 2008 and 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize.

They legal claim is that, between 1964 and 1990, Texaco dumped 18,000,000 gallons of post-drilling wastewater into the rainforest around the north western town of Lago Agrio, heavily contaminating the land and threatening the health of up to 30,000 Amerindians and local peasants who live there.

[3][4][5] The indigenous Kichwa tribal leader Guillermo Grefa joined forces with the activists, appearing in Houston to confront Chevron at the annual shareholders meeting.

Cofans in Zabalo are currently working to bring back some of the traditional animals of their culture to the tributaries of the Amazon River where they live.