Indigenous Political Movements in Ecuador. From Political Movements of Divergeant Ideologies to a Clash of Civilisations.

Indigenous Political Movements in Ecuador.

By the early 1990s when we began working with the Quechua in the Andean Mountains, several confederations of Quechua had merged with those of the Amazon Basin tribes to form a united indigenous front called CONAIE, which over the years appears to be one of the best-organized and most influential Indigenous movement in Latin America. It was CONAIE’s grassroots organisational work that incited a rural uprising of indigenous communities on a national scale. Thousands of people blocked roads, paralyzed the transport system, and shut down the country for a week while making demands for bilingual education, agrarian reform, and recognition of the plurinational state of Ecuador. This was the largest uprising in Ecuador's history and ushered in the awareness of the potential social power of Ecuador’s indigenous community – both to themselves and to the existing establishment. This uprising served to partly reorient our Special Forces missions in Ecuador and Peru from pure counter-narcotics advisory and training support to Ecuador’s 19th Jungle Brigade, towards a civic engagement and research effort to better understand the complex intricacies of the power behind these growing movements. In hindsight, the emergence of these organisations and their early social and political activist organising was only the beginning of an entirely new political and social contest that would upend Ecuador’s development trajectory in a string of later uprisings. Follow on CONAIE-led uprisings played a role in the fall of president Abdala Bucaram and subsequent drafting of a new constitution in 1998. CONAIE leaders also participated in the 2000 coup d'etat that deposed President Jamil Mahuad.

CONAIE's political agenda has always been focused on positive strengthening and socially adapting Indigenous identity as a basis for reclaiming their long denied social role in Ecuadorian society. The central tenant of this effort was the recuperation of land rights with a corresponding change in the socio-political structure that would be needed to allow for alternative uses and means of production related to land. This, in turn, required major changes in the state’s conceptualisation of land as a capital resource for mass extraction of wealth from precious metals and energy sources. Where the existing Spanish-Euro society of Quito and Guayaquil understood this to mean versions of environmental preservation and perhaps restoration, they would later realise that the Quechuan cosmological ideology meant something else entirely; a complete change to the relationship between man and nature that is not easily compatible with western society in developed urban spaces. During our deployments to Ecuador in the early 1990s, the Indigenous movement in Ecuador consolidated a large number of often competing agendas, and issued 16 demands the first of which was the declaration of Ecuador as a plurinational state.

The return of lands to Indigenous people and control over territory have been consistent central demands for the Indigenous movement in Ecuador. In addition to these central concerns, CONAIE's 16-point platform broadly addressed cultural issues such as bilingual education and control of archaeological sites; economic concerns such as development programs; and political demands such as local autonomy. See figure 5.

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From Political Movements of Divergeant Ideologies to a Clash of Civilisations.

Even as we found that we were making positive headway in transformational change within the Colombian structure of society, participation, and governance under Plan Colombia, we found and reported that we were losing ground in Ecuador. Most all the initiatives that our team developed in conjunction with Colombia’s indigenous communities and our host nation partner, Colombian Government’s Accion Social, were ultimately accepted by the civilian governance, the COLAR and lastly, the COLPOL. This acceptance by the security and administrative services of those Colombian states that we were advising allowed us to turn the aspirations of the indigenous and marginalised mestizo communities inwards towards a social construction of a multi-world cosmology that did not necessitate the destruction of the pre-existing society. The likelihood of a similar success being replicated in Ecuador between indigenous and Euro-centric population segments does not seem plausible, unfortunately, based simply on the ongoing record of reporting. The reasons for the difference may be the level of violence that Colombia experienced over its half-century struggle with the FARC, leading to conditions for what USIP calls. The population potential for a much larger demand for Ecuador’s national identity to turn sharply towards indigenous versus euro-centric segments is also likely, an important difference from Colombia’s experiences. The threatened depth of the national identity change that Ecuador’s euro-centric community will ultimately face may lead to conflict that is existential in nature, leaving them with only ‘fight or flight’ options much like similar communities of Tegucigalpa and San Salvador. There are similarities in the psychological pathologies in evidence within Quito’s ruling mestizo class to those of Tegucigalpa, Guatemala City, and San Salvador. Our understanding of these psychopathologies is critical to our ability to predict how the participants to the conflict will likely react to current and future events as they unfold. Now, the collectives of ethnically related upper-class mestizos harbour the vestiges of post-colonial cultural identity. These collectives populate most of the parliament, courts, leadership of security services, banks, corporate governance, and most of the upper-level positions of government administration and academia. Individually and collectively, they create, sustain, and enforce national social cohesion and order according to what they believe to be a national standard that is not subject to wholesale abandonment. Their willingness or capacity to evolve (non-violently) their inherited national Euro-centric identity, towards one that is markedly different – alien even – in its indigenous nature, would likely require them to be free from inferiority complexes that might cause them to react in extreme uses of national power to stave off such change.