Opaque Drivers of Social Chaos – Making sense of Ecuador’s population.

The underlying drivers of Ecuador’s conflicts (psychosocial, political, structural, economic, environmental, etc.) only begin to make sense when the population segments at odds with each other are illustrated phenomenologically and heuristically compared. For most of Ecuador’s national history, the successors of Spanish colonization have largely ignored the indigenous population and left them to manage themselves if they remained in their rural habitats. In my work with the security services of Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia, we found it difficult to interest my advisees of the necessity to research, engage, and positively influence their indigenous populations. We found that census taking in Ecuador did not even begin until 1950 and the effort was planned and executed by the mostly white Spanish governing class at that time. The census was driven by a desire within the Spanish Ecuadorian government to understand the indigenous population of Ecuador in terms of its size, social orientations and aspirations, and potential future political behaviour. The early census efforts attempted to classify people by asking for certain physical markers of identity-belonging, such as Spanish language facility, positive occurrence of Spanish ethnicity in parents or grandparents, and race, with choices of Negro or Caucasian. The most recent census was in 2010, and according to the results, the population projection for 2019 was an estimated 17.268 million Ecuadorians, living in 24 provinces distributed in 4 different regions: the Coast, the Highlands or the Andes, Amazonia, and the insular region. The Ecuadorian citizens in 1950 who were literate enough to fill out their census form were limited to a small percentage of upper-class mestizos and the ruling class of criollos.

The latter category of South and Central American identity, criollo (see figure 3), means that the individual and their family can trace all their bloodlines back to original Spanish and or Caucasian European ancestry in publicly available documentation. Upper-class mestizos, on the other hand, either could not factually ascertain their bloodlines or whose phenotype (face, skin, hair, body composition) observably contained some evidence of Mesoamerica ANDID ethnicity illustrated in figure 3. In the 2010 census, 72% of Ecuadorians self-identified as having some level of Spanish ethnicity and accepted their status as “mestizo.” A further 7.5% identified as a form of coastal mestizo called “montubio,” 7.2% identified as Afro Ecuadorians, 7% as pure “Indígenas” and 6.1% as criollo “blancos.” Ecuador’s criollo and upper-class mestizo communities have always maintained that only pure indigenous peoples should be allowed to claim that status and any amount of Spanish ancestral blood required citizens to self-identify as mestizo. Under this ethnic identity scheme, former President Leon Febres Cordero, insisted that the indigenous population of Ecuador consists of not more than two million people, while historian Enrique Ayala Mora, estimated that the indigenous population is no more than sixteen percent. The net goal of defining Ecuador’s population as majority ‘Mestizo’ was intended to maintain its national identity as being of European origin rather than allowing this narrative of origination to be challenged by an emerging indigenous narrative of origination. During our field work with the Highland Quechuas in the valleys of the Sierra region of the Andean Mountain Range, our qualitative interviews revealed that many, if not most of the residents that we engaged described themselves and their families as part of an Andean Indigenous world. When we asked them about their responses to census questionnaires, our interviewees responded by asking if their ability to conduct business in Spanish; or if one of their ancestors had the blood of a Spaniard; or if any of their family members displayed the physical characteristics of a European; then did any of those questions mean that they were Mestizos? We found during our field research that most indigenous people whom we interviewed believed that they lived in two worlds. The first was the world of the Spanish Colonial administration that perpetuated their rule long after they achieved separation from Europe. The second was their own Andean Indian world that we learned was called Tawantinsuya, or ‘Realm of the Four Parts’. This inner world of indigenous life shaped and harboured their collective identities, historical narrative, and memorialisation of their lives through songs, stories, artifacts,

clothing, architecture, food, social construction, and psychological organisation. My research found that approximately 95% of Ecuador's Indigenous population are Highland Quechuas living in the valleys of the Sierra region of the Andean Mountain Range. These people are Quechua/Runasimi speakers, and their family-clan-tribe names include the Caranqui, the Otavalenos, the Cayambi, the Pichincha, the Panzaleo, the Chimbuelo, the Salasacan, the Tungurahua, the Tugua, the Waranka, the Puruhá, the Cañari, and the Saraguro, to name the most prominent. An electorally significant number of Ecuadorian citizens who have historically been classified by government administrations as Spanish mixed blood, or mestizo, have always identified as indigenous. We found that this large segment spoke some or all their most intimate conversations at home in their individual indigenous languages or in the Runasimi bridge language. We found that few families in this category possessed oral stories, poems, songs, and carvings in the colonial language of the Spanish. We found that their normalised use of Spanish was minimally sufficient as a language to bridge their lives with the Spanish governing administration. As one moves beyond the paved roads and other markers of European civilizations in Quito and Lima, you emerge into a vastly different world than what is often envisioned by people who have never lived there. Within the Spanish speaking capitals of Colombia, Peru, or Ecuador, Spanish Mestizo elites maintain a pattern of European life and psychological symbolic objects that seem distinctly ethnic yet possess a surprising familiarity to the European Peninsulares visiting from Spain. To the millions of non-Spanish speaking inhabitants of these countries, these capital cities are mental symbolic objects of a familiar but foreign occupation, and for some or many, a subjugation of indigenous collective identity.

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Emergent Ideology of National Life – Quechua Pacha Figure 8

The Quechua word sumak literally translates roughly into ‘ideal purpose’ and kawsay roughly translates into ‘life’. These two Quechuan words have been used by the indigenous peoples of pre-Columbian society to create a diffuse neo-logical conceptualisation of psychosocial-emotional construction of life that is based on ancestral indigenous ideas. These ancestral ideological concepts predate the Incan Empire by as much as 1,000 years and were incorporated by the Inca rulers into their conceptualisation of their empire. European oriented Spanish intellectuals and scholars in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, have translated Sumak-kawsay into Spanish as Buen vivir, or ‘Good life’ focused on collective wellbeing, social responsibility, and an alternative to traditional development and capital accumulation. Indigenous leaders were quick to appreciate this initial acceptance by the Spanish elite, until the concepts became ‘re-imagined’ as modifications of the existing socio-political-economic order that kept most of the western based Westphalian state model intact. Agreements on the translation of indigenous psychosocial-emotional reality (collective and individual) would quickly fracture leaving growing chaos and confusion about the real intentions of the indigenous communities. This chaos and confusion translated, in turn, to the loss of common ground on which to base winning electoral coalitions that could achieve sufficient unity to govern.

Both Euro-centric Spanish and Indigenous-Centric political organisations are discovering that the emerging indigenous translations of ancient cosmology may be incompatible with existing European social constructions. As described in figure 6, this possibility of incompatibility has always been a concern of the Spanish inheritors of post-colonial Ecuador and Peru, hence the structuring of national censuses that ‘guided’ the populations’ responses towards a more unified version of cultural assimilation. Unfortunately for those who dream of keeping Ecuador a Spanish state, most full and partial blood indigenous people remained deep within their own cosmological reality and simply co-existed with their rulers. Until the present day. Since my earliest days operating within the indigenous societies of the Amazon and Andean Mountains, we’ve observed and researched this diffuse conceptualisation as it crystalised into political thought, followed by political activities of electoral organisation, representation, negotiation, and finally, legislation. The conceptualisation of indigenous Sumak-Kawsay in its purest form, would if allowed, transform Ecuador and Peru from nation-states that are European-orientations to ones that are remade into modern versions of social communities modelled after the Tawantinsuyu civilisations of the Incan Empire. The sprawl of tribes, clans, families of the Andean Mountain Ranges have, until recently, constituted an invisible world that operates beyond the control of the Spanish oriented governing administrations.