Ecuador’s Pan-Indian Uprising

ON MAY 27, 1990, ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY
Indians occupied Santo Domingo Cathedral in the
heart of the old city of Quito. They demanded the immedi-
ate resolution of land disputes in six highland provinces.
The takeover marked the beginning of a nationwide
uprising which shut down the country for over a week.
The uprising was called by the Confederation of Indig-
enous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), in the name
of the regional federations from the highlands (sierra), the
Amazon (Oriente), and the coast. The takeover also
marked an end-the end of hundreds of years of life on the
political periphery for the 40% of Ecuador’s 10 million
people who are Indians.’
Everywhere the demand was the same: give back the
land that once belonged, and still rightfully belongs, to
indigenous communities. “The indigenous peoples of this
country will continue to struggle until we achieve our
rights,” CONAIE’ s president Crist6bal Tapuy declared in
a press conference. “We are tired of offers and promises,
of being berated and looked down upon. We are prepared
now, with our own ideas and our own criteria.”‘ 2
By Monday, June 4, the mobilization had paralyzed
the sierra provinces of Bolfvar, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi,
and Tungurahua (all to the south of Quito), Pichincha
(where Quito is located), and Imbabura (north of Quito).
The Indians’ strategy involved placing large boulders,
walls of rock, and tree trunks across the Pan-American
highway and other major roads. Within a day, the block-
ade created spot shortages of certain products in provin-
cial capitals and outlying towns, revealing the country’s
dependence on native farmers. In the provinces of
Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, where Indians were already
engaged in open struggle for land with estate-owners
(hacendados), they took police and local officials hos-
tage. At one point, the governor of Chimborazo was
reportedly in the hands of the Indigenous Movement of
Chimborazo (MICH). In Cotopaxi, indigenous farmers
actually expelled hacendados from lands that had been
usurped generations ago.
The central government deployed the national police
and the army throughout the sierra to roll back the insur-
rection. Troops in full combat gear swept through the
countryside, making free use of tanks, tear gas, night-
sticks, and, in some cases, bullets. Police arrested and
imprisoned many of the Indians blockading roads, par-
ticularly those identified as leaders. MICH leaderOswaldo
Cuwi was killed by police in Riobamba, the capital of
Chimborazo, even as the government invited the national
leadership to negotiate.
VOLUME XXV. NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER 1991)
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Les Field teaches anthropology at the University of
New Hampshire.
39The First Nations
The First Nations
On June 8, President Rodrigo Borja designated several
upper-level ministers, including the head of the Agrarian
Reform Ministry (IERAC), to negotiate with the native
leadership. The Archbishop of Quito acted as mediator
and CONAIE vice president Luis Macas was the
movement’s main spokesperson. Eleven days after the
occupation of Santo Domingo Cathedral began, the Indi-
ans left the church in a disciplined manner, having cleaned
the building thoroughly.
As they departed, Indian leaders released a list of 72
priority land conflicts in the sierra requiring immediate
resolution, as well as 16 demands that summarize how
CONAIE proposes to end the subjugation of indigenous
peoples, particularly in the sierra. [See sidebar p.41]
These demands outline a program of land distribution and
community economic development, investment in basic
infrastructure and the removal of barriers the state bureau-
cracy places in the way of the indigenous economy, such
as debt, lack of credit, regressive taxation, and a punishing
price structure for indigenous agricultural products. The
16 points mandate a cultural rights campaign based on
bilingual education, indigenous control of archaeological
sites and government support for native medicine. The
program also envisions an amendment to the Ecuadorian
constitution to recognize the country as a pluri-national,
multi-ethnic state.
T HE CONSERVATIVE QUITO DAILY EL
Comercio called the uprising “the sixth Indian
insurrection”-the others having taken place in 1578,
Shuar representative Rafael Pardam at the CONAIE
congress in August. CONAIE envisions a national
economy based on territorial autonomy and indigenous
forms of development.
A
1599, 1615, 1766 and 1892-and described the succes-
sion of rebellions as one on-going battle to regain lost
lands. CONAIE, however, has compiled a list of no less
than 145 distinct insurrections between 1533, immedi-
ately following the Conquest, and 1972, when the re-
gional federation Ecuarunari organized the entire sierra. 4
Indigenous historians cite 12 distinct rebellions in
Chimborazo alone and historians of the Canari people
from Cuenca recount repeated attempts to turn internecine
Creole conflicts into a struggle for indigenous rights.
Despite a thread of continuity, CONAIE and its con-
stituent organizations view the 1990 uprising as qualita-
tively different from earlier indigenous resistance, which
was “in general, local in character, isolated…in reaction to
abuses, in defense of land,” and as such vulnerable to the
centralized repressive apparatus marshalled by the Ecua-
dorian state.’
When the Spanish arrived, native peoples had been
living in the sierra for over ten thousand years. A constel-
lation of small chieftain-states, particularly around the
modern cities of Otavalo, Quito and Cuenca, conducted
active trade in coca leaves, cotton, bird feathers, gold,
potatoes, fine textiles, pottery, and many other commodi-
ties, among the three regions of Ecuador (sierra, Oriente
and coast) and with peoples in the modern territories of
Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Central America. The sierra
chieftain-states constructed large earthen pyramids, stone
temples, and irrigation works.
Though these hierarchical societies were dominated
by powerful families, land was held communally and
labor performed collectively (the minga). Like communal
land, the persistence of the minga infuses contemporary
indigenous identity with a distinctive vision of social
organization. The Inca conquest of Ecuador, approxi-
mately 50 years before the arrival of the Spanish, likely
maintained communal and collective social institutions,
which also characterized the social base of Inca civiliza-
tions. By contrast, Spanish subjugation undermined com-
munal land and the minga, and severed the relationship
between the native leadership and the farmers who com-
prised the majority of the population.
The Spanish Crown issued land-grants throughout the
sierra to prominent conquistador families. The Spaniards
then forcibly settled indigenous farmers in colonial towns
and instituted a labor-draft (the encomienda) to create a
workforce for the haciendas they established on confis-
cated land. The Spanish Crown at times attempted to
mitigate the harsher aspects of this neo-feudal system, but
hacendados continued to dispossess Indian communities
of their lands throughout the colonial period and after
independence. The communities struggled to maintain
traditional social structures, but these dwindled as the
decades passed.
From early on, the sierra became a stronghold of
subsistence and stagnation. While hacendados reinvested
their income in the much more dynamic, export-oriented
cacao plantations on the coast, indigenous farm families
REPORT ON THE AMERICASwere allowed only tiny plots to cultivate after performing
obligatory labor on the hacienda. The sustainable prac-
tices of indigenous cultivation, a “science” which utilizes
complex systems of crop diversity, crop association, and
organic composting, enabled indigenous people to sur-
vive the brutality of colonial exploitation. Yet the Spanish
deliberately froze the trajectory of indigenous technologi-
cal and economic development, even though sierra towns
and cities depended on the produce that Indians brought
to market. This dependence, which expanded in the inter-
vening centuries, lay at the heart of CONAIE’s strategy
during the uprising of 1990, and provided a crucial advan-
tage for the movement.
The only dynamic sector of the indigenous economy in
the sierra that the colonial administration maintained and
exploited was the ancient textile industry at Otavalo. 1 The
Incas had prized Otavalefio textiles, and soon after the
Spanish Conquest, the colonial administration built enor-
mous primitive factories in the town. These produced the
clothes that garbed the slaves who toiled in the mines of
Bolivia and Peru. The factories also made the uniforms of
the armies of independence in the early nineteenth cen-
tury.
CONAIE’s historical rendering of national indepen-
dence relates that “the creation of the Republic of Ecuador
did not mean any change in our living conditions; it was
nothing more than the passage of power from the hands of
the Spaniards to the hands of the Creoles.”‘ Today Indians
commonly describe independence as “the last day of
despotism and the first day of the same.” Hacendados
yoked indigenous farmers to their estates by debt-peon-
age (the huasipungo system), while free-trade policies
allowed cheap machine-made English textiles to flood the
country, destroying the export potential of Otavalefio
weaving and weakening the internal market.
A century later, however, Otavalefios discovered they
could imitate the styles of foreign imports and compete
effectively in urban markets, due to the comparative
advantage of their underpaid labor. Their growing suc-
cess beginning in the 1920s-the only departure from the
overall picture of indigenous rural poverty-created a
model of indigenous capitalism and exercised an impor-
tant influence on the political platform of Ecuarunari and
CONAIE.
O TAVALEI&O WEAVERS BEGAN BY INVEST-
ing their tiny profits in new, inexpensive synthetic
dyes, as well as in any machinery they could afford. 9
Successful weavers then began a long-term policy of
using their small profits to purchase farmland for their
families. By buying land with whatever funds they could
amass, the Otavalefios resolved the underlying problem
confronting them and the rest of the Indians of the sierra:
access to farmland stolen by the haciendas.
Otavalo’s capitalist development occurred during the
same period that small workers’ syndicates and artisans’
guilds emerged. President Eloy Alfaro, the radical general
CONAIE’S SIXTEEN DEMANDS
1. Return of lands and territories taken from indigenous
communities, without costly legal fees.
2. Sufficient water for human consumption and irrigation
in indigenous communities, and a plan to prevent pollution of
water supplies.
3. No municipal taxes on small properties owned by
indigenous farmers.
4. Long-term financing for bilingual education programs
in the communities.
5. Creation of provincial and regional credit agencies to
be controlled by CONAIE.
6. Forgiveness of all debts to government ministries and
banks incurred by indigenous communities.
7. Amendment of the first article of the constitution to
proclaim Ecuador as a multi-national state.
8. Immediate delivery of funds and credits currently
budgeted for indigenous nationalities.
9. Minimum two-year price freeze on all raw materials
and manufactured goods used by the communities in agricul-
tural production, and reasonable price increase on all agricul-
tural goods sold by them, using free-market mechanisms.
10. Initiation and completion of all priority construction
on basic infrastructure for indigenous communities.
11. Unrestricted import and export privileges for indig-
enous artisans and handicrafts merchants.
12. National legislation and enforcement to provide for
strict protection and controlled exploration of archaeological
sites, under the supervision of CONAIE.
13. Expulsion of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, in
accordance with Executive Decree 1159 of 1981.
14. Respect for the rights of children and greater govern-
ment awareness of their current plight.
15. National support for indigenous medicine.
16. Immediate dismantling of political party organiza-
tions that parallel government institutions at the municipal
and provincial levels, and which manipulate political con-
sciousness and elections in indigenous communities.
and nationalist hero of the Ecuadorian Left, aided these
anarchist and liberal organizations, which were profoundly
influenced by the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1926 radical
artisans, workers and intellectuals formed the Socialist
Party, which began organizing peasant unions in the
sierra, particularly around Quito, and in Imbabura, the
Otavalehios’ province. These unions (with names like The
Inca, Free Land, and Bread and Land) emphasized the
struggle for a fair agricultural wage, shorter hours, and
improved working conditions.1
In 1944 the newly formed Communist Party and the
leftist Confederation of Ecuadorian Workers helped in-
digenous unions, artisan guilds and communities to orga-
nize the Federation of Ecuadorian Indians (FEI). “This
organization,” according to CONAIE, “brought together
unions, cooperatives and communities, and for the first
time did so in the name of representing indigenous
people.”” FEI limited its activities to the sierra, and
VOLUME XXV. NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER 1991) 41The First Nations
struggled for specific agrarian goals: elimination of the
huasipungo, break-up and return of hacienda land to
Indians, a shorter workday, and the like.
Because FEI’s program did not “take into account the
totality of our problems, that is both class exploitation and
ethnic discrimination,” according to CONAIE, “and be-
cause most of [FEI’s] leaders were not indigenous, this
organization could not…represent the totality of our aspi-
rations.”” FEI’s success, aided by the Communist-led
Federation of Peasant Organizations (FENOC), encour-
aged a parallel effort on the part of the Ecuadorian
Federation of Catholic Workers, in an attempt to limit the
growth and influence of the Communists. The net result
was an insistent wave of pressure for land reform, which
peaked in the 1960s. Under the added incentives of the
Alliance for Progress and the Cuban revolution, the mili-
tary overthrew the democratically elected government in
1964, vowing to both fight communism and carry out land
reform.
The agrarian reform law of 1964 focused on promoting
farm efficiency, and did not set a maximum allowable
farm size. The military agreed with the hacendados’
assessment that the real inefficiency in sierra agriculture
lay in the tiny size and subsistence nature of indigenous
farms. The reform became a way to help large landowners
develop dairy and meat industries to feed the growing
urban population. It did abolish the huasipungo, which
meant the end of the paternalistic domination of the
hacendados. The law also promised to distribute hacienda
lands to former huasipungeros, but failed to do so in the
vast majority of cases.
The agrarian reform legitimized native demands for
land, while it frustrated the expectations of indigenous
farmers. Only in Otavalo did the reform help to change
conditions of rural poverty. Indigenous weavers, liber-
ated from the onerous huasipungo, augmented their pro-
duction of textiles significantly. Dovetailing with the
slow but steady increase of foreign tourism in the late
1960s, which created a ready-made market for Otavalefio
textiles, the process of indigenous capital accumulation
and investment in farmland accelerated.
The failure of agrarian reform undermined FEI’s class-
based ideological platform in the eyes of indigenous
farmers. But seasoned FEI activists went on to play a
significant role in the building of new ethnically defined
and locally based indigenous organizations, culminating
in Ecuarunari’s founding in 1972.
T HE SIX INDIGENOUS ETHNIC GROUPS OF
the Oriente began organizing a region-wide move-
ment in the late 1960s, when petroleum gushed from wells
drilled in their rainforest territories.'” Only then did these
peoples, who utilize sophisticated sustainable systems to
cultivate the fragile rainforest soils, confront an Ecuador-
ian regime determined to confiscate their lands. Their
movement, the Confederation of Indigenous Amazonians
(CONFENIAE), and the local federations that comprise it
Since the 1990 uprising, indigenous people, like these
women from the village of Salasca, have faced a
campaign of police intimidation and harassment.
reject the ecologically destructive extractive industries
the Ecuadorian state and economy have imposed in the
Oriente, and seek to obtain title to the territories Oriente
peoples have inhabited for centuries.
The military has maintained a strong presence in the
Oriente since a conflict with Peru in the 1940s led to the
loss of over half of Ecuador’s claim in the Amazon. The
discovery of petroleum delivered a massive prize into the
military’s hands-since the generals hardly considered
the presence of indigenous peoples in the region signifi-
cant-and inspired another coup in 1972. The junta prom-
ised to nationalize the oil industry and carry out reformist
development projects with the profits that petroleum
produced.
The military’s second agrarian reform, announced in
1973, also stressed efficiency and productivity, and allo-
cated funds to promote capital-intensive export crops,
accessible only to large land-owners. IERAC, the
government’s new Agrarian Reform Ministry distributed
even less land in the 1970s than the first reform had in the
1960s. Soon thereafter, police in Chimborazo and
Tungurahua assassinated two of Ecuarunari’s principal
leaders, Lizaro Condo and Crist6bal Pajuna. The
organization’s second congress, in 1975, focused specifi-
cally on resisting the state’s crackdown and fighting the
injustice of the 1973 reform.
REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 42
‘IrCEcuarunari’s platform at that time introduced a “class-
based conception of the peasant-indigenous movement,”
and by 1979 it was promoting a program that combined
land revindication with bilingual education and cultural
rights. It called for waging both economic and cultural
struggles in the context of community development ef-
forts.'” This platform reflected the growing power of the
provincial and community-based organizations Ecuarunari
had set out to create. Ecuarunari’s ideological platform
and increasing emphasis on grassroots control set the
organizational tone for both the Orient’s CONFENIAE
and the national CONAIE.
In the Oriente, petroleum development greatly im-
proved access to rainforest terrain, allowing thousands of
mestizo farmers to carve out agricultural plots in indig-
enous domains. The military junta viewed this as an
opportunity to alleviate the “land shortage” in the sierra,
and put IERAC in charge of a colonization program.
Notwithstanding increasingly clear signs that mestizo
farmers did not know how to utilize rainforest soils in a
sustainable fashion, IERAC continued to support coloni-
zation. The oil companies (both foreign and national) and
IERAC accepted the presence of U.S. missionaries among
the six indigenous ethnic groups of the Oriente, in the
hope that they could “civilize” indigenous societies, par-
ticularly by reducing indigenous peoples’ attachment to
their land.
To combat the open conspiracies against their lands
and cultures, in 1980 a meeting of organizations repre-
senting the two largest ethnic groups of the region-the
Quichua-speakers in the north and the Shuar in the
south-founded CONFENIAE. The Quichua-speaking
peoples, descended from sierra people who had fled to the
east during the colonial and republican regimes, inherited
a long history of successful violent resistance to Spanish
and Ecuadorian penetration of their territory. Their resis-
tance limited government activities to extractive indus-
tries such as gold mining and rubber tapping. In the
southern Oriente, the Shuar successfully repelled all Span-
ish and Ecuadorian incursions into their territory until the
last years of the nineteenth century.
In both regions, indigenous organizations seek to title
their land, to protect their cultures from predatory mis-
sionary groups-particularly the infamous Summer Insti-
tute of Linguistics (SIL)-and to fight against the succes-
sion of ecologically ruinous extractive industries that
reached their nadir with oil. Oriente peoples’ revulsion
against missionary activity thrust their demand for the
expulsion of SIL onto CONAIE’s list of 16 points pre-
sented during the 1990 uprising. Ecuarunari and
CONFENIAE gave birth to CONAIE in 1986, after six
years of experimenting with looser and less effective
forms of coordinating indigenous struggles nationwide.
AS NEGOTIATIONS DRAGGED ON THROUGH
the summer of 1990, the social democratic admin-
istration of President Rodrigo Borja expressed optimism
that the dialogue with Indian leaders was advancing, and
that the restitution of indigenous farmland confiscated
over 400 years would be resolved. Gonzalo Ortiz Crespi,
secretary to the president, displayed a positive attitude
toward CONAIE’s demands, and took pains to describe
“how much land we have distributed and how much
money we have already spent on infrastructure” in Indian
communities.” CONAIE director Rodrigo de la Cruz
expressed guarded skepticism, citing the case of
Chimborazo, where the government had done nothing
about the landlessness of Ecuador’s most impoverished
Indian farmers.
In late August, CONAIE and CONFENIAE intro-
duced a new document outlining an ambitious program of
territorial autonomy and community development for the
indigenous peoples of the Oriente province of Pastaza.
CONAIE’s previous negotiating positions demanded only
the return of land confiscated over the centuries, particu-
larly in the sierra. The Pastaza plan explicitly demarcated
proposed territories for the four resident Indian ethnic
groups. The proposal reserved for them approximately
90% of the land and its sub-soil resources, confining
mestizo Ecuadorians to one comer of the province, around
the provincial capital, Puyo. CONAIE vice president Luis
Macas justified the allocation and titling of most of
Pastaza to indigenous peoples by invoking “the total
validity of traditional rights” of Indian people to territo-
ries they have inhabited for thousands of years.’ 6
President Borja denounced the proposal and brought
the negotiations to an abrupt end. He claimed that the
document was really a master plan for creating a “parallel
state” within Ecuador’s borders, in which national laws
would have no power over “traditional rights.” The presi-
dent appeared particularly incensed over CONAIE and
CONFENIAE’s request that the government discontinue
oil exploration in the indigenous territories of Pastaza and
elsewhere in the Oriente, where the vast majority of
Ecuador’s sizeable petroleum deposits lie.
“We are not trying to erode Ecuadorian sovereignty,”
Macas responded, but rather establish “space to develop
our communities in a collective form, in order to prevent
an exodus of Indians from the Oriente to the cities, as has
occurred so tragically in the sierra.” The document de-
fined autonomy as necessary to “stimulate our own model
of development using traditional techniques within the
ecological equilibrium, using what modern technology
can offer.” Macas stressed that the titling of indigenous
lands should be communal, because individual plots “in
no way favor the small farmer.”
Since the demise of direct negotiations, a campaign of
police intimidation and government harassment has at-
tempted to return Ecuador to politics as usual. In the
sierra, the secretary general of the Federation of Indig-
enous Farmers of Imbabura was assassinated in May by
“paramilitary squads” organized by hacendados, accord-
ing to Juan Dfaz Picuasi, a local leader in that province.
Numerous other sierra leaders were imprisoned by the
VOLUME XXV, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER I981)43 VOLUME XXV, NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER 1991) 43The First Nations
police, and some have been killed. In several disclosures
to Hoy, the liberal daily affiliated with Borja’s own party,
which generally sympathizes with the indigenous posi-
tion, Macas cited specific instances in which the army has
militarized indigenous communities and impeded politi-
cal activities.’ 7 The government then opened the door to
oil exploration in Yasuni National Park, an ancient spe-
cies refuge in the Oriente, rich in endemic plant and
animal life.
But the cat cannot be put back in the bag. Rather than
retreating from their initial political platform of land
reform, cultural rights and economic development,
CONAIE’s leadership, particularly Luis Macas, aims to
go farther, to “delineate a political alternative for the
transformation of all of Ecuadorian society.”‘” 8 Their
vision is fundamentally new: a national economy deter-
mined by uniquely indigenous forms of economic devel-
opment, and a politics of territorial autonomy and self-
determination which contemplates neither separatism nor
the seizure of state power. As such, it stands apart from the
traditional postures of both Marxists and revolutionary
nationalists.
The community-level organizations that make up
CONAIE’s rank and file plan to pursue land acquisition
and community development by recreating institutions of
communal land and collective labor. Given CONAIE’s
decentralized organizational structure, its overall strategy
will be determined by the results of such local experimen-
tation. These could pave the way for the transformation of
the country from the bottom up, or presage repression the
likes of which this small nation has never seen.
Five hundred years after the Conquest, building dy-
namic indigenous economies and reviving indigenous
language, culture and social organization would be diffi-
cult even without the racist opposition of national elites
and the studied ignorance of political parties. Having
survived into the twentieth century to forge a compelling
political and economic vision, the indigenous peoples of
Ecuador can already claim a victory which the conquista-
dors would never have imagined possible.
Ecuador’s Pan-Indian Uprising
1. David Corkill and David Cubitt, Ecuador: Fragile Democracy (Lon-
don: Latin America Bureau, 1988)
2. El Comercio (Quito), June 6, 19910.
3. El Comercio, June 18, 1990.
4. CONAIE, Las Nacionalidades Indfgenas en el Ecuador: Nuestro
Proceso Organizativo (Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 1989), pp. 295-304.
5. Ibid. pp. 173-174 and 193-194.
6. Ibid. p. 26.
7. Otavalo was called Sarance before the Conquest. See Frank Salomon,
Native Lords ofQuito (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
8. CONAIE, Las Nacionalidades Inhigenas, p. 26.
9. Ironically, some of the seed money apparently came from local
hacendados. See Lynn Meisch Otavalo: Weaving in the Marker (Quito:
Ediciones Libri-Mundi, 1987)
10. One of the government’s responses to this incipient mobilization was
the 1937 Law of the Communes, which abolished the power of traditional
leaders (curacas) and substituted government-sponsored town councils
(cabildos). CONAIE and provincial indigenous federations view this infiltra-
lion of the state into indigenous society as particularly heinous. CONAIE, Las
Nacionalidades Indigenas, p.13 I
11. Ibid. p. 31.
12. Ibid. pp. 31-32 and p. 276.
13. The six groups, in descending order of population size, are: Forest
Quichuas, Shuar, Achuar, Huaorani, Siona-Secoya, and Cofan. Coastal Ecua-
dor featured large, complex and materially wealthy indigenous civilizations at
the time of European contact. Plagues and the conquistadors’ firearms quickly
exterminated coastal cultures. The three small coastal indigenous peoples who
survived have also organized themselves into federationsandjoined CONAIE.
14. CONAIE, Las Nacionalidades Indigenas, pp. 216-222.
15. El Comercio, June 23 anid June 25, 1990.
16. This and subsequent quotes on the Pastaza Document are from Hoy
(Quito), Aug. 23 and 31, 1990, and El Comercio, Aug. 23, 25 and 28, 1990.
17. Hoy, Nov. 13, 1990.
18. CONAIE, Las Nacionalidades Indigenas, p. 268.