In June 1990, in a powerful levantamiento, or uprising, the largest ever in Ecuador's history, indigenous peoples blocked roads with boulders, rocks, and trees that paralyzed the transport system, effectively cutting off the food supply to the cities and shutting down the country for a week. Frustrated by stagnated talks with the government over bilingual education, agrarian reform, and demands to recognize the plurinational nature of Ecuador, the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE, Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) launched the uprising to force the government to negotiate.
Indigenous militants began to refer to this uprising as a pachakutik. In the Kichwa language, pacha means "time or land," and kutik means "return to," hence the word pachakutik implies a return in time or a cultural rebirth. It implies a process of change, rebirth, transformation, or cataclysm intended to rid the world of injustice and restore order. In a nutshell, pachakutik was the Kichwa word for the Andean concept of "revolution," and it shook Ecuador's white elite power base.
The 1990 levantamiento is commonly seen as representing the emergence of indigenous peoples as new political actors, but it formed part of a political engagement that evolved in a variety of ways throughout the twentieth century. In the 1920s indigenous activists organized peasant syndicates to fight for higher wages and better working conditions on haciendas (landed estates). With leftist support and encouragement, activists founded the Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios (FEI, Ecuadorian Federation of Indians) in 1944. The FEI was the first successful attempt to establish a national organization for and by indigenous peoples. It flourished from the 1940s through the 1960s but began to decline after realizing its main objective of agrarian reform in 1964.
In the 1960s new indigenous organizations surfaced that emphasized ethnic aspects of their struggle, including a defense of culture, religion, medicine, and bilingual education. Rather than being allied with labor unions and the political left, progressive sectors of the Catholic Church under the influence of liberation theology encouraged their development. The first significant ethnic organization was the Shuar Federation that Salesian missionaries helped establish in the early 1960s. After the passage of agrarian reform legislation, progressive priests also helped found the Federación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas (FENOC, National Federation of Peasant Organizations) and Ecuarunari (Ecuador Runacunapac Riccharimui, a Kichwa phrase that means to awaken the Ecuadorian Indians). In both cases religious workers sought to create these federations as alternatives to the Communist-dominated FEI. Both organizations soon distanced themselves from their religious base and began to move leftward, increasingly engaging class and economic issues of land reform and better living conditions.
Although CONAIE attempted to position itself at the head of a unified movement, other currents and organizations competed for representation of indigenous concerns. FENOC renamed itself the Federación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas Indígenas y Negras (FENOCIN, National Federation of Indigenous, Peasant, and Black Organizations) to reflect its broadened scope of struggling for the rights of peasant, indigenous, and Afro-Ecuadorian communities. The Federación Ecuatoriana de Indígenas Evangélicos (FEINE, Ecuadorian Federation of Evangelical Indians) promoted the holistic development of evangelical indigenous peoples, focusing on both their spiritual and their cultural identity. CONAIE, FENOCIN, FEINE, and occasionally FEI coordinated efforts as they struggled for common goals. Sometimes they competed for the allegiance of the same people. It would be a mistake to conceptualize this as a unified indigenous movement, for in reality Ecuador had numerous indigenous movements representing competing interests, concerns, and cultures.
Scholars commonly paint the history of Ecuador's indigenous movements as moving from a focus on local concerns to regional, national, and finally international issues, and transitioning through constructing indigenous demands in the language of class, then ethnicity, and finally nationality. This is too simplistic an interpretation, for since the 1920s indigenous organizations have often simultaneously engaged local, regional, national, and international issues, and organized on the basis of class, ethnic, and national identities. In the 1920s peasant federations used the language of indigenous nationalities, whereas in the 1990s an authentic and democratic land reform continued to be one of CONAIE's key economic demands. In April 1992, two thousand Kichwa, Shuar, and Achuar peoples began a 240-mile (385-kilometer) caminata (march) from the Amazon to the capital city of Quito to demand legalization of land holdings. In June 1994 indigenous organizations again organized a "Mobilization for Life" campaign in protest of neoliberal economic reforms that would take away their land, privatize water resources, and undermine their economic livelihood.
The formation in 1995 of the Movimiento Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik-Nuevo País (MUPP-NP, Pachakutik Movement for Plurinational Unity-New Country) to campaign for political office represented a shift in strategies from a focus on civil society to a focus on electoral campaigns. Activists had long debated whether indigenous organizations should put forward their own candidates for political office, or whether they should support existing parties. Pachakutik represented the emergence of a third option in which indigenous peoples and other sectors of Ecuador's popular movements organized together as equals to form a new political movement. It explicitly identified itself as part of a new Latin American left that embraced principles of community, solidarity, unity, tolerance, and respect. Pachakutik opposed the government's neoliberal economic policies and favored a more inclusive and participatory political system. It represented a culmination of CONAIE's drive to insert indigenous peoples directly into debates, giving them a voice and allowing them to speak for themselves.
Pachakutik experienced moderate success on both local and national levels, and achieved significant gains in the 1998 constitutional assembly. Most significantly, in January 2000, indigenous leaders allied with lower ranking military officials in a coup that removed President Jamil Mahuad from power after he had implemented unpopular neoliberal economic policies. In 2002, Pachakutik first allied with coconspirator Colonel Lucio Gutiérrez in a bid for the presidency, but once he was in power Pachakutik broke from his government after he implemented the same neoliberal reforms that hurt poor and indigenous peoples. Indigenous movements had learned how to bring governments down, but it proved more difficult to construct viable and sustainable alternatives.
[See also Ecuador and Indigenous Movements in Latin America.]
Sawyer, Suzana. Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004.
Selverston-Scher, Melina. Ethnopolitics in Ecuador: Indigenous Rights and the Strengthening of Democracy. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001.
Whitten, Norman E., Jr., ed. Millennial Ecuador: Critical Essays on Cultural Transformations and Social Dynamics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003.
How to cite this entry:
Marc Becker "Ecuador, Indigenous Uprisings in" Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World. Ed. Peter N. Stearns. © Oxford University Press 2008. Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World: (e-reference edition). Oxford University Press. http://www.oxford-modernworld.com/entry?entry=t254.e492