Pachakutik and the Rise and Decline of the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement

Chapter 7. The Rise and Decline of the Indigenous Movement

 Chapter 7 The Rise and Decline of the Indigenous Movement Pachakutik does not confront the traditional parties. Instead it has become one. —José Pedro de la Cruz, former president of FENOCIN, 2006 Pachakutik has this cúpula on top and they concentrate power. And this is why the movement has weakened. Little by little they did not fulfill the philosophy of the movement. They began acting . . . not to help the social sectors, but only to enrich a few privileged ones. —Confidential interview with an elected Pachakutik official, 2008 The Promise and Pitfalls of the Electoral Game Commencing with the formation of the Shuar Federation in the 1960s, Ecuador’s late-twentieth-century indigenous movement took wing in the following decade with the development of local organizations across much of the country, finally coalescing into two regional confederations, one in the Sierra (ECUARUNARI) and one in the Oriente (CONFENIAE). In the mid-1980s these major regional confederations created CONAIE,Ecuador’s first countrywide indigenous organization and the first, and still only, effective national indigenous confederation in all of Latin America. A few years after its formation, CONAIE and its affiliates stunned the country’s mestizo  the rise and decline of the indigenous movement population—and made news throughout the world—with a levantamiento, or uprising, that mobilized Indians from the jungles of the Amazonian provinces to the villages, towns, and cities of the highlands. Indians occupied municipal government buildings, blocked roads and highways with felled trees and large boulders, and provided Ecuador’s nonindigenous people a colorful view of previously “invisible” peoples dressed in traditional garments , marching and demonstrating for recognition of their rights to and respect for their lands, languages, and cultures. The prestige and strength of the indigenous social movement grew rapidly in the final decade and a half of the twentieth century, resulting in a number of successful negotiations with the state’s power wielders. Under relentless pressure from CONAIE, the state created a program for bilingual education and placed it under CONAIE’s jurisdiction, backed down more than once on policies that would have increased the prices of mass transportation and liquefied propane, recognized land titles to the Huaorani people of the Oriente, and failed in its proposal to privatize water rights. Though all of CONAIE’s demands were not realized,its strategy of mobilizing the indigenous peoples through its regional, provincial, and local base organizations must be deemed a generally successful one.Moreover,CONAIE increasingly came to be viewed by activists, scholars, and journalists as the head of the most powerful indigenous movement in the Americas. International conferences addressing indigenous rights and organizing inevitably included major CONAIE leaders as key speakers. This understanding of Ecuador’s movement certainly made sense when one considered the state of indigenous organizing —or lack thereof—in other Latin American countries with substantial Indian populations, such as Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru. Despite the overall success of CONAIE’s barricades-and-negotiations strategy, and notwithstanding the confederation’s virulent condemnation of Ecuadorian political institutions and processes, on the urging of CONFENIAE and with the reluctant acquiescence of ECUARUNARI, this pan-indigenous professional social movement joined forces with other progressive organizations to create its own electoral vehicle: the Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik–Nuevo País. Pachakutik was envisioned as the answer to the corrupt politics and sham representation so long practiced by the country’s dominant interests, a political movement that would represent and struggle for the well-being of Ecuador’s real majority: that portion of the population that lived in poverty and that included the country’s  chapter 7 indigenous and nonindigenous peoples alike. In order to effectively represent that majority, Pachakutik’s founders argued that the goal was not simply to get elected to posts previously won by candidates of the traditional parties but, once elected, to transform the very foundations on which the Ecuadorian state rested. Corruption and clientelism, for example, would be uprooted and replaced by the moral code expressed in the Quichua axiom, Ama killa, ama llula, ama shua (Don’t be lazy, don’t lie, don’t steal). Giddy confidence characterized the creators of Pachakutik,and that optimism was at least partly realized in the 1996 elections,with a number of local and provincial offices going to Pachakutik candidates in addition to victories in contests for eight legislative seats in the National Congress. Moreover, the movement’s presidential candidate finished a respectable...