The Electoral Fortunes of Ecuador’s Pachakutik Party: The Fracaso of the 2006 Presidential Elections

Ecuador’s Pachakutik political movement/party, created by the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE), first sponsored candidates in the country’s elections in 1996. CONAIE’s and Pachakutik’s leadership claimed at that time, and continue to claim today, that Pachakutik is the only party that truly represents the interests of Ecuador’s indigenous peoples, most of whom are a part of the country’s majority poor population. While Pachakutik leaders assert that the party pursues policies that also address the needs of Ecuador’s non-indigenous poor majority, it is widely believed that the country’s indigenous people comprise Pachakutik’s core constituency and certainly constitute the majority of the party’s leadership cadre. For the first time, Pachakutik selected an indigenous candidate for the 2006 presidential race, Luis Macas. Despite the fact that Macas is arguably the best known and most widely respected leader in the indigenous movement, he attracted only slightly more than 2% of the valid vote in the first round. Furthermore, this movement was only able to elect six deputies to congress, a clear decline from their performance in 2002. This analysis focuses on the 2006 presidential vote and uses the Ecological Inference method to estimate levels of support for Macas and other candidates by indigenous and non-indigenous voters. Additionally, the authors use pre-election interviews of various political activists as well as post-election analyses by Ecuadorians in an effort to explain Pachakutik’s electoral failure.