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AI Overview
Texaco (now Chevron) operated in the Ecuadorian Amazon from 1964 to 1992, dumping ~16-18 billion gallons of toxic waste and oil. During this period, the company worked with evangelical missionaries to displace Indigenous communities to facilitate oil extraction, a partnership aimed at settling semi-nomadic groups, according to.
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Key Aspects of the Texaco and Evangelical Connection
- Forced Displacement: Texaco relied on evangelical missionaries (specifically from groups like Summer Institute of Linguistics/Wycliffe Bible Translators) to contact, settle, and move Indigenous groups such as the Cofán, Secoya, and Huaorani off land rich in oil.
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- Systematic Displacement: Researchers indicate that missionaries worked to create "settlement dwellers" out of nomadic populations, which served the oil company’s need to clear vast areas for exploration.
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- Environmental Legacy: The operations resulted in massive water and soil contamination. The company used unlined pits for toxic sludge, which leaked into the water supplies used by these communities.
Legal and Social Consequences
- The "Amazon Chernobyl": The pollution caused severe health issues, including high cancer rates, skin diseases, and deaths, leading to a long-running class-action lawsuit filed by thousands of affected Indigenous residents.
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- Legal Battles: Ecuadorian courts ordered a $9.5 billion fine, butChevron has largely avoided payment, successfully arguing in U.S. courts that the judgement was obtained through fraud by the plaintiffs' lawyer, Steven Donziger.
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- Lasting Impact: The affected Indigenous communities continue to live with the environmental destruction, often described as one of the world's worst oil-related public health crises.
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DRILLED KAREN SAVAGE
Tens of thousands of Ecuadorians have been locked in legal battle with the oil major Chevron for decades. In recent years media attention has been focused on the lawyers in this case, but to understand what’s at stake we need to go back and look at what actually happened in Ecuador as the original defendant in this case, Texaco, began to explore for oil there.
Texaco began its search for Ecuadorian oil in March 1964, when the junta, the military government that had seized power the previous year, granted the firm aconcession agreement. The initial agreement gave TexPet, Texaco’s Latin American subsidiary, the right to explore for oil in the Oriente region (in the eastern side of the country, covered primarily by rainforest).
Three years later, in the northern region of the concession that was home to the Indigenous A’i, or Cofán people, Texacofound what it was looking for deep under the rainforest: a vast, untapped reservoir of crude. Texaco and the government expanded their concession agreement, making a subsidiary named TexPet the “consortium operator” in charge of exploration and development of new oil fields.
TexPet’s operations in the A’i ancestral lands eventually expanded to include 15 fields, 18 production facilities, and 316 wells, as well as hundreds of miles of pipelines connecting them.
Texaco’s discovery made bold national headlines and mesmerized government officials, who anticipated that the black gold would line Ecuador’s coffers…and possibly their own pockets.But the inhabitants of the region knew better, because by the late 1960s, Texaco and its frenzied search for oil, or sangre del diablo, “blood of the devil,” as locals came to call it, had already taken a devastating toll on Indigenous tribes including the Cofán, Secoya, Siona, Huarani, Sansahuari, Kichwa, Rumipamba, and Tetete.
As Texaco’s oil operations advanced, they displaced Indigenous tribes to make way for drilling operations, while interactions with workers disrupted and even shattered Indigenous communities.
The oil operations introduced a host of new harms to the Indigenous communities. Flaring and open burning of oil led to respiratory and other illnesses. Wastewater and other drilling and processing byproducts dumped into rivers, streams, and unlined pits poisoned drinking water sources, and killed off fish the tribal communities had long depended on. Strong and healthy adults and children became weakened and sick from ingesting contaminated food and water.
There was a cultural clash too, between Indigenous communities that lived as part of the natural system and Westerners who viewed nature as something to own and exploit. Oil workers would routinely ridicule tribal members for wearing traditional clothing, ply them with alcohol, and intentionally exacerbate existing conflicts to divide and weaken once-cohesive communities. Thesexual harassment and rape of Indigenous women and girls by Texaco’s oilmen is well documented; it was horrific and widespread.
Indigenous people and campesinos (non-Indigenous Ecuadorians who lived in the countryside) would later recount widespread ethnic discrimination and racism at the hands of Texaco’s gringo workers.
“They don’t understand that we too are human beings and deserve to live with dignity,” says Donald Moncayo, a 47-year-old campesino who was born just 200 meters from the second well Texaco drilled in 1967.
Sour Lake
Texaco first struck black gold in the “sundown town” of Sour Lake, Texas, a town with a racist legacy. In 1903 the white people of Sour Lake terrorized Black workers in the oil patch, posting notices around town with a stark warning; “Notice—[n-word expletive], don’t let the sun go down on you in Sour Lake to-night.”
In the 1930s, Texaco chief executive Torkild Rieberviolated U.S. law tosupply Francisco Franco with enough deeply discounted fuel, on credit, to overthrow the Spanish government in a bloody civil war.
Under Rieber, a Nazi sympathizer, Texaco would go on to supply fuel with the Hitler and Mussolini regimes as well. The German secret service later called Rieber, “absolutely pro-German” and “a sincere admirer of the Fuhrer.” It wasn’t until 1940, when the media caught on, that Rieber’s sentiments began to threaten the firm’s bottom line and the board forced Rieber to resign.
In 1994, a year after Ecuadorian plaintiffs filed suit against Texaco for its behavior in that country, Bari-Ellen Roberts, an African American employed as a senior financial analyst, filed aclass action suit against Texaco after she was passed over for a promotion and then asked to train the white man who was given the position.
One Texaco manager referred to Roberts, a previous vice president at Chase Manhattan, as a “little colored girl.” Several Black employees from across the company signed affidavits stating they were purposefully overlooked for promotion and called names like Aunt Jemima, orangutans and porch monkeys by other Texaco employees.
“Texaco is corporate Calcutta, organized along racial caste lines as rigid and implacable as those of traditional Hindu society,” Roberts would later write.
The company could have settled earlier than it eventually did, but balked. Texaco would never “throw money at a bunch of Blacks! You all can forget that,” a company lawyer said defiantly, and as it turned out, prematurely.
As the case made its way through the New York court system, recordings surfaced in 1996 of Texaco officials talking about plans to shred evidence in the case. The executives could also be heard referring to Black employees as “niggers” and “Black jelly beans.”
Oil companies facing pollution allegations often hire outside experts, who purportedly find the companies haven’t contaminated the environment or sickened communities.
In this case, Texaco’s outside expert determined that the whole episode was a misunderstanding, concluding that one of the executivesdid use an n-word, but the word was Nicholas, as in St. Nicholas, not the n-word.
Utterly unconvinced, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders organized anation-wide boycott. Texaco stock plummeted. Its bottom line again threatened, within days Texaco had settled the suit for $176 million. At the time it was the largest employment discrimination settlement ever reached.
“Throwing dynamite out of planes”
Far from the prying eyes of reporters and tree-hugging environmentalists, Texaco operated with impunity in Ecuador’s Oriente region, deep in the Amazon rainforest and a ten-hour bus ride from Ecuador’s capital of Quito.
The Indigenous tribes call the region Kanungukhu. But in a nod to the East Texas town where the company incorporated in 1903, Texaco named the company town that sprung up around its operations Lago Agrio, Spanish for Sour Lake.The company frequently re-named other areas after the oil subcontractors operating in the region.
“They brought names [Indigenous Amazonians] hadn’t heard before: Lago Agrio, Orienco, Parker, Herbert, and the like,” wrote Luis Yanza, president of the Frente de Defensa de la Amazonia, an NGO that has worked with the campesinos and Indigenous plaintiffs, in the book Los Voces de las Victimas.
“Then they gave them food that they had not tried in their life either; clothes and utensils that did not know what they were for.”
The discovery of oil drew colonists from Quito and settlers from the countries’ other regions to the area surrounding Lago Agrio, hoping to escape poverty and crop-destroying droughts.
The new arrivals grabbed land wherever they could, sometimes near well sites or waste pits, and often on ancestral land of the Cofán, Huaorani, Siona, Secoya, and/or Kichwa people.
As the oil industry grew, in the 1970s and 80s, the pristine Kanungukhu rainforest, once home to more parrots, macaws, and other tropical birds than people, became a booming oil town with tens of thousands of residents.
The alcohol supplied by Texaco’s workers became an easily available replacement for a traditional plant-based drink called chicha, which takes several days to prepare. The oil workers’ abuse and rape of Indigenous women and girls often led to tensions that ended in violence between Indigenous groups and workers.
The Indigenous peoples viewed the encroaching army of oil workers as invaders. As they began to defend their communities and ancestral lands, Texaco and its workers came to view them as warlike savages to be tamed. Rosemary Kingsland, a Christian journalist writing about missionaries and oil men in the Amazon at the time wrote about what happened as Texaco moved northward, attempting to expand its operations:
“The northern strike was enormous . . . . Nothing would stop them from going in now and there was talk of using guns, bombs, flamethrowers. Most of the talk was wild, but the result would be the same: a war between the oil men and the Aucas [Huaorani]; a handful of naked savages standing squarely in the middle of fields of black gold, blocking the progress of the machine age. If it was to be a question of no oil or no Aucas, there was only one answer.”
“This is how they were considered, not only by the men who arrived with machinery and noises thirsty for black gold, but also by those who arrived in their territories much earlier, with the cross and the Gospel,” Yanza wrote.
Texaco has said that race played no factor in its operations, or in its relations with Indigenous communities.
An Alliance with Missionaries
To get the tribes out of its way, Texaco teamed up with Evangelical Christian missionaries, who sought to transform the semi-nomadic peoples into settlement dwellers as part of their conversion to Christianity.
Ewenguime Enkeri, a leader of the Waorani people (sometimes referred to as Huaorani or Waodani), described collusion between missionaries and oil companies in a speech reprinted in a 2013 publication of theInternational Work Group for Indigenous Affairs.
“Surely the missionaries had contact with the oil companies. [Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana or CEPE] the Ecuadorian state oil corporation, doing business along with Texaco. Piling us up there in order to exterminate the Waorani, to kill the Waorani,” Enkeri said. “They do this so that this land will be free, free for the oil companies and others, like the mining companies that want to do damage.”
The missionaries also introduced new diseases to the Indigenous communities, including polio, and separated families. Some, including members of his family, tried to return to their birthplaces and defend their territory, Enkeri recalled, “[B]ut they could not defend it any longer because the majority had died and because while they were caged in one place, the CEPE and Texaco had taken advantage of their land for colonization.”
Law and policy professor Judith Kimerling, whose 1991 book Amazon Crude helped prompt the Indigenous communities’ eventual litigation against Texaco, was one of the first outside observers to document Texaco’s impacts on Indigenous communities in Ecuador.
Missionaries would fly in Texaco’s planes over the rainforest searching for Huaorani, she says, sometimes throwing dynamite out of the planes to scare them. “Texaco just wanted them out of areas where they wanted to operate,” she said, “and, the government of Ecuador wanted Texaco to be able to find more oil and extract more oil.”
To this day, the rainforests’ Indigenous tribes continue the fight to retain their land, says Kimerling. “They’re trying to protect what remains so that they can survive,” resisting oil exploration amid a wave of new companies that encroach further and further into the region.
A “Fourth World” Country
In Ecuador, Texaco was part of a consortium that included Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana (CEPE), which would later become PetroEcuador, Ecuador’s state-run oil company.
Texaco took primary responsibility for drilling operations, as well as training of an influx of mostly unskilled Ecuadorians to work them.
Kimerling explained the arrangement in an 2006 article in the New York University Journal of International Law and Politics:
:{:{“When Texaco began its operations, there was little public awareness or political interest in environmental issues. Moreover, environmental protection in the oil patch depends on the use of technology, and Ecuador relied on Texaco—as the operator in the oil fields—to transfer petroleum technology and train national technicians. This reliance on Texaco’s expertise and access to technology continued even after Petroecuador became the majority shareholder in the consortium led by Texaco, in 1977.}:
In the environmental law vacuum, Texaco set its own environmental standards and policed itself. As Petroecuador’s “professor,” Texaco also set the standard for that company’s operations. Government regulators in the hydrocarbon sector—who had to learn on the job—also received their basic education in the “school” of Texaco. But Texaco’s standards and practices did not include environmental protection or monitoring. Ecuadorian oil fieldworkers who were trained by Texaco were so unaware of the hazards of crude oil during the 1970s and 1980s that they applied it to their heads to prevent balding, and gave it to elderly parents who suffered from arthritis. Those rumors, attributing medicinal qualities to Amazon crude, were not surprising given the status of petroleum at the time as the harbinger of a great future for the nation, and Texaco’s neglect of environmental protection,”}:
Kimerling has described the Amazon and its residents as a “fourth-world country,” colonized initially by Spain in the 18th century, then by the Ecuadorian government when the country was founded in 1882, and by Texaco in the 1960s.
Indigenous Amazonians were afforded few rights and even fewer protections under Ecuadorian law at the time, making them ideal candidates for the most hazardous jobs Texaco had to offer. Locals were given little training and almost no protective equipment.
Still, for the most part, Texaco simply ignored the Indigenous and campesino residents, operating as though they were invisible or didn’t exist.
Finding oil was relatively easy for Texaco. Moving it over a rugged and earthquake-prone stretch of the Andes Mountains to the coast for market was not. To solve that problem, Texaco contracted in 1970 with an Oklahoma-based oil patch infrastructure firm called Williams Brothers to build the roughly 310-mile-long TransEcuadorian pipeline. Oil began to flow through the TransEcuadorian to the Pacific for export in 1972. How much oil spilled along the way is impossible to know, but between 1972 and 2001, according to historian Patricia Widener, the Ecuadorian advocacy group Accion Ecologica documented 47 pipeline leak that spilled an estimated 19 million barrels of oil into lush rainforest. For context, the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon spill, widely considered one of the greatest ecological disasters in oil industry history, pumped an estimated 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Texaco’s policy was to never speak—or even retain records, in many cases—of the alleged millions of gallons of crude oil that its operations discharged into the once pristine rainforest.
Even U.S. diplomats at the time were aware of the chronic spills from the TransEcuadorean pipeline. In 1976 correspondence to the State Department, U.S. ambassador to Ecuador Richard Bloomfield reported, “TransEcuadorean (sic) pipeline was broken once again by land-slides morning of July 29. Pipeline had only been in service thirty hours since previous break. Texaco-Gulf estimates this break will require at least several days to repair.”
Major Ecuadorian news outlets carried editorials at the time, Bloomfield wrote, asking why the vulnerable pipeline leaked so often.
But the damage was more than just a series of accidental spills and leaks.
---
[### Latest Twist in Chevron's Amazon Pollution Saga: Ecuador ...
Inside Climate News
https://insideclimatenews.org › News](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10122025/ecuador-to-pay-chevron-220-million-amazon-pollution/)
Dec 10, 2025 — Indigenous and other Ecuadorians have lived with millions of gallons of toxic pollution from Texaco's operations for decades.
[### Blood of the Devil
Drilled
https://drilled.media › news › chevron-ecuador-2](https://drilled.media/news/chevron-ecuador-2)
To get the tribes out of its way, Texaco teamed up with Evangelical Christian missionaries, who sought to transform the semi-nomadic peoples into settlement ...Read more
[### Crude Awakening
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https://www.texasmonthly.com › News & Politics](https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/crude-awakening/)
Ecuador's oil is found almost entirely in a remote Amazon rain-forest region ... Texaco is now gone, other oil companies must not be allowed to impose ...Read more
[### How Pope Francis and Vatican activists helped rein in Big ...
National Catholic Reporter
https://www.ncronline.org › news › how-pope-francis-a...](https://www.ncronline.org/news/how-pope-francis-and-vatican-activists-helped-rein-big-oil-climate-change)
Oil waste pit fire in 1993 at a facility in Shushufindi, Ecuador, built by Texaco, which later merged with Chevron. (Courtesy of Steven Donziger).Read more
[### After Decades Of Oil Drilling, Indigenous Waorani Group ...
Bioneers
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Sep 13, 2023 — After 50 years of expanding oil operations in its Amazonian region, Ecuador will close the door on crude extraction in three oil fields that are ...Read more
---
scott s robinson
SIL
texaco? roads ? helos viet nam; reservations reservas
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14 minutes, 44 seconds
instability. For decades, SiL told the Peruvian government that it would reconcile jungle Indians to colonization, that is to the loss of
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most of their land. According to Yaandrand, Sil has helped the Aguana face a new highway and colonization by one, anchoring them around the bilingual
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schools so that they not abandon choice land and flee into the hills as the elders initially advised. Two,
...
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Finally, as if all that's not enough,
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SIL missionaries actively helped oil companies and the USbacked Ecuadorian government force indigenous people in
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Ecuador into reservations. The evangelicals under the strategic leadership of the more politically sophisticated SIL supported the oil
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companies and an ethnocidal Ecuadorian government policy of encouraging highland homesteaders that's referring to the missionaries to stake out parcels of land along oil company access roads.
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After consultation with the Ecuadorian military, Aka converts flying above the remaining band of uncontacted kin in SIL
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helicopters operating on Texico fuel were urged to put down their arms and join their evangelized kin at Rachel
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Saints Reserva Village. In similar frontier conditions, the American missionaries grandfathers had pacified the American West and placed the Indians
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on reservations. Now their grandchildren in the service of the same 19th century god proposed reservos for the shiwara
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and the aas. Imagine Ecuadorian native reservos a legal entity administered in
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17 minutes, 54 seconds
effect by sil missionaries evangelical protestants and dictatorships under USbacked military dictatorships across
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Latin America. Progressive Catholics faced serious persecution alongside the people with which they organized. In
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1975, not long after Nixon's ruminations about Catholicism, Bolivia's Hugo Banzer, with advice from his Nazi
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security chief, Klaus Barbie urged his interior ministry to draw up a plan against liberation theology. Para worked
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closely with the CIA to draw up what would be known as the Banzer plan, which was a direct attack on liberation
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theology. Bolivian intelligence joined by the CIA and by the intelligence services of 10 other Latin American countries began to compile dossas on
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liberation theologists to plant communist literature in churches to shut down any progressive church publication and to arrest and expel foreign priests
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and nuns who believed in liberation theology. Things are about to get even heavier somehow in this video. So,
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18 minutes, 58 seconds
content warning for a discussion of genocide and torture, like even a little bit more explicitly than we've already
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discussed. Uh, Eric, let's find a time stamp where people can skip to um after
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that specific discussion is over. Under Brazil's military dictatorship, which the US financially supported at an
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unprecedented rate at that time, the state sought to assimilate and eliminate the indigenous people in order to
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develop the Amazon. Some Catholic clergy advocated for the rights of indigenous people. So, Brazil's generals also
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railed against the church, even kidnapping and torturing church representatives. The regime killed at least 8,350
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indigenous people during the dictatorship. According to Brazil's National Truth Commission, in 1980s El Salvador, where 2026 USbacked
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19 minutes, 53 seconds
concentration camps are currently located, groups of US-trained army and national guardsmen sexually abused and
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20 minutes
murdered Catholic nuns and priests. In Chile and across Latin America, dictator Austo Pinish's government and its allies, all backed by the USA at the
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time, carried out Operation Condor, a project which killed an estimated 50,000 civilians, disappeared 30,000 who were
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all presumed dead, and imprisoned 400,000 for being suspected communist
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sympathizers. Many thousands of these civilians were likely tortured. The United States provided the funding and
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inspiration for this project and the CIA specifically instructed Latin American security forces in methods of torture
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and bomb construction. While all of this was happening, evangelical Protestant leaders supported these dictatorships and they received some love in return.
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In December 1974, Chilean General Pinocha personally attended the dedication of the Hotbee Pentecostal Methodist Church Cathedral in Santiago,
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marking the first time a Chilean head of state had ever attended a Protestant service. 2 days earlier, approximately
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2500 evangelicals had gathered to publicly pledge their support for the Huta and denounce Chile's international
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critics. By September 1975, the Methodist Pentecostal Church had assumed the Catholic Church's traditional role
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of hosting the annual Tedum service, a patriotic ceremony attended by Pinocha and other government leaders. Billy
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Graham, who we were all raised to rever in evangelical churches, coordinated directly with Latin American military dictatorships. Between 1962 and 1974,
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Graham personally met with Brazil's dictator Ernesto Geel and other authoritarian rulers. He praised Chile's
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Austo Pinese as a great Christian leader. And then there is Ephraim Rios
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Mont. Eric, can you please record yourself saying this dude's name with the utmost disrespect?
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Yeah, Spanish names can be difficult sometimes. Um, I can help. Uh, here is how you pronounce that.
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Hope that helps. Thank you. If there was a single moment when evangelical Christianity and US counterinsurgency
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fully merged, it was this period in Guatemalan history. Rios Mont was a general who took power in a 1982
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military coup. He was a born-again Pentecostal and a member of an American affiliated charismatic church. His
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weekly national TV addresses sounded like sermons mixing Bible verses with calls for obedience to God and the
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state. His government carried out one of the worst genocides in modern Latin American history against the Maya and
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the US financially and spiritually supported him. Good old Ronald Reagan praised Mont as a man of great integrity.
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I know that President Rios Mont is a man of great personal integrity and commitment.
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Jerry Fwell openly supported him. Pat Robertson interviewed the dictator on his TV show, The 700 Club. Ephraim Rios Mont who was uh the president there.
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He's a terrific guy. He was with the Elver Verbo Church and um they had a a a marvelous government. Christian
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evangelist Luis Pau told Christianity Today in 1983, "It's great to have a Christian president as a model. The hand of God appears to be upon him."
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Meanwhile, remember Catholic priests who supported indigenous rights were being assassinated, disappeared, and tortured along with countless other civilians.
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Rios Mont's rule was the logical end of a decadesl long project. Replace politically engaged Catholicism with a
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politically compliant Protestantism so that the structures of inequality remained untouched.
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Even today, evangelical Protestants in Latin America overwhelmingly support the same kinds of politicians which evangelical Protestants in the US support, authoritarian right-wingers.
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And while I would say that leftist thought and action is probably more common in South and Central America than
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it is in the Imperial Corps of the United States. Catholics in these areas
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now also tend to lean right. So much media about American evangelicalism
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today, including some of my own work. To be honest, operates on the premise that it's getting worse. It's becoming more
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extreme. This media often also examines a supposed paradox. This faith is based
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on God's love, but its adherence somehow support cruel leaders. As I hope is obvious by the end of this video. Though
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morally permitting the extreme brutality of states and corporations is exactly what evangelical Protestant Christianity
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was shaped to do. It is not cruel in spite of itself. It is a permission structure for cruelty and always has
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been. In 2026, it is just doing to the people of the United States what it and
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the government of the United States have always done to people of other nations and the indigenous people who were here
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before me. As you may have heard the saying go, fascism is colonialism
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just turned inward. This story should also teach us that evangelical Christianity is not synonymous with
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Christianity as a whole. This was a story about state allied Christians helping to exterminate Christians who stand in solidarity with the oppressed.
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If we also want to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, we should not buy into and spread the propaganda which
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evangelicals enforced on others at gunpoint. that true Christianity is whatever evangelicals define it to be.
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We can't afford to alienate some of our historically strongest allies,
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progressive and leftist Christians who stand with the crucified people.
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This video was co-written by the excellent Colton Barnaby, a former Christian minister and evangelical missionary coordinator. You might have seen his stuff on Instagram and Tik Tok.
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I love his work and I'm so hyped that we actually got to collab. Colton used to be on the inside of this grotesque
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machine of colonialism kind of without his knowledge and now spends his time
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organizing with marginalized people and speaking against imperialism. I know that he's inspired me to be much more
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vocal in in speaking against imperialism, too. I had to have him tell me his story of being in missions and
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then getting out. And that video is now up on my second channel. One of the students who went on missions trips that
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I organized in recent years made news out of school as an adult that you might have heard of. Uh his name was John. And
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John decided he wanted to reach one of the last unreached people groups in the world in the Sentinel Islands. and he
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went out there and was actually killed uh by indigenous people that hit him with spears and that sparked a huge debate, right? And this is the first time I've talked about this publicly.
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John was somebody that I knew, somebody that I mentored on the missions trips that I uh organized and led and I think about that that kind of impact and the damage that it does. Thank you so much,
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Colton, for working with me to adapt a piece from your Substack for this. The original article is linked in the description for you all to check out.
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You should follow Substack. It's really good. As you guys might have noticed,
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there's this cute little pillow in the background. Uh, recently I uh hosted an event at the Atheist Community of Austin
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and uh new friend who watches the channel gave this to me like
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like the guy made this for me. This is it's if you don't realize my little icon logo is um is a it's a tomato and the joke is like, "Oh, there's not actually
28:33
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a genetically modified tomato on the market." And yeah, whatever. This is my logo and now it's a pillow and in my
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background. It's really, really cool. I think this is super cute. Thank you so much for this. Thank you for watching.
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I've been Drew of Genetically Modified Skeptic. A special thanks to my patrons for their constant love and support. And praise be unto our lady, River, my top
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patron and the official savior of this channel. If you want to support my work,
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then subscribe. As always, if you are an apostate in need, there are resources linked in the description to help you find community and mental health support. Remember to be kind to others in the comments. And until next time,
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stay skeptical.
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Evangelical Christianity Is Literally a PSYOP
576,460 views Jan 31, 2026
US intelligence agencies have conducted a long-term psychological operation promoting Evangelical Protestantism.
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Liberation Theology is absolutely based. My interview with Colten: [
• Our Evangelical Christian Universities Wer...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2KI50nB7cs)
...
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1 minute, 41 seconds
theology responds to such criticism with just one question. What part have you played in the effective and integral liberation of the oppressed? In El
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Salvador, thinkers like John Sabrino and Ignasio Aakuria related the suffering of the poor to the passion of Christ directly and the sin of oppressors to
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1 minute, 59 seconds
the sins for which he was crucified. The crucified people, that is the poor, are the historical continuation of Yahweh's
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2 minutes, 6 seconds
servant whom the sin of the world continues to deprive of his human face.
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2 minutes, 11 seconds
The powerful of this world continue to strip them of everything to snatch everything from them even their lives
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2 minutes, 18 seconds
especially their lives. Jesus takes a very different approach to each group.
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He offers salvation to all and makes demands of all but in a very different way. He directly demands a radical conversion of the oppressor, an act of
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2 minutes, 30 seconds
cessation from oppressing. For these the coming of the kingdom is above all a radical need to stop being oppressors.
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2 minutes, 39 seconds
These theologians did not invent liberation theology from above. They put into words what Christian-based communities were discovering for
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2 minutes, 47 seconds
themselves as they studied scripture in the shadow of military dictatorships, land monopolies, and US-backed elites.
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2 minutes, 54 seconds
These communities did not just pray together. They examined the conditions of their lives. They asked why their societies were structured to benefit a
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3 minutes, 2 seconds
small ruling class and what it meant that Jesus identified with the poor.
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3 minutes, 8 seconds
Liberation theology took those questions seriously and treated them as a call to collective action, offering ordinary
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people tools to interpret their own oppression and to organize for land reform, workers rights, literacy, and
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3 minutes, 23 seconds
democracy. You might see the problem with this. for the wealthy, the greedy,
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3 minutes, 27 seconds
the powerful, aka the US empire. This movement encouraged those who suffered most under the existing political order
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to demand they be treated with basic respect. By the late 1960s, US intelligence assessments characterized
3:43
3 minutes, 43 seconds
progressive Catholic clergy as an increasingly disruptive force whose work threatened established political order
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3 minutes, 49 seconds
in Latin America. A 1969 CIA memorandum warned that liberationoriented priests,
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3 minutes, 55 seconds
sermons, and writings have already aroused the concern of conservative church officials and military leaders and predicted some clergy may be driven
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into alignment with leftist political groups. By 1971, President Nixon identified the deterioration of the
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4 minutes, 11 seconds
attitude of the Catholic Church as the single most important event in Latin America over the previous decade,
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4 minutes, 18 seconds
worrying that priests were now standing with the peasants and workers against the oligarchs and the armies. Yes, he
4:27
4 minutes, 27 seconds
actually said that the 1980 Santa Fe document prepared for the incoming Reagan administration declared that liberation theology represented Marxist
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4 minutes, 36 seconds
Leninist forces using the church as a political weapon against private property and productive capitalism and
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4 minutes, 43 seconds
called for US foreign policy to mount a counterattack on and not merely react against liberation theology. The US did
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4 minutes, 53 seconds
use direct violence to manage its problem, and we'll talk about that. But with liberation theologies proponents having some protection from the Vatican,
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5 minutes, 2 seconds
the US couldn't just take out everyone it disliked, at least. So, it chose an
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additional approach to liberation theology. It would dilute, replace, and counterprogram it. How might it do this?
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5 minutes, 18 seconds
As a 1969 report by Republican politician and eventual vice president Nelson Rockefeller said, since the
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Catholic Church in Latin America raises the consciousness of the people, the US should give support to fundamentalist Christian groups. As I'm filming this,
...
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and which of these things I'm saying are are my actual words. All right, you've been warned. If SIL linguists were zealous, as they often were, the
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teachers imposed an evangelical order as a condition for the schooling and other material advantages they introduced.
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14 minutes, 35 seconds
Where necessary, the teacher pastors concentrated dispersed populations around the schools, which tended to produce ecological and social
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14 minutes, 44 seconds
instability. For decades, SEL told the Peruvian government that it would reconcile jungle Indians to colonization, that is to the loss of
14:52
14 minutes, 52 seconds
most of their land. According to Yaandrand, Sil has helped the Aguana face a new highway and colonization by one, anchoring them around the bilingual
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schools so that they not abandon choice land and flee into the hills as the elders initially advised. Two,
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15 minutes, 8 seconds
convincing the teachers of the highways benefits through new trade opportunities. And three, by giving the Agorana a feeling for progress in the
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15 minutes, 15 seconds
accumulation of material goods. As that last quote indicated, missionaries also introduced foreign trade goods, clothes,
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medicines, vehicles, building materials,
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15 minutes, 25 seconds
and along with them a capitalist market economy and materialist consumerrist culture to indigenous people. This meant
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to break indigenous traditions of reciprocity as well as their community's self-reliance. Since control over trade
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goods, medicine, and schooling is so basic to missionary work, it is tempting to dismiss it as a coercive economic transaction, one which simply alienates
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15 minutes, 49 seconds
native people from their culture and induces them to accept exploitation in the image of the suffering Jesus. In the
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marginal situation, Sil therefore enslaves native people to the trade good. Considerable economic power is
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concentrated in the teacher who becomes the agent of trade good dependency and is placed under pressure to break with
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the tradition of reciprocity. The population is more likely to require concentration around the school and the evangelical order becomes a condition
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attached to the trade good. SIL's own aviation service, Jungle Aviation and Radio Service, or JARS, also
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occasionally transported state officials in regions where leftist guerilla movements operated. JARS pilots were not
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CIA assets, per se, but they did operate in regions otherwise inaccessible to government forces, and their cooperation was certainly mutually beneficial.
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Finally, as if all that's not enough,
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SIL missionaries actively helped oil companies and the USbacked Ecuadorian government force indigenous people in
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Ecuador into reservations. The evangelicals under the strategic leadership of the more politically sophisticated SIL supported the oil
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companies and an ethnocidal Ecuadorian government policy of encouraging highland homesteaders that's referring to the missionaries to stake out parcels of land along oil company access roads.
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After consultation with the Ecuadorian military, Aka converts flying above the remaining band of uncontacted kin in SIL
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helicopters operating on Texico fuel were urged to put down their arms and join their evangelized kin at Rachel
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Saints Reserva Village. In similar frontier conditions, the American missionaries grandfathers had pacified the American West and placed the Indians
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on reservations. Now their grandchildren in the service of the same 19th century god proposed reservos for the shiwara
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and the aas. Imagine Ecuadorian native reservos a legal entity administered in
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effect by sil missionaries evangelical protestants and dictatorships under USbacked military dictatorships across
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Latin America. Progressive Catholics faced serious persecution alongside the people with which they organized. In
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1975, not long after Nixon's ruminations about Catholicism, Bolivia's Hugo Banzer, with advice from his Nazi
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security chief, Klaus Barbie urged his interior ministry to draw up a plan against liberation theology. Para worked
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closely with the CIA to draw up what would be known as the Banzer plan, which was a direct attack on liberation
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theology. Bolivian intelligence joined by the CIA and by the intelligence services of 10 other Latin American countries began to compile dossas on
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liberation theologists to plant communist literature in churches to shut down any progressive church publication and to arrest and expel foreign priests
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and nuns who believed in liberation theology. Things are about to get even heavier somehow in this video. So,
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content warning for a discussion of genocide and torture, like even a little bit more explicitly than we've already
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discussed. Uh, Eric, let's find a time stamp where people can skip to um after
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that specific discussion is over. Under Brazil's military dictatorship, which the US financially supported at an
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unprecedented rate at that time, the state sought to assimilate and eliminate the indigenous people in order to
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develop the Amazon. Some Catholic clergy advocated for the rights of indigenous people. So, Brazil's generals also
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railed against the church, even kidnapping and torturing church representatives. The regime killed at least 8,350
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indigenous people during the dictatorship. According to Brazil's National Truth Commission, in 1980s El Salvador, where 2026 USbacked
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concentration camps are currently located, groups of US-trained army and national guardsmen sexually abused and
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20 minutes
murdered Catholic nuns and priests. In Chile and across Latin America, dictator Austo Pinish's government and its allies, all backed by the USA at the
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time, carried out Operation Condor, a project which killed an estimated 50,000 civilians, disappeared 30,000 who were
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all presumed dead, and imprisoned 400,000 for being suspected communist
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sympathizers. Many thousands of these civilians were likely tortured. The United States provided the funding and
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inspiration for this project and the CIA specifically instructed Latin American security forces in methods of torture
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and bomb construction. While all of this was happening, evangelical Protestant leaders supported these dictatorships and they received some love in return.
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In December 1974, Chilean General Pinocha personally attended the dedication of the Hotbee Pentecostal Methodist Church Cathedral in Santiago,
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marking the first time a Chilean head of state had ever attended a Protestant service. 2 days earlier, approximately
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2500 evangelicals had gathered to publicly pledge their support for the Huta and denounce Chile's international
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critics. By September 1975, the Methodist Pentecostal Church had assumed the Catholic Church's traditional role
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of hosting the annual Tedum service, a patriotic ceremony attended by Pinocha and other government leaders. Billy
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Graham, who we were all raised to rever in evangelical churches, coordinated directly with Latin American military dictatorships. Between 1962 and 1974,
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Graham personally met with Brazil's dictator Ernesto Geel and other authoritarian rulers. He praised Chile's
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Augusto Pinochet as a great Christian leader. And then there is Ephraim Rios
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Mont. Eric, can you please record yourself saying this dude's name with the utmost disrespect?
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Yeah, Spanish names can be difficult sometimes. Um, I can help. Uh, here is how you pronounce that.
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Hope that helps. Thank you. If there was a single moment when evangelical Christianity and US counterinsurgency
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fully merged, it was this period in Guatemalan history. Rios Mont was a general who took power in a 1982
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military coup. He was a born-again Pentecostal and a member of an American affiliated charismatic church. His
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weekly national TV addresses sounded like sermons mixing Bible verses with calls for obedience to God and the
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state. His government carried out one of the worst genocides in modern Latin American history against the Maya and
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23 minutes
the US financially and spiritually supported him. Good old Ronald Reagan praised Mont as a man of great integrity.
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I know that President Rios Mont is a man of great personal integrity and commitment.
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Jerry Fwell openly supported him. Pat Robertson interviewed the dictator on his TV show, The 700 Club. Ephraim Rios Mont who was uh the president there.
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He's a terrific guy. He was with the Elver Verbo Church and um they had a a a marvelous government. Christian
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evangelist Luis Pau told Christianity Today in 1983, "It's great to have a Christian president as a model. The hand of God appears to be upon him."
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Meanwhile, remember Catholic priests who supported indigenous rights were being assassinated, disappeared, and tortured along with countless other civilians.
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Rios Mont's rule was the logical end of a decadesl long project. Replace politically engaged Catholicism with a
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politically compliant Protestantism so that the structures of inequality remained untouched.
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Even today, evangelical Protestants in Latin America overwhelmingly support the same kinds of politicians which evangelical Protestants in the US support, authoritarian right-wingers.
...
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RWW
03/25/2026
by
- Martha McHardy @ The Daily Beast: Humiliation in Trump’s Backyard Could Signal Worst GOP Midterms in 100 Years
If the enormous 21-point swing against Trump in his own hometown was replicated across the country, this would be the Republicans’ worst midterms in 100 years.
- Tracy Simmons @ Religion News Service: For Doug Wilson's neighbors, CNN documentary a reminder Moscow is Christian nationalism's ground zero
‘I’m hopeful that this exposure will help people recognize the signs of Christian nationalism in their own spaces,’ one Moscow resident said.
- Luis Ferré-Sadurní José María León Cabrera, Annie Correal **and Eric Schmitt @ The New York Times: The U.S. Said It Helped Bomb a Drug Camp. It Was a Dairy Farm.
The Times visited a village where the United States and Ecuador said they destroyed an armed group’s training camp. Residents said it was actually a dairy farm.
---
guk no lnx
guk
maga since forever’: mercenary mogul Erik Prince pushes to privatize Trump deportation plans
Notorious Blackwater founder is lobbying allies in White House for private contractors to assist in mass deportations
Ben Makuch
Sun 16 Mar 2025
Silicon Valley has played a sizable part in the early days of Donald Trump’s new administration, but another familiar face in the Maga-verse is beginning to emerge: businessman Erik Prince, often described by his critics as a living “Bond villain”.
Prince is the most famous mercenary of the contemporary era and the founder of the now defunct private military company Blackwater. For a time, it was a prolific privateer in the “war on terror”, racking up millions in US government contracts by providing soldiers of fortune to the CIA, Pentagon and beyond.
Now he is a central figure among a web of other contractors trying to sell Trump advisers on a $25bn deal to privatize the mass deportations of 12 million migrants.
Erik Prince and Daniel Noboa
Ecuador enlists founder of Blackwater private army as ally in ‘war’ on crime
Read more
In an appearance on NewsNation, he immediately tried to temper that his plan had any traction.
“No indications, so far,” said Prince about a federal contract materializing. “Eventually if they’re going to hit those kinds of numbers and scale, they’re going to need additional private sector.”
But the news had people wondering, how is Prince going to factor into the second Trump presidency?
Sean McFate, a professor at Georgetown University who has advised the Pentagon and the CIA, said: “Erik Prince has always been politically connected to Maga, the Maga movement, and that’s going back to 2015.”
Prince, himself a special forces veteran and ex-Navy Seal, is a known business associate of Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first electoral win. Prince even appeared with him last July at a press conference before Bannon surrendered to authorities and began a short prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena.
“He comes from a wealthy Republican family,” said McFate, who has authored books on the global mercenary industry and is familiar with Prince’s history. “His sister, Betsy DeVos, is the former education secretary, and he’s been a Maga, not just a Maga, he’s been a Steve Bannon, Maga Breitbart Republican, since forever.”
Beginning during the two Bush administrations, Blackwater was a major recipient of Pentagon money flowing into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a massacre in Baghdad at the hands of some of his contractors led to prison sentences, congressional inquiries and blacklistings of the firm.
Years later, Trump would come to the rescue: pardoning all of the Blackwater mercenaries involved in the massacre.
Now, with the current administration, which is doling out free advertising to Elon Musk and other Maga loyalists, Prince has a new and familiar ally in Washington.
“This is a big market time for him,” said McFate. “He’s very quiet when there’s a Democrat in the White House and gets very noisy when a Republican, especially Trump, is in the White House; I expect this to be one of many things he will try to pitch.”
Do you have tips about private military contractors or the world of Erik Prince? Tip us securely here or text Ben Makuch at BenMakuch.90 on Signal.
McFate said Prince is nothing if not an “opportunist” and an “egotist” with a penchant for getting into media cycles.
“If Trump or somebody says ‘That’s an interesting idea,’ he will pump out a PowerPoint slideshow proposing an idea, whether or not he can do it,” he said. Prince also has the ear of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and was a character witness for her Senate confirmation.
There’s no denying Prince is a relentless pitchman, offering world governments billion-dollar plans to privatize wars or other less expensive espionage activities. For example, he was recently named to the advisory board of the London-based private intelligence firm Vantage Intelligence, which advises “sovereign wealth funds” and other “high-net-worth individuals”.
Post-Blackwater and under new companies, he has proposed missions in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Congo, Libya and, purportedly, Venezuela – a country he often mentions as ripe for overthrow on his podcast, Off Leash. rare earth minerals?
A senior commander in an alliance of former Venezuelan soldiers who defected from the Chavista regime told the Guardian his organization has been asking Prince for help against the country’s current president, Nicolás Maduro.
“We have sent messages to Mr Erik Prince to try to see if we can meet,” said Javier Nieto Quintero, a Florida-based former captain in the Venezuelan military and leader of the Venezuelan dissident organization Carive. “If he wants, we can provide help, support in terms of information, intelligence, or any other area based on the freedom of our country.”
Nieto Quintero, who said Prince has yet to respond, and Carive was used in a failed operation against Maduro in 2020 led by a former Green Beret. In what is notoriously known as the “Bay of Piglets”, six of Nieto Quintero’s men were killed and close to 100 captured, including two former US servicemen recruited for the job who were freed two years ago from a Caracas prison.
Prince’s eye has undoubtedly been focused on Venezuela, a country with vast oil reserves that has long been in the crosshairs of Trump’s retinue. In recent months, Prince has supported a Venezuelan opposition movement called Ya Casi Venezuela, claiming to have raised more than $1m for it over the summer. The Maduro regime is now investigating Prince’s links to the campaign, which it paints as a sort of front for western governments fostering its downfall.
Venezuela has reason to fear Prince and his connections to American spies: the CIA, with a rich history of covert actions in Latin America, was at least aware of a plot to overthrow Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez in 2002.
“We were in contact with Ya Casi Venezuela, but a meeting never took place,” said Nieto Quintero. “We have continued to grow and strengthen our ranks and our doctrine, our plans, our institutional, military, security and defense proposals.”
Prince is officially active in the region. Last week, Ecuador announced it would be partnering with Prince in a “strategic alliance” to reinforce the country’s controversial “war on crime” with his expertise.
Prince did not respond to a request for comment sent through his encrypted cellphone company, Unplugged. Ya Casi Venezuela did not answer numerous emails about its relationship with Prince. As of now, no business deal between the Trump administration and Prince has been signed or publicly disclosed.
But across his career as both a shadowy contractor and a political figure, who just graced the stages of the latest Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to applause and then spoke to Harvard Republicans, the public and private sides of Prince remain somewhat antithetical.
“He likes to be in the news, which makes him a very bad mercenary,” said McFate. “Frankly, most mercenaries I talk to in Africa, the big ones, despise him.”
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6 22
I hope that you are all well. My name is Juli Hazlewood, and I am currently in Quito, Ecuador. The country is undergoing an indefinite National Strike and an emergency. As I write, there are constant helicopters overhead, and the people of Ecuador are uprising all over the country to demand a life with dignity and to stop the expansion of extractive projects in their autonomous territories. Led by Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), today is the 13th day of occupying the streets with 10 specific demands. You can read more about the situation here in a NACLA article.
The state has authorized "repression with the progressive use of force" including the use of "carbines with multiple ammunition (buckshot rifles)" (words of the Ecuadorian Minister of Government). The President also declared releasing whatever forces and measures it takes to send the people back home. It is an extremely violent and distressing situation.
As of June 26th, 2022:
- 8 people People have disappeared
- 5 people have died
- 11 people have been severely repressed
- 145 people injured
- 127 people arrested
In the context of this emergency, I send you this request to respect the human and constitutional rights of the Ecuadorian people, written to the President of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso. The letter is written in Spanish, and there is an English translation provided below the Spanish text. Following the Spanish translation is a place to sign your names and to put your institutional affiliation.
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Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has ruled that Indigenous communities should have much more control over whether to allow extractive projects on their lands. In a decision handed down Friday, judges ruled that Indigenous groups can halt proposed mining and oil drilling projects if they’re found to require “excessive sacrifices to the collective rights of communities and nature.”It’s a blow to President Guillermo Lasso, who has promised to double Ecuador’s oil production, and a major victory for the A’i Cofán communityand other Indigenous groups who’ve suffered the effects of environmental destruction for decades.
---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ecuador
...
The Incas
The Inca civilization expansion northward from modern-day Peru during the late 15th century met with fierce resistance by several Ecuadorian tribes, particularly the Cañari, in the region around modern-day Cuenca; the Cara in the Sierra north of Quito along with the Quitu, occupants of the site of the modern capital, with whom they had formed the Kingdom of Quito. The conquest of Ecuador began in 1463 under the leadership of the ninth Inca, the great warrior Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. In that year, his son Tupa took over command of the army and began his march northward through the Sierra.
By 1500 Tupa's son, Huayna Capac, overcame the resistance of these populations and that of the Cara, and thus incorporated most of modern-day Ecuador into Tawantinsuyu, or the Inca empire.[9] The influence of these conquerors based in Cuzco (modern-day Peru) was limited to about a half century, or less in some parts of Ecuador. During that period, some aspects of life remained unchanged. Traditional religious beliefs, for example, persisted throughout the period of Inca rule. In other areas, however, such as agriculture, land tenure, and social organization, Inca rule had a profound effect despite its relatively short duration.[10]
Emperor Huayna Capac became fond of Quito, making it a secondary capital of Tawantinsuyu and living out his elder years there before his death in about 1527. Huayna Capac's sudden death and the death days later of the Incan heir apparent from a strange disease, described by one source as smallpox,[11] precipitated a bitter power struggle between the legitimate heir Huáscar, whose mother was Coya (Empress) Mama Rahua Occillo, and Atahualpa, a son born to a Quitu princess who was reputedly his father's favorite.
This struggle raged during the half-decade before the arrival of Francisco Pizarro's conquering expedition in 1532. The key battle of this civil war was fought on Ecuadorian soil, near Riobamba, where Huáscar's northbound troops were met and defeated by Atahualpa's southbound troops. Atahualpa's final victory over Huáscar in the days just before theSpanish conquerors arrived resulted in large part from the loyalty of two of Huayna Capac's best generals, who were based in Quito along with Atahualpa. The victory remains a source of national pride to Ecuadorians as a rare case when "Ecuador" bested a "neighboring country" by force.
Spanish discovery and conquest
Main article: Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire
As the Inca Civil War raged, in 1531 the Spanish landed in Ecuador. Led by Francisco Pizarro, the conquistadors learned that the conflict and disease were destroying the empire.[12] After receiving reinforcements in September 1532, Pizarro set out to the newly victorious Atahualpa.
Arriving at Cajamarca, Pizarro sent an embassy, led by Hernando de Soto, with 15 horsemen and an interpreter; shortly thereafter he sent 20 more horsemen led by his brother Hernando Pizarro as reinforcements in case of an Inca attack.[13] Atahualpa was in awe of these men[citation ^needed] dressed in full clothing, with long beards and riding horses (an animal he had never seen). In town Pizarro set a trap for the Inca and the Battle of Cajamarca began. The Inca forces greatly outnumbered the Spanish; however, the Spanish superiority of weapons and tactics and the fact that the most trusted Inca generals were in Cusco led to an easy defeat and the capture of the Incan Emperor.
During the next year Pizarro held Atahualpa for ransom. The Incas filled the Ransom Room with gold and silver awaiting a release that would never happen. On August 29, 1533 Atahualpa was garroted. The Spanish then set out to conquer the rest of Tawantinsuyu, capturing Cuzco in November 1533.
Benalcázar, Pizarro's lieutenant and fellow Extremaduran, had already departed from San Miguel with 140 foot soldiers and a few horses on his conquering mission to Ecuador. At the foot of Mount Chimborazo, near the modern city of Riobamba (Ecuador), he met and defeated the forces of the great Inca warrior Rumiñahui with the aid of Cañari tribesmen who served as guides and allies to the conquering Spaniards. Rumiñahui fell back to Quito, and, while in pursuit of the Inca army, Benalcázar encountered another, quite sizable, conquering party led by Guatemalan Governor Pedro de Alvarado. Bored with administering Central America, Alvarado had set sail for the south without the crown's authorization, landed on the Ecuadorian coast, and marched inland to the Sierra. Most of Alvarado's men joined Benalcázar for the siege of Quito. In 1533, Rumiñahui burned the city to prevent the Spanish from taking it, destroying the ancient pre-Hispanic city.
In 1534 Sebastián de Belalcázar along with Diego de Almagro established the city of San Francisco de Quito on top of the ruins of the secondary Inca capital, naming it in honor of Pizarro. It was not until December 1540 that Quito received its first captain-general in the person of Francisco Pizarro's brother, Gonzalo Pizarro.
Benalcázar had also founded the city of Guayaquil in 1533, but it had subsequently been retaken by the local Huancavilca tribesmen. Francisco de Orellana, yet another lieutenant of Francisco Pizarro from the Spanish city of Trujillo, put down the native rebellion and in 1537 reestablished this city, which a century later would become one of Spain's principal ports in South America.
Spanish colonial era
See also: Royal Audience of Quito
Map ofRoyal Audience of Quito. Most of its Amazonian territory was never under its effective control.
Between 1544 and 1563, Ecuador was a part of Spain's colonies in the New World under the Viceroyalty of Peru, having no administrative status independent of Lima. It remained a part of the Viceroyalty of Peru until 1720, when it joined the newly created Viceroyalty of New Granada; within the viceroyalty, however, Ecuador was awarded its own audiencia in 1563, allowing it to deal directly with Madrid on certain matters. The Quito Audiencia, which was both a court of justice and an advisory body to the viceroy, consisted of a president and several judges (oidores).
The most common form in which the Spanish occupied the land was the encomienda. By the early 17th century, there were some 500 encomiendas in Ecuador. Although many consisted of quite sizable haciendas, they were generally much smaller than the estates commonly found elsewhere in South America. A multitude of reforms and regulations did not prevent the encomienda from becoming a system of virtual slavery of the Native Ecuadorians, estimated at about one-half the total Ecuadorian population, who lived on them. In 1589 the president of the audiencia recognized that many Spaniards were accepting grants only to sell them and undertake urban occupations, and he stopped distributing new lands to Spaniards; however, the institution of the encomienda persisted until nearly the end of the colonial period.
The coastal lowlands north of Manta were conquered, not by the Spanish, but by blacks from the Guinean coast who, as slaves, were shipwrecked en route from Panama to Peru in 1570. The blacks killed or enslaved the native males and married the females, and within a generation they constituted a population of zambos that resisted Spanish authority until the end of the century and afterwards managed to retain a great deal of political and cultural independence.
The coastal economy revolved around shipping and trade. Guayaquil, despite being destroyed on several occasions by fire and incessantly plagued by either yellow fever or malaria, was a center of vigorous trade among the colonies, a trade that was technically illegal under the mercantilist philosophy of the contemporary Spanish rulers. Guayaquil also became the largest shipbuilding center on the west coast of South America before the end of the colonial period.
The Ecuadorian economy, like that in the mother country, suffered a severe depression throughout most of the 18th century. Textile production dropped an estimated 50 to 75 percent between 1700 and 1800. Ecuador's cities gradually fell into ruins,and by 1790 the elite was reduced to poverty, selling haciendas and jewelry in order to subsist. The Native Ecuadorian population, in contrast, probably experienced an overall improvement in its situation, as the closing of the obrajes commonly led Native Ecuadorians to work under less arduous conditions on either haciendas or traditional communal lands. Ecuador's economic woes were, no doubt, compounded by the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 by King Charles III of Spain. Missions in the Oriente were abandoned, and many of the best schools and the most efficient haciendas and obrajes lost the key that made them outstanding institutions in colonial Ecuador.
Jesuits of Quito during the Colonial era
Major square of Quito. Painting of 18th century.Quito Painting Colonial School.
Father Rafael Ferrer was the first Jesuita de Quito (Jesuit of Quito) to explore and found missions in the upper Amazon regions of South America from 1602 to 1610, which at that period belonged to the Audiencia of Quito, that was a part of the Viceroyalty of Peru until the Audiencia of Quito was transferred to the newly created Viceroyalty of New Granada in 1717. In 1602, Father Rafael Ferrer began to explore the Aguarico, Napo, and Marañon rivers ( Sucumbios region in what is today Ecuador and Peru), and set up, between 1604 and 1605, missions among the Cofan people. Father Rafael Ferrer was martyred in 1610.
In 1637, the Jesuits of Quito, Gaspar Cugia and Lucas de la Cueva began establishing missions in Mainas (or Maynas). These missions are now known as the Mainas missions after the Maina people, many of whom lived on the banks of the Marañón river, around the Pongo de Manseriche region, in close proximity to the Spanish settlement of Borja.
In 1639, the Audiencia of Quito organized an expedition to renew its exploration of the Amazon river and the Quito Jesuit (Jesuita Quiteño) Father Cristobal de Acuña was a part of this expedition. The expedition disembarked from the Napo riverFebruary 16, 1639, and arrived in what is today Pará Brazil, on the banks of the Amazon river on December 12, 1639. In 1641, Father Cristobal de Acuña published in Madrid a memoire of his expedition to the Amazon river. The title of the memoire is called Nuevo Descubrimiento del gran rio de las Amazonas, and it was used by academics as a fundamental reference pertaining to the Amazon region.
Between 1637 and 1652, there were 14 missions established along the Marañon river and its southern tributaries – the Huallaga and the Ucayali rivers. Jesuit Fathers de la Cueva and Raimundo de Santacruz opened up 2 new routes of communication with Quito, through the Pastaza and Napo rivers.
Between 1637 and 1715, Samuel Fritz founded 38 missions along the length of the Amazon river, between the Napo and Negro rivers, that were called the Omagua Missions. These missions were continually attacked by the Brazilian Bandeirantes beginning in the year 1705. In 1768, the only Omagua mission that was left was San Joaquin de Omaguas, since it had been moved to a new location on the Napo river away from the Bandeirantes.
In the immense territory of Mainas, also referred to as Maynas, the Jesuitas of Quito, made contact with a number of indigenous tribes which spoke 40 different languages, and founded a total of 173 Jesuit missions with a total population of 150, 000 inhabitants. Because of the constant plague of epidemics (smallpox and measles) and warfare with other tribes and the Bandeirantes, the total number of Jesuit Missions were reduced to 40 by 1744. At the time when the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish America in 1767, the Jesuits of Quito registered 36 missions run by 25 Jesuits of Quito in the Audiencia of Quito – 6 Jesuits of Quito in the Napo Missions and Aguarico Missions, and 19 Jesuits of Quito in the Pastaza Missions and Iquitos Missions of Maynas with a total population of 20,000 inhabitants.
Struggle for independence and birth of the republic
Main article: Ecuadorian War of Independence
The struggle for independence in the Quito Audiencia was part of a movement throughout Spanish America led by Criollos. The Criollos' resentment of the privileges enjoyed by the Peninsulares was the fuel of revolution against colonial rule. The spark was Napoleon's invasion of Spain, after which he deposed King Ferdinand VII and, in July 1808, placed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne.[3]
Shortly afterward, Spanish citizens, unhappy at the usurpation of the throne by the French, began organizing local juntas loyal to Ferdinand. A group of Quito's leading citizens followed suit, and on August 10, 1809, they seized power in the name of Ferdinand from the local representatives, whom they accused of preparing to recognize Joseph Bonaparte. Thus, this early revolt against colonial rule (one of the first in Spanish America) was, paradoxically, an expression of loyalty to the Spanish king.
It quickly became apparent that Quito's Criollo rebels lacked the anticipated popular support for their cause. As loyalist troops approached Quito, they peacefully turned power back to the crown authorities. Despite assurances against reprisals, the returning Spanish authorities proved to be merciless with the rebels and, in the process of ferreting out participants in the Quito revolt, jailed and abused many innocent citizens. Their actions, in turn, bred popular resentment among Quiteños, who, after several days of street fighting in August 1810, won an agreement to be governed by a junta composed with a majority of Criollos, although with the Peninsular president of the Royal Audience of Quito acting as its head.
In spite of strong opposition from the Quito Audiencia, the Junta called for a congress in December 1811 and declared the entire area of the audiencia to be independent of any government currently in Spain. Two months later, the Junta approved a constitution for the state of Quito that provided for democratic governing institutions but also granted recognition to the authority of Ferdinand should he return to the Spanish throne. Shortly thereafter, the Junta elected to launch a military offensive against loyalist regions to the south in Peru, but the poorly trained and badly equipped troops were no match for those of the Viceroy of Peru, which finally crushed the Quiteño rebellion in December 1812.
Gran Colombia
Main article: Gran Colombia
The second chapter in Ecuador's struggle for emancipation from Spanish colonial rule began in Guayaquil, where independence was proclaimed in October 1820 by a local patriotic junta under the leadership of the poet...José Joaquín de Olmedo.By this time, the forces of independence had grown continental in scope and were organized into two principal armies, one under the Venezuelan Simón Bolívar in the north and the other under the Argentine José de San Martín in the south. Unlike the hapless Quito junta of a decade earlier, the Guayaquil patriots were able to appeal to foreign allies, Argentina and Gran Colombia, each of whom soon responded by sending sizable contingents to Ecuador. Antonio José de Sucre, the brilliant young lieutenant of Bolívar who arrived in Guayaquil in May 1821, was to become the key figure in the ensuing military struggle against the royalist forces.
After a number of initial successes, Sucre's army was defeated at Ambato in the central Sierra and he appealed for assistance from San Martín, whose army was by now in Peru. With the arrival from the south of 1,400 fresh soldiers under the command of Andrés de Santa Cruz Calahumana, the fortunes of the patriotic army were again reversed. A string of victories culminated in the decisive Battle of Pichincha.
Two months later Bolívar, the liberator of northern South America, entered Quito to a hero's welcome. Later that July, he met San Martín at the Guayaquil conference and convinced the Argentine general, who wanted the port to return to Peruvian jurisdiction, and the local Criollo elite in both major cities of the advantage of having the former Quito Audiencia join with the liberated lands to the north. As a result, Ecuador became the District of the South within the Republic of Gran Colombia, which also included present-day Venezuela and Colombia and had Bogotá as its capital. This status was maintained for eight tumultuous years.
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Map of the formerGran Colombia in 1824 (named in its time as Colombia), the Gran Colombia covered all the colored region.
These were years in which warfare dominated the affairs of Ecuador. First, the country found itself on the front lines of Gran Colombia's efforts to liberate Peru from Spanish rule between 1822 and 1825; afterward, in 1828 and 1829, Ecuador was in the middle of an armed struggle between Peru and Gran Colombia over the location of their common border. After a campaign that included the near destruction of Guayaquil, the forces of Gran Colombia, under the leadership of Sucre and Venezuelan General Juan José Flores, proved victorious. The Treaty of 1829 fixed the border on the line that had divided the Quito audiencia and the Viceroyalty of Peru before independence.
The population of Ecuador was divided during these years among three segments: those favoring the status quo, those supporting union with Peru, and those advocating independence for the former audiencia. The latter group was to prevail following Venezuela's withdrawal from Gran Colombia at the very moment that an 1830 constitutional congress had been called in an ultimately futile effort to stem the growing separatist tendencies throughout country. In May of that year, a group of Quito notables met to dissolve the union with Gran Colombia, and in August, a constituent assembly drew up a constitution for the State of Ecuador, so named for its geographic proximity to the equator, and placed General Flores in charge of political and military affairs. He remained the dominant political figure during Ecuador's first 15 years of independence.
Republic of Ecuador
The early republic
Further information: History of Ecuador (1830–1860)
Before the year 1830 drew to a close, both...Marshal Sucre and Simón Bolívar would be dead, the former murdered (on orders from a jealous General Flores, according to some historians) and the latter from tuberculosis.
Juan José Flores, known as the founder of the republic, was of the foreign military variety. Born in Venezuela, he had fought in the wars for independence with Bolívar, who had appointed him governor of Ecuador during its association with Gran Colombia. As a leader, however, he appeared primarily interested in maintaining his power. Military expenditures, from the independence wars and from an unsuccessful campaign to wrest Cauca Province from Colombia in 1832, kept the state treasury empty while other matters were left unattended. That same year, Ecuador annexed the Galapagos Islands.[14]
Discontent had become nationwide by 1845, when an insurrection in Guayaquil forced Flores from the country. Because their movement triumphed in March (marzo), the anti-Flores coalition members became known as marcistas. They were an extremely heterogeneous lot that included liberal intellectuals, conservative clergymen, and representatives from Guayaquil's successful business community.
The next fifteen years constituted one of the most turbulent periods in Ecuador's century and a half as a nation. The marcistas fought among themselves almost ceaselessly and also had to struggle against Flores's repeated attempts from exile to overthrow the government. The most significant figure of the era, however, was General José María Urbina, who first came to power in 1851 through a coup d'état, remained in the presidency until 1856, and then continued to dominate the political scene until 1860. During this decade and the one that followed, Urbina and his archrival, García Moreno, would define the dichotomy — between Liberals from Guayaquil and Conservatives from Quito — that remained the major sphere of political struggle in Ecuador until the 1980s.
By 1859 — known by Ecuadorian historians as "the Terrible Year" — the nation was on the brink of anarchy. Local caudillos had declared several regions autonomous of the central government, known as Jefaturas Supremas. One of these caudillos, Guayaquil's Guillermo Franco, signed the Treaty of Mapasingue, ceding the southern provinces of Ecuador to an occupying Peruvian army led by General Ramón Castilla. This action was outrageous enough to unite some previously disparate elements. García Moreno, putting aside both his project to place Ecuador under a French protectorate and his differences with General Flores, got together with the former dictator to put down the various local rebellions and force out the Peruvians. The final push of this effort was the defeat of Franco's Peruvian-backed forces at the Battle of Guayaquil, which led to the overturning of the Treaty of Mapasingue. This opened the last chapter of Flores's long career and marked the entrance to the power of García Moreno.
The era of conservatism (1860–1895)
Further information: History of Ecuador (1860–1895)
Gabriel Garcia Moreno, considered the Father of Ecuadorian conservatism.
...Gabriel García Moreno was a leading figure of Ecuadorian conservatism. Shortly after the onset of his third presidential term in 1875, García Moreno was attacked with a machete on the steps of the presidential palace by Faustino Lemos Rayo, a Colombian. As he was dying, García Moreno took out his gun and shot Faustino Lemos, while he said "Dios no muere" ("God doesn't die"). The dictator's most outstanding critic was the liberal journalist, Juan Montalvo, who exclaimed, "My pen killed him!"
Between 1852 and 1890, Ecuador's exports grew in value from slightly more than US$1 million to nearly US$10 million. Production of cacao, the most important export product in the late 19th century, grew from 6.5 million kilograms (14 million pounds) to 18 million kilograms (40 million pounds) during the same period. The agricultural export interests, centered in the coastal region near Guayaquil, became closely associated with the Liberals, whose political power also grew steadily during the interval. After the death of García Moreno, it took the Liberals twenty years to consolidate their strength sufficiently to assume control of the government in Quito.
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Further information: History of Ecuador (1895–1925)
Antiquedug out canoes in the courtyard of the Old Military Hospital in the Historic Center of Quito.
The new era brought in liberalism. Eloy Alfaro, under whose direction the government headed out to aid those in the rural sectors of the coast, is credited for finishing the construction of the railroad connecting Guayaquil and Quito, the separation of church and state, establishment of many public schools, implementing civil rights (such as freedom of speech), and the legalization of civil marriages and divorce.
Alfaro was also confronted by a dissident tendency inside his own party, directed by its General Leonidas Plaza and constituted by the upper middle class of Guayaquil. His death was followed by economic liberalism (1912–25), when banks were allowed to acquire almost complete control of the country.
Popular unrest, together with the ongoing economic crisis and a sickly president, laid the background for a bloodless coup d'état in July 1925. Unlike all previous forays by the military into Ecuadorian politics, the coup of 1925 was made in the name of a collective grouping rather than a particular caudillo.The members of the League of Young Officers came to power with an agenda, which included a wide variety of social reforms, deal with the failing economy, establish the Central Bank as the unique authorized bank to distribute currency, create a new system of budget and customs.
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Further information: History of Ecuador (1925–1944)
Much of the 20th century was dominated by José María Velasco Ibarra, whose five presidential terms began with a mandate in 1934 and final presidency ending in 1972. However, the only term he actually completed was his third from 1952 to 1956.
Much of the century was also dominated by the territorial dispute between Peru and Ecuador. In 1941 Ecuador invaded Peruvian territory, and the Peruvians counterattacked and forced them to retreat into their own territory. At that time Ecuador was immersed in internal political fights and was not well equipped to win its offensive war.
With the world at war, Ecuador attempted to settle the matter by means of a third-party settlement. In Brazil the two countries' negotiations were overseen by four "Guarantor" states (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States — four of the most powerful countries in the region).[15]The resulting treaty is known as the Rio Protocol. The protocol became the focus of a surge of Ecuadorian national pride and concomitant opposition, which resulted in an uprising and overthrow of the government.
The postwar era (1944–1948)
The Quiteño multitudes stood in the pouring rain on May 31, 1944, to hear Velasco promise a "national resurrection", with social justice and due punishment for the "corrupt Liberal oligarchy" that had been responsible for "staining the national honor", believed that they were witnessing the birth of a popular revolution. Arroyo partisans were promptly jailed or sent into exile, while Velasco verbally baited the business community and the rest of the political right. The leftist elements within Velasco's Democratic Alliance, which dominated the constituent assembly that was convened to write a new constitution, were nonetheless destined to be disappointed.[3]
In May 1945, after a year of growing hostility between the president and the assembly, which was vainly awaiting deeds to substantiate Velasco's rhetorical advocacy of social justice, the mercurial chief executive condemned and then repudiated the newly completed constitution. After dismissing the assembly, Velasco held elections for a new assembly, which in 1946 drafted a far more conservative constitution that met with the president's approval. For this brief period, Conservatives replaced the left as Velasco's base of support.
Rather than attending to the nation's economic problems, however, Velasco aggravated them by financing the dubious schemes of his associates. Inflation continued unabated, as did its negative impact on the national standard of living, and by 1947 foreign exchange reserves had fallen to dangerously low levels. In August, when Velasco was ousted by his minister of defense, nobody rose to defend the man who, only three years earlier, had been hailed as the nation's savior. During the following year, three different men briefly held executive power before Galo Plaza Lasso, running under a coalition of independent Liberals and socialists, narrowly defeated his Conservative opponent in presidential elections. His inauguration in September 1948 initiated what was to become the longest period of constitutional rule since the 1912–24 heyday of the Liberal plutocracy.
Constitutional rule (1947–1960)
Further information: History of Ecuador (1944–1960)
Galo Plaza differed from previous Ecuadorian presidents by bringing a developmentalist and technocratic emphasis to Ecuadorian government. No doubt Galo Plaza's most important contribution to Ecuadorian political culture was his commitment to the principles and practices of democracy. As president he promoted the agricultural exports of Ecuador, creating economic stability. During his presidency, an earthquake near Ambato severely damaged the city and surrounding areas and killed approximately 8,000 people. Unable to succeed himself, he left his office in 1952 as the first president in 28 years to complete his term in office.
A proof of the politically stabilizing effect of the banana boom of the 1950s is that even Velasco, who in 1952 was elected president for the third time, managed to serve out a full four-year term. Velasco's fourth term in the presidency initiated a renewal of crisis, instability, and military domination and ended conjecture that the political system had matured or developed in a democratic mold.
Instability and military governments (1960–1979)
Further information: Military Governments of Ecuador (1960–1979)
In 1963, the army overthrew President Carlos Julio Arosemena Monroy, falsely accusing him of "sympathizing with communism". According to former CIA agent Philip Agee, who served several years in Ecuador, the United States incited this coup d'état to eliminate a government that refused to break with Cuba.[16]
Return to democratic rule (1979–1984)
Jaime Roldós Aguilera, democratically elected in 1979, presided over a nation that had undergone profound changes during the seventeen years of military rule. There were impressive indicators of economic growth between 1972 and 1979: The government budget expanded some 540 percent, whereas exports as well as per capita income increased a full 500 percent. Industrial development had also progressed, stimulated by the new oil wealth as well as Ecuador's preferential treatment under the provisions of the Andean Common Market (AnCoM, also known as the Andean Pact).
Roldós was killed, along with his wife and the minister of defense, in an airplane crash in the southern province of Loja on May 24, 1981. The death of Roldós generated intense popular speculation. Some Ecuadorian nationalists attributed it to the Peruvian government because the crash took place near the border where the two nations had participated in a Paquisha War in their perpetual border dispute. Many of the nation's leftists, pointing to a similar crash that had killed Panamanian President Omar Torrijos Herrera less than three months later, blamed the United States government.
Roldós's constitutional successor, Osvaldo Hurtado, immediately faced an economic crisis brought on by the sudden end of the petroleum boom. Massive foreign borrowing, initiated during the years of the second military regime and continued under Roldós, resulted in a foreign debt that by 1983 was nearly US$7 billion. The nation's petroleum reserves declined sharply during the early 1980s because of exploration failures and rapidly increasing domestic consumption. The economic crisis was aggravated in 1982 and 1983 by drastic climatic changes, bringing severe drought as well as flooding, precipitated by the appearance of the unusually warm ocean current known as "El Niño". Analysts estimated damage to the nation's infrastructure at US$640 million, with balance-of-payments losses of some US$300 million. The real gross domestic product fell to 2% in 1982 and to −3.3% in 1983. The rate of inflation in 1983, 52.5%, was the highest ever recorded in the nation's history.
Outside observers noted that, however unpopular, Hurtado deserved credit for keeping Ecuador in good standing with the international financial community and for consolidating Ecuador's democratic political system under extremely difficult conditions. As León Febres Cordero entered office on August 10, there was no end in sight to the economic crisis nor to the intense struggle that characterized the political process in Ecuador.
During the first years of the Rivadeneira administration, Febres-Cordero introduced free-market economic policies, took a strong stand against drug trafficking and terrorism, and pursued close relations with the United States. His tenure was marred by bitter wrangling with other branches of Government and his own brief kidnapping by elements of the military. A devastating earthquake in March 1987 interrupted oil exports and worsened the country's economic problems.
Rodrigo Borja Cevallos of the Democratic Left (ID) party won the presidency in 1988, running in the runoff election against Abdalá Bucaram of the PRE. His government was committed to improving human rights protection and carried out some reforms, notably an opening of Ecuador to foreign trade. The Borja government concluded an accord leading to the disbanding of the small terrorist group "¡Alfaro Vive, Carajo!" ("Alfaro Lives, Dammit!"), named after Eloy Alfaro. However, continuing economic problems undermined the popularity of the ID, and opposition parties gained control of Congress in 1990.
Economic crisis (1990–2000)
See also: 1998-99 Ecuador banking crisis
In 1992, Sixto Durán Ballén won his third run for the presidency. His tough macroeconomic adjustment measures were unpopular, but he succeeded in pushing a limited number of modernization initiatives through Congress. Durán Ballén's vice president, Alberto Dahik, was the architect of the administration's economic policies, but in 1995, Dahik fled the country to avoid prosecution on corruption charges following a heated political battle with the opposition. A war with Peru (named the Cenepa War, after a river located in the area) erupted in January–February 1995 in a small, remote region, where the boundary prescribed by the 1942 Rio Protocol was in dispute. The Durán-Ballén Administration can be credited with beginning the negotiations that would end in a final settlement of the territorial dispute.
In 1996, Abdalá Bucaram, from the populist Ecuadorian Roldosista Party, won the presidency on a platform that promised populist economic and social reforms. Almost from the start, Bucaram's administration languished amidst widespread allegations of corruption. Empowered by the president's unpopularity with organized labor, business, and professional organizations alike, Congress unseated Bucaram in February 1997 on grounds of mental incompetence. The Congress replaced Bucaram with Interim President Fabián Alarcón.
In May 1997, following the demonstrations that led to the ousting of Bucaram and appointment of Alarcón, the people of Ecuador called for a National Assembly to reform the Constitution and the country's political structure. After a little more than a year, the National Assembly produced a new Constitution.
Congressional and first-round presidential elections were held on May 31, 1998. No presidential candidate obtained a majority, so a run-off election between the top two candidates – Quito Mayor Jamil Mahuad of the DP and Social Christian Álvaro Noboa Pontón – was held on July 12, 1998. Mahuad won by a narrow margin. He took office on August 10, 1998. On the same day, Ecuador's new constitution came into effect.
In July 1998, Christian Democrat Jamil Mahuad (who was the former mayor of Quito) was elected president. It is facing a difficult economic situation, linked in particular to the Asian crisis. The currency is devalued by 15%, fuel and electricity prices increase fivefold, and public transport prices increase by 40%. The government is preparing to privatize several key sectors of the economy: oil, electricity, telecommunications, ports, airports, railways and post office. The repression of a first general strike caused three deaths. The social situation is critical: more than half of the population is unemployed, 60% live below the extreme poverty line, public employees have not been paid for three months. A further increase in VAT, combined with the abolition of subsidies for domestic gas, electricity and diesel, triggers a new social movement. In the provinces of Latacunga, the army shoots the indigenous people who cut the Pan-American Highway, injuring 17 people with bullets.
The coup de grâce for Mahuad's administration was Mahuad's decision to make the local currency, the sucre (named after Antonio José de Sucre), obsolete and replace it with the U.S. dollar (a policy called dollarization). This caused massive unrest as the lower classes struggled to convert their now useless sucres to US dollars and lost wealth, while the upper classes (whose members already had their wealth invested in US dollars) gained wealth in turn. Under Mahuad's recession-plagued term, the economy shrank significantly, and inflation reached levels of up to 60 percent.
In addition, corruption scandals are a source of public concern. Former Vice President Alberto Dahik, architect of the neoliberal economic programme, is fleeing abroad after being indicted for "questionable use of reserved funds". Former President Fabián Alarcón is arrested on charges of covering more than a thousand fictitious jobs. President Mahuad is implicated for receiving money from drug trafficking during his election campaign. Several major bankers are also cited in cases. Mahuad concluded a well-received peace with Peru on October 26, 1998.[17]
Ecuador since 2000
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On January 21, 2000, during demonstrations in Quito by indigenous groups, the military and police refused to enforce public order, beginning what became known as the 2000 Ecuadorean coup d'état. Demonstrators entered the National Assembly building and declared, in a move that resembled the coups d'état endemic to Ecuadorean history, a three-person junta in charge of the country. Field-grade military officers declared their support for the concept. During a night of confusion and failed negotiations, President Mahuad was forced to flee the presidential palace for his own safety. Vice President Gustavo Noboa took charge by vice-presidential decree; Mahuad went on national television in the morning to endorse Noboa as his successor. The military triumvirate that was effectively running the country also endorsed Noboa. The Ecuadorean Congress then met in an emergency session in Guayaquil on the same day, January 22, and ratified Noboa as President of the Republic in constitutional succession to Mahuad.
Although Ecuador began to improve economically in the following months, the government of Noboa came under heavy fire for the continuation of the dollarization policy, its disregard for social problems, and other important issues in Ecuadorean politics.
Retired Colonel Lucio Gutiérrez, a member of the military junta that overthrew Mahuad, was elected president in 2002 and assumed the presidency on January 15, 2003. Gutierrez's Patriotic Society Party had a small fraction of the seats in Congress and therefore depended on the support of other parties in Congress to pass legislation.
In December 2004, Gutiérrez unconstitutionally dissolved the Supreme Court and appointed new judges to it.This move was generally seen as a kickback to deposed ex-President Abdalá Bucaram, whose political party had sided with Gutiérrez and helped derail attempts to impeach him in late 2004. The new Supreme Court dropped charges of corruption pending against the exiled Bucaram, who soon returned to the politically unstable country. The corruption evident in these maneuvers finally led Quito's middle classes to seek the ousting of Gutiérrez in early 2005. In April 2005, the Ecuadorian Armed Forces declared that it "withdrew its support" for the President. After weeks of public protests, Gutiérrez was overthrown in April. Vice President Alfredo Palacio assumed the Presidency and vowed to complete the term of office and hold elections in 2006.
On January 15, 2007, the social democrat Rafael Correa succeeded Palacio as President of Ecuador, with the promise of summoning a constituent assembly and bringing focus on poverty. The 2007-8 Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly drafted the 2008 Constitution of Ecuador, approved via the Ecuadorian constitutional referendum, 2008.
In November 2009, Ecuador faced an energy crisis that led to power rationing across the country.
Between 2006 and 2016, poverty decreased from 36.7% to 22.5% and annual per capita GDP growth was 1.5 percent (as compared to 0.6 percent over the prior two decades). At the same time, inequalities, as measured by the Gini index, decreased from 0.55 to 0.47.[18]
Former PresidentRafael Correa (left) attends President-elect LenínMoreno's (middle) 'changing of the guard' ceremony. The two PAIS leaders were considered close allies before Moreno's "De-correaization" efforts started after he assumed the presidency.
Beginning in 2007, President Rafael Correa established The Citizens' Revolution, a movement following left-wing policies, which some sources describe as populist.[19][20][21][22][23] Correa was able to utilize the 2000s commodities boom to fund his policies,[22] utilizing China's need for raw materials.[24] Through China, Correa accepted loans that had few requirements, as opposed to firm limits set by other lenders.[24] With this funding, Ecuador was able to invest insocial welfare programs, reduce poverty and increase the average standard of living in Ecuador, while at the same time growing Ecuador's economy.[25][26][27] Such policies resulted in a popular base of support for Correa, who was re-elected to the presidency three times between 2007 and 2013.[22] Media coverage in the United States viewed Correa's strong popular support and efforts to re-found the Ecuadorian State as an entrenchment of power.[22][28]
As the Ecuadorian economy began to decline in 2014, Correa decided not to run for a fourth term[29] and by 2015, protests occurred against Correa following the introduction of austerity measures and an increase of inheritance taxes.[19][30] Instead, Lenín Moreno, who was at the time a staunch Correa loyalist and had served as his vice-president for over six years, was expected to continue with Correa's legacy and the implementation of 21st century socialism in the country, running on a broadly left-wing platform with significant similarities to Correa's.[28][31][32][33]
In the weeks after his election, Moreno distanced himself from Correa's policies[34] and shifted the left-wing PAIS Alliance's away from the left-wing politics and towards the neoliberal governance.[28] Despite these policy shifts, Moreno continued to identify himself as social democrat.[35] Moreno then led the 2018 Ecuadorian referendum, which reinstated presidential term limits that were removed by Correa, barring Correa from running for a fourth presidential term in the future.[28] At his election, Moreno enjoyed an approval rating of 79 percent. Moreno's distancing from his predecessor's policies and his electoral campaign's platform, however, alienated both former President Correa[36] and a large percentage of his own party's supporters.[37][38] In July 2018, a warrant for Correa's arrest was issued after facing 29 charges for alleged corruption acts performed while he was in office.[23][39][40]
Due to increased borrowing by Correa's administration, which he had used to fund social welfare projects, as well as the 2010s oil glut, public debt tripled in a five-year period, with Ecuador eventually coming to use of the Central Bank of Ecuador's reserves for funds.[41][42] In total, Ecuador was left $64 billion in debt and was losing $10 billion annually.[42] On 21 August 2018, Moreno announced economic austerity measures to reduce public spending and deficit.[43][44] Moreno stated that the measures aimed to save $1 billion and included a reduction of fuel subsidies, eliminating subsidies for gasoline and diesel, and the removal or merging of several public entities, a move denounced by the groups representing the nation's indigenous groups and trade unions.[43][44][28]
In August 2018, Ecuador withdrew from Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (Alba), a regional bloc of leftwing governments led by Venezuela.[45]
In October 2018, the government of President Lenin Moreno cut diplomatic relations with the Nicolás Maduro regime of Venezuela, a close ally of Rafael Correa.[46]
In March 2019, Ecuador withdrew from Union of South American Nations. Ecuador was an original member of the block, founded by left-wing governments in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2008. Ecuador also asked UNASUR to return the headquarters building of the organization, based in its capital city, Quito.[47]
In June 2019, Ecuador agreed to allow US military planes to operate from an airport on the Galapagos Islands.[48]
On 1 October 2019, Lenín Moreno announced a package of economic measures as part of a deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to obtain US$4,209 millions in credit. These measures became known as "el paquetazo" and they included the end of fuel subsidies, removal of some import tariffs and cuts in public worker benefits and wages.[49][50][51]
This caused mass protestswhich began on 3 October 2019. On 8 October, President Moreno relocated his government to the coastal city of Guayaquil after anti-government protesters had overrun Quito, including the Carondelet Palace. On the same day, Moreno accused his predecessor Rafael Correa of orchestrating a coup against the government with the aid of Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, a charge which Correa denied.[52] Later that day, the authorities shut down oil production at the Sacha oil field, which produces 10% of the nation's oil, after it was occupied by protesters. Two more oil fields were captured by protesters shortly thereafter. Demonstrators also captured repeater antennas, forcing State TV and radio offline in parts of the country.Indigenous protesters blocked most of Ecuador's main roads, completely cutting the transport routes to the city ofCuenca.[53]
On 9 October, protesters managed to briefly burst into and occupy the National Assembly, before being driven out by police using tear gas. Violent clashes erupted between demonstrators and police forces as the protests spread further.[54][55] During the late-night hours of 13 October, the Ecuadorian government and CONAIE reached an agreement during a televised negotiation.[56] Both parties agreed to collaborate on new economic measures to combat overspending and debt. The government agreed to end the austerity measures at the center of the controversy and the protesters in turn agreed to end the two-week-long series of demonstrations. President Moreno agreed to withdraw Decree 883, an IMF-backed plan that caused a significant rise in fuel costs.[57]
The relations with the United States improved significantly during the presidency of Lenin Moreno. In February 2020, his visit to Washington was the first meeting between an Ecuadorian and U.S. president in 17 years. ^[58]
The 11 April 2021 election run-off vote ended in a win for conservative former banker, Guillermo Lasso, taking 52.4% of the vote compared to 47.6% of left-wing economist Andrés Arauz, supported by exiled former president, Rafael Correa. Previously, President-elect Lasso finished second in the 2013 and 2017 presidential elections.[59] On 24 May 2021, Guillermo Lasso was sworn in as the new President of Ecuador, becoming the country's first right-wing leader in 14 years.[60]
See also
- 1830 Constitution of Ecuador
- 2008 Constitution of Ecuador
- Economic history of Ecuador
- History of Latin America
- History of South America
- History of the Americas
- Military history of Ecuador
- Politics of Ecuador
- President of Ecuador
- Spanish colonization of the Americas
References
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1987 no lnx
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/african-palm-oil-impacts-equadors-amazon
AFRICAN PALM OIL: IMPACTS IN EQUADOR'S AMAZON
June 1987
Author Ashley John M.
The development of large African palm oil plantations in Ecuador's Amazonian province of Napo has become a sensitive issue for this small South American country. Over the past couple of years the Cofán, Siona-Secoya and Quichua peoples have felt threatened by the existence of palm plantations and are concerned because of palm plantations and are concerned because of plans to greatly expand this agro-industry in their region. Such an expansion for them means extensive destruction to the rainforest and a decline in the quality of the river waters, both of which are vital to their physical and cultural survival. The government supports the plantations as a vital part of development in the Oriente and, for the most part, has been insensitive to the Indian's needs.
Ecuador's Amazonia commonly called the Oriente, includes the upper Amazon basin and a portion of the westernmost lower Amazon basin as the river systems flatten out. The entire Oriente is rainforest, in which year-round moist conditions along with a stable warm temperature have created incredible biological richness. In addition to a diversity of plant species, the rainforest is also the home to a wide variety of forest animals, and a complex set of interdependent relationships between these multitudinous animals and plants, which are well known to the region's indigenous people. Western scientists, on the other hand, readily admit that they are just beginning to comprehend the complexity of the rainforest.
Presently approximately 20,000 ha of African palms are under cultivation in the Oriente.
Although 20,000 ha does not seem extreme, substantial environmental and social damage has already resulted. Given this significant destruction, it is particularly alarming that the palm oil industry now plans to increase the area for palm oil cultivation up to as much as250,000 ha. If these plans are realized, it means the deforestation of almost four percent of the Oriente, which in turn, accounts for almost half of Ecuador's total land base. The oil-palm industry is particularly interested in expansion within the provinces of Napo where, unlike most of the Amazon basin and other parts of the world's tropics, the soils are quite rich due to the breakdown of volcanic material that has washed down from the Andes.
Oil Industry - "Pure Business"
The palm oil industry is not new to Ecuador. The first African palm seedlings were plated in 1953. Until recently all oil palm plantations were located on the coastal side of the Andes, primarily in the area of Santo Domingo de los Colorados. To grow well and produce an abundant crop of oil nuts, African palms require strong sunlight, regular rainfall and a consistent temperature between 25o - 28o. They also need fertilizer, pesticides and, most of all, extensive amounts of manual labor to prevent Kudzu vines from choking the palm trees. Because Ecuador is endowed with excellent growing conditions and an abundant supply of cheap labor, it is considered an ideal location by the palm oil industry.
Palm oil trees grow rapidly; five to six years after planting, they start to produce clusters of reddish-orange nuts and, if managed well, will continue to do so for 20 years. Once the nuts are harvested they are put through an extraction process which produces two kinds of oil. The first one, reddish in color, is extracted from the fleshly pulp of the nut's outer coverings. The "red oil". as it is commonly called, is sold primarily within the country to companies that produce cosmetics, industrial grease and cheap cooking oil. The other oil clearish-white, is extracted from the seed kernel of the nut. Used for cooking, this higher-grade white oil is exported abroad and is common in a wide variety of prepackaged foods in the US. According to Bruce Kernon, a USDA (US Dept. of Agriculture) forester in Ecuador, Ecuador now imports approximately 30 percent of its cooking oil. This figure is a major justification for the palm oil industry's expansion plans to make the country less dependent on imports. However, it really comes down to pure business, because cooking oil is already being exported from the country. Yet, in spite of its growing popularity abroad, palm oil is far more saturated and more damaging to blood vessels than they any animal fat known, including pork and beef fat.
Companies Receive Title to Indian Land
Fifteen years ago, the areas where the palm oil plantations are now located were trackless virgin rainforest. The discovery of high-grade petroleum in the 1960s and the subsequent development of the industry in the northern Oriente has radically altered the forest ecosystem. New roads for oil exploration and a network of oil pipelines have opened the way to a continuous invasion of landless colonists and land speculators from the Sierra and coastal regions of the country. With little or no knowledge of how to subsist in a rainforest, the oil industry and the colonists have caused massive deforestation. This imported labor supply and a new infrastructure of roads have made it feasible for the palm oil industry to develop plantations in the Oriente.
In 1978 two palm oil companies, Palmoriente and Palmeras del Ecuador, received titles from IERAC (the Ecuadorian Institute of agrarian Reform and Colonization) for 10,000 ha each of "undeveloped" rainforest in Napo province. In the process of clearing these tracts of forests to plant the African palm seedlings, little of the timber resources was used. According to Jorge Uquillos, a sociologist working for INIAP (National Institute of Agricultural Research),Palmeras del Ecuador simply bulldozed trees and left them in large piles to rot. This same 10,000 hectares had previously been one of the primary hunting grounds for the Siona-Secoya Indians, who still live adjacent to the plantation along the Shushufindi and other nearby rivers.
The Palmoriente plantation is located approximately 40 km to the southwest of Palmeras del Ecuador near the river town of Puerto Francisco de Orellana, more commonly called Coca. Palmoriente lies along the Huashito River, a fast-moving tributary of the Napo River. The largest river in the region, the Napo, is the main "highway" for the Indians. All along the river and its tributaries, the Quichua and Siona-Secoya peoples have numerous settlements and homesteads.
Toxic Pesticides Endanger Indians and Environment
When forests are cleared for these plantations wild-life populations decline because of a loss of habitat. Although not documented, there is strong reason to suspect the extinction of some species because of the high degree of plant and animal endemism in the area. Further deterioration of the environment continues once the palm oil seedlings have been planted. To protect the palms, a variety of highly toxic pesticides must be applied to the crop at regular intervals which later find their way into the local rivers and destroy essential sources ofriverine protein upon which the native peoples depend. Fish kills have been reported downstream from Palmeras in both the Shushufindi and Aquarico rivers. The Huashito, Punino and Payamino rivers are now contaminated with toxins from Palmoriente. In recent years sickness among the Indian communities, who use the rive water for cooking and drinking, has increased significantly due to deterioration of the water quality.
The use of toxic pesticides is a common practice and essential for protecting a large monoculture crop in the tropics from a wide variety of insects and other pests that abound in the surrounding forests. There are 15 separate pesticides being used on the oil-palm plantations in Ecuador. These particular pesticides are extremely toxic and easily enter nearby streams and rivers via runoff from a vast network of ditches throughout these plantations. The most dangerous include endrin, aldrin, dieldrin. Both aldrin and dieldrin were banned for crop use in the US in 1974. Endrin is so dangerous that it is now considered the most toxic of the commercial cyclodienes. It is both persistent in the environment and highly toxic to fish. Eating game contaminated by endrin has caused brain damage and birth defects. Parathion is also extremely persistent in the environment and has an estimated lethal dose one-sixteenth that of DDT.
Once the oil extractors are installed within the next year or two at these two plantations the quality of the nearby river water will deteriorate further. For example, the Cucaracha River just west of Santo Domingo de los Colorados is now constantly covered with a greasy film and unfit for human consumption because of the waste dumped from palm oil extractors. Some rivers in Malaysia are compared to open sewers due to the waste from palm oil extractors in that country.
Such contamination threatens Indian peoples who live near plantations. Their physical survival depends on the well-being of the rainforest and the rivers; disturbances in this complex ecosystem will more than likely affect them adversely as well. The forests provide building materials for their homes, wood for canoes, palm leaves and vines for baskets, and a place together wild foods and medicines and to hunt small game. The rivers supply them with water and protein from fish, caimen and turtles.
The Indians also depend on extensive areas of rainforest to support their swidden form of agriculture, which is ideally suited to the tropical rainforest. Their small forest gardens, called chakras, use only one to two hectares of land and require no pesticides or fertilizer.A wide variety of crops are planted together rather than in rows. By intercropping these plants, plant-specific pests are controlled and the different root systems avoid competition for nutrients. Finally, this multilayered garden canopy, which mimics the structure of the surrounding rainforest, helps to break up the impact of the rainfall and minimize erosion. After a couple of years a new garden site is cleared and the old garden is left fallow, allowing the forest to regenerate.
Indians Accuse Industry of Ethnocide
For the indigenous peoples of the Oriente, a whole culture is interrelated with the rainforest. It has been their home for millenia; the history of their people and the bones of their ancestors lie within these forests. The forests give their lives meaning and purpose and are a continuous source of spiritual sustenance. Their traditional religion could be called a type of ecological animism because of the respect it inspires for all the plants and creatures of the rain-forest. Quite complex, this spiritual relationship with the forest is based on the careful observations and experiments of many generations of native shamans. New knowledge about the forests is constantly being acquired as apprentices to shamans must prove not only their knowledge of known plants but also demonstrate potential uses of new plants.
Because of this long-term association with the rain-forest, the indigenous people, supported by various Indian organizations, accuse the expanding palm oil industry of ethnocide. The connection for them is obvious. The destruction of the rainforest threatens their traditional way of life and with it their identity as a forest-dwelling people. Several reports published in 1984 that include plans for expanding the plantations confirm the worst of their fears about the intentions of the national government and the palm oil industry.
In the spring of 1984 the Central Bank of Ecuador published a report (Informe 84-012 SEI) elaborating plans to expand development of palm oil in the province of Napo up to 245,000 ha. Most of this land lies within areas the Quichua and Siona-Secoya communities already inhabit.
A second report four months later, from the Ministry of Agriculture (MAG), known as Ministerial Agreement 0431, created two conservation reserves of 11,000 and 45,000 ha. Although the reserves were supposedly designed for conservation purposes, this agreement stipulated that certain forms of development would be acceptable within its boundaries. The cultivation of palm oil was specifically listed as an acceptable form of development (to Uquillos, personal communication). Even worse, MAG declared the areas within these reserves "empty of all human settlement," although 40 Indian communities, some with formal land title documents, lie within the proposed boundaries of these reserves.
Finally, in April 1984, the national newspaper Hoy quoted the director of the French Oil Institute (Institute de Recherches pour les Huilles et Oliagineux) as saying"...that the best land he has ever seen for growing African palms exists in the Oriente". Not only does the Oriente have the prerequisite growing conditions of sunlight, rainfall and constant temperatures, it also has unusually rich soils for a tropical rainforest region.
These three reports represent an attitude toward the land totally different from that of the native peoples. For the bureaucrats of MAG and agro-business entrepreneurs, the rainforests in their natural state are useless with no inherent value and therefore must be "improved". IERAC policies reinforce this attitude by encouraging colonists to clear the land and raise cattle, cash crops, or both. In fact upon receiving title to new forest lands, some "improvement" is required within five years or the title may be revoked. A large sign in the local MAG office in Coca eloquently sums up the government's attitude toward the rainforest: "El Bosque es Trabojo y Dinero" (The Forest is Work and Money).
The government lack of understanding, much less appreciation of the forest Indians' land-use patterns, exacerbates the ongoing problems of awarding titles to all Indian land claims. According to Uquillos, a sociologist working for INIAP, the government's notion of tierras baldias (empty, unoccupied land) is a complete myth because indigenous peoples inhabit or make use of almost all areas of the Oriente. To the government any forest lands that are not yet surveyed and registered with IERAC qualify as tierras baldias (Uquillos: personal communication).As recently as July 1985, Rafael Perez, the executive director of IERAC, stated that Ecuador's Oriente contains 13.8 million ha of unoccupied land.Such a statement from IERAC is consistent with its poor record of awarding titles to Indians as compared to non-Indian families. Moreover, IERAC is particularly reluctant to recognize communal lands and prefers to award titles to the heads of individual families, according to Cristobal Tapuy, president of the Confederation of Indian Nations of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Such a policy, which Indian organizations strongly criticize, undermines tribal solidarity and cultural values.
Indians Fight Government Discrimination
Another essential component to this cultural interface is the deep racist attitudes held toward the Indians in Ecuador and forest Indians in particular. Although they are admired as picturesque in tourist posters, for the most part forest Indians are considered backward and a hindrance to national progress. According to anthropologist Norman Whitten, who has spent years in the Oriente: even the kindliest of the whites tend to look upon the Indian as a child held perpetually at the development stage. For the mestizo caught up in the national process of blanquemiento (White-mindedness), the thought of living in the jungle is repugnant, since only animals and Indians live there.
The Indian people of the Oriente are well aware of the severity of the problem and have made great efforts to organize. They have established several regional organizations and most of them work together through the umbrella organization CONFENIAE, which was founded in 1980 and has a modern office in Quito. Under the leadership of Cristobal Tapuy, CONFENIAE has worked to formalize Indian grievances with the national government. Committed to protecting the Indians' cultural heritage and land rights throughout Amazonia, CONFENIAE is trying to do what the government has yet to do - establish a consistent policy for dealing with Indian peoples. It was only because of strong local and written protests from CONFENIAE, for example, that MAG retracted Agreement 0431 for creating two conservation zones.
Deeply concerned about the negative effects of the palm oil industry, CONFENIAE last year published a booklet, Palma African y Etnocidio (African Palm and Ethnocide), to educate the local public and people abroad. Two well-known international Indian rights organizations, Cultural Survival and Survival International, along with the Inter-American Foundation and the national environmental group within Ecuador, Fundación Natura, support CONFENIAE's work.
Adán Grefa, president of FCUNAE (Federation of Napo Communities - Union of Ecuadorian Amazonian Natives), a regional affiliate of CONFENIAE, in a recent interview indicated that violence has erupted in the Oriente because of the colonists' intrusion.In one confrontation this past year a colonist was killed. Grefa expressed regret over this death, but was adamant about the Indians' willingness to fight if necessary.He also believes colonist invasions may be organized with the help of the palm oil companies because their efforts are coordinated, not the usual spontaneous activities of colonists.
Industry Provides Few Local Benefits
The very existence of palm oil plantations would not be possible without foreign capital and technology. Both Palmoriente and Palmeras del Ecuador operate with 40 percent foreign participation. The three principal foreign investors include British Commonwealth Development Corporation, German Development Company (DEG) and SOCFINO, a Belgian firm.
Although foreign investors, Ecuador's Central Bank and the government all point to the growing palm oil industry as a sign of development in the Oriente, local living conditions do not support this position.Even during the heyday of high petroleum prices, little if any money was put into the local communities. The existing roads are used primarily to transport heavy equipment to and from oil fields. Neither Coca nor Lago Agrio have any paved roads and Coca still lacks a running water system. Few Indians or local people are hired to work the plantations. The majority of the workers are brought in from the coast and paid by contratistas (contractors) (Uquillos, personal communication).Usually the laborers work on a rotation system, which saves the companies from providing social services and health insurance benefits, as well as overtime and vacation pay. Entry into the Palmoriente plantation is difficult because of guards and a high metal fence. In order to gain entry, a visitor must submit a letter of intent to the head office in Quito where it is reviewed for approval at meetings once every two months.
More than likely Palmoriente's attitude is a response to formal protests and public criticism from Indian rights organizations, CONFENIAE and Fundación Natura. There has been an obvious decline in government praise for the economic and social benefits of the "golden crop", as the palm oil was once hailed.
Government Remains Indifferent to Indians As Industry Expands
Nevertheless, the palm oil industry continues to expand in the Oriente and rumors repeatedly surface about United Brands and a Japanese firm starting a plantation in the near future. The ACEIPA Corporation, which already has a palm oil plantation near Santo Domingo de los Colorados, is presently clearing 5,000 ha of rainforest that adjoins the eastern boundary of Palmeras del Ecuador.
The development of this new plantation by ACEIPA is another example of the government's indifference to the rights of indigenous peoples. The land that ACEIPA is now clearing has already been recognized by the government as part of the Indians' traditional lands. Although not legally titled to them now, it adjoins the boundaries of their present comuna called San Pablo. In 1980 an inter-institutional commission set up by MAG, which included IERAC, agreed that these lands would be included with the San Pablo Comuna. By 1983 all the paper work had been completed and the land had been surveyed and marked with the participation and money of the Siona-Secoya. The Indians were simply waiting for IERAC to finish processing "their" land title.
However, IERAC continued to delay awarding them the title and then, inexplicably, lost all the paperwork related to the Siona-Secoya land. Several people, including some employees at MAG, believe that this action was intentional on the part of IERAC because they knew a change in the administration from Hurtado to Febres-Cordero was coming. Consequently, 5,000 ha of this land now "belongs" to ACEIPA and is being cleared with the use of heavy military equipment. According to anonymous sources, a retired military general named Azanza, who is a stockholder of ACEIPA, is reportedly responsible for acquiring the use of this machinery. Left in a desperate situation, the Siona-Secoya are willing to compromise the loss of this land if it will prevent any further delays in acquiring the remaining lands that have been marked off for them.
In an interview, the director for MAG's African Palm Oil Program, Carlos Adolfo González, acknowledged that ACEIPA was in the Oriente but said that he knew of no problems with the Indians there. When asked about river pollution from pesticides González contradicted information published by INIAP, saying that it was minimal because the companies prefer to use organic pesticides. The INIAP documents list clearly the chemicals used in managing palm oil with warnings about those considered most toxic.
As long as the palm oil industry continues to expand, conflicts with the Indian people will continue, Right now the major economic spin-off of the palm oil industry in the Oriente is land speculation for its further expansion. Unless the government commits itself to securing all Indian land claims, the Indians' struggle to defend their will continue and perhaps result in other violent confrontations.
The present administration does not appear to be particularly favorable to the Indians' plight. Although difficult to confirm, it is widely believed that President Febres-Cordero is a stockholder in the ACEIPA Corporation. It is common knowledge, however, that Ecuador's Ambassador to the United States, Ribadeneyra, is a major shareholder of the Palmoriente plantation. In addition, Vice-President Blanco Peñaherrera Padilla is pressuring officials to bring back to the Oriente the infamous Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), a missionary organization with a notorious reputation for insensitivity to indigenous cultures. The SIL was officially expelled from Ecuador in 1982 after numerous complaints from various Indian communities. CONFENIAE is adamantly opposed to its return and feels that it would drive a wedge in the Indian community and open the door for further development, particularly African palm oil (Tapuy, personal communication).
Contrary to government propaganda, Indian peoples of the Oriente do not see themselves as antidevelopment. Fully aware of a larger world, they welcome innovations when incorporated into their lifestyles without unnecessary disruption to their environment and cultural values. To date, the palm oil industry has added nothing of positive value to their lives. Considering that Western science knows little about the rainforest and that Indians have a deep intimate knowledge of the complex ecosystem, to destroy these forests and disrupt the lives of these people in order to plan a monoculture crop of palm oil trees is not only highly inappropriate but tragically foolish.
Article copyright Cultural Survival, Inc.
African Palm Oil: Impacts in on | CultEquador's Amazural ...
https://www.culturalsurvival.org › publications › cultural-survival-quarterly
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ew 12/20
Nemonte Nenquimo filed a lawsuit against the Ecuadoran government and successfully safeguarded 202,000 hectares of Indigenous territories and Amazon rainforest from oil exploration and extraction.
Nenquimo, 33, is an Indigenous Waorani woman from the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador. In 2015, she co-founded an Indigenous-led coalition called the Ceibo Alliance and was elected president of an organization that represents the Waorani of Ecuador's Pastaza province.
Ecuador is among the most biodiverse places in the world, but its forests and people have been increasingly threatened by logging, road construction, oil exploration and other extractive industries. In 2018, in an effort to bring oil company investments into the nation,Ecuador's minister of hydrocarbons announced 2.8 million hectares (7 million acres) of land constituting primary rainforest would be auctioned off for oil concessions.
In 2019, Nenquimo and other Waorani leaders filed a lawsuit against three government ministries in Ecuador for falsely claiming they had consent from the Waorani to sell their lands at auction.She also bolstered Indigenous community independence by installing solar and rainwater catchment systems in villages and supporting cottage industries such as chocolate production. Nenquimo helped secure funds for Indigenous filmmakers to tell their stories and played a lead role in a community mapping project charting the Waoroni territory around 16 communities.
In April 2019, Nenquimo and the Waorani won the court case against the Ecuadoran ministries, and the ruling was upheld in the court of appeals, safeguarding 202,000 hectares of Indigenous territories and Amazon rainforest from oil exploration and extraction. This case set an important legal precedent for Indigenous rights in Ecuador.
Nenquimo was named one of TIME magazine's list of 100 most influential people of 2020, and continues to work as a leader of her people and the environmental movement in Ecuador.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-ecuadors-democracy-is-being-suffocated/
==
820 desmog
https://www.desmog.co.uk/2020/08/12/campaigners-demand-court-shuts-down-ecuador-s-oil-pipelines-after-spill
==
perkins econ hit man:
I was in Ecuador when it was forced by the IMF and the World Bank to use the dollar as its currency. In that one moment everything changed. The people that had their money in sucres — which was all of the lower classes and most of the middle class — lost half their money relative to the world economy. People who had their money in dollars — the rich families and the foreign corporations in Ecuador — increased their net worth and spending power. That happened the minute, the second, the dollar was put into effect. Similar shocks are hitting the United States and parts of Europe as well as Asia, places which are not used to such sudden economic change.
==
https://www.lonelyplanet.com/ecuador/background/history/a/nar/7d746990-4190-40c7-a882-616c1c7c882f/363337
...The Inca for their part grew quite fond of Ecuador. Emperor Huayna Capac made Quito a secondary capital of the Inca Empireand lived there until his death in 1526. Locals were largely left alone as long as they paid tribute and acknowledged his divinity. Those who opposed him were exiled to far reaches of the kingdom, with other colonists brought in to take their place. This forced migration of peoples also helped to spread Quechua (Kichwa in Ecuador), the language of the empire.
The Spanish Conquest
Pizarro’s advance was rapid and dramatic. His horseback-riding, armor-wearing, cannon-firing conquistadors were believed to be godlike, and although they were few in number, they spread terror among the local people. In late 1532 a summit meeting was arranged between Pizarro and Atahualpa. Although Atahualpa was prepared to negotiate with the Spaniards, Pizarro had other ideas. When the Inca arrived at the prearranged meeting place (Cajamarca, in Peru) on November 16, the conquistadors captured him and massacred most of his poorly armed guards.
Atahualpa was held for ransom,and incalculable quantities of gold, silver and other valuables poured into Cajamarca. Instead of being released when the ransom was paid, however, the Inca was put through a sham trial and sentenced to death. Atahualpa was charged with incest (marrying one’s sister was traditional in the Inca culture), polygamy, worship of false gods and crimes against the king, and he was executed on August 29, 1533. His death effectively brought the Inca Empire to an end.
When Atahualpa was executed, his war-general Rumiñahui was supposedly on his way to Cajamarca with large quantities of gold and treasure as ransom for the Inca. Legend has it that, upon hearing of Atahualpa’s death, Rumiñahui stashed the treasure in the impenetrable mountains of present-day Parque Nacional Llanganates; it has never been found.
Rumiñahui then continued to fight against the Spaniards for two more years. The general was so fierce that according to legend he dealt with a Spanish collaborator (and possible heir to Atahualpa’s throne) by murdering him, breaking all the bones in his body to bits, extracting them through a hole, and stretching the body – with head and appendages intact – into a drum. By the time Pizarro’s lieutenant, Sebastián de Benalcázar, had finally battled his way to Quito in late 1534, he found the city razed to the ground by Rumiñahui, who preferred to destroy the city rather than leave it in the hands of the conquistadors. Quito was refounded on December 6, 1534, and Rumiñahui was finally captured, tortured and executed in January 1535.
Despite the Inca’s short presence in Ecuador (just over 100 years), they left an indelible mark on the country. Quechua (known as Kichwa in Ecuador) was imposed on the population and is still spoken today by a quarter of all Ecuadorians. The Inca built a vast system of roads that connected Cuzco in the south with Quito in the north, and part of the ‘royal highway’ – the Inca trail to Ingapirca – can still be hiked today. Ingapirca itself is Ecuador’s most important Inca archaeological site and has splendid examples of the Inca’s mortarless stonework.
The Mythical Amazon
One of the most significant events of the early colonial period was the epic journey of Francisco de Orellanaalong the Río Napo. Orellana set off in December 1541 to search for food to bring relief to a hungry contingent of Gonzalo Pizarro’s men following a rigorous crossing of the Cordillera Oriental. Once Orellana caught sight of the lush promise of dense jungle lining the riverbanks, however, he quickly abandoned his original mission and set off in search of gold. These were the days when Spanish conquistadors spoke of legendary lost cities of gold, and Orellana was obsessed with finding El Dorado. ‘Having eaten our shoes and saddles boiled with a few herbs,’ Orellana wrote, ‘we set out to reach the Kingdom of Gold.’ It was a grueling journey that would leave half of his comrades dead.
On June 5, 1542, some five months after setting sail, Orellana’s boats reached a large village decorated with carvings of ‘fierce lions’ (probably jaguars). One of the villagers said that the carvings represented the tribe’s mistress and their ruler. When his boat later came under ferocious attack (following several raids by his own men on other riverside settlements), Orellana was convinced that female warriors were leading the onslaught. He later named the river after the Amazons, the mythical all-female warriors of ancient Greece. By the time he reached the Atlantic Ocean – some eight months after he began – he had given up his quest for gold. He became the first European to travel the length of the Amazon River, a feat not to be repeated for another 100 years. The event is still commemorated in Ecuador during the annual Aniversario del Descubrimiento del Río Amazonas (Discovery of the Amazon River), celebrated on February 12.
Werner Herzog's 1972 film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, was inspired by Orellana's fruitless quest and its subsequent documentation by chronicler Gaspar de Carvajal, although it borrowed from both Orellana's and Aguirre's separate voyages.
The Colonial Era
From 1535 the colonial era proceeded with no major uprisings by indigenous Ecuadorians. Francisco Pizarro made his brother Gonzalo the governor of Quito in 1540.
During the first centuries of colonial rule, Lima, Peru, was the seat of Ecuador’s political administration. Originally a gobernación (province), in 1563 Ecuador became the Audiencia de Quito (a more important political division), which in 1739 was transferred from the viceroyalty of Peru to the viceroyalty of Colombia (then known as Nueva Grenada).
Ecuador remained a peaceful colony throughout this period, and agriculture and the arts flourished. New products such as cattle and bananas were introduced from Europe, which remain important in Ecuador today. Churches and monasteries were constructed atop every sacred indigenous site and were decorated with unique carvings and paintings that blended Spanish and indigenous artistic influences. This so-called Escuela Quiteña (Quito School of Art), still admired by visitors today, left an indelible stamp on the colonial buildings of the time and Ecuador’s unique art history.
Life was comfortable for the ruling colonialists, but the indigenous people (and later the mestizos, people of mixed Spanish and indigenous descent) were treated abysmally under their rule. A system of forced labor was not only tolerated but encouraged, and by the 18th century there were several indigenous uprisings against the Spanish ruling classes. Social unrest, as well as the introduction of cocoa and sugar plantations in the northwest, prompted landowners to import African slave laborers. Much of the rich Afro-Ecuadorian culture found in Esmeraldas province today is a legacy of this period.
The Quito School of Art
As the Spanish colonized present-day Ecuador, religious conversion became the key to subduing the indigenous population and remaking the New World in a likeness of the Old. The most successful tool for conversion was art, whose storytelling power and visual representations had long served the Catholic Church for gaining believers. At first, sculptures and paintings were imported from Spain, but from the mid-16th century the Church set up guilds and workshops to train a local base of indigenous artisans. From these workshops blossomed one of the most important artistic genres in Latin America: the Escuela Quiteña (Quito School of Art).
The beauty of the Escuela Quiteña lies in its fascinating blend of indigenous concepts and styles and European art forms. The beliefs and artistic heritages of the artisans crept into their work. If you look closely at paintings in Quito’s many religious museums and churches, you’ll see a lot of non-European themes: Christ eating a plate of cuy (roast guinea pig), or the 12 apostles dining on humitas (a type of corn dumpling). Religious figures are often depicted with darker skin or stouter builds that reflect indigenous Ecuadorian body types. Inside churches, sun motifs and planetary symbols appear on ceilings that are decorated in what appear to be Moorish patterns.
The Escuela Quiteña became renowned for its mastery of the realistic. By the 18th century, artisans were using glass eyes and real hair and eyelashes in their sculptures. They added moving joints, inserted tiny mirrors into mouths to mimic saliva, and their accomplished polychrome painting (the use of multiple colors) became famous. Some sculptures, particularly those of the 18th-century carver Manuel Chili (nicknamed ‘Caspicara’), are so realistic they almost seem to be alive. Notable painters of the Escuela Quiteña include Miguel de Santiago (whose huge canvases grace the walls of Quito’s Monastery of San Agustín), Manuel Samaniego, Nicolás Goríbar and Bernardo Rodríguez.
After Quito gained independence from Spain in 1822, the religious art of the Escuela Quiteña lost both its potency and necessity. Today, Caspicara’s work can be seen in Quito’s Monastery of San Francisco and the Museo Nacional.
Independence
The first serious attempt to liberate Ecuador from Spanish rule was by a partisan group led by Juan Pío Montúfar on August 10, 1809. The group managed to take Quito and install a government, which lasted only 24 days before royalist troops (loyal to Spain) regained control.
Independence was finally achieved by Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan liberator who marched southward from Caracas, freed Colombia in 1819 and supported the people of Guayaquil when they claimed independence on October 9, 1820. It took almost two years before Ecuador was entirely liberated from Spanish rule. The decisive battle was fought on May 24, 1822, when one of Bolívar’s finest officers, Mariscal (Field Marshal) Antonio José de Sucre, defeated the royalists at the Battle of Pichincha and took Quito. This battle is commemorated at a stunningly situated monument on the flanks of Volcán Pichincha, overlooking the capital.
Bolívar’s idealistic dream was to form a united South America, and he began by amalgamating Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador into the independent nation of Gran Colombia. This lasted only eight years, with Ecuador becoming fully independent in 1830. In the same year a treaty was signed with Peru, drawing up a boundary between the two nations; this boundary is the one shown on all Ecuadorian maps prior to 1999. The border had been redrawn in 1942 after a war between Ecuador and Peru, but was not officially acknowledged by Ecuadorian authorities until a peace treaty was signed with Peru in late 1998.
Political Development
Following independence from Spain, Ecuador’s history unfolded with unbridled political warfare between liberals and conservatives. The turmoil frequently escalated to violence. In 1875 the church-backed, conservative dictator President García Moreno (who attempted to make Catholicism a requisite for citizenship) was hacked to death with a machete outside Quito’s presidential palace. In 1912 liberal President Eloy Alfaro, who attempted to undo much of García Moreno’s legacy, was murdered and burned by a conservative mob in Quito (ironically, Alfaro was transported to Quito via the Pacific Coast train line he helped pioneer). Rivalries between these factions continue to this day, albeit less violently. Quito remains the main center for the church-backed conservatives, while Guayaquil stands, as it has for centuries, on the side of more liberal and sometimes socialist beliefs.
Throughout much of the 20th century Ecuador’s political sphere remained volatile, though the country never experienced the bloodshed or brutal military dictatorships suffered by other Latin American countries. That’s not to say the military never took the reins of power, with the 20th century seeing almost as many periods of military rule as civilian rule. One president, José María Velasco Ibarra, was elected five times between 1934 and 1972 and was ousted by the military before he could complete any one of his terms. Ibarra wasn’t alone: in the 10 years between 1930 and 1940, 17 different presidents took a shot at leading Ecuador, not one of whom completed a term.
Yellow Gold to Black Gold
Until the 1970s Ecuador was the archetypal ‘banana republic,’ and the fruit was the country’s single most important export. In fact, Ecuador exported more bananas than any country in the world. Although bananas are a staple of the country’s economy today, they ceased being Ecuador’s sole export after the discovery of oil in the Oriente in 1967. By 1973 oil exports had risen to first place, and by the early 1980s they accounted for well over half of total export earnings. Oil undoubtedly boosted the economy, though politicians from the left, allied with indigenous-rights groups, say much of the largesse remained in the hands of a few controlling interests with little benefit to the many. The statistics support this claim, with the majority of the rural population at an equal – or lower – living standard than they experienced in the 1970s.
After oil was discovered, Ecuador began to borrow money, with the belief that profits from oil exports would enable the country to repay its foreign debts.But this proved impossible in the mid-1980s due to the sharp decline in Ecuador’s oil exports; world oil prices slumped in 1986, and in 1987 a disastrous earthquake wiped out about 40km of oil pipeline, severely damaging both the environment and the economy. The discovery of oil also opened up vast tracts of Ecuador’s Amazon Basin to exploration, affecting both the rainforest and the local indigenous tribes – some of whom had never before encountered outsiders.
Ecuador continues to rely on oil as its economic mainstay, but reserves are not as large as had been anticipated. Over-reliance on oil revenues has also wreaked havoc on the economy when the world price of oil collapses (as it did most recently in 2008).
The granting of mining concessions to foreign companies (Japan, Canada, China and Chile) has brought much controversy in recent years, as these concessions have most often been granted without a public discussion period. Groups such as DECOIN have rallied against these concessions, made possible by a loophole in the constitution which allows the president to open park lands to development.
Return to Democracy
The 1980s and early ’90s were a continuing struggle between conservatives and liberals, with corruption scandals weakening public confidence in the ruling elites. The contenders in the 1996 election were two firebrand politicians from Guayaquil, both known for their brashness. The candidate who won, Abdala Bucaram, was nicknamed ‘El Loco’ (The Madman) for his fiery, curse-laden style of oration and his penchant for performing at rock concerts as part of his campaign. Bucaram promised cheap public housing, lower prices for food staples and free medicine; but instead he promptly devalued Ecuador’s currency, the sucre, and increased living costs, and was often spotted carousing in nightclubs by Quito residents.
Within a few months massive strikes led by trade unions and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)paralyzed the country. Congress declared Bucaram ‘mentally unfit’ and terminated his presidency, and Bucaram fled to Panama.
After Bucaram was ousted, his vice president, Rosalía Arteaga, became Ecuador’s first female president, albeit for fewer than two days. Congress voted overwhelmingly to replace her with Fabián Alarcón, the head of congress. He led the government until 1998, when quiteño Jamil Mahuad of the Popular Democracy party was elected president.
Mahuad had his political savvy put to the test. The effects of a nasty El Niño weather pattern and the sagging oil market of 1997–98 sent the economy into a tailspin in 1999, the same year that shrimp exports dropped by 80% following devastating shrimp diseases. When inflation topped 60% – making Ecuador’s the worst in Latin America – the embattled president took drastic measures: he pinned Ecuador’s economic survival on dollarization, a process whereby Ecuador’s unstable national currency would be replaced by the US dollar.
Dollarization
Dollarization has been used successfully in a few other struggling countries, including nearby Panama (where the US dollar is called a balboa). But when President Mahuad declared his plan to dump the national currency, the country erupted in strikes, protests and road closures. On January 21, 2000, marches shut down the capital, and protesters took over the legislative palace, forcing Mahuad to resign.
The protesters were led by Antonio Vargas, Colonel Lucio Gutiérrez and former supreme court president Carlos Solorzano, who then formed a brief ruling triumvirate. Two days later – and largely due to the international pressure that followed Latin America’s first military coup in two decades – the triumvirate turned the presidency over to Vice President Gustavo Noboa.
Noboa went ahead with dollarization, and in September 2000 the US dollar became the official currency. Although only one year earlier 6000 sucres bought one dollar, people were forced to exchange their sucres at the dramatically inflated year 2000 rate of 25,000 to $1. Their losses were severe.
The 21st Century
Along with dollarizing the economy, Noboa also implemented austerity measures to obtain $2 billion in aid from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international lenders. At the end of 2000, gas and cooking-fuel prices sky-rocketed (largely because of dollarization) and the new year saw frequent strikes and protests by unions and indigenous groups. The economy finally stabilized, and Noboa left office on somewhat favorable terms.
After Noboa, former coup leader Lucio Gutiérrez, elected president in 2002, promised a populist agenda but insteadimplemented IMF austerity measuresto finance the country’s massive debt.Protests erupted in the capital, and in 2005 congress voted overwhelmingly to remove Gutiérrez (the third Ecuadorian president ousted in eight years), replacing him with Vice President Alfredo Palacio.
A political newcomer who referred to himself as a ‘simple doctor,’ Palacio soon turned his attention to the social problems his predecessor had abandoned. In order to fund health and education programs and kick-start the economy, Palacio announced he would redirect oil profits earmarked for paying the foreign debt. An essential partner in this endeavor wasRafael Correa, a US-educated economist, whom Palacio appointed as his finance minister and who later carried out even more aggressive social reforms – while also consolidating power – after becoming president in 2006.
Correa described himself as a humanist, a fervent Catholic of the left and a proponent of 21st-century socialism. After taking the reins, he ushered in a series of large-scale changes. A new constitution in 2008, approved by referendum, laid the groundwork for a new social archetype that increased spending on healthcare and the poor, gave more rights to indigenous groups, accorded new protections to the environment and even allowed civil unions for gay couples.
Ecuador has doubled social spending since 2006, investing $8.5 billion in education and $5 billion-plus in health care. More than 5500km of roads and highways have been built or repaired. A new disability program has helped 300,000 people, while the poorest now receive a monthly stipend. The poverty rate has fallen, declining by 9% between 2006 and 2011. Middle-class Ecuadorians have also benefited under programs such as a $5000 grant for first-time homebuyers.
One of Correa's biggest targets was the oil industry: he called for increased taxes on oil revenue to be spent on the Ecuadorian poor, and accused foreign oil companies operating in Ecuador of failing to meet current environmental regulations. He also criticized his predecessor Mahuad for adopting the US dollar as the national currency, and suggested Ecuador would return to the sucre when economically feasible. More recently Correa focused on creating a digital currency, but few entered the market. Supporters applauded Correa's attention to the poor and his focus on economic reform.
Meanwhile, critics described Correa as an aspiring version of the late Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's controversial left-wing president, who nationalized major industries such as telecommunications, and attempted to stay president in perpetuity (following a Venezuelan referendum removing term limits for public officials). Others said he was reneging on his promises to protect the environment, particularly when drilling for oil began in 2016 in Parque Nacional Yasuní, a region of staggering biodiversity in the Amazon.
Life After Correa
Ultimately Correa’s decade-long legacy will be a mixed one. While he united the country with new roads and communication lines, he accomplished much of this by borrowing billions of dollars after the price of petroleum plummeted in 2008. The outstanding lender, the Chinese government, is calling in these loans by demanding rights to Ecuador’s vast mineral and other resources,beginning with a massive hydroelectric project near coastal Manta which will dry up the nation’s highest waterfall for a few months per year. As in other nations, China brings its own workers for these projects, and it is reported there is an unhealthy relationship between the Ecuadorian and Chinese laborers, sometimes to the point of violence.In December 2016, Ecuadorian police detained Shuar leader Agustin Wachapá, who was leading protests against a large open-pit copper mine on tribal land in the Amazon.
Lenín Moreno, formerly Correa's vice president, was elected in May 2017. In an historic moment, Moreno became the only global head of state in a wheelchair, having been paralyzed in an armed robbery in 1998. He had done much for the disabled in Ecuador during his time as vice president, increasing spending on disabled services 50-fold, and was even nominated for the Nobel Prize in 2012.
Upon assuming office, Moreno took a stand against Correa's free-spending ways, leading to a bitter dispute between the former allies.
Correa’s legacy may also be tainted by a corruption scandalthat began playing itself out a few months after he left office. In September 2017 his former vice president Jorge Glas (former oil minister and until then, also VP under Lenín Moreno) was jailed after being implicated in a huge bribery scandal concerning the Brazilian company Odebrecht, which was involved in many of Ecuador’s massive infrastructure projects. Glas had been stripped of all his vice presidential powers the previous month by Moreno. The scandal, in fact, stretches across South America.
Tourism has been hit hard by the after-effects of the great earthquake of April 2016, which caused massive destruction along the coast (its epicenter was in Muisne) and resulted in nearly 700 deaths and thousands of injuries. Even more damaging, in the long term, was the sense of the nation as an international tourist destination, just one year after it poured millions into a 30-second Super Bowl ad aimed at that market. The quake, and misplaced fears about the ZIKA virus, had a negative impact on tourism in Correa’s final years which continu....
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https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/indigenous-peoples-ecuador-declare-support-national-mobilizations-exercise-self-determination
Quito, Ecuador—October 8, 2019 – Indigenous Peoples across Ecuador have mobilized against the central government’s neoliberal policies and extractive practices, as have workers unions, student unions and a diverse group of civil society. Our civil disobedience has included marches, road blocks, and the detention of military and police personnel accused of violence and aggression within Indigenous territories. Currently, over 20,000 Indigenous Peoples from the Andes to the Amazon are marching to the capital city of Quito in indefinite protest.
Our movement aims to reverse the Ecuadorian government’s closed-door agreement with the International Monetary Fund and protect our territories from the social, economic and environmental fallout of the accelerated extractive agenda that will follow. This is not simply about gasoline subsidies. The austerity measures of President Lenin Moreno will widen inequality and marginalization of Indigenous Peoples. Paired with the recent announcement of Ecuador to leave OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), they are clear indicators that the government will ramp up devastating oil, mining and hydroelectric projects in Indigenous territories. For centuries we have protected our lands in the mountains and the Amazon, and we will not allow Indigenous Peoples, indigenous territories and our global climate to pay the cost for the government’s mounting debt to China and international lenders.
These political decisions and policies were made in the capital without our consent or input, yet they affect our rights and our ability to survive. We have shown throughout Ecuador’s history that Indigenous Peoples have the power to shut down the country when our rights are put at risk and power is abused. Once again, we are putting our bodies and our lives on the line to protect our families, rights, cultures and territories, this time from the central government’s neoliberal assault.
We denounce the campaigns of misinformation promoted by the central government and by both national and international media outlets. Opportunists, both politicians and looters, are attempting to co-opt the Indigenous movement and distort our message. This inflames violence and division. We repudiate the violence, vandalism and looting by external actors who are not affiliated with our movement or goals. The government must reverse its declaration of a State of Emergency, which facilitates widespread police and military violence, arbitrary detentions and the suspension of fundamental rights.
We call on the Ecuadorian government to repeal the recently announced austerity measures, cancel the agreement with the International Monetary Fund and respect Indigenous Peoples’ decision to keep our territories free of extractive industries.
Read CONAIE and CONFENIAE’s statement in Spanish here.
For further information and interviews please contact via WhatsApp:
Andrés Tapía, CONFENIAE Communications, +593 98 446 5175
Apawki Castro, CONAIE Communications, +593 98 385 6491
Jaime Vargas, President of CONAIE, +593 96 092 1242
Marlon Vargas, President of CONFENIAE, +593 98 903 4035
---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_in_Ecuador
Indigenous peoples in Ecuador, also Native Ecuadorians or Native Americans, are the groups of people who were present in what became Ecuador before the Spanish colonization of the Americas. The term also includes their descendants from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present. Their history, which encompasses the last 11,000 years,[2] reaches into the present; 25 percent of Ecuador's population is of indigenous heritage, while another 70 percent is of mixed indigenous and European heritage.
:{:{}:
}:
- 1Migration
- 2Archaeological periods
- 3Paleo-Indians
- 4Origins of agriculture
- 5Pre-Inca era
- 6Inca conquest
- 7Spanish conquest
- 8Rubber boom
- 9Modern times
- 10See also
- 11References
- 12External links
The first inhabitants of the Americas migrated from Asia across the Beringia land bridge.
...
Political organization
The extended family, in which polygyny was common, was the basic unit of society. The extended family group is referred to by the Kichwa word "ayllu", although this type of organization predates the arrival of Quechua speakers. Two political systems were built on the basis of the ayllu: the curacazgo and the cacicazgo. Each curacazgo is made up of one or more ayllu. The Ecuadorian ayllus, unlike in the Southern Andes, were small, made up of only about 200 people, although the larger ones could reach up to 1,200 members. Each ayllu had its own authority, although each curaca also answered to a chief (cacique), who exercised power over the curacazgo. The cacique's power depended on his ability to mobilize manual labor, and was sustained by his ability to distribute highly-valued goods to the members of his curaca.
Religion
Local beliefs and practices co-existed those practiced regionally, which allowed each ethnic group to maintain its own religious identity while interacting, especially commercially, with neighboring groups. Some regional commonalities were the solar calendar, which marked the solstices and equinoxes, and veneration of the sun, moon, and maize.
Inca conquest
The Inca empire expanded into what later became Ecuador during the reign of Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, who began the northward conquest in 1463. He gave his son Topa control of the army, and Topa conquered the Quitu and continued coastward. Upon arriving, he undertook a sea voyage to either the Galápagos or the Marquesas Islands. Upon his return, he was unable to subdue the people of Puná Island and the Guayas coast. His son Huayna Capac, however, was able to subsequently conquer these peoples, consolidating Ecuador into "Tawantinsuyu", the Inca Empire.[16]
Many tribes resisted the imperial encroachment, in particular the Cañari in the south, near modern-day Cuenca,[17] and the Caras and the Quitu in the North. However, the Inca language and social structures came to predominate, particularly in the Sierra. To reduce the opposition to their rule, one of the Inca's tactics included uprooting groups of Quechua-speakers loyal to the empire and resettling them in areas that offered resistance, a system called mitma. The Saraguros in Loja province may have their origin from mitmas relocated from other parts of the Inca Empire.
Some scholars dispute the Inca heritage of indigenous people of Ecuador.[18]
Spanish conquest
In 1534, at the time of the arrival of the first columns of Spanish conquistadores, the population of the present day territories of Ecuador is believed to border the figure of one million inhabitants. This might have been a result of epidemics of smallpox and diphtheria that spread in the Andes after the first contacts with Spanish explorers and their livestock. According to early Spanish chronicles the Inca Huayna Capac died of smallpox and then the territories of Collasuyo and central Peru so a period of civil war for the control of the royal household between two brothers each an heir to the dominions of their respective maternal feudal lands.
Huáscar was a prince born to a noble family of Cuzco and Atahualpa was a son from a noble family of the Quitus. The quitus were a tribe that formed an alliance with the Incas during the conquest of Huayna Capac. Most important in this civil war was the participation of Huayna Capac generals on the side of Athaulpa's faction, probably due to the late sovereign wish.
Rubber boom
The 19th century marked a time in history when the need for rubber came into high demand in the world.[19] Many Western Territories including America wanted to produce Rubber Industries in desire to produce economic prosperity. They also expressed an alternative goal, which was to also make better the region they will be in partnership with by improving their land and their economic status as well.[19] Reasons as to why they decided to obtain partnership with the Amazonian region was for multiple reasons. One of the reasons was that the location was ideal. Two of the most high quality rubber trees grew in that region; the Hevea tree and the Castilloa. tree[20] the Hevea tree was only able to be used 6 month out of the year while the Castilloa was able to be used the whole year.[20] To begin the trading system, the Western territories began to obtain discourse with the Mestizos of the land which were known to be the more prestigious of the different groups residing in Ecuador. They became highly tied into the trading system that was created.
There was fast money involved in this system that attracted the Mestizos. Economic prosperity seemed promising. As the rubber industry flourished many other factors came to surface in the system of Rubber production. Because of the high demand for rubber at the time, the Mestizos who became known as the Caucheros (rubber barons) decided that they needed to obtain an abundant number of workers that would work for low wages.[19] The indigenous population soon came to mind because of a couple of factors. One was due to the fact that they seemed the best fit to perform the labor. They knew the lands on which they would work because of their long history of living on the land. They were well adapted to the climate and familiar with means of survival like hunting and gathering.[19] The enslavement of the Indigenous people soon became an epidemic. Natives were taken from their homes by a group called the Muchachos who were African men hired by the Caucheros to do their dirty work.[19] They were in turn forced to work in the rubber industries by fear and intimidation and were put on a rubber quota with time constraints and were expected to meet the demands.
If the quotas were not met they were punished. Punishments by the Muchachos were very severe and brutal. Common punishments including flogging, hanging, and being put into a cepo.[19] When the workers were put into a cepo they were chained in pain inflicting positions and left without food and water for an extended period of time.[19] More extreme punishments included the shooting workers if they tried to escape or became too ill to work.[19] The pay for their hard labor was minimal. They were put on what was called a debt-penoage where they had to work for a long period of time in order to gain funds to pay back debt they owned to the Caucheros for supplies that they were given for their daily tasks such as tools to work, clothes, and food.[19] The low compensation for their labor often led to working their whole life for the rubber barons. They usually received a small item that they were able to keep, like a hammock, and the rest was given straight to the employer.[19] There was very little Government intervention thanks to bribery that got local officials to overlook what was occurring and the fear of being attacked by the Indians.[19]The end of the Rubber Boom was in 1920 when the prices of rubber dropped. The enslavement of the Indigenous people ceased with the end of the rubber boom.
Modern times
Population and demographics
There is debate about the quantities of indigenous currently inhabiting Ecuador. Some elements of society, most famously the former President León Febres Cordero, have insisted that the indigenous make up no more than two million people. Historian Enrique Ayala Mora, too, estimates that the indigenous population is no more than sixteen percent.[21][page needed] Other organizations, such as CONAIE, while giving varying estimates in different years, tend to approximate closer to four million. The discrepancy arises from the ways in which they are counted: "[d]oes one consider them such on the basis of physical characteristics or whether they live in the Andean Indian world?"[22]
Approximately 96.4% of Ecuador's Indigenous population are Highland Quichuas living in the valleys of the Sierra region.[21][page needed] They are Quichua speakers and include the Caranqui, the Otavaleños, the Cayambi, the Pichincha, the Panzaleo, the Chimbuelo, the Salasacan, the Tungurahua, the Tugua, the Waranka, the Puruhá, the Cañari, and the Saraguro. Linguistic evidence suggests that the Salascan and the Saraguro may be the descendants of Bolivian ethnic groups transplanted to Ecuador in a mitma, or forced migration.
Coastal groups, including the Awá,Chachi, and the Tsáchila, make up 0.24% percent of the indigenous population, while the remaining 3.35 percent live in the Oriente and consist of the Oriente Quichua (the Canelo and the Quijos), the Shuar, the Huaorani, the Siona–Secoya, the Cofán, and the Achuar.
Politics
In 1986, indigenous people formed the first "truly" national political organization.[dubious – discuss][21]:xv The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) has been the primary political organization ever since, and has been influential in national politics, including the ouster of the presidents Abdalá Bucaram in 1997 and Jamil Mahuad in 2000.
In 1998, Ecuador signed and ratified the current international law concerning indigenous peoples, Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989.[23] It was adopted in 1989 as the International Labour Organization Convention 169.
Petroleum operations
The year 1978 marked the beginning of petroleum production in Ecuador.[24] Texaco is documented to be the primary international oil company that was given permission to export oil from the coast of Ecuador. This company managed the oil operation from 1971 to 1992.[25] The Ecuadorian government along with Texaco began to scout the Oriente in a joint business known as a consortium.[24] Major shipments of oil were put into action in 1972 after the Trans-Ecuadorian Pipeline was finished. In the years of production business in oil production increased rapidly and Ecuador soon became the second largest producer of oil in South America.[26]
Texaco's contract for oil production in Ecuador expired in 1992. PetroEcuador then took over 100% of the oil production management. 1.5 billion barrels of crude oil was reported to have been extracted while under the management of Texaco.[25] There were also reports of 19 billion gallons of waste that had been dumped into the natural environment with the absence of any monitoring or overseeing to prevent damages to the surrounding areas.[25] In addition there was a report of 16.8 million gallons of crude that was dispersed into the environment in relation to spillage out of the Trans-Ecuadorian pipeline.[25]
In the early 1990s a lawsuit led by Ecuadorian government officials of 1.5 billion dollars was presented against the Texaco company with claims that there was an immense pollution epidemic that led to the demise of many natural environments as well as an increase in human illnesses.[26] A cancer study was conducted in 1994 by the Centre for Economic and Social Rights which found a rise in health concerns in the Ecuadorian region.[26] it was found that there was a notably higher incidence of cancer in women and men in the countries where there was oil production present for over 20 years.[25] Women also reported increased rates in a copious number of physical ailments such as skin mycosis, sore throat, headaches and gastritis.[25]
The primary argument against these findings were that they were weak and biased. Texaco decided on jurisdiction in Ecuador. The case put against Texaco remained in the works for some time.In 2001, Texaco was taken over by Chevron, another oil company, which assumed the liabilitiesleft by the previous production.[26] On February, 2011 Chevron was found guilty after inheriting the case left by Texaco and was said to be required to pay 9 billion dollars in damages. This is known to be one of the largest environmental lawsuits award recorded.[27]
Ethnic Wage Gap in Ecuador
Ecuador has a history of Spanish colonization of indigenous people that were enslaved, abused, and exploited. Eventually the country adapted the French Neo-Lamarck ideology leading to “mestizaje.” This “mestizaje” began in the sixteenth century where white colonizers began to mix with indigenous to “improve” the indigenous race. Ecuador’s historical background has left the country with a very stratified social environment.[28] This is the nucleus of the stratification of different social classes in Ecuador. There have been many attempts to reduce such stratification such as making indigenous languages official in 1998. The Republic of Ecuador also self claimed itself plurinational and intercultural in 2008.[29] It is essential to understand the causes of such racial inequality in a given society in order to be able to approach the problem. Understanding the root of the problems also allows us to understand the existence or lack of public policy initiatives.[28] Structuralist explanations for such inequality is supported by both the minority and dominant groups. Although 19.5% of Ecuadorians believe the economic inequality between the races is due to insufficient work effort from minorities, 47.0% believe it arises from discrimination.[28]
Unfortunately, the widest gap of income inequality in the world is in Latin America.[28] The difference in economic division across ethnicities is a consequence of human capital and discrimination.[30] It can be concluded through research that indigenous people in Ecuador are predisposed to live in poverty and be discriminated against.[30] The percent of indigenous population in Ecuador that lives in poverty differs by 4.5 times that of the non-indigenous population.[30] Education is one of the greatest factors for such economical inequality in the country. The lack of education for many indigenous people makes it difficult for the ethnic group to overcome such poverty.
Unfortunately, the probability of indigenous people to stay in school is very low. It is evident that there is an existing difference in education between the ethnic groups. The indigenous population only has an average of 4.5 years of formal education, while non-indigenous population’s average of years is 8.[30] The minority group has a net secondary school enrollment rate of 14.0% and because of rural residence and work they have a much lower probability of staying in school.[30]
There is also a drastic social impact on Indigenous people mainly through exclusion. This racism raised the use of certain terminology such as “cholo” and “longo” which are threatening because they are not institutionalized to any official ethnic group. With such unhistorical and unstructured rise to the terminology, the terminology is more flexible when used and persistent.[29] The paternalistic system of ethnic discrimination transitioned to a more democratization of racial relations. Although there are no more “hacienda’s” (working systems where Indians were exploited for labor) and Indians now have a right to vote, there is still an everyday discriminatory challenge. Indians often feel vulnerable and predisposed to physical and verbal attacks, which cause them to be more reserved and avoid contact with whites. An indigenous witness claimed he was told to leave a restaurant because “no Indians [were] admitted to [that] locale”.[31] Racism can be seen such as travelling in public transportation, interactions in public spaces, and the yearning to be white from Indians.[31]
See also
- Dolores Cacuango, Ecuadorian indigenous rights activist
References
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no lnx
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ecuadors-battle-environmental-justice-against-chevron/
The Nation
ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM FOSSIL FUELS FEATURE JUNE 22-29, 2015 ISSUE
Ecuador’s Battle for Environmental Justice Against Chevron
For more than two decades, impoverished indigenous people have been seeking restitution from the oil giant for polluting their region.
By James North JUNE 2,2015
Quito—Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s popular president, does not mince words when he talks about the Chevron Corporation. In an interview with The Nation here recently, Correa accused the oil giant—the third-largest company in the United States, as measured by gross revenue—of “deliberately polluting” the Amazon rain forest in eastern Ecuador, of “shamelessly lying” to evade its legal responsibility to clean up, and of waging a ferocious international campaign “to destroy the reputation of our justice system and government.” In a wide-ranging, hourlong interview in the centuries-old presidential palace, Correa was intense and passionate as he spoke about how Texaco—which was taken over by Chevron in 2001—had dumped toxic waste into nearly 1,000 pits and spilled billions of gallons of oil-exposed water into a 1,700-square-mile area between 1972 and 1992. Correa said that Texaco could have chosen not to pollute. “Back then, better techniques [of waste disposal] already existed,” he said. “The techniques they used here were against the law in their own country. They weren’t interested in the human beings who lived in the Amazon region. To me, it is a question of racism.”
For more on Rafael Correa, see James North at TheNation.com.
Correa’s outspoken comments are just one of the latest developments in a massive international legal case that has pitted 30,000 poor Ecuadorans who live in the rain forest against a corporation that reported $19.2 billion in profits last year—more than half of Ecuador’s entire government budget. The battle has already lasted 22 years, spanned several countries on three continents, and shows no signs of ending anytime soon.
The American public is largely uninformed about this epic struggle, even though it’s as important as the dispute over the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The mainstream US media, when it hasn’t ignored the case, has often taken Chevron’s side, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) endorsing the company’s view that an alliance of Ecuadoran extortionists and crooked US lawyers is using the corrupt Ecuadoran court system to shake down an innocent corporation.
On closer inspection, the truth is totally different. If the plaintiffs finally win in the end, the rain-forest inhabitants will not just have their habitat start to be cleansed of the oil muck that oozes into their water supply, or enjoy improved health facilities to treat what they argue are elevated levels of cancer and other diseases. They will also have proved the success of an innovative legal strategy that recruits financial help in the rich developed world to provide at least a fighting chance against a corporate colossus like Chevron, which has already spent, by some estimates, $2 billion in its massive legal and propaganda campaign. But if Chevron prevails, it will be one more depressing proof that multinational corporations can defy national and international law and pollute with impunity.
Here, as briefly as possible, is what has happened so far:Texaco left Ecuador in 1992, having disposed of its wastes by methods that in some cases would have been illegal, and in others unethical, in the United States. The company dumped a combination of drilling muds, “formation water,” and actual crude oil into unlined waste pits—a procedure that Texas outlawed back in 1969. It released billions of gallons of oil-laced “produced” waters straight into the streams and lakes, even though standard procedure in the United States was to “reinject” the potentially toxic compounds safely deep underground. In 1995, Texaco agreed to “remediate” part of the mess, which it later said cost $40 million. In 1998, Ecuador’s government certified that the purported cleanup had been successfully completed, thus relinquishing its right to bring further legal action.
But popular movements in the rain forest that had already started organizing against Texaco’s pollution were outraged, charging that their government had sold them out. They brought their own lawsuit against Texaco in a New York federal court in 1993. Eventually, the plaintiffs would represent some 30,000 people, known as the afectados (affected ones) in Spanish.
In 2001, Chevron took over Texaco.The oil giant’s lawyers were already fighting to dismiss the case in the United States and move it to Ecuador. That same year, federal judge Jed Rakoff finally agreed, ruling that the case “had everything to do with Ecuador and nothing to do with the United States.” So, in 2003, the legal battle reopened in the eastern oil-frontier town of Lago Agrio. The Ecuadorans would soon be led by Pablo Fajardo, a young lawyer who had grown up in the region and lived through the contamination firsthand.
In 2007, Chevron, probably sensing that the case was going against it, sold all of its assets in Ecuador—which now meant that even if the plaintiffs won a judgment, they would struggle to collect; they would be forced to bring lengthy and costly legal action in other countries where the company still had operations. Finally, in 2011, the local court found in favor of the rain-forest residents. The original judgment was for $19 billion. Chevron appealed to higher courts, and the case ended up in Ecuador’s National Court of Justice, which in 2013 reduced the judgment to $9.5 billion. The amount may sound large, until you consider that another major oil corporation, BP, has already spent $27 billion to clean up its 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and could face an additional US fine of nearly $14 billion.
By then, Chevron’s intransigence was drawing some unwanted attention in the financial world. A respected oil analyst, Fadel Gheit of Oppenheimer & Co., said in 2013 that the litigation was damaging the corporation’s stock price and encouraged it to settle. New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who is responsible for some $540 million of Chevron stock in a state pension fund, had also pointedly suggested in 2011 that Chevron come to an agreement.
Instead, Chevron launched a publicity counterattack. The oil giant’s home page includes a prominent banner linking to its views on the case.It ran large ads in print, on television, and online—not to encourage readers to buy its products, but to boast in general terms about its purported social and environmental conscience.
Other tactics in Chevron’s onslaught were vicious, and historically unprecedented in their scope and intensity. In 2011, the corporation came back to a federal district courtroom in New York, this time before Judge Lewis Kaplan, and counter-charged a group of Ecuador’s lawyers and plaintiffs under the notorious RICO Actwith “racketeering” and “fraud.” The corporation’s main target was Steven Donziger, an American attorney who had been part of the Ecuadoran legal team almost from the start.
Here is where the Chevron/Ecuador legal saga becomes truly bizarre. After a three-year trial without a jury, a US judge, in a US courtroom, somehow found the predominantly Ecuadoran defendants guilty of fraud in the Ecuadoran courts, and then issued a legal injunction that would almost certainly prevent them from collecting on the judgment they’d won in Ecuador anywhere else in the world. Judge Kaplan did concede that “there is pollution” in Ecuador’s rain forest, and that “On that assumption, Texaco and perhaps even Chevron—although it never drilled for oil in Ecuador—might bear some responsibility.” But he insisted that his chief concern was the fraud that he decided had taken place in an Ecuadoran courtroom more than 3,000 miles away.
It’s little wonder that legal scholars have been scratching their heads over Kaplan’s verdict. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which had already reversed one of Kaplan’s earlier rulings in the Ecuador case, heard arguments from Donziger and his codefendants on April 20 of this year. Meanwhile, the Ecuadoran legal team remains undeterred: The plaintiffs are already taking action to collect their judgment in other countries. Canada, where Chevron has an estimated $15 billion in assets, is their first target, and a leading Canadian trial attorney is already fighting their case there.
Chevron’s ferocious counteroffensive didn’t stop in Judge Kaplan’s courtroom. Even though Ecuador’s government is not a party to the lawsuit, President Correa denounced, in our interview, what he called Chevron’s “multimillion-dollar publicity campaign” against his country and its judicial system. He also criticized Chevron for bringing a case against his government at the Permanent Court of International Arbitration in The Hague,where the corporation alleged that its rights under the Bilateral Investment Treaty between the United States and Ecuador had been violated. Chevron’s demands are brazen: It’s asking the Hague tribunal to either order the government of Ecuador to quash the lawsuit brought on behalf of the 30,000 rain-forest residents, or to financially compensate the company for any verdict against it.
Correa has visited the polluted Amazon region several times and criticized what he’s witnessed there. Chevron’s supporters contend that his comments reveal bias—and imply an interference in the judicial process. Correa was indignant at this assertion. “It is a monstrous lie,” he said. “Of course I spoke out about our citizens in the affected zone; they have all our sympathy. But it is an independent judicial system. When President Obama said that BP had to take responsibility for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, that did not mean he was interfering in court cases.” Correa concluded, with feeling: “If they can show that the president interfered in this case, I will resign the same day.”
Chevron doesn’t deny that there is substantial pollution in eastern Ecuador. But it blames Petroecuador, the state-owned oil company, which took over some operations after Texaco left in 1992. President Correa counters Chevron’s assertion by arguing that some of the most polluted waste pits are right alongside wells that have not pumped any oil since Texaco departed. “Just ask the people in the community: Who contaminated? I invite the readers of your magazine—the entire world—to come to Ecuador and put your hands in those waste pits. Your hands will come out black with oil.”
* * *
I had, in fact, already visited the polluted rainforest zone three years earlier. My guide back then was Donald Moncayo, a serious, even somber man, now in his 40s, who belongs to the Amazon Defense Coalition, a popular organization that represents the 30,000 rain-forest afectados. Over the years, he had led several hundred of what he calls “toxi-tours,” but he hasn’t gotten tired, or lost his indignation at Texaco for poisoning his home area. He seemed to know many of the waste pits by name; he said there were 953.
Our two-day tour started in Lago Agrio, the raw, ramshackle oil town 120 miles east of Quito that Texaco founded after it struck oil in the 1960s. Lago Agrio is a shabby place, with no sign that the oil boom had much local benefit. The courtroom in which Chevron first lost the historic decision is on the third floor of an unprepossessing building trimmed in yellow paint.
Here are the tools of Moncayo’s trade as a toxi-tour guide: a machete to cut through the forest underbrush; a spade for digging up the shallower waste pits; a coring device for taking soil samples at other dumps, where the waste is more deeply covered up; and rubber gloves for when he does unearth the oozing poison.
We set off into the rain forest. Oil pipelines of various sizes run alongside the roads; in one spot, you can count dozens of them, like strands of spaghetti. Moncayo uses the tour to rebut, point by point, Chevron’s main claims, such as blaming Petroecuador for the pollution. He started at Aguarico 2, a well that has been closed for years and that Petroecuador never operated. The oily residue is still floating on the surface. Then he marched down a steep slope to a stream, where you could see and smell the oil as well.
Chevron says that during the mid-1990s, Texaco “remediated”—cleaned up—some of the waste pits where it did acknowledge responsibility for the pollution. Moncayo went to Pozo Lago 2, which is near the modest wood-frame house where he lives with his wife and baby daughter. He pulled out his core sampler and set to work. After only a meter and a half, he struck some viscosity; before two meters, he hit heavy oil soak. “Texaco said they cleaned up here,” he said. “All they really did was dump some soil over the mess.” Less than 50 yards away, people were washing in a stream. (An irony is that the word in Spanish for the waste pits—piscinas—actually means “swimming pools.”)
Chevron’s supporters insinuate that the local people are the pawns of ambulance-chasing lawyers in the United States. Halfway through the tour, we crossed La Victoria River; people were doing their laundry as children splashed in the water. Moncayo explained that the fight against Texaco started there, back in 1986—not in the offices of US attorneys. He said that local people carried out a paro—a work stoppage and road blockade—to protest the pollution, then formed the grassroots organizations that launched the long campaign for environmental justice.
During the two days of the toxi-tour, Moncayo regularly asked by name about cancer sufferers all over the area. The 30,000 afectados cite five peer-reviewed scientific studies that show an increased incidence of cancer and other health risks in the area; one article in the International Journal of Epidemiology reported on the “statistically significant higher rates of cancer found in people living in oil-producing areas compared to people living in similar regions of the Ecuadorian Amazon unaffected by oil operations.” (Chevron funded its own peer-reviewed study, which claimed to find no such increased cancer risk.) As Moncayo pointed out, “Our local hospital is not capable of diagnosing cancer properly, much less treating it. So we really don’t know how many cases there have been.” Some cancer patients have to travel all the way to Quito, or even farther, for treatment.
Moncayo emphasized that the legal case is not about winning cash payments. “None of us is going to get a check,” he said. “The damages will be used for environmental repair, not individual indemnifications. We have discussed this all in our Assembly of Affected People. The money will be used to genuinely clean up the piscinas and to set up a proper hospital to treat our cancer patients.”
The final stop on the toxi-tour was the Sacha 41 oil well, which Moncayo said had been truly fixed. You see a deep excavation, from which tons of earth had evidently been removed and scoured, rather than waste covered up by spreading a few feet of soil over it. “Only 28 of the 953 pits have been remediated like this,” Moncayo told me. “This is what must happen all over our region.”
* * *
Burt Neuborne, 74, is a nationally respected human-rights attorney who is also a professor at the New York University Law School. He’s appealing on behalf of Hugo Gerardo Camacho Naranjo and Javier Piaguaje Payaguaje, two of the Ecuadoran defendants who got snared in Chevron’s “racketeering” case against Steven Donziger in Judge Kaplan’s New York courtroom. Neuborne declines to comment publicly while the Chevron/Ecuador case is pending before the federal appeals court in Lower Manhattan, where he appeared on April 20 on behalf of his clients. But his vigorous, closely reasoned, and biting arguments are publicly available in the two appellate briefs he has filed. He apparently finds it hard to hide his astonishment at Judge Kaplan’s verdict.
Neuborne notes that Kaplan’s decision included a sweeping indictment of Ecuador’s entire judicial system, but he reminds the appeals court that it was actually Chevron that argued hard and successfully back in the early 2000s to transfer the case to Ecuador. Neuborne writes that “scarcely a decade ago,” Chevron fought “to send the case to Ecuador by swearing that its courts were fully capable of resolving this dispute justly.” He argues that Chevron should not be permitted to get away with shopping around for a more sympathetic venue. In passing, he also notes that Chevron has not produced “an iota of evidence” suggesting that President Correa has interfered in the case.
Neuborne reserves some of his most compelling language for Chevron’s star witness, a disgraced former judge in Ecuador named Alberto Guerra, who testified in Kaplan’s New York courtroom that Donziger and Fajardo had agreed to pay a $500,000 bribe to let them ghost-write the Ecuadoran trial judge’s final opinion. Judge Kaplan accepted Guerra’s testimony as convincing.
Neuborne is scathing in response. He notes that Chevron admitted in court that it had given Guerra cash and benefits that added up to $2 million, including relocating his family to the United States. Neuborne’s appeal argues: “The uncorroborated word of Alberto Guerra, a conceded liar and cheat who was paid at least $2 million by Chevron for his intensely rehearsed testimony (Guerra met with Chevron’s lawyers at least 53 times to prepare his testimony), cannot possibly be deemed clear and convincing evidence of judicial bribery…. If such thin, uncorroborated testimony by a conceded liar and crook justifies a finding of judicial bribery, no verdict (or judge) is safe from corrupt collateral attack.”
Neuborne observes that Judge Kaplan was forced to acknowledge that pollution had taken place in the Ecuadoran rain forest, even though he ignored the extent of the environmental poisoning. His brief asserts that “the District Court’s preoccupation with Mr. Donziger’s alleged wrongdoing in the Ecuadorian trial court cannot erase the independent legal rights of thousands of innocent inhabitants of the environmentally ravaged areas….”
* * *
To hear Chevron’s side of the story, I offered to visit the oil giant’s world headquarters, a leafy 92-acre campus in the San Francisco Bay Area.The corporation declined my request, but Morgan Crinklaw, whose job title is “manager, issues management communications,” did answer my questions by e-mail. In response to Correa’s claim that Chevron is waging a “multimillion-dollar publicity campaign” against Ecuador and its judicial system, Crinklaw said: “If President Correa has evidence to support his claims, he has yet to present it….” And in response to the claim that Texaco “deliberately polluted” the rain forest, Crinklaw answered: “President Correa’s rhetoric is nothing more than an effort to evade his government’s own responsibility for addressing the environmental, social and economic needs of the people of the Amazon.” I asked him how much Chevron had paid ex-judge Guerra; if the company was still paying him; and whether he could put me in touch with Guerra. Crinklaw’s complete response: “In his sworn declaration to the U.S. court, Judge Guerra testified under oath that he was not being compensated for his testimony.” Crinklaw didn’t answer my query as to why Chevron had sold all its assets in Ecuador.
Steven Donziger, the American lawyer who is the main target of Chevron’s counterattack, lives on New York’s Upper West Side. In person, he is tall and intense, but also friendly and open. He said that his ongoing status as a defendant in the racketeering case meant that he would prefer to speak on the record by e-mail.
Donziger commenced by pointing out: “Since the legal case began 22 years ago, we estimate that Chevron has spent at least $2 billion to pay at least 60 law firms, 2,000 lawyers, 200 private investigators, dozens of lobbyists and at least eight different public-relations firms. Most of that amount has been spent in the past four years as part of an unprecedented retaliation campaign designed by Chevron management to cover up the company’s misconduct from its own shareholders, and to silence anybody who helped to hold the company accountable for its wrongdoing and fraud in Ecuador.”
(I asked Chevron spokesman Crinklaw, “How much does Chevron estimate that it has spent so far on this legal case? How many attorneys has Chevron used?” His answer: “We have not disclosed the resources that we have dedicated to defending ourselves in this case. The amount of resources we have expended is commensurate with the level of fraud perpetrated against the company.”)
Donziger contrasts Chevron’s bitter resistance with the actions of BP after its 2010 disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. “It is instructive to compare Chevron’s model of perpetual litigation in the Ecuador matter with BP’s response,” he wrote. “In the immediate aftermath of that spill, BP created a $20 billion fund to compensate its victims without so much as a trial.”
The central mystery in this epic battle, noted by many who have followed the case over more than two decades, is simply this: Why didn’t Chevron cut its losses and settle long ago, avoiding the expenses and the damaging publicity of the endless intercontinental litigation? Donziger argues that the case is about more than just Ecuador’s contaminated rain forest. He believes that a victory for the rain-forest plaintiffs would set an important precedent: It would prove the success of a business model that can inspire other communities around the world to confront Chevron and other multinational corporations with some chance of success.
Donziger uses the expression “monetize hope” to describe this new business model. He explains that the affected Ecuadoran communities could never have financed legal action on their own—“not even the filing fee for the original lawsuit.” So he and others found investors around the world: American law firms, hedge funds, and other backers. “When there is a recovery on the judgment,” he explained, “many of these individuals and entities will receive their investment back plus a modest percentage of the overall recovery. This is just like thousands of other contingency-fee cases filed every year in the United States and around the world.
“What is unusual about this one,” he continued, “is that it involves indigenous groups in Ecuador. These folks usually don’t figure out how to access funds and lawyers to carry on year after year and ultimately win against a big oil company and its army of sophisticated lawyers, lobbyists, political consultants, and public-relations propagandists.”
Donziger emphasized that the fight against Chevron concerns more than just money: “Chevron is trying to kill off the idea that impoverished indigenous groups and lawyers can pool their talents and resources like we have to take on Big Oil and be successful.”
* * *
On April 20, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals in Lower Manhattan heard oral arguments in Chevron Corporation v. Steven Donziger, et al. Chevron was represented by a phalanx of corporate lawyers headed by Theodore Olson, solicitor general of the United States in the George W. Bush administration. Olson continued the attack against Rafael Correa and Ecuador’s entire legal system, asserting that “the president of Ecuador has laid his hands on this case.” As Donziger looked on in the visitors’ gallery, attorneys for him and the Ecuadoran rain-forest plaintiffs vigorously countered these arguments; Neuborne charged that the decision in Judge Kaplan’s lower court “stands on sand.”
Later, Donziger met the press outside the courtroom. “I’m as strong as I’ve ever been,” he said. “I represent the people of Ecuador, who will continue to fight to get this valid judgment enforced, to force Chevron to comply with the law. This case is not about Steven Donziger; it’s about the people of Ecuador. The people of Ecuador will continue to fight with all the tools at their disposal. This battle will continue.”
James North has reported from Africa, Latin America, and Asia for four decades. He lives in New York City.
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new 320 flooding
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuadorian%E2%80%93Peruvian_territorial_dispute_of_1857%E2%80%931860
war between Ecuador and Peru took place between 1857 and 1860. The dispute began when Ecuador attempted to sell Amazon basin land claimed by Peru in order to settle a debt with British creditors. When diplomatic relations between the two countries broke down, prior to the fragmentation of the Ecuadorian government into several competing factions, the Peruvian government ordered a blockade of Ecuador's ports in order to force the cancellation of the sale, and the official acknowledgement of Peruvian ownership of the disputed territories. By late 1859, control of Ecuador was consolidated between General Guillermo Franco, in the city of Guayaquil, and a provisional government in Quito headed by Gabriel García Moreno. Peruvian President Ramón Castilla sailed to Guayaquil with several thousand soldiers in October 1859, and negotiated the Treaty of Mapasingue with General Franco in January 1860. The signing of the treaty indicated Ecuadorian compliance with all of Peru's demands, and temporarily marked the end of the territorial dispute between the two countries. However, in September 1860, the forces of the provisional government, commanded by García Moreno and General Juan José Flores defeated Franco's government at the Battle of Guayaquil, ending the civil war in Ecuador. The new government disavowed the Treaty of Mapasingue, followed shortly afterwards by its Peruvian counterpart; this re-opened the territorial dispute.
The dispute is sometimes referred to as the Ecuadorian–Peruvian War of 1859, due to the temporary occupation of Ecuadorian territory by Castilla's forces upon arriving in Guayaquil. No fighting took place between the troops of the two countries within the duration of the dispute, although a detachment of Peruvian forces pledged by Castilla in the Treaty of Mapasingue was involved in the later Battle of Guayaquil.
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Ecuadorian debt situation
During its war of independence from Spain, the government of Gran Colombia had incurred a number of debts to private European creditors. Its three daughter states: Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, split the debts amongst themselves. In 1837, Ecuador assumed responsibility for 21.5 percent[1] of the debt.[2] In the 1850s, a committee of holders of Latin American bonds organized itself and sent several representatives to Ecuador to arrange settlement of the debt.[1] On September 21, 1957, George S. Pritchett, representing the Ecuadorian Land Company, Ltd.[3] signed a treaty with Ecuadorian Minister of Finance Don Francisco de Paula Icaza, that gave the creditors rights to several territories in Esmeraldas; several more on the shores of the Zamora river; one million quarter sections in the canton of Canelos; as well as 410,200 quarter sections near the Cañar river: a total of 2,610,200 quarter sections, at a value of £566,900.[1][4] Ecuadorian sovereignty over the lands would be preserved, but all activities carried out there would be tax-exempt for a period of 15 years.[1] This was not the first time that the Ecuadorian government had attempted to settle debts by transferring title over part of its territory.[2]
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:{:{ :(style="background-color:#eaf3ffff"):}:In some sources, Pritchett is referred to as [chargé d'affaires of Britain, suggesting that the British government was somehow involved; according to Elías Murguía & Nieto Vélez (p. 492), the British Crown had no part in the territorial dealings; the committee was a private corporation, not public entity.]}:
dad?
Explorations in Ecuador in the Years 1856 and 1857 Author(s): George James Pritchett Source: The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, Vol. 30 (1860), pp. 64-75 Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1798288 Accessed: 16-03-2020 20:04 UTC
https://archive.org/details/jstor-1798288
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page 103 ec land also oil co
https://books.google.com/books?id=ts5lKWho2YwC&pg=PA103
1939 attmpt to resettle jews vienna vets?
Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust
By Henry L. Feingold
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1888?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/706443/summary
Colonialist Attitudes in Nineteenth-Century Latin America ...muse.jhu.edu › article › summary
by A Aliaga-Buchenau - ?2010 - ?Cited by 1 - ?Related articles
Jan 25, 2019 - His job with the Ecuadorian Land Company makes the company's goals ... Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 71 The Latin Americanist, March 2010 and to ...
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9420819.pdf
Race, class and national identity in black Ecuador: Afro ... - Corecore.ac.uk › download › pdf
by D Dixon - ?Cited by 1 - ?Related articles
Jan 4, 1977 - context, have severely limited the social mobility of Afro-Ecuadorians. The manifestation ... were made to the Ecuadorian Land Company.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ecuador#Early_20th_century
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see chevron boutrous dunn gibson
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https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44821726 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quijos_Canton .
..Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the region had been widely farmed by Quijos peoples. Maize was cultivated and there was very little tree pollen to be found - the valley had been cleared for agriculture. Once the Spanish arrived, things changed abruptly. A spike in charcoal in the soil sample coincided with historical records of an uprising against Spanish rule in the mid-16th century.Afterwards, a sharp increase in grass pollen gave way to evidence of the forest slowly returning. Nature was reclaiming the valley, and the people who had inhabited it for at least 1,000 years were gone.
By the time the 19th century tourists wrote their accounts, the cloud forest had been repopulated by many of the same species that had occupied the area around 40,000 years earlier, before the first humans arrived in South America.The nearby town of Baeza, previously home to about 11,000 inhabitants, was reduced to just a few families."So you went from something that was quite a large population centre to almost completely empty... there was certainly a massive depopulation of the indigenous peoples there," says Dr Loughlin."I still believe it's severely underestimated the impact that European colonisation had on the indigenous population," he added....
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EB colonial period
During much of the colonial period, what is now Ecuador was under the direct jurisdiction of the law court (audiencia) of Quito and ultimately under the rule of the Spanish crown. Spanish culture was spread primarily by religious orders and male Spanish colonists.In the Sierra, the Spaniards established a colony of large estates worked by Indian peons. Settlements included semiautonomous Indian villages and Spanish and mestizo administrative and religious centres such as Quito, Ambato, and Cuenca. The making of rough textiles in primitive sweatshops was the only industry. The development of Roman Catholic religious establishments provided for the flowering of Baroque architecture, sculpture in wood and stone, painting, music, and other arts and crafts.In the tropical Costa, much of the population died as a result of introduced diseases, and the area remained unhealthy until the advent of modern medicine. As a result, the coast was somewhat neglected during the colonial period, although there was some shipbuilding and exporting of cacao (as cocoa beans) from the port of Guayaquil. The small coastal population of slaves, free blacks, and mixed ethnicities, with plenty of vacant land and less coercion of labour, developed a culture very different from that of the Sierra.In the Oriente, the region on the eastern slopes between the Andes and the headwaters of the Amazon, large populations of Shuar and other indigenous people successfully repelled European invaders; however, Jesuits and other missionaries were able to spread both Christianity and the Quichua language.
The Spaniards used Quichua as a language of evangelization—at one period missionaries were required to know the language—and continued to spread it orally by means of Quichua speakers who travelled with them in further conquests.The country’s fourth major subdivision, the Galapagos Islands, were little more than pirate nests during the colonial period. They were to achieve world fame in the 19th century, because it was there that Charles Darwin made a major portion of the observations that led to his theories on evolution and his On the Origin of Species.The people of Quito, the Ecuadoran capital, claim that it was the scene of the first Ecuadoran patriot uprising against Spanish rule (1809). Invading from Colombia in 1822, the armies of Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre came to the aid of Ecuadoran rebels, and on May 24 Sucre won the decisive Battle of Pichincha on a mountain slope near Quito, thus assuring Ecuadoran independence.
Early national history, 1830–c. 1925
Ecuador’s early history as a country was a tormented one. For some eight years it formed, together with what are now the countries of Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela, the confederation of Gran Colombia. But on May 13, 1830, after a period of protracted regional rivalries, Ecuador seceded and became a separate independent republic....Problems of the early 20th century
The liberals remained in office, but the real power continued to rest in the hands of the wealthy merchants and bankers of Guayaquil. During World War I and the short boom that followed it, this clique further extended its influence and diversified its capital with a view to controlling the agriculture of the coastal plain. Cacao was the dominant export crop, as in the colonial period, but sugar and rice became increasingly important. A depression followed in the early 1920s. The price of food increased, and exports in general declined. The sucre—the national unit of currency—fell rapidly in value. At the same time, the country’s cacao plantations became infected with a fungus that causes a malformation known as witches’-broom, and production sagged. These crises brought urban discontent, the formation of trade unions in Guayaquil, riots, and massacres by the army. Hundreds died during riots and shootings in November 1922. In 1925 the army entered this turbulent situation, claiming that it wished to restore national unity and blaming many of the country’s problems on the merchant bankers of Guayaquil. Unfortunately, the 1925 revolution brought little change to Ecuador’s social and economic structures.
Modern history
The period between 1925 and 1948 was one of greater turbulence than Ecuador had ever known. Increasing involvement in the world market and in international politics meant that the country could no longer escape entanglements and the consequences of world ideological conflicts. Yet during this crucial period, Ecuador’s internal disunity prevented the modernization of its social structure, land tenure system, education, and communications. Thus, the country was badly equipped to face the demands of the age. Economic development and loss of territory in the 1940s
Ecuador was still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression when it became involved in World War II. It sided with the Allies and allowed the United States to build military bases on its territory, but it played little direct part in the war. Under Pres. Carlos Arroyo del Río, Ecuador drew some benefit from the higher prices for raw materials caused by the war, and the early years of the war were relatively prosperous and tranquil. World War II had a serious secondary effect on the country, however. The large Amazonian territories claimed by Ecuador had never been effectively controlled by the government; much of the area was occupied by indigenous groups. Dating back to the 16th century, Peruvians had increasingly settled along the Amazon and its tributaries. In July 1941, after long diplomatic bickering and a series of border incidents, the Peruvian army invaded, seized much of the disputed Amazonian area, and devastated El Oro provincia (province). The Ecuadoran forces, poorly trained and equipped, were easily defeated, and the disgrace caused the overthrow of Arroyo del Río.
The United States and the other major powers were too preoccupied with World War II to allow such small conflicts to destroy Allied unity or to disrupt the production of vital raw materials. A peace conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1942 forced Ecuador to relinquish its claims to much of the Amazonian region. Subsequently, Ecuador repeatedly attempted to reopen the question, claiming that the Protocol of Rio did not establish precise borders and that the new borders were therefore invalid. This constant irredentism was used repeatedly by demagogues and ultranationalists, who distracted attention and effort from urgent internal problems. Domination of Velasco Ibarra after World War IIPolitics and government after World War II presented contradictions. Ecuador enjoyed a long period of constitutional government and relatively free elections following the presidency of the PLR leader Galo Plaza (1948–52). There were also two long interludes of military government (1963–66; 1972–79), but the period was dominated by one of Latin America’s great caudillos, José María Velasco Ibarra. Velasco Ibarra, who died in 1979, was president of Ecuador five times but completed only one of these terms.
He seemed able to win any election, such was his popularity with the masses, but his terms of office were marked by sudden reversals in policy, contradictory economic programs, personal outbursts, temporary suspensions of civil liberties, and military interventions. Some critics claimed that Velasco Ibarra drew support from communist groups; others said he was the puppet of powerful business groups in Guayaquil. But neither these nor other groups were able to control the erratic Velasco Ibarra for long. His political presence may have inhibited the development of coherent political parties and programs for changing the country’s antiquated social and economic structure, but his personal appeal cut across parties and ideologies. The traditional parties—the PLR and the PC—were thrown into disarray by his incursions, and the growth of newer parties, such as the Ecuadoran Socialists and the Social Christians, was retarded. Opponents alleged that Velasco Ibarra made economic progress impossible because constructive measures undertaken by previous governments were halted or reversed by the Velasco Ibarra interludes.Ecuador from the late 20th centuryAfter Velasco Ibarra’s last fall from power, in 1972, military officers ruled for some seven years before handing over the government to a constitutionally elected (July 16, 1979) civilian president. The civilian and military governments of the 1970s had not developed a firm policy for dealing with the oil boom that occurred in that decade. The boom increased the size and wealth of the middle class, led to the building of roads, quays, pipelines, and other infrastructure, and caused severe inflation. No basic structural reforms took place, however, and the poor suffered the effects of inflation but reaped few of the benefits of the oil boom.
Velasco Ibarra’s death and the withdrawal of the military officers from government allowed the country to return to an elected civilian government and a new constitution in 1979. Jaime Roldós Aguilera, a young social democrat, was elected president on a reformist platform. He promised greater social equality and a more equitable distribution of oil industry profits, but he was unable to manage the legislature and was soon at odds with his own party, the Concentration of Popular Forces. His popularity increased after a border skirmish with Peru in early 1981, but he was killed in an airplane crash later that year. His successor was Osvaldo Hurtado Larrea of the small Christian Democratic party. The economy, depressed by the drop in world oil prices, spiraled downward with accompanying high inflation and a depreciating currency. León Febres Cordero, a congressman from Guayaquil, was elected president in 1984. His free-market economics and pro-U.S. foreign policy drew Ecuador into closer alliance with the U.S. administration of Pres. Ronald Reagan, but Febres Cordero was never popular in Ecuador. Oil prices continued to fall, and his troubles with the National Congress and the military led to calls for his resignation and, on one occasion, to his being kidnapped by air force personnel for half a day, until he agreed to release one of their leaders.
In March 1987 he suspended interest payments on Ecuador’s $8.3 billion foreign debt after an earthquake destroyed part of a major oil pipeline. Left-wing opponent Rodrigo Borja Cevallos was elected to the presidency in 1988, but he seemed to have few solutions to the steadily worsening economic crisis. His term was marked by a major national uprising in 1990, with Indian groups demonstrating in favour of such issues as land reform; the uprising and subsequent protests pushed the Ecuadoran government to recognize the land rights of these indigenous groups and address their other concerns. In 1992 Sixto Durán Ballén was elected president. He brought the government budget into balance, reduced trade barriers, brought Ecuador into the World Trade Organization, and encouraged foreign investment. The benefits of his accomplishments, however, were somewhat offset by conflict: in early 1995, the long-simmering boundary dispute with Peru erupted in a border war, leading to a standoff that persisted until a peace accord was signed on October 26, 1998. The country was left with a crippling war debt. From the mid-1990s to the early 21st century, Ecuador experienced several years of political upheaval, during which time many individuals served as president. Populist leader Abdalá Bucaram Ortíz was elected president in 1996;
however, he became increasingly unpopular because of his erratic and controversial behaviour, and in early 1997 Congress removed him from office and replaced him with Fabián Alarcón Rivera. In elections held in 1998, Quito mayor Jamil Mahuad Witt was elected president. Early in his term, Mahuad was confronted with a serious economic crisis that peaked in 1999. His unpopular austerity measures, implemented to address the crisis, and high rates of inflation resulted in public demonstrations against his leadership. In 2000 Mahuad made perhaps his most unpopular decision—to adopt the U.S. dollar as Ecuador’s currency. This proposal proved to be his undoing, and shortly thereafter he was removed from the presidency in a coup engineered by indigenous leaders and some members of the military, including Col. Lucio Gutiérrez Borbua.
The coup leaders eventually agreed to let Vice Pres. Gustavo Noboa Bejerano ascend to the presidency, which effectively ended the coup. Noboa followed through with Mahuad’s decision to convert Ecuador’s currency to the dollar, despite the plan’s unpopularity. However, this conversion, as well as a rise in oil prices, helped stabilize the economy in 2001. The beginning of the 21st century found Ecuador struggling with many of the same issues as in previous decades: political upheaval, social unrest due to dissatisfaction with indigenous rights and economic policies, and poor economic performance. Former coup leader Gutiérrez stood in the 2002 presidential elections and won, taking office in 2003. He made some attempts at economic reform, but he did not have the cooperation of the National Congress and was initially limited in his success. Gutiérrez was removed from office in April 2005 and replaced with Vice Pres. Alfredo Palacio. Rafael Correa was elected president in November 2006 as an independent leftist, with oil policy, poverty, debt, and relations with the United States as the main campaign issues.
Correa, an ally of populist Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez and other left-leaning leaders, strengthened state control over the country’s extensive oil resources, increased spending on social programs, and diminished ties to U.S. development organizations. In early 2008 he broke off diplomatic relations with Colombia after that country’s forces raided a guerrilla camp inside Ecuador. Correa also received support from the majority of voters for his plan to devise a new constitution to fight long-standing corruption in Ecuador’s National Congress. Gregory W. KnappMurdo J. MacLeodA draft constitution was approved by a special Constituent Assembly in July 2008, and more than 60 percent of Ecuadoran voters backed the new constitution in a referendum held in September. When the constitution entered into force in October 2008, the Constituent Assembly assumed the duties of the legislative branch, pending the election of the new National Assembly outlined in the constitution. The new constitution was the 20th since the country gained independence in 1830, and it reflected many of Correa’s leftist ideals, including a ban on foreign military bases, the allowance of same-sex marriage, free education through the college level, social security benefits for unpaid domestic workers, and greater national control over the oil and mining industries.
Moreover, it gave broad powers to the president and, most notably, allowed the president to serve up to two consecutive four-year terms. Critics of the new constitution accused Correa of giving the government too much control and aligning himself too much with Chávez. Correa won another four-year term, receiving more than 50 percent of the vote in the April 2009 presidential elections (it was ruled that his tenure in office prior to the promulgation of the new constitution did not count as a term under that document). In July the newly elected National Assembly convened for its first session. Correa’s hold on power was threatened on September 30, 2010, when factions of the military and the national police—responding to the president’s austerity measures in general and to cuts in benefits for public servants in particular—staged protests that escalated into a virtual coup attempt. Correa was addressing protesting police when he was injured by tear gas and taken to a hospital that was quickly besieged by police. He was rescued by the military (whose leadership remained loyal) and returned to the presidential palace as order was restored. By May 2011 Correa was firmly back in control, his presidential powers having been extended by approval of a 10-issue referendum that included authorization for him to appoint a commission to overhaul the judicial system and to direct the National Assembly to form a commission (reporting to him) that would regulate media content. In August 2012 Ecuador granted political asylum to Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, who had been living under Ecuador’s protection in its embassy in London since June, having exhausted appeals under the British legal system to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.
Correa secured another term as president in February 2013, when he was reelected in a landslide, capturing nearly 58 percent of the popular vote, a margin of more than 30 percent over the next closest competitor in a field of eight major candidates. In 2014 a new crescendo was reached in a long ongoing legal battle that had led an Ecuadoran judge in 2011 to order the Chevron Corporation to pay $18.2 billion for environmental damage done to the Amazonian Lake Agrio region where oil producer Texaco (taken over by Chevron in 2001) had been active. The Ecuadoran Supreme Court upheld this judgment in 2012 (though it reduced the compensation for the Amazonian residents to $9.5 billion); however, Chevron won several subsequent legal victories in its bid to avoid paying compensation, most notably the March 2014 decision by a U.S. court that found that the Amazonian plaintiffs’ legal team (led by an American lawyer) had used “fraudulent evidence” and paid bribes to obtain its favourable rulings in the Ecuadoran courts.The balance in the battle shifted again in Ecuador’s favour in September 2015 when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Ecuador could use the Canadian legal system to pursue redress from Chevron.
In the first half of 2015, Ecuadorans repeatedly took to the streets en masse to protest Correa’s government’s proposal to impose an inheritance tax of 77.5 percent and a real-estate capital gains tax of 75 percent. Protests were also more broadly aimed at what many Ecuadorans saw as the dictatorial style of Correa, whose popularity waned as his government’s largesse was reined in as a result of dramatically declining oil revenues. Correa withdrew the tax proposals in advance of Pope Francis I’s visit to Ecuador in early July. In December 2015, however, the National Assembly, controlled by Correa’s party, adopted 15 amendments to the constitution, including the removal of term limits for public office as of 2021, paving the way for Correa to seek reelection indefinitely. The changes to the constitution, which prompted a new round of street protests, also included the classification of communications as a “public service,” allowing the government to further extend the control of the media that it had begun to exert in the previous few years. A magnitude-7.8 earthquake that shook the Pacific coast of Ecuador on April 16, 2016, caused widespread destruction and hundreds of deaths in the northwestern part of the country. The quake was centred about 17 miles (27 km) south-southeast of Muisne and roughly 100 miles (160 km) west of Quito. It was the worst such event in decades—recalling the powerful earthquake that hit the coast of Ecuador and Colombia in 1979 and sparked a tsunami that took more than 600 lives and the 1987 earthquake in which more than 1,000 individuals died. After growing at an average rate of about 4 percent per year between 2006 and 2014, GDP in Ecuador bottomed out in 2015 as the toll taken by falling world oil prices fully hit home. In 2016 the Ecuadoran GDP contracted by some 1.7 percent. In the process, government revenue shrunk from about $25 billion to about $11 billion.
With his ability to finance popular social programs critically impaired and his popularity further eroded by scandal (including billions of dollars in bribes allegedly paid to Ecuadoran government officials by the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht), Correa opted not to run for reelection in 2017. He threw his support to Lenín Moreno, who had served as his vice president from 2007 to 2013. Moreno was the winner of the first round of voting in February 2017 but was unable to preclude a runoff by failing to capture the majority of the total vote and falling just short of obtaining 40 percent of the vote plus a 10 percent or greater victory margin that would also have eliminated the need for a second round of voting. For the first time in recent Ecuadoran history, authorities were not able to declare a winner on election night. As the count continued two days after voting (owing ostensibly to delays in the arrival of the vote from rural districts and abroad), supporters of second-place finisher Guillermo Lasso, suspecting fraud, took to the streets to demand confirmation of a second round of balloting.
When that confirmation came, Lasso—who had promised corporate tax cuts, job creation through foreign investment, and the end to Ecuadoran protection for Assange—appeared to be well positioned to benefit from the support of other runner-up candidates heading into the April runoff election. Lasso and his supporters again cried fraud when Moreno was declared the winner in the runoff election held on April 2. Moreno captured just over 51 percent of the vote to almost 49 percent for Lasso. However, a prominent exit poll had indicated that Lasso would be the winner, and he had already claimed victory when the National Electoral Council announced Moreno (projected as the victor in a different exit poll) as the winner. Lasso demanded a recount, and his supporters angrily took to the streets again to protest the results. Nonetheless, Moreno took office and surprised many observers when he began reversing some of Correa’s policies rather than preserving the status quo in anticipation of Correa seeking to return to office in 2021.
Moreover, Moreno pushed for a referendum that would limit Ecuadoran presidents to two terms. An outraged Correa campaigned against the referendum, but on February 4, 2018, voters approved it by roughly a two-to-one margin, thus preventing Correa from ever running for the presidency again. In April 2019 Ecuador revoked the asylum it had granted Assange. It allowed British police to enter the Ecuadoran embassy in London after securing a written agreement from the British government that Assange “would not be extradited to a country where he could face torture or the death penalty.” President Moreno indicated that the decision to allow Assange’s arrest came in response to “his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols." In March 2019 the International Monetary Fund finalized a $4.2 billion loan for Ecuador that would support the Moreno government’s economic policies over the next three years. That agreement was predicated on the contingency that Ecuador adopt austerity measures to bring stability to the country’s finances. When Moreno made a dramatic step in that direction in early October by eliminating a fuel subsidy that had been in place for some 40 years, protests erupted throughout the country and quickly turned violent, especially in Quito. Indigenous groups and transportation workers played a major role in the protests, which escalated into running battles with security forces, persisted over a number of days, and forced Moreno to temporarily transfer the government to the coastal city of Guayaquil.
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https://www.ecowatch.com/ecuador-residents-palm-oil-2644430752.html1/20 Communities in Ecuador Fight Back Against Palm Oil
mongabay
By Alejandro Pérez, translated by Romina Castagnino
Fifteen years ago, Martha Valencia relied on the nearby river for water and for food. But then oil palm crops arrived in the area and polluted the river, say Martha and her neighbors. The community took the oil palm grower to court, which ultimately resulted in a ruling in their favor.
"It is determined that there had been serious environmental effects in the territory of the communities … which should have been prevented by the Ecuadorian government," the ruling read, and a judge ordered compensation for those affected.
That was two years ago. And Martha and her neighbors say they are still waiting for things to change.
No Clean Water
The river and the community, both named La Chiquita, are located within the municipality of San Lorenzo in the Esmeraldas province of Ecuador. Logging and oil palm plantations, in addition to its proximity to the Colombian border where drug trafficking and armed conflict is rife,contribute to the area's dubious honor of having the highest levels of poverty and violence in the country.
Every eight to 15 days, the municipality sends a water truck to La Chiquita. The tank fills a 1,500-liter blue plastic tank "but not even that water is clean. We were told by the Municipality to put chlorine before drinking it," says Olga, another community member.
When a new truck does not arrive in town before their tank runs dry, residents say they can buy 20-liter water canisters in San Lorenzo, which last three or four days. However, this option often proves too expensive for community members who must subsist off meager profits from small farms. They say that in that case, they are forced to walk great distances to other rivers.
There's little in the way of alternatives for people living in the area. According to the National Statistical System and the National Statistics and Census Institute (INEC), 16% of San Lorenzo residents are illiterate, which is more than double the national rate of 6.8%. Almost half of its population is engaged in agriculture and fishing due to a lack of industrial development in the area.
Two years have passed since the Jan. 2017 ruling of Esmeraldas' Provincial Court of Justice, and those affected in La Chiquita are still waiting for the judge to order the provision of drinking water, among other compensations. The ruling also requires the construction of a health center and a school.
La Chiquita lies in the the Chocó-Darién, an ecosystem that extends from Panama to northwest Ecuador and is known for its unique forests and vast biological wealth – both of which are disappearing at a fast clip due to agribusiness and other human pressures.
Oil palm companies are required to have a buffer zone between planted fields and water sources. They must remove any crops that are located less than ten meters (33 feet) from community water sources and replace them with endemic species such as guadua bamboo. According to former environment ministers, a fine is applied "for obvious negligence in the performance of their duties."
"It is a historic ruling, although it has objections and inaccuracies that must be corrected in its execution," says Manolo Morales, a lawyer and representative of the Corporation of Management and Environmental Law (Ecolex) that sponsored the lawsuit.
Eduardo Rebolledo pix?]
The ruling also calls for the Ministry of Environment, together with affected communities, to reforest 500 hectares of degraded land with native species. However, La Chiquita resident Isaha Ezequiel says this is absurd. "Companies are the ones that have polluted and killed the forest but they want us to reforest," he told Mongabay.
Violence is common in the region. The murder rate in San Lorenzo in 2018 was 96 per 100,000 inhabitants – almost ten times the national rate. The area gained further notoriety that year when a reporting team from the El Comercio newspaper was kidnapped and then killed by FARC dissident groups. The incident occurred in Mataje, a border town near Guadalito, Colombia.
Although four companies were referenced during the trial, two were included in the ruling: Palmera de los Andes and Palmar de los Esteros (Palesema). Only Palmera de los Andes agreed to comment for this story.
Never-Ending Battle
Oil palm plantations in Ecuador cover about 250,000 hectares (617,763 acres) and are distributed among several provinces. Due to its suitable growing conditions, Esmeraldas has the lion's share.
Palm oil companies arrived in San Lorenzo in the late 1990s and early 2000s, settling in an area of around 30,000 hectares (74,131 acres) that was later expanded to 50,000 (123,552 acres). The inhabitants of La Chiquita, who are mostly the descendants of enslaved people of African ancestry, say local children began to develop stomach diseases and that they noticed oil and pesticide residue in a river that was their primary water source.
When La Chiquita residents went into the forest to investigate the cause of this pollution, they discovered that one of the oil palm growers had installed a palm oil mill less than three kilometers upriver that was dumping liquid waste into the water. The same thing was reported by members of the Awá Guadalito indigenous community, who also joined the demand for change and reparations.
However, a representative of Palmera de los Andes contends claims of pollution.
"We have 11 processing pools with strict environmental controls," said Fabián Miño, a lawyer and director of the company's legal department. "It is false that we are the cause of any contamination." He explained that, after the palm oil refinement process, wastewater is treated in each pool until it is decontaminated. "To confirm that the liquid comes out clean from our building, in the last two pools we have fish and seaweed," he said.
Miño says communities have been manipulated by NGOs with ulterior motives.He claims Ecolex is an environmental organization that receives funds from abroad, and that the organization attacks oil palm growers to justify its activities and budget regardless of the employment and development opportunities plantations create.
Manolo Morales, of Ecolex, says Miño's accusations are absurd. He says the organization has worked in the area since 1998 helping local communities gain legal rights to their ancestral territories. He claims that in the intervening years the government promoted and encouraged the cultivation of oil palm and that many inhabitants were persuaded to sell their territories to agroindustry companies. He said he made the decision to advise La Chiquita and Guadalito when he learned of the problems they face.
In 2005, a water quality study by the Al Tropic environmental foundation detected the presence of endosulfan and terbufos in the tributaries that provide water for these two communities. Commonly used as pesticides, these compounds can cause severe illness and death in humans, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies both asCategory 1 toxins – a designation reserved for the most dangerous substances. This information was included in areport from the Ministry of Environment (MAE) in 2009and served as the basis for initiating the trial. However, subsequent water studies were not decisive enough to directly hold oil palm companies accountable. Therefore, the judge only partially accepted the claim, ordering the government to fulfill some of the requested reparations to affected communities.
Ecolex reported that oil palm grower companies were alerted by government authorities before officials went to take water samples looking for the presence of toxins. Meanwhile, Fabián Miño, from Palmera de los Andes, claims that the organization was trying to obtain samples of stagnant water.
"They went out of their way to find pollution," Miño said. "We have all the environmental certifications, national and international."
Rodrigo Sierra]
Isaha Ezequiel and his neighbors say two years have passed and they have seen no progress towards court-mandated reparations. According to Nathalia Bonilla, an environmental engineer and coordinator with the NGO Ecological Action in Ecuador, this is because the judge did not report the verdict to the ministries responsible for carrying them out.
Because there is a mountain between the towns of Guadalito and La Chiquita, the judge ordered the building of a school in each. However, Bonilla says the Ministry of Education was also not made aware of this ruling.
Palmera de los Andes reports that it has already begun fulfilling the reparations required by the ruling. However, company representatives say it is doing so because such activities are within its environmental responsibilities and protocols, not because it considers the ruling to be right.
"We are reforesting as required by the ruling," says lawyer Fabián Miño. He adds that the company has a 1200-hectare (2,965-acre) forest reserve, which was not requested in the reparations, and that the company has an environmental license and provides upwards of 700 jobs to local residents. "They should applaud us and not judge us," he said.
A Refuge for Many Species
Deforestation in northern Esmeraldas began well before oil palm moved in. In the 1960s, the government implemented its Northwest Forestry Development project that established 14 forest concessions. According to project data, more than 400,000 hectares (988,421 acres) of dense forest was cleared between 1966 and 1975. Five more concessions were subsequently created.
"This is how the primary forests of Esmeraldas were cut down," says Walter Palacios, a forest engineer and associate researcher at the National Institute of Biodiversity (Inabio). He explains that the primary forests of northwestern Ecuador are home to around 4,000 species of plants, and says many may have disappeared due to habitat loss without biologists ever knowing them.
Eduardo Rebolledo
The region's protected areas preserve what has been lost to agriculture elsewhere: reserves, rich in orchids and giant ferns, extend to the paramos of the Ecuadorian highlands, providing vital habitat for a multitude of species including jaguars and ocelots. A microcosm of the biodiversity of the Chocó-Darién can be seen in just one of its massive trees. A Sande tree, for example, can be covered by as many as 60 species of ferns, orchids and other plants, its fruit important food for birds and insects.
According to Walter Palacios, when the palm plantations first appeared in the area, the secondary forests that had regenerated after the mass clearing of the 1960s were cleared once again.
"A secondary forest no longer has the same species density, it has less wildlife," Palacios said. "However, it is better to preserve them than to turn them into monocultures."
Of the region's remaining primary forest, Palacios says he hopes that the government spares these areas from the expansion of the agricultural frontier.
Eduardo Rebolledo]
Residents say conversion of forest to plantations has affected their lives.
"I used to make with my mother wicker baskets out of Piquigua – an endemic plant," Martha Valencia said. "We used the baskets to transport fish, or the meat of guanta, deer and other animals that we hunted. The forest and the river gave us everything, now we have to go to San Lorenzo to buy the food that was taken from us."
Residents like Valencia say they know everything they had before will not return in their lifetimes, but that they should still be able to expect clean water. "That is why we need the reparations promised by the ruling," says Wilberto Valencia, another community member.
The current Minister of Environment in Ecuador is Raúl Ledesma, who assumed the position four months ago. In an appearance before the National Assembly, together with the affected community members, Ledesma offered to further investigate the situation in La Chiquita to verify the damage that Wilberto Valencia and others say is affecting their ability to live. At that same meeting, Ledesma said he was aware that Energy Palma is breaking environmental standards.
David Silva]
What Does the Future Hold?
Large-scale plantations aren't the only places where oil palm is grown in Ecuador, and advocates of the crop say stricter regulations on its cultivation could hurt small farmers.
"If there are infractions, justice must act," says Wilfredo Acosta, executive director of the National Association of Palm Oil Growers (Ancupa). "But 89% are small producers and for us, it is an agricultural activity, like any other, that encourages the development of the country."
In recent years oil palm crops have been beset with "bud rot." As of October 2019, the fungal disease had wiped out 15,000 hectares (37,065 acres) of plantations, according to Acosta. His proposed solution: support farmers with credits and provide, through the Ministry of Agriculture, new seeds that are resistant to this disease.
Assemblyman Lenin Plaza, a native of Esmeraldas and president of the Committee on Food Sovereignty, together with Ancupa, is promoting a bill in the National Assembly, which has already passed the first debate. One of its objectives is to double palm oil yields for biofuel production, but Plaza says that does not necessarily mean expanding the agricultural frontier with new plantations. "This will depend on the country's demand," Plasa said. "The important thing now is to help the producers."
Cecilia Puebla]
Acosta says oil palm expansion could take advantage of underutilized land once used for agriculture but which has since been abandoned.
"It's not necessary to expand, it's about optimizing crops," Acosta said. "With that, we take the pressure off the forests."
However, even if the majority of producers may be small, environmental organizations say large companies control around 80% of land used for oil palm cultivation.
"The big companies are the ones that benefit," said Nathalia Bonilla of Ecological Action. "What they say about small producers is just a story. [Oil] palm is an activity that uses chemicals that seep into the earth [and] needs large areas, and working conditions are precarious."
Reposted with permission from Mongabay.
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palm oil ecuador drinking water forests agribusiness pesticides wastewater deforestation agriculture public health
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuadorian%E2%80%93Peruvian_territorial_dispute_of_1857%E2%80%931860
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2x?
....
Problems of the early 20th century
The liberals remained in office, but the real power continued to rest in the hands of the wealthy merchants and bankers of Guayaquil. During World War I and the short boom that followed it, this clique further extended its influence and diversified its capital with a view to controlling the agriculture of the coastal plain. Cacao was the dominant export crop, as in the colonial period, but sugar and rice became increasingly important.
A depression followed in the early 1920s. The price of food increased, and exports in general declined. The sucre—the national unit of currency—fell rapidly in value. At the same time, the country’s cacao plantations became infected with a fungus that causes a malformation known as witches’-broom, and production sagged. These crises brought urban discontent, the formation of trade unions in Guayaquil, riots, and massacres by the army. Hundreds died during riots and shootings in November 1922.
In 1925 the army entered this turbulent situation, claiming that it wished to restore national unity and blaming many of the country’s problems on the merchant bankers of Guayaquil. Unfortunately, the 1925 revolution brought little change to Ecuador’s social and economic structures.
Modern history
The period between 1925 and 1948 was one of greater turbulence than Ecuador had ever known. Increasing involvement in the world market and in international politics meant that the country could no longer escape entanglements and the consequences of world ideological conflicts. Yet during this crucial period, Ecuador’s internal disunity prevented the modernization of its social structure, land tenure system, education, and communications. Thus, the country was badly equipped to face the demands of the age.
Economic development and loss of territory in the 1940s
Ecuador was still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression when it became involved in World War II. It sided with the Allies and allowed the United States to build military bases on its territory, but it played little direct part in the war. Under Pres. Carlos Arroyo del Río, Ecuador drew some benefit from the higher prices for raw materials caused by the war, and the early years of the war were relatively prosperous and tranquil.
World War II had a serious secondary effect on the country, however. The large Amazonian territories claimed by Ecuador had never been effectively controlled by the government; much of the area was occupied by indigenous groups. Dating back to the 16th century, Peruvians had increasingly settled along the Amazon and its tributaries. In July 1941, after long diplomatic bickering and a series of border incidents, the Peruvian army invaded, seized much of the disputed Amazonian area, and devastated El Oro provincia (province). The Ecuadoran forces, poorly trained and equipped, were easily defeated, and the disgrace caused the overthrow of Arroyo del Río. The United States and the other major powers were too preoccupied with World War II to allow such small conflicts to destroy Allied unity or to disrupt the production of vital raw materials. A peace conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1942 forced Ecuador to relinquish its claims to much of the Amazonian region. Subsequently, Ecuador repeatedly attempted to reopen the question, claiming that the Protocol of Rio did not establish precise borders and that the new borders were therefore invalid. This constant irredentism was used repeatedly by demagogues and ultranationalists, who distracted attention and effort from urgent internal problems.
Domination of Velasco Ibarra after World War II
Politics and government after World War II presented contradictions. Ecuador enjoyed a long period of constitutional government and relatively free elections following the presidency of the PLR leader Galo Plaza (1948–52). There were also two long interludes of military government (1963–66; 1972–79), but the period was dominated by one of Latin America’s great caudillos, José María Velasco Ibarra. Velasco Ibarra, who died in 1979, was president of Ecuador five times but completed only one of these terms. He seemed able to win any election, such was his popularity with the masses, but his terms of office were marked by sudden reversals in policy, contradictory economic programs, personal outbursts, temporary suspensions of civil liberties, and military interventions. Some critics claimed that Velasco Ibarra drew support from communist groups; others said he was the puppet of powerful business groups in Guayaquil. But neither these nor other groups were able to control the erratic Velasco Ibarra for long.
His political presence may have inhibited the development of coherent political parties and programs for changing the country’s antiquated social and economic structure, but his personal appeal cut across parties and ideologies. The traditional parties—the PLR and the PC—were thrown into disarray by his incursions, and the growth of newer parties, such as the Ecuadoran Socialists and the Social Christians, was retarded. Opponents alleged that Velasco Ibarra made economic progress impossible because constructive measures undertaken by previous governments were halted or reversed by the Velasco Ibarra interludes.
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Ecuador from the late 20th century
After Velasco Ibarra’s last fall from power, in 1972, military officers ruled for some seven years before handing over the government to a constitutionally elected (July 16, 1979) civilian president. The civilian and military governments of the 1970s had not developed a firm policy for dealing with the oil boom that occurred in that decade. The boom increased the size and wealth of the middle class, led to the building of roads, quays, pipelines, and other infrastructure, and caused severe inflation. No basic structural reforms took place, however, and the poor suffered the effects of inflation but reaped few of the benefits of the oil boom.
Velasco Ibarra’s death and the withdrawal of the military officers from government allowed the country to return to an elected civilian government and a new constitution in 1979. Jaime Roldós Aguilera, a young social democrat, was elected president on a reformist platform. He promised greater social equality and a more equitable distribution of oil industry profits, but he was unable to manage the legislature and was soon at odds with his own party, the Concentration of Popular Forces. His popularity increased after a border skirmish with Peru in early 1981, but he was killed in an airplane crash later that year. His successor was Osvaldo Hurtado Larrea of the small Christian Democratic party. The economy, depressed by the drop in world oil prices, spiraled downward with accompanying high inflation and a depreciating currency.
León Febres Cordero, a congressman from Guayaquil, was elected president in 1984. His free-market economics and pro-U.S. foreign policy drew Ecuador into closer alliance with the U.S. administration of Pres. Ronald Reagan, but Febres Cordero was never popular in Ecuador. Oil prices continued to fall, and his troubles with the National Congress and the military led to calls for his resignation and, on one occasion, to his being kidnapped by air force personnel for half a day, until he agreed to release one of their leaders. In March 1987 he suspended interest payments on Ecuador’s $8.3 billion foreign debt after an earthquake destroyed part of a major oil pipeline.
Left-wing opponent Rodrigo Borja Cevallos was elected to the presidency in 1988, but he seemed to have few solutions to the steadily worsening economic crisis. His term was marked by a major national uprising in 1990, with Indian groups demonstrating in favour of such issues as land reform; the uprising and subsequent protests pushed the Ecuadoran government to recognize the land rights of these indigenous groups and address their other concerns.
In 1992 Sixto Durán Ballén was elected president. He brought the government budget into balance, reduced trade barriers, brought Ecuador into the World Trade Organization, and encouraged foreign investment. The benefits of his accomplishments, however, were somewhat offset by conflict: in early 1995, the long-simmering boundary dispute with Peru erupted in a border war, leading to a standoff that persisted until a peace accord was signed on October 26, 1998. The country was left with a crippling war debt.
From the mid-1990s to the early 21st century, Ecuador experienced several years of political upheaval, during which time many individuals served as president. Populist leader Abdalá Bucaram Ortíz was elected president in 1996; however, he became increasingly unpopular because of his erratic and controversial behaviour, and in early 1997 Congress removed him from office and replaced him with Fabián Alarcón Rivera. In elections held in 1998, Quito mayor Jamil Mahuad Witt was elected president. Early in his term, Mahuad was confronted with a serious economic crisis that peaked in 1999. His unpopular austerity measures, implemented to address the crisis, and high rates of inflation resulted in public demonstrations against his leadership. In 2000 Mahuad made perhaps his most unpopular decision—to adopt the U.S. dollar as Ecuador’s currency. This proposal proved to be his undoing, and shortly thereafter he was removed from the presidency in a coup engineered by indigenous leaders and some members of the military, including Col. Lucio Gutiérrez Borbua. The coup leaders eventually agreed to let Vice Pres. Gustavo Noboa Bejerano ascend to the presidency, which effectively ended the coup. Noboa followed through with Mahuad’s decision to convert Ecuador’s currency to the dollar, despite the plan’s unpopularity. However, this conversion, as well as a rise in oil prices, helped stabilize the economy in 2001.
The beginning of the 21st century found Ecuador struggling with many of the same issues as in previous decades: political upheaval, social unrest due to dissatisfaction with indigenous rights and economic policies, and poor economic performance. Former coup leader Gutiérrez stood in the 2002 presidential elections and won, taking office in 2003. He made some attempts at economic reform, but he did not have the cooperation of the National Congress and was initially limited in his success. Gutiérrez was removed from office in April 2005 and replaced with Vice Pres. Alfredo Palacio.
Rafael Correa was elected president in November 2006 as an independent leftist, with oil policy, poverty, debt, and relations with the United States as the main campaign issues. Correa, an ally of populist Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez and other left-leaning leaders, strengthened state control over the country’s extensive oil resources, increased spending on social programs, and diminished ties to U.S. development organizations. In early 2008 he broke off diplomatic relations with Colombia after that country’s forces raided a guerrilla camp inside Ecuador. Correa also received support from the majority of voters for his plan to devise a new constitution to fight long-standing corruption in Ecuador’s National Congress.
Gregory W. Knapp
Murdo J. MacLeod
A draft constitution was approved by a special Constituent Assembly in July 2008, and more than 60 percent of Ecuadoran voters backed the new constitution in a referendum held in September. When the constitution entered into force in October 2008, the Constituent Assembly assumed the duties of the legislative branch, pending the election of the new National Assembly outlined in the constitution. The new constitution was the 20th since the country gained independence in 1830, and it reflected many of Correa’s leftist ideals, including a ban on foreign military bases, the allowance of same-sex marriage, free education through the college level, social security benefits for unpaid domestic workers, and greater national control over the oil and mining industries. Moreover, it gave broad powers to the president and, most notably, allowed the president to serve up to two consecutive four-year terms. Critics of the new constitution accused Correa of giving the government too much control and aligning himself too much with Chávez. Correa won another four-year term, receiving more than 50 percent of the vote in the April 2009 presidential elections (it was ruled that his tenure in office prior to the promulgation of the new constitution did not count as a term under that document). In July the newly elected National Assembly convened for its first session.
Correa’s hold on power was threatened on September 30, 2010, when factions of the military and the national police—responding to the president’s austerity measures in general and to cuts in benefits for public servants in particular—staged protests that escalated into a virtual coup attempt. Correa was addressing protesting police when he was injured by tear gas and taken to a hospital that was quickly besieged by police. He was rescued by the military (whose leadership remained loyal) and returned to the presidential palace as order was restored. By May 2011 Correa was firmly back in control, his presidential powers having been extended by approval of a 10-issue referendum that included authorization for him to appoint a commission to overhaul the judicial system and to direct the National Assembly to form a commission (reporting to him) that would regulate media content.
In August 2012 Ecuador granted political asylum to Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, who had been living under Ecuador’s protection in its embassy in London since June, having exhausted appeals under the British legal system to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.
Correa secured another term as president in February 2013, when he was reelected in a landslide, capturing nearly 58 percent of the popular vote, a margin of more than 30 percent over the next closest competitor in a field of eight major candidates.
In 2014 a new crescendo was reached in a long ongoing legal battle that had led an Ecuadoran judge in 2011 to order the Chevron Corporation to pay $18.2 billion for environmental damage done to the Amazonian Lake Agrio region where oil producer Texaco (taken over by Chevron in 2001) had been active. The Ecuadoran Supreme Court upheld this judgment in 2012 (though it reduced the compensation for the Amazonian residents to $9.5 billion); however, Chevron won several subsequent legal victories in its bid to avoid paying compensation, most notably the March 2014 decision by a U.S. court that found that the Amazonian plaintiffs’ legal team (led by an American lawyer) had used “fraudulent evidence” and paid bribes to obtain its favourable rulings in the Ecuadoran courts.The balance in the battle shifted again in Ecuador’s favour in September 2015 when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Ecuador could use the Canadian legal system to pursue redress from Chevron.
In the first half of 2015, Ecuadorans repeatedly took to the streets en masse to protest Correa’s government’s proposal to impose an inheritance tax of 77.5 percent and a real-estate capital gains tax of 75 percent. Protests were also more broadly aimed at what many Ecuadorans saw as the dictatorial style of Correa, whose popularity waned as his government’s largesse was reined in as a result of dramatically declining oil revenues. Correa withdrew the tax proposals in advance of Pope Francis I’s visit to Ecuador in early July.
In December 2015, however, the National Assembly, controlled by Correa’s party, adopted 15 amendments to the constitution, including the removal of term limits for public office as of 2021, paving the way for Correa to seek reelection indefinitely. The changes to the constitution, which prompted a new round of street protests, also included the classification of communications as a “public service,” allowing the government to further extend the control of the media that it had begun to exert in the previous few years.
A magnitude-7.8 earthquake that shook the Pacific coast of Ecuador on April 16, 2016, caused widespread destruction and hundreds of deaths in the northwestern part of the country. The quake was centred about 17 miles (27 km) south-southeast of Muisne and roughly 100 miles (160 km) west of Quito. It was the worst such event in decades—recalling the powerful earthquake that hit the coast of Ecuador and Colombia in 1979 and sparked a tsunami that took more than 600 lives and the 1987 earthquake in which more than 1,000 individuals died.
After growing at an average rate of about 4 percent per year between 2006 and 2014, GDP in Ecuador bottomed out in 2015 as the toll taken by falling world oil prices fully hit home. In 2016 the Ecuadoran GDP contracted by some 1.7 percent. In the process, government revenue shrunk from about $25 billion to about $11 billion. With his ability to finance popular social programs critically impaired and his popularity further eroded by scandal (including billions of dollars in bribes allegedly paid to Ecuadoran government officials by the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht), Correa opted not to run for reelection in 2017. He threw his support to Lenín Moreno, who had served as his vice president from 2007 to 2013.
Moreno was the winner of the first round of voting in February 2017 but was unable to preclude a runoff by failing to capture the majority of the total vote and falling just short of obtaining 40 percent of the vote plus a 10 percent or greater victory margin that would also have eliminated the need for a second round of voting. For the first time in recent Ecuadoran history, authorities were not able to declare a winner on election night. As the count continued two days after voting (owing ostensibly to delays in the arrival of the vote from rural districts and abroad), supporters of second-place finisher Guillermo Lasso, suspecting fraud, took to the streets to demand confirmation of a second round of balloting. When that confirmation came, Lasso—who had promised corporate tax cuts, job creation through foreign investment, and the end to Ecuadoran protection for Assange—appeared to be well positioned to benefit from the support of other runner-up candidates heading into the April runoff election.
Lasso and his supporters again cried fraud when Moreno was declared the winner in the runoff election held on April 2. Moreno captured just over 51 percent of the vote to almost 49 percent for Lasso. However, a prominent exit poll had indicated that Lasso would be the winner, and he had already claimed victory when the National Electoral Council announced Moreno (projected as the victor in a different exit poll) as the winner. Lasso demanded a recount, and his supporters angrily took to the streets again to protest the results.
Nonetheless, Moreno took office and surprised many observers when he began reversing some of Correa’s policies rather than preserving the status quo in anticipation of Correa seeking to return to office in 2021. Moreover, Moreno pushed for a referendum that would limit Ecuadoran presidents to two terms. An outraged Correa campaigned against the referendum, but on February 4, 2018, voters approved it by roughly a two-to-one margin, thus preventing Correa from ever running for the presidency again.
In April 2019 Ecuador revoked the asylum it had granted Assange. It allowed British police to enter the Ecuadoran embassy in London after securing a written agreement from the British government that Assange “would not be extradited to a country where he could face torture or the death penalty.” President Moreno indicated that the decision to allow Assange’s arrest came in response to “his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols."
In March 2019 the International Monetary Fund finalized a $4.2 billion loan for Ecuador that would support the Moreno government’s economic policies over the next three years. That agreement was predicated on the contingency that Ecuador adopt austerity measures to bring stability to the country’s finances. When Moreno made a dramatic step in that direction in early October by eliminating a fuel subsidy that had been in place for some 40 years, protests erupted throughout the country and quickly turned violent, especially in Quito. Indigenous groups and transportation workers played a major role in the protests, which escalated into running battles with security forces, persisted over a number of days, and forced Moreno to temporarily transfer the government to the coastal city of Guayaquil.