Brandishing the Ecuadorian flag, indigenous protestors march in a bid to save their
currency.
“If we don’t jump on this
car,
we’ll be left by the side of the road.”
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Key indicators
Population
(millions, 1998): 12.2
GNP ($ billions): 18.4
GNP per capita
($): 1,520
Population below
income poverty line of $1 a day (%): 20.2
Source: UNDP Human
Development Report 2000
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Globalization is fine, say Ecuador’s
indigenous leaders, as long as it allows us to preserve our traditional culture and
begin talks with the North on a level playing field
 Luis Macas is one of the most prominent leaders and thinkers
in Ecuador’s indigenous people’s movement. Invariably dressed in the distinctively
dark poncho and sombrero from his village of Saraguro, in the country’s western highlands,
he manages the Internet edition of a newsletter published by the Institute for the
Knowledge of Indigenous Culture. Macas heads this Quito-based body, having served
stints as president of the Confederation of Ecuador’s Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE) and as a national
deputy for the Pachakutik movement.
The CONAIE
and its political wing Pachakutik, which today has six deputies in the 123-seat unicameral
Ecuadorian parliament, was one of the main groups involved in a popular uprising
in January 2000 that shocked the world by seizing control of the government and parliament
in Quito. Allied with a group of young military officers rebelling against corruption,
the indigenous groups forced the then President Jamil Mahuad to resign and flee the
country, though the insurgents failed to secure one of their main objectives: stopping
a bid to dollarize the economy, which wiped out the national currency, the sucre,
with the stroke of a pen.
Niches of local power
For Luis Macas, a restored sense of identity
is not only important for indigenous people, who make up a third of the country’s
12 million people, but for Ecuadorian society as a whole. Once indigenous people
complete their period of “self-definition” through struggles for land and preservation
of their ancestral culture, Macas argues, “ethnic differences can be superseded”
and political plans drafted for the whole society.
Macas places great hope in the niches of local power won by Ecuador’s indigenous
movement in May 2000, when they romped to victory in 27 town halls and five provincial
districts out of 22–a totally unparalleled event in recent Latin American history.
According to Macas, success at the ballot box needs to be converted into better training
for local indigenous leaders and greater democratic participation by communities:
“there are two bases, the technical and the political, and we have to strengthen
both,” he declares.
One person who appears to carry off both technical and political roles with ineffable
skill is Mariano Curicama. Mayor of the Guamote district in the province of Chimborazo,
which houses over 133 indigenous communities, Curicama combines a long career as
leader of his people’s campaigns with an extraordinary managerial dynamism. “You’ll
never find me inside my office,” he explains, “I’m always on the road.” Re-elected
twice since 1992, this Quechua from the country’s central highlands who started work
as a builder at the age of 17, has revolutionized his district, promoting public
participation in local assemblies, and combining the minga–the Quechua people’s traditional
community work–with assistance from leading foreign organizations. The results are
there for all to see: roads, drinking water, irrigation channels, reforestation and
replenishment of the local fish stock in places where previous governments sowed
only poverty and patronage. A few months ago he created the Indigenous Chamber of
Commerce, which local people hope will advertise and sell their products within the
country and abroad. Mariano Curicama, who has travelled to 14 countries, is not afraid
of globalization: “If we don’t jump on this car, we’ll be left by the side of the
road,” he declares.
Miguel Lluco, a former national deputy and national co-ordinator of the Pachakutik
movement, is also convinced that his people’s horizons will have to widen: “Ecuador
can’t be an exception in this process of globalization,” he says. The bloodless uprising
in January, he acknowledges, was “the inevitable reflection of a global situation
that has been imposed on us through dollarization and the globalization of currency
exchanges, and which threatens to disrupt the development of our own political agenda.
“That’s why it’s so vital to build up links with people who are campaigning and proposing
alternatives across the world. If we had stayed put in Ecuador with the local land
conflicts of the 1960s, when every village fought with its own landlord as if it
were engaged in a private battle, we would never have made all this progress in indigenous
people’s organization. People in the First World can provide us with a lot, while
we can promote our values and community vision.”
Until the age of 13, when on one moonlit night he left the rustic house where he
lived with his illiterate peasant family and headed to the sugar cane plantations
on the coast, Miguel Lluco knew nothing outside his small corner of the Andes. On
the basis of his experience as a labourer, shoeshine boy, ice-cream salesman, carpenter,
union leader, politician, deputy, and indefatigable defender of the “integral human
being,” as he likes to put it, Lluco weighs up the risks and opportunities of a globalized
world: “I see it in the same way as the course of my life, from my village of Sacaguan,
to discovering the neighbouring town of Guamote and its school, then on to the situation
of Ecuador and Latin America as a whole, until I started to wonder ‘What do they
think in the First World?,’ ‘How do we build a form of communication and perhaps
co-operation?’”
The future of the first Latin American country to abandon its own currency hinges
on the answers that Ecuador and the North give to these questions.
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