14 Indigenous Autonomy in Ecuador: Fundamentals, Loss and Challenges

Pablo Ortiz-T

Introduction

A little more than three decades have passed since the Ecuadorian Indigenous movement made public its demand to recognize the country as a Plurinational State. This was one of the 16 demands presented during the “Indigenous uprising” of June 1990, along with others such as the legalization and award of land and territories; the right to self-determination and autonomy, which consists of creating a self-government regime that allows Indigenous peoples to have legal competence in the administration of the internal affairs of their communities, within the framework of the nation-state; and respect for their own worldviews, organizational forms and political practices.

The emergence of Indigenous actors in the political arena meant an open questioning of the failed criollo nation-state project established in the first half of the 19^th century. This project, whose highly exclusive and ethnocentric character was based on a primary-exporting socioeconomic model that materialized in a stratified and highly inequitable way, condemned Indigenous territories and other areas to be zones of overexploitation and extraction. It also established an asymmetrical national territorial structure, with territories that are rich in the center and poor on the peripheries.

In this context, this chapter explores the main advances and limitations of the exercise of the right to Indigenous autonomy, including, on the one hand, the responses provided by the State and the premises that have guided its decisions; and, on the other hand, the actions carried out by Indigenous peoples in their territories. What elements explain the current situation of the collective right to autonomy of Indigenous peoples and nationalities in Ecuador?

An hypothesis surrounding this question is that the actions of the State to process Indigenous demands for autonomy have been extremely limited by two conditions: first, the urgency of the State to prioritize its territorial control and the income derived from extractive activities as the economic basis of its finances, especially in its national-populist period (2008-2016); and second, the aggressive outburst of neoliberalism (2017-2020) that suspended all institutional reforms derived from the 2008 Constitution and imposed policy that is subordinated to the demands of financial capital, extractive mining and oil industry and agro-exporting capital, intensifying the pressure on Indigenous territories and their resources.

But the hypothesis also includes an overview of the gradual disarticulation process of the subaltern and popular power that made possible the constitutional reforms and the recognition of Ecuador as a State of “constitutional rights and justice, intercultural and plurinational, that is organized as a republic and governed in a decentralized manner.” In other words, a complex process fragmentation of positions within the indigenous movement has prevented it from having a coherent proposal on the right to autonomy, as well as a greater visibility to count on allies, and a favorable correlation of forces that allow the establishment of special autonomous Indigenous regimes in the country.

This has forced certain fractions of Indigenous peoples to try out ways of continuing their initiatives of territorial or community self-management, albeit with many difficulties. In some cases, in an autarchic way, without State recognition; and in others, combining this strategy with the access and management of local governments, which for some has allowed the creation of autonomous management spaces. To illustrate this, this chapter refers to two experiences that highlight several of the points mentioned. The first is of the Kayambi people in the community of Pesillo in the northern highlands. The second is in the territory of the Kichwa people of Pastaza and its organization “Pastaza Kikin Kichwa Runakuna-Pakkiru” (Kichwa Nation of Pastaza) in the central Amazon.

The Communitarian Government of Pukará Pesillo, Cayambe: Northern Highlands

Pesillo in Cayambe is a good example of how the old heritage of colonial and hacienda (large landed estates) structures weigh on the rationality of the use and distribution of resources. The Kayambi people have a long history of residence and resistance in that place, dating back to the 14^th century during the Inca expansion, passing through the entire colonial period until reaching the republic. A constant of the people in their actions as subaltern¹ individuals has been the permanent reconstitution of their identity and their struggle for the recognition of rights from time to time. To some extent, they have been able to respond to these different dynamics of domination by highly exclusive, shameful and despotic economic and political systems.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, the Kayambi were involved in the struggles related to the Liberal Revolution. In the 1930s, in the context of the economic crisis, the emergence of the Socialist Party and the surrender to state entities of haciendas such as those of Pesillo — which were in the hands of the clergy — made it possible to form the first agricultural unions, whose initial slogans were the rights to receive payment and education. Two decades later, the demand for access and redistribution of land would mark the struggle of the people and their organizations. Historians such as Becker and Tutillo (2009) or Galo Ramón (1993) point out that despite the adverse working conditions of laboring on hacienda lands (legally alien), Kayambi had finally regrouped into an ethnic nucleus, to the point that in the census of 1950 they are identified in five of the six parishes, which, in addition to the influence of the socialist and communist parties, opened the possibility of reworking their organizational structures, both in the rural area and in the haciendas (Kaminsky Crespi, 1969; Ponce García, 2011).

To some extent, the repertoire of collective action and mobilization of agricultural unions and cooperatives linked to the Communist Party of Ecuador (PCE), first led by Dolores Cacuango and later by Tránsito Amaguaña, were oriented under indigenist premises of the time, and they included demands that sought not only to recover the land and the agrarian base of the communities, or to improve the working conditions in the haciendas, but to expand communal organization and to establish productive bases for a fair insertion in the market, considering their identity as Indigenous peoples (Becker, 2004). But apart from the debate on the ethnogenesis of the Kayambi and the role played by the PCE in that process, its adherence to the emerging indigenist ideology and its attachment to the Criollo nation-state project is clear (Clark, 1998; Prieto, 1980). ²

The 1937 Law of Communes (Comunas) protected the concept of communal organization and incorporated the Indigenous population of the highlands into the legal administrative order of the State. In other words, it was not a question of subjecting or disarticulating them, but of integrating or assimilating them to the project of the nation-state process (Silva Charvet, 2004).

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the anticipated distribution of lands began in important areas in the highland region by a new generation of landowners like Galo Plaza and Emilio Bonifaz, who — educated in the United States since their youth — visualized the need for their families’ properties to become modern capitalist productive units, including the elimination of servile forms of work, and incorporating the hiring of agricultural labor with wage payments. That initiative would coincide with the urgency emanating from the United States, through the “Alliance for Progress” program and the “Andean Mission,” to neutralize the more radical demands for land distribution by the peasant-Indigenous movement (Velasco, 1983; Murmis, 1980; Guerrero, 1983).

The content of the Agrarian Reform and Colonization Act adopted by the military dictatorship of 1964 and its subsequent execution made it possible to hand over land to the ex-hacienda workers (huasipungeros). Before the agrarian reform process, the rural and Indigenous communities of the highlands controlled only 17% of the land. This figure subsequently increased to 35% in the aftermath of the reform. The Ecuadorian agrarian reform never had a popular content, nor was it proposed to solve the land problem, but its aim was to neutralize peasant-Indigenous demands, co-opting that sector to the demands of modernization toward an agro-exporting capitalism (Martínez-Valle, 2016; Gondard & Mazurek, 2001; Guerrero, 1991; Velasco, 1983; Murmis, 1980; Prieto, 1978).

In the context of socioeconomic formation dominated by the agro-industrial dairy and flower industries, small and medium-sized agricultural producers also emerged in the region. In the latter sector, there are the Kichwa families of Kayambi whose economy is based on three subgroups: wage earners integrated with agro-industrial enterprises (dairy farming and floriculture); floating population that migrates to large cities such as Quito and works in the construction or small trade sector; and farmers, who still prioritize production for self-consumption and surpluses to guide them to meet the demands of agro-industry and nearby urban markets (Becker & Tutillo, 2009; Martínez-Godoy, 2016; Korovkin, 2002a).

Almost two decades of neoliberal policies in Ecuador (1983-2006) had generated negative social impacts: increased poverty, high unemployment and underemployment rates, low levels of schooling and high infant mortality rates (Dubly & Granda, 1983; Becker & Tutillo, 2009; Ferraro, 2004). In agriculture, the general framework of neoliberal policies not only suspended the process of agrarian reform but also blocked access to land, which would have an impact on the destabilization of Indigenous communities (Bebbington, 2004). This dynamic changed the demands of the Indigenous communities for land: instead of expropriations, applications for titling became prioritized, leading to an acute process of subdivision of communal lands, especially in the highland plateau region. According to Luciano Martínez:

This implied three negative consequences: (a) the properties that entered the land market were mainly small plots, which resulted in these properties being further reduced; (b) many of these properties moved from effective control of the communities to private individuals; and (c) ecologically sensitive areas in the highland plateau that are not suitable for agriculture were divided and sold for agricultural production. (Martínez, 2003, pp. 91, 92)

Capital investments in the region deployed during this period would be the main factor in the de-territorialization of Kichwa communities. The land was mostly concentrated in extensive livestock production linked to the dairy industry and agro-floricultural plantations for export (Haesbaert, 2013; 2014). In the flower export sector, for example, production is highly technical, characterized by the unregulated use of agrochemicals (Harari, 2003); the production and marketing chain has created a large number of jobs, but with low incomes and occupational and health risks. These are factors that have triggered demographic changes in the region: on the one hand, immigration from other parts of the country, saturating the demand for housing and basic services that local governments have had difficulties in meeting; and, on the other hand, the recruitment of Indigenous, especially female labor (Martínez Godoy, 2016; Korovkin, 2002a).

Several families in Pesillo have managed to maintain agricultural production relatively efficiently. Temporary and seasonal migrants, however, have returned frustrated with their experience with non-stable and underpaid jobs. From this negative experience, they have shown interest in pushing family agriculture and community institutions within their communities (Ferraro, 2004). Within this framework, microcredit programs such as the one promoted by the Peasant House of Cayambe (CCC) in partnership with Aid in Action emerged as a response to the demand of Indigenous communities in the area to meet certain needs of the family economy (Herrán, 2011, pp. 58, 59).

The partial resurgence of peasant family farming also generated greater demand for water and water resource control disputes with other users such as medium-sized producers and especially the flower companies and the dairy industry (Poats et al., 2007). This fact, along with legal reforms resulting from the constitutional recognition of water as an inalienable human right which should be administered exclusively by the State and community and association organizations, influenced rural territories throughout the country and was the subject of disputes between the government, agro-industrial entrepreneurs and much of the Indigenous movement in the second decade of the 21^st century (Hoogesteger van Dijk, 2013).

In particular, the creation of the National Secretariat for Water (SENAGUA) in 2008 as an entity attached to the Presidency of the Republic³ and the approval of the Water Law were followed by some discussions, disputes and protest by organizations affiliated with the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), which caused the government to delay the project, postponing the debate for more than five years. In 2014, the National Assembly would review the deliberations on the new Act and approve it with the persistent rejection of Indigenous organizations (Guerrero & Hinojosa, 2017).

The recognition and enforcement of the rights of Nature and collective rights in the Constitution generated expectations ranging from changes in focus on water management (with more emphasis on environmental protection) to the establishment of spaces for the participation of Indigenous peoples and organizations. CONAIE demanded the creation of an autonomous decision-making body, but ultimately the approved Water Law, although it incorporated almost all of the other points demanded, did not consider such a possibility. Instead, the Law merely created the Water Regulatory Agency (ARCA), which would assume powers around the awarding of the resource, the renewal of concessions and the resolution of conflicts between water users, among others. All this was interpreted by CONAIE and its allies as the establishment of highly restricted spaces in the face of more participation by Indigenous peoples and in favor of the government. This would deepen the already deteriorating relations between the Indigenous movement and the Correa government (Isch López, 2012).

In this context, the Kayambi of Pesillo had been actively involved in protest actions and discussions around the Water Law, which also linked it to endogenous processes of community organization, the defense of fragile ecosystems such as the highland plateau, the reconstitution of the ancestral Kayambi territory and the strengthening of their identity and local historical memory. As explained by Graciela Alba, governor of Pesillo:

… the present Constitution includes rights recognized for our communities to preserve our knowledge. We follow the legacy of our grandparents, who sacrificed their lives to be where we are. We are not going to lose that vision and those principles, and despite the dominance of capitalism, we will continue to resist in our way and try to revitalize our knowledge. (Great-granddaughter of the historic leader of the Kayambi people. Personal interview, Pesillo, 10 October 2018)

In some ways, community water management has been seen as a path to strengthen the territorial and autonomous communal government proposal, as is evident from the process that started around the construction of the “Life Plan” of the Pukará Community of Pesillo.

In this region where the Kayambi people live, the dispute over water — in a framework of favorable distribution to the flower and livestock companies — would seem to be reduced only to the economic or technical dimension of physical infrastructure. In reality, water disputes also involve stories of convergence between opposing local actors on many other issues. In relation to water and irrigation, local actors have reached minimal agreements to share efforts and responsibilities, whether to build or maintain infrastructure, to define rules for the use of irrigation or to operate in accordance with local reality and culture.

In this framework of space-territory control, Jorge Bastidas, spokesperson of the Confederation of Kayambi People, explains that they live a process of continuous recovery of their identity, which comes from a historical tradition, with a memory and a science developed by their ancestors. The hills, the rivers, the lagoons, the valleys, in other words the footprint of the Kayambi people, is present in all, marking the existence of agricultural systems of Andean crops, he explains. ⁴

Since the mid-1990s, the communes of Pesillo, as part of the Confederation of Kayambi People, supported CONAIE’s decision to participate directly in electoral contests by way of the Pachakutik Movement for Plurinational Unity (MUPP), to influence change through alternative proposals and forms of public management. As John Cameron points out: “Peasant-Indigenous organizations became increasingly involved in municipal policy, as a mechanism for exercising more control over rural infrastructure and local development processes” (Cameron, 2003, p. 164). Guillermo Churuchumbi, one of the main representatives of the Confederation, was elected mayor of this parish from 2014 to November 2022. He resigned this post to become candidate for governor of Pichincha in the 2023 regional elections.

The municipal council presided over by Churuchumbi, in one of its first acts, approved the ordinance that declared the municipality as a Plurinational and Intercultural Decentralized Self-Government (GADIP), which would set the pattern of its public management around the construction of plurinationality from below. This would enable some degree of transformation in the management of the use of political power and in the implementation of plans and policies for the resolution of local problems (GADIP, 2015, p. 17).

To illustrate, programs articulated between the municipal administration and the Confederation of Kayambi People, which seek to respond to the demands of community-based organizations and their processes of ethnic revitalization and political prominence, could be highlighted according to the following: (a) the strengthening of citizen participation mechanisms for planning and implementing the governance plan, together with accountability; b) the commitment to participatory budgets and the execution of “co-management works,” in which priorities are set by neighborhood or communal assemblies and costs are shared between the municipal government and the community through mingas or communal work projects; (c) the promotion of alternative production systems where ancestral practices and knowledge of Kayambi people are recognized, valued and made visible; and (d) the observance of the rights of Nature through the implementation of programs for the protection of the highland plateau area and water sources (Gendron, 2019).

The last two examples serve to illustrate the impact of community proposals on the decisions of the town hall. On the one hand, the establishment of the Community Water Protection Area of Cayambe, and on the other, the participatory construction of the Ordinance on the use of public spaces for the marketing of healthy products at the so-called “Agro-ecological Fairs of Cayambe.”

The first refers to an area under the management of the Kayambi people, benefiting four communes and three development committees, and which corresponds to territories specifically designed for the maintenance and protection of the highland plateau and water sources that guarantee irrigation. It is an environmentally important area as it establishes an ecological corridor for species such as the spectacled bear, the highland wolf and the Andean condor, which live in this sector. ⁵

The second, however, points to processes of strengthening organizations dedicated to the rescue and multiplication of seeds, soil conservation and agro-ecological production, and where the role of Kichwa women groups in communities is highlighted; those who formed the Network of Solidarity Economy and Food Sovereignty of the Kayambi Territory (RESSAK). The passage of the Ordinance allows these community organizations to recover spaces within the city to show their proposal for food sovereignty. According to Mayor Guillermo Churuchumbi:

The Ordinance was a lesson for councilors and officials as it was created by agro-ecological women producers, who know the reality of planting, harvesting and marketing, since it represents the work of each of them. (Requelme et al., 2019, p. 102)

Despite these advances, not everyone in the organization is convinced of the importance of such proposals, highlighting internal discrepancies and contradictions, as Graciela Alba points out:

… one of these is the disassociation and disarticulation between different organizations involved in the process. In the case of water management, for example, between the Irrigation Water Board, the Consumer Water Board and the Community Government. So far, we have not yet been able to reach a moment of unity in order to motivate the community. (Personal interview, Pesillo, 10 October 2018, not published)

For Humberto Cholango, one of the leaders of the Kayambi people, there are other elements of analysis that should be considered:

… in the matter of the Plurinational State, it has had an impact by proposing the community as the foundation of the Plurinational State, the key is: how is that obtained? For example, here in the highlands, the thesis of communal governments […] [regarding] the administration of justice, control and management of natural resources, moors, water, direct relationship with State agencies have achieved an impact, but it must be understood that it is no longer the same Indigenous society as it was 25 years ago, when the Indigenous uprising occurred and when the thesis of the plurinational state was put forward. Indigenous society in the last 25 years has changed, economic relations are now very different; capital and the market have arrived and are inside the communities. (Personal interview, Quito, Salesian Polytechnic University, 29 November 2017)

The processes of internal social differentiation, market articulation and associated cultural changes are undoubtedly impacting community life and its future. According to Alba:

… here we have some problems and difficult experiences that have generated distrust and the limits of coordination. Gaining that trust and fostering those levels of coordination do not occur in a short time. In the future we must leave documents and tools for the work to come, so that the community can be guided and that the Community Assembly has those tools. We want to restructure the statute and generate a regulation. (Personal interview, Pesillo, 10 October 2018, not published)

Articulating under a single entity of self-government and having the power to manage water and the territory seem to be the target of the communal government of Pesillo, which has de facto partially advanced in the organization and management of water boards, for both consumption and irrigation. Nevertheless, formal recognition of “community water management” by the State remains to be seen, even though the current restrictions imposed by the Water Law would make it possible for competences such as the issuance of authorization for water use to be in the name of the community and not of the boards, as is happening now.

Neither the political alliance between CONAIE nor the government of Moreno in 2017, formed by ruptures and resentments with the government of Correa, favored the problem so that notions such as “community water management” can be recognized. In addition to the internal conflicts within the Indigenous organization around the proposal for communal government, which according to Graciela Alba, “... nor is it accepted entirely by all the commoners, as the space of water associations are niches of power that are disputed internally” (Interview, Pesillo, 10 October 2018).

The alliance between CONAIE and the government of Moreno lasted a little more than two years and deteriorated during 2019 after a series of confrontations, mainly resulting from the implementation of neoliberal adjustment measures agreed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which provoked the greatest social protest mobilizations since the 1990s and led to a definitive rupture of this pact in October (Herrera, 2020; Ramírez Gallegos, 2020).

The neoliberal policies implemented by Moreno between 2017 and 2020 irreversibly paralyzed the reforms initiated in 2008, weakening the role of the State through the dismantling of the institution created in the Water Law of 2014. To a large extent, government policy has limited itself to executing an agenda agreed with the IMF, favoring holders of external debt bonds and fractions of the financial and agro-exporting⁶ bourgeoisie.

Self-Government of the Kichwa of Pastaza: The Experience of the Pastaza Kikin Kichwa Runakuna-Pakkiru (Kichwa Nation of Pastaza)

In the last three decades, the Kichwa Nation of Pastaza — whose current organization is Pastaza Kikin Kichwa Runakuna-Pakkiru — has defended and managed its ancestral territory, the largest in the country with more than a million and a half hectares, located in the central Amazon. The Kichwa of Pastaza have played a leading role within the Ecuadorian Indigenous movement, demanding since the beginning of the 1980s the recognition of collective rights, particularly the right to autonomy and self-government.

Through the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza (OPIP), whose origin dates back to 1977, the Kichwa of Pastaza raised the legalization and collective titling not only of their territories, but of all the nationalities of the Amazon and the Ecuadorian coast as well as the cessation of colonization programs and the total suspension of oil activities. The OPIP also called for a reform of the 1978 Constitution to make Ecuador a Plurinational State and for the adoption of the Indigenous Nationalities Act of Ecuador (Chirif et al., 1991; Whitten, 1987).

The OPIP amplified and made public these demands and presented them on 22 August 1990, at the Palace of Carondelet, the seat of the government in Quito, through the so-called “Territorial Agreement of Kichwa People, Shiwiar and Achuar of the province of Pastaza to subscribe to the Ecuadorian State” (Guzmán Gallegos, 2012; Ruiz, 1993).

Two years later, in May 1992, OPIP would ratify the agreement following a march from Pastaza to Quito (about 400 km away), “Allpamanda, Causaimanda, Jatarishum” (Let´s rise up for Earth, for Life), which called for the legalization and distribution of collective property titles of ancestral territories, one for each of the nationalities of this province, and for the recognition of the right to autonomy and self-government (Ortiz-T., 2016; Ruiz, 1993).

In terms of the first demand, the government responded by granting 18 titles of collective property, which partially recognized ancestral territories, although at the same time it did so by altering the ancestral limits and causing a cluster of internal conflicts of lynching and demarcation (Guzmán Gallegos, 1997; Ortiz-T., 2016; Garcés, 2001). Regarding the second demand, the government had a negative reaction and gave way to an aggressive campaign led by the military and replicated by right-wing groups and the media that accused the organization of seeking to impose a “secession” project and create “one State within another” (Ruiz, 1993; Ortiz-T., 1997).

This situation would also be marked by the beginning of the largest oil exploitation project in this province: while titles were being granted, the Arco/Agip oil consortium announced the existence of proven reserves and commercial interest in the field. It would not be until 1998 that operations to exploit and transport heavy crude from this area would begin (Ortiz-T., 1997; McCreary, 1992; Guzmán Gallegos, 2012; Wasserstrom & Southgate, 2013).

It is estimated that, since then until now, crude oil extraction has generated revenues of over $3 billion for more than two decades, and given contractual arrangements, the main beneficiary has been the operating company itself (with more than 80% of the proceeds). The remaining 20% is distributed in royalties between the central government and local Amazonian government. In other words, from the entire stream of capital extracted, Pastaza failed to retain for itself any major taxes or royalties (Mendez et al., 1998; Korovkin, 2002b; Guzmán Gallegos, 2012; Diantini et al., 2020).

Both of these facts would mark to some extent the scene of recurrent conflicts between the State and the Indigenous nationalities of Pastaza. The desire of the Kichwa people to ensure the control and legalization of their territories, and thus the existence of an inherited ancestral space in which to exercise their autonomy and self-government, has frequently collided with the interests of capital linked to the extractive industry and the State in co-opting these populations and territories in order to ensure an area of exploitation and extraction of a commodity such as oil (Bebbington, 2013; Veltmeyer, 2013; Sawyer, 2016).

The partial legalization of the Indigenous territories of Pastaza obtained in 1992 provided, to a large extent, the impetus for the autonomous process, particularly of the Kichwa people, although soon internal differences would result in disputes and fractions.

The advance began with the elaboration of Plan Amazanga (1993-1996) whose central conceptual premises are summarized by Alfredo Viteri Gualinga, founder and first President of OPIP and coordinator of the plan:

… our territory is not one thing, nor is it a usable, exploitable set of things, nor is it a set of resources. Our territory, with its jungles, its lagoons, its wetlands, its sacred places where the Supay live, with its black, red and sandy lands and its clays, is a living entity that gives us life, provides us with water and air; it cares for us, gives us food and health; it gives us knowledge and energy; it gives us generations and a history, a present and a future; it gives us identity and culture; it gives us autonomy and freedom. Then, life is along with the territory, and next to life is dignity; next to the territory is our self-determination as people (Viteri Gualinga, 2004, p. 31)

It would be the first time that the concepts of Sacha Runa Yachay (the knowledge of people of the forest), Sumak Kawsay (life in fullness) and Sumak Allpa (land without evil) guided an instrument of management and self-government. This also made it possible to create economic initiatives of its own through the organization’s own companies, such as the OPIP Department of Aviation; Atakapi Tours organized with the purpose of promoting community ecotourism; Palati Savings and Credit Cooperative, oriented to the promotion of the production of family economies; Fatima Zoocrianza Center and the Amazanga Institute, the latter focused on research, conservation and education (Tapia, 2019; Merino Gayas, 2019; Escobar, 2008).

Subsequently, the OPIP Self-Development Plan (1996-1999) was implemented, which included education components, community infrastructure and communication and productive projects of various kinds (Stacey, 2004). Later, the OPIP Plan of Life (1999-2012) was developed and approved, which included as its central axis the consolidation of the autonomy process and territorial self-management; the mapping update at the association level; the strengthening of local capacities through a training program for local technicians and leaders; the promotion of sustainable productive projects at the family economy level; and the establishment of strategic alliances around the autonomic process of Pastaza´s Kichwa people (Silva Charvet, 2002; Guzmán Gallegos, 2012; Chauzá Samboní, 2016).

Alexandra Aguinda, from the Nina Amarun community on the Curaray River, belonging to the Association with the same name, explains the meaning of the process:

… our Sumak Kawsay (life in harmony) has been to maintain the knowledge of our ancestors, especially biodiversity, just as we have built a management plan for Sumak Kawsay. Likewise, our children must continue with this knowledge; when they get old, they will pass it on to their children, and they on to their children and so on, forever. We still live to take care of our territories, so that resources are not extinguished; this vision must be maintained from generation to generation. Just as we have grown up knowing all diversity, our children must also know in their lives. We are living here with these visions, so it is not extinguished, so it is not altered, and other generations would continue to maintain and care for everything that exists in our territory. We inherit it from our grandparents and pass it on to our children. (ProIndigenous-GIZ, 2016, p. 47)

All the OPIP plans and programs between 1992 and 2018 have responded to differentiated demands and priorities of their organizations and ayllus. ⁷ There are communities such as San Jacinto del Pindo, Rio Anzu, Copataza and Santa Clara that live in the so-called colonization zone, close to the main road hubs and urban centers such as Puyo, Arajuno, strongly impacted by the most individualistic western markets and culture. On the other hand, there are other associations, such as Curaray, Rio Tigre and those of the Bobonaza River located in relatively isolated and distant territories, where there is still no direct connection by land, and transport is primarily by boat or air (Chauzá-Samboní, 2016; Silva Charvet, 2002).

In this second group, the cohesion around the autonomic project is greater and stronger, maintaining an integral perspective as the Kichwa nationality; while, in the first group, the autonomic perspective is weak, to the point that there have emerged positions openly contrary to autonomic theses and favorable to agreements with the State and extractive capital.

Two significant events occurred in the framework of the oil company offensive between 1988 and 2003: in 1994 the agreement between Arco/Agip and OPIP on the oil operations of block 10, and in 2003, the outbreak of the conflict between the original Kichwa people of Sarayaku against the State and the General Fuel Company CGC of Argentina, concessionaire of the so-called Block 23 on Bobonaza River (Melo, 2015; Sawyer, 2016).

The first was a forced exit from the conflict that started in 1989 and which jeopardized the demand for the titling of ancestral territories. But it also sought to mitigate the State’s accusation against OPIP of “attacking national interests” by radically opposing oil projects in its territory, while setting a precedent for a new type of State-Indigenous peoples and extractive companies relationship, on the basis of respect for collective rights, mitigation of environmental impacts and introduction of new oil exploitation practices that exclude the opening of land routes and the direct participation of Indigenous peoples in the economic benefits of the exploitation of the oil block. This last point is defined by OPIP as a potential source of funding for its “life plans” and the ability to access resources to sustain the regional process.

Both the State’s apathy through the institutions involved in the oil sector, and the departure of the Arco company from the country in 1999, led to the suspension of the 1994 agreement; Agip Oil Ecuador (AOE), the new head operator of block 10, would abandon the commitment made by its predecessor and prioritize a vertical, focused and client-based relationship with the 17 communities of the area. In exchange for small donations for focused projects of road, productive, educational and health infrastructure, it conditioned the delivery of these projects to the formation of a new organization called AIEPRA (Association of Independent Pastaza Peoples) to the total exclusion of the OPIP and its associations (Ortiz-T., 1997; Diantini, 2020).

Secondly, the outbreak of the conflict between the original Kichwa people of Sarayaku against the State and the oil company CGC between 2003 and 2012 highlighted several issues: the recurrent practice of the State of not guaranteeing or respecting existing collective rights such as that of free, prior and informed consultation; negligence to prevent corrupt practices through intimidation, bribery and division of communities promoted by companies such as CGC; the intimidation and violent actions by the repressive forces of the State and paramilitary groups contracted by the oil company. However, it also showed the predominance of organizations like Sarayaku of an autarchic, short-term vision isolated from the autonomous demand of the whole Kichwa nationality of Pastaza, to give way to a narrative and fragmenting perspective of the problem (Ortiz-T., 2016).

Consistent with this position, and after the judgment issued nine years later by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), which condemned the State for violating the right to free, prior and informed consultation and sentenced it to compensate the affected communities (Melo, 2015), Sarayaku has developed an autarchic proposal called “Kawsay Sacha” (Living Forest) outside the rest of the autonomous political-territorial dynamics of the Kichwa nationality as a whole, and in which it stands out in radical opposition to the presence of extractive activities within its territory, which represents less than 10% of the Kichwa territory of Pastaza. The Sarayaku thesis has been supported by some ecological networks and related academic groups inside and outside Ecuador⁸ (Santi & Ghirotto Santos, 2019; Teixeira, 2020).

The adoption of the Constitution in 2008 would be the development that brought about the greatest organizational changes among the Kichwa, who decided to dissolve all existing organizations and give way to a larger representative body, which would be provisionally called the “Coordinator of the Kichwa Nationality of Pastaza” (CNKP). The CNKP would assume the responsibility of promoting the draft constitution of the Kichwa Territorial Community of Pastaza (CTKP), for which in 2011 they signed an agreement with the government, which included the Kuraray-Liquino Organization and the Association of Indigenous Communities of Arajuno (ACIA).

However, numerous difficulties have caused the initiative to go along a highly sinuous path, including structural, legal and institutional problems such as the differences between the ancestral territoriality of people and nationalities and the logic of national territorial administration and organization of the State, marked by the existence of parish jurisdictions, cantonal and provincial, which have historically been created from an ethnocentric matrix to the measure of the colonist interests and the extraction of resources, to the margin of ancestral territorial uses and management, imposing limits that have fragmented and divided ancestral territorial units (Ortiz-T., 2015).

Other conjunctural factors that influenced the interest and political will of the central government led by Rafael Correa added to process and concretized the establishment of the CTI (Indigenous Territorial Circumscriptions) regime. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a controversial decision by the Sarayaku leadership to shelter three fugitives who were sentenced to prison for injuries caused against the President of the Republic. “The government considered that it was not right for Indigenous people to shelter fugitives and to condition the state as if it were another state.” Thus, according to Franco Viteri, former president of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE), it set the discussion of the limits of self-determination of people (Chirif, 2016, p. 100).

After that moment, the process of forming the CTI had to be suspended as it did not receive any funding. Until then, the Institute for Amazonian Ecodevelopment (ECORAE), as a State body, had supported agreements with the Kichwa Nationalities of Pastaza, Achuar, Andwa and Shiwiar for the updating of geographic information (physical and demographic changes); participatory construction of life plans through workshops and assemblies; socialization of the legal-constitutional framework and the development of statutes and training of communities around the new regional special regime (Chirif, 2016; Ortiz-T., 2015).

The initiative of the Kichwa of Pastaza was isolated and had no political support from Indigenous organizations of national scope such as CONAIE or CONFENIAE, which had declared themselves in opposition to the government.

For some organizations of the Kichwa People of Pastaza, the interest in setting up CTI is due to the dream of going beyond the titling of ethnic territories, already achieved almost in their entirety, and to make progress in establishing administrative territorial jurisdictions that have a state budget to implement their life plans. Initially, in 2011, Ecorae socialized the national regulations and provided budgets to several Amazonian nationalities for a total amount of USD 3 000 000, to generate government proposals, statutes and life plans. At present, this competence was removed from this institution and its implementation was diluted over time. (Vallejo et al., 2016, p. 52)

The issue of the demand for the creation of the CTI would be resumed two years later in the government of Lenín Moreno, and through the National Assembly, which favored the demands of municipal and prefectural governments to impose the so-called “Organic Law for the Integral Planning of the Special Amazonian Territorial Circumscription (CTEA),” which looks for a “Fund for Amazonian Sustainable Development,” whose resources will be managed by local governments, prioritizing basic services such as health and education, and which replicates the old practices of short-term, client-based, ethnocentric treatment that is focused exclusively on tangible demands of some Indigenous and peasant communities in the region.

Our relationship with the public authorities is non-existent, because every initiative of its own is not supported by public powers; support is only encouraged at the client level, which does not respect the worldview of our people [emphasized by César Cerda, also former president of the OPIP]. (Personal interview, Puyo-Pastaza, 23 August 2019, not published)

Problematic Knots Derived from the Ecuadorian Experience

The experiences described in this chapter show the difficulties and limitations of the process of building a Plurinational State. Even though the 1990s were marked by a triple crisis associated with the social impacts of neoliberal policies, the crisis of the nation-state project and the collapse of the political system, the emergence of the Indigenous movement on the public scene opened up new possibilities for the restructuring of the popular vision. This led to the development of proposals that ranged from the construction of alternatives to neoliberalism, to the criticism of the coloniality of power (understood as a domination pattern that combines the ethnic hierarchy of Europeans vis-à-vis colonized people, with the exploitation of capital on labor) and the Creole nation-state project established in the 19^th century, that was ethnocentric and exclusionary (Guerrero, 1993).

The cases of the Kayambi people in the northern highlands and of the Kichwa nationality of Pastaza in the central Amazon, in some ways, reveal several elements that involve the State and its scope to process demands that include its own structural and institutional reforms, as well as the Indigenous organizations themselves in their capacity to deepen and concretize their demands and manage their strategies of political advocacy and negotiation with the State.

It should be considered that throughout the 20^th century the State failed to consolidate the old Creole project of “integrating a single State into a single nation, based on a language, culture and religion,” which meant the annihilation of cultural differences, either through bleaching or “de-indianization” or through the integration of Indigenous peoples into the dominant mestizo project, as advocated by indigenists. And in its breakup, such a project generated the exacerbation of regionalism with the resurgence of oligarchic secessionist theses, particularly in Guayaquil until the eruption of Indigenous peoples and their questioning of the current nation-state project (Zamosc, 2005; Ortiz-T., 2014, Silva Charvet, 2004, Taylor, 1994).

The long history of resistance of Indigenous peoples, widely alluded to in the two cases mentioned above, show in some way the evolution of Indigenous thought in its relationship with the dominant State and society in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, ranging from indigenism and multiculturalism through demands for access to land, legalization of territories, improvement of working conditions, access to bilingual intercultural education, or regulation of colonization programs, until arriving at the plurinational thesis, based on the recognition of people as collective individuals of rights, coupled with the notions of autonomy, self-government and self-determination, which mainly refer to a new type of State institutionality and territorial organization, as is the case in several Latin American countries (González, 2010; Dussel & Fornazzari, 2002; Silva Charvet, 2004).

In this context, explaining the situation of the collective right to the autonomy of Indigenous peoples and nationalities in Ecuador requires considering, on the one hand, the State in its capacity to process claims around collective rights or to ensure their validity, and on the other hand, the dynamics of the other actors who struggle to influence the direction of institutional reforms and public policies.

Indigenous demands in the last 70 years have never been fully met and promoted by the State. Three examples of State responses around land tenure, water distribution and mining and oil concessions by the extractive industry within ancestral territories can illustrate this point.

In the first case, between the beginning of the 1970s to mid-1980s, the struggles for land and agrarian reform, although they annihilated the forms of precarious work and the structure of the large properties of the hacienda system, especially in the highlands, the data show that Ecuador is a country with more than 94% of the agricultural area privately owned, while only 4.9% is for collective and/or community ownership. Land tenure has not changed substantially and the Gini coefficient in the rural sector exceeds 0.9, a highly inequitable distribution (Chirif & García Hierro, 2007; Gondard & Mazurek, 2001; Korovkin, 2002; Martínez Godoy, 2016; Martínez Valle, 2016).

In the second case, related to water, as the National Water Forum points out:

The concentration of water in a few hands is similar or even worse than that of the earth. Peasant and Indigenous population have communal irrigation systems that represent 86% of the users, however, they only have 22% of the irrigated area and most seriously, they access to 13% of the flow, while the private sector, representing 1% of Agricultural Production Units (APUs), have access to 67% of the flow. (Hoogester van Dijk, 2013; Isch López, 2012)

In relation to the third case about the rejection of the presence of the extractive oil and mining industries, especially in Indigenous Amazonian territories, figures show that in the last 50 years (1970–2020), the State has not stopped exploiting oil and does so directly, through the state-owned company Petroecuador in a total of 12 oil blocks or fields, representing 20% of the Ecuadorian Amazon; or in partnership with private contracted companies, which operate 14 blocks on an area of 23.3% of the cadastral map. In the last 30 years, the State has tried, without success and in the framework of strong confrontations with the Indigenous organizations of the South Center, to license 21 new blocks, which, if concretized, would represent more than 4 million new hectares (Ministry of Energy and Non-Renewable Resources, 2019). ⁹

In the case of mining, concessions prior to 2008 reached more than 5 million hectares (20% of the national territory) including protected areas and Indigenous territories. Following the Constituent Assembly and the legal reforms surrounding this activity, the new concessions from 2009 cover an area of more than 1 million hectares (4.5% of the national territory), focusing particularly on the south and south-east region of the country, peasant agricultural land and ancestral territories such as those of Shuar nationality (Sacher & Acosta, 2012; Ministry of Energy and Non-Renewable Resources, 2019).

What these data demonstrate is the persistence of a primary dependent capitalist export model established since the 19^th century simultaneously with the Creole nation-state project. To some extent, this is a pattern of territorial organization and management accompanied by a system of population control and administration that has not changed substantially, and which is highly functional to the requirements imposed by global capitalism and the world market for commodities and other primary products (Burchardt & Dietz, 2014; Sachs & Warner, 1995; Bebbington, 2013).

The logic of accumulation and reproduction of capital that originated in industrialized countries and multinational corporations directs their investments in finance and extraction of raw materials at low cost. The small but powerful elites of the Ecuadorian bourgeoisie who endorse or participate in such investments will hardly allow them to alter the favorable conditions for the investment, reproduction and accumulation of this capital (Conaghan & Malloy, 1995; Bunker, 2006; North et al., 2006; Sachs & Warner, 1995; Mehlum et al., 2006).

In the last 40 years, the extractive border of oil, mining and export agro-industry has only expanded and increased, together with acute deterioration and deprivation processes of vital resources for the Indigenous population, ecosystems and their sustainability (Sawyer, 2016; Valdivia, 2008; Veltmeyer, 2013)

In this context, the mixed, capitalist and dependent national State is limited in the face of the onslaught and pressures of the agro-exporters or the extractive oil and mining industry, and the State weakness exacerbated during two neoliberal periods (1984–2006) and (2017–2020) and barely interrupted by the emergence of a popular national coalition that reformed the Constitution and ruled the country between 2007 and 2016.

It is precisely this period which characterized the urgency to recover the State after two decades of neoliberalism, and that led the government of Correa and its allies to govern by prioritizing nationalistic policies and strengthening the State and its regulatory and redistributionist role, often in disregard of the high expectations and specific needs of Indigenous peoples, as shown by the inconveniences around the Water Law or the suspension of the CTI formation process in Pastaza (Conaghan, 2015; Andrade, 2012).

The paradox at the base of the deep misunderstanding between the progressive or “national-popular” coalition that ruled the country between 2008 and 2016 and much of the Indigenous movement led by CONAIE are the different conceptions of change around the scope and content of the State. If plurinationality, as a concept, requires another type of State institutional structure, a new territorial organization and an overcoming of representative or delegative democracy to a more participative, deliberative and intercultural one, the “Citizen’s Revolution” of Correa barely limited itself to prioritizing in its redistributive political development plans through greater tax control and investment in social poverty reduction programs, mainly through the provision of basic services and road, education and health infrastructures (Andrade, 2012; Ramírez Gallegos, 2020).

The “Citizen’s Revolution” left out substantial aspects such as combating discrimination, racism or cultural violence, or encouraging deeper and more comprehensive reforms of education and health systems, particularly with more intercultural and inclusionary approaches (Ortiz, 2015; Ramírez Gallegos, 2016)

These difficulties in the government-Indigenous peoples relationship during the period of the “Citizen’s Revolution” are few compared to the restrictions posed during the neoliberal periods (before 2007 and after 2016), in which certain State policies were dismantled or restricted to the maximum (oil contracts, tax policy, environmental regulation, education and health tax programs, water co-management and management, etc.). Instead, it would appear that targeted responses had more acceptance and sympathies in some Indigenous leadership circles (social emergency funds, Council of Indigenous Nationalities, Directorate of Bilingual Intercultural Education (DINEIB), programs funded by multilateral agencies, among others) (Herrera, 2020; Ramírez Gallegos, 2020).

The absence of a popular group capable of sustaining and advancing the rest of the political-institutional reform process and of building hegemony and a new consensus around a new type of Plurinational State, would thus end up deeply undermining the State’s capacity to respond effectively to Indigenous demands (Chilcote, 1990).

Rather than negotiating and strengthening capacity in development plans and other public policy instruments (such as the National Agenda for the Equality of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities), several Indigenous sectors linked to CONAIE preferred to exclude themselves from these discussions and processes and to deepen differences and establish their own agenda, regardless of the historical proposals that had guided Indigenous mobilizations years earlier. From this analysis, one can visualize the experience of the Sarayaku organization in Pastaza, that beyond the important content and scope of the historical judgment issued by the IACHR in 2012 against the Ecuadorian State (Melo, 2015), it is evidence of the loss of the leadership of this organization, which has chosen to privilege its interest to the detriment of the collective demand of the Kichwa nationality of Pastaza. In the case of the Kayambi people, by living accelerated processes of sociocultural transformation, occupying the same spaces as the mestizos, they would appear to be more open to political negotiation with the State, either to occupy public institutions and to manage them or to access municipalities such as Cayambe, to generate autonomy processes without having to opt for the path of a special CTI-type regime.

Beyond the difficulties and misunderstandings, it is important to note that the progress made through the Constitution in 2008 is a fact. The most important legal instrument of the country reflects historical demands made by Indigenous peoples: it recognizes the plurinational and intercultural character of the State; it establishes three fields of rights (individual, collective and of Nature) and it will continue to pose permanent challenges such as those described in the experiences. The question remains about the change in the model of society demanded by the Constitution in order to fully guarantee the rights.

A key issue of the new Latin American social constitutionalism is to promote change in the development model, the political model of the State and the transformation of power relations. This political-constitutional proposal has been driven by social movements, and the Indigenous movement has imbued it with its own distinctive sign (sociocultural approach), forged in its great mobilizations and emancipatory struggles (Narváez, 2017, p,127).

In this matter, Alfredo Viteri Gualinga, points out:

… Indigenous have to build what we have conquered. Then, this is the exercise of law, it is the time of exercising rights and it implies the construction of a Plurinational State [...] We need to participate actively in the rights recognized in the Constitution. We must apply them, otherwise we cannot lay the foundations for the construction of a Plurinational State (cited in Lalander & Lembke, 2018, p. 203)

It involves some verbs like exercising, practicing, demanding, indicating and in one: practicing. A Plurinational State requires an intercultural society. As scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2006) points out, exercising rights and building plurinationality involves experimenting, creating institutions, generating another democracy more tied to the deliberative and participative than to the delegative and representative, another type of institutionality where different modes of institutional membership (shared and collegial institutions) may be present in the area of electoral control, the defense of people, subnational governments and even the National Assembly itself, which are called to be plurinational and intercultural. It also implies looking at the whole country as a sovereign, unitary Plurinational State, which means not ignoring the demands of the whole.

Conclusions

The experiences of Indigenous peoples and nationalities of Ecuador in the exercise of autonomy and self-government show not only a clash of visions with regard to development, but also the difficulties involved in the transformational processes of the State, both subject to capital pressures.

If the State historically comes from a post-colonial and ethnocentric matrix and has sought to homogenize the whole population, in doing so, it faces a heterogeneous, diverse, multicultural and highly asymmetric reality. The imagined community of nation, of the Creole elites, certainly refers to the desire to replicate in the Andean-Amazon periphery that which has been generated in the center of Europe, as it is established as a reference. This model has excluded Indigenous peoples since the creation of the Republic, whether through invisibility or non-recognition of existing diversity.

The replica of the coloniality of power, as a system of domination and social classification that continued strongly until the end of the 20^th century, defined Indigenous peoples as inferior, thus designing and creating institutions anchored in that ethnocentric, monocultural and post-colonial vision. The challenge posed by the current Constitution in recognizing the State as plurinational and intercultural goes beyond a simple role of guaranteeing certain collective rights. It involves developing a capacity to regulate and prevent such rights from being violated. And to this end, the exercise of interculturality and plurinationality must transcend the institutional sphere and encompass the entire political field, including the organizations themselves, as shown by the experience of the Kichwa of Pastaza, who dissolved their organizations, questioning the union and corporatist model that had grouped them for almost 40 years, and giving way to the constitution of self-governing bodies. By doing so, they have opened debates about the authoritarian, vertical and macho character in which they were created. Being collective subjects of rights and exercising autonomy demands another type of political and organizational subjectivity.

The two cases above show how state institutions, beyond the legal scaffolding reached, are designed and organized to sustain the basic relationship between capital and labor, between capital and Nature converted into object, merchandise, commodities, regardless of whether the Constitution has granted it rights. This results in a State that is fragile, generous and docile to the demands of the agri-exporting bourgeoisie and the extractive industry, and narrow and sinuous with the multiple demands of historically excluded people.

Economically, the dependent, extractive and predatory capitalist model that prevails in the Amazon through large-scale oil and mining activities, as well as that of export floriculture, through its recurrent promise to achieve progress, generate employment, overcome poverty and integrate these peripheral or nation-border regions have been a permanent source of frustration, conflicts, labor rights violations and aggression against Nature, whose fragile ecosystems have led to the shortage or depletion of basic goods for the sustainability of the lives of many populations.

It is evident that in cases such as those mentioned above, the Kayambi people and Kichwa nationality of Pastaza, the historical Indigenous organizations have developed their own proposals for territorial self-management, self-government and experiences such as those described by the dominant development model, supporting the thesis of the re-founding of the State and the need to have a special autonomous regime that allows them to attend their affairs according to their knowledge, their norms, their practices, their identities and their specific realities. Autonomy is indeed made of this: praxis, and a process under construction. What underlies the protest and resistance of Indigenous nationalities is the concern to find guarantees to the integrity and integrality of their territories, thus understanding issues of pending legalization and integral security of ancestral territories, until achieving the recognition of self-governments, with full powers and resources to manage their living spaces.

That is the meaning underlying the Constitution in force in Ecuador. In other words, it is about making plurinationality alive and not a mere slogan without empirical reference. It is a matter of moving toward new institutional forms, which are based on recognizing what exists. The experience of the Kayambi people, the initiatives that continue to push the present generations of Kichwa in Pastaza, bring into view other epistemologies, other local practices and understandings of Nature and other institutions that are called on to enrich Ecuador’s proposals for transformation.

Undoubtedly, planning experiences from below, from a holistic perspective that questions anthropocentrism, as shown in the so-called “life plans,” are initiatives to continue to exercise autonomy or the right to deal with their affairs according to their rules, their authorities, and their institutions as defined in Convention 169 and included in other instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Finally, it is clear that the autonomy of Indigenous peoples is a fundamental right that can and should be exercised, regardless of the administrative and political organization of the State, as demonstrated by these experiences. In short, it is not a question of inventing new bureaucratic or administrative bodies, but of recognizing and strengthening the actual existing processes, which are the ones that make it possible and condition the exercise of autonomy and the observance of the right to self-determination in the framework of unitary and Plurinational States.

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