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Jatarishun. Testimonios de la lucha indígena de Saquisilí (1930-2006)
Abstract
Durante el siglo XX Saquisilí fue un verdadero calidoscopio del movimiento indígena ecuatoriano de la sierra. en los 205 km2 que abarca el actual cantón se concentran muchos de los procesos que caracterizan el movimiento indígena del Ecuador. Verificamos un ascenso vertical de lo indígena desde la sumisión en la hacienda hasta el poder local en la alcaldía.
No queremos aquí presentar un análisis o un estudio de estos procesos, como si pensáramos que des- de una visión exterior y asimétrica, desde la torre académica, podríase todo de mejor manera. Por el contrario, consideramos que todos estos antecedentes indican que estos hombres y mujeres son capaces de contar sus historias por sí mismos. Queremos mostrar las visiones “desde abajo” y “desde adentro” de estos procesos, junto con sus historias y anécdotas. En las próximas páginas escucharemos sus percepciones –muchas veces invisibles– que verdaderamente hacen correr la rueda de la historia.
... Through the unity built in the process of struggling for land redistribution and forming the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador-CONAIE (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador) in the 1980-1990s, the movement built its representation at the national level, while maintaining a solid grassroots support through indigenous organizations and federations firmly established within communities and at the regional level. Traditional parties, even from the left, hardly sustained political support for the claims of CONAIE; much of the linkage to parties occurred since the 1930s as classbased linkages that diluted the ability to unite the indigenous behind identity-based issues (Selverstone-Scher 2001;Kaltmeier 2008). When CONAIE formed, its leaders were intent on producing their own power base built on ethnic based demands for recognition and substantial policies aimed specifically for indigenous communities. ...
... actions by indigenous groups (Korovkin 2003, 137). According to Kaltmeier (2008) Yet, access to resources for land redistribution and crop production was still meager, especially as the state struggled to get landowners to acquiesce to the new laws. Though the intensification of indigenous mobilizations around land redistribution called for IERAC to change the course of its policies, "the call was ignored by agrarian policy authorities, surely convinced of the proverbial patience of the indigenous peoples, and without a doubt succumbing to pressures from the Agricultural Chamber and Livestock Association" (Rosero 1991, 40). ...
... Just like the government was caught by surprise with the 1990 uprising, political parties also were confronted with the new political challenge of the indigenous movement. The land problem had existed for decades, but it had not been dealt with adequately within a political 273 party system characterized by instability and weak clientelistic linkages to the parties' societal bases (Yashar 2005;Kaltmeier 2008). In the aftermath of the initial negotiations between CONAIE and the Borja administration, the parties formulated their own positions with respect to the uprising and land policy. ...
... IERAC archive, 402-RA mentions Talahua had a German administrator named N. Fischman in a document dated24/09/1967. 17 In nearby Cotopaxi, a former Nazi was able to rent an hacienda that belonged to the Central University(Kaltmeier 2008). ...
This thesis is a historical ethnography of the parish of Simiatug, from the turn of the twentieth century to the present but focused mainly between 1970-2020. Simiatug is a rural parish located in the Bolívar province in the central highlands of Ecuador, where Kichwa indigenous communities, a major hacienda (Hacienda Talahua), and a white-mestizo town coexisted until the early 1980s. Relationships of exploitation and racial discrimination against indigenous people were predominant during this period. Legislation such as the agrarian reforms were not implemented locally, due to the unassailable power of the landowning family, the Cordovez, who were able to maintain their estate despite the law. This began to change in the 1970s, and social change accelerated during the 1980s. Indigenous peasants organised themselves to create a Peasant House for adult literacy, founded independent bilingual schools and a Kichwa radio frequency. They also demanded changes in market relations with mestizos, refusing the asymmetrical exchange systems that had been usual until then. In April 1981, hundreds of people marched to occupy the land of hacienda Talahua, pressing for the application of land reform legislation. In 1982, they were successful, and the hacienda’s land was granted to the indigenous organisation Fundación Runacunapac Yachana Huasi (FRY). FRY still owns several hundred hectares of communal land, on which they have since carried out many agricultural and educational projects. Each chapter of the thesis analyses a different aspect of the transformation of Simiatug, contrasting observations made during fieldwork with archival material, including documents from the Land Reform Archive and several unpublished video interviews with indigenous leaders filmed by anthropologists in the 1980s. Chapter One describes the hacienda through the landowners’ and peasants’ concepts of land, Chapter Two portrays the town and its market as a second backdrop for the struggles, Chapter Three describes the uprising in which indigenous peasants occupied Hacienda Talahua, Chapter Four looks at education and Chapter Five reflects on indigeneity as a form of historical consciousness. The main historical narrative woven through the thesis has been reconstructed from the perspective of the generation who participated in the occupation of the hacienda. This narrative is complemented by other interpretations made by the indigenous youth, mestizos, and landowners. Focusing on indigeneity, from the point of view of different actors - including not only the indigenous peasants’ perceptions of their identity but also the mestizos’ and the elites’ discourses - I trace how being indigenous in Simiatug is a complex, intricate and changing reality. I argue that the struggles for land, education and fair commerce, as a practice and lived experience of political mobilisation, shaped certain forms of historical and ethnic consciousness. This allows the consideration of historical consciousness not only as an abstract process, but as a multi-layered, embodied experience, with a strong relation to certain forms of indigeneity. Unravelling these histories of change and the pivotal events that made change possible from the perspective of my interlocutors, I present the complexities of being indigenous in Simiatug in the recent past and today and across different generations.
... 12 En el Ecuador los estudios sobre la memoria, constituyen un campo heterogéneo que responde también a los giros en las agendas investigativas como respuesta a la configuración de los contextos sociales y políticos. Algunos ejemplos de esto pueden ser los trabajos sobre la lucha obrera y campesina: Capelo, Ramos, Guzmán (1982), Durán Barba (1981, Striffler (2010), Kaltmeir (2008). Interesantes trabajos analíticos sobre la memoria en el marco de los aniversarios de fundación e independencias en Ecuador se encuentran en Coronel y Prieto (2010), también ver sobre este tema Bustos (2007;2010b). ...
El artículo plantea que el documental “La muerte de Jaime Roldós” dirigido por Lisandra Ri- vera y Manolo Sarmiento abre nuevas líneas para el debate sobre la memoria en el Ecuador por su posicionamiento crítico ante la historiografía de este país. Tales líneas resultan de esta- blecer el lugar de este ‘trabajo de la memoria’ ante lo que el filósofo armenio Marc Nichanian ha denominado como ‘perversión historiográfica’. En este sentido, en el artículo se sigue la reflexión y las interrogantes que los autores plantean en el documental, para así analizar la complejidad envuelta en toda confrontación con la perversión historiográfica.
... 22 As in the rest of Ecuador, poverty is concentrated among the rural, indigenous population. The rural Saquisilí parish of Canchagua is indicative of this pattern, with 95% of the population living below the poverty line (Kaltmeier 2008:13 Kaltmeier (2008) provides an excellent history of the haciendas in Saquisili, and their transfer from owner Gallo Almeida to the Universidad Central (see especially [19][20][21][22]. 25 Groups of indigenous families living on land not held by the hacienda. ...
This dissertation explores social change in the post-Cold War period through a two-year ethnographic study of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement. Like many other 1990s social movement organizations, the CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) pursued social transformation along three pathways: participatory democracy, cultural citizenship, and development with identity. In all three the CONAIE has met with seeming success, and yet the outcomes of its twenty-year history have disappointed many. Drawing on participant observation, including a year of residency in an indigenous community, and formal interviews in Saquisil??, one of the highland cantons where the CONAIE and its political party were strongest, this dissertation argues that the three routes of social transformation have not produced theorized progressive outcomes. On the contrary, they have strengthened the neoliberal capitalist project they were meant to subvert.
Participatory democracy established a form of participatory clientelism that served to easily establish links between indigenous communities and neoliberal development agents. Cultural citizenship produced complex situations in which certain expressions of indigenity were not considered ???Other.??? However, those expressions, defined by the dominant ???national??? culture, effectively excluded actually existing indigenous peoples. Development with identity perpetuated under-development by its reliance on romanticized notions of indigenous tradition held by development agents, restricting indigenous aspirations to what they consider culturally appropriate.
Moreover, it is argued that the three routes of transformation have been mechanisms of neoliberal governmentality, through which the rationalities of neoliberalism, understood in the Foucaultian sense, as a mode of governance, and practices based on those rationalities have shaped indigenous subjectivities into self-regulating, neoliberal subjects.
This dissertation asserts that neoliberal governmentality grants indigenous peoples opportunities to participate in state spaces of empowerment but that change is limited to cultural rights and that which does not threaten the economic order. Although at times they can push beyond the pre-established parameters and challenge neoliberalism, participation in Saquisil?? demobilized the indigenous movement, reinforced neoliberalism, and restricted the scope of social change.
Building social alternatives is necessary to resist the destructive impacts of the capitalist organization on well-being, social organization, and the planet. This paper offers an analysis of the ways in which peoples are mobilizing to build organizations and to define social movements to move beyond current crises. The lines for constructing an ecologically sound and social-solidarity society require mechanisms for mutual cooperation based on alternative systems of decision making, as well as for doing work and assuring well-being to every member of the community. These depend on forging a process of solidarity among the members of a society as well as building alliances among communities; to assure the satisfaction of basic needs while also attending the most pressing requirements for physical, social and environmental infrastructure and to assure the conservation and rehabilitation of their ecosystems.
This paper, published in two parts, contains an analysis of the links between the ‘agrarian question’ in the Ecuadorian Andes and the creation of a network of indigenous-peasant organizations that became the backbone of the national indigenous movement. Based on a monographic study in the province of Cotopaxi, in Ecuador's central sierra, I explore the relations between agrarian and social change. I analyse the agrarian roots of Andean ethnic platforms at the local level, attempting to see how those processes that politicized ethnicity came about between the 1960s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. Beginning with the redistributive results of the state-driven agrarian reform (1964–73), the paper demonstrates that the articulation of the contemporary indigenous movement cannot be explained without an understanding of the implications that the reform process entailed and the synergies it unleashed, amongst these being an increase in the internal differentiation of the peasantry until then subject to the power of large estate owners. Throughout this process, the leaders, authentic organic intellectuals, played a fundamental role, picking up the reins of the organizations, weaving their own political discourse and becoming independent of their external allies. In a second stage, the NGOs and cooperation agencies that focused their attention on the indigenous world made organizational strengthening a banner of their work on the ground, consolidating that structural transformation. In this paper, I explore the deep roots of the agrarian system's political economy in order to come to a full understanding of the social differentiation process and the ethnicization of the peasant movement. This contributes towards the comparative reflection of other scenarios in the Andean region and, in general, of those Latin American spaces characterized by the presence of significant contingents of indigenous-peasant populations.
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