Todo se ha trasmutado siempre en capital europeo o, más tarde, norteamericano, y como tal se ha acumulado y se acumula en los lejanos centros de poder. Todo: la tierra, sus frutos y sus profundidades ricas en minerales, los hombres y su capacidad de trabajo y de consumo, los recursos naturales y los recursos humanos. El modo de producción y la estructura de clases de cada lugar han sido sucesivamente determinados, desde fuera, por su incorporación al engranaje universal del capitalismo.
Es América Latina, la región de las venas abiertas.
Eduardo Galeano (Galeano 2)
The illusion of riches of the jungle has seduced many, even the state. In olden times, it seduced with gold, cinnamon, vanilla, clove, and rubber… today with lumber, petroleum, land, and mines. For Western civilization, the exploitation of these riches has constituted the base of their fortune. For our peoples, it has represented genocide.”
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)
As proclaimed on the website of the World Wildlife Fund, “flying high over the Amazon in a commercial jet grants the traveler a vision of limitless pristine wilderness,” (WWF). The emerald canopy of the rain forest is like a rolling sea that seems to go on forever, bringing to mind all those conservation and travel posters of tall trees wreathed in majestic vines and studded with monkeys and brightly colored parrots. However, a careful exploration beneath these first impressions reveals an ecosystem that is far more complicated. For instance, in 1878 M. G. Meir of the Texaco Oil Company looked through the glittering canopy, past the dense layers of plant, animal, and human lives, and saw the potential for oil reserves deep beneath the ground. Ever since, the quest for oil has framed much of the dialogue concerning human conduct in the rain forests of Ecuador. Oil companies are iconic scapegoats for the West’s dueling campaigns to at once profit from their product and also preserve plant and animal species; we vilify these pillagers as they desecrate the Edenic rain forest yet encourage them to continue extracting because our economy is addicted to petroleum. However, this limited binary fails to take into account the agency and perspectives of myriad other stakeholders in the fate of the forest.
This paper explores indigenous resistance amidst the violence done to the Amazon by attempts to privatize and liberalize the national economy during the past half-century. Inhabitants of Ecuador’s rain forest argue that the economic policies imposed on them have undermined their human rights and endangered the ecosystem as a whole. My analysis of the research and theories of others has been deeply informed by my personal investment in one particular Kichwa community with which I have worked as they struggle to challenge and subvert the state’s agenda. The efforts of the Mushu Causai Association are in many ways in solidarity with a national indigenous social movement represented by a hierarchy of advocacy organizations, but tensions between different indigenous visions of justice and autonomy further problematize the presumed homogeneity and synchronization of this Amazon nation. Nevertheless, conflicts within these social movements are part of a united, if diverse, struggle for human rights that is based in hybrid and multiform indigenous identities. Ecuador has become one of the leading exporters of crude oil to the United States, and this dependency on petroleum has wreaked extensive social and environmental damage on the Amazon. Indigenous protests have challenged the legitimacy of state structures and illustrated the harmful consequences of privatization and other neoliberal reforms on already marginalized populations. Many indigenous voices have spoken together to articulate a damning critique of government policies as played out in a third-world dependent economy, and indigeneity has proven a powerful mobilizing force with which to reconfigure the social order.
My first journey through the Amazon began by bus as we descended from the crisp open air of the Andes into the lush green tangle of the forest, but I couldn’t begin to appreciate the dynamic texture of its myriad interwoven narratives until I explored it on foot. While living and working with the people of Mushu Causai during the summer of 2006, I was introduced to the land by a community whose collective identity has been rooted in the forest for millennia. Mushu Causai is a Kichwa association of about 600 people living on about 1600 hectares of dense rain forest on the foothills of the Andes in the south of the Napo province. Until recently, Mushu Causai had been a local component of Ecuador’s hierarchical system of indigenous advocacy. However, in 2005 the association broke from this system of political representation in an effort to articulate concerns they had which seemingly had no place within the broader agenda. Mushu Causai has inhabited a rare space of relative autonomy when compared to other indigenous communities in the Amazonion region. For all the bountiful, life-giving resources of the rain forest on their land, there is one resource that the people of Mushu Causai are blessed to be without: no petroleum has yet been discovered beneath their homes, beneath their hunting trails, beneath their agroforestry fincas. As a result, they have not faced the same intense political pressure from the state and oil companies that confronts indígenas elsewhere in the Oriente.
Yet, even Mushu Causai is caught up in the process of globalization and the economic reforms that have opened Ecuador to the global market. Ever since the discovery of vast oil reserves in 1967 by Texaco in the northern Amazon region, these economic policies have revolved primarily around the extraction and exportation of petroleum. Ecuador is currently the third largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the United States, and the economic development involved has come with far-reaching social and environmental consequences. The plans for “progress” constructed around Western economic theories and fueled with black gold demand even the involvement of areas that aren’t being drilled for oil. Even in the depths of Amazonia, as I fish for our dinner in the Río Jondachi miles and miles away from anything running off of fossil fuels, I can see the impact. Right across from my favorite fishing spot runs a nondescript duct about three feet in diameter: the Trans-Andean pipeline pumping crude petroleum west from the forested lowlands across the mountains to port cities on the coast. Directly alongside the river that supports the livelihood of the Mushu Causai community pulses the lifeblood of the national economy, representing parallel realities that are profoundly at odds with one another.
In order to obtain oil, we place myriad lives within the rainforest and beyond at risk. The intense processes of exploration and extraction involved to get oil out of the ground exact a huge toll on the local ecosystem – huge swaths of the forest are cleared for roads, pipelines, and platforms which sets the stage for further developing in the area – and the destruction of the largest stretch of forest in the world in turn impacts the global climate. In addition, the extraction practices themselves are extremely polluting. During the eighteen years in which Texaco led the development of the Ecuadorian Amazon, from 1972 to 1990, the company extracted nearly 1.5 billion barrels of oil out of the jungle and produced more than 20 billion barrels of “production water,” the combination of water and toxic waste separated from the extracted oil (Jochnick 14). That amounts to four million gallons of waste each day that was then either deposited into hundreds of unlined pits dug into the countryside, baled off into rivers when the pits were full, or poured onto roads to “keep the dust down.” The toxins then leach into lakes, streams, and groundwater, leaving petroleum hydrocarbons in the drinking and bathing sources of every inhabitant of the forest. As part of their cost-efficient business, Texaco also burned off billions of cubic feet of excess natural gas that it wasn’t selling – this in a gas-importing country – further polluting the area and releasing millions of tons of greenhouse gases (Jochnick 15). Residents near drilling sites report the devastating impacts of these imposed health hazards. Hugo Urena, a community leader in the province of Pastaza, reported that “families wash their clothing and take drinking water from the contaminated streams. Cattle drink bad water from the streams or waste pools, and then get sick and die. We are suffering from head and throat pains. There are children born with birth defects, with migraines, or eye pain. We can’t bathe in the water” (Sawyer 201). A epidemiological study by the University of London also found that cancer rates, particularly stomach cancer, cervical cancer, and lymphoma, were significantly higher in villages around oil drilling sites (Jochnick 14). As of yet, the pipeline cutting through Mushu Causai territory hasn’t ruptured, but their state of health is a tenuous reprieve from the effects of a ruthless business, for national politics has prioritized the profits from oil over human rights or environmental concerns.
Ecuador’s implementation of its highly contentious form of “modernization” has taken place within the context of a shifting global economy over the past several decades. The OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil price hike in the early 1970s launched this small agrarian country into the industrialized world (Harvey 27). Ever since, Ecuador has been beholden to a petroleum economy, for the revenue from crude oil (all of which comes from the Amazon) represents over 50% of the federal government’s budget (Gerlach 14). With record amounts of surplus petrodollars flowing around the world, Ecuador became swept into the global movement to liberalize international credit and financial markets. “Over the course of the 1980s, three separate democratically elected governments began introducing a neoliberal program that sought to increase export production (especially oil), open the economy to foreign investment and trade, and reduce the state’s productive and distributive functions” (Sawyer 11). These development plans require start-up capital, and Ecuador took on loan after loan from the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank. These loans – contingent upon the implementation of “structural adjustment programs” which international financial institutions imposed on indebted countries worldwide – are an ingenious positive-feedback cycle. The IMF and World Bank gave them on the condition that Ecuador put into action neoliberal economic policies (privatizing state-owned firms, deregulation, cutting social services, and devaluing the currency) which drove the country further into debt. Ecuador’s debt rose from 18% in 1974 to 60% in 1984 and, by 2001, Ecuador had a ratio of foreign debt to GDP of 104%, the highest in Latin America (Sawyer 226).
The economic “modernization” programs that transformed the country’s political-economy during the 1990s are new manifestations of the influential theories of economist Adam Smith. Smith’s ideal member of society was a profit-seeking individual whose economic activity he argued would result in the greatest economic good for society as a whole: “by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention” – and which benefits all (Smith 476). According to Smithian logic, individuals should behave as atomized units and pursue selfish accumulation of wealth as a top priority. This “invisible hand” thesis constructed powerful legitimation for foreign oil companies to take political capital from the Oriente, along with its petroleum.
In the same way that our imaginings of virgin Amazonian nature mask the violent conflicts taking place on the forest floor, the mirage of neoliberal rhetoric belies the reality of its environmental and social costs. Though the entire enterprise is couched in the language of personal emancipation, benefits for a few have come at great cost to many. Under neoliberalism, the concept of freedom does not encompass freedom from hunger or violence, let alone the freedom to opt out of neoliberalism itself. Rather, the market ethics and profit-making institutions are mandate and individuals are “free” to compete amongst themselves to buy and sell whatever they choose. As Karl Polanyi points out, this debasement of the concept of freedom “into a mere advocacy of free enterprise” can only mean “the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure, and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property” (Polanyi 257). Indígenas in the Amazon have found political and civil liberties to be monopolized by the same elites who wield control over the oil in a process of “accumulation through dispossession” (Harvey). Put into Ecuador’s postcolonial context, Eduardo Galeano would see neoliberal capitalism as merely the latest exploitive tactic during 500 years of pillaging resources through the “open veins of Latin America” (Galeano). Ecuador may have technically achieved political independence almost 80 years ago, but it has yet to realize economic independence and sovereignty over its human and natural resources; neoliberalism streamlines a much more fluid system of imperialism without the political hassle of colonies. Ecuador’s indígenas have had decades of firsthand experience with the consequences of economic modernization, and they remain incredulous that Texaco could be promoting the best interests of Ecuadorian society when it monopolizes the profits from the country’s oil. Where Smith would see potential for the “trickling-down” of wealth from the elite to the masses, those who live in the rain forest have witnessed a hemorrhage in the opposite direction. Behind the façade of authoritative economic theories, profit-seeking individuals are bleeding the Amazon dry.
Analyzing these structural power inequalities is essential in order to confront the root causes of problems facing marginalized communities. This corrects the long-standing tradition of blaming the victim, but if everything is someone else’s fault then the question becomes whether indígenas can initiate positive change. According to dependency theorists, post-colonial countries remain mired in exploitive relationships that serve the interests of rich countries and elite individuals, and as a result have hardly any capacity with which to buck international pressures. This dependency is both “economic (on foreign investment and fickle export markets) and ideological (an incapacity to formulate policies distinct from those imposed from the outside)” (Andrade 432). From this perspective, Ecuador and indígenas are defined by their exploitation and, though neither is to blame, they are both seemingly doomed to victimhood. In the Amazon, however, neoliberal policies have been “neither smoothly implemented nor passively received,” (Sawyer 15) for indígenas have taken it upon themselves to demand change. As the violent processes of neoliberalism exacerbate political, economic, and social inequalities, they “simultaneously provoke the spread of oppositional identities and counter dreams” (Sawyer 16). Indeed, the very consequences that neoliberalism simultaneously produces and denies have eroded the credibility of the reforms.
Ecuador’s postcolonial legacy has only brought independence to a select portion of the country, and the deep history of indigenous opposition to oppressive rule has intensified in recent history. Though the country was officially established in 1830, it enacted its first agrarian reform law in 1964, simultaneously establishing IERAC (Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y Colonización), Ecuador’s land titling agency. However, the primary focus of this agency was not egalitarian redistribution, but continued colonization. As Ecuador collaborated with the United States to develop an export-oriented capitalist economy, the resulting rising inequality fueled unrest and threatened to incite another Cuba. Spurred by this challenge to its legitimacy, the state sponsored a mass colonization of the rural landscape and encouraged the development of the Oriente into profitable export-oriented agriculture and ranching. Between 1964 and 1994, homesteaders moved by the thousands to the lowlands and cleared previously untitled rain forest land that, according to the Agrarian Reform Law, was the patrimony of the state (Sawyer 44).
The discovery of oil in the late 1960s transformed the agrarian reality even further. The appropriation of indigenous land for private enterprise was only one facet of the neoliberalization sweeping the region as the state invested further and further in the oil industry. David Harvey, in his analysis of the history of neoliberalism, argues that economic growth which feeds off of exploitation and inequality must be secured through antidemocratic means: “In the event of a conflict, the typical neoliberal state will tend to side with a good business climate as opposed to either the collective rights (and quality of life) of labour or the capacity of the environment to regenerate itself” (Harvey 70). The Ecuadorian state sought to construct legitimacy for their neoliberal reforms and, barring the success of these measures, disciplined dissenters through both the classically violent suppression of demonstrations and the structural violence of punitive economic policies. While neoliberal theory assumes that an economy restructured according to neoclassical ideals is a prerequisite for a functioning electoral democracy, empirical evidence from Ecuador says otherwise. As Jan Knippers Black points out, “it has been conveniently forgotten that in general the ‘opening’ of Latin American economies coincided with the shutdown of democratic systems in the 1970s rather than with their return” (Black 15). Even within Ecuadorian administrations that appeared democratic on the outside, the state functioned to manage, not represent, the electorate. The neoliberal state is devoted to furthering the interests of capital, which means it develops methods of governing designed to shape and direct people into becoming Smith’s ideal individuals: “autonomous liberal subjects who will espouse the rational economies of competition” (Sawyer: 14). In order to foster a good business climate, the government intervenes in society to coax and coerce the participation of others in the same venture.
In response to a state that had become more sophisticated in its tactics for the control and manipulation of indigenous populations, indigenous organizing structures became more sophisticated as well. In the 1960s, with the assistance of priests influenced by liberation theology, Shuar in the southern provinces formed Ecuador’s first “Indian Federation” (Salazar). The Shuar Federation became an organizational model for an increasing number of communities throughout the country over the course of the 1970s, and indigenous federations became the primary political bodies through to express indigenous interests (Sawyer). Following years of mobilization through regional federations, over 500 community leaders came together in November 1986 to form a larger organization, el Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE), which focused on agrarian reform as a unifying factor in the lives of indígenas. CONAIE explicitly connects the right to environmental well-being to human rights and a right to cultural integrity. In 1994 Luis Macas, a Saraguro from the southern highlands and an early CONAIE president, outlined the organization’s position as follows:
The problems facing the indigenous peoples are deeply connected to the issue of land ownership. When the colonizers arrived, they cleared out the Indians. Today, land is concentrated in the hands of the few, and many of our people don’t have any land. In the Amazon region, there is a crisis caused by the presence of oil and mining companies and their violations of indigenous peoples’ rights. …The oil companies have not only caused the decomposition of our communities and the decomposition of our culture but also the destruction of the ecology. The fight for land is thus extended to the struggle for maintaining the ecology (CONAIE).
Formed in response to the application of the 1990s “Washington Consensus”, CONAIE drew upon the traditional centrality of land to indigenous resistance, but also framed its agenda specifically in terms of an opposition to neoliberalism from the very beginning. It sought to present a united front of indigenous concerns to face the imperialistic economics and antidemocratic politics of a rising hegemony that was fundamentally global. Today CONAIE claims to represent Shuar, Achuar, Siona, Secoya, Cofán, Huaorani, Záparo, Chachi, Tsa'chila, Awá, Epera, Manta, Wancavilca and Kichwa peoples on the national level and contains three regional organizations: the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana; CONFENIAE) in the eastern Amazon region or Oriente; The Confederation of Peoples of Quichua Nationality in the central mountain region (Confederación de Pueblos de la Nacionalidad Kichuas del Ecuador; ECUARUNARI); and the Coordination of Indigenous and Black Organizations of the Ecuadorian Coast (Coordinadora de Organizaciones Indígenas y Negras de la Costa Ecuatoriana; CONAICE) (“CONAIE” www.conaie.org). (Some communities have changed the spelling of their identity group from Quichua to Kichua or Kichwa. Mushu Causai uses Kichwa, but considers alternate spellings to refer to a single people).
This system of representation was allowed no space within the country’s institutional politics, for indigenous advocacy conflicted with the agenda of a state beholden to neoliberalism (Harvey 66). And yet, in a political situation in which indigenous populations have no effective voice within the federal government, they have successfully influenced policymaking from the outside the system. CONAIE has the ability to mobilize overwhelming numbers of indígenas around the country, and its best known tactics of direct action include the takeover of government buildings and road blockades which effectively cut of the commercial arteries of the country. It organized levamientos populares (popular uprisings) in 1990, 1992, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2002, and 2005 which have provoked crises of representation and accountability in the state and created an opening for alternatives to the global neoliberal hegemony (Andrade 425). These innovative social movements forged new ways to advocate and exercise human, civil, and political rights.
In 1992 over 20,000 indígenas from all across the country marched to Quito in order to celebrate indigenous culture on the 500-year anniversary of Columbus’ arrival to the Americas, and also to demand the legalization of indigenous land. In their symbolic reversal of the route of imperial conquest, the residents of the forest sought to likewise reverse imperialistic economic policies. This arrival of marginalized people and ideas from the country’s lowlands to the seat of its political power marked a dramatic challenge to the state’s neoliberal agenda against a backdrop of the history of exclusionary and racist governing of the Amazon.
These strong protests forced the Ecuadorian government to enter into negotiations with CONAIE. The talks resulted in the IERAC Adjudication Map of Indigenous Land in which over 16,000 square kilometers of the Amazon was granted legal indigenous title, one of the largest land rights concessions in the history of Latin America (Gerarch 135). The march also put indigenous concerns on the map metaphorically, raising national and international awareness of indigenous concerns. However, despite the march’s many achievements, the state’s response also compromised indígenas in many ways. The ostensibly objective science behind the adjudication map concealed how technology can entrench inequality. For starters, the government only granted the indígenas 55% of the territory they claimed, and it divided this land into blocks which bore no resemblance to how the residents themselves shared use of the Amazon. As anthropologist Suzana Sawyer argues, this “purportedly neutral representation (i.e. a map) codified a new official reality into existence and in the process erased identity, history, and inequality… allowing others to shape the conduct of conduct” in the Amazon (Sawyer 50). These land blocks fragmented indigenous solidarities, favored commodified resource-extraction by eroding the “deeply embedded cultural practices of living in a landscape,” (Sawyer 51) and ultimately served to undermine the integrity of indigenous nationalities. Additionally, these land titles provided indigenous communities with very ineffective control over their territory, for they did not grant what the state terms “subsoil rights.” “Indians gained only surface rights to their ancestral lands in 1992. Subterranean resources – of which petroleum was the most coveted – belonged solely to the state, and the state retained the right to develop this resource as it deemed necessary” (Sawyer 58).
These struggles for justice did not only involve material goals, for much of the battle was over questions of identity and belonging which are as central to the realization of civil and human rights. Though debates over definitions, imagery, and metaphor can at times seem like indulgent loitering over semantic details, the various abstract narratives over land use and possession have dramatically different, intensely concrete impacts on the lives of Ecuadorian indígenas. The 1992 Land Adjudication offered titling based on “ethnicity,” which indigenous intellectuals argued defined minority groups in opposition to the self-declared majority of the dominant society. “By circumscribing the margins (marking who is ethnic), the dominant sector erased its own ethnic and racial content, giving the illusion of itself as neutral, nonpartisan, ahistoric” (Sawyer 48). Such a position allowed the state to gloss over ongoing human rights violations and erase its historical role in fostering inequality. Indigenous articulations of nacionalidad challenged the legitimacy of the state, evoking instead identities grounded in very specific historical and political contexts. In questioning the framing of nationhood in Ecuador, indigenous federations inspired a fiery debate on who constituted the nation and whether the nation need be singular (CONAIE 1994). These indígenas also rejected the premise of land titles predicated on the commodification and homogenization of land-based resources, which would have them convert the rain forest to cattle pasture. They instead claimed a right to territorio (territory) or, in Kichwa, ñucanchi rucuguna huiñay causana pachamama (“the land where our ancestors have always lived”) (Sawyer 48). In this way, indigenous identities served as expressions of resistance to the neoliberal modernization policies which were so destructive to social and ecological spaces.
These identities are deeply rooted in life on the land in question, and in a way of living that is more ideologically aligned with Western environmentalism than with an equally Western export-oriented industrialization. However, when Ecuadorian indígenas joined their concerns with those of international tropical conservation, they did not find the alliance to be purely empowering. Their environmental concerns are intertwined with their quest for self-determination, which often conflicted with the ecological imperialism of many broad-brush conservation efforts.
In 1992, Luis Macas, then president of CONAIE, addressed Ecuadorian President Borja in the Presidential Palace thusly: “As the guardians of the Amazon, in the name of life, we, los indígenas, have walked to Quito. We want to be the owners of our territory, and those responsible for our destiny” (CONAIE 1994). More than a decade later, this rhetoric is still employed in indigenous political claims. In 2006 I worked with Mushu Causai to translate (from Kichwa into Spanish and then into English) a request for funds to purchase back ancestral territory from a rancher in the area. The members of the Association articulated a two-pronged justification for this project: they lay claim to the land as Kichwa heritage and also connected the health of their local environment to global sustainability:
The Amazon is one of the most biodiverse regions of the earth and we know that is it a great challenge to restore our land – to allow the forest to recover and the animals to repopulate – for hunting, fishing, and traditional agriculture are our only sources of nourishment. We protect these traditions as our ancestors and grandfathers and fathers have done, and as we want our children and grandchildren and future generations to do, so that all may utilize and live in harmony with our great home THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST.
Help us to return to our home so that we may protect it and so that it, in turn, may provide for future generations. After all, it serves as the great lung which supplies oxygen for the people of the world.
This narrative simultaneously argued for indigenous autonomy by defining Kichwa identity as unique and historically specific, and sought support for their vision of development by highlighting a global investment in the health of the Amazon.
This rhetoric of Indians as defenders of the rain forest relies, as so much political posturing does, on glorified stereotypes. In these cases, indígenas consciously employ Noble Savage imagery that most definitely strikes a chord with their target international audience, while simultaneously centering themselves as actors. They certainly benefit from replacing the narrative of an untouched, virgin forest with one of an ecology with humans and livelihoods at stake. However, the language of tropical conservation, which often provides indigenous groups with political traction, also lays the groundwork for manipulative state and corporate intervention. Suzana Sawyer argues that, “as an ecological Eden chock full of biological treasures of global import, the Amazon was quickly becoming a space that others (outsiders) felt they needed to control” (Sawyer 54). While thousands upon thousands of initiatives have cropped up to “Save the Rain Forest,” they rarely specify what it needs saving from or towards what ends should it be preserved. The Ecuadorian state and international organizations (both corporations and conservation NGOs) control the scientific discourse on ecology which enables them to construct a Nature that is distinct from human society and then act “sustainably” towards one but not the other.
In the mid-1990s, the oil company Arco displayed a prime example of such strategic sophistry. In an effort to garner political and public support for their oil drilling in the Ecuadorian province of Pastaza and to ease the attacks from outraged defenders of the Amazon’s biodiversity, Arco cultivated an image as an environmentally sensitive company. It publicized the new technology in its latest drilling venture in the village of Villano in Pastaza, Ecuador as leaving a “minimal footprint,” for they fly a helicopter to the drilling platform instead of building roads, clear a narrower path for the pipeline, and re-inject the production water back into the ground (Environmental Concerns). Though Arco effectively neutered the powerful environmental groups by flaunting ecologically-minded technological improvements, the environmental soundness of its practices is hardly assured. Operatives are flown in by helicopter to their main drilling platform, but Arco also built two hundred miles of transit infrastructure in the area which the company deemed outside the rain forest worth protecting (Forero). Furthermore, oil wells could explode, pipelines could rupture or leak, formation waters (the toxic waters which emerge with crude oil from the deep pits) are likely to seep into and contaminate surface water and sub-surface aquifers, and any of these accidents would be devastating for the rain forest and all of the life in it. No matter how sophisticated, no technology is foolproof – especially in a region prone to earthquakes – and the local residents were not given any say in Arco’s conduct. A parallel use of environmental rhetoric is found in an article in the Oil & Gas Journal entitled “Arco's Villano Project: Improvised Solutions in Ecuador's Rainforest.” The first sentence states unequivocally that “Arco Inc. has just raised the bar in the evolving new paradigm of oil industry sustainable development in the rainforest” (Williams), and goes on to parrot Arco’s every boast with regards to its new “environmental” technologies. In addition, this article perpetuates the slanderous assertion that indigenous Ecuadorians are, through ignorance or a lack of concern, responsible for the destruction of the rainforest, asserting that “the population there has increased dramatically, creating greater environmental pressure. There is the problem of widespread tree-cutting in the rain forest by the indigenous population. They cut the timber in a circular pattern around where they live and then, because they have more babies to feed, they run out of trees nearby to cut and then expand the circle broader” (Williams). This summation completely ignores the historical and social context, which dictates many choices for the impoverished in Ecuador and rests on the assumption that the environment and humans are distinct and in opposition.
As reported by Sixto Mendez of the Oil & Gas Journal (who only interviewed representatives from Arco) the oil company stated that “relations with indigenous peoples are a high priority” (Mendez). However, after working for years with indigenous organizers in Pastaza, Suzana Sawyer contends that “Arco’s sharp focus on the environment went hand in hand with its continual attempt to contain the presence of indigenous peoples” (Sawyer 72). From the moment it began exploring for oil in 1988, the corporation publicly championed its corporate compassion for the environment while simultaneously concealing its part in pitting local communities against each other, weakening indigenous political capacity, and using both state and private security forces to stifle local protests. By highlighting the rain forest as a place of biological nature and minimizing its human side, Acro was able to evaluate its own success along purely technological lines. In this way, it managed to appease many environmental groups and earn global commendation for its efforts. A different bio-script, one of a peopled forest, would make it difficult to present Arco’s operations as an unequivocal success.
Though most outsiders have come to accept a vision of the rain forest that includes the people who live in it, our neoliberal conception doesn’t allow much room for these peoples’ political organizations or their demands for control over communal lands. In his discussion of the “postmodern form of ecological capital”, Arturo Escobar describes the limitations placed on indigenous actors when we incorporate biodiversity into our development programs:
Nature becomes a source of value in itself. Species of flora and fauna are valuable not so much as resources but as reservoirs of value that research and knowledge, along with biotechnology, can release for capital and communities. This is one of the reasons why ethnic and peasant communities in the tropical rain-forest areas of the world are finally being recognized as owners of their territories (or what is left of them), but only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital. Communities and social movements in various parts of the world are being enticed by biodiversity projects to become stewards of the social and natural ‘capitals’ whose sustainable management is, henceforth, both their responsibility and the business of the world economy (Escobar 203).
The challenge for indigenous movements has been to balance use of the arguments that help them gain political traction with those that challenge oppressive political practices. After the incomplete and compromised success of their 1992 march, CONAIE continued staging public challenges to state imperialism. In 1994 a new neoliberal Agrarian Reform Law and a World Bank loan granted in order to privatize the oil sector led to what Sawyer deems “the most powerful indigenous mobilization of the decade” (Sawyer 49). The Agrarian Reform Law was an attempt to sell communally held land to stimulate competition and productivity, reduce and consolidate indigenous land holdings, and privatize the water system, all of which represented great threats to indigenous livelihood. In response, indígenas and campesinos rallied by CONAIE set up road blockades which cut off all major transport arteries throughout Ecuador, effectively paralyzing the country for ten consecutive days (Andrade 430). This mobilization and another round of protests in 1997 finally secured a monumental civil rights victory for the country’s indigenous population, for the unrelenting political pressure forced the government to reform the constitution to explicitly include indigenous rights to self-determination. In later years, CONAIE began splitting their resources between political campaigning and supporting direct action mobilizing. Protests against privatization and cuts in social services brought oil production to a standstill in 2002 and again in 2005. CONAIE has been influential in the ousting of three presidents since 1997, and can arguably be credited with the fact that every president for the past decade has promised – however disingenuous or naïve such promises appear in retrospect – to oppose neoliberal free-trade policies (Gerlach 127).
Though the political changes catalyzed by actions of resistance were at times subverted, co-opted, and overridden by a state bent on neoliberalization, the collaboration of communities from across the country made significant headway voicing indigenous concerns in a hostile political space. The profound achievements – both discursive and otherwise – did not overthrow systems of oppression, but they lay a foundation for further social movements for human rights. However, members of Mushu Causai argued that CONAIE became more disconnected from the realities experienced by local communities the deeper it became involved in national electoral politics, to the point where they felt the need to form a separate association in order to pursue their development goals. With a look of regret on his face, Gonzalo explained to me, “CONAIE works so hard to get resources for indígenas, but when they receive millions of dollars from foreign donors, none of it ever reaches us.”
CONAIE was also building their case for political reform around a relatively narrow, and therefore exclusive, narrative. They did not find it feasible to attack the imperialistic core of neoliberalism directly and therefore sought to mitigate its destructive impact; instead of demanding complete and immediate revolution, they worked with the government to win concessions that were less threatening to Western individualized notions of liberty and development. Unfortunately, this meant that rights secured on behalf of one group were not necessarily transferable across the constituency that CONAIE claimed to represent. In one poignant example from 2003, CONAIE used claims of indigeneity and environmental stewardship to win reparations from PetroEcuador (the country’s national oil company) which could be used by communities living in the rainforest to repair the environmental damage caused by the oil industry. As an indigenous community likewise seeking to protect their local ecology, Mushu Causai applied to this fund. Just like the lowland groups who won the suit, Mushu Causai had suffered environmental destruction at the hands of PetroEcuador when the company tore up the forest to construct the Trans-Andean pipeline. In fact, Mushu Causai was in constant danger from a possible rupture in the pipe that would unleash toxic crude on their land. However, their appeal for reparations was rejected by PetroEcuador who claimed that they were “not directly impacted by oil drilling,” and were therefore ineligible. The concessions won in the name of indigeneity were, in effect, community-specific. Mushu Causai did not conform to the mold laid out for them, and established precedent allowed them no way to demand autonomy for its own sake. Shortly after this incident, the members of Mushu Causai decided to leave CONAIE and go it alone. The odds were stacked even higher against them outside the established structure for indigenous advocacy, but they saw no other way to make their voices heard.
In her book, Sawyer describes the overwhelming popular support of CONAIE mobilizations across South America, but sets up a dangerous binary between the members of CONAIE – who she sees as heroic – and everyone else. After hundreds of pages detailing CONAIE’s struggles against manipulative state officials and the few indigenous communities whose support had been bought with gifts from the oil companies, Sawyer concludes that, “though CONAIE represents the majority of Indians in Ecuador, it does not represent all; over the past decade a handful of anti-CONAIE organizations have arisen often with the direct support of the state” (Sawyer 229). In one fell swoop she eloquently envelopes all indigenous discourses not co-opted by elite interests into one organization’s agenda. This leaves no space for the groups like Mushu Causai that find CONAIE’s bureaucracy as inaccessible and disempowering as CONAIE finds the federal government to be. Sawyer presents the hierarchical system of indigenous advocacy federations uncritically and, for the sake of emphasizing their laudable achievements, risks recreating the politics of marginalization she so passionately opposes.
Many in Mushu Causai had been involved in direct actions organized by CONAIE and still believe strongly in those struggles for human rights. Gonzalo describes the empowering feeling of marching to Quito to express common concerns, and Mariana tears up when describing her stakeout at a roadblock during the ten-day protest in 1994. They feel solidarity with the members of CONAIE and proudly display the organization’s flag on the wall of Mushu Causai headquarters, but they find their particular needs undermined in many ways by the hierarchical system of representation. Even within an honorable organization dedicated to subaltern empowerment and plurinationality, a top-down political process is exploitive to those on the bottom. However, these critiques of CONAIE provide further support for its movement for a plurinational Ecuador, a vision of a mosaic nation dedicated to the collective health and empowerment of the heterogeneous whole.
The struggles between narratives of the rain forest challenge us to translate as much between contrasting visions of ‘development’ and ‘justice’ as between the spoken languages of the actors involved. As part of my effort to broaden the dialogue of indigenous politics beyond the conventional myopic setting, I chose a provocative word that was voiced often (in Spanish) in Mushu Causai to be the title for this paper. A tracing of the etymology of the remarkably multivalent word cruda mirrors the journeys of meaning traversed in the political ecology of the rain forest. As with the English “crude,” the adjective in Spanish denotes a raw, cruel, and grievous condition, happening, or sentiment, as well as petroleum. In addition to describing a painful facet of the messy political history of oil in Ecuador, the root meanings in Latin point to wider imagery woven into tales of the Amazon: crudus can mean “rude, coarse, or unrefined” when referring to matter or manner, “raw and bleeding” when referring to wounds, “fierce and wild” when referring to persons, and “bitter and grevious” when referring to experience. As a slang term for hangover, cruda also evokes the throbbing repercussions of Ecuador’s headlong dive into neoliberal reforms. However, the most profound contribution this word can make to Ecuador’s fast-paced, ongoing social movements is as a verb: the ancient Spanish verb cruor meaning to flow like blood from a wound captures the violent history of this blood-soaked land.
Indigenous politics has exposed the paradox of nationality in Ecuador: an imperialist state itself caught up in the (post)colonial empires of neoliberalism. Given that the political-economic policies which claim to support participatory democracy have served to deeply reinscribe exploitive hierarchies, it would seem that some still find indigenous blood to be a necessary sacrifice.
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