Search Results

It is extremely dangerous to resist extractive megaprojects in Latin America. The intensive accumulation of natural resources for export on global markets has long characterized Latin America, but the boom in exports of raw commodities since 2000 has accentuated a violent history of dispossession. As of 2020, Latin America represents 60% of nature defenders killed in the world. Governments license natural resources at unprecedented rates, pushing land- and water-grabbing to new levels. Resistance against mining, oil, hydroelectric, and agribusiness projects is framed as antidevelopment and repressed with brutal violence. Governments are expanding the extractive frontier fast, promoting megaprojects in the name of national development or to fund social policies, a so-called redistributive neo-extractivism. This extractive consensus has increased social conflict across the region; but it has also inspired new forms of resistance. Resistance, which is mostly Indigenous and largely female, is a political struggle against extractive industries that represent ongoing forms of colonial dispossession. Resistance against extractivism focuses on the defense of nature as much as on rights to self-determination, a central element to shape a postextractive world. Ecuador is a case in point. The country recognizes international rights to prior consultation and established the first rights of nature framework in the world, yet it criminalizes nature defenders as it continues to expand the extractive frontier. The emerging rights of nature framework, like mining bans, are alternatives to extractivism that offer insights into experiences of resistance in the highlands of Ecuador. The Rio Blanco mine, an iconic megaproject financed by China, was suspended in 2018 thanks to a solid network of resistance that secured a broad mobilization of rural communities and urban youth, lawyers and academics, blending street protest with legal action. The Rio Blanco case shows the complementarity of various strategies, the potential of courts as allies, and the powerful coordination between social movements and government to contest structural dispossession.

Under Ecuador’s “third wave” democracy that began in 1979, the armed forces have exhibited considerable autonomy vis-à-vis civilians in government, as measured by (a) military intervention in politics and (b) the armed forces’ spread into internal security. Perhaps most noteworthy, military participation in politics and internal security increased significantly during the second half of the 1990s, in a permissive environment: as a result of their rule in the 1970s, the armed forces enjoyed a positive reputation within society as an institution capable of getting things done, without committing human rights abuses. Within that context, a traumatic military role crisis prompted the armed forces to expand their political and internal security roles. The armed forces lost their traditional mission of defending Ecuador’s southern border against Peru in the late 1990s, due to the resolution of that border dispute. In its search for institutional justification, the military proactively intensified its participation in politics and internal security. That extensive internal security work not only served as an indicator of military autonomy vis-à-vis civilians but it also made the armed forces ineffective and unreliable in responding to the civilian government’s basic national defense requirements, as evinced by the military’s response to a new sovereignty threat. When Colombian guerrilla crossings into northern Ecuador became a salient border threat in the 2000s, the armed forces focused on internal security in the north and not border defense.

In the 200 years since Ecuador gained independence from Spain in 1822, it has experienced many of the social problems that have plagued other Latin American countries. Ecuador experienced a high degree of political instability during the 19th century, and a series of extra-constitutional and military governments marked much of the 20th century. At the dawn of the 21st century, Ecuador followed the rest of Latin America’s “pink tide,” which introduced progressive governments that sought to address long-standing problems of poverty and inequality. The country has endured numerous coups, caudillo and populist leaders, and forms of government ranging through conservative, liberal, populist, military, and civilian “democracy.” The diversity in political institutions led the political scientist John Martz to observe that Ecuador, although little studied among scholars of Latin American issues, “serves as a microcosm for a wide variety of problems, questions, and issues relevant to various of the other Latin American countries.” Despite a high degree of political instability, the country is also home to very strong popular movements that opened up space for the election of the left-wing government of Rafael Correa in 2006. His administration resulted in a remarkable shift from a period of extreme instability to political stability, with notable gains in economic growth and corresponding drops in poverty and inequality. Scholarly research on Ecuador has often reflected the country’s current political environment. In the 1950s, in the midst of the emergence of populist politics, researchers defined the country’s landscape in terms of its personalist leadership, particularly as represented by the perennial leader José María Velasco Ibarra. In 1972, General Guillermo Rodríguez Lara led a military coup that removed Velasco Ibarra from office. In the midst of a petroleum boom, he established a nationalist regime similar to that of Juan Velasco Alvarado in neighboring Peru. A massive Indigenous uprising two decades later introduced a generation of studies that examined ethnonationalist-based social movements. Those movements led to Correa’s election in the midst of a broader turn to the left in Latin America, which once again influenced the direction of investigations.