Ontological Conflicts in the Plurinational State: The Case of Indigenous Resistance against the Mirador Mega-Mining Project in Ecuador

Abstract

This article focuses on ontological conflicts over territoriality in Ecuador’s plurinational state. Departing from an ontological perspective, we examine how the Ecuadorian government and Indigenous communities battle over different ways of relating to and existing through territories, and thus over ways of practicing or undermining plurinationality. We offer a historical analysis of plurinationality, a proposal that is constituted by concrete territorial practices of Indigenous self-determination and that challenges the homogenized idea of the nation. We show how this proposal, though adopted in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution, was undermined by the government’s subsequent expansion of extractive projects. To illustrate how this ontological conflict played out in concrete terms, we focus on Indigenous resistance to the mega-mining project Mirador in Ecuador’s southern Amazon. While the state’s capacity to territorially assert itself has led to the displacement of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities continue to claim and invoke this territory as their own.

Keywords:

• Amazon
• Ecuador
• indigenous movement
• kichwa
• mining
• plurinationality
• shuar

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful for the time, openness and trust that CASCOMI members have placed in us to carry out this research. This article is dedicated to their tenacity and perseverance in keeping the collective memory of their territory alive. We would also like to thank Riccarda Flemmer, Jonas Hein, Verena Gresz for putting together this special issue, and the editors and reviewers of Society & Natural Resources.

Notes

1 The churo is a large shell used to emit sounds as signs of communication.

2 The following description of the Indigenous leader Luis Sánchez corresponds to a video recorded by María Fernanda Carpio of the anti-extractive collective Comunálisis in 2021: “Luis Sánchez, amedrentado por las mineras chinas ECSA-Tongling/CRCC en Tundayme, Ecuador.” Accessed March 20, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSI4IV3fUw0

3 Mirador is a copper and gold project and one of the most advanced mega-mines in Ecuador. Its infrastructure covers a substantial part of three river basins, Quimi, Tundayme and Wawayme, whose course was completely transformed by the mine. Initially, Mirador foresaw the annual production of 208,800 tons of copper concentrate through the excavation of an open pit mine and a daily treatment of 30,000 tons of rock. However, ECSA decided to double the amount of rock treated: 60,000 tons per day, which would imply a much larger mine (1,000 meters deep and about 1.5 km diameter), and a much higher waste generation (Báez 2017). With these numbers, it is estimated that “at the end of the mine’s life, […] water consumption will be 21 million liters of water per day […], that is the equivalent of 8 olympic swimming pools” (Acosta, Cajas, Hurtado and Sacher 2020, 124). It is also important to emphasize the geopolitical importance of this mine. Mirador represents one of the most important Chinese investments in Latin America. Between 2005-2015, there were a total of 10 mega-mining investments in the region, of which seven projects are in Ecuador and Peru, and three in Brazil, Venezuela and Chile (Sacher 2017, 136). These investments are further characterized by the ability to obtain other types of contracts in order to secure control of other productive, financial, infrastructural, transportation and refining aspects associated with mineral extraction (ibid, 139).

4 A similar analysis that intersects plurinationality with an ontological perspective on “sovereignty” is Isabella Radhuber and Sarah Radcliffe’s article “Contested Sovereignties: Indigenous disputes over plurinational resource governance” (2022) for Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.

5 While many scholars have interpreted Ecuador’s Indigenous movement through the lens of ethnicity, emphasizing the movement's demands in terms of cultural rights, we prioritize analyses that reveal how both class and ethnicity have been critical to the formation of Ecuador’s Indigenous Movement (Almeida 1984; Ibarra 1992; Becker 2008). Indigenous class demands are product of Indigenous struggles for land and labor rights throughout the 20th century, in alliance with trade unions, and the socialist and communist parties. It is in the context of this Indigenous-left alliance that the concept of “nationalities” was used for the first time to define the organizational structure of Indigenous peoples in 1928 (Becker 2008).

6 There are important differences between multiethnicity, pluriculturality and plurinationality. While the first two concepts defend diversity within the modern liberal state, where differences are tolerated in cultural terms as long as they do not challenge the unity of the nation and the capitalist economic system, plurinationality challenges the homogeneity of the nation and the state as a liberal (capitalist) formation.

7 The plurinational proposal was never intended to reduce the size of the state, as proponents of the neoliberal state suggest. Rather, plurinationality proposes the decentralization of state power and the pluralization of forms of territorial self-government, without dismantling the state’s functions. It is worth remembering that the decade in which the Indigenous Movement proposed plurinationality was marked by its repeated mobilizations against neoliberal policies and the “reduction” of the state.

8 Here, we do not intend to “essentialize” the Latin American state as intrinsically “extractive” or to separate its economic dependency on extractivism from transformations in the global regime of capitalist accumulation. As Verónica Gago rightly notes, we think that both, Ecuador’s geo-political position in the world-economy and the increasing international demand for raw materials between 2000 and 2014, are central elements in the “mutation” of Ecuador’s “nation-state institutions” (2017, 6).

9 Redacción El Universo. 2013. Rafael Correa dice que desarrollará minería a gran escala. El Universo, February 23. Accessed March 20, 2023. https://www.eluniverso.com/2013/02/23/1/1355/rafael-correa-dice-desarrollara-mineria-gran-escala.html

10 We would like to underline that we consider both the Shuar and Kichwa-Cañari peoples legitimate inhabitants of the Cordillera del Condor. Furthermore, we understand Indigenous territorial self-determination as defined by concrete practices and relations that connect communities to the places they inhabit, and not by an essentialist understanding of Indigenous identity.

11 Some families from San Marcos, for example, continue to pay their property tax for the lands they were evicted from, as a way to show the state that they have not given up their territory.