From Invisibilidad to Participation in State Corporatism: Afro-Ecuadorians and the Constitutional Processes of 1998 and 2008

Abstract

In this article I briefly discuss the process that led in 1998 to the first Ecuadorian Constitution to adopt multiculturalism as a fundamental principle in its description of the nation and that for the first time gave special collective rights to Indigenous peoples and, in a less obvious way, to Afro-Ecuadorians. I then discuss some of the processes by which the second multicultural Constitution was adopted in 2008 in Ciudad Alfaro by a Constituent Assembly dominated by the party Alianza País, founded by the current President, Rafael Correa, a proponent of “21^st century socialism.” My discussions are done with the objective of commenting on the Afro-Ecuadorian activism and political organizing that took place since the late 1970s and also right before or, for the 2008 Constitution, during the actual processes of constitutional writing. I discuss Afro-Ecuadorian participation in corporatism, which mostly developed since the end of the 1990s along with the corporatist integration of other sectors of Ecuadorian society, including Indigenous groups and workers' unions. I show that Afro-Ecuadorian influences on, and participation in, the process that led to the adoption of the 2008 Constitution was in fact corporatist. I conclude that if it is true that current corporatist practices and the existence of the CODAE make it more difficult to represent and theorize Afro-Ecuadorians as the country's “ultimate Others,” particularly when considering the rather successful Afro-Ecuadorian participation in the 2008 Constitutional processes, it is not less true that Ecuadorian civil society still has a long way to go to end its long history of anti-black racism.

Keywords:

• Ecuador
• Afro-Ecuadorians
• anti-black racism
• State Corporatism

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous reviewer for Identities, who provided valuable comments that certainly made this essay better. I am also grateful to Jhon Antón Sanchéz and José Chalá for inviting me to accompany the Afro-Esmeraldian delegation to the 2007–2008 Constituent Assembly, and for their brotherly support along the years. My gratitude goes in fact to all Afro-Ecuadorian communities, for allowing me in their homes and in their inner circles.

All translations are the author's.

Notes

1. It is important to note here that Alberto Acosta was the first president of the National Constituent Assembly that adopted the new Constitution in 2008. In June 2008 he resigned from that position as a result of his opposition to the speeding up of the debates about the content of the remaining articles, which was engineered by President Rafael Correa to meet the deadline of 26 July 2008. He was replaced by his deputy, Fernando Cordero Cueva, on 24 June 2008. He is also an economist who has written some widely read books on Ecuadorian economic history and such issues as the foreign debt. He taught in various Ecuadorian universities, including the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO-Ecuador). He is the longtime director of the think tank Latin American Institute for Social Research or Instituto Latinoamericano de Investigaciones Sociales Quito-Ecuador (ILDIS), and a longtime opinion-maker as a newspaper editorialist. He is also the great-nephew of five-time Ecuadorian populist president José María Velasco Ibarra.

2. Pallares (2002) and Lucero (2008), among others, have shown how the emergence of the indigenous umbrella organization CONAIE (a national organization that has few peers in other Latin American countries) was based on a process of establishing a wide variety of local associations dating especially to the 1960s and 1970s during the agrarian reforms when the state's interventions in the countryside increased in density. In the 1970s in particular expectations were raised during the oil boom, but many promises were not carried through in the subsequent economic crisis of the 1980s—at which point these many and varied local organizations began to mobilize around those issues and became more integrated with the main regional indigenous organizations for the highlands and Amazon, which then joined together to form CONAIE. It is not surprising that Afro-Ecuadorians have had more difficulty in establishing a national organization because there was no similar process of linkages between grassroots and regional organizing among Afro-Ecuadorians on which to build. It is also not surprising that some Afro-Ecuadorian leaders became affiliated with Pachakutik, since CONAIE itself took on a leadership role in representing the concerns of a much larger, including non-indigenous, constituency during some of its mobilizations.

3. Juan García Salazar was born in the small village El Cuerval, in the Province of Esmeraldas. Today, he is considered by many as the grandfather of the Afro-Ecuadorian political movement. He has been pivotal in the struggle for the defense of Afro-Ecuadorian cultural traditions, for the defense of communal ownership of Afro-Ecuadorian lands, for the development of an “ethno-education” that would promote the teaching of Afro-Ecuadorian cultures and traditions in the classrooms. In the 1980s and early 1990s he led the group that published the Cuadernos Afroecuatorianos, which reproduced Afro-Ecuadorian oral traditions. He has avoided any direct involvement with Ecuadorian political parties.

4. Oscar and José Chalá are brothers. They have been involved in politics since the late 1970s. http://static.rnw.nl/migratie/www.informarn.nl/sociedad/act090109-oscar-chala-redirected. They are not directly related to Liliana and Mónica Chalá, two sisters rather well known in Ecuador. The first sister was a famous athlete in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the second became the first black Miss Ecuador in 1995 (see Rahier 1998) Oscar and José are not directly related either to Catherine Chalá, who has been involved with the Centro Cultural Afroecuatoriano. The last name Chalá is indeed quite common among black people of the Chota-Mira Valley, in the northern Ecuadorian Andes. Both Oscar and José Chalá graduated with a BA in Anthropology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE) in Quito. Oscar, the older of the two brothers, has been close to the Socialist Party of the Province of Imbabura for a while, before joining the Pachakutik Movement. He was the first director of PRODEPINE. José Chalá, who shared the political sympathy of his brother for the Socialist Party in the 1980s, got close to the Alianza País Movement, which led the current president, Rafael Correa, to power.

5. African diasporic resistance in Ecuador is as old as their presence is. Their organizing prior to the 1970s was mostly focused on specific issues relevant at the local level as opposed to the national level.

6. A copy of these cassettes is housed in the Esmeraldas branch of the Centro de Investigación y Cultura del Banco Central del Ecuador; another set of copies can also be found in the Fondo Afro of the Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar in Quito.

7. Nina Pacari was born María Estela Vega Cornejo in Cotacachi, Province of Imbabura. She is a Kichwa politician, lawyer, and Indigenous leader. She studied Law at the Universidad Central del Ecuador, in Quito, where she met other Indigenous students and began her political fight for Indigenous rights. When she turned twenty-four she changed her name to Nina Pacari, which means “the Dawn of Fire” in Kichwa. She worked as legal representative for the Federación de los pueblos Kichwa de la Sierra Norte del Ecuador (FICI), an Imbabureña organization member of ECUARUNARI. In 1989 she became legal adviser of the indigenous confederation CONAIE, founded in 1986. In the uprising of 1990 she supported indigenous communities in Chimborazo and participated in the negotiations with the government. In 1997 she was representative of Chimborazo in the National Assembly and collaborated in the elaboration of the new Constitution. In August 1998 she was the first indigenous woman to be elected to the Ecuadorian parliament, as a member of the newly established Pachakutik movement. In 2003 she became foreign minister in the government of Lucio Gutiérrez, but soon after she resigned together with the agriculture minister, Luis Macas, another leading Indigenous political figure, because of the neoliberal policies of Gutiérrez. In May 2007 she was elected judge of the Supreme Court of Ecuador.

8. See Antón Sanchéz N.d. for a rather detailed analysis in which he emphasizes the tension between the neo-liberal notion of citizens' rights and the antithetical notion of collective rights that in fact animated the congressional debates between the political right and the political left prior to the passing of the law. Antón shows that it is in fact the demonstration that in the Province of Esmeraldas Afro-Esmeraldians should have received the same rights as Indigenous peoples have received in Esmeraldas and in other provinces that tilted the debates in favor of the adoption of a “corrective measure” for Afro-Esmeraldians in the form of this law.

9. Ecuador has a corruption perception index score of 2.1 on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means “very corrupt” and 10 “squeaky clean.” http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781359.html.

10. It is interesting to note that these criticisms of the CODAE were published in newspapers printed in Guayaquil, where numerically important segments of the Afro-Ecuadorian population now live. This might point to a regional frustration vis-à-vis the current leadership of the CODAE, which is seen as mostly Serrano.