Sovereignty and the other in Ecuadorian nationalist discourse

Abstract

This article explores how exhortations for national unity are intrinsically linked to the symbolic displacement of a problematic other through an examination of elite Ecuadorian nationalist discourse and its construction of Indigenous activists as internal enemies. Specifically, this article looks at the role that the 2008 border row between Ecuador and Colombia played in publicly legitimating a concept of Ecuadorian citizenship rooted in racial homogeneity. Ecuador's northern border served as an ideal mechanism for performing the Ecuadorian state's authority to establish the internal borders that separated ‘citizens’ from ‘enemies’. These performances of state legitimacy highlighted Ecuador's victimisation by a more powerful neighbour/imperial proxy as a means for building regional empathy, while reinforcing the legitimacy of the Ecuadorian government to marginalise Indigenous social movements as a means to symbolically assert ‘national unity’.

Keywords:

• Ecuador
• Colombia
• sovereignty
• nationalism
• Indigenous peoples
• borders

Acknowledgements

Funding for this research was provided in part by the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities and the Department of Anthropology at Iowa State University. Earlier versions of this article were presented at Iowa State University's Latin American Studies Brownbag Talks Series, the Middle-Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies meetings and the University of Iowa's Department of Anthropology Colloquium Series. I would like to thank the audiences and participants at these events for their feedback. I am also indebted to Grant Arndt, Marc Becker, Héctor Bombiella Medina and Laura Graham for their encouragement and comments at different points in the development of this work. Finally, I thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of Identities for recommendations that greatly strengthened this article's argument.

Notes

1. I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this line of inquiry.

2. I intentionally capitalise ‘Indigenous’ throughout this article in keeping with the wishes of many Indigenous activists and scholars.

3. Government spending has been directed primarily at poor urbanites and largely circumvented rural and Indigenous communities, as Weisbrot and Sandoval (2009) demonstrate.

4. The State Department declared the FARC a terrorist organisation in 1997, along with Colombia's other active left-wing guerrilla group, the ELN (National Liberation Army). It was not until September 2001 that the right-wing paramilitary AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) was added to the list.

5. The FARC emerged out of peasant self-defence forces organised in the 1940s and 1950s in the Colombian Amazon during that country's civil conflict (Ramírez 2011, pp. 37–38). During the 1960s, these groups transformed into an ‘armed revolutionary movement’ in response to the state's dirty war to identify and eradicate communism in the Colombian countryside (Ramírez 2011, p. 41). In recent decades, FARC has become a key player in Colombia's drug trade and grown into one of the best-funded non-state armies in the world.

6. A video of Correa's 2 March 2008 response is available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?

7. In 2002, Colombian troops crossed into Carchi Province in pursuit of rebels and accidentally exchanged fire with Ecuadorian troops. Colombian and Ecuadorian governments responded by agreeing to discuss how to better coordinate border security.

8. In 2012, Correa successfully sued the three owners of El Universo and one of the paper's columnists for libel; weeks after the ruling he pardoned all four.

9. Indigenous responses to Ecuador's border wars have tended to be more localised and have not represented a primary issue for Ecuador's national Indigenous confederations. For a discussion of the impact of the spillover of the Colombian conflict on Ecuadorian Indigenous peoples see Vickers (2003).

10. Noticeably absent from official discourse on the border row was xenophobia directed at the growing number of Colombians living in Ecuador, who are often criticised for taking jobs and rising crime. Correa's voluble denunciation of the Colombian border raid and call for national unity could be read as a symbolic commentary on Colombian immigrants in Ecuador and a reassurance to Ecuadorians. Yet the general lack of xenophobic commentary in either official or popular discourse likely stems from the fact that Ecuadorian criticism was directed not so much at Colombia and its citizens, but at the Uribe government as a proxy of US imperialism. It was common for Ecuadorian commentaries on the border row, both official and popular, to invoke the idea that Colombia was a ‘sister republic’ or ‘sister nation’ with a shared foundation in Bolivarian mestizaje (the grand republic founded by Bolivar, which encompassed present day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela along with parts of Brazil and Peru). This discourse not only tapped into renewed notions of regional solidarity and Bolivarian unity espoused by Correa (and Chávez and Morales) as alternatives to US domination in the region. It also subtly reinforced the centrality of mestizo culture for defining Ecuadorian nationalism.