GL

Sections of the Western liberal media have posed the principal political and societal conflict in Ecuador as one between the state and indigenous communities, when in fact the picture is far more complex.

In this narrative, indigenous people are romanticized and often treated as the essence of virtue and innocence. It is not the first time that this form of racist infantilization has been presented in a positive light. The ideology behind Britain’s Indirect Rule and, long before that, Montaigne’s “Noble Savage” did likewise.

The main issue around which the alleged indigenous/government conflict is explained — mining and oil extraction — is not simple and should not be treated as such. Firstly, there is no uniform indigenous opposition to oil extraction. This attempt to speak on behalf of the indigenous people is an essential part of the Western myth that indigenous people always shun modernity, when in practice most indigenous people, like the rest of humanity, tend to value access to education, healthcare, and social provisions in general.

A second issue has to do with whether it would be right to simply stop extracting oil before we have completed or even engineered the transition to a non-primary economy. Aside from the collapse of the Ecuadorian state, it would mean a sharp return to the plantation economy (and owner!), a dramatic reduction of resources to tackle poverty (one of the principal causes of environmental degradation in the first place), and no capital to invest in the diversification of our economy.

This cannot be a serious proposal, especially if we consider that the greatest threat to our biodiversity, the utmost cause of deforestation and environmental ruin in Ecuador is poverty and the aggressive advance of the agricultural frontier. Poverty and the lack of infrastructure means many precarious towns and cities still offload their waste into ever-more-polluted Amazonian rivers.

There is no question as to the need to move away from oil. Oil economies are the victims of boom and bust cycles, and oil extraction has also been responsible for many societal ills, chaotic urbanization, and ethnocide.

But today, oil extraction is not the cause of the greatest social and environmental problems the Amazonian region faces. And until we move away from a dependence on the export of raw materials which has put us in such a disadvantageous situation in the international system, oil still generates the income Ecuador requires to build the sewers and water treating systems the country desperately needs to tackle the environmental degradation generated by poverty.

Interestingly, many East Asian countries achieved enough capital surpluses to steer away from their primary economies by exploiting their labor force. This we do not seek to emulate. Can our natural resources, exploited in a responsible manner, not help us avoid this tragedy?

We have much to learn from indigenous social systems, ancestral knowledge, and worldview. Each indigenous nationality (under Ecuador’s new constitution they are called nationalities not tribes) is the holder of a great cultural legacy that we must respect and strive to understand. But just as we must admire the intrinsic worth of our great diversity, we must ensure that we do not succumb to the naïve idealization of any society.

In many ways, this is not a new discussion. The CONAIE itself has long been in the throes of these debates. On the one hand, the ethnicists (or essentialists) were always skeptical of close interaction with the mestizo (mixed-race) world. The temptation was to look back at an indigenous past, or even at indigenous states, such as the Tahuantin Suyu, the Inca Empire, which was mythologized.

On the other hand, another group within the CONAIE, including the founding fathers of the movement, rightly denounced the ethnic roots of exclusion and domination, but also insisted on structural factors.

They had a more class-based approach and looked at such things as the free market, absence of the state, foreign domination, land ownership, and the many predicaments of the peasantry. This part of the CONAIE had always managed to congregate around a discourse which did not completely deny modernity but demanded a modernity that didn’t exclude them from the social contract.

Whereas during the 1990s the CONAIE was clearly led by the latter, over the last few years the former have gradually taken over a much weakened organization with none of the political and ideological leadership of the previous years.

Today many of the historic leaders of the CONAIE have sided with the Ecuadorian government, some openly joining its ranks and serving as civil servants. Others have been more critical of some government policies but have refused to take sides with the new leadership of the CONAIE and have accused it of playing into the hands of the traditional Ecuadorian oligarchy, including through recent events.

In electoral terms, over 60 percent of indigenous people, which encompass just above 7 percent of the Ecuadorian people, voted in the first round of the 2013 presidential elections for President Correa.

Overall, to describe the current situation as a supposed standoff between the Ecuadorian government and indigenous peoples is a gross misrepresentation. Scratch the surface and one will find the indigenous question to be much more complex than what the essentialist left would lead us to believe.