by Todd Gordon
As noted, the new constitution that materialized from the assembly was popularly approved through a referendum, and the depth with which its commitments to social, political, and economic change resonated with Ecuadorians was expressed in Correa’s majority victory in the first round of presidential elections in 2009. “The new constitution opened the door for a series of profound changes,” argues Alberto Acosta, a former Minister of Energy and Mines in Correa’s first administration and the President of the Constituent Assembly in 2007 and 2008:889
Its statutes guarantee the construction of a plurinational state. This means the incorporation for the first time of marginalized groups, like indigenous peoples and nationalities and Afro-Ecuadorians. The constitution mandates respect for their unique ways of life and community organizing, and a new way of structuring the state in general.890
Likewise, the new constitution includes probably the most progressive environmental commitments of any constitution in the world. The text ensures, for example, an allegiance “to ‘living well,’ or Sumak Kawsay, in Quichua,” Acosta explains, “which is an entirely distinct way of understanding development.” A part of this new understanding is reflected in the fact that the “Constitution guarantees the rights of nature. Nature is a subject with rights in the Constitution. Ecuador’s Constitution is the only one in the world with this characteristic.”891 The constitution also solidified an important declaration of sovereignty made by Correa during his 2006 election campaign—that he would not renew a ten-year lease on the Manta U.S. air base on the Pacific coast of the country. Indeed, the new constitution officially prohibited foreign military bases on Ecuadorian soil, and the last of the U.S. troops stationed at Manta had departed the country by September 2009.892
In keeping with the spirit of the Constitution, the 2009 electoral campaign featured Correa’s promise of the “radicalization of the Citizen’s Revolution.”893 It quickly became apparent, however, that there would be a chasm between the contents of the paper Constitution and the lived reality of the country under Correa’s rule.894 Shortly after the 2009 elections, Correa shifted decisively to the Right, presenting “infantile Leftism, environmentalism and indigenism” as the preeminent threats to economic modernization and progress, particularly as regards the President’s plans to shift the extractive focus of the economy from oil to mining.895 Correa allowed the disintegration of the “mega-bloc” of parliamentary Left forces that had held together loosely during the Constituent Assembly, as the MPD and Pachakutik abandoned the coalition in the face of the rightward drift of the AP. Key business federations that had been hostile to the first Correa administration notably altered their discourse and practical orientation toward the government in the post-2009 conjuncture, presumably as a reward for the government’s newly invigorated commitment to strong elements of neoliberal continuity.896 Correa, now openly “allied with traditional, right-wing businessmen,” the Uruguayan sociologist Raúl Zibechi points out, “reserves his most poisonous darts for the Left.”897
By the end of 2009, the government was in open conflict with the indigenous movement. Mobilizations were launched against proposed water legislation that would have effectively privatized lakes and rivers in the interests of hydroelectrical development and the water needs of multinational mining corporations, at the expense of peasant and indigenous communities. Teachers unions and university professors, meanwhile, were locked in a confrontation with the government over a new law ostensibly about regulating higher education, but actually designed to weaken union power. Throughout 2010, a series of conflicts continued to convulse the country. Indigenous movements agitated against mining projects, while public sector workers engaged in defensive battles to defend their most basic of labour rights. Indeed, according to sociologist Mario Unda, the essence of 2010 can be captured in the phrase, “a project of capitalist modernization confronting social movements.”898
A high point in recent indigenous struggle took place on June 5 of that year. Ecuador was hosting a presidential summit of The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) in the majority-Quichua, Andean city of Otavalo. Despite the fact that the gathering was ostensibly called to discuss themes of indigenous and Afro-Latin American peoples within the ALBA countries, the principal indigenous organization of Ecuador, CONAIE, was not on the guest list. The indigenous movement consequently organized a march of three thousand people through the city, and symbolically installed a parallel Plurinational Parliament in the streets and plazas.899 Police repressed the march and serious charges of terrorism and sabotage were laid against key indigenous leaders, including Marlon Santi of CONAIE. “When the presidents of the countries involved in the ALBA were meeting here in Ecuador, in Otavalo, they talked about indigenous rights,” Santi explained to us:
But the main representatives of the indigenous movement in the country, that is to say CONAIE, were never invited to the meeting. And we wanted to have a voice in ALBA. We wanted to say to the governments of ALBA that without the indigenous peoples of Latin America ALBA can’t exist. We will not be excluded any longer. And for saying this in protests outside the ALBA meeting we have been given this new name of terrorists and saboteurs. We’re supposedly against the nation. But we believe the truth will rise to the surface about these claims.900
At the time of writing, approximately two hundred activists are facing charges of terrorism and sabotage with the possibility of lengthy prison terms.901 For Luis Macas, in the same interview, the motivation for targeting the indigenous movement with such repression is clear enough. “It’s not that the government wants simply to get rid of the Indians, or that it is racism for racism’s sake. The objective is to liquidate the indigenous movement in this country, to dismantle and destroy this movement.” The rationale grows out of the fact that “the indigenous movement is the principal social and political actor in the country that has struggled against the economic model, against neoliberalism.” From Macas’ perspective, “Correa wants to have a green light to do as he pleases. And his project of development is rooted in the exploitation of natural resources. We in the indigenous movement have an emphatically different conceptualization of Mother Nature and are saying no.” The conflicts over mining are likely to intensify further in coming months and years. Closed-door negotiations with multinational corporations seeking to secure large-scale mining projects were due to be completed in July of 2012, but have not yet come to fruition. While the details remain secret, it is estimated that US$3.5 billion in foreign direct investment will flood the mining sector from 2012 forward.902 If past patterns are repeated, Canadian imperial mining capital is likely to play a defining role.
Delfín Tenesaca, president of ECUARUNARI, the Andean highland indigenous organization, painted a clear picture of struggle in the mining sector when we met with him in August 2011. “For us, it’s very clear,” Tenesaca said,
all of a sudden, a bureaucrat or technocrat appears from the government and tells indigenous communities, “let us enter these territories because we have to exploit this mine.” When you resist, you are sanctioned, receive death threats and all the rest. This has happened throughout the country. Anyone who opposes this, anyone who resists, is considered a terrorist.903
President Correa is “clashing with indigenous communities,” the Financial Times reports. “Once he claimed to champion their rights. Now his government accuses them of terrorism and sabotage.”904
The growing socio-political cleavages between organized social movements and the Correa government led to the formation of a new political coalition, the Unidad Plurinacional de las Izquierdas (Plurinational Unity of the Lefts, UPI) in the run up to the February 2013 presidential elections. The UPI selected Acosta as their presidential candidate. However, buoyed by high and steady commodity prices on the international market, growing state revenues, declining rates of poverty, and popular social policies, Correa won the elections handily—Correa landed 57 percent of the vote, up from 52
percent in 2009, while the main right-wing contender, a conservative banker Guillermo Lasso, came second with 23 percent, and Acosta was crushed with only 3 percent.905 The still visible and undeniable social weight of popular environmental and indigenous movements in the country—even if weaker than at their height in the 1990s and early 2000s—has not found a clear, independent expression in the electoral arena during the Correa period.
BIRTH PAINS OF THE NEOLIBERAL MINING ORDER IN ECUADOR
Since the second half of the nineteenth century Ecuadorian capitalism has been alternately fueled or exhausted by the booms and busts of its central export commodities—in succession, cacao, bananas, oil, and, now, mining minerals.906 The principal metallic mineral resources under its soil are gold, silver, copper, and antimony. There are also indications of a substantial presence of other minerals, such as lead, zinc, and platinum. According to the figures offered by President Correa in 2007, based on the optimistic projections of private mining companies, the mining reserves in Ecuador are worth roughly US$200 billion, compared to the remaining oil reserves, which reach an estimated value of US$70 billion.907 In accordance with the Washington Consensus in neoliberal restructuring that began to open up Latin America to a free market transformation in the 1980s and 1990s, Ecuador began its specific process of attracting foreign private investment in the mining sector with a vision of building zones of industrial mining on a grand scale.
The process was facilitated through a series of new laws, issuing in a mining regime which stressed the reduction of state oversight in the sector, advantages for foreign mining companies in terms of financial support, guaranteed access to potential mining territories, the flexibilization of labour conditions, the weakening of related environmental legislation, the sharing of geological information with multinationals, and the coerced phasing-out of informal markets of artisanal mining to make room for the advance of large-scale industrial companies.908 The principal laws through which this new orientation in mining was advanced were the 1991 Ley 126 de Minería (Mining Law 126), the 2000 Ley para la Promoción de la Inversión y de la Participación Ciudadana (Law for the Promotion of Investment and Citizen Participation), and, in 2001, the Reglamento General Sustitutivo del Reglamento General de la Ley de Minería (Replacement General Regulation of the Mining Law). These domestic laws were implemented in part through the World Bank-funded program, Proyecto de Asistencia Técnica para la Gestión Ambiental (Project for Technical Assistance in Environmental Management) and, later, the Proyecto para el Desarrollo Minero y Control Ambiental (Project for Mining Development and Environmental Control). In the language of the World Bank, these initiatives were designed to modernize mining activity and environmental management in the country while generating an improved overall knowledge of available natural resources in the country.909
This new juridical framework allowed for a veritable flood of foreign investment in mining, and the granting of a huge number of new concessions concentrated in relatively few hands. By 2008, prior to a mining mandate that put these concessions in a legal limbo (more on that later), the geographic area conceded to mining exploration amounted to roughly 20 percent of Ecuadorian territory, including ostensibly protected environmental and forested areas, indigenous territories, archeological sites, and agricultural zones.910 This was the opening to which Canadian mining capital responded with gusto. According to Alberto Acosta:
Canadian companies were the primary beneficiaries of the new disposition of the mining laws throughout the early 2000s. These laws were meant to strengthen the presence of mining companies in Ecuador. This was a project pushed forward by the World Bank, and which received support from the governments of that period. We’re talking about the neoliberal epoch. Canadian companies were the ones who took advantage of the new laws with the greatest enthusiasm, to invest in Ecuador. Canadian companies have expanded their presence in various regions of the country, in the Condor mountain range, in the Intag valley, and elsewhere. They’ve managed to win a huge number of concessions. Ecuador gave out over 5,000 concessions in an irresponsible manner, without any controls or criteria. The great majority of these concessions were concentrated in the hands of just a few companies, Canadian companies.911
With the acceleration in concessions, it is unsurprising that well before Correa assumed the presidency conflicts between indigenous and peasant communities and Canadian mining companies were proliferating throughout the country. The principal mineral deposits of interest to mining companies are located on the eastern and western slopes of the Andean mountain range in the North, and the Condor mountain range in the South—as noted, these are regions characterized by high levels of biodiversity, fragile ecosystems, indigenous and peasant territories, and are the points of origin for many of the country’s rivers. When the scope of exploration by multinational mining companies in Ecuador experienced a concerted uptick in the early 2000s—in the wake of the liberalization policies and in response to the beginning of an extended commodities boom driven largely by the dynamic growth of China—a diverse range of socio-ecological and political conflicts began to develop, very often involving Canadian corporations.
One early conflict that would resonate politically throughout the country in subsequent years developed in the town of El Pangui, in the canton of the same name, situated in the Condor mountain range, in the provinces of Moronoa Santiago and Zamora Chinchipe, along the border with Peru. One of the most biodiverse areas in the world, the area’s landscape is characterized mainly by animal husbandry, square-pond fisheries, and wild forests. EcuaCorrientes S.A. (ECSA), the subsidiary of the Canadian mining giant Corriente Resources, began exploring the region for minerals as early as 2000. As part of the company’s preemptive campaign of corporate social responsibility (CSR), specific leaders of the predominant Shuar indigenous community in the area were hired to work directly for the company in public relations, and small development projects were funded by the corporation.912 However, the Shuar people’s extended history of militant confrontation with oil multinationals made it unlikely that their organizational capacities would be easily undone, even by a sophisticated and well-financed CSR campaign.913
And, indeed, what had been largely invisible, subterranean stirrings of discontent in the early 2000s had by mid-2006 escalated sufficient momentum to mobilize significant above-ground resistance to the presence of Corriente Resources and other multinational mining enterprises. In October 2006, a week-long march of 260 kilometers brought protesters north from El Pangui to Jimbotono where a demonstration was staged demanding the end of all mining activities and associated hydroelectric dams. This action was followed in November by a march of the Shuar community of Warintz to the mining camp of Corriente Resources from which they evicted the workers. The collective resistance of the Warintz community was then joined by others, and actions extended to a series of other camps where workers were also evicted—a Shuar leader referred to the process as, “cleansing our territories of mining.”914 Momentum continued to draw hundreds of protesters in the coming days to the main mining camp in El Pangui, where they fought—with rocks, sticks, and dynamite—workers, police, military, and the pro-mining factions of the Shuar community.
The actions culminated in the early days of December 2006, when, after an assembly of one thousand in the coliseum of El Pangui, anti-mining activists marched on the Mirador mining camp, where they were assaulted with bullets and smoke grenades in a three-day standoff with the coercive forces of the state and the company. At the close of events, the government was forced to suspend the activities of Corriente Resources in both of the relevant provinces.915 In the heated context of that period, Canadian embassy officials “encouraged the Ecuadorian government to facilitate discussion between EcuaCorriente and local residents so that…conflicts could be resolved peacefully,” as if the fundamental conflict of interests at stake was reducible merely to a misunderstanding on the part of the indigenous and peasant opposition.916
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sp; Next to the conflict in El Pangui, probably the most well-known Ecuadorian instance of anti-mining resistance in the 2000s took place in Intag, a humid and tropical valley situated in the canton of Cotacachi, north of Quito. A copper deposit known as Junín is located within the valley. The first geological exploration for mining minerals in the area was carried out by the Ecuadorian and Belgian governments in the 1980s, but it was the Metal Mining Agency of Japan, financed by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, that confirmed a large copper deposit in 1990. By 1993, exploration of the area was taken over by Bishi Metals, a subsidiary of the Japanese giant Mitsubishi. Social protest in the 1990s drove Bitshi Metals out of the site in 1997. After an idle period in which the concession was abandoned, Ascendant Copper Corporation, a junior company from Vancouver, acquired the deposit.917 The ecological NGO Acción Ecológica (Ecological Action) played a crucial role in making contact over the course of the 1990s with communities inside the mestizo (mixed race) peasant settlements that populate the Intag region. Acción Ecológica conducted environmental workshops for the communities, generating collective consciousness around the socio-ecological risks involved in large-scale mining projects driven by multinational corporations. Out of this initial phase of organizing, a local group was formed called DECOIN. It drew on youth organizations, a priest inspired by liberation theology, and a variety of community environmental activists.918 Once Bitshi Metals had been driven out in 1997, these organizations took advantage of the idle period (until 2002) to solidify their organizational bases and organic links with local peasants, as well as to develop a national profile and international linkages through the work of Acción Ecológica.
