State Ventriloquism and Racism in Ecuador

• In Event: Lasting and Resurgent Forms of Racism after Recognition and the “Decolonial Turn” in Latin America

Abstract

This presentation examines the Janus-faced relation of the Ecuadorian state with the indigenous people living in this nation’s territory. On the one hand, as part of the self-identified “turn to the left” in Latin America, the government of President Rafael Correa (2007-present) promised to decolonize Ecuadorian society. It aimed to do so through the Andean concept of Sumak Kawsay or Good Living that purportedly guides the development strategies of the regime, as well as through interculturality, plurinationality, rights of nature, and other policies. Despite these praiseworthy discourses, the paper discusses how the Ecuadorian state has used these and other concepts associated to indigeneity as a way to “speak for” indigenous people while depriving them of agency and decision-making power. When the Ecuadorian state “speaks for,” it draws on a tradition of parternalistic “ventriloquism” that dates back to the colonial period.
A second part of the paper contrasts “ventriloquism” to other violent, racialized and gendered interactions between the state and indigenous communities. Since roughly 2009, the indigenous movement has opposed this regime because of its focus on the extraction of non-renewable resources, its lack of engagement with structural change, and its authoritarian approach. The President and other high state officials have disparaged the indigenous leadership in ways that have reopened spaces for crude expressions of racism in Ecuadorian society. Moreover, the state has used racialized and gendered forms of violence against the indigenous population in the context of repression of anti-government protests. Finally, the state has conducted a process of exclusion of indigenous peoples from state institutions. How does the Ecuadorian state reconcile its ventriloquist and racist, violent and exclusionary sides? How do these approaches contradict or fertilize each other? What can the analysis of these contradictions teach about historically grounded but renewed racial formations? How are contrasting understandings of indigeneity deployed by the state and social movements in this conflict?

Author

• Carmen Martínez Novo, University of Kentucky