by O. Hugo Benavides
Never had a gerund so much blood…
—Miguel Angel Zambrano Mendoza
The October 2nd to 13th uprising in 2019 in Ecuador would prove to be one of the largest Indigenous social mobilizations taking place in the continental Americas. Despite recent movements in Bolivia and Ecuador over the last few years, it has been several decades since the Andean region has seen such a large-scale movement of Indigenous people coalescing around their ancestral identity. Even more surprising was seeing the Indigenous communities use their political might to claim democratic restructuring and economic equality for the entire nation.
The October movement would prove to be more influential and powerful than was initially understood, a reality made more striking by the fact that the Indigenous community was not one of the social groups to have started the mobilizations. However, without a doubt they were the ones to make the government backtrack on its agreements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the cause for the initial popular strikes. Even more surprising is the fact that what exactly one year ago seemed an isolated political incident turned out to be the beginning of a long year of turmoil heightened by the nearly world-wide Coronavirus pandemic.
The uprising made visible a remarkable form of social identification—remarkable for several reasons. One of them was the fact that the initial government resolution to raise gas prices and transportation fares did not affect Indigenous communities more than others. Perhaps because of that it was students, the unions of urban workers (FUT), educators (UNE) and drivers who were the first to take to the streets to oppose the government’s “new old” neoliberal policies. It was only after the government had undermined the unions, buying out the powerful drivers’ union and inhumanely repressing the students that the Indigenous movement, represented by CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) took over the protests and became the representatives of the people’s claims against the government.
The image of Indigenous communities walking for days on end from all over the country to join their urban mestizo brethren became visually engrained in the country’s imagination. And this occurred despite the fact that all the major national media companies (Ecuavisa, Teleamazonas, and Telecentro) censored the images. These companies had the audacity to air soap opera repeats while not only the police, but also the military, savagely met the protesters with armored trucks, tear gas and real bullets. The unevenness of the fight between the Indigenous communities and the police/military was caught by the multiple images of the Waorani leaving their Amazon homeland and entering Quito, the country’s capital, in traditional dress with their arrows and spears and being met by thousands of local citizens who lined the streets to cheer them on (see figure 1).
Figure 1 (source: Información Napo)
However, this repeated scene was only one of many that contributed to the uprisings’ visual success. More poignant still perhaps was the moment captured on video of a policeman killing a student, shooting a bullet directly into his eye. The image went viral and helped to make even more obvious the inequality of the struggle between the government forces and the students and Indigenous communities. The footage increased support for the protests from across the entire population, particularly those in Quito and the surrounding highlands. Meanwhile, Guayaquil’s mayor (member of the fascist Partido Social Cristiano), Cynthia Viteri, would brutally repress protesters. And less than four months later, the city’s inhabitants would find themselves needing the agricultural support of these same Indigenous communities when the city was ravaged by the Coronavirus pandemic and suffered a public health collapse so complete that the bodies of the dead had to rot at home or be burned on the streets by their loved ones (see figure 2).
Figure 2 (source: STR/Marcos Pin/AFP via Getty Images)
These hundreds of images, both photographs and videos, were circulated and were reproduced continuously throughout the two weeks of the uprising. They turned out to be a powerful tool in the struggle to force the government to rescind its unpopular economic policies. Precisely because the national media censored the images and refused to broadcast the repression occurring throughout the country, cell phone cameras and social media did the work of truth telling that the major media, particularly Ecuavisa, refused to do. The public documentary record was composed of thousands of images that made their way into the visual mainstream through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp accounts.
Figure 3 (Source: Rodrigo Buendia / AFP via Getty)
Figure 4 (Source: Ecuador Today)
Any and all social media outlets became essential in getting the news out. This was especially true after a military curfew was imposed upon the whole country. These images (see figures 3-5) proved vital throughout the uprising, securing both national and international support for it. They have now also become part of several major media projects. (See Migrar Photo (figures 6-7) and Fluxus Foto (figures 8-9.) These images now are being used self-consciously to connect the Ecuadorian political unrest to other movements and to broader global concerns their creation and mode of circulation so clearly embody.
Figure 5 (Source: Dolores Ochoa / AP)
These images and media projects enable us to see precisely how local and national elements of political and social uprisings are now central in shaping a wider continental and global reality. Not least in importance is how vital modern visual culture and its technologies are to maintaining and developing energies of popular mobilization. It was largely through these photos and video images, taken by regular citizens and grass roots organizations (e.g., Wambra Medio Digital, Radio La Calle, and others), that the Indigenous communities brought the government to the negotiation table. It was largely due to their influence that the government was forced to hear their case and finally rescind the policies that had started the protests two weeks earlier.
Figure 6 (Source: Eric Allende/Migrar Photo)
Figure 7 (Source: Eric Allende/Migrar Photo)
Figure 8 (Source: Fluxus Foto)
Figure 9 (Source: Fluxus Foto)
CONAIE brought off an enormous representational coup when it successfully demanded a live negotiation with President Lenín Moreno himself and the different secretaries of state agencies (see figures 10-11). The government representatives soon realized the enormous mistake they had made. The negotiations were by far the country’s largest live event ever transmitted on-line or by television. There were watched by almost ten million viewers--over half the country. In real time citizens could experience together their hopes that negotiations would lead to the end of the bloodshed that by then had left eight dead and hundreds wounded, including many blinded. Over one thousand protesters had been imprisoned. For perhaps the first time, images of the different Indigenous representatives dressed in their traditional attire, speaking in Kichwa-accented Spanish did not feed into the nation’s traditional racist ideology. On the contrary, such images now served to expose the white/mestizo government elite’s unconscionable distance from the needs and aspirations of the country’s Indigenous others. Indigenous people had suddenly, and seemingly for the first time, revealed themselves as the true representatives of the whole nation.
Figure 10 (Source: AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)
This revolutionary identification of the political nation through living Indigenous communities revalued what previously had been an archaeological national imaginary concerning Ecuador’s most exploited and dispossessed people. How did this transformation occur? In part by the political actors’ first-hand use of camera phones and videos. These brought an intimacy to the struggle that had not been there previously. In addition, the protests were no longer confined to claims of Indigenous communities to their land and livelihoods in the Amazon. Rather their claims extended to the daily prices of food and transportation that affected almost every Ecuadorian.
Figure 11 (Source: Presidencia de la República del Ecuador)
The language used by both sides proved to be crucial. Each Indigenous representative spoke in plain terms about the cruelty and failure of government policies and, at the same time, directly called out the heavy-handed repression that protesters suffered at the hands of the police and military. Their words’ expressive eloquence stood in sharp contrast to the long rhetorical explanations given by the government representatives. These were clearly intended to embarrass Indigenous members who were assumed to lack the technological knowledge and sophistication of government spokespersons. In fact, the Indigenous representatives’ simple, though very far from simplistic, demands, delivered in everyday language, proved far more persuasive and cathartic for the majority of Ecuadorians. The last Amazonian representative to speak drove these contrasts home. Identifying herself as a mother and sister, Miriam Cisneros, President of the Sarayaku community, spoke of leaving her family behind to come to the capital to protest. She had come all this way, she said, only to see her fellow protesters and brethren be beaten and die at the hands of the Ecuadorian police—those who were supposed to protect both her and them.
By the end of her speech that night the Indigenous representatives had left no way out for the government other than to end their policies. In a behind-the-scenes meeting that had taken place in an extended intermission, CONAIE representatives backed up their own Indigenous lawyers and economists who were fully prepared to meet and argue against the government on their own rhetorical and technological terms. The outcome was profound and immediate. On the night of October 13th a loud celebration took place in the capital and throughout the entire country. People felt as if collapse into social chaos and civil war had been averted.
Not in over a century had Ecuador been so close to a complete unraveling of its social fabric. Never before had the Indigenous groups been embraced by the majority of Ecuadorians or been seen as representing not only their own concerns but the plight of the wider mestizo nation. The depths of these feelings and their significance come through unforgettably in a poem by Miguel Angel Zambrano Mendoza. Here are his words that circulated widely as the Indigenous communities made their long trek back home, on foot, in cars and buses:
Nadie sabe exactamente cuáles son los límites de este país.
Pero quizá es este horizonte de ponchos
que enrojece el final del verano como un amanecer primigenio.
Tal vez el indígena es un país
y es el único que piensa en todos.
Quizá solo ellos nos quieren como nunca sabremos querer a nadie,
por eso vinieron a darnos luchando, a darnos pidiendo
(nunca un gerundio tuvo tanta sangre),
a darnos muriendo.
Nobody knows exactly what the limits of this country are.
But maybe it's this horizon of ponchos
That reddens the end of summer like a primeval dawn.
Perhaps the indigenous is a country
and they are the only ones who think of all.
Maybe only they love us like we will never know how to love anyone,
that's why they came to do the fighting, to do the asking
(never had a gerund so much blood),
to do the dying.
This however was far from a triumphant story of a millenarian movement’s political success or a paradigmatic moment of moral and racial reckoning for the nation. To be sure, there is no denying that the October uprising did much to make the Indigenous community a central player in national and global politics. CONAIE’s presidential candidate, Yaku Perez (see figure 12), is now among the top contenders for the presidency in 2021, and Nemonte Nenquimo, the Indigenous Amazonian leader, was the only Ecuadorian selected by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world (see figure 13). But like the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and myriads of movements in Chile, France, Yemen, and Colombia over the past year, the Ecuadorian Indigenous Uprising speaks to much broader unresolved and interconnected global concerns of race, class and national belonging. Far from adequately addressing (much less “solving”) these national conundrums, I suspect that all of these movements, including Ecuador’s, hide an unacknowledged signifier in their midst: climate change and global warming. Couldn’t this partially account for the nation’s new self-identification through the Indigenous? At the end of the day (or night) climate change will catastrophically affect everyone. But the worst destruction first impacts, as all capitalist extractive processes do, those who previously have been disenfranchised and have historically been the most exploited. Let us not minimize the irony that it was rising gas prices that brought Ecuadorians into the streets in the first place.
Figure 12 (Source: Yaku Pérez)
Figure 13 (Source: Time/Stefan Ruiz)
Might we not wonder whether we are seeing in Ecuador, and around the world, responses to a global “pandemic” even worse than that of Coronavirus, one which is on the brink of killing untold numbers of organisms, extinguishing over half the living species in the world? Is it not perhaps our inability to control or even face this climate calamity that is partly motivating the unrest expressed in these different national mobilizations? I believe we need to explore how these different national movements may be responding to “old new” forms of ethnocide and genocide. The killing of our native bodies and the decimation of our Indigenous populations are not new. But perhaps time is running out for those in power to realize that their planetary death is imminent as well.
The fact remains that those groups historically most oppressed by the West’s misuse of global resources are best able to recognize the end of the habitable world caused by unchecked global neoliberal capitalism. It is these native and otherized bodies, the historical losers, who can measure most accurately the temperature of the times and who are yet again being forced to do the work for all of us—“to do the dying.” Stephen King rightly points out in his novel It, the thing about losers “is that they have nothing left to lose.” Or even more potently, as James Baldwin stated half a century ago: “the most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” If that condition now describes global capitalism at its defining historical moment, might we not ask ourselves if all the turmoil and unrest experienced since October 2019 could yet be translated into the sense of a beginning—that is, into some alternative course to the climate change determined catastrophe now in plain sight?