Ecuador As Victim: the Development of the Discourse on the Territorial Dispute with Peru, 1860-1981

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2018-08-29 Ecuador as Victim: The Development of the Discourse on the Territorial Dispute with Peru, 1860-1981

Lalama Vargas, Andres Leonardo

Lalama Vargas, A. L. (2018). Ecuador as Victim: The Development of the Discourse on the Territorial Dispute with Peru, 1860-1981 (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary. Calgary, AB doi:10.11575/PRISM/32893 http://hdl.handle.net/1880/107717 master thesis

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Ecuador as Victim: The Development of the Discourse on the Territorial Dispute with Peru,

1860-1981

Andres Leonardo Lalama Vargas

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN HISTORY

CALGARY, ALBERTA

AUGUST, 2018

Abstract

This thesis investigates the historical trajectory of the dominant Ecuadorian narrative of

its territorial conflict with Peru. Through qualitative discourse analysis of monographs,

pamphlets, and textbooks dedicated to the long conflict, it shows the development of a discussion

with its own consistency and internal logic, a discourse in the Foucauldian sense. Above all, this

discourse possessed a nation-building logic in which Peru was depicted as its main existential

threat and nemesis. Thanks to this discourse, the long and complex territorial dispute became a

means to achieve and strengthen national cohesion, and to strengthen the idea of Ecuadorian

nation. Given that the political, cultural, and economic rapprochement that Ecuador and Peru

experienced after the final peace settlement of 1998 contributed to a decades-long radical

reformulation of the idea of Ecuadorian national community, this thesis aims to contribute to the

understanding of Ecuadorian nationalism by analyzing one of its key aspects in relation to the country’s territory and an external other.

Preface

This thesis began with a personal interest in finding out more about the Ecuador-Peru conflict. One day in the summer of 2016, before the start of the Graduate Program in History at the University of Calgary, I came across the Wikipedia article about the Paquisha War of 1981, one of the several border clashes between Ecuador and Peru in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The narrative contradicted the idea of Ecuadorian territorial victimization in the hands of Peru that I had learned in school regarding this and all the other episodes of the century-old conflict between the Andean neighbours. Feeling somewhat outraged but not surprised that I had learned a version of history that completely favoured one side of the story, I decided to investigate more about the matter, not from the point of view of military history, but to find out how of the narrative of the conflict that I learned in my childhood had become the sole version taught in schools. The results of this investigation are presented in the following pages.

The archival research for this thesis was conducted mostly in Quito, at the library of the

Ministerio de Cultura y Patrimonio, the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Movilidad

Humana’s Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco and Archivo del Departamento de Soberanía Nacional, and at the Archivo Nacional del Ecuador. It also includes sources available online from the

Biblioteca Nacional Eugenio Espejo, Hathi Trust, HeinOnline, Spain’s Biblioteca Nacional de

España and Biblioteca Virtual del Patrimonio Bibliográfico, and the Cervantes Virtual online library. The videos discussed in the introduction and chapter 3 are available on YouTube, and the interviews to the veterans in the conclusion are available in The Diario La Prensa (Riobamba)

Facebook page.

iii

Acknowledgments

Above all, I thank God for the gift of life. I would also like to thank the people whose love, care, sacrifices, and help made it possible to pursue my dreams in Canada, and to make me the person I am today. I want to thank my parents for bringing me to Canada, and especially because they taught me to love learning. Mamá Tere for her undying love. My dear friend

Adriana Rincón for giving me support and strength during the months of research and writing, and that happiness that comes from true friendship. Thanks to my supervisor, Amelia Kiddle, for her constant guidance through my journey as a graduate student and apprentice historian. The members of my committee, Hendrik Kraay and Elizabeth Montes, for their time and interest in this investigation. Monique Greenwood, Pablo Policzer, Rogelio Vélez Mendoza, David Barrios, and the fellows at the Latin American Research Centre, where I found a warm and welcoming place of debate, discussion, and friendship. I am grateful to my professors, especially Carolee

Pollock, my classmates, and all the people at the Departments of History at Grant MacEwan

University and the University of Calgary, for encouraging me to become the best scholar I could be. In Ecuador, I would like to thank the librarians and archivists at Quito’s Ministerio de

Cultura y Patrimonio, the Foreign Ministry’s Archivo Histórico Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco and

Archivo del Departamento de Soberanía Nacional, and the Archivo Nacional del Ecuador, who kindly and patiently helped find the primary sources for this investigation. I am also grateful to

Lucy Freire, my uncles, and my cousins in Riobamba, for helping me realize that history lives not only in the archives but in the memory of the people. Thanks to all my friends in Edmonton,

Red Deer, Calgary, and anywhere else I might forget, for making graduate school life easier and happier. Finally, thanks to Daniela Villamar for believing in me before anyone else did.

A la memoria de mi tía Rosita

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Preface ...... iii Acknowledgments ...... iv Dedication ...... v Table of Contents ...... vi List of Figures ...... viii Introduction ...... 1 A Brief History of the Ecuador-Peru Territorial Dispute ...... 4 Sources on Ecuadorian Nationalism and the Ecuador – Peru Conflict ...... 11 Historiography of the Ecuador-Peru Conflict ...... 13 Theoretical Framework ...... 22 Structure of this Thesis ...... 24 1. Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941...... 26 Nineteenth-Century Discourses on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict ...... 29 The Early Twentieth Century: Honorato Vázquez, Enrique Vacas Galindo, and other works on the Ecuador-Peru Dispute ...... 37 Other Works before 1941: The Oriente and the Ecuador-Peru Dispute ...... 44 The Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol and the End of the Spanish Arbitration ...... 50 Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict in the 1920s and 1930s ...... 54 Conclusion ...... 60 2. The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis ...... 62 Propagandistic Literature on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict ...... 65 Explaining the War and the Rio Protocol: Monographs and Essays on the Territorial Conflict ...... 81 Conclusion ...... 98 3. The Consolidation of the Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Dispute, 1960s-1980s ...... 102 Portrayals of the Conflict by Members of the Establishment ...... 104 Monographs, Textbooks, and a Study Plan on the History of the Conflict ...... 113 Jaime Roldós, Paquisha, and the Discourse on the Conflict in the Early 1980s ...... 129 Conclusions ...... 134 Conclusion: The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict ...... 138 Background of the Authors ...... 139

State Control ...... 141 Foucauldian Analysis and the Discourse on the Conflict ...... 142 Nationalism ...... 144 Questions and Possible Directions for Future Research ...... 146 Epilogue: Ecuador and Peru after the Conflict ...... 147 Bibliography ...... 150 Archives ...... 150 Primary Sources ...... 150 Secondary Sources ...... 156

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List of Figures

Figure intro.1 Map of Ecuador, 1971...... 1 Figure 3.1. The cover illustration of Martirio Ecuatoriano...... 101 Figure 3.2. José María Velasco Ibarra giving a speech before a crowd in Quito, October 20, 1960...... 101

viii

Introduction

Figure intro.1 Map of Ecuador, 1971. The portion with coloured stripes corresponds to the areas awarded to Peru in the Rio Protocol of 1942. Ecuador. Instituto Geográfico Militar. Mapa político compilado por el Instituto Geográfico Militar (sección geográfica) (Quito: Instituto Geográfico Militar, 1971). Biblioteca Nacional Eugenio Espejo – Mapoteca. http://repositorio.casadelacultura.gob.ec/handle/34000/1767.

Introduction

“Pobre mi país Ecuador, es el Cristo contemporáneo a quien lo crucificaron entre dos

ladrones”

This phrase, attributed to nineteenth-century theologian and writer Fray Vicente Solano,

appears on a YouTube video called Reportaje especial, del Ecuador amazónico a la Guerra del

Cenepa, in which narrator Robinson Robles–with the help of a historian, a former Foreign

Minister, and a retired military commander–narrates the history of Ecuador’s shifting territory

and boundaries, taking the audience through a series of decrees and treaties from the colonial and

republican eras, thanks to which the country had lost or ceded to its neighbours vast lands east of

the Andes mountains.1 Robles’s video covers several centuries of Ecuadorian history, and it constructs a narrative that focuses on the losses the nation has sustained vis-à-vis its neighbours, especially Peru. The Solano quote, which appears near the beginning of the video, summarizes the feeling of loss and victimization that characterizes this production, and which had been present in the minds of many Ecuadorian authors for much of the country’s existence. In a period of approximately one hundred and twenty years, authors from different backgrounds–mostly but not exclusively men, often part of or associated with the state and its institutions, or members of the country’s political, military, and diplomatic establishment–dedicated thousands of pages to analyzing and discussing the long territorial dispute between Ecuador and Peru, whose origins lay in the colonial administration, and was definitively solved in 1998. The works of these authors constitute a body of literature in which a distinct theme of loss and victimization, still present in Robles’s video, became both a mode of explanation of the different events in the long conflict, and more generally, a place in which to discuss the concept of Ecuadorian nation.

1 Robinson Robles, Reportaje especial, del Ecuador amazónico a la Guerra del Cenepa, February 8, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT-7yjatJPo. The quotation translates as “poor my country Ecuador, it is a present-day Christ crucified between two thieves.” All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

Introduction

These works, monographs, school textbooks, and pamphlets of diverse lengths, degrees of scholarly sophistication, and target audiences, constitute the primary sources of this thesis. I argue that these sources show a decades-long conversation that took place in educated circles, a discussion regarding the significance of the long and difficult conflict with Peru, until it acquired an internal consistency, although at times dissident voices could be heard as well. The product of this discussion is what I call the Ecuadorian discourse on its territorial conflict with Peru. The most important elements of this discourse–in the Foucauldian sense–are the territorial victimization of Ecuador in the hands of its southern neighbour, and a nation-building logic thanks to which the difficult and complex dispute became a means and a lesson to strengthen the idea of Ecuadorian nation. The protagonists in the development of this discourse were first the country’s elites who wrote the books and pamphlets, and as the twentieth century advanced, the

Ecuadorian state, as well as scholars and authors of non-elite backgrounds, all of whom considered writing on the topic to be their own patriotic contributions to the defense of the nation.2 For reasons that will become clear later, it is important to point out that, even though the year 1941 did mark a significant change in the content of works dedicated to the conflict, the

2 The term “elite,” as it appears in this thesis, designates a somewhat diffuse group of people who took a personal and institutional interest in producing literature on the Ecuador-Peru territorial conflict. As it will become evident throughout the chapters, the social composition of this group changed with time, sometimes including men and women with little in common other than the mentioned interest in discussing the territorial dispute. They did not necessarily belong to either the hacendado aristocracy of the sierra, or the powerful bourgeoisie from the coast, although some authors did come from those backgrounds. Most frequently, elite authors were members of the country’s political, diplomatic, and military establishments. They were former or current presidents, foreign ministers, commanders of the Army, and government officials whose interest in the conflict originated in their being or having been part of the circles responsible for formulating the country’s foreign policy. In many cases, they took part in the events they discussed, and their writings are more or less explicitly meant to justify their own actions. In some cases, “elite authors” refers to people not directly linked to the conduct of the country’s foreign policy, but still closely associated with the upper strata of the government and society, for example as directors or leaders of a government institution, or of larger institutions such as the Catholic Church and the Liberal forces that took power in 1895. In contrast, non-elite authors are men and women who produced literature on the conflict, but who were not associated with the governing classes in any explicit way. These authors were often professional scholars, career officers in the armed forces, and mid- to low-level politicians. They were not members of the urban working class, much less rural peasants or indigenous people.

Introduction

idea of victimization at the hands of Ecuador’s neighbour was present long before that date, as

early as the nineteenth century.

A Brief History of the Ecuador-Peru Territorial Dispute

The long, complex, and intermittent border dispute between the two Andean neighbours

saw Ecuador and Peru engage in warfare and open hostilities four times in 136 years, in addition

to several rounds of direct negotiations, third-party mediation, border incidents, and diplomatic crises.3 In general terms, the Ecuador-Peru border dispute was one of several disputes with

colonial origins in Latin America, a consequence of the changing and often poorly defined

territorial nature of the Spanish colonial states and administrative units from which the modern

republics descend. It was also product of the difficulty Spanish authorities had in asserting their

authority and claim to dominion over the remote jungles of South America, to which other

European powers also laid claim.4 The Latin American republics inherited the difficulty job of

asserting their authority over their vast jungle frontier, but in the nineteenth century, more than

Europeans, they disputed these lands with each other.

Despite the international legal principle of uti possidetis that supposedly provided a clear

way of determining borders, the territorial ambiguities and disputes of the colonial era continued

after independence, and in many cases, they proved very difficult to solve quickly or without

resorting to war, as was the case of Ecuador and Peru.5 The first such confrontation was in 1828-

3 This synopsis is mostly based on David H. Zook, Jr., Zarumilla-Marañón: The Ecuador-Peru Dispute (New York: Bookman Associates, 1964). 4 Ana María Sevilla Pérez, El Ecuador en sus mapas: Estado y nación desde una perspectiva espacial (Quito: FLACSO Ecuador, 2013), 140. 5 Uti Possidetis, literally “as you have possessed,” is a principle of Roman Law adapted to international during the Independence Wars of the region that allows states to adopt and respect the supposed colonial boundaries of the units from which they descend, for example Ecuador from the Audiencia of Quito, and Chile from the General Captaincy of Chile. For a complete discussion on the origins and issues of uti possidetis, and the problems with its applicability in different parts of the world, see Suzanne Lalonde, Determining Boundaries in a Conflicted World: The Role of Uti Possidetis (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).

Introduction

29, although it was between Peru and Simón Bolívar’s short-lived Gran Colombia, from which

Ecuador separated in 1830. The inconclusive Peru-Gran Colombia War was fought over

conflicting claims to the provinces of Jaén and Maynas, today in northeastern Peru. The 1829

Treaty of Guayaquil that officially ended the conflict vaguely stipulates that the border will

follow that of the colonial administrative divisions.6 It never translated into an actual boundary because Gran Colombia disintegrated soon thereafter, resulting in Ecuador laying claim to those disputed lands as its successor state. Conflict over the border with Peru flared up again in 1859, this time with a Peruvian victory and occupation of Guayaquil amid a crisis in which Ecuador found itself on the verge of disintegration. A long and unsuccessful arbitration process with

Spain started in 1887 and ended in 1910, with an interval between 1890 and 1906 during which the Herrera-García Treaty was signed. The treaty gave Ecuador access to the Marañón and

Pastaza rivers, but the Peruvian Congress conditioned ratification of the treaty to limiting

Ecuador’s access to a single port, something the Ecuadorian Congress found unacceptable, thereby leaving the treaty unratified. In 1910, Ecuador boycotted the arbitration process when it was leaked that the arbitrator, King Alfonso XII, would give Peru most of the disputed territory,

resulting in the monarch refusing to give a verdict. Both the Herrera-García Treaty and the

Spanish arbitration contemplated awarding Ecuador more land than is included in its present-day boundaries.

In the twentieth century, the Andean neighbours fought each other three times in fifty- four years and went through another failed process of arbitration and negotiation. In 1922, Peru

6 República de Colombia and República de Perú, “Tratado de paz y amistad entre la República de Colombia y el Perú 1829,” International Treaty, Guayaquil, September 22, 1829, article 5. Archivo Histórico Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco (AHAPD)-Sistema de Tratados (ST)-PER006. References to primary sources will include the name of the archive or library, the first time in full and subsequently in initials, as well as the name of the fond or collection when available, and the call number.

Introduction

and Colombia signed the Salomón-Lozano Treaty, which solved their territorial dispute by

recognizing Peruvian possession of the lands between the Putumayo and Caquetá rivers in

exchange for a Colombian sovereign outlet to the Amazon River in the Leticia area. Although

Ecuador had finished its own dispute with Colombia in 1916, renouncing its claims to the lands

specified in the 1922 treaty, the Ecuadorian government felt the Salomón-Lozano Treaty had

hurt its honour because of the secrecy with which it had been signed, and broke off relations with

Colombia.7 Two years later, Ecuador and Peru signed the Ponce-Castro Oyanguren Protocol, an agreement to solve the territorial dispute through an arbitration and mediation process, this time under the leadership of the United States. These negotiations did not take place until a dozen years later, during which time the economic and political situation in Ecuador and the world changed considerably.

Between the 1920s and the 1940s, the succession of Liberal regimes gave way to more than a decade of coups, dictatorships, and interim presidents. Ecuador went through a period of prolonged economic crisis due to the collapse of the cacao-centered economy, which was exacerbated by the global crisis of the Great Depression.8 The Second World War brought

prosperity, as the country became more integrated into world capitalism, a process that included

a new, banana-centered export boom.9 However, the years of economic and political crisis also

meant that the government had not been able to dedicate as much of its attention to the conflict

with Peru as before.10 In addition, by the early 1940s the government still struggled to develop

7 Juan Miguel Bákula, Vol. 3 of Perú y Ecuador: tiempos y testimonios de una vecindad (Lima: CEPEI- FOMCIENCIAS, 1992), 245. Also see Germán Cavelier, Política internacional de Colombia (Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia, 1997), 196-200. 8 Juan Maiguashca, “La incorporación del cacao ecuatoriano al mercado mundial entre 1840 y 1925, según los informes consulares,” Procesos no. 35 (2012): 88. Wilson Miño Grijalva, “La economía ecuatoriana de la gran recesión a la crisis bananera,” in Vol. 10 of Nueva historia del Ecuador, ed. Enrique Ayala Mora (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1990), 44. 9 Miño Grijalva, “La economía ecuatoriana,” 60-61. 10 Bákula, Tiempos y Testimoios, 3: 241.

Introduction

and integrate the country’s peripheral areas, especially the Oriente, which had few if any access

roads, and whose administration was quasi-colonial.11 Peru’s diplomatic attention in the 1920s

and early 1930s had been elsewhere, first with the dispute over Tacna and Arica with Chile, then

with the Leticia incident with Colombia. At this time, Ecuador pushed Peru for a solution to their

dispute, with the intention to be part of a general settlement of Amazonian lands between the

three neighbours.12 A failed round of direct negotiations in Lima gave way to the 1936 Act of

Lima in which Ecuador and Peru agreed to execute the 1924 Ponce-Castro Oyanguren Protocol, recognizing the status quo of their respective occupations of the disputed area until reaching a definitive agreement.13 The Washington Conference between Ecuador and Peru started in the fall

of 1936, but ended in failure after two years.14 As in 1890, Peru refused to give Ecuador access

to the Marañón-Amazon, but this time the latter presented its case in a more informed manner,

including proposing two “transactional lines” that recognized Peruvian presence in the

Amazon.15

In the three years that followed the end of the Washington conference, an increasing

number of military incidents took place. Both in the Pacific and Amazonian sides of the disputed

border, Ecuador and Peru established garrisons beyond their existing positions, backed by their

respective interpretations of the 1936 Act of Lima.16 However, while Ecuador maintained less than one thousand poorly trained and inadequately equipped and supplied troops for this effort,

11 William Thompson Fischer, “Ecuadorianizing the Oriente: State Formation and Nationalism in Ecuador’s Amazon, 1900-1969” (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2015), 262-263. 12 Zook, Zarumilla-Marañón, 118. 13 Ecuador and Peru. “Acta para el arreglo de límites territoriales (Acta de Lima),” International Treaty, Lima, July 6, 1936, article 3. AHAPD-ST-PER030. 14 Zook, Zarumilla Marañón, 129. 15 Ecuador. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores. Sección de límites, Síntesis del desarrollo de las negociaciones limítrofes entre el Ecuador y el Perú en Washington, D.C. (Quito: Gutenberg, 1939), 5 and 11 for each of these lines. MCYP-BARRERA-IB00044. 16 Zook, Zarumilla Marañón, 156-57.

Introduction

Peru began to build up an army that was far superior to anything Ecuador had or was capable of

acquiring.17 Moreover, the Peruvian army was efficiently and professionally organized, while the

Ecuadorian military had become politically influential at the expense of its discipline and

professionalism, establishing and unseating presidents, dictators, and government juntas.18 In

July 1941 and after months of preparations, the Peruvian army crossed the border at Ecuador’s southern El Oro and Loja provinces, as well as in the disputed upper Amazon basin north of the

Marañón. The War of ’41, as it is known in Ecuador, ended in complete defeat for the unprepared, ill-equipped, and understaffed Ecuadorian army, and represented a traumatic episode

for civilians in El Oro, many of whose towns were not in dispute, but were bombarded and

occupied nonetheless. This occupation ended in January 1942, after the two countries signed the

Rio de Janeiro Protocol under the auspices and legally binding guarantee of Argentina, Brazil,

Chile, and the United States. The protocol awarded approximately half of the disputed lands to

each country. Whereas Ecuador got those territories that were closest to the Andes Mountains,

Peru got the lower half of Upper Amazon basin, a territory it had slowly colonized since the nineteenth century. As in the Colonial era, Ecuador had had very limited success in colonizing the Amazonian lands, with only a few and scattered missionary efforts that had been already in decline before independence. Ecuador partly acknowledged its limited success in Amazonia years before the War of 1941 and the Rio Protocol, as the Act of Lima states that the two countries were to “maintain the status quo of their current territorial positions,” without mentioning colonial borders, until the end of the Washington negotiations.19 As issues and

17 Zook, Zarumilla Marañón, 159. Newspapers reported Peruvian airplanes performing reconnaissance flights over El Oro as early as January 1941. “Aviones peruanos han volado sobre las poblaciones de El Oro,” El Comercio (Quito), January 2, 1941. 18 Zook, Zarumilla Marañón, 164. 19Ecuador and Peru, “Acta de Lima,” article 3. Zook, Zarumilla-Marañón, 124-25. No specific geographic markers appear in the Act of Lima itself, but Peru interpreted the status quo of territorial possession as a line dividing the upper Amazonian lands along the navigable limit of the northern tributaries of the Marañón-Amazonas.

Introduction

impasses surfaced during the demarcation process, the guarantor countries named Brazilian Navy

Captain Brás Dias de Aguiar to provide an interpretation of the boundary provisions of the

Protocol in the sections of the border in which the impasses happened. These included several

minor issues on the coast and the Oriente, as well as a more significant impasse in the Cordillera

del Cóndor, in the eastern Andes. The Rio Protocol vaguely states that in this area the border

goes through the divortium aquarum, or drainage divide, of the Santiago and Zamora rivers.

Geographical knowledge of this remote area was poor at that time, and a United States Air Force

photographic mission revealed that a river with an independent fluvial system running between

the Zamora and Santiago, the Cenepa, originated much further north than previously thought.

Ecuador’s government argued that the Rio Protocol was consequently flawed, given that there

were two drainage divides instead of one between the Santiago and Zamora rivers.20 Ecuador subsequently withdrew its members from the commission, leaving the demarcation process incomplete, and a section of the border at the Cordillera del Cóndor without demarcation for the next half-century.

The 1950s and 1960s saw the birth of what became the long-running Ecuadorian policy of contesting and not recognizing the Rio Protocol, starting in 1951 when President Galo Plaza

Lasso declared its inexecutability for geographical issues at the Cordillera del Cóndor, also protesting the aggression of 1941, and demanding a peaceful alternative for the outstanding demarcation issues.21 This policy came to a climax in 1960, when José María Velasco Ibarra

declared the protocol’s nullity, a position quickly ratified by Congress.22 The reasons were four:

20 The atlas of Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry, published in 1942 but prepared in the late 1930s, shows only a short, nameless river where the 190-kilometre Cenepa lays. Juan Morales y Eloy, Ecuador: Atlas histórico y geográfico (Quito: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 1942) 81-82. MCYP-LARREA-CML07176. Zook, 212-13. 21 Zook, Zarumilla Marañón, 214. 22 Zook, Zarumilla Marañón, 223. “El Protocolo de Río es nulo y jamás lo reconoceremos, dice el Dr. Velasco Ibarra,” El Comercio (Quito), August 18, 1960. Ecuador. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, El Protocolo de Río

Introduction

it had been signed under military occupation and was made under duress; because the War of

1941 had been one of conquest, which inter-American laws prohibit; because Peru had not

allowed Ecuador’s free navigation of the Amazon River; and because of the issue of

executability in the Cordillera del Cóndor. Both Peru and the guarantor countries criticized this

policy and declared that the Protocol could not be unilaterally nullified. Although Velasco

Ibarra’s fourth presidency only lasted until 1961, nullity remained the theoretical position of the

Ecuadorian government on the Rio Protocol for decades. More importantly, the declaration

appeared within a climate of generalized anger, and voices questioning the legitimacy of the

Protocol existed soon after the treaty was signed. Therefore, the declaration of nullity was in

effect the result of two decades of searching for answers to the humiliating defeat of 1941, the

expression of which were the printed sources that discussed the conflict and the Protocol from a

variety of perspectives.

In the 1970s, the Ecuadorian position seemed to soften up significantly, possibly because

the nullity policy did not accomplish anything, and also because oil reserves had been discovered on Ecuador’s side of the Amazon basin in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, in 1981 a series of clashes took place in the Cordillera del Cóndor, the so-called Paquisha War or Falso Paquisha

Conflict. The last armed confrontation between Ecuador and Peru war took place in 1995, again in the Cordillera del Cóndor, and for the first time with some Ecuadorian success. Three years later and after much joint work and negotiation, the Andean neighbours signed the Presidential

Act of Brasilia, which ended the century-old conflict. The last two decades have seen a radical

de Janeiro de 1942 es nulo de acuerdo con el sistema jurídico interamericano y con el Derecho Internacional (Quito: Editorial Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1960), 41. MCYP-LARREA-CML10102.

Introduction

change in Ecuador-Peru relations, although the subject of the War of 1941 is still somewhat

taboo.23

Sources on Ecuadorian Nationalism and the Ecuador – Peru Conflict

Only a small number of scholarly sources are dedicated to the Ecuador-Peru conflict from a perspective that is not military or diplomatic history, and no work engages in discourse analysis of Ecuadorian sources from the time of the conflict. Some authors have showed an interest in the characteristics of Ecuadorian nationalism, and in the use of symbols to this end, but these have not looked at the relationship between the Ecuador-Peru conflict and the development of the idea of the Ecuadorian nation. This thesis is meant to bridge these two trends. The first author to discuss the territorial conflict from a point of view other than military and diplomatic history was

Dale Slaght, whose 1972 unpublished PhD dissertation investigates the Ecuadorian elite’s hostility towards Peru, which he states motivated the country’s foreign policy.24 He saw that, as

of the early seventies, the press had changed the nature of its reports on Ecuador-Peru relations, focusing more on border development and less on the dispute.25 Maximilian Viatori discusses

how the idea of historical rupture, which was displayed during Ecuador’s 2008 border crisis with

Colombia, reaffirmed the status of internal enemies of the country’s indigenous peoples, even though white-mestizo elites tended to portray this and other border incidents of the twentieth century as opportunities for a breakup with the past.26 Viatori is more interested in the race

23 Interested readers can find more about the conflict throughout Bákula, Tiempos y Testimonios. See also Félix Denegri Luna, Perú y Ecuador: apuntes para la historia de una frontera (Lima: Bolsa de Valores de Lima-Instituto Riva Agüero Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1996). Zook, Zarumilla Marañón. These were all published before the final treaty of 1998. Accounts of the final phase of the conflict and the peace process are discussed later in this introduction. 24 Dale Vernon Slaght, “The Ecuadorian Image of Peru: A Study of Changing Elite Perceptions” (PhD diss., American University, 1972), ii. 25 Slaght, “The Ecuadorian Image,” 232. 26 Maximilian Viatori, "Rupture and the Maintenance of Indigenous Alterity: Crises, Borders, and Race in Ecuador, 1941-2008." Ethnohistory 63, no. 3 (July 2016): 497.

Introduction

relations behind the representations of conflict than the history of Ecuador’s border controversies

themselves. His work is significant because it constitutes an example of discourse analysis that

looks at the power relations behind elite narratives of border conflict in Ecuador.

During the final years of the Ecuador-Peru dispute, two authors investigated Ecuadorian

national symbols and their relationship with the Ecuador-Peru dispute. Gary Elbow analyzes the

different ways in which the Ecuadorian establishment created a national iconography, made of

state-sanctioned maps, monuments, place names, and the teaching of historical narratives,

stressing representations of loss and unrealistic hopes of redemption that made resolution of the

border conflict almost impossible.27 Sarah Radcliffe stresses the role of “multiple geographies of

identities.” These were the imagined and imaginative geographies that came from Ecuadorian

non-state actors in which the Amazonian jungle was portrayed mainly as an unknown land,

deserted but ripe for development, especially after the Río Protocol settled the border.28

Two authors whose works deal with Ecuadorian nationalism in general are worth

mentioning here. Ana María Sevilla Pérez studies the relationship between nation, state, and

territory through the analysis of three official maps of Ecuador from between 1858 and 1906.

She shows that the different images of Ecuador’s territory reflect a complex process of border

definition, both in relation to its neighbours and internally.29 In other words, for Sevilla maps are

a fundamental tool in the process of national consolidation, as they create a distinction between

the internal and the external, a key element of nationalism, and because they create an illusion of

territorial permanence while hiding conflicts of representation and hegemony.30 Guillermo

27 Gary S. Elbow, "Territorial Loss and National Image: The Case of Ecuador," Yearbook (Conference of Latin American Geographers) no. 22 (1996): 103. 28 Sarah A. Radcliffe, "Frontiers and Popular Nationhood: Geographies of Identity in the 1995 Ecuador-Peru Border Dispute." Political Geography 17, no. 3 (1998): 283. 29 Sevilla, El Ecuador en sus mapas, 11. 30 Sevilla, El Ecuador en sus mapas, 20.

Introduction

Bustos studies the development of a metanarrative of Ecuadorian history through the analysis of

public rituals of commemoration of the founding fathers of the country, and through the writings

of academic historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He argues that these writings,

and especially the public commemorations, were the activities in which “national memory” was

elaborated and disseminated, and which defined the historical dimension of Ecuadorian national

identity, cognitively and emotionally.31 This thesis is not meant to be a history of Ecuador’s

borders or of its conflict with Peru, but rather it discusses the development of Ecuadorian

nationalism through some of its cultural manifestations, including historical writings on the

conflict. Because I argue that the published sources on the conflict were written with a logic of

nation-building that dictated the tone and contents, at the same time creating a space for

discussion of the legacy of the different events that were part of the conflict, this thesis is in

direct conversation with the works of Bustos and Sevilla. I also expand on and update the

literature that looks at the conflict itself and what has been said and written about it in symbols or

by its elites.

Historiography of the Ecuador-Peru Conflict

Among the literature that discusses the Ecuador-Peru conflict itself, few sources in

English or Spanish deal with the full trajectory of the dispute. Instead, most monographs and articles focus on one aspect or period, usually the most recent episode, or on developments from the time when the sources were written. Of these, only a relatively small number focus solely on the history of the conflict. David H. Zook published in 1964 Zarumilla Marañón, an overarching view of the conflict that stressed its early stages. He argues that while the conduct of Ecuador’s foreign policy shows that pacifism and great trust on International Law and institutions were

31 Guillermo Bustos, El culto a la nación: escritura de la historia y rituales de la memoria en Ecuador, 1870-1950, (Quito: Fondo de Cultura Económica-Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2017), 35.

Introduction

achievable–something Zook considers vital to the survival of the Inter-American system–the

territorial conflict offers a lesson on realpolitik, namely that pursuing a country’s foreign policy

goals without the military or economic power to back them up is an impossible enterprise.32

Moreover, he argues that Ecuador’s unilateral declaration of nullity of the 1942 Peace Protocol

shows that even clear military superiority does not translate into a quick solution to this or any

dispute, nor does it eliminate the possibility of future conflict.33 Over half a century after its

publication, Zarumilla-Marañón is a key work on the topic, especially among English-language

sources, due to the uncommon diachronic treatment of the topic, and because his view that this

minor conflict offered lessons for other countries is repeated in later authors such as Marcella

and Downes, Herz and Nogueira, and Mares and Palmer. Another scholar whose work on the

conflict became a referent is William L. Krieg, who authored an unpublished study for the U.S.

Department of State meant to serve as an advisory report for the government. Krieg agrees with

Zook that Ecuador’s practical inability to occupy the Amazonian lands in dispute greatly

debilitated the country’s legal and historical case.34 Echoing Ecuadorian wartime Foreign

Minister Julio Tobar Donoso’s treatise on the War of 1941 and Rio Protocol, he sees the

definitive border as an expression of the historic boundary between Ecuador and Peru, and the

1936 status quo line as a de facto border arrived at without any coercion.35

32 For more on the origins of the Inter-American System, the most important institutional expression of which is the Organization of American States (OAS), see Inter-American Institute of International Legal Studies, The Inter- American System: Its Development and Strengthening (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1966). 33 Zook, Zarumilla Marañón, 228-29. 34 William L. Krieg, Ecuadorean-Peruvian Rivalry in the Upper Amazon (Washington, DC: Department of State External Research Program, 1979), n.p, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a088837.pdf. 35 Krieg, Ecuadorean-Peruvian Rivalry, 253-55. Julio Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana y el Protocolo de Río: antecedentes y explicación histórica (Quito: Banco Central del Ecuador, 1982), 462. MCYP-MANOSALVAS- MS1188. He mentions that Ecuador had in fact lost about 13,500 square kilometres after the Rio Protocol, and that in fact Peru had to withdraw from their positions. Chapter two discusses in detail two of Tobar Donoso’s writings on the conflict, Exposición del Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores del Ecuador a las Cancillerías de América: problema territorial ecuatoriano-peruano (Quito: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 1941), MCYP-MUÑOZ-LM1300, and La invasión peruana.

Introduction

The works by Zook and Krieg are to this day the only book-length works that study the

conflict from a historical perspective. Later scholars tended to follow Zook’s tendency to study the conflict for the lessons it could offer to other unresolved inter-state conflicts. Scholars also

tend to agree with Krieg’s conclusions with respect to the nation-building abilities of each

country, and their influence on the eventual resolution, both in 1941-42 and in 1995-98. For

William Avery, an analysis of the origins of the then-unsolved conflict could contribute to

strengthening Latin America’s economic and security links, something particularly important

given that, when Avery published his article, the region was immersed in multiple civil wars and

military dictatorships with American support and involvement.36 He also argues, like Zook, that

the conflict became a “nationalistic fix” or theme, a last resort for politicians and the military of

Ecuador and Peru whenever they faced crises or needed support for internal measures.37 This

interest in the security dimension is common in authors who later focused on the 1995-98 era. By contrast, Bryce Wood is less interested in the conflict itself, and more in the role the United

States played in it. For Wood, the War of 1941, along with the Chaco War of 1932-35, and the

Leticia Incident of 1932-33, show the inadequacies and obsolescence of the previous, largely informal legal framework for solving conflict in the Americas, which combined with the international situation facing the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, made direct intervention impossible or undesirable. Even then, he acknowledges the conflict’s colonial roots, and hints at nation-building and territoriality when he states that the large territorial prize involved in the

1941 war made diplomatic efforts ineffective.38

36 William P. Avery, “Origins and Consequences of the Border Dispute between Ecuador and Peru,” Inter-American Economic Affairs 38, no. 1 (1984): 67. 37 Avery, 76-77. 38 Bryce Wood, The United States and Latin American Wars 1932-1942 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 10. Decades later, Ahsan I. Butt discussed the American failure to prevent the war as product of both an inability to act as regional hegemon due in part to Chilean interference, and an inability to be firmer in its diplomatic

Introduction

More recent literature analyzes the conflict in the context of its final phase, which spans

the years between the Cenepa War of 1995, and the signing of the Brasilia Presidential Act of

1998. Ronald Bruce St John’s series of articles on the conflict offer a detailed historical analysis

of the boundary dispute and its resolution. In St John’s estimation, the Ecuador-Peru conflict and other border conflicts in Latin America show that the principle of Uti Possidetis, though it was universally agreed upon in the region, did not solve the issues coming from the ambiguity of

Spanish colonial administrative delimitation.39 In a contribution to an edited volume published in

Quito after the settlement of 1998, St John analyzes the participation of external actors in the

century-old conflict, from the Spanish arbitration of 1887 to the final negotiations in Brasilia.

Despite the repeated efforts of these actors, the longevity, complexity, and emotional load of the dispute hindered Inter-American relations for a long time.40 Other works written in the nineties

that discuss the events from this decade usually dedicate a chapter or section to the historical

background, sometimes with valuable insights regarding the nature of the conflict’s whole

trajectory that expand on the idea that the conflict had turned into a national theme or fixation.

Hal Klepak’s Confidence Building Sidestepped explains Peru’s motivations during “the other

war of 1941” in terms of the political and economic context of the WWII years, which gave it an

economic advantage Ecuador did not enjoy, plus a sense of nationalistic redemption needed after

the defeats against Colombia and Chile in Leticia and the War of the Pacific. In the case of

Ecuador, he thinks that circulating ideas of prior sovereignty over the disputed lands of the

Amazon basin, plus the undeniable facts of military defeat and diplomatic isolation, made the

efforts. "Anarchy and Hierarchy in International Relations: Examining South America's War-Prone Decade, 1932- 1941." International Organization 67, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 598. 39 Ronald Bruce St John, The Boundary between Ecuador and Peru (Durham, UK: International Boundaries Research Unit-University of Durham, 1994), 1. 40 Ronald Bruce St John, "Las relaciones Ecuador y Perú: una perspectiva histórica." En Ecuador-Perú: horizontes de la negociación y el conflicto, ed. Adrián Bonilla (Quito: FLACSO Ecuador 1999), 90-91.

Introduction

1942 Rio Protocol, discursively speaking, responsible for Ecuador’s worst humiliation and

national tragedy.41 The editors of the volume Security Cooperation in the Western Hemisphere,

Gabriel Marcella and Richard Downes, also allude to the symbolic role played by the conflict

and the Amazon itself as frontier and imagined source of wealth, and to the “state of mind”

deriving from the defeat of 1941 that determined the Ecuadorian military’s strategic thinking and

social standing for the decades between 1941 and 1998.42 Finally, Monica Herz and João Pontes

Nogueira present the long conflict as an enduring rivalry where pending issues are dealt with

through military confrontation or the threat thereof.43 The rivalry endured for so long, first,

because the idea of sovereign territory, on which modern nation-states are built, took on negative

connotations when traumatic military losses cemented much of the countries’ borders, and

became a catalyzer of national unity in both Andean neighbours.44 Second, like St John, Herz and Nogueira show how the principle of Uti Possidetis was unable to provide unequivocal solutions to this and other territorial disputes. This principle resulted in what they call “open borders” because there never was an agreed-upon principle to settle them, even more so given the vastness and remoteness of the Amazon.45 More recently, David Mares and David Scott

Palmer studied the conflict from the perspective of conflict resolution, also looking to extract

41 Hal Klepak, Confidence Building Sidestepped: The Peru-Ecuador Conflict of 1995 (Toronto: The York Centre for International and Security Studies-FOCAL, 1998), 73. 42 Gabriel Marcella and Richard Downes, “Introduction,” in Security Cooperation in the Western Hemisphere: Resolving the Ecuador-Peru Conflict, ed. Gabriel Marcella and Richard Downes (Miami: Miami: North-South Center Press at the University of Miami, 1999), 4-5. In an earlier study for the U.S. Department of National Security and Strategy, Marcella presented many of the conclusions reached by scholars of the conflict, particularly that the conflict refutes the idea that democratic states naturally avoid international warfare, and that in this case, it may be indicative that Latin American democracy is less developed than previously thought. Gabriel Marcella, War and Peace in the Amazon: Strategic Implications for the United States and Latin America of the 1995 Ecuador-Peru War (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute-U.S. Army War College, 1995), 8-9, http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/00037.pdf. 43 Monica Herz and João Pontes Nogueira, Ecuador vs. Peru: Peacemaking amid Rivalry (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), 15. 44 Herz and Nogueira, 25. 45 Herz and Nogueira, 26-27.

Introduction

lessons for other conflicts. In the absence–before the discovery of oil in the late 1960s–of

obvious strategic or economic value in the disputed areas, these authors’ explanation for the

longevity of the dispute goes along the same lines as the rest of the literature, pointing to an

Ecuadorian belief of the supremacy of historic rights over de facto Peruvian sovereignty in a region the latter considered an integral part of its territory, even after the Rio Protocol supposedly decided the question.46 Finally, Maximilian Viatori departed from standard analyses

to use a racial perspective, showing that the white-mestizo Ecuadorian elites framed the various border crises as “opportunities to break up with the past” in which normative mestizo patriotism was reinforced rather than questioned, thereby keeping indigenous peoples and Afro-

Ecuadorians in the place of others precisely when these groups had begun to make strides towards greater participation in the polity.47

The considerable number of English-language secondary sources on the conflict show

that scholarly attention has existed for a long time, and that this interest usually coincided with

major events in the history of the conflict. Due to the dispute’s longevity, with its pattern of

periodic escalation followed by years or decades of relative quiet, scholarly interest often

resembles an analysis of “current events” that need some historical explanation of limited depth

and extent, though Herz and Nogueira’s portrayal of the conflict as an enduring rivalry

synthesizes long-circulating ideas about the conflict and the disputed territory being a recurring

theme or an obsession with nation-building implications.

46 David R. Mares and David Scott Palmer, Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace: Lessons from Peru and Ecuador, 1995-1998 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 33. 47 Viatori, “Rupture and the Maintenance of Indigenous Alterity,” 513.

Introduction

Spanish speaking authors, especially Ecuadorian authors, have produced literature on the

Ecuador-Peru conflict from a much earlier time than their English-speaking counterparts.48

However, these authors will receive limited attention here, mainly because many of their works

constitute primary sources for this thesis, as they contributed to the construction of the

Ecuadorian discourse on the conflict in one way or another. On top of this, many works that use a historical perspective in their analyses come from individuals or institutions directly linked to the events of 1941-42, 1981, or 1995-98. This is the case, for example, of La invasión peruana y

el Protocolo de Río, written by Julio Tobar Donoso, the Ecuadorian foreign minister who signed

the Rio Protocol, and of Derecho territorial ecuatoriano, also by Tobar Donoso and Alfredo

Luna Tobar, who was a diplomat during the 1981 Paquisha War. These two works contain

important insights regarding the Ecuador-Peru conflict, but because their authors were so close to

the events themselves, and because the books were published before the final settlement of 1998,

they are considered contributions to the national dialogue from which the Ecuadorian discourse

on the conflict arose, and will be analyzed in the main body of this thesis.

Much of the literature produced during or after the years between the Cenepa War and

the final settlement has little to offer in terms of historical analysis of the conflict because

authors often reproduce the logic of the national discourse on the conflict. These authors did not

have the benefit of geographical distance or hindsight to put the national discourses into

perspective, and their usefulness as secondary sources on the history of the conflict is therefore

limited. Still, some of them offer some or many valuable insights that cannot be overlooked. In

48 For example, Juan Ignacio Gálvez’s El Perú contra Colombia, Ecuador y Chile (Buenos Aires: Agencia General de Librería y Publicaciones, 1919), which portrays Peru as the most belligerent South American state and reproduces the main elements of the Ecuadorian position on the dispute; and Pastoriza Flores’s “History of the Boundary Dispute between Ecuador and Peru” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1921), a doctoral dissertation by an Ecuadorian scholar who presented an English-speaking audience with an Ecuadorian perspective of the dispute.

Introduction

Ecuador-Perú: historia del conflicto y de la paz, Oxford-educated Ecuadorian historian Enrique

Ayala Mora cites the explicitly nationalistic goal of making available to a wide audience the history of “four centuries of Amazonian presence” of colonial Quito and republican Ecuador.49

He recognizes that territorial loss has become a species of “Ecuadorian mythology” under which all citizens grew up, and which created a sense of defeatism after the real trauma of military defeat and occupation of undisputed areas. Regarding the origins of the conflict itself, he thinks that properly speaking, Ecuador was not a nation when it was created in 1830 (after the breakup of Gran Colombia), but a precarious territorial union plagued by civil conflict, with undefined borders inherited from extinct entities and with stronger ties to its neighbours than between its own regions. Conflict was thus possible from the very beginning, as settling a border was not

among the governing elite’s priorities.50 His discussion of the possibility of rewriting the history

of the conflict given the final settlement of 1998 is most relevant for the purposes of this thesis.

His eloquent portrayal of the “fear of the Peruvian,” which sums up how feelings of victimization after the defeat of 1941 became a national theme, deserves to be quoted at length:

For all its life as an independent country, Ecuador lived under the threat of a military confrontation with its southern neighbour, Peru. Many generations of Ecuadorians were born and died with the idea that that country was “the enemy.” For years, we learn “History of Boundaries”, which was no more than a memorized sequence of royal decrees, treaties, and border arguments, after which we ended up hating the topic but convinced that Ecuador had always been defeated. More than a vindication of our Amazonian rights, it was a school for consolidating a species of defeatism and national inferiority complex.51 Other relevant Ecuadorian studies published in Ecuador include the edited volume

Ecuador-Perú: horizontes de la negociación y el conflicto. According to its editor Adrián Bonilla the history of the Ecuador-Peru conflict shows that the symbolic value of the border and the

49 Enrique Ayala Mora, Ecuador-Perú: historia del conflicto y de la paz (Quito: Planeta, 1999), 7. 50 Ayala Mora, Ecuador-Perú, 18-19. 51 Ayala Mora, Ecuador-Perú, 41.

Introduction

image of a ‘nation in peril’ consisted in their unique ability to unify “practically all relevant

social and political actors.”52 In his three-volume work Perú y Ecuador: tiempos y testimonios de una vecindad, Peruvian historian and diplomat Juan Miguel Bákula states that his aim, instead of defending one side, is to “demystify the territorial question” by exposing the numerous brotherly ties between the two peoples.53 This long-time ambassador of Peru in Quito does not hide his own involvement in the diplomatic life of both countries, but the extent and thoroughness of analysis of his work merit its inclusion of among the relevant literature. Writing in the late eighties and early nineties, he does not escape the traditional characterization of the Peruvian and

Ecuadorian nation-states as existing somewhat out of time (for example when he discusses the pre-Hispanic era). Even then, he acknowledges that the sharp distinctions of “us the good versus them the bad” are inaccurate, and that societies and peoples coexist, overlap, and benefit from each other.54 Bákula’s optimistic view of the relationship between Ecuador and Peru does not

preclude him from a wanting to “set the record straight” regarding common nationalistic

misconceptions about relevant parts of the history of both countries. An example of this is his

view of the role of the port of Guayaquil in the conflict. Like Ayala Mora, he stresses that

Guayaquil’s relationship with Lima was at one point stronger than that with Quito, but that their

ties eventually weakened and became negative. Bolívar’s incorporation of the port to Gran

Colombia was in fact a military conquest amid a context of legal and political uncertainty,

showing how arms and pacts, more specifically the 1822 conference between Bolívar and San

Martín, superseded the supposed legality of the principle of Uti Possidetis.55 In contrast to the

52 Adrián Bonilla, "Fuerza, conflicto y negociación: proceso político de la relación entre Ecuador y Perú." In Ecuador-Perú: horizontes de la negociación y el conflicto, ed. Adrián Bonilla (Quito: FLACSO Ecuador, 1999), 18. Bonilla speaks of all relevant actors, perhaps alluding to the relationship between racial discourses and the portrayal of the conflict that Viatori analyzes in his article. 53 Bákula, Vol. 1 of Tiempos y testimonios, 14. 54 Bákula, Vol. 2 of Tiempos y testimonios, 20-21. 55 Bákula, Vol. 2 of Tiempos y testimonios, 133-34.

Introduction

optimism of Bákula, Percy Cayo Córdova’s Perú y Ecuador: antecedentes de un largo conflicto has a more polemical tone. Disappointed that the rapprochement of 1991’s “Gentlemen’s

Agreement” between the countries’ foreign ministers gave way to yet another episode of confrontation, the author aims to debunk the idea that Peru is a bellicose, imperialistic nation.56

He places this unfair stereotype at the genesis of the historic anti-Peruvianism of Ecuador.57

Theoretical Framework

This thesis acknowledges the fundamental work of Benedict Anderson on the origin of

nations and nationalism, in which he sees the nation as “an imagined political community” of

citizens who see it as “inherently limited and sovereign.”58 Several scholars of Latin America

have criticized Anderson’s work, given that he formulated his theory of nationalism using

precisely the case of the region in the nineteenth century, but that he was mistaken in the

“particulars of Latin American history.”59 Nevertheless, and as Claudio Lomnitz points out,

Anderson’s work is likely the most important contribution to the analysis of nationalism of the

last decades.60 Far from existing outside a concrete historical context, nations were the product

of the efforts of the elite to redefine themselves and their subalterns in terms of a new

community. This is crucial to understand the motivations of someone writing on the Ecuador-

Peru conflict in the 1860s or in the 1970s. Miguel Angel Centeno challenges the traditional

56 Percy Cayo Córdova, Perú y Ecuador: antecedentes de un largo conflicto (Lima: Centro de investigaciones de la Universidad del Pacífico, 1995): 7-8. 57 Cayo Córdova, 9. 58 Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 6. 59 Claudio Lomnitz, “Nationalism as a Practical System: Benedict Anderson’s Theory of Nationalism from the Vantage Point of Spanish America,” in The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America, ed. Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando López-Alves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 330. 60 Lomnitz, “Nationalism as a Practical System,” 329. Another work that takes a critical look at Anderson is Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, eds., Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press-Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

Introduction conception of the genesis of nation and nationalism in Latin America, questioning the applicability of the principle that wars, especially international ones, functioned as creators of the state, as the newly independent republics were too weak to wage large scale warfare, and that the elites were for a long time uninterested in expanding state authority.61 Ecuador was too weak as a state to assert its authority, both in terms of its colonization of the disputed lands of the

Amazon, and in its military confrontations with Peru. Members of the elite had been writing on the conflict since the nineteenth century, but the discourse on the conflict became a concerted effort under official direction only in the twentieth century, once the great civil wars for control of the state were over. It is beyond the scope of this thesis to investigate the historical trajectory of Ecuadorian nationalism in general, but I aim to contribute to its understanding by showing one of the dimensions in which it was expressed.

The authors of the primary sources for this thesis formulated a discourse, in the

Foucauldian sense, thanks to which Ecuador became the victim of territorial predations by its neighbours, especially Peru. The utility of depicting these contributions as a discourse or discursive formation is to see it as something arising from a complex interplay of relations between institutions, economic and social processes, and values circulating among the elite and the public. In other words, even though a logic and structure dictated what belonged in the discourse, and who said it, these are not intrinsic to the subject discussed, nor do they correspond to a ‘historical spirit’ – to paraphrase Foucault – consubstantial with the society in which it arose,

Ecuador.62 Moreover, to see the contributions of the authors as a discursive formation means that they lack any unity, that they are diverse in format, time, background of the author, and target

61 Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 276. 62 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), 49-50.

Introduction

audience, other than the object to which they refer, in this case the conflict with Peru, and

perhaps more specifically the defense of Ecuador’s rights in the context of the conflict.63 This

explains the consistency in the stated goals of the authors, who otherwise would not have known

each other, lived in entirely different historical contexts, or had the same views of the nation they

wanted to defend. Although many of the themes in the discourse of Ecuadorian victimization,

such as the view that the country’s rights stemmed from the Real Audiencia de Quito’s

possession of the disputed lands, were present in very early sources, these became a discursive

formation only once a regularity was clearly identifiable, which allowed for the repetition of

themes, or their challenge and revision.64 This happened at the same time as the increased interest of the state in contributing to and controlling what was said about the conflict. Discursive

consolidation and state control of the discourse of the territorial dispute happened throughout the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it was fully completed by 1981.

Structure of this Thesis

This thesis looks at the development of the Ecuadorian discourse on the territorial dispute

with Peru through the printed contributions of individuals and institutions who wrote about it

between 1860 and 1981. The first chapter discusses the works of authors from the nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries, showing that individuals belonging to the political and diplomatic

elites were the first ones to write systematically on the conflict, until approximately the 1920s,

when the first efforts to spread the Ecuadorian position through official channels such as

education appear. The second chapter discusses authors who published between 1941, the year of

the Peruvian invasion, and 1961, the end of the fourth administration of Velasco Ibarra, during

which the nullity thesis became state policy. It shows that the greatest state efforts to formulate

63 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 35. 64 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 41.

Introduction and control what was said about the conflict date from this era, something that resulted from the efforts to find an explanation to the traumatic events of 1941-42. In addition, while individuals closely related to the events of the conflict still published at this time, scholars and non- specialists from more humble backgrounds also published a variety of works. Both groups saw their works as patriotic contributions to the defense of the country. Finally, the last chapter discusses authors who published between the end of the fourth velasquismo and the Paquisha

Incident of 1981. It argues that, by the latter date, the elements of the Ecuadorian discourse on the conflict as it reached its final phase of 1995-98 were in place, and that this made possible some minor revisions and challenges to the narrative of the conflict to appear.

1. Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

The anonymous pamphlet Contestación de un ecuatoriano al artículo inserto en El

Comercio de Lima No. 826, intitulado Peru y Ecuador is a response to an article that appeared in

Lima’s El Comercio newspaper earlier that year, which discussed the relations between Ecuador

and Peru. The goal of the pamphlet’s author was to refute the El Comercio article “with clear

reasons, with notorious facts, and with irrefutable documents” regarding the conduct of foreign

policy by Ecuador’s president, Juan José Flores.1 It questions the Peruvian article’s claim that

Flores had any expansionist ambitions on its neighbours, countering that, far from such personal

designs, he has acted honourably with Ecuador’s neighbour, for example by staying away from

the Peruvian civil wars of the 1830s and the War of the Peru-Bolivian Confederation.2 Moreover,

the anonymous writer of Contestación claims the real reason for the controversy is Flores’s

request to honour the Treaty of Guayaquil of 1829, the treaty that ended the Peru-Gran Colombia

War of the Bolívar era.3 This short piece is significant for the study of Peru-Ecuador relations for

a few reasons. It was published a dozen years after the birth of Ecuador, some fourteen years

after the war, later considered the first confrontation between Ecuador and Peru. One of this

war’s battles, a limited Colombian victory, took great symbolic value within the discourse on the conflict later. Contestación is one of the earliest, if not the earliest available Ecuadorian publication commenting the Ecuador-Peru relations, an important part of which was their mostly

1 Contestación de un ecuatoriano al artículo inserto en El Comercio de Lima No. 826, intitulado Perú y Ecuador (Guayaquil: M. I. Murillo, 1842), 1. Biblioteca Ministerio de Cultura y Patrimonio, Quito (MCYP)-JIJÓN- JJ002734. 2 Contestación, 1. The Confederation was an ephemeral state that unified Peru and Bolivia between 1836 and 1839, a project of caudillo Andrés de Santa Cruz. See Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, The Caudillo of the Andes: Andrés de Santa Cruz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 114. 3 Contestación, 2-3. The Treaty of Guayaquil was a peace treaty between Gran Colombia and Peru, after a short and inconclusive war between them. Gran Colombia being the direct political antecedent of Ecuador, the treaty became central to Ecuador’s territorial claims, and it appears in many of the sources analyzed in this thesis.

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

undefined border and disputed borderlands.4 Publications dealing with boundaries appeared

throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with textbooks, atlases, and maps

of diverse quality and depth of analysis that constitute the main primary sources for this thesis.

By claiming to present “irrefutable documents” the author makes historical documents a key

element to support Ecuador’s claim, anticipating the long volumes containing colonial and

republican documentation on borders produced later, especially in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. Finally, the pamphlet reflects an incipient national narrative because certain

military and political events occupy a central place, for example in the discussion of the Treaty

of Guayaquil and Ecuador’s army.5

Authors who published on the Ecuador-Peru conflict between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1930s wrote, in most cases, for an audience of scholars, diplomats, and politicians. They set the tone and determined the main elements of an emerging national historical narrative, one in which loss and victimization became an increasingly common explanation for the different events related to the conflict that occurred at the time. Honorato Vázquez and Enrique Vacas

Galindo are the best-known authors of this era, but they were not the only authors who contributed to the discussion of the cuestión de límites (issue of boundaries, a common way to refer to the dispute). People from different geographic backgrounds and occupations had a say in the dispute. These authors were usually–but not exclusively–men, and almost always were members of the political and intellectual elite of the country. Most of them wrote during periods

4 The foreword to a volume reproducing some diplomatic talks between the two countries, which appeared in the same year as the Contestación, appeals to common ties with Peru, as well as to the shared history of independence warfare, in the hope of not only reaching a solution, but of garnering attention and support from Nueva Granada (as Colombia was called between 1831 and 1858) and Venezuela for the Ecuadorian cause. Discusión diplomática tenida en Quito entre los ministros plenipotenciarios del Perú i Ecuador sobre la deuda i límites territoriales pertenecientes a la República de Colombia según el tratado público de 1829 (Bogotá: José Ayarza, 1842), n.p. MCYP-JIJÓN-JJ007817. 5 Contestación, 2. 27

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

in which the long dispute flared up or entered a new phase, such as the two decades of the

Spanish arbitration process, or the 1920s, when the dispute involved Colombia as well as Perú.

However, we can find many of the structural elements of what became an increasingly coherent

discourse as early as in 1860, or even in in the anonymous Contestación of 1842: the recourse to

documentation, the mixed use of legal and historical arguments to support Ecuador’s claims, and

the great importance given to the colonial past, and so on, all of which were intended to elevate

the discussion from mere controversy to historical and national discourse.

This chapter discusses, through analysis of published sources that dealt with the territorial

conflict, the early stages in the trajectory of the Ecuadorian discourse on its conflict with Peru, a

nation-building project of imagining Ecuador as a nation-state in relation to its southern

neighbour, to its own Colonial and Independence-era history, and to the ever-present and

mysterious upper Amazonian basin, known as the Oriente. It goes from the disjointed and

isolated contributions of journalists and other politicians published between the 1860s and 1890s,

which tended to talk about the dispute with a current-events perspective, to the semi-official texts of Honorato Vázquez and Enrique Vacas Galindo produced during the second phase of the

Spanish Arbitration process in the early twentieth century, to the officially-sanctioned textbooks, conferences, and courses of the 1920s. Between the 1860s and the 1930s, the incipient discourse of Ecuador on its territorial conflict with Peru became increasingly coherent and unified. As a nation-building discourse, it was naturally not isolated from other developments in Ecuadorian society, and this chapter discusses these discuss whenever they are relevant to understanding the primary sources and the discourse itself, albeit always briefly.

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

Nineteenth-Century Discourses on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict

A book that appeared in Quito some eighteen years after the anonymous Contestación is

the earliest official publication about Ecuador-Peru relations. Journalist, politician, and diplomat

Pedro Moncayo published Cuestión de límites entre el Ecuador y el Perú según el Uti Possidetis

de 1810 y los tratados de 1829 in 1860, and as the book’s title indicates, the author goes beyond the defense or condemnation of a caudillo to discuss what is already an international conflict.6

This section is dedicated to Moncayo and other writers who in the nineteenth century produced

the earliest works on the territorial dispute with Peru. The authors from this period do not yet

possess the depth of analysis and sophistication of argument found in their counterparts from the

early twentieth century, but they are nevertheless important because they show that an open

discussion containing the foundations for the coherent discourse of later decades was already

present during Ecuador’s early republican life.

Pedro Moncayo published Cuestión de límites in the aftermath of the civil war and

Ecuador-Peru War of 1859-60 that threatened Ecuador’s very existence as a state.7 He presented

the issue for the first time as one concerning the whole country, and as something essential to the

maintenance of Ecuador’s and the region’s balance and stability. For this end, he brings history

to the table, appealing to the conflict’s “true perspective, that is, according to ancient [colonial]

law, history, tradition, etc.,” by appealing to law and history, as well as “according to science,

observation, travels, and the opinion of experts; according to new law, public treaties, official

documents, etc.”8 Like the author of the 1842 pamphlet, Moncayo uses documents to support its

6 Pedro Moncayo y Esparza, Cuestión de límites entre el Ecuador y el Perú según el uti possidetis de 1810 y los tratados de 1829 (Quito: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1860). MCYP-JIJÓN-JJ003521. 7 An introduction to the crisis of 1859-60 is found in chapter two of Peter V.N. Henderson, Gabriel García Moreno and Conservative State Formation in the Andes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). 8 Pedro Moncayo, Cuestión de límites, 8. 29

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case, including colonial documents, and even some historical narrative. By providing a

periodization of the dispute from the Spanish conquest to 1860, the journalist and politician

places the work within an incipient national narrative, one in which social and political structures

from colonial times serve as antecedent and framework for the young republic.9 First among the

elements of this incipient national narrative is, as discussed before, the use of the Colonial era as starting point, more specifically the semi-autonomous Real Audiencia or Presidencia de Quito. In addition, Moncayo uses this colonial entity to present a story of exploration and occasional conflict in which a certain natural region east of the Andes occupies a prominent place. In his opinion, Europeans such as Gonzalo Pizarro did not just explore and conquer the diverse lands of what later became Ecuador, they arrived to a “New Ceylon of the West,” the upper and middle

Amazon basin or Oriente. The cultural, economic, and political implications of such comparison with the British colony were likely not lost to anyone living in the nineteenth century. Of these vast lands themselves the author does not say much, except that they have been a coveted prize for a long time, and that it was religious missionaries more than military conquistadores who had the most success in bringing it under Spanish control.10 Whereas the missions themselves went

through a long decline after the expulsion of the Jesuits in the late eighteenth century, for

Moncayo their very existence is synonymous with centuries-long possession by the Audiencia de

Quito, and thereby Ecuador, through the principle of Uti Possidetis.11

The second key element in the narrative is the recourse to legal argument, particularly to

Uti Possidetis (“as you possess” in Latin), a supposedly clear-cut principle for the determination

9 Moncayo, Cuestión de límites, 11. 10 Moncayo, 13-14. 11 Moncayo, 23. 30

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of borders between Latin American states.12 Whereas the reality of colonial administrative and

political jurisdictions was far more confusing than Latin America’s independence leaders and

early republican politicians would have liked, for Moncayo and later Ecuadorian commentators

this confusion was resolved once and for all with the third element of the incipient national

narrative: the 1829 Treaty of Guayaquil, product of the war between Peru and Gran Colombia, functions both as the beginning of the territorial dispute between the Andean neighbours, and as the key to its resolution.13 Close reading of the Treaty of Guayaquil reveals that it does not really

provide a definite line to function as international border, only citing “the same [boundaries] as they possessed before independence the former Viceroyalties of Nueva Granada and Peru” without mentioning rivers or other geographical features, and stipulating that a joint commission would determine these at a later date.14 The joint commission never crystallized, as Gran

Colombia collapsed a few months later, but as will become evident later, Ecuadorian experts

after Moncayo never failed to use the Treaty of Guayaquil as the acknowledged beginning of the

conflict. Finally, because the book appeared soon after the crisis of 1859-60 had ended, its

narrative is loaded with emotional and moral implications that turn it into an issue of “us the

good versus them the bad” that became an important element of the national narrative afterwards.15 Without ignoring that the situation in the Amazon was chaotic to say the least, the

idea of usurpation and threat to national existence is evident when Moncayo mentions the

existence of a Peruvian map in which Ecuador is reduced “in an act of fraud” to the Pacific coast

12 Lalonde, Determining Boundaries, 28-29. The principle was also meant to replace the right of conquest, legally protecting these fragile states from foreign invasion. 13 Moncayo, 25, 37. 14 Colombia and Peru, “Tratado de paz y amistad,” Guayaquil 1829, Article 5 stipulates that the limit will be that between the viceroyalties, and article 6 mentions the future commission. 15 Moncayo, 69. 31

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and the Andean highlands.16 Use of this language continued and became more emotional in later

decades.

Pedro Moncayo’s Cuestión de límites answered to the political and diplomatic context in

which he lived. It shows nonetheless most of the elements of the narratives of the conflict that

would be found in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of which stayed

relatively unchanged for decades. It belongs to, or perhaps inaugurated, a category of books that utilize history as a narrative and rhetorical tool to discuss the issue of boundaries between

Ecuador and Peru, and to a much lesser extent between Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil. In contrast, other publications tended to approach the conflict with a current-events approach, limiting themselves in many cases to discuss a certain diplomatic or political event or document of relevance at the time. This is the case of a short booklet Observaciones sobre el tratado de 25 de enero celebrado en Guayaquil entre los plenipotenciarios de los Jenerales Ramon Castilla y

Guillermo Franco by politician and diplomat Pablo Herrera, who in the same year of 1860 published a series of “observations” to the Treaty of Mapasingue, signed that same year between

Peru and Guillermo Franco, leader of one faction in Ecuador’s civil and international conflict.

Herrera questions the validity of the unratified treaty, the legitimacy of Ecuadorian signatory

Franco as representative of a central government, and most significantly, he argues that it was damaging to the country, given that it constituted a “true dismemberment and cession of the most precious part of the State,” its territory.17 Herrera, who would go on to sign another important

but failed treaty with Peru in 1890, dedicated part of his Observaciones to the history of the

dispute from the Spanish Conquest to his time. And like the author of the anonymous

16 Moncayo, 57, 59-60. 17 Pablo Herrera. Observaciones sobre el tratado de 25 de enero celebrado en Guayaquil entre los plenipotenciarios de los Jenerales Ramon Castilla y Guillermo Franco (Quito: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1860), 4. MCYP-LARREA- CML10063. 32

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Contestación of 1842, he includes documents, in this case meant to serve as proof of his

argument that the Treaty of Mapasingue threatened the country by threatening its territorial integrity.

The three decades between 1860 and 1890 were relatively quiet in terms of the dispute and of publications dealing with it, except for an important book by Francisco Andrade Marín on the region of Oriente itself, which will be analysed separately. The years between 1887 and 1891 saw an increased amount of diplomatic activity between two neighbours, starting with an agreement to bring the increasingly intractable dispute under arbitration of the Spanish monarch, a relatively common practice in the late nineteenth century.18 What became known as the

Arbitration Convention of 1887, or Espinoza-Bonifaz Treaty, generated much interest and

discussion in Ecuador, especially after failure to carry on the arbitration gave way to direct

negotiations and the García-Herrera Treaty of 1890.19 The renewed interest in the dispute is

reflected in a volume titled Documentos Importantes (Important Documents) from 1893.

Keeping with the mixed pattern of commentary on current events and historical research, this

book contains two opinion pieces by prominent Liberal writers of the time, but as the title

indicates, it is the documents that constitute the core of the work.20 The compiler of Documentos

importantes, who signs with the demonym “Guayaquileños,” is not interested in finding a holy

grail of colonial documentation to support Ecuador’s position– as is arguably the case of authors

from a decade later. His work is important because it is the earliest volume dedicated primarily

to historical documents relevant to the dispute, not a book in which documents are supporting

18 Juan Miguel Bákula, Vol. 2 of Perú y Ecuador: tiempos y testimonios de una vecindad (Lima: CEPEI – FOMCIENCIAS, 1992), 361, 357. 19 Chapter 18 of Bákula, Tiempos y testimonios, Vol. 2, discusses the treaty in length. 20 Guayaquileños, Ecuador y Perú. Documentos importantes (Guayaquil: El Globo, 1893). MCYP-LARREA- CML10189. 33

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evidence to an opinion piece or a more general narrative. In addition, Guayaquileños exhibits a nation-building intention functioning as motor of his contribution to the discussion. In the short introduction, he states that the book is meant “to be useful to the Fatherland,” meaning that the compiler felt it was his patriotic duty to contribute to understanding the conflict.21 The same

sense of patriotic duty appears in a book by journalist, politician, and military leader Luciano

Coral, a well-known leader of the country’s Liberal Revolution.22 Like Moncayo, Coral utilizes

emotional language when he characterizes the García-Herrera Treaty as an attempt at territorial

usurpation, which he sees as both a consequence of Peru’s military defeats against Chile, and

most significantly, as another of its attempts to invade Ecuador, kin to that of 1859-60, but above

all similar to the colonizing advance in the Amazon itself.23

More sophisticated than Documentos Importantes in its sources is a compilation that

appeared a year later also in Guayaquil. The compiler of Recopilación de documentos oficiales

of 1894–only known by the initials C.E.V.–brings forward a collection of Colonial and

Independence-era documents that start with Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile’s decree

of support for Christopher Columbus’s fateful voyage of 1492, and ends with the ratification of

the Treaty of Guayaquil of 1829 by Peru and Gran Colombia. C.E.V. wrongly believed he was

the first Ecuadorian to undertake such task of archival research, as Documentos Importantes

precedes it by a year. But whereas Guayaquileños’s volume is directed towards a more general

audience, the work of C.E.V. is clearly too complex and extensive not to have been published

with a specialist public in mind. However, the purpose of fulfilling one’s patriotic duty by

21 Guayaquileños, Documentos importantes, iv. 22 Luciano Coral, Conflicto internacional (Ecuador y Perú) (Guayaquil: El Tiempo, 1894), 2. Biblioteca Municipal de Riobamba (BMR)-986.6:328.5 C823. Enrique Ayala Mora, Historia de la Revolución Liberal ecuatoriana, 2nd ed. (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 2002), 157. A staunch supporter of radical liberalism and of Eloy Alfaro, Coral shared the old general’s tragic fate of lynching in Quito in 1912. Ayala Mora, Revolución Liberal, 183-94. 23 Coral, Conflicto internacional, 15, 21. 34

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contributing to the written history of the country is present in both, and even the in some of the

older works. The compiler thinks that while Ecuador is not a country that forgets its Colonial and

Independence-era history, efforts to preserve historical memory have consisted in statues and

monuments, not actual documentation, which he aims to do.24

The final year of the nineteenth century saw the publication of a work by Camilo

Destruge, a journalist and intellectual from Guayaquil remembered today as an important

contributor to Ecuadorian identity.25 In his work, whose title is El Ecuador y el Perú en su

cuestión de límites, Destruge goes beyond the reach of the prior works because he consciously

frames his narrative of the conflict in moralizing more than solely emotional terms. His narrative

even becomes teleological when he presents the conflict’s history in terms that portray Ecuador

as the perpetually good, and Peru as its long-time threat and nemesis. Though by the end of the century it was clear that the conflict was as old as it was difficult to solve, the logic of “good versus bad” is in this source only due product of Peru’s lack of goodwill, for example its rejection of the García Herrera Treaty of 1890.26 When discussing the main developments of the

conflict after independence, he does it again to stress Ecuadorian good will and Peruvian lack

thereof, in this case by showing Peru’s refusals to settle the question in 1829-30, and Ecuador’s

own refusal to take advantage of its neighbour’s weakness after the failure of the Peru-Bolivian

24 C.E.V. Introduction to Recopilación de documentos oficiales de la época colonial con un apéndice relativo a la independencia de Guayaquil y a las batallas Pichincha - Junín - Ayacucho y Tarqui, ed. C.E.V. (Guayaquil: La Nación, 1894), iv-v. MCYP-AURELIO-AE0535 25 “Hace 150 años nació el historiador Camilo Destruge Illingworth,” El Universo (Guayaquil), October 20, 2013. 26 Camilo Destruge, El Ecuador y el Perú en su cuestión de límites (Guayaquil: Tipografía Guayaquil, 1899), 4. MCYP-LARREA-CML10064. For Bákula, in a way it was Ecuador the country that killed the treaty, as it refused to ratify the modifications the Peruvian Congress had introduced to the boundary line because they denied the originally ample access Ecuador got to the Amazon River. Bákula, Vol. 2 of Tiempos y Testimonios, 388. In any case, the failure of the treaty, and Destruge’s mention of it serve as evidence of the “hardening of positions” I discuss at the beginning of the next section. Both Quito and Lima desired an all-or-nothing solution to the conflict, which the García-Herrera Treaty did not provide. 35

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Confederation.27 Finally, Destruge dedicates considerable space to the Oriente, expanding on

Moncayo’s story of discovery and religious conquest/conversion. The region itself and its natives

are thus exoticized, only meant to be discovered and subjugated by Europeans. Besides the

obviously teleological narrative, Destruge’s Cuestión de Límites constitutes an effort to write and

popularize the increasingly nationalistic history of Ecuador, especially when discussing the

history of the Real Audiencia de Quito, which the author considers a direct but larger antecedent

of the Republic of Ecuador. He traces a direct relationship between colonial presence and

possession, and Ecuador’s rights to the disputed territory.28

It is difficult to draw from the sources specific conclusions regarding the influence of the

socio-economic and political situation of Ecuador went through in the second half of the

nineteenth century, with some exceptions. The different efforts at nation building, including

those from the authors presented until now, and the projects of Amazonian colonization of the

same era discussed in another section of this chapter, constituted attempts by the elite to write a

history of the nation, something evident in the identity of the authors of these books and

pamphlets. These efforts often transcended party lines or a specific administration: Pedro

Moncayo, a reputed Liberal, was formerly an ally of Gabriel García Moreno, the Conservative

leader who emerged victorious in the crisis of 1859-60. By the time he published Cuestión de

límites, he was already an adversary of García Moreno and would soon march into self-imposed

exile, but his study reads like one looking to support rather than question the government’s

claims over the territory.29 Pablo Herrera was a close friend of García Moreno who served during two of the “moderate” Conservative governments of the 1880s and 1890s known as Progresistas.

27 Destruge, El Ecuador y el Perú, 14-15. 28 Destruge, El Ecuador y el Perú, 71. 29 Rodolfo Pérez Pimentel, “Pedro Moncayo y Esparza,” Diccionario biográfico ecuatoriano, http://www.diccionariobiograficoecuador.com/tomos/tomo9/m3.htm. 36

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

Camilo Destruge, on the other hand, was an ally of Eloy Alfaro, who as Liberal leader was an

opponent of García Moreno and the Progresistas.30 Portrayals of the dispute after the triumph of the Liberal Revolution have received most of the attention of later scholars and Ecuadorian society, but the nation-building intention behind the discourse on the conflict was present decades before.

The Early Twentieth Century: Honorato Vázquez, Enrique Vacas Galindo, and

other works on the Ecuador-Peru Dispute

The first decade of the twentieth century was one of the most dramatic in the long history

of the Ecuador-Peru territorial dispute. The failure of original push for third-party arbitration of

the late 1880s, as well as the unratified García-Herrera Treaty of 1890, resulted in a hardening of

positions in both countries.31 Ecuador veered towards a more belligerent discourse that coincided

with the triumph of the Liberal Revolution, which resulted in two decades of civil war and

political violence, as well as far-reaching changes to the structure of the Ecuadorian state including modernizing, secularizing, and liberalizing the society and the economy, and consolidating the same state that had been close to dissolution in 1859-60.32 In the foreword to

Documentos Importantes, Guayaquileños refers to Peruvians as possessing an “insatiable greed”

for territory, just as Herrera had done in 1860. He also states that the dispute had reached such an

intractable state that armed conflict is not out of the question to defend Ecuador’s territorial

rights.33 Likewise, in the conclusion of 1899’s Cuestión de Límites, Destruge acknowledges the

30 More on the politics of the Progresistas in María Cristina Cárdenas Reyes, “El progresismo ecuatoriano en el siglo XIX. La reforma del presidente Antonio Flores (1888-1892),” Andes no. 18 (2007): 1. 31 Bákula, Vol. 2 of Tiempos y testimonios, 383. 32 See Ayala Mora, Revolución Liberal, 134-40 for a synthesis of the changes of this era, which roughly coincided with the first administration of Leonidas Plaza, 1901-05. Also see Bákula, Vol. 3 of Tiempos y testimonios, 70. 33 Guayaquileños, Documentos importantes, iii. 37

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popularity of the belligerent position when he questions its status as the only possible solution.34

Nevertheless, a series of border incidents led to negotiations and a new agreement in 1904 that

revived the arbitration process, while a separate treaty with Brazil meant that Ecuador renounced

its claims east of what today is the southernmost section of the border between Colombia and

Brazil.35

During this era of internal strife, inconsistent foreign policy, and Spanish arbitration, a

period of intense research in colonial archives began, which one historian calls the “Batalla de

las cédulas”, or Battle of the Royal Decrees. In Peru and especially in Ecuador, scholars with

government support pored over colonial documents in Spanish archives, most commonly the

cédulas of creation or change of jurisdictions, looking for a legal Holy Grail that would allow

them to conclusively destroy the other country’s claims before the Royal Arbiter.36 This intense

archival search found its way to Ecuadorian public consciousness, and some of the best-known

works on the conflict appeared at this time. One of them is the Memoria histórico-jurídica sobre

los límites ecuatoriano-peruanos, by Honorato Vázquez, a diplomat and writer who served as

Minister Plenipotentiary before the Spanish Government from the 1880s until 1911.37 This

treatise is a long and sometimes obscure work, with flaws and inconsistencies in its strictly

legalistic approach that earned Vázquez the criticism of other Ecuadorian experts at the time and

afterwards.38 Together with Enrique Vacas Galindo’s several volumes of essays and documents,

34 Destruge, El Ecuador y el Perú, 77. 35 Ayala Mora, Revolución Liberal, 138-39. He argues that the series of treaties and agreements Ecuador signed at this this time showed inconsistency and incompetence, especially to the Spanish authorities in charge of the arbitration. 36 Bákula, Vol. 3 of Tiempos y testimonios, 29. 37 Efrén Avilés Pino, “Vázquez Dr. Honorato,” Enciclopedia del Ecuador, http://www.enciclopediadelecuador.com/personajes-historicos/dr-honorato-vazquez/. 38 Honorato Vázquez, Memoria histórico-jurídica sobre los límites ecuatoriano-peruanos (Quito: Imprenta Nacional, 1904). MCYP-GUARDERAS-FG072. The original version was printed in Quito in 1892 by Imprenta del Clero. Bákula, Vol. 3 of Tiempos y testimonios, 77. Enrique Vacas Galindo, Exposición sobre los límites ecuatoriano-peruanos (Quito: Escuela de Artes y Oficios por R. Jaramillo, 1903), vii. MCYP-MUÑOZ-LM1761. 38

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it is one of the best known collections of documents related to the dispute, and it enjoyed a long life in the consciousness of specialists and commentators. Vázquez’s combined use of documentation and arguments reminds of the work of Pedro Moncayo, even of the anonymous

Contestación of 1842 with which this chapter began. C.E.V.’s Recopilación de documentos oficiales of 1894 also presented a collection of colonial documents in support of Ecuador’s case over the disputed areas. However, none of the earlier works used actual legal arguments, and in this sense, and despite its problems, Vázquez’s Memoria histórico-jurídica has justly gained the fame of being the first attempt to present a systematic and scholarly exposition of Ecuador’s case

against Peru.39

The Memoria histórico-jurídica first appeared in 1892, soon after the first push for

Spanish arbitration and the signing of the García-Herrera Treaty. It was reprinted in 1904, in the

years when the second push for arbitration began to take force, and it seems to be an expanded

edition rather than a reprint, and funded by the government. Another key work from the second

period of arbitration, published in 1903, pays homage to it and the arguments it uses to “elevate”

the Ecuadorian cause. The work is Exposición sobre los límites ecuatoriano-peruanos, by

Enrique Vacas Galindo, a scholar and Dominican friar who also spent many years working in

Spanish archives in the early twentieth century, and who performed missionary work in some of

the disputed areas of the Amazon. Probably to avoid the obscurity of Honorato Vázquez, Vacas

Galindo states in his Exposición that he aimed to create a work of that is both clear and

approachable, and with the adequate documentation to support its argument.40 However, at 754

pages and being part of a multivolume work that also included two volumes of documentation,

the friar’s work is not an easier book to approach than Vázquez’s. It was likely written for a

39 Bákula, Tiempos y testimonios, Vol. 3: 79. 40 Vacas Galindo, Exposición, v. 39

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specialized or educated audience in mind, unlike his 1905 book La integridad territorial de la

República del Ecuador, which was written for a general audience. The actual structure of the

latter book follows the pattern established by earlier authors, including himself in the 1903

Exposición, and Vázquez in Memoria histórico-jurídica. Vacas Galindo’s narrative and

argumentation follow a chronological progression, proceeding from the Spanish conquest and the establishment of the Real Audiencia de Quito, to the early nineteenth century and Independence era, and to the situation at the turn of the twentieth century. The Dominican friar’s 1905 work also dedicates considerable space to legal discussion of the colonial documents Ecuador used as evidence of territorial possession, and he strives to refute Peru’s arguments in the process.

However, rather than presenting Ecuador’s case as it would be presented before the Spanish

Arbitrator, the Vacas Galindo’s aim is to show Ecuadorians the work of the Junta Patriótica

Nacional, a non-partisan, legislator-led organization meant to “study and guard the territorial rights of the fatherland” whose name appears on this book’s title page as a secular nihil obstat approving it.41 The expected readership of Integridad Territorial was a larger circle of

politicians, intellectuals, and general public than the two complex works from earlier in the

decade, making Vacas Galindo more successful in spreading the Ecuadorian narrative of the

conflict in the direction of nation building than his predecessors.

Using the territorial dispute to reach wider audiences, and through it contributing to nation building and national dialogue, was also the aim of lesser known works from the two decades of Spanish arbitration. These works are much more polemical in their tone and nature

than those of their more famous colleagues from the same era. In a booklet from 1893 titled

Estudios históricos, Ecuador y Perú, Belisario L. Calisto suggests that, after the Peruvian loss

41 Enrique Vacas Galindo, La integridad territorial de la República del Ecuador (Quito: Tipografía y Encuadernación Salesiana, 1905), iv. MCYP-LARREA-CML10265. 40

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against Chile in the War of the Pacific of 1879-83, Ecuador would be able to take back its

“beloved daughters,” the provinces of Loreto and Amazonas under Peruvian control.42

Constantino Fernández dedicates 1894’s Refutación al Tratado Herrera-García to refuting the failed 1890 treaty of boundaries article by article, and he refers to the circumstances in which the treaty was signed and kept from the Ecuadorian public as an “absolute, mysterious secret.”43

These views are clearly polarized and belligerent against Peru, but also against the Ecuadorian

government, for example in Fernández’s ironic relief at the García-Herrera Treaty’s rejection by

the Peruvian Congress. The author of the refutation thinks the rejection happened because

Lima’s real goal was to deprive Ecuador of the entire the upper Amazon basin.44

Other books from the first decade of the twentieth century are less openly belligerent than

their counterparts from the previous decade, but they share the same interest in popularizing the

available knowledge and furthering understanding of Ecuador’s position. The illustrious

historian and Archbishop of Quito Federico González Suárez, founder of Ecuador’s Academia

Nacional de Historia,45 dedicated his only publication directly related to the conflict to a detailed historical analysis of the Cédula Real of 1802. This Cédula is a decree in which the Spanish monarch orders the change of jurisdiction of many of the disputed areas of the Amazon, taking

them away from Nueva Granada and Quito, and placing them under the authority of Lima.46 This

42 Belisario L. Calisto, Estudios históricos. Ecuador y Perú (Riobamba: Imprenta Municipal, 1893), 22. MCYP- JIJÓN-JJ002790. 43 Constantino Fernández, Refutación al Tratado Herrera-García (Ambato: Salvador R. Porras, 1894), 3. MCYP- JIJÓN-JJ002819. 44 Fernández, Refutación, 5. 45 Academia Nacional de Historia del Ecuador, “Historia,” Academia Nacional de Historia, October 15, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20161021035812/http://academianacionaldehistoria.org.ec/index.php/quienes- somos/historia. 46 Available in Ricardo Aranda, Vol. 1 of Colección de los Tratados, convenciones capitulaciones, armisticios, y otros actos diplomáticos y políticos celebrados desde la independencia hasta el día, precedida de una introducción que comprende la época colonial (1890-1911) (Lima: Imprenta del Estado, 1890), 204, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.weaties/ctcca0001&i=1. 41

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document became a fundamental element in the Peruvian case during the arbitration process.47

Similar to Vázquez and Vacas Galindo,48 González Suárez questions the 1802 Cédula’s true

character as a decree redefining the boundaries of part of the colonial empire, concluding that it

was ecclesiastical rather than political, and therefore useless for the question of boundaries.49 His

analysis is unique in that he accepts some of the arguments used by Peruvians, including the

authenticity of the document itself,50 and the fact that the actual borders of remote Amazonian

jurisdictions were unclear.51 Virgilio Ontaneda published Resumen de la importante cuestión de

límites ecuatoriano-peruanos in the same year as Vázquez’s Memoria, he intended the work to

be a summary of the latter, thereby educating people from diverse backgrounds on the dispute,

while at the same time acknowledging that there is little already written on the matter.52 J.

Alejandro López’s La integridad territorial y el clero uses a familiar element in Ecuadorian

narratives of the conflict, the religious missions in the Amazon in colonial times, to prove the

clergy’s patriotism and fundamental role in the genesis of the Ecuadorian nation.53 The concern

of López goes beyond the Ecuador-Peru conflict, as he attempts to rescue the name of the

Church, which had been discredited due to the internal politics of the time–many of the reforms

of the Liberal Revolution that triumphed in 1895 were anticlerical in nature.54 Nevertheless,

López, as well as the more belligerent Fernández and Ontaneda, made relevant contributions to

47 Mariano H. Cornejo and Felipe de Osma, Memoria del Perú en el arbitraje sobre sus límites con el Ecuador, (Madrid: Hijos de M. G. Hernández, 1905), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001270064. 48 Vázquez, Memoria histórico-jurídica, 15. Vacas Galindo, Exposición, 239. 49 Federico González Suárez, Estudio histórico sobre la cédula del 15 de julio de 1802, 2nd ed. (Quito: Imprenta del Clero, 1913), 12-13. MCYP-JIJÓN-JJ005288. 50 González Suárez, Estudio histórico, 11. 51 González Suárez, Estudio histórico, 26. 52 Virgilio Ontaneda, Resumen de la importante cuestión de límites ecuatoriano-peruanos (Quito: Escuela de Artes y Oficios, 1904), ii-iii. MCYP-LARREA-CML10243. 53 J. Alejandro López, La integridad territorial y el clero (Quito: Imprenta del Clero, 1905), 4-6. MCYP-LARREA- CML10264. 54 Ayala Mora, Revolución Liberal, 137-38. 42

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941 what was said about the border conflict at the time, for example in his interest in showing previously unpublished documents to further Ecuador’s case, his stress on patriotism, and even his protests against a perceived exclusion of the Church from the nation-building efforts.55

The beginning of the twentieth century coincided with the beginning of a new era in

Ecuador’s conflict with Peru, and in Ecuadorian internal politics. The second push to solve the dispute through Spanish arbitration saw the publication of some of the best-known treatises on the dispute. The works of Vázquez, Vacas Galindo, and González Suárez did not inaugurate the discussion, research, and argumentation related to the dispute in Ecuador, but they certainly elevated it to a more complex, predominantly legal, and academic level. An official and privately-led effort to produce relevant content and engage in nation building on the dispute for an audience beyond governmental circles was present in the works of nineteenth-century authors, and it became more prevalent during the Spanish Arbitration process. Nation-building as a goal of a scholarly work was present in the endorsement by the Junta Patriótica Nacional of Vacas

Galindo’s work, and in the nature of the studies by Destruge, Coral, and others. Moreover, and as in the case of those published anonymously or by relatively unknown authors such as Fernández and Ontaneda, they are better understood within the context in which they appeared, beyond the territorial conflict. The Liberal Revolution’s triumph in 1895 made support for scholarly research on the dispute more possible because the state was looking to consolidate and legitimise itself in other ways besides large infrastructure projects such as the grand railway projects connecting the different regions of the country. The spontaneous but discursively consistent effort to produce a history of the territorial conflict would become a matter of official concern and control in the

55 López, La integridad, 4-5, 7. 43

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

following decades. The following section discusses publications that dealt with the conflict in a

less direct but equally important manner, focusing on the disputed region itself, the Oriente.

Other Works before 1941: The Oriente and the Ecuador-Peru Dispute

In 1899, the same year in which Camilo Destruge published his take on the cuestión de

límites, Fidel Alomía published a booklet with the provocative title Sin Dios ni ley (Without God

or Law). In the booklet, Alomía, who may have been governor of the province of Oriente and

taken part in a scheme for kidnapping native families to sell them to rubber traders in Iquitos,

Peru,56 discusses the Peruvian Amazonian port by characterizing its historical trajectory as going

from a place where Lima sent an “army of prostitutes” to rid itself from moral corruption, to a

flourishing city.57 More than a commentary on the origins of the capital of the Loreto region, his words bitterly remind Ecuadorian readers of what their country had failed to do, a job in which in which Peru had clearly succeeded: colonizing the disputed Upper Amazon. In this section I discuss some of the people who, like Alomía, wrote about the region, especially colonization projects, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I focus on how they contributed to the nascent nation-building discourse of the Ecuador-Peru conflict.

Many of the authors discussed up to this point make the accusation that Peru is or has been engaged in systematic colonization of the disputed upper Amazonian basin, Such process is referred to sometimes as a usurpation of Ecuadorian territory, and in later sources even as an invasion. As in the case Alomía’s amazed bitterness towards Iquitos, for these authors the accuracy of these adjectives in describing the Peruvian colonization of the Amazonian basin was

56 See Blanca Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, Culture and History in the Upper Amazon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 111. 57 Fidel Alomía, Sin Dios ni ley (n.c.: n.p., 1899), 19. MCYP-LARREA-CML10240. There is no publishing information in this pamphlet, but the author does mention Río Napo at the end, which is not a city but a river, likely the region where he wrote the piece rather than published it, along with the specified date. 44

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

less important than that the very occurrence of such colonization, given that it reminded

governments and the citizenry of the failure of Ecuador to replicate such process in any

significant way. Politician and confessed non-working aristocrat Francisco Andrade Marín

published in 1884 a booklet in which discusses a project to send a mission to establish a

settlement in the upper part of the Napo river, an navigable tributary of the Amazon.58 In his

narrative the Oriente is, first, a place full of exploitable resources, interestingly including such

animal products as living specimens and manatee oil.59 Second, it is a primitive land where

“unhappy” natives are subject to the abuse of private colonizers.60 Andrade Marín’s inevitably

Western bias towards the region led him to describe it as a final frontier whose value resides in

its exoticism and potential economic value. At the same time, even though mention of native

exploitation by private citizens is meant to portray Andrade and his government sponsors as

saviours, it implicitly legitimises the environmental and human violence of colonizing projects

such as the one described in Viaje a la región oriental when they serve to further the state’s aims

of extending its dominion and extracting wealth.61 This view of the Oriente as both a source of

riches and a place of vital importance for the national life would become a common justification

for Ecuador’s position on its territorial dispute with Peru, especially after the events of 1941-42

left the border hundreds or thousands of kilometers away from the Amazon River.

Regarding the fate of the colonizing project described above, historian Natalia Esvertit

Cobes shows in a 1996 article how it failed completely. In the context of organization of the nation-state in the Ecuador of the 1800s, the Oriente played two important roles. First, a

58 Francisco Andrade Marín, Viaje a la región oriental del Ecuador (Quito: M. Rivadeneira, 1884), 2, 9. MCYP- LARREA-CML10257. 59 Andrade Marín, Viaje a la región, 6-7. 60 Andrade Marín, Viaje a la región, 15. He also published a Project for legislation related to the Oriente in the same year as this one, Leyes para el Oriente (Quito: J. P. Sanz, 1884). MCYP-JIJÓN-JJ002739. 61 Andrade Marín, Viaje a la región, 16. 45

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

political-ideological one: as both a frontier and international border, it was the place where the

elites showed their ability to control the territory of the nation-state and defend its borders, thus

showing capacity to perform as leaders in its construction and consolidation. Second, an

economic and political role, given that the Amazon was for Ecuadorians a region purportedly full

of resources which, if exploited, would serve to strengthen different regional elites vying for

political power.62 If successive administrations took some measures to effectively place the

Oriente within reach of the state’s economic and administrative apparatus, these measures were

generally insufficient and ineffective, resulting in failure as in the case of Francisco Andrade

Marín’s project, something Esvertit attributes to lack of political will to actually make the

Oriente Ecuadorian, even though at the same the region acquired increasing political and

symbolic/discursive importance.63 In the case of Andrade Marín, he was made Governor of the

province of Oriente – a province theoretically comprising the entirety of the upper Amazon north

of the Marañón – precisely at a time when the conflict added further pressure to incorporate

those territories into the nation-state. The governor was acutely aware of the long neglect of the

region after independence, and the colonization project was intended to address this.64

Consequently, although Viaje a la región oriental does not directly mention it, the book’s call to formally integrate the region through the colonization mission, with the economic exploitation it

would have entailed, makes more sense when read with the conflict and its implications on

territorial sovereignty in mind.65 Andrade Marín is never mentioned by the authors of later books

62 Natalia Esvertit Cobes, “La colonia oriental: un proyecto de colonización fracasado en la Amazonía ecuatoriana (1884-1885),” Boletín Americanista no. 46 (January 1996): 99. 63 Esvertit Cobes, “La colonia oriental,” 100-101. 64 Esvertit Cobes, “La colonia oriental,” 101-102. 65 Andrade Marín, Viaje a la región, 18. 46

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and pamphlets on the conflict, but his view of neglect of the region is not entirely lost in Vacas

Galindo, and in authors from the 1920s to 1940s.

Other authors from the late nineteenth century echo Andrade Marín’s interest in the

Amazonian frontier, including the region’s implications for the international dispute. Rafael

Cáceres published an account of a trip he made to the Oriente in 1891. He contributes to the discussion on the Oriente and the territorial dispute with some valuable insight on the limited reach of all Spanish jurisdictions in the Amazon in colonial times. He clarifies that, because of

poor geographical knowledge, documents always refer to the extent of Quijos or Canelos–

colonial names for parts of the upper Amazon that fell inside the Audiencia de Quito–only by the

cities they included, not by natural borders such as rivers or mountains.66 He also argues for the

construction of roads, schools and more settlements linking the region symbolically and

physically to the rest of Ecuador. Cáceres thinks this is an urgently needed task, possibly because

he wrote after the first attempt at Spanish arbitration and the signing and rejection of the García-

Herrera Treaty.67 Two years after Cáceres, and a decade after Andrade Marín, José Mora

López’s self-published book Límites del Ecuador y proyecto de colonización presented a short

description of Ecuador’s boundaries that included a project of colonization of the Oriente as

well. This author discusses the historical development of the borders between Ecuador and

Brazil, Ecuador and Peru, and Ecuador and Nueva Granada (Colombia).68 Mora López is the first author to treat the coexisting and sometimes overlapping territorial controversies of the

66 Rafael Cáceres, La provincia oriental de la República del Ecuador. Apuntes de viaje (Quito: Imprenta de la Universidad: 1892), 1. MCYP-LARREA-CML10259. 67 Cáceres, La provincia oriental, 44. 68 José Mora López, Límites del Ecuador y proyecto de colonización (Cuenca: Imprenta del Autor, 1894), 5, 11, 19. MCYP-JIJÓN-JJ002816. 47

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country in neatly divided chapters and topics that remind of the structure of school textbooks on

this topic published in later decades.

Other authors who published pamphlets on the Oriente and the dispute in this era tend to

repeat and add to the theme of native savagery contrasted with the beneficial effects of

civilization, particularly the Ecuadorian one, as they identify Peruvian colonizing efforts with

corruption as well as the more familiar danger of usurpation. The revealing title of Fidel

Alomía’s Sin Dios ni ley refers to the foundation and growth of Peruvian Iquitos in the banks of the Amazon.69 The point the author makes is not so much that Peruvian colonists posed a threat to natives in the area, but that the success of the Amazonian port meant the disappearance of

Ecuadorian populations nearby, without which natives would become the prey of unscrupulous merchants.70 It is also charged with religious and moralizing–yet ambiguous–references. Sending

an army of prostitutes was for Alomía an immoral way to colonize the Amazon, which is why he

calls Iquitos and Peruvians Godless and lawless. The idea of Ecuadorian colonists protecting

natives against the abuses of other colonists is one of Andrade Marín’s justifications for his

project as well.71 The author of Sin Dios ni ley also shows a preoccupation with how to address the failure of Ecuador to colonize the region. He suggests, like Rafael Cáceres, founding more schools to teach Spanish culture to natives, arguably to make them full citizens with more of a stake in protecting the land against Peru.72

Another way of approaching the conflict within the general discourse of the Amazonian region was to talk about the construction of roads or railways to it. As Esvertit concludes, the failure to complete these railway projects, elsewhere in the country a trademark of the Liberal

69 Alomía, Sin Dios, 19. 70 Alomía, Sin Dios, 6. 71 Andrade Marín, Viaje, 15. 72 Fidel Alomía, Ecos del Napo (Quito: El Tiempo, 1903), 2-3. MCYP-LARREA-CML10241. 48

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

Revolution, shows the great limitations on which the Ecuadorian state of the time operated, in

terms of finance, conflicting regional interests, and political instability.73 Given that these

projects were often justified in terms of territorial defense and assertion of sovereignty in

disputed areas, it is fair to say that the great amount of attention to the matter, inside and outside

the government, testifies to the importance of the region within the general context of what was

discussed and said about the conflict.74 Later decades would not see the same number of authors

discussing projects of colonization of the Amazonian basin, possibly because the great

infrastructure projects such as the railway were, by the 1920s and 1930s, a rather distant memory.75 Only historian and diplomat Jorge Pérez Concha, author of several works on the

Ecuador-Peru conflict, refers to the Amazonian region in his 1934 work El Ecuador ante el

problema amazónico. However, this book is a collection of essays written during the months of

the Leticia Conflict of 1932-33 between Colombia and Peru, during which Ecuador

unsuccessfully attempted to have a place at the negotiating table because of its own claims in the

region.76 Concha’s 1934 collection of essays is a patriotic attempt at keeping up with international events of great interest to the Ecuador, and thus in a way a nation-building effort

similar to the works of Coral, Destruge, and others, but it offers little in terms of the actual

perceptions and state of the Oriente at the time.77

73 Natalia Esvertit Cobes, “Ferrocarriles hacia el Oriente. Articulación del territorio y construcción nacional a inicios del siglo XX en el Ecuador,” Procesos 41 (January – June 2015): 162-163. 74 For example, an organization called Junta Promotora del Camino al Oriente (Board to Promote the Road to the Oriente) published a manifesto in 1907 in which its members clearly state that this is the key to maintaining sovereignty A la nación (Quito: El Comercio, 1907), 2. MCYP-LARREA-CML10266. Rafael Cáceres talks about the need for roads to the region in La provincial oriental, 15. 75The explanation for this decline in large projects regarding the Oriente such as the railway, besides the violent end of their main proponent Eloy Alfaro in 1912, has to do with the prolonged economic crisis that followed the end of the so-called “cacao boom” at the time of the First World War. Maiguashca, “La incorporación del cacao,” 88. 76 Jorge Pérez Concha, El Ecuador ante el problema amazónico (Guayaquil: Litografía e imprenta La Reforma, 1934.), 2-3. MCYP-LARREA-CML10200. 77 Pérez Concha, Problema amazónico, i. 49

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

The Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol and the End of the Spanish Arbitration

Geographer Ana María Sevilla, in her study about the importance of maps in the

construction of Ecuador as a nation-state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, analyzes a map by Enrique Vacas Galindo, the scholar and friar who published the Exposición sobre los límites ecuatoriano-peruanos discussed earlier in this chapter. This map, Sevilla argues, is different from earlier official maps in that it provides readers with a historical and political depth that goes beyond mere geographical representation of the territory, to portray Ecuador fundamentally as a territory in dispute.78 Whereas maps had fulfilled a nation-building role since the earliest decades of the Republican era, it was at the turn of the twentieth century, the time of the Spanish arbitration process and the Battle of the Royal Decrees, that maps acquired a historical dimension.79 Spanish cartographer Guillermo de Federico prepared in 1906 a map as

an appendix to Ecuador’s official case before the Spanish monarch. In this map he included a

crucial historical element of the Ecuadorian discourse on the conflict for the first time. It was the

Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol of 1830, and the graphic and narrative representation of it

became fundamental for the way Ecuadorian sources imagined the nature of the conflict as one

of usurpation rather than struggle over the disputed lands.80

Guillermo de Federico’s map was an appendix to the Ecuadorian case presented before

the Spanish King in the arbitration process, and it was meant to serve as a visual aid to the main

body of the demand written by Honorato Vázquez.81 It likely never reached more than a small

78 Sevilla Pérez, El Ecuador en sus mapas, 124-25. 79 For example, the map that accompanied a geographical treatise by Manuel Villavicencio, published in 1858 and used in schools until 1892. Sevilla Pérez, El Ecuador en sus mapas, 33. 80 Guillermo de Federico. Mapa del litigio de límites entre las repúblicas del Ecuador y Perú anexo a la demanda del Ecuador. Construido y dibujado por Guillermo de Federico, cartógrafo de la Dirección de Hidrografía (Madrid: Lit. Méndez, 1906). Biblioteca Nacional Eugenio Espejo (BNEE)-Mapoteca-Map00288 C075. 81 Federico, Mapa del litigio. 50

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

audience of diplomats and specialists of Ecuador, Spain, and Peru. However, this map deserves

analysis along with that of Vacas Galindo because of the visual dimension that these two and

subsequent maps added when it came to understand the conflict. More importantly, besides the

text of the demand, it constitutes the first mention of the Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol, which is absent from other works, including the one by Vázquez from 1904. This protocol–of which no original copies are known to exist, and whose legitimacy was questioned immediately after

Ecuador revealed it–was supposedly signed on August 11, 1830, between representatives of Peru and Gran Colombia just as the latter was collapsing. In this document, the border follows along the Marañón-Amazonas waterway, thus fulfilling the provision of article 5 of the Treaty of

Guayaquil of 1829.82 Because Ecuador saw itself as successor to Bolívar’s federation, the 1830

Protocol awarded Ecuador the disputed Amazonia. In other words, the 1830 Protocol was the

ultimate piece of evidence Ecuador needed in its case before the Spanish monarch. The

circumstances surrounding the signing of the 1829 Treaty of Guayaquil, and its vague

stipulations for a border, do appear in earlier sources.83 Vacas Galindo’s map does indeed

represent Ecuador with a southern border mostly–but not completely–coinciding with the

Marañón-Amazonas line that the Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol stipulates.84 However, neither

his map nor any other map or written source up to this point refer to the negotiations of 1829-

1830 as having gone beyond informal talks, which suggests that someone in Ecuador’s

82 The copy of this Protocol that Ecuador possesses is a typewriter copy of what is purportedly an 1893 transcript from an older, 1870 transcript of the protocol allegedly resting in Colombia’s Legation of Lima. No copies are known to exist in Peruvian or Colombian archives. The document in Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry is available as Carlos Pedemonte and T.C. de Mosquera, “Protocolo Mosquera Pedemonte,” International Treaty, Lima, August 11, 1830. AHAPD-ST-PER007. See note 5 in the Introduction. Also see note 86 in this chapter. 83 Discusión diplomática tenida en Quito entre los ministros plenipotenciarios del Perú i Ecuador sobre la deuda i límites territoriales pertenecientes a la República de Colombia según el tratado público de 1829 (Bogotá: Reimpresa por José Ayarza, 1842). MCYP-JIJÓN-JJ07817. 84 Enrique Vacas Galindo, Mapa geográfico e histórico de la República del Ecuador (Paris: Imp. A. Gentil – Henri Barrére, Editeur-Geographe, 1906). Real Academia de la Historia-Departamento de Cartografía y Artes Gráficas-C- V n 1 (1-4), http://bvpb.mcu.es/es/consulta/registro.cmd?id=423410. 51

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government may have doctored the document. In any case, both Vacas Galindo and Guillermo de

Federico’s maps inaugurated in 1906 a visual and cartographic way of talking about the

territorial dispute that was not present before, one that acquired much greater importance after

the war of 1941.

It is worth briefly discussing the circumstances of the discovery of the previously

unknown protocol. In the eighth chapter of Ecuador case before Alfonso XIII of Spain, we find

that the Protocol, which in Federico de Guillermo’s map serves as indicator of the southern

border of Ecuador, is in fact a “definitive agreement with which [Gran] Colombia and Peru

ended the issue of boundaries.”85 To the obvious question of why such an important document

had not been mentioned ever before, Vázquez blames the inaccessibility of Colombian archives

to Ecuadorians, a result of the mutual distrust that reigned between the two neighbours after the

collapse of 1830. Until this point, the focus of commentators and experts had been on the

necessity and failure to assert sovereignty in the disputed region. Documentary evidence usually consisted in decrees and documents from the colonial and independence eras, including the vague Treaty of Guayaquil. In any case, what the Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol represents for the history of the Ecuadorian discourse on its conflict with Peru, even considering the doubts on its pertinence and authenticity, is the introduction of a previously unknown and subsequently crucial discursive element to the way the conflict was presented in Ecuadorian publications, especially those that are graphical in nature such as maps and atlases.86 Knowledge of the

85 Honorato Vázquez, Exposición ante S. M. C. don Alfonso XIII en la demanda de la República del Ecuador contra la del Perú sobre límites territoriales por Honorato Vázquez Enviado Extraordinario y Ministro Plenipotenciario de la República del Ecuador, en misión especial (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1906), 357. BNEE-Fondo Ecuatoriano Republicano 1 (FER1)-FER1L001518. 86 Antonio Maura, a Spanish scholar who published a sympathetic defense of Ecuador’s case in 1906, mentions that no originals of the document probably existed any more, at least not within the reach of Ecuadorian officials. Defensa de los derechos de la República del Ecuador en su contienda con la República del Perú sobre los límites territoriales de ambas (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1906), 45. MCYP-LARREA-CML10112. Peruvian diplomat Víctor Andrés Belaúnde gives detailed reasons to doubt the Protocol’s authenticity, La constitución inicial 52

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Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol was likely limited to diplomatic circles acquainted with the

Ecuadorian demand during the final years of the Arbitration process. It was only in the 1920s when books directed at wider audiences included it in the narrative of the territorial conflict.

The Spanish Arbitration process came to a sudden and bitter end in 1910. A leak of the final judgment led the monarch to abstain from emitting any verdict, causing a diplomatic crisis that put the two countries in the verge of war, a situation only averted thanks to the intervention of Brazil, Argentina, and the United States.87 It is possible to make Ecuador responsible for this crisis, as it threatened to boycott the process after the leak revealed that Alfonso XIII’s verdict was in favour of Peru. In addition, the crisis came after the failure of decades of attempts of colonization and road-construction to the Oriente, which contrasted with the undeniable legal and practical success of Peru in the same areas: Iquitos was by then a thriving port in the

Amazon.88 In any case, the first decade of the twentieth century left Ecuadorians arguably more united but more bitter than ever when it came to discussing the conflict. In the next two decades, nation-building efforts related to the territorial dispute would acquire a more official, nation- building, and almost propagandistic character, with atlases, maps, and school materials increasingly referring to the conflict in a consistent, state-sanctioned way.

del Perú ante el Derecho Internacional, 3rd ed. (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1997), 175- 182. Raúl Porras Barrenechea and Alberto Wagner de Reyna point out that there is no copy of it in Lima’s Foreign Ministry because it was never signed, Historia de los límites del Perú (Lima: Editorial Universitaria, 1981), 55. Emilio Luna Vegas dedicates a section to the “fake Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol,” Perú y Ecuador en cinco siglos (Lima: Okura, 1986), 145. Bákula dedicates an entire chapter to it, and he points out that proving the Protocol’s authenticity is impossible, whereas proving its inexistence easy. Vol. 3 of Perú y Ecuador, 37. Percy Cayo Córdova calls it a “pseudo-protocol” and concludes that the circumstances of is signing show it must be apocryphal, Antecedentes, 94. Félix Denegri Luna concludes that it was impossible for Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, Gran Colombia’s envoy to Peru in 1830, to have been in Lima on the supposed signing date of August 11, 1830, as he was sick and already on his way back to his country. Apuntes para la historia, 107. In contrast, Cavelier avoids explicit mention of the controversial document, but he does include a foldout map called “Límites de Colombia con Perú según el Protocolo Mosquera-Pedemonte de 1830,” Vol. 1 of Política internacional de Colombia, 176-177. 87 Ayala Mora, Revolución Liberal, 172-73. 88 Alomía, Sin Dios, 6. 53

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict in the 1920s and 1930s

In 1921 Carlos Manuel Tobar y Borgoño, a landowning aristocrat and internationalist

lawyer whose father co-signed the 1904 Tobar-Rio Branco treaty of boundaries with Brazil,

published a booklet called Programa del curso libre acerca de los límites del Ecuador con el

Perú .89 This short work is an extended syllabus for a projected university course on Ecuador’s

borders at Quito’s Universidad Central. Building on some of the earlier works on the subject,

Tobar planned to start with a discussion of the Treaty of Guayaquil and its value as a treaty of

peace and boundaries.90 Then the course–which in all likelihood never took place–91 would have

discussed the Presidencia or Real Audiencia de Quito, along with the nature of jurisdictions and

administrative divisions in colonial Spanish America, as well as the study of relevant documents.

Two sections of the Programa – likely corresponding to lectures – are dedicated to the Cédula of

1802, and they are meant to prove to prove that, unlike the 1829 treaty, the royal decree was not

concerned with boundaries.92 Other familiar landmarks in the history of the conflict would have

made up the following lectures, including the so-called Revolution of Quito, the legal principle of Uti Possidetis, and the crisis of 1859-60. Part of the course would have been dedicated to discussing the Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol and the controversy surrounding it, although it is not possible to know Tobar y Borgoño’s position regarding its questioned authenticity. Finally, a

concluding lecture would have discussed recommendations for future handling of the dispute,

which still included colonization of the Oriente, and avoiding loud but empty gestures in

89 Rodolfo Pérez Pimentel, “Carlos Manuel Tobar Borgoño,” Diccionario Biográfico Ecuador http://www.diccionariobiograficoecuador.com/tomos/tomo12/t1.htm. In this treaty, Ecuador recognized as Brazilian any territory east of a line that runs between the port of Leticia on the Amazon, and the confluence of the Apaporis and Caquetá rivers further to the north, and is today part of the border between Colombia and Brazil. 90 C. M. Tobar y Borgoño, Programa del curso libre que acerca de los límites del Ecuador con el Perú dictará el Sr. Dr. C. M. Tobar y Borgoño (Quito: Universidad Central, 1921), 1. MCYP-JIJÓN-JJ006105. 91 In 1922, Tobar suffered a horse riding accident that caused him to die soon after. Pérez Pimentel, “Carlos Manuel Tobar Borgoño.” 92 Tobar y Borgoño, Programa del curso libre, 1-2. 54

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941 diplomacy. The latter recommendation on empty gestures was probably an allusion to President

Eloy Alfaro’s slogan “Tumbes, Marañón o la Guerra” during the crisis of 1910.93 In other words, at a time when first-hand accounts from many of the actors of the Spanish Arbitration were still available, this lawyer proposed the systematic study of a subject that had previously been the preserve of the political and diplomatic elite. More importantly, because it was supposed to be a course in the country’s oldest public university, the Programa’s existence shows the author’s and the authorities’ intention to bring scholarly knowledge of the conflict to a wider audience than before. In addition, the thematic structure of the program turns a certain version of Ecuadorian history into the official narrative of the country to be taught in schools. In it, the territorial dispute becomes synonymous with national existence and identity, that is, it becomes synonymous with nationality, given that all these events from the Colonial, Independence, and

Republican eras serve to prove and justify Ecuador’s position regarding the Oriente. Although individual efforts to talk about the conflict from different perspectives never ceased to appear,

Tobar y Borgoño’s four-page booklet, and most publications discussed in this section, constitute the earliest examples of how the nation-building dimension of the dominant discourse on the territorial conflict started to acquire a more formalized and institutional shape.

We know that Tobar y Borgoño and the Universidad Central’s idea of popularizing the study of the conflict was not an isolated case because of a few other publications that show a similar effort around that time or soon after. One of them is a doctoral dissertation for Columbia

University’s Political Science Department by Pastoriza Flores. Submitted in 1921 but never published, the dissertation likely precedes Tobar y Borgoño’s effort due to the research and writing time it must have required. Rather than presenting a new perspective or even balancing

93 Tobar y Borgoño, Programa del curso libre, 3-4. 55

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both sides of the conflict, Flores’s study is an exposition of Ecuador’s claims before an unfamiliar, English-speaking audience, something that gives the dissertation a measure of clarity

often absent from Ecuadorian sources of the time.94 It is also unique because Flores is the only

woman writing on the dispute in the first half of the twentieth century, and one of the very few

female voices throughout the whole span of the conflict. Another project for formal education of

the conflict is historian and journalist Modesto Chávez Franco’s Cartilla Patria: Epítome de

historia y geografía referentes a las fronteras entre Ecuador y Perú, de 1531 a 1921, a 1922

work that, according to a decree by the Ecuadorian Congress, became the first official and

mandatory textbook to study the country’s boundary history.95 With this textbook, the effort of

nation-building through discussion of the conflict, which was a common theme running in official and unofficial efforts to discuss the conflict in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became more or less an explicit and coherent state-sanctioned project. The motive for

Chávez Franco to write Cartilla Patria sounds familiar, that is, popularizing knowledge on the dispute with plain language. However, state intervention made the popularizing effort in this case more likely to reach far beyond educated elites and government circles, just as Tobar y

Borgoño’s university course intended to do.96 Moreover, because state backing made Cartilla

Patria an official instrument of education, the narrative of this work shows a character of

indoctrination more than one of discussion and debate. Whereas Pedro Moncayo justifies his

1860 study of the origins of the dispute in very presentist geopolitical terms, for Chávez Franco–

who sees himself as a compiler rather than author, implying that this is knowledge transmitted

but not so much elaborated on–the goal of studying the geography and history of Ecuador’s

94 Pastoriza Flores, “History of the Boundary Dispute,” 3. 95 Modesto Chávez Franco, Cartilla Patria. Epítome de historia y geografía referentes a las fronteras entre Ecuador y Perú, de 1531 a 1921 (Quito: El Día, 1922), 3. MCYP-LARREA-CML10105. 96 Chávez Franco, Cartilla Patria, 10-11. 56

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

borders is to “shape the national soul of future Ecuadorians” in a way that the precepts presented

become second nature.97

A year after the publication of Cartilla Patria, the second edition of Miguel Ángel

Galarza’s Conferencia histórico-geográfica sobre límites entre el Ecuador y el Perú showed a

much more explicitly indoctrinating intent. This is clear, for example, in the link between the

territorial dispute and the epic independence narrative of Ecuador and South America. In a

symbolically important gesture, Galarza starts by commemorating Antonio José de Sucre, Simón

Bolívar’s closest friend and ally, and the commander at the 1829 Battle of Tarqui that led to the

Treaty of Guayaquil.98 In addition, the author claims that he wants to refrain from the complexity

of the legal side of the dispute, focusing instead on the “heroic events” and characters on which

Ecuador’s territorial rights rest, including the actions of well-known characters such as Antonio

José de Sucre, but also people still living at the time of publication, especially Honorato

Vázquez, who for the author is a champion of the cause and the “destroyer of the Cédula of

1802.”99 In Galarza, as well as in Chávez Franco and Tobar y Borgoño, arguments originally

meant to convince expert audiences both in Spain and Ecuador of the justice of the cause, are turned into elements of a narrative whose goal was to educate school audiences. Prefiguring

textbooks of later decades, and following Vacas Galindo’s idea of producing a historically-

informed map, Chávez Franco includes a map at the end of his book, not a diagram of Ecuador’s

borders like Guillermo de Federico’s but a reproduction of a 1779 map of the Audiencia de Quito

97 Chávez Franco, Cartilla Patria, 13-14. For Moncayo, showing Ecuadorian rights over Tumbes and the Amazon was the only way of solving the dispute with fairness, which in turn was necessary to maintain political balance in the region. Moncayo, Cuestión de límites, 7-8. 98 Miguel Ángel Galarza, Conferencia histórico-geográfica sobre límites entre el Ecuador y el Perú (Cuenca: J. M. Astudillo Regalado, 1923), n.p. [sketch and poem at the beginning of book]. BNEE-Fondo Ecuatoriano Republicano 2 (FER2)-320.1209866085 G1467. Also see page 1 of the text of the conference. An older version of this book appeared in Quito in 1913. 99 Galarza, Conferencia, 2-3. 57

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

by Francisco de Requena, a late eighteenth-century Spanish engineer whose report to the monarch after a governorship in the Amazon became the basis for the Cédula of 1802.

These efforts to formalize education also reflect the actual development of the dispute

during their time, and as such they coexisted with publications that dealt with it from a current-

affairs perspective. The main events regarding Ecuador’s borders until the 1920s include the end

of Ecuador and Colombia’s own boundary dispute in 1916, with the Muñoz Vernaza-Suárez

Treaty. In this treaty, Ecuador renounced its claims over much of present-day Colombian

Putumayo and Amazonas departments. In 1922, Peru and Colombia signed the initially secret

Salomón-Lozano Treaty of 1922, causing a breakup of relations between Colombia and Ecuador

after its divulgation.100 Colombia ceded some of the territory stipulated in the 1916 treaty to Peru

in exchange for an outlet to the Amazon River next to the Apaporis-Tabatinga line with Brazil, a

move seen by many in Ecuador as a betrayal. Two-years later, Ecuador and Peru signed a protocol in which they agreed to a mixed formula for resolving the dispute, meaning that they promised to engage in direct negotiations, subjecting any unresolved impasses to United States’ arbitration. This was called the Ponce-Castro Oyanguren Protocol.101 A couple of 1924

opuscules–one by José Peralta, Foreign Minister between 1898 and 1901, the other by Nicolás

López, a Colonel with several publications on Latin American affairs–comment on the goals,

aim, popularity, and legitimacy of the protocol signed that year.102 Peralta also published Breve exposición histórico - jurídica de nuestra controversia de límites con el Perú, a work that

100 See Cavelier, Vol. 2 of La Política internacional de Colombia, 196-200, for a discussion of the context of this diplomatic breakup. 101 Cristián Garay Vera, “La competencia por el control del espacio amazónico en el contexto de la diplomacia sudamericana, 1830-1998,” Procesos no. 44 (July - December 2016): 29-39 discusses the complex circumstances surrounding these treaties. 102 José Peralta, Una plumada más sobre el Protocolo Ponce-Castro Oyanguren (Cuenca: Manuel Vintimilla, 1924), 6. BNEE-FER2-320.12 P426. Nicolás F. López, Cuestiones de Actualidad: Protocolo Ponce-Castro Oyanguren (Quito: Artes Gráficas, 1924), 9. MCYP-LARREA-CML10162. 58

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

constitutes the former diplomat’s own answer to the official’s initiatives to educate the

Ecuadorian population on the conflict. The latter study includes legal discussion, historical

narrative, and patriotic calls to defend the Patria, showing that even among those voices

questioning the specific conduct of Ecuadorian diplomacy, there was a rather unified response

about the need to make the issue one of universal interest.103

The same pattern of indoctrination and analysis of current affairs can be found in works

from the latter part of the 1920s. The one-hundredth anniversary of the Peru-Gran Colombia war

served as an appropriate occasion for the publication of several books that commemorated the

war with an eminently civic spirit, while generally showing what were perceived as the historical

origins of a century of rivalry with Peru. This is the case of Camilo Destruge’s Ecuador-Perú

dos centenarios, an analysis of Peru’s involvement in Ecuadorian affairs during the decade

between the independence of Guayaquil (1820) and the Treaty of 1829, and of Ángel Isaac

Chiriboga’s collection of documents on the same war and historical period.104 These two are

works with highly propagandistic value that contrast with Alberto Muñoz Vernaza’s detailed

analysis of the 1916 treaty with Colombia, which he signed as Ecuador’s representative in

Bogotá. His Exposición sobre el tratado de límites entre el Ecuador y Colombia is in large

measure a response to the firestorm that followed knowledge of the treaty between Colombia and

Peru.105 A 1930 booklet with the familiar title La cuestión límites talks about possible ends to the

103 José Peralta, Breve exposición histórico - jurídica de nuestra controversia de límites con el Perú, 2nd ed. (Cuenca: Junta Administrativa de la Universidad, 1925), i-ii. MCYP-MUÑOZ-LM3553. 104 Camilo Destruge, Ecuador-Perú: dos centenarios. Combate de Malpelo. Agresión a Guayaquil. La defensa de la ciudad (Guayaquil: La Opinión Pública, 1928), iii-iv. BNEE-FER2-986.609866323 D477. Ángel Isaac Chiriboga N., Tarqui Documentado. Guerra de 1828-1829. Vol. 1 (Quito: Talleres Tipográficos Nacionales, 1928), 4-5. BNEE-FER1-986.6 C5416. Chiriboga explains that his book, a collection of documents on the war of 1828-29, is nevertheless meant to prove the “vicissitudes and stages of the Peruvian conspiracy against [Gran] Colombia” and by extension, against Ecuador’s claims. 105 Alberto Muñoz Vernaza, Exposición sobre el tratado de límites entre el Ecuador y Colombia y Análisis Jurídico del Tratado de Límites de 1922 entre Colombia y el Perú (Quito: El Comercio, 1928), 7-8. BNEE-FER2- 320.1209866 M9719. 59

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

dispute. Interestingly, it mentions the necessity of a compromise between the Peruvian gains of

the previous half century, and Ecuador’s claims in the same area. The outlandish proposals made

in it, such as returning the lands ceded by Colombia in 1922, or vacating all settlements north of

the Marañón-Amazonas including Iquitos, mean that the author was likely not well versed in the

complexities of International Law or was simply making a rhetorical case and thus calling for a

patriotic response to the dispute.106

Conclusion

Amid the variety and number of sources analyzed in this chapter, it is possible to point

out what seems like the early phases in the development of a discourse that progressively turned

the dispute into one of the core elements of the Ecuadorian state and society’s nation-building

efforts. Among these elements we find an increasingly official and explicit interest in

propagating some degree of knowledge about the dispute, one that crucially included long

discussions of the country’s colonial and, to a lesser extent in this period, pre-Hispanic history.

This did not mean that there were no contributions from private citizens. Discussion of the

conflict was arguably part of one’s patriotic duty. More often, these publications came from

well-known individuals, people from the political, diplomatic, and intellectual circles deeply

involved in Ecuador’s government and foreign policy. Some of them, such as José Peralta,

Alberto Muñoz Vernaza, and Francisco Andrade, were diplomats, state ministers, and governors

of the province of Oriente. Others were people such as Luciano Coral and Camilo Destruge, who

contributed to the discussion without being directly involved in the diplomatic aspects of the dispute, but who were nonetheless part of the political establishment from which most writing on the subject originated. The names and works of Vacas Galindo and Honorato Vázquez, the

106 Pablo Alfonso Vásconez, La cuestión límites (Quito: Artes Gráficas, 1930), 6-7. BNEE-FER1-320.1209866085 V331. 60

Published Sources on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict Before 1941

former a member of the Catholic Church and the latter a career diplomat, eventually became part

of the history and narrative of the conflict. The Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol, absent from any official or unofficial source before 1906, quickly became an important part of the way Ecuador talked about the conflict, through texts and maps. The conflicting maximalist claims of both countries, which help explain the rejection of the 1890 treaty as well as the failure of the Spanish

Arbitration, and the increasing status of the dispute as an Ecuadorian “national theme” made an easy solution unlikely. Accordingly, it was during these decades of repeated failures to reach a satisfactory solution to the conflict that the discourse on the territorial conflict became increasingly moralizing, and authors are more openly bitter and propagandistic about it, until the history of Ecuador’s boundaries became a subject of formal education in the 1920s, when it became less open to questioning than before. Many authors discussed the role of the vast region known as Oriente, whose significance as frontier of civilization and source of untold riches became closely related to the dispute, especially since the country’s unsuccessful attempts to colonize it contrasted with Peruvian success in the same area. It was regarding the Oriente, the larger of the two regions in dispute, that the conflict with Peru was referred to in terms of a historical process of usurpation or invasion. In sum, by the onset of the War of 1941, there was already a coherent, elite-led, progressively official discourse on the dispute. The next chapter discusses the character the discourse took immediately before and after the military disaster of

1941 and the Rio de Janeiro Protocol of 1942.

2. The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of

1941 to the Nullity Thesis

In 1961, Ecuador’s Presidential Office published a short booklet titled Martirio

Ecuatoriano: el Ecuador ha sido, es y será país amazónico.1 The proclamation that Ecuador has

been, is, and always will be an Amazonian country is a clear allusion to the territorial conflict

with Peru, as most of the disputed lands were located in that region. More importantly, this low- quality publication is aimed at a much wider audience than the thick and difficult early-twentieth century treatises of Vázquez and Vacas Galindo, something evident in the booklet’s presentation, quality, and tone. Hardly original in content, its anonymous author discusses some of the best- known episodes in the history of the conflict, including the controversial Pedemonte-Mosquera

Protocol of 1830. It also includes low-resolution maps showing the territory of Ecuador in different eras, as well as long quotes of populist leader José María Velasco Ibarra, then in his fourth term as Ecuador’s head of state. Furthermore, the booklet presents the topic of the dispute in a way that may have sounded strange or excessive in the early part of the century, during the

Spanish arbitration process. Sources from earlier decades did portray the long dispute in moralising and teleological terms.2 In contrast, the author of Martirio ecuatoriano openly and

boldly victimizes the protagonist of the narrative, Ecuador itself. The pamphlet’s title and cover

illustration elicit an emotional response that draws on the assumed religious background of the

audience, Catholic Christianity, as well as on some knowledge of the country’s recent history,

particularly regarding the conflict with Peru. Accordingly, in the title Ecuador becomes a martyr,

a victim of cruelty and persecution in the same manner as a Christian saint. The cover illustration

1 Martirio ecuatoriano: el Ecuador ha sido, es y será país Amazónico (Quito: Sala de Prensa de la Presidencia de la República, 1961). MCYP-LARREA-CML11023. 2 Destruge, El Ecuador y el Perú, 4.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

goes even further, conveying the message of martyrdom graphically: a scene of Christ’s passion,

much like those found in any Catholic church, illustrates the idea of territorial victimization. In

this allegorical scene, Jesus, who is identified as Ecuador, has fallen under the weight of the

cross and endures the abuse of two soldiers and three civilians. The soldiers are Peru and the

United States, and the civilians are Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. The cross itself is labelled “Rio

de Janeiro Protocol,” the treaty signed in January 29, 1942, by Ecuador and Peru after an

undeclared war that took place between July and September of the previous year, and during

which Peruvian troops occupied Ecuador’s southernmost provinces. The other four characters in

the allegorical cover illustration also signed the Protocol, as they were assigned the role of

guarantors in the process of demobilization and resolution of differences “until the definitive

demarcation of the border between Ecuador and Peru.”3 In short, the cover illustration shows that

the Rio Protocol of 1942 constituted a punishment and sacrifice for Ecuador, and places the

blame on the other countries that signed it (Figure 3.1).

The openly propagandistic, almost strident nature of the state publication Martirio

Ecuatoriano seems like a distant cry from the polemical but educated publications of authors and commentators from the nineteenth century. Its style is even more distant from the legalistic and highly complex treatises produced during the arbitration process of the first decade of the twentieth century. However, the booklet also shares the controversial, moralising but accusatory tone of some authors from the turn of the twentieth century, for example Fidel Alomía when he discussed the “army of prostitutes” that helped colonize Iquitos.4 In addition, the press room of

the Presidential Office published Martirio Ecuatoriano, which shows that the work was an effort

3 Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, United States. Protocolo de paz, amistad y límites entre Ecuador y Perú, articles III, V, VII, IX. AHAPD-ST-PER033. 4 Alomía, Sin Dios, 19.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

to publicize the government’s actions in the field foreign policy at the time. To put it another

way, the anonymous booklet constituted an official contribution to discourse about the Ecuador-

Peru dispute, and an effort to present the available knowledge about the dispute to a general

audience, much like lectures and textbooks that appeared in the 1920s.5 Similar to Modesto

Chávez Franco, who included a colonial map of the Audiencia de Quito at the end of his Cartilla

Patria, the author of the 1961 booklet’s included maps that are more iconic illustrations than

visual aids to understand the subject. This is achieved, perhaps unintendedly, by their low

resolution and the way they depict the Ecuadorian territory unitary and block-like, with place

names that are almost illegible.6 Martirio Ecuatoriano is significant because it shows how certain discursive elements became synonymous with the Ecuador-Peru dispute, especially the

self-victimization dimension, which was already present in earlier authors when they attempted

to give their narratives a teleological turn.

This chapter discusses the approximately two decades that led to the portrayal of the

territorial dispute seen in this booklet. It will show that discussion in published sources after the

events of 1941 and 1942 was aimed at providing explanations for the unprecedented military

defeat, while at the same time engaging in the process of nation-building through the conflict that

began decades before. Moreover, it will show that even though President Velasco Ibarra’s shift

in foreign policy from 1960, which Martirio Ecuatoriano helped popularize, seemed like a

radical departure from the prior state of recognition of international obligations, the ideas

contained in his nullity thesis had been circulating in at least some of the books from the last two

decades. As such, the President’s move towards nullity expressed and synthesized the sentiments

of anger and injustice at the war and the Rio Protocol, and in this he was engaging in an exercise

5 For example, Tobar y Borgoño, Programa, and Chávez Franco, Cartilla Patria. 6 See for example, Martirio Ecuatoriano, 11.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

in nation-building parallel to the efforts of the authors who published on the subject. Finally, the

existence of dissenting voices shows that the adoption of the nullity thesis, though rooted in

sentiments from the past, was not the only possible way to interpret the legacy of 1941-42.

This chapter examines published sources from the years between the war of 1941 and Velasco

Ibarra’s fourth presidency in 1960-61, grouping them in two categories depending on their nature

and objectives: first, propagandistic literature consisting mainly of short pamphlets often

produced by a government organization; and second, monographs and essays dedicated to

studying the conflict, particularly the War of 1941 and Rio Protocol. By doing this, the study will

show the two manners in which authors approached discussion of the Ecuador-Peru conflict at this time. The first appealed most directly to emotion and culturally significant images such as the crucifixion of Jesus, generally expressing a sense of impotence and anger at the defeat of

1941. Sources of the second type often constituted attempts to explain and sometimes allocate responsibilities for the disastrous outcome of the war, blaming for example the Ecuadorian

Army’s high command, the government and the diplomatic establishment, and external factors

such as the guarantor states.

Propagandistic Literature on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict

In July 1941, a few weeks after the conflict in the southern province of El Oro began, an

official study and diplomatic communication by Julio Tobar Donoso appeared. This

Conservative politician, diplomat, and scholar was Ecuador’s Foreign Minister at the time, and

he signed the Rio Protocol the following year. The study is titled Exposición del Ministro de

Relaciones Exteriores del Ecuador a las cancillerías de América, and its content and structure is the product of the development of the discourse on the conflict, whose trajectory was the subject of the previous chapter. Tobar Donoso brings forward historical and legal arguments that are

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

reminiscent of authors from the early part of the century, and even from some nineteenth century

authors.7 As in the case of Pedro Moncayo’s Cuestión de límites from 1860, the Foreign

Minister’s Exposición appeared at a time when Ecuador experienced an international crisis of

some magnitude, in this case the overland advance of the Peruvian army to non-disputed land.

Consequently, the author made the Exposición a polemical work that went beyond the strict aims

of an official communication between governments, as the title otherwise suggests. Despite the

dryness and complexity of the issue, Tobar Donoso strives to make the booklet more accessible

to non-specialist audiences through a didactic device that would come up in another of his works

on the conflict. The text has annotated margins, short printed phrases that describe or summarize

the topic or main idea of a paragraph or section. These phrases have the double function of

allowing any reader to find a section or a line of argumentation in the work more quickly,

something useful both to specialists writing about it, and to a wider audience unfamiliar with the

events in El Oro or the diplomatic battle unfolding at the same time. For example, he summarizes

Ecuador’s tendency to not get involved in Peru’s other wars and international conflicts in the

nineteenth century as “pacifist and Americanist policy.”8 Here Tobar Donoso alludes to the

country’s decision to not answer Chile and Peru’s calls for support during the War of the Pacific

of 1879-83. He sees this decision as a conscious act of neutrality based on higher international

principles, even though more likely causes were Ecuador’s institutional weakness and primacy of

regional elites, Guayaquil’s historic and commercial ties with Lima, and Ecuador’s limited

7 The book does not mention a specific author, but the date, July 1941, makes it clear that Tobar Donoso was the Foreign Minister at the time. As a scholar and career diplomat, he likely contributed with his own knowledge on the matter, even if the work was collaborative. I credit him because the title presents the tract as written by the Minister himself. Julio Tobar Donoso, Exposición del ministro, 77. 8 Tobar Donoso, Exposición del ministro, 4. In Spanish, “América” refers to the single American continent, what is known in English as the Americas, in plural. Therefore, Americanism does not refer here or in any other source to a pro-United States attitude, but to one of continental fellowship. In this thesis, I will only use these terms in the Spanish sense.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

military capability at the time.9

The most common argument Tobar Donoso uses to advance Ecuador’s case of innocence

before the Foreign Ministries of the continent, is the view that the country’s rights over the

disputed territories come from colonial-era titles and institutions, which in many cases supersede

Peru’s own titles and successful colonization efforts of the Republican era.10 The canciller adds

that the territoriality of Ecuador is a direct consequence of the “vital unity, organic links, and

economic interdependence” of the Audiencia de Quito’s constitutive parts, including disputed

Tumbes, Jaén, and Maynas. This argument echoes the nation-building rationale of writings

published before the events leading to the War of 1941, a rationale that sometimes came as

endorsements from government authorities, and other times as the authors’ views that writing

about the conflict’s history is a way of contributing to the country’s defense and of fulfilling

one’s patriotic duty.11 However, an explicit recourse to the unity of the Audiencia de Quito as

basis of Ecuadorian nationality such as the one in Tobar Donoso’s study does not appear in any

sources of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is where the Exposición of 1941 is

most original. It anticipates the propagandistic tone of governments and authors who emphasized

the crucial importance of the Amazon as a foundation of the Ecuadorian nation in the following

decades.

Other authors from diverse backgrounds contributed to the discussion on the war and the

conflict in the same turbulent year the Foreign Minister published his Exposición. Often written

during the two-month war, their works are more reactions than declarations of principles or

9 Claudio Andrés Tapia Figueroa, “Política exterior ecuatoriana durante la guerra del Pacífico: un análisis desde la óptica de los equilibrios de poder en la región latinoamericana,” Revista Brasileira de História 36, no. 72 (2016): 146-47. 10 Tobar Donoso, Exposición del ministro, 38. 11 An example of the first case is Chávez Franco, Cartilla Patria, 3. For the second case, Guayaquileños, Documentos Importantes, iv, Vacas Galindo, Exposición sobre los límites, viii, and Ontaneda, Resumen, iii-v.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

detailed analyses of the situation. They are usually directed at a wider audience than Tobar

Donoso’s Exposición. One is a manifesto by the Ecuadorian Institute for Amazon Studies, a short

work published one week after the first incidents at El Oro in July 1941. This institute intended

to reiterate Ecuador’s Americanism, and to call upon the continent to exercise its solidarity to

prevent aggressions, conquests, and fratricidal wars to take place in it.12 Although the manifesto

is directed at the whole continent, its simple, cheap format suggests that mainly Ecuadorian

readers accessed it. In this sense, the Institute of Amazon Studies’ calls for continental solidarity

constitute a patriotic reiteration of its position at the forefront of the academic defense of the

territory it studied, the Amazonia. A few weeks after the publication of this manifesto, in late

July 1941, Nicolás López published a collection of newspaper articles and lectures ideally meant

to circulate inside and outside the country. Instead of appealing for solidarity, López portrays the

ways in which “Peruvian Imperialism” worked to legitimate its colonization and conquest of the

Oriente. The author provides an explanation of the unfolding events by appealing to a

teleological narrative of the dispute–Ecuadorian weakness versus Peruvian Machiavellianism, which for him is what characterizes Peruvian Imperialism and the conflict in general. In the second article, originally a lecture delivered to an audience of retired military officers, López describes the creation of a map of the province of Loreto – the Peruvian name for the region known as Oriente in Ecuador – as testifying to Peru’s unilateral, inflexible, and imperialistic approach to solving territorial differences.13

The Ecuadorian Legation in Panama edited a short volume during the months of war and

12 Instituto Ecuatoriano de Estudios del Amazonas, Hacia la efectiva solidaridad de América: manifiesto que el Instituto Ecuatoriano de Estudios del Amazonas dirige a las naciones de América (Quito: Talleres Gráficos de Educación, 1941), 4. MCYP-MUÑOZ-LM4258. 13 Nicolás F. López, Argumentaciones y procedimientos del imperialismo peruano (Quito: L.A. Miño T., 1941), 11. MCYP-LARREA-CML10252.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

occupation of southern Ecuador. It is called La agresión peruana: caracteres de ella. Narración

verazmente documentada. As the title indicates, in this booklet the Legation presents the

situation in El Oro and Loja as a narrative, not a report or an official communication, yet it is

also “truthfully documented.” It stresses the premeditated character of the Peruvian Army’s

actions in El Oro and Loja, drawing on the same teleological narrative of Ecuadorian sacrifice

and Peruvian perfidy that appears in Nicolás López. In La agresión peruana al Ecuador, Peru is

solely responsible for the series of border incidents that took place in the years before the war,

whereas Ecuador, the weakest of Peru’s neighbours, worked to establish a definitive border.14 As

expected from a representative of the Foreign Ministry abroad, the author follows a line of

argumentation coherent with Tobar Donoso’s Exposición published a few months earlier. The

Legation’s booklet is an edited version of an communiqué from the Informative Section of the

Ministry.15 Consequently, there is a chance that the two booklets were written by the same group

of people in Quito, given that the 1941 Exposición was, rather than a personal work, a

collaborative effort in which Tobar Donoso had some or much input. The contribution of the

Legation in Panama was precisely to turn an entirely diplomatic document into a manageable

booklet more likely to reach the hands of non-specialists or people outside the government.

In August 1941, Archbishop of Quito Carlos María de la Torre gave two speeches about

the conflict, later published as pamphlets, the first of which took place during a commemorative

mass for those fallen in the war. A host of dignitaries, including Ecuador’s President Carlos

Arroyo del Río, members of the Legislature, and the Church’s hierarchy counted themselves

among the audience, but the simple format of the published version suggests a broader

14 Ecuador. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores. Legación en Panamá. La agresión peruana al Ecuador: caracteres de ella. Narración verazmente documentada (Panama City: Legación del Ecuador en Panamá, 1941), 2. MCYP- MUÑOZ-LM5502. 15 Legación de Panamá, La agresión peruana, 37.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

audience.16 As in the case of Tobar Donoso’s book, the archbishop’s speech explicitly alludes to

an ideal of Ecuadorian nationality. However, according to de la Torre, the most salient

characteristic of this nationality is not so much its territorial heritage, but the development of a

common culture, especially what he calls its “moral physiognomy,” which is different from that

of all other nations, and in whose defense Catholicism plays a fundamental role.17 When he calls

the people of the capital city “representatives of the Ecuadorian people,” the Archbishop refers to

the physical audience of Quiteños present during his speech, but beyond that audience, to the fact

that Quito’s elite had pushed for a long time for a model of Ecuadorian nationality in which its history and culture occupied a central role. A city famed for its many churches and convents, as well as for the religiosity of its population, Quito was, in his view, best suited to carry forward the archbishop’s vision of Catholic nationality.

In many respects, de la Torre’s idea of Quiteño cultural supremacy within Ecuador was coextensive with the nation-building discourse on the territorial conflict that is the subject of this thesis. In the colonial era, the Andean city had been an administrative, economic, and cultural centre of some reputation.18 Francisco de Orellana’s 1541-42 voyage to the Amazonian jungles

and down the great river departed from Quito, and for many Quiteños such as de la Torre it is

partly from this event that Ecuador’s status as Amazonian nation derived, together with the

missionary work alluded to in earlier publications on the dispute.19 In a 1940 speech published

16 Carlos María de la Torre, Alocución que el Exmo. y Rmo. Sr. Dr. D. Carlos María de la Torre, Arzobispo de Quito, pronunció en las solemnes exequias que, en sufragio de las almas de los ecuatorianos muertos en Zarumilla y Macará, se celebraron en la iglesia metropolitana, el 8 de agosto de 1941. (Quito: n.p., 1941), 3. MCYP- LARREA-CML10249. 17 De la Torre, Alocución, 6. 18 Ernesto Capello, City at the Center of the World: Space, History, and Modernity in Quito (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 8. Gabrielle G. Palmer, Sculpture in the Kingdom of Quito (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 65. 19 Michael Wood, Conquistadors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 188. He briefly describes the sense of glory ascribed to Orellana’s expedition, but his work must be taken critically, as it perpetuates the narrative of glorified discovery and conquest found in the many of the sources analyzed in this thesis. On the work of

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

the following year as Ecuador nación amazónica, writer and lawyer Pío Jaramillo Alvarado

asserts that Ecuador’s sovereignty in the Oriente derives from the colonial-era conquest and

missionary work whose origin was Quito, even stressing that Orellana had travelled with Quito’s

money.20 Such focus on the actions and efforts of Quito during some of the key events in the

Ecuadorian narrative of the conflict are especially significant if we consider that assertions of

Quito’s culture, prestige, and history took place within the context of the rivalry with Ecuador’s

other regional centres of power, Cuenca to the south, and especially the port of Guayaquil. The

latter city, often called “the Pearl of the Pacific,”21 enjoyed some prosperity first during its days

as a shipyard and shipping port in the Spanish Empire,22 and then as Ecuador’s industrial,

agricultural, and financial heartland until at least the 1970s.23 Analyzing the particulars of the

rivalry is outside the scope of this research, but it is worth mentioning that the struggle between

Ecuador’s capital and its puerto principal predates the territorial dispute itself, and has pervaded

the country’s politics and culture for most of its republican life.24

During the decades in which de la Torre, Jaramillo Alvarado, and other authors discussed

Quiteño nationalism within the context of the territorial dispute, Ecuador experienced the

transformation of its society, economy, and political system. The outcome strengthened the

central government and diminished the power of the old regional elites, as the hacienda system

missionaries as source of sovereignty on the Amazon, Moncayo, Cuestión de Límites, 23, López, La integridad territorial y el clero, 4-6. 20 Pío Jaramillo Alvarado, Ecuador nación amazónica, (Guayaquil: Ediciones Vicente Rocafuerte, 1941), 7. MCYP- MUÑOZ-LM3976. 21 “Por qué Guayaquil es conocida como la ‘Perla del Pacífico’,” Ecuavisa, May 30, 2017, http://www.ecuavisa.com/articulo/guayaquil-mi-destino/279056-que-guayaquil-conocida-como-perla-del-pacifico. 22 María Eugenia Chaves, “Guayaquil: un puerto colonial en los mares del sur, siglo XVIII,” Procesos no. 24 (July- December 2006): 47. 23 Osvaldo Hurtado Larrea, "El sistema político en el Ecuador." In Vol. 13 of Nueva historia del Ecuador, ed. Enrique Ayala Mora (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1995), 105-06. 24 Capello, City at the Center of the World, 10-11, and 15-16 for the cultural dimension of the rivalry.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

gave way to a capitalist and oil-oriented society.25 By putting Quito, the seat of the government

and the main beneficiary of the economic shift, at the forefront of the nation-building project that

was the discourse on the dispute with Peru, the city’s political, intellectual, and diplomatic elite

provided a historical counterpart to their unprecedented economic power, prosperity, and

political influence. This dimension of the developing Ecuadorian discourse on the territorial

dispute with Peru that constructed Quito as a model for the rest of the nation and at the forefront of the defense of the territory would become more commonplace in the 1960s, especially when considered in relation to the Oriente.

It is not surprising that some of the propagandistic sources from this era are structured as a response of some sort. This response can be explicit, such as when Tobar Donoso explains that his Exposición is a response to the mediator governments of Argentina, Brazil, and the United

States, whose official position after the start of the conflagration was to remain neutral to avoid damaging their relations with either side in the dispute.26 Pablo Hannibal Vela’s work Un traidor

más, es un ciudadano menos from August 1941 is also a response, but directed at the reactions of

a well-known Ecuadorian politician regarding the situation in the frontier. More specifically, it is a response to a letter by Velasco Ibarra, who was then in exile after his first overthrow from the presidency in 1935. The populist leader had published, in early August 1941, an open letter to

sitting President Carlos Arroyo del Río in which he accused Arroyo of fraud and usurpation,

poor handling of the economy, and along with the Defense and Foreign Ministers, of losing the

war against Peru.27 The Guayaquileño poet and journalist Vela responded to Velasco Ibarra’s

25 Alejandro Moreano, “El sistema político en el Ecuador contemporáneo,” in Vol. 11 of Nueva historia del Ecuador, ed. Enrique Ayala Mora (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1991), 203. 26 Tobar Donoso, Exposición del ministro, 3. 27 José María Velasco Ibarra, “You Are Not My President, (Letter to Carlos Arroyo del Río, August 2, 1941)” in The Ecuador Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Carlos de la Torre and Steve Striffler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 163, 165. Robert Norris discusses the context in which this letter appeared in Vol. 1 of El gran ausente: biografía de Velasco Ibarra (Quito: Libri Mundi/Enrique Grosse-Luemern, 2004), 273-279.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

accusations by calling them and their author treasonous against both the President and the Patria,

and the Chilean newspaper in which they appeared a propaganda instrument of Peru.28

Interestingly, an important element of Vela’s argument is that Velasco Ibarra used the

international situation for his own political gain, to avoid the reality of recent electoral and

political defeats.29 Vela does not discuss the conflict itself in detail, but he reserves for the end of

his work the harshest criticism of Velasco Ibarra: far from expressing support for the country and

the President during the conflagration, the populist leader would have treasonously predicted

Ecuador’s defeat, and blamed the army’s failure on Arroyo’s ineptitude.30 The events leading to

Arroyo del Río’s overthrow in the so-called Revolución Gloriosa of 1944 proved Vela’s passionate defense of Arroyo del Río an inaccurate reflection of the sentiments of the majority of the politically engaged population at the time.31 Nevertheless, this author’s reflexive allegiance to the Patria, its President, and its armed forces surfaced again as popular sentiment some two decades later, when the same Velasco Ibarra reinvented himself as defender of the country’s territorial rights. Finally, Vela’s response to Velasco Ibarra’s letter shows there was a struggle to control how the war of 1941 and Rio Protocol were explained. Vela’s implicit defense of Arroyo del Río became the silenced discourse: Velasco Ibarra became President four more times and introduced a new official policy on the conflict that lasted decades. Arroyo del Río’s view, expressed in a memoir called Por la pendiente del sacrificio, remained unpublished until the

28 Pablo Hanníbal Vela, Un traidor más, es un ciudadano menos: La carta de J. M. Velasco Ibarra al Doctor Carlos A. Arroyo del Río, Presidente Constitucional de la República (Quito: n.p., 1941), 5. MCYP-LARREA-CML10251. 29 Vela, Un traidor más, 7. 30 Vela, Un traidor más, 13. 31 Enrique Ayala Mora points out how, in the face of continuing repression, economic measures that worsened the quality of life for most Ecuadorians, the disaster of the war of 1941, and the shaky legitimacy of Arroyo del Río due to the fact that he had accessed the Presidency through fraud, resulted in an unlikely alliance of Conservatives, Socialists, Communists, and even some of members of the Liberal oligarchy, to topple him in May 1944. “La represión arroísta: caldo de cultivo de la ‘Gloriosa’,” in La Gloriosa, ¿revolución que no fue?, ed. Santiago Cabrera Hanna (Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar-Corporación Editora Nacional, 2016), 23-24.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

1990s.32

Rafael Alvarado, a writer with several works about the conflict with Peru, published two

studies during the months of war and occupation. In La elocuencia de las cifras en el problema

territorial ecuatoriano-peruano, Alvarado alludes to the use of geographical knowledge in the

formation of Ecuador’s discourse on the dispute with Peru. Like some of the other

propagandistic works analyzed to this point, Alvarado responds to a series of accusations or

assertions, this time those of the Peruvian press, which the author says had been publishing

“anything judged favourable to the demands or territorial pretensions of that country.”33 Where

geographical knowledge enters is in the resulting discursive struggle between Alvarado and his

interlocutor, a Peruvian journalist named Ricardo Cavero who on September 2, 1941, had

published an article in Lima’s El Comercio claiming that Ecuador coveted some 400,000 square

kilometers of the Amazonian basin.34 For Alvarado, these were outlandish accusations, given

that Ecuador did not want any of the provinces of Jaén, Maynas, and Tumbes. The apparent

modesty when asserting Ecuador’s claims–the country had historically claimed all or part of

these territories–was a result of the situation of the previous months and years. Peru’s military

and political control of much of the disputed Amazonia led Ecuador’s diplomacy to propose a

transactional border line that contradicted its maximalist claims to the entire left bank of the

Marañón-Amazon waterway.35 Though at one point the author unrealistically suggests a new

round of negotiations, Alvarado’s work is remarkable and uncommon in his view of the origins

and nature of the dispute. For Chávez Franco in 1922, and even for older authors such as

32 Carlos Alberto Arroyo del Río, Por la pendiente del sacrificio (Guayaquil: Banco Central del Ecuador, 1996). MCYP-NUEVOS-033442. The editor, writing before the final peace accord with Peru was signed, predicted that the decades-old memoir would still generate criticism and strong emotions, v. 33 Rafael Alvarado, La elocuencia de las cifras en el problema territorial ecuatoriano-peruano (Quito: Talleres Gráficos de Educación, 1941), 3. MCYP-LARREA-CML10255. 34 Alvarado, La elocuencia de las cifras, 6. 35 Zook, Zarumilla-Marañón, 132.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

Luciano Coral and Constantino Fernández, the history of the Ecuador-Peru dispute is one of usurpation of Ecuadorian lands.36 In contrast, Alvarado acknowledges that the Spanish

authorities were not precise in their demarcation of colonial jurisdictions, and that general

knowledge of some of the areas was still limited. Only the perspective expressed in the earlier

works became popular in the next decades.

The second of Rafael Alvarado’s works from the time came a few months after the Rio

Protocol was signed. As in the case of the earlier book, the 1942 study Demarcación de fronteras shows the author’s somewhat uncommon perspective on the nature of the conflict, this time regarding the demarcation of the border stipulated in the Protocol. This time, Alvarado shows a different understanding of the territoriality of the nation-state from the more common legal, historical, and teleological arguments that portray Ecuador’s territory and characteristics as existing in perpetuity. On one hand, he acknowledges that the respective treaties of 1916 and

1942 with Colombia and Peru ended Ecuador’s border issues by drawing a complete border.37

On the other hand, he stresses the conflict between seemingly clear-cut treaties and the often-

difficult geography of the territory, especially when it came to the concept of divortium

aquarum. This seems to anticipate the controversies that arose a few years later regarding the

demarcation of the Cordillera del Cóndor.38 Alvarado’s 1942 work is problematic, for example

in its silence when discussing the “friendship” that characterized the arrangement with

Colombia–Ecuador broke off relations with Colombia after knowledge of the Salomón-Lozano

Treaty with Peru became public.39 In addition, his view of what he thought would be the end of

36 Chávez Franco, Cartilla Patria, 112. Luciano Coral, Conflicto Internacional, 261. 37 Rafael Alvarado, Demarcación de fronteras (Quito: Talleres Gráficos de Educación, 1942), 3. MCYP-LARREA- CML10256. 38 Rafael Alvarado, Demarcación de fronteras, 19. 39 Rafael Alvarado, Demarcación de fronteras, 8.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis the conflict strikes as optimistic even for a work published so close to the Rio Protocol. As in the case of Pablo Hanníbal Vela, Alvarado’s work shows the existence of differing–if not quite dissident–voices, and therefore of a dialogue, when determining the content of the dominant discourse on the dispute.

Almost two decades after the war and Rio Protocol, a new era in Ecuador’s foreign policy dawned when Velasco Ibarra’s declaration of nullity of the Rio Protocol became the state’s official position on the territorial dispute with Peru. Accordingly, a second group of propagandistic sources dates from this era, which coincided with the start of the populist leader’s short fourth presidency. These tend to be linked to the regime or another government organization. Some of these publications, booklets, and short studies with a propagandistic character often came from either the Office of the President or the Foreign Ministry. One of these is Martirio Ecuatoriano, which began this chapter. The Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry published the earliest of these works, titled El Protocolo de Río de Janeiro de 1942 es nulo, a few weeks after the events surrounding José María Velasco Ibarra’s declaration of nullity and its official adoption as government policy. This booklet was published barely a month into the fourth velasquismo–as the populist leader’s presidencies are often called. It provides readers with a narrative of the adoption of and reactions to the nullity thesis. First, it reproduces a few selected phrases from when Velasco Ibarra first proclaimed the nullity thesis, in a public speech in the central Andean city of Riobamba in mid-August 1960, shortly before the start of his term.40 Subsequently, we read, Congress gave the August declaration an official seal of approval because it appealed to patriotism and nation-building beyond partisanship.41 Predictably, the

40 Ecuador. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, El Protocolo de Río de Janeiro es nulo de acuerdo con el sistema jurídico interamericano y con el Derecho Internacional (Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1960), 7. MCYP- LARREA-CML10102. 41 Ecuador. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, El Protocolo de Río, 8.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

Peruvian government reacted promptly to the new position, and the response from the

Ecuadorian Chamber of Deputies makes it possible to look at some of the reasons behind the

adoption of the nullity thesis.42 Velasco Ibarra had ample reason to think he had enough popular support, as he was elected with the highest number of votes in the country’s history.43 Second,

the government sold nullity as the nation’s invariable and unquestionable position.44 As such, the

new policy forced Peru and the guarantor countries to recognize that, while the Rio Protocol

provided a border that was mutually recognized, it certainly did not end the conflict. Third, the

nullity thesis reflected national sentiment demanding justice for what many considered the unjust

arrangement of 1942.45 The foreword by Foreign Minister José Chiriboga reveals that the

booklet’s goal was perfectly in sync with the new government policy, as it aimed to provide readers with a clear yet legalistic explanation of what he calls “the irreversible and unanimous

Ecuadorian rejection of the Protocol.”46 To call a state policy, especially one related to

diplomacy and international relations, a unanimous and irreversible position of the nation is

inaccurate, given that there had been voices, such as that of Rafael Alvarado, calling for respect

of the Protocol since 1941. However, this is also a position to be expected from a government

official whose job was precisely to represent the country’s interests before other governments

and international organizations. More importantly, Chiriboga’s bold assertion of the new nature

42 Ecuador. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, El Protocolo de Río, 9. 43 According to data from Dieter Nohlen and Simón Pachano, slightly less than 370,000 people voted for Velasco Ibarra in that election, or 48.2% of the electorate. Voter turnout was just over 1 million, and the country’s population was about 4.5 million. “Ecuador,” in Elections in the Americas: A Data Handbook, Vol. 2, South America, ed. Dieter Nohlen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 401. The World Bank Group. “Population, Total (Ecuador 1960-2016),” The World Bank – Data https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=EC. Some elections from the Liberal-plutocratic period in the early twentieth century registered a higher percentage of valid votes cast for the winning candidate, but the 1960 election saw the highest absolute number of citizens voting for Velasco Ibarra. 44 Ecuador. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, El Protocolo de Río, 10. 45 Ecuador. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, El Protocolo de Río, 10. 46 Ecuador. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, El Protocolo de Río, 5.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

of Ecuador’s foreign policy constitutes a truthful assessment of the sentiments of at least part of

the population regarding the justice of the War of 1941 and the Rio Protocol, the printed versions

of which had been circulating ever since hostilities began in July 1941.

The formulation of the nullity thesis represented the consolidation of a specific discourse that victimized Ecuador and turned Peru into a nemesis and existential threat. It was also the boldest attempt to present such discourse to an international audience. Official efforts to

publicize Ecuador’s new policy continued after the shocking turn of events at the beginning of

Velasco Ibarra’s fourth presidency, and perhaps more importantly, these were designed to project

an image of international strength or prestige inside the country. The Foreign Ministry published

another booklet during the final months of 1960, a transcription of the statement of José

Chiriboga before the United Nations General Assembly in September of that year. The work

contains the full speech of the Ecuadorian canciller, as well as the reply of Víctor Andrés

Belaúnde, the Peruvian Foreign Minister. Unlike Tobar Donoso’s 1941 Exposición, the editors of

this volume do not employ any visual or didactic tools to make the Minister’s arguments more

accessible to casual readers. More than a useful guide for non-specialists, Chiriboga’s published

speech constitutes a testament of Ecuador’s position as a member of the international

community. The title of the booklet, Ecuador exhibe ante el mundo la justicia de su causa,

alludes to Ecuador presenting its case before the world, something the Foreign Minister says was

impossible before the advent of the UN.47 The Minister opens and closes his statement by

appealing to the right of smaller nations such as Ecuador to intervene in international affairs, and

to present their plight before the world, which in the case of Ecuador meant voicing the

47 José R. Chiriboga Villagómez, El Ecuador exhibe ante el mundo la justicia de su causa (Quito, Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1960), 6. MCYP-GUARDERAS-FG140.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

sentiments of injustice and territorial usurpation behind the declaration of nullity.48 To prove that

the intervention was successful is not really the goal of the publication of the Foreign Minister’s

speech in the UN, and the intervention itself was likely not meant to achieve anything more

concrete than asserting Ecuador’s presence in opposition to that of Peru. Ultimately, the goal of

Chiriboga’s Ecuador exhibe ante el mundo at that time was to raise Ecuador’s profile in the context of the conflict.

Other works of propagandistic nature from this period maintain the focus on the labours of the government in the realm of international politics. However, they focus less on the work of the Foreign Ministry and more on the figure of President Velasco Ibarra, who is usually portrayed as a leader whose ability to gather and lead the masses set him apart from past presidents. One of these is a booklet also published in late 1960. Called El Ecuador amazónico: nueva política internacional, it is a transcription of a public speech that took place in October 20 of the same year before a local crowd of politicians, military and civilian authorities, and students from Quito. More interestingly, it is part of a series of three booklets edited by a governmental office not directly related to foreign policy in any way, the Visitaduría General de la Administración.49 The office’s director explains in the introduction that the booklets were

intended to answer the President’s “patriotic call” to voice the sentiment that the Rio Protocol

was unjust, and therefore that the nullity thesis is justified.50 In other words, the pamphlet edited by the Visitaduría General possesses some of the characteristics of the other works from government offices, in that it attempts to bring the new policy closer to the population, and that

48 Chiriboga Villagómez, El Ecuador exhibe ante el mundo, 31. 49 No such office exists in Ecuador today, but an office with the same name in Mexico explains its functions include the “technical-legal evaluation, supervision, inspection, and control” of various public officials and officers, as well as the investigation of crimes within the government. México. Procuraduría General de la República, “¿Qué es la Visitaduría General?” Gob.mx https://www.gob.mx/pgr/acciones-y-programas/que-es-la-visitaduria-general. 50 Universi Zambrano Romero, Introduction to El Ecuador amazónico: nueva política internacional, by José María Velasco Ibarra (Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1960), 3. MCYP-LARREA-CML11019.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

its focus is projecting strength and unity inside Ecuador.

The other official source from this time is Martirio Ecuatoriano, the work that introduced this chapter. This booklet gives great importance to images when trying to convey its message of perceived diplomatic injustice, and national unity. This is a strategy also present in El Ecuador amazónico. Unlike Chavez Franco, who includes a colonial map at the end of Cartilla Patria,

and unlike the anonymous author of Martirio ecuatoriano, who employs allegorical imagery

with religious references in the booklet’s cover, the editor from the Visitaduría General chose to

reproduce several images of the meeting in which Velasco Ibarra spoke. In these pictures, the

main elements are the towering figure of the President addressing his audience, and the people

listening to him. The photographer took the image in such a way that the disciplined crowd form

a series of rows and columns that physically lead to the populist leader, who appears in the right-

third instead of the centre of the picture [Figure 3.2].51 It is as if the editors wanted to highlight

their view of Velasco Ibarra’s leadership, paternalistic but connected to the people. The use of

images to convey a message of El Ecuador amazónico is much more subtle than that of Martirio

Ecuatoriano, whose author saw the need to explain the religious allegory of the crucifixion by

identifying each biblical character with a state actor related to the Rio Protocol. Nevertheless,

both constitute evidence of a new way of bringing the dominant, nation-building discourse on the

territorial conflict to an ever-increasing audience.

Analysis of propagandistic literature from the two decades between the War of 1941 and

the fourth presidency of Velasco Ibarra has revealed some interesting aspects of the development

of the Ecuadorian discourse on its conflict with Peru. These sources appeared in two waves that

coincided with the more intense moments of what was otherwise a long and simmering conflict.

51 Velasco Ibarra, El Ecuador amazónico, 7.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

The first of these waves was, predictably, the months immediately before and after war broke out

in Ecuador’s southern provinces. The second wave coincided with–and was a product of–the

dramatic turn in the country’s foreign policy during the populist leader’s fourth term as

President. This does not mean that authors did not publish on the dispute in the two decades

between the two events. Given the nature of the propagandistic literature analyzed, the authors of

these sources, which by during this part of the twentieth century were usually government offices

or people closely linked to the regime, were more likely to produce them at times when there was

a need for popular and international support. The years of 1941-42, and 1960-61 were such

periods, as they marked the beginning of new phases in the dispute with Peru, either thanks to

the defeat in El Oro and Loja, or due to the introduction of a new, apparently radical policy

regarding the conflict. It is important to remember that the seeming hiatus in literature

production, and the apparently radical discursive change of 1960, are the product of a long

process of discussion and negotiation where dissenting voices existed as well. The process

started in the nineteenth century, as shown in the first chapter, and which did not stop after the

initial shock of the War of 1941 and Rio Protocol of 1942.

Explaining the War and the Rio Protocol: Monographs and Essays on the

Territorial Conflict

The years and months before the War of 1941 and Rio Protocol saw an ever-increasing amount of diplomatic and military activity inside and between Ecuador and Peru. This was also

the case, to a certain extent, with the production of literature on the subject, a trend that

continued after the end of hostilities, the occupation of El Oro and Loja, and the signing of the

Rio Protocol. The previous section dealt with those sources that were propagandistic in nature,

that is, those that were produced by government offices or authors linked to them. Among other

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis things, analysis of these sources suggested that their purpose was to share and advance the government’s work and policies during key moments of the long dispute with Peru, and that as such, they tended to appear during these periods, namely 1941-42 and 1960-61. This section deals with a different but related type of published source, monographs and essays that discussed one or more specific aspects of the territorial conflict more deeply than their propagandistic counterparts. As such, these sources did not exclusively appear during the key periods at the beginning of the 1940s and 1960s, but were published throughout these two decades. Analysis of the monographic literature of the time shows that, despite the diversity in themes and approaches to studying and narrating the dispute and the war and Rio Protocol, as a whole they constitute evidence of how the hegemonic discourse on the conflict was primarily concerned with explaining Ecuador’s military defeat and occupation, while at the same time perpetuating and strengthening the main narrative of the conflict, which had been in development since the nineteenth century. In other words, the War of 1941 did not signify a discursive rupture with the predominant discourse on the dispute, but it did represent a new focus on the more recent and traumatic event.

Among the sources from before the War of 1941, it is worth mentioning two by Pío

Jaramillo Alvarado, a noted journalist and writer from Loja, one of the southern provinces that became the theatre of the war. The first is a lengthy, two-volume study whose title and subject,

La Presidencia de Quito refer to the colonial administrative unit commonly known as the

Audiencia or Presidencia de Quito. In this work, Jaramillo Alvarado analyzes a popular theme in

Ecuadorian literature on the conflict, the Audiencia de Quito as legal and historical precedent of the nation and state of Ecuador. In this sense, his work pays homage and is heir to the work of the different authors who wrote on the conflict in the previous half century, which the author

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

does when he calls his work Memoria histórico-jurídica, like Honorato Vázquez’s study, and when acknowledging the common legal approach of earlier works.52 However, whereas the

purpose of the earlier scholars and authors had been to prove the colonial origins of Ecuador’s

claim to the disputed Amazonian territories, Jaramillo Alvarado aims to discuss the history of the

Audiencia de Quito as the primary source of Ecuadorian nationality, for him the best way of

proving the country’s territorial rights. Moreover, his perspective on the dispute is fundamentally

different from previous works, to the point that he calls his study a revision. He claims that he does not write history with a presentist mindset, as scholars and diplomats working under the government’s auspices had. Instead, he thinks that situating the dispute in its “historical and environmental context” constitutes the best defense of Ecuador’s position. The reason is that history shows the territoriality the country has enjoyed since the time of its colonial predecessor, the Presidencia de Quito. Jaramillo Alvarado even suggests that this territoriality has existed since pre-Hispanic times, given that the fabled Kingdom of Quito was an organized state equal to that of the Incas.53 The Lojano journalist’s attempt to historicize the dispute in its own terms

shows the existence of the idea that the dispute with Peru posed a threat to Ecuador’s life as a

nation. Interestingly, even though La Presidencia de Quito came in 1938, years before the Rio

Protocol, there is a clear sense of consummated injustice in his view that the book is a call to the

conscience of America and the world. Such idea of injustice likely comes from Jaramillo

Alvarado’s view of the conflict as existential threat, but also because by this time it was clear

that the negotiations in Washington, on which the country’s diplomacy had put all its hopes for a

52 Pío Jaramillo Alvarado, La Presidencia de Quito: memoria histórico-jurídica de los orígenes de la nacionalidad ecuatoriana y de su defensa territorial (Quito: El Comercio, 1938), 3. MCYP-MUÑOZ-LM1202. 53 Jaramillo Alvarado, La Presidencia de Quito, 310, where the author suggests Ecuadorian nationality comes from Atahualpa’s “reorganization” of the Kingdom of Quito during the civil war with Huascar.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis solution, could lead nowhere.54

The second of Jaramillo Alvarado’s works from this time is a lecture delivered to an audience of secondary school students in Guayaquil in 1940. It took place soon after Brazilian

President Getúlio Vargas, during a visit to Manaus in the mid-Amazon, called for a conference of Amazonian countries to discuss their common interests in the region.55 The content of the talk itself is typical within the context of discourses on the conflict, and the author resorts to the view that Ecuadorian sovereignty in the area originates in the early colonial expeditions to the region, as well as from the work of missionaries in later centuries.56 Jaramillo’s conference is noteworthy within the development of the discourse on the conflict because it aims to show the justice and significance of including Ecuador within the group of Amazonian nations, a status that Peru had questioned or denied in the past.57 His view of the role of the Oriente in the construction of Ecuadorian sovereignty is less explicitly Quito-centric than that of Archbishop de la Torre. However, he is conscious of the importance of what is said about the Oriente for the development of Ecuador’s position on the dispute with Peru.

An opponent of Carlos Arroyo del Río named Pedro Concha Enríquez completed a manuscript in 1942 that would not be published until 1945, after the fall of the Liberal President.

As he mentions in the short introduction, Concha Enríquez’s goal is “to allocate responsibilities

54 Jaramillo Alvarado, La Presidencia de Quito, 4. He likely completed the book in mid-1938, the date of the introduction, and although the conference only ended in October, it must have been clear, after 2 years of negotiations, that little could be achieved. Ecuador. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Síntesis del desarrollo de las negociaciones limítrofes, 14, gives January 21 as the date when an impasse ended any useful negotiations between the parts. 55 Getúlio Vargas, “Discurso do rio Amazonas” Revista Brasileira de Geografia 4, 2 (April-June 1942): 261. 56 Jaramillo Alvarado, Ecuador nación amazónica, 7. References to the missions appear in 9-10. 57 A Peruvian map from 1913 shows that country’s border with Ecuador running along the Eastern reaches of the Ecuadorian Andes, Carlos Vallejos Z., Perú mapas administrativos ca. 1913 [El Perú en 1913 trazado por la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima y mandado publicar y distribuir gratuitamente en el XXV aniversario de su institución por su socio fundador Excmo. Sr. Guillermo E. Billinghurst, Presidente de la República] (Lima: Carlos Fabri, 1913). Biblioteca Nacional de España-Fondo antiguo (anterior a 1958)-MV/25 56272-1001. Also available at Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, http://bdh.bne.es/bnesearch/detalle/bdh0000018616. The Foreign Ministry’s Síntesis del desarrollo, Map 2, shows a line called “furthest Peruvian claim” that corresponds with the 1913 map’s borders.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

and responsible parties” for the tragedy that led to the Rio Protocol of the same year. Sanción, as

the manuscript is named, is likely the earliest example of a way of discussing the conflict that

became more common during the first decade after the events of 1941-42. Along with the commander of the army and the Foreign Minister, the author of Sanción argues that the main responsible for the defeat is Arroyo del Río himself, who had been a tyrant working behind the shadows of a previous regime, and who during the war cared more about protecting himself than the invaded southern provinces.58 Concha Enríquez completed Sanción a few months after the events he discusses, writing in secret during a time when Arroyo del Río exercised power in a police state. His manuscript is an early example of a trend that became common during the first decade after the war and the Rio Protocol, one in which authors searched for explanations to the

“Ecuadorian tragedy,” as he calls it. The author’s allocation of responsibility to the country’s

head of state is perhaps predictable for someone as chronologically close to the events as he was.

However, Concha Enríquez also hints at some structural reasons that made an effective response

to the Peruvian Army more difficult, such as the secrecy with which diplomacy was conducted,59

lack of professionalism in the Ecuadorian military,60 and the influence of Conservatives and

Falangists in the government, especially the foreign ministry.61 Some of these explanations were

echoed in later sources, especially those regarding the social and political role of the armed

forces.

Concha Enríquez’s manuscript from 1942 signals a significant, if understandable, shift in

the focus of the discourse on the Ecuador-Peru conflict, away from the study of colonial titles

58 Pedro Concha Enríquez, Sanción: documentos y comentarios sobre la tragedia ecuatoriana del año 1941, (manuscript, December 3, 1942), 1. MCYP-MUÑOZ-LM1030. 59 Concha Enríquez, Sanción, 9. 60 Concha Enríquez, Sanción, 20. 61 Concha Enríquez, Sanción, 8.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

and the administration of the Audiencia de Quito, and more towards finding a place for the war

and Rio Protocol, all within the context of the nation-building efforts that were present behind

most publications on the territorial conflict. Julio Tobar Donoso, who signed the Rio Protocol

and authored some of the propagandistic literature from this time, published a book in 1945 that

became subject of much commentary and reproduction afterwards, La invasión peruana y el

Protocolo de Río. This is a lengthy study whose treatment of the territorial dispute and armed

conflict of 1941-42 that summarizes the historical development of the dominant discourse behind

its production and influence. On one hand, the book’s title and introduction allude directly to the

recent shock of the war, and to Tobar Donoso’s explicit goal of pinpointing responsibilities for

the military and diplomatic disaster.62 On the other hand, the author’s goal of providing a

historical explanation for the events, evident in the work’s subtitle, antecedentes y explicación

histórica, is a reference to a way of studying the subject that is found in most works on the

dispute of the previous hundred years, from Pedro Moncayo’s 1860 Exposición, to Pío Jaramillo

Alvarado’s Presidencia de Quito. In his best-known work, Tobar Donoso combines historical and legal arguments to prove Ecuador’s unquestionable ownership of the disputed territories.

Similar to many of the earlier works on the subject, Tobar Donoso sees the conflict as

deriving from two fundamental factors that determined the outcome of 1941-42, Ecuador’s

military and economic weakness, and Peru’s perfidy and duplicity.63 Moreover, even though

Ecuador’s limited and tenuous control and domination of the Ecuador-Peru borderlands became

evident to everyone only after the events of 1941-42, the fundamental perspective of nation-

building derived from the history of the conflict still depended on the perceived coherence and

solidity of the well-known Ecuadorian claims to legal, historical, and cultural descent from the

62 Foreword to Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, xi. The foreword is credited to an unnamed editor. 63 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 1.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

Spanish colonial establishment. Such discursive coherence gave the dominant discourse of the

conflict its legitimacy before the citizenry, linking the conflict to the existence of the nation. For

example, the former canciller argues that the legal principle Uti Possidetis, synonymous with

republican life, could only be upheld if Spanish America maintained the full extent of the territorial grants of the Spanish monarch, despite the existence of competition for land between caudillos and states during and after the Independence era.64 In addition, the Audiencia de

Quito’s own legitimacy as the political entity from which Ecuador derives, comes from the

supposedly unquestionable existence of the pre-Hispanic Kingdom of Quito. This is important because the former minister adheres to this narrative, first depicted in Jesuit historian Juan de

Velasco’s Historia del Reino de Quito in 1789,65 despite the fact that it had never had any

archaeological or documentary basis, and despite the fact that early works of Ecuadorian

archaeology and academic history from previous decades had reinforced the idea that the

kingdom was a legend.66 There is reason to think that the former Canciller was aware of this

sacrifice of historical accuracy for the sake of nation-building. In his introduction to a volume of

collected works of Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño–the founder of Ecuadorian archaeology and an

ardent critic of the legend of the Kingdom of Quito–67 Tobar Donoso recounts that Jijón y

Caamaño’s 1919 article “Examen crítico de la veracidad de la Historia del Reino de Quito”

caused great controversy in learned circles precisely because it “destroyed lovingly maintained

64 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 2. 65 Juan de Velasco, Historia del Reino de Quito en la América meridional, escrita por el presbítero Dn. Juan de Velasco, nativo del mismo reino, tomo II y parte II que contiene la historia antigua, año 1789 (Quito: Imprenta de Gobierno por Juan Campuzano, 1841), Libro 1, 1-25. MCYP-JIJÓN-J007455. For Velasco, the ancient kingdom corresponds to the antiquity of the Kingdom of Quito, another name used to refer to his native Audiencia or Presidencia de Quito. O. Hugo Benavides, Making Ecuadorian Histories: Four Centuries of Defining Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 39-40 notes that the work of Velasco was ideologically charged from the time of its production, and remained so the following two centuries. 66 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 3. Benavides, Making Ecuadorian Histories, 39-40. 67 Benavides, Making Ecuadorian Histories, 37.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

legends,” by which he meant the influence of Juan de Velasco’s Historia del Reino de Quito.68

Moreover, even though this introduction appeared some fifteen years after La invasion peruana,

Tobar Donoso surely knew of the controversy long before, as he and Jijón y Caamaño were

members of Ecuador’s elite institution Academia Nacional de Historia, in whose journal the

archaeologist published the controversial article in 1919.69 Partly due to the privileged status

accorded to the work of someone directly involved in the conflict, Tobar Donoso’s inclusion of

the Kingdom of Quito among the conflict’s antecedents shows that this legendary entity had fully

become a foundational myth of Ecuadorian nationality, to the point that this educated diplomat

was willing to ignore the controversy surrounding the kingdom’s historicity for the sake of

constructing a coherent discourse in which Peru and Ecuador were perpetual rivals.70

Tobar Donoso reproduces the dominant discourse of the conflict as national narrative in

other ways in La invasión peruana, for example when he accords great significance to the work

of religious missionaries in the Amazon,71 or in his discussion of the historical trajectory of the

Cédula of 1802.72 However, he is also critical of the work of other authors who wrote

extensively on the conflict and their interpretation of the colonial titles used to defend Ecuador’s

territorial claims.73 He accuses Honorato Vázquez of preparing a rushed defense of Ecuador’s

position during the Spanish Arbitration process, and that the Ecuadorian refutation to the Cédula

68 Julio Tobar Donoso, Introduction to Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, (Puebla: J.M. Cajica, 1960), 18. Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/jacinto-jijon-y-caamano--0/html/0009a752-82b2- 11df-acc7-002185ce6064_8.html#I_4. 69 Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, “Examen crítico de la veracidad de la Historia del Reino de Quito del P. Juan de Velasco, de la Compañía de Jesús,” Boletín de la Sociedad Ecuatoriana de Estudios Históricos Americanos 1,1 (1919): 49. The article itself is unsigned, but Tobar Donoso credits Jijón y Caamaño as author, Introduction to Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, 18-19. 70 The 1982 edition of La invasión peruana I consulted clearly identifies the author’s role as former Foreign Minister, and his name was well known by school children precisely as an actor in the narrative of the conflict. 71 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 48. 72 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 22. 73 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 42.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

of 1802 was based on a misinterpretation of this document.74 More generally, Tobar Donoso’s

criticism introduces a historical theme that was echoed in later sources. He criticized the way

governments and the diplomatic establishment conducted the country’s foreign policy, accusing

it of short-sightedness and negligence.75 In other words, the diplomat’s indictment of Ecuadorian

diplomacy shows that, like many of his contemporaries, he sought to find an explanation to the

shock of 1941-42. Some of the distant causes he offers are in tune with what we saw in earlier

sources regarding the state’s ability or willingness to colonize the disputed areas, which in turn

point to endemic instability, and to military and economic weakness.76 More interesting are the

proximate causes of the defeat. These include lack of professionalism in the armed forces,

causing a defeatist sentiment as well as lack of adequate arms, and the improper integration of

the peripheral zones that came under attack.77 These regions had no connecting roads to the rest

of the country, and their inhabitants lacked patriotism to engage in a civilian resistance.78 This

last suggestion regarding civilian resistance seems outrageous even today, coming from someone

who as minister likely did not leave the relative safety of the capital and the halls of government except for diplomatic trips. However, the idea that something needs to be done with the army does appear in other sources from this time, and it corresponds to the theme of a general re-

formulation of the social and political role of Ecuador’s army.

Tobar Donoso’s La invasión peruana is a long and complex mixture of historical and

legal studies, and the diplomat’s own testimony as the person who signed the Rio Protocol for

Ecuador. It reproduces and reinforces the already dominant narrative of the conflict, in which the

74 Tobar Donoso, La Invasión Peruana, 44. 75 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 35. 76 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 88. A deeper analysis of the distant causes appears in 253. I refer here to those works on the colonization of the Oriente, especially those by Alomía, who complains bitterly about Peru’s success and Ecuador’s failure to establish a city in the area. 77 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 241-42, 246. 78 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 248.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

image of Ecuador is that of a weaker country whose rights the stronger, Machiavellian Peru

systematically violated, from the time of the Gran Colombia, to the War of 1941. This is the

main status the book acquired in the decades after its publication. Nevertheless, its author also

introduces, in the general conclusions, important observations that go against the narrative of

Ecuadorian victimization as nation-building. The most significant of these is that the Protocol

was not the primary responsible for the loss of the Oriente, and instead it may have served to

stop and reverse much of the Peruvian advance along the northern tributaries of the Marañón.79

His mention of the 1936 Act of Lima, and the way it served as basis for the boundaries of the Rio

Protocol, was not taken up in later sources, which tend to portray the territorial arrangement of

1942 as one of massive territorial loss almost overnight.80 Accordingly, he points out that the

real loss from the Protocol was less than 13,000 square kilometres, not half the country’s

territory, and that it was Peru who ceded the most, given its positions by the end of 1941.81

These are observations Tobar Donoso makes to protect and justify his role in the events, but they

are worth noticing because they show there were other ways of interpreting the defeat of 1941-

42, even within a work that otherwise reinforces the dominant ideas of nationhood and

territoriality.

Leonardo Chiriboga, a self-described Socialist military officer and opponent of Arroyo

del Río, wrote while in prison a treatise titled Sepultureros de la Patria–gravediggers of the

Patria. Continuing with the search for explanations to the recent confrontation, he tries to find in

his book those responsible for the “great shame of 1941”.82 Politically speaking, Chiriboga’s

79 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 550. 80 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 551. 81 Tobar Donoso, La invasión peruana, 462. Peru’s intention to use the new positions as basis for a new line appears in 551. 82 Leonardo Chiriboga O., Sepultureros de la Patria (enjuiciamiento de las responsabilidades): para la historia del desastre nacional de 1941 (Quito: Rafael Armendaris, 1945), 6. MCYP-LARREA-CML10057.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

Socialist identification placed him opposite to Tobar Donoso, who was a Conservative closely linked to the Catholic Church.83 Nevertheless, both authors stress the responsibility of the diplomatic establishment from the previous half century, which for Chiriboga had been ineffective, hesitant, and trained for appeasement.84 Chiriboga even echoes the sentiments of

Concha Enríquez and Tobar Donoso when he states that political intrigue and lack of adequate leadership, preparedness, and training turned the military’s commanding posts into political rewards, resulting in poor discipline and morale. 85 In other words, discussion of the territorial conflict was quickly becoming an avenue for discussing the reformulation of the nature and role of one of the state’s key institutions. Chiriboga, a lieutenant-colonel in the army, gives some hints of the scale of his vision for the new role of the armed forces that go beyond simple calls for patriotism and reform. In his final remarks, he calls future officers to lead the country to a rebirth of its armed forces to resist the imperialism of the southern neighbour. The way to achieve this rebirth, he suggests, is to become professional officers of quality, and above all to

“make of the military profession a true priesthood” to become invincible and look for redress to the injustice of the war and Rio Protocol.86

One year after Tobar Donoso and Chiriboga published their studies, another army officer,

Col. Rafael Puente, published his contribution to the discussion on the parties responsible for the defeat in El Oro and Loja. As in the case of Leonardo Chiriboga’s Sepultureros de la Patria,

Puente’s La mala fe peruana y los responsables del desastre de Zarumilla presents a narrative that explains the reasons for the military defeat of 1941, at the same time trying to find out who needs to be blamed for it, reflecting on the future role of the armed forces in national life, while

83 Ayala Mora, “La represión arroísta,” 21. 84 Chiriboga O., Sepultureros de la Patria, 34-35. 85 Chiriboga O., Sepultureros de la Patria, 132. 86 Chiriboga O., Sepultureros de la Patria, 240-41.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

subscribing to and reinforcing the dominant discourse of nationhood through the conflict.

Regarding the issue of responsibilities of the military defeat, he blames recently ousted Carlos

Arroyo del Río, along with Julio Tobar Donoso, and a few military commanders.87 Furthermore,

besides blaming those in power during the war, Puente ventures an explanation of the distant

causes of the conflict, which he does in terms of the teleological narrative of Peruvian perfidy

and Ecuadorian righteousness dating from pre-Hispanic times.88 This theme is present in studies

of the territorial dispute since the end of the nineteenth century, which testifies to its

effectiveness as a narrative element that provides an easy, overarching explanation to the

complexities of diplomacy. However, this line of argumentation is less powerful than the one

regarding the recent war, as Puente utilizes the narrative of responsibilities to introduce his own

vision for the future of the Ecuadorian army as defender and embodiment of the nation. He

explains that, whereas in the past the armed forces have been little more than praetorian guards

preoccupied with appointing and unseating presidents, to become better defenders of the

country’s sovereignty they should not be involved in – or even know about – the world of

politics. The endemic instability of Ecuador’s politics could be remediated in this manner.89

Most importantly, Puente wants to turn the armed forces into the very heart of national life. An

appropriate defense of the territory implies seeing the military as the most important institution

of the state from which all others emanate, including cultural, political, and civil ones.90 Even the

country’s economy and industries should revolve around the military, which would guarantee the

army’s constant preparedness in the case of war.91 In sum, the idea that the army needs to be

87 Rafael A. Puente, La mala fe peruana y los responsables del desastre de Zarumilla (Quito: Editora Moderna, 1946), 300. MCYP-LARREA-CML10098. 88 Puente, La mala fe peruana, 3. He elaborates on this theme throughout the first half of the study, for example when discussing the Inca invasion of Quito, 5. 89 Puente, La mala fe peruana, 309. 90 Puente, La mala fe peruana, 310. 91 Puente, La mala fe peruana, 311.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

reorganized reaches a new level in Puente, as he imagines Ecuador’s economy and institutions to

be organized around a perceived constant threat of war from the south.

In 1952, Chiriboga published a second work about the War of 1941, ¿Pudo el Ecuador

ser agresor en 1941?, in which the idea of nullity of the Rio Protocol appears for the first time.

His reasoning, which came eight years before Velasco Ibarra made it official policy, shows that

the Rio Protocol of 1942 is invalid because it was signed while the country was under armed

occupation, and because it suffers from “vicio de subrepción,” given that “documentary,

geographical, and geological truths” were kept from the signing parties to force a result at the

end of the Rio conference in 1942.92 Such a thesis comes at the end of a line of argumentation

that shares many of the arguments behind the later declaration of nullity. One of these is the idea

that Ecuador had an undeveloped sense of nation, that it lacked the cohesion necessary to

develop a “national idea” to guide its diplomacy and the colonization the Oriente.93 When discussing the confrontation of 1941, Chiriboga stresses that finding the aggressor does not mean finding solely who shot first, but which nation had been historically geared more towards warfare. In this case, the answer is Peru because it had amassed troops at the border for years before the attack.94 Nevertheless, he implies that such assertiveness is the ideal of strong nation,

precisely because in the southern neighbour it was responsible for the country’s diplomatic and

military success. Another argument from Pudo el Ecuador later presented as one of the reasons

behind the idea of nullity is the historical greed of the southern neighbour over Ecuador’s

“privileged Amazonian lands and southern provinces.” According to this interpretation, the

conquest of Ecuadorian lands began in pre-Hispanic times, continuing through the Independence

92 Leonardo Chiriboga O., ¿Pudo el Ecuador ser agresor en 1941? Verdades para la historia de Sud-América (Quito: La Prensa Católica, 1952), 99. MCYP-MUÑOZ-LM1079. 93 Chiriboga O., Pudo el Ecuador, 5. 94 Chiriboga O., Pudo el Ecuador, 31, 36.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

era and the nineteenth-century colonization of the Amazonia, to the invasion and occupation of

1941-42. It constitutes the “historical truth” kept secret when signing the Rio Protocol, which

makes the treaty suffer from “subrepción”. The other truths, geographical and geological, refer to

the problem with the divortium aquarum between the Santiago and Zamora rivers.95 The year

before the publication of Chiriboga’s second book on the conflict, President Galo Plaza Lasso

had declared the Rio Protocol inexecutable and asked for a “peaceful alternative,” interrupting

border demarcation indefinitely.96 Chiriboga’s idea of nullity is a product of this climate of

revision, but he takes it to an entirely new level, as he even calls for the government to declare

the nullity of every border treaty signed after 1829, something Velasco Ibarra did not do in

1960.97

Another work published during the final years of Galo Plaza’s presidency testifies to the

endurance of a manner of explaining and portraying the Ecuador-Peru, one that focused on the disputed region rather than on the conflict.98 In Los traidores al Ecuador, Ecuadorian

“Orientalist” Domingo Romero Terán, like other authors from the mid-twentieth century, points out the responsible parties of the decade-old war. However, rather than looking at the actions of the diplomatic establishment, political elites, or military command, the self-professed explorer, propagandist, and defender of the Oriente spends considerable time discussing the Amazonian basin from a historical point of view.99 Romero does not write a history of the inhabitants of the

region from their perspective, although the study contains the sole praise of a contemporary

indigenous leader I could find, someone called Tihuiruma who attacked a group of Peruvians

95 For an explanation of the problems of demarcation due to the nature of the divortium aquarum, or watershed divider, between these rivers, see the historical background section in the introduction to this thesis. 96 Bákula, Vol. 2 of Tiempos y testimonios, 331. 97 Chiriboga O., Pudo el Ecuador, 99. 98 Galo Plaza Lasso’s presidency went from 1948 to 1952. He declared the Rio Protocol inexecutable in 1951. 99 Domingo Romero Terán, Los traidores al Ecuador: apuntes para la historia. (Quito: Servicio de Suministros, 1952), 5. MCYP-MUÑOZ-LM1932.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

who had raided his lands.100 Much to the contrary, his narrative spells out ideas of riches and

exoticism of the Oriente implicit in Chiriboga’s second work, and which are prevalent in authors

who commented on the colonization of the region in the late nineteenth century. Within this

narrative, the most interesting element is the debate regarding the status of the region as a rich and fertile part of the country, a debate that seems to have taken place in Ecuadorian society just as it did in Romero himself. Because attempts to find oil reserves in the area were not successful

until the following decade, Romero states that Ecuador’s potential as an oil and mining country

is a myth.101 In line with declarations of Galo Plaza on the potential of Amazonia, Romero Terán

disavows the older idea that the jungle could be exploited for agriculture, except for those parts

closest to volcanoes.102 However, later in the text the Orientalista reveals that, in his personal

opinion, there is oil wealth in the Oriente that has not been found yet, as the foreign companies’

insistence in exploration cannot not be for nothing. The contradictory nature of Romero’s

thoughts reflects a national search for meaning related to the Amazonia, and indirectly, to the

Ecuador-Peru conflict. It is very telling that, despite the study’s title, the author does not discuss

who is to blame for the loss of 1941, or even study the conflict itself. Still, Romero Terán’s

thoughts and work are connected to the theme of nation building through the conflict because he

talks about the disputed region in more detail than most sources of this time. Towards the end of

100 Romero Terán, Los traidores al Ecuador, 38. 101 Romero Terán, Los traidores al Ecuador, 153. President Galo Plaza had declared, after a tour he made to the Oriente in 1952, that the region’s purported riches were no more than a myth and dream to Ecuadorians. Although Plaza was referring to the status of the Oriente as an agricultural region, his declarations, and Romero Terán’s response, came in the wake of the failure of Shell and Standard Oil to find oil reserves in the area. See Ecuador. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores. “Pronunciamientos de Jefes de Estado relativos al Problema Territorial: Edición Provisional” (unpublished manuscript, n.d.), 46. Archivo del Departamento de Soberanía Nacional Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Movilidad Humana (MREMH) - Soberanía Territorial (ST) - Límites con Perú (LP) - Época Moderna 1941-1994 - Box 8. Typewritten manuscript. Oil Production in the Ecuadorian Amazonia started in March 1967, John D. Martz, Politics and Petroleum in Ecuador (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987), 55. 102 Romero Terán, Los traidores al Ecuador, 156. He alludes to a national debate on this subject in 161.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

the book the author calls authorities to integrate the region more effectively than ever before,

stating that the prosperity or ruin of the whole country depends on it.103

Most authors approached the issue of the Oriente by focusing on the importance of a specific part of that region–and of the Ecuador-Peru conflict itself–for continental peace and the development of solidarity. Homero Viteri Lafronte, Foreign Minister in the late 1920s, leader of the Ecuadorian delegation during the Washington conference of 1936-38, and ambassador to

Mexico, published in 1952 a series of articles collectively called Ecuador y su salida propia al

Marañón. In them, he argued in favour of Ecuador obtaining a sovereign outlet to the Marañón

River, a possibility that arose from the suspension of border demarcation in the Cordillera del

Cóndor.104 Viteri Lafronte begins by making two assumptions from which his argument follows.

First, that Ecuador’s colonial and independence-era titles are still valid documents for claiming the entirety of the northern upper Amazon, even in the aftermath of the war of 1941.105 He

makes this assumption despite the existence of a ratified international treaty, the Rio Protocol,

whose outline for a border undoubtedly supersedes these titles, and despite the fact that this

Protocol does not contemplate a sovereign access to the Marañón for Ecuador. Second, he assumes that the answer to the legal problems arising from a possible revision to a treaty can be solved by appealing to justice, by which he meant providing redress to a perceived historical injustice, in this case denying Ecuador access to the Amazon River and the Atlantic.106 It is not possible to know whether a seasoned diplomat such as Viteri Lafronte actually thought that

103 Romero Terán, Los traidores al Ecuador, 192. 104 Homero Viteri Lafronte, Ecuador y su salida propia al Marañón (Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1952), 6-7. MCYP-GUARDERAS-FG133. 105 References to the colonial and independence eras as sources of rights appear throughout the book, for example Viteri Lafronte, Ecuador y su salida, 13-14, 55-58, and 65-66. Although in page 69 he says the country is willing to leave the titles aside to negotiate a new solution, the mention of these means for him they are still valid and possess legal force. 106 Viteri Lafronte, Ecuador y su salida, 7-8.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

rejecting or changing an instrument of International Law was feasible or realistic. In any case,

his call for justice indicates that the most significant part of the claim for an outlet to the

Marañón, in the context of the development of an Ecuadorian discourse on the conflict, is his

awareness of the emotional effects the events of 1941-42 in Ecuadorian society, as these were

foremost in the minds of those authors writing about the conflict in subsequent years. In this sense, Viteri Lafronte’s articles are not too different from those from authors who looked for responsible parties to blame for the military defeat. Moreover, arguing for a sovereign outlet to the Amazon is a form of imagining a future for the country, much like Puente and Chiriboga did from a military perspective. For Viteri, a career diplomat, the future does not include a prominent role for the armed forces, but it does imply that Ecuador’s prosperity and self-value depended upon boundaries that correct the wrongs of its conflict with Peru. Velasco Ibarra’s declaration of nullity turned the idea of redress for the perceived injustice into state policy, and its origins are certainly here, in these earlier works thst identified the need for such a redress.

During the fourth administration of Velasco Ibarra in 1960-61, several authors contributed to the discussion that followed the declaration of nullity of 1960. Colombian scholar

Jesús María Yepes gave several speeches in Ecuadorian universities and published a study on

Ecuador’s “border controversy.” Regarding Ecuador’s new policy on the dispute, he

sympathized with Ecuador’s search for redress for the injustice of 1941-42, and supported the

Ecuadorian establishment’s quest for having their case for nullity heard before hemispheric and

world organizations.107 In addition, he agreed with the idea that the Rio Protocol suffers from

“vices” that compromise its validity, but the bulk of his analysis follows the same lines as many

of the Ecuadorian authors who wrote on the conflict before and after the Rio Protocol, stressing

107 Jesús María Yepes, La controversia fronteriza entre el Ecuador y el Perú (Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1960), 17-18. MCYP-GUARDERAS-FG138.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

for example that Ecuador’s rights originated in Quito’s status as discoverer of the river due to

Orellana’s expedition in 1542,108 as well as from religious missions to Amazonia.109 Yepes’s

significance for the development of the dominant Ecuadorian discourse on the conflict rests in

the fact that he was a foreign scholar writing on the matter. The country had had difficulty

finding allies or even support for its refusal to honour an international treaty. The initial

declarations of Velasco Ibarra and his canciller Chiriboga created a crisis with the four guarantor

countries. When these countries upheld the validity of the Rio Protocol, mobs attacked their

embassies in Quito, and the Peruvian and Ecuadorian heads of state exchanged veiled threats of conflict, which were not considered empty at the time.110 Ecuador was sailing into uncharted territory with its declaration of nullity, and the subsequent crisis showed that it would be difficult to find anything other than sympathy from other states and organizations. Therefore, Ecuadorian authorities took the interest of a Colombian scholar to show that they were not completely alone in their view. Both of Yepes’s works were published in Ecuador, by the Casa de la Cultura

Ecuatoriana, which had a history of publications related to the topic, and by the Ministries of

Education and Foreign Relations. The words of Yepes were used as an instrument of propaganda both within the country – hence the Ministry of Education’s participation – and as part of its international policy. In this sense, Yepes’s work served to promote the government’s policy regarding the conflict, the nullity thesis, by suggesting that it had some international support.

Conclusion

The monographs and essays included in this chapter, which were written in the two

108 Yepes, La controversia fronteriza, 19-20. 109 Jesús María Yepes, El Ecuador país amazónico. La nulidad absoluta del Protocolo de Río de Janeiro y el panamericanismo (Quito: Ministerio de Educación-Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 1961), 14. MCYP- GUARDERAS-FG136. 110 Zook, Zarumilla-Marañón, 224-25.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

decades between the War of 1941 and the end of the fourth velasquismo are more diverse than

their counterparts from before this time, in that the authors are not as limited to high-profile

politicians or people directly involved in Ecuador’s diplomacy or government. Career diplomats

such as Tobar Donoso and Viteri Lafronte still published works on the conflict, but others came

from the army, and in the case of Yepes, from academia. The fact that the military defeat of 1941

is often interpreted in these sources as a shock and humiliation for the country and its armed

forces may explain the interest of officers in finding an explanation for the war through essays

and monographs on the subject, as well as their calls for a greater social and professional role for

their institution. It is worth mentioning that a series of military dictatorships did take power in

Ecuador between 1960 and 1980, and one author partly credits one of them for the

unprecedented constitutional stability Ecuador enjoyed between 1948 and 1960.111 It is beyond

the purpose of this thesis to investigate whether the military regimes’ policies reflected the ideas

contained in the sources analyzed here. In any case, the existence of such ideas, and the fact that

they appeared amid an effort to explain the war and Rio Protocol, shows how these events led to

at least a partial reformulation of the aims and nature of the nation-building discourse on the

conflict.

Regarding the development of the discourse on the conflict itself, it is worth noticing how

the sources help to explain how and where the nullity thesis of 1960 emerged, especially given

that the diplomatic crisis it caused shows that the international community considered it an

extreme act, unthinkable and illogical for a state that previously ratified the Rio Protocol. The

propagandistic literature shows how the efforts to promote José María Velasco Ibarra’s speeches

111 John Samuel Fitch, The Military Coup d’état as a Political Process: Ecuador, 1948-1966 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 46. Also see Anita Isaacs, Military Rule and Transition in Ecuador, 1972-92 (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 61-65, for a discussion of the role of the Ecuadorian military as modernizing and reforming force.

The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

regarding the nullity thesis during his fourth presidency sought to infuse a sense of national pride

and unity. Velasco Ibarra read the sentiments of some segments of the population, the ones

whose voices were heard in the sources examined in this chapter. These voices do not represent

the totality of the Ecuadorian people who lived through the war of 1941 and the subsequent years

and decades, but they do show that Velasco Ibarra did not act alone, and that he did not create

the nullity thesis from thin air.

Returning to Martirio ecuatoriano, the booklet with which this chapter started, it is

reasonable to say that its historical significance resides precisely in that it synthesizes and

popularizes these pre-existing tendencies, and that its cover is a graphic interpretation of the anger at the war, as well as an expression of the long tendency to victimize the country while also blaming external actors, which by then included several American countries besides Peru.

Finally, it is also worth noting that, within the generally accusatory tone of the sources that looked for an explanation for the war and Rio Protocol, Pedro Hanníbal Vela and Rafael

Alvarado constitute examples of authors whose explanations of the War of 1941 and Rio

Protocol did not become dominant in later years. This is especially important because it shows that the voices calling for justice and retribution, and voices blaming Carlos Arroyo del Río for the military defeat, were not the only ones circulating in the mid-twentieth century. This in turn shows that the dominant discourse on the conflict only became so through a negotiation in which some voices and ideas were favoured over others, to the point that by 1960 the controversial nullity thesis seemed like the most appropriate way to express the sentiments of the whole country.

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The Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Conflict from the War of 1941 to the Nullity Thesis

Figure 3.1. The cover illustration of Martirio Ecuatoriano. MCYP-LARREA-CML11023. Photograph by author.

Figure 3.2. José María Velasco Ibarra giving a speech before a crowd in Quito, October 20, 1960. From El Ecuador amazónico: nueva política internacional No. 2. MCYP-LARREA-CML10119. Photograph by author.

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3. The Consolidation of the Discourse on the Ecuador-Peru Dispute,

1960s-1980s

In 1973, the historian and nun Leonor del Carmen published the second edition of a textbook titled Historia de límites. In the introduction, she mentions a controversy that took place after the publication of the book’s first edition back in 1967. In that edition, the title of which was Historia Internacional del Ecuador, she had been openly critical of the role that President and Liberal leader Eloy Alfaro played during the crisis that followed failure of the Spanish

Arbitration in 1910, implying that Alfaro, as other presidents before and after him, had “toyed with national honour” for political gain.1 She received harsh criticism in the press, with one politician calling her a traitor and suggesting her expulsion from the country.2 Subsequently the wave of criticism, which resulted in a political report on the textbook, led to an order from the government to confiscate all copies of the textbook.3 Beyond the accuracy of Leonor del

Carmen’s judgment of Eloy Alfaro, there is reason to think that other issues influenced the course of this controversy, including the nun’s openly Conservative political stance, and even her gender, in addition to the symbolic role Eloy Alfaro played in Ecuadorian society. The fate of

Leonor del Carmen’s work strikes as an excessive for a school textbook otherwise concerned with a favourite topic of nationalist education, the conflict with Peru. The political establishment found her words unpalatable because, by criticizing Eloy Alfaro, she appealed to a different idea of nation and the territorial dispute to the dominant one whose development is the subject of this thesis, and in which the viejo luchador was unquestionably patriotic.

1 Leonor del Carmen, Historia de límites del Ecuador (Quito: Don Bosco, 1973), 7. MCYP-LARREA-CML10238. 2 Leonor del Carmen, Historia de límites 27. 3 Carlos Ribadeneira Flores, Prologue to Historia de límites, 9.

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In this chapter I argue that the two decades after Velasco Ibarra’s 1960 declaration of nullity

were a period of consolidation for the dominant discourse on the dispute with Peru, which could

result in both challenges to the narrative of Ecuadorian victimization, and in the case of Leonor

del Carmen, in government censorship. The first section shows how authors closer to the events

of the conflict and the governing classes introduced minor challenges to the dominant narrative

through books that revealed unknown aspects in the history of the conflict, mainly by explaining

these authors’ participation in the events of 1941-42. The second section discusses the writings

of teachers, lawyers, and scholars who, though they were not part of the diplomatic, political, or

military establishment, published textbooks and monographs that were closely aligned with the

state’s vision of publicizing the official narrative of the conflict to create national consciousness

and achieve national unity, as expressed in a study plan by the Ministry of Education for a course

on the history of the conflict from 1969. These sources also reveal that the conflict became an

arena where other issues of gender and nationalism were discussed. The final section of this chapter is a description of what I call the definitive form of the dominant discourse on the territorial dispute, the one displayed in two of President Jaime Roldós’s public speeches during and after the Paquisha incident of 1981. In general, these decades saw the consolidation and

continuity of the discourse on the conflict with Peru, which was precisely what enabled the small

challenges of some authors, and what allows us to read into the larger issues present in the works

of others. The declaration of nullity had become part of this discourse in official and unofficial

publications, even though the military ousted José María Velasco Ibarra from the presidency on

November of 1961. Successive governments, from Carlos Julio Arosemena Monroy (1961-63) to

the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s, maintained the nullity thesis, at least officially,

and through the teaching of the conflict as a subject in schools.

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Portrayals of the Conflict by Members of the Establishment

During the sixties and seventies, people who were close to the diplomatic, political, and

military establishment showed continuing interest in writing about and contributing to the

discussion about the Ecuador-Peru conflict, just as they had in previous decades. These

individuals, former or current diplomats, consuls and foreign ministers, commanders of the army,

and career politicians, produced volumes that looked to bring new insights to the discussion by

revealing, defending, and justifying their own participation in the conflict. This is the case, for

example, of former Foreign Minister Gonzalo Escudero’s Justicia para el Ecuador,4 and of

Army Commander Francisco Urrutia’s Apuntes para la historia: la agresión peruana.5 With the exception of the highly technical work of former President Luis Larrea Alba, the significance of these works is that they constitute first-hand testimonials from people at the forefront of

Ecuador’s diplomatic and territorial establishment.6 Their contribution to the development of the

discourse consisted in providing an authoritative voice that contrasts with that of state-sanctioned textbooks and course plans on the same subject that circulated at the time.

The fourth presidency of Velasco Ibarra, during which time the nullity thesis acquired the status of government policy, ended in November of 1961 amidst widespread crisis, including an economic downturn, confrontation with opposition politicians, and violent protests in the streets.7 However, the nullity thesis itself, which was an accurate reading of the sentiments of a

significant part of the population regarding the war of 1941 and Rio Protocol, continued as a

4 Gonzalo Escudero, Justicia para el Ecuador (Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1968). MCYP-LARREA- CML10079. 5 Francisco Urrutia Suárez, Apuntes para la historia: la agresión peruana (Quito: Editorial Ecuatoriana, 1968). MCYP-MUÑOZ-LM1742. 6 Luis Larrea Alba: La campaña de 1941: la agresión peruana al Ecuador, 2 Vols. (Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1964). MCYP-MUÑOZ-LM3820 (Vol. 1). MCYP-GUARDERAS-FG362 (Vol. 2). 7 The circumstances surrounding the fall of the fourth velasquismo are discussed in Norris, Vol. 2 of El gran ausente, chapter 10.

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policy. More importantly, publications in support of the thesis continued to appear in the months

and years after the end of the fourth velasquismo. Luis Anda Viteri, Consul of Ecuador in Pasto,

Colombia, published a book titled Un tratado inexistente in the early months of 1962.8 This

work, the subtitle of which presents it as a homage to the Spanish discovery of the Amazon

River, argues for the nullity of the Rio Protocol through the familiar combination of legal and

historical arguments used since the time of the Spanish arbitration process. In Anda Viteri, it is

possible to group these arguments in two categories. The first one refers to the idea of Ecuador as

inherently Amazonian, a concept for which the author uses arguments that purportedly show the

country’s ownership of the northern half of the Upper Amazon basin since the time of the

Audiencia de Quito.9 Crucially, he suggests that the various colonial titles also prove Ecuador’s

territorial unity, which included possessions in the Amazonian basin since Colonial times, and

especially after Independence.10

The second concept category of arguments in the work of the consul in Pasto refers to the idea of Ecuadorian victimization at the hands of Peru. In this case, he employs mostly historical arguments to prove that the relations between both countries illustrate how Peru and its people

have constituted a threat to Ecuador and the continent.11 When discussing the War of 1941, Anda

Viteri suggests that Peruvian Commander Eloy Ureta and Adolf Hitler were similar in their

disregard for truces and outside mediation.12 Meanwhile, Ecuador appears in the consul’s narrative sometimes as a victim of its neighbours’ greed and indifference,13 sometimes as a

righteous but naïve defender of peace and legalism, but always convinced of the justice of its

8 Luis Anda Viteri, Un tratado inexistente: homenaje al descubrimiento del río Amazonas (Pasto: n.p., 1962). MCYP-AURELIO-NAFAE07802. 9 Anda Viteri, Un tratado inexistente, 5. 10 Anda Viteri, Un tratado inexistente, 8. 11 Anda Viteri, Un tratado inexistente, 16-17. 12 Anda Viteri, Un tratado inexistente, 20. 13 Anda Viteri, Un tratado inexistente, 26.

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cause and the nullity of the Rio Protocol.14 The consul’s work is remarkably similar in this sense

to the monographs and propagandistic literature of authors from the previous decades, and is

reminiscent of the legal-historical treatises of the early part of the twentieth century. Rather than

lack of creativity, Anda Viteri’s Un tratado inexistente shows how, by the 1960s, an established way of explaining the Ecuador-Peru conflict had become widely accepted among intellectual circles, which led authors to resort to a set of arguments considered more legitimate or more effective when delivering their message of nation-building through territorial victimization. This

way of explaining the conflict is the dominant Ecuadorian discourse on the territorial dispute

with Peru.

Two years after Anda Viteri published his study, former Interim President and Interior

Minister Luis Larrea Alba published La campaña de 1941: la agresión peruana al Ecuador, a

two-volume work in which he discusses both the antecedents and development of the campaign

from a historical, political, and tactical point of view. This study of the war of 1941 is different from similar works for two reasons. First, Larrea Alba’s analysis of the war is highly technical and detailed on the military history side, a rare occurrence when compared to previous authors, who tended to focus on the diplomatic side, or on allocating responsibilities for the disastrous war. For example, rather than reproducing the teleological narrative of Ecuadorian innocence and

Peruvian wickedness, the former President argues that Peru had maintained stable military goals

and achieved sustained development, resulting in well-equipped forces and highly professional

commanders.15 In addition, Larrea Alba situates Peru’s plans and preparations for the war within

the historical context of the time, creating a unique combination of Peruvian strength and

14 Anda Viteri, Un tratado inexistente, 43. 15 Larrea Alba, Vol. 2 of La campaña de 1941, 50.

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Ecuadorian weakness that opened a window of opportunity to the attack of 1941.16 He also

places the war of 1941 within the context of Peru’s long-term military goals and motivations

after the War of the Pacific with Chile. He argues that this episode, a humiliating defeat for Peru

and Bolivia, left a sense of humiliation in Peru’s military establishment, which chose to focus on

the Amazonia in the place of a revenge with Chile.17 In any case, though Larrea Alba’s analysis

of the background to the War of 1941 is more thorough and his focus on the military more

original than most monographs published at the time, he still suggests that the events of 1941-42

show the contrast between Ecuador’s “moral force” and Peru’s opportunistic and aggressive

foreign policy.18 Notwithstanding the originality of Larrea Alba’s military history approach to

the War of 1941, and the quality and depth of argumentation, the teleological narrative is not

absent in his work, and it must be seen as another contribution to the discourse of Ecuador’s

territorial victimization.

Similar to other authors who were members of the armed forces, Luis Larrea Alba

advocates for a stronger military that addresses past humiliations, and which stands above the

tangled world of diplomacy to achieve its objectives.19 Four years later, former Foreign Minister

Gonzalo Escudero contributed to the discussion on the Ecuador-Peru conflict with a study that

also addressed some myths about the nature of diplomacy. His Justicia para el Ecuador is a lengthy work that studies the territorial conflict by describing and defending the author’s role as member of the diplomatic establishment, where he worked for half a century.20 In this sense, his aims are like those of Julio Tobar Donoso, whose work La invasión peruana y el Protocolo de

16 Larrea Alba, Vol. 2 of La campaña de 1941, 66-67. 17 Larrea Alba, Vol. 2 of La campaña de 1941, 51. 18 Larrea Alba, Vol. 2 of La campaña de 1941, 375. 19 Larrea Alba, Vol. 2 of La campaña de 1941, 377. 20 Escudero, Justicia para el Ecuador, 7. He defends his performance as diplomat in 13, stating that it strengthened the sovereignty and dignity of the Patria.

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Río is partly structured as a testimonial.21 Escudero is more openly apologetic than his predecessor, as he states that his aim is to uncover the intentions and motives behind events related to the conflict in which he participated in or witnessed personally.22 While he fully

subscribes to the idea that Ecuador has been a victim of its neighbours’ greater strength and

ambitions,23 he seems to respond to Larrea Alba and other military authors when he stresses that

the story of victimization goes beyond simply blaming the Foreign Ministry.24 For example, he

mentions the growing rift that existed between the military and the ministry in the years

immediately before 1941, a situation that hurt the country’s alertness and defense capabilities

once the confrontation started, as the army failed to obey orders from the government.25

Moreover, he thinks that, while the military commanders of 1941 did not lack patriotism, they

displayed an unrealistic amount of confidence in the situation of the armed forces, whose

precarious situation they knew very well.26

Gonzalo Escudero defends the actions of the diplomatic delegation present at the Rio conference of 1942 when he states that the war of 1941 was not a war of conquest, but instead one whose ultimate objective was to force Ecuador to recognize territories that were already under Peruvian control.27 Although this position is different from that of most authors, it does

not imply that Escudero acknowledges Peruvian de facto sovereignty over the Marañón, or even

that the Oriente was a frontier where for a long time Andean states had limited presence and

control. It simply shows that the diplomat saw the Peruvian colonization of Amazonia as a

21 See chapter 2. 22 Escudero, Justicia para el Ecuador, 8. 23 Escudero, Justicia para el Ecuador, 8. See also 103, where he says that Ecuador learned, during the 1942 Rio Conference, of Colombia-Peru discussions to partition the country. 24 Escudero, Justicia para el Ecuador, 12. 25 Escudero, Justicia para el Ecuador, 23. 26 Escudero, Justicia para el Ecuador, 24. 27 Escudero, Justicia para el Ecuador, 36. On page 99 he states that the most that Ecuador could achieve in the Rio Conference of 1942 was to raise a voice of protest over a consummated act.

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conquest of Ecuadorian lands, a process that had been completed years and decades before 1941.

This is important for his discussion of the subsequent era of the conflict, the one involving the nullity thesis. Escudero thinks the events of 1960 were inevitable, but he does not pay attention to the legal arguments other authors (including Velasco Ibarra) favoured. Instead, he focuses on how the nullity thesis was an expression of the “supremacy of spirit,” and the “force of fate.”28

For example, one of the arguments for the nullity of the Rio Protocol was that the War of 1941 had been a war of conquest, something outlawed in the continent’s international legal system since the late nineteenth century. Using such an argument was not possible for the former

Foreign Minister, given that he thought Peru’s goal in the war had been to force Ecuador to recognize the reality of a process of domination and control that took decades to achieve, but which was fully completed by 1941. Instead of appealing to the victimization of Ecuador as the reason behind the Rio Protocol’s nullity, Escudero is more aware than most authors that the nullity thesis was significant and legitimate for Ecuadorians precisely because it was the expression of collective aspirations to become stronger and greater as a nation.29 This line of reasoning suggests that, more than one century after the publication of Pedro Moncayo’s

Cuestión de límites, it had become socially accepted to acknowledge that much of what was said about the territorial conflict, including the nullity thesis, had the ultimate goal of strengthening the idea of the nation.30

The contribution of Francisco Urrutia Suárez, Commander of the Ecuadorian Army during the war of 1941, to the discourse on the territorial conflict came in a posthumous book called Apuntes para la historia: la agresión peruana, published in the same year as Escudero’s

28 Escudero, Justicia para el Ecuador, 177. 29 Escudero, Justicia para el Ecuador, 182. 30 See chapter 1. I suggested that, even in such early work on the Ecuador-Peru conflict, a nation building intention was identifiable.

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work. Like the former Foreign Minister, Urrutia thinks that his personal experience as member of

the country’s governing classes gave him authority to defend the role of the institution to which

he belonged, the military, and his actions during the events of 1941-42. Like Escudero, and his

fellow military officer and former President Luis Larrea Alba, Urrutia sheds new light on some

elements of the conflict narrative, especially the effectiveness of Independence-era titles as proof

of Ecuadorian sovereignty. He thinks that one of the episodes of the conflict with more

emotional and symbolic load, the Battle of Tarqui and more generally the war of 1829, were on

their own insufficient proof of Ecuador’s territorial rights.31 However, the author’s partial

revision of the narrative of the dispute does not lead to a deeper questioning of the central ideas

of Ecuadorian victimization and Peruvian wickedness.32 He acknowledges that there was certain

inevitability in the longevity of the conflict, which he blames on the difference between Ecuador

and Peru’s territorial goals and the means by which to pursue them. In the end, Urrutia still

thinks Ecuadorian diplomats were responsible for the failed rounds of negotiations and mediation before 1941.33

One decade after the publication of Urrutia and Escudero’s books, Carlos Palacios Sáenz,

a leftist politician with some diplomatic experience, published a book that also contained a

limited revision to the traditional narrative of the territorial conflict. As his book’s title suggests,

La Guerra del 41: el Protocolo de Río de Janeiro no demarcó fronteras definitivas, Palacios

questions some of the common ideas regarding the nature of the war of 1941, and of the

Ecuador-Peru border as established in the Rio Protocol and demarcation process. First, he states

that the Ecuadorian army was not defeated in 1941, given that the small number of troops that

31 Urrutia Suárez, Apuntes para la historia, 9. 32 Urrutia Suárez, Apuntes para la historia, 9. 33 Urrutia Suárez, Apuntes para la historia, 35.

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operated the border outposts in El Oro and the Oriente did not constitute the entirety of

Ecuador’s forces.34 Palacios does not offer much evidence to support this assertion, but he likely

refers to the fact that Arroyo del Río stationed more carabineros as his personal guards, than

there were soldiers fighting at the borders.35 Second, he argues that the Rio Protocol was not the

result of political pressure by the United States during the Rio Conference of Foreign Ministers,

and therefore of United States imperialism. Blaming the Rio Protocol on pressure by the four

guarantor countries, especially the United States, was an explanation other authors commonly

used, for example the anonymous Martirio Ecuatoriano analyzed in the second chapter. Palacios

states that the decision to give away the Oriente had been taken before September of 1941.36

Third, Palacios thinks that the Rio Protocol was not a definitive treaty of borders, only a

preliminary protocol, and it had only established a status quo line similar to the Act of Lima of

1936.37 This is the more important of the challenges Palacios poses to the dominant conflict

narrative, and it is directed at both the Ecuadorian and Peruvian establishments. On the

Ecuadorian side, it means that the leftist politician does not support the nullity thesis, and even

argues that Velasco Ibarra had been hasty when he proclaimed it in 1960. On the Peruvian side,

he disagrees with the Ecuadorian government’s idea that the Protocol is not “perfect” and

perpetual, thus agreeing with the position that Lima had stressed during the diplomatic crisis that

followed Velasco Ibarra’s declaration of 1960.38 Carlos Palacios’s recognition of the validity of

the Rio Protocol constitutes a more open revision of a key aspect of the dominant narrative of the

conflict than those of the other three authors discussed in this section. However, such revision

34 Carlos Palacios Sáenz, La guerra del 41: el Protocolo de Río de Janeiro no demarcó fronteras definitivas (Guayaquil: ARA, 1979), 5. MCYP-MANOSALVAS-MS1140. 35 An idea found in Concha Enríquez, Sanción, 1. See Chapter 2. 36 Palacios Sáenz, La guerra del 41, 5. 37 Palacios Sáenz, La guerra del 41, 6, 154. 38 Palacios Sáenz, La guerra del 41, 6.

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should not be read as the first manifestation of an entirely new narrative such as the one that

stressed Ecuador-Peru brotherhood and solidarity after 1998. Towards the end of the study, he

calls the United States to make amends for the Rio Protocol, and help Ecuador recover its lost

territories, which shows that for him, like for the other authors discussed in this section, he

adhered to the basic view of the Amazonia as inherently Ecuadorian in perpetuity, and to the

narrative of Ecuador’s victimization.39

Larrea Alba, Escudero, Urrutia, and Palacios’s partial revisions and challenges to the

narrative are perhaps the most surprising findings from the two decades after Velasco Ibarra’s

declaration of the nullity of the Rio Protocol. These revisions do not prevent them from adhering

to the idea of Ecuadorian victimization, and of the country’s status as inherently Amazonian. The

existence of these small challenges shows that the discourse itself had become more established by this time, but that discussion was still possible. In addition, it would be inaccurate to see in these authors’ arguments the beginnings of an entirely new set of assumptions about the nature of the conflict, and of Ecuador’s history and national identity. All the authors discussed in this section argue for an ideally strong Ecuadorian nation that addresses the errors of the past inside and outside its borders, but each of them advocates a different the way of achieving it. For Luis

Anda Viteri and Gonzalo Escudero, both career diplomats, the nullity thesis was the best hope available, as they thought it was the clearest expression of the popular sentiment of injustice at the War of 1941 and the Rio Protocol. In contrast, Luis Larrea Alba and Francisco Urrutia

Suárez, members of the upper ranks of the military, link the idea of Ecuadorian national strength to the strength and prestige of its military. In short, their works show how the dominant discourse on the Ecuador-Peru conflict continued to develop after one century of discussion. Palacios

39 Palacios Sáenz, La guerra del 41, 166.

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Sáenz is a special case, as he published his more open revision of the nullity thesis at the start of

the democratic era, much later than the other authors. By then Velasco Ibarra had become

President a fifth and final time, and he had offered a new possible solution to the territorial

conflict by signalling readiness to abandon or at least tone down the nullity thesis as government

policy.40

Monographs, Textbooks, and a Study Plan on the History of the Conflict

When discussing the contributions of elite authors to the Ecuadorian discourse on the

territorial conflict, the most significant findings were the small challenges these authors posed to

the narrative as it existed at the time. It is in a way logical to see such challenges coming

precisely from members of the governing classes. Their background and personal experiences

provided them with tools of analysis not readily available to authors not associated with the

military, diplomatic, or political establishment. In contrast, publications of authors outside the

government or the governing class that appeared between the 1960s and the 1980s tended to

adhere more closely to the nationalist script of the conflict. Very often the introduction to their

publications included a goal statement suggesting that the value of these studies resides in their

ability to deliver the dominant discourse of national victimization to wider audiences, especially

students, whose patriotism they hoped to inculcate. In one case, the author expressed that he

wrote a defense of Ecuador’s Amazonian rights as a response to the College of Lawyers of Lima,

and because he wanted to show the patriotism of his own organization, the Academy of Lawyers

of Quito.41 These authors had less interest and maneuvering space to present challenges to the

40 Palacios Sáenz, La Guerra del 41, 153. At that time, he suggested that Ecuador would renounce the nullity thesis, and fully recognize the Rio Protocol, in Exchange for a free port in the Marañón/Amazon. 41 Alfonso María Mora, “El problema territorial ecuatoriano-peruano/El descubrimiento del Río Amazonas” in Ecuador: dos estudios de actualidad (Quito: n.p., 1963), 1. MCYP-GUARDERAS-FG147. Although Mora speaks for the Academy of Lawyers of Quito, his study does not have that professional association’s corporate seal, indicating that it was likely self-published.

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established narrative of the conflict, as the State and society exercised closer scrutiny of the contents of their publications. This was the case of the controversy that followed the first edition of Leonor del Carmen’s textbook in 1967, the anecdote that started this chapter. By the late

1970s, the dominant narrative of the territorial conflict with Peru had acquired such an official status, it had raised such enduring scholarly interest, that it became integrated into Ecuador’s education system. On the sesquicentennial of the War of 1829, the Foreign Ministry organized an essay contest, the winner of which was one of only three female authors who wrote about the conflict.42 When considered together with the contributions by the authors discussed in the previous section – and perhaps more so than these – textbooks and monographs on the Ecuador-

Peru dispute from this period show the social and cultural context in which Jaime Roldós’s definitive manifestation of the discourse appeared, and they help explain their endurance beyond that President’s death.

In 1963, a scholar named Alfonso María Mora self-published a volume with two studies on current affairs, which he named Ecuador: dos estudios de actualidad. The first of these is, rather than the detailed analysis of recent problems that the book’s title suggests, a legal and historical defense of Ecuador’s Amazonian rights, and as such it has much in common with the works of Honorato Vázquez and Enrique Vacas Galindo, the authors whose lengthy legal- historical treatises appeared in the early twentieth century.43 The essay discusses such topics as the colonial titles and nature of the Audiencia de Quito, starting with the Cédula of 1563 that created it. He even praises the works of early twentieth century scholars for compiling that and

42 Rodolfo Pérez Pimentel, Foreword to Significado histórico-jurídico del Tratado de Guayaquil (septiembre 22 de 1829), by María de Lourdes Rodríguez de Alvear (Guayaquil: Centro de Investigación y Cultura Banco Central del Ecuador, 1981), i. MCYP – ECONOMICO – 986.604 R696. The contest had in fact two winners. 43 The current affairs approach is suggested in the book’s subtitle, dos estudios de actualidad. See chapter 1 for a discussion of the works of Vázquez and Vacas Galindo.

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other colonial decrees from Spanish archives. 44 In other words, the author turns Vázquez and

Vacas Galindo, whose studies other authors had both praised and criticized, into characters in the history of the conflict. The lawyer discusses and defends the nullity thesis, and he praises the

Ecuadorian government for formulating it. Mora does not contribute with new arguments or perspectives to the Ecuadorian discourse on the conflict, and to defend the validity of this argument, he cites many of the familiar arguments found in works of previous years. For example, he mentions the issue of inexecutability of the Rio Protocol in the Cordillera del

Cóndor, and that the Protocol was signed under military occupation, thereby lacking the free consent necessary to make treaties legal under the Inter-American legal system.45

The similarities between Mora’s work and studies that were years and decades old do not merit calling it a study of current affairs, even if the territorial dispute was unresolved and, in a way, always current. Where he shows a concern for recent events is in the circumstances surrounding publication of the work itself. The article was a response to a similar article published in Lima by the College of Lawyers. In this sense, the Ecuadorian lawyer wrote a study that reminds of the responses of diplomats of earlier decades. More specifically, it is reminiscent of Julio Tobar Donoso’s 1941 booklet responding to the governments of Lima and the mediator countries, and Homero Viteri Lafronte’s 1952 article arguing for a sovereign outlet to the

Marañón.46 The difference is that neither the Ecuadorian nor the Peruvian professional associations are government organizations, even if some of its members might have been associated with or were part of the regimes in Lima and Quito. The controversy presented in

Mora’s article concerns two private associations, each of which had their own interest in

44 Mora, “El problema territorial,” 13. 45 Mora, “El problema territorial,” 5. 46 Tobar Donoso, Exposición del ministro, 3. Viteri Lafronte, Ecuador y su salida, 5. Also see chapter 2.

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defending the position of their countries. In the case of Mora, he states that the Academy of

Lawyers has always displayed patriotism in defending Ecuador’s Amazonian rights, which indicates that the social prestige gained by contributing to the discussion on the conflict was a powerful motivator for both individuals and private organizations.47

Several years after Mora published his patriotically-minded response to the College of

Lawyers of Lima, Leonor del Carmen published Historia internacional del Ecuador, the textbook on the history of the conflict that caused the controversy described at the beginning of this chapter.48 Regardless of the accuracy of her assessment that the actions of Eloy Alfaro in

1910 had been more out of self-interest than patriotism, her critique of the Liberal leader sounded treasonous to her detractors because it was directed at one of the few truly unifying figures in the country’s history.49 Moreover, Leonor del Carmen was a member of the Catholic

Church, the direct target of the Liberal Revolution’s most virulent attacks and confiscations. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising to see her charge Eloy Alfaro and the Liberal Party with many of the country’s policy mistakes and structural problems, including the crisis of 1910.50 In contrast, she presents nineteenth-century Conservative President Gabriel García Moreno as a model of patriotism, downplaying his dealings with Peru during the crisis of 1859-60.51 Nevertheless, the reaction of those who asked for her expulsion from the country seems excessive even for a period of heightened nationalism. Leonor del Carmen might have been perceived as an easier

47 Mora, “El problema territorial,” 1. 48 The introduction to its second edition explains that the title changed to Historia de límites to comply with the education reform of 1969-70. The study plan for secondary-level courses that resulted from this education reform is analyzed later in this chapter. Leonor del Carmen, Historia de límites, 7. 49 See, for example, “El legado de Eloy Alfaro trasciende pese a 122 años de la Revolución Liberal,” El Telégrafo (Guayaquil), June 7, 2017. Four years after Eloy Alfaro’s death, writer Roberto Andrade argued that publishing the history of Alfaro’s life was a fundamental service to honour the Patria, even if many details were naturally not yet known in their entirety. Vida y muerte de Eloy Alfaro (memorias) (New York: York Printing co., 1916), 3. 50 Leonor del Carmen, Historia de límites, 55, 57. 51 Leonor del Carmen, Historia de límites, 51.

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target, since she was a common member of the church, not one of its leaders. More importantly,

as the author of the introduction to Historia de límites subtly suggests, there might have been

gender considerations behind the “unfair and ignoble attacks” against the historian nun.52 She was not the first member of the Church to publish on the conflict, as Enrique Vacas Galindo,

Federico González Suárez, and others came before her. She was the first nun to do so, and the second woman to write about the conflict. Moreover, her book was the first one with a female author that circulated in the country, given that Pastoriza Flores’s 1921 dissertation remained unpublished. What the controversy surrounding Leonor del Carmen’s textbook reveals is that, by the late 1970s, the narrative of the territorial dispute had become established among wider audiences, to the point that for the first time a woman ventured to enter the discussion with a publication. It also suggests that, when issues of sectarian politics and gender became involved in the discussion of the territorial dispute, the room to maneuver that authors enjoyed became much smaller, and they were subject to closer ideological scrutiny.

In 1969, several years after Mora published his article, and during Velasco Ibarra’s fifth and final presidency, the Ministry of Education published a study plan for a secondary level course called Historia de límites del Ecuador.53 Unlike Tobar y Borgoño’s 1921 program discussed in the first chapter, the Ministry of Education’s publication was intended to provide guidelines to all schools, as it was part of an education reform that included similar plans on subjects ranging from physical education to psychology.54 Another difference is the level at

which the subject is being taught. While Tobar y Borgoño had envisioned teaching his course to

52 Ribadeneira Flores, Prologue to Historia de límites, 9. 53 Ecuador. Ministerio de Educación Pública. Departamento de Planeamiento Integral de la Educación. Programas de Estudio Ciclo Diversificado. Humanidades Modernas Plan Común: Historia de Límites del Ecuador. Quito: Ministerio de Educación, 1969. MCYP-AURELIO-AE06925. David W. Schodt discusses the fifth velasquismo in Ecuador: An Andean Enigma (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 86-94. 54 These plans are available in the Ministry of Culture Library Catalogue with the search term “Programas de estudio ciclo diversificado,” http://biblioteca.culturaypatrimonio.gob.ec/.

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university students, the Ministry made Historia de límites part of the curriculum for youths in the

fourth, fifth, and sixth year of secondary school.55 A change in the theoretical focus of the course

accompanied that of the target audience: the introduction reveals that courses on the Ecuador-

Peru conflict already were taught in schools, but that the focus had been on Territorial Law, a

subject the Ministry now deemed more appropriate for older students.56 The contents of the

course reflect many of the themes discussed by the authors of monographs, treatises, and

textbooks from previous decades. Beginning with the Pre-Hispanic era, it requires teachers to

discuss the Kingdom of Quito, which is an allusion to the controversy regarding the historicity of

this entity. Interestingly, the plan only aims to foster discussion and debate among students as far

as these are meant to show the Kingdom’s historicity and individuality.57 The War of 1829, the

Treaty of Guayaquil, and the Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol of 1830 receive similar treatment.

In the case of the latter, the plan encourages discussion of the objections to the Protocol, and of the reasons why it was hidden until 1906.58 As discussed in the first chapter, no authors had

discussed the Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol before Honorato Vázquez wrote about it in 1906,

during the Spanish Arbitration process. The study plan therefore integrates the controversy

regarding the authenticity of the Protocol into the narrative of the conflict. The two lectures

dedicated to these topics indicate how certain themes related to the Ecuador-Peru conflict, having

started as personal contributions of one or more authors, became the official history of the

nation, to the point that they were considered fundamental parts of a youth’s education. Even the

stated goals of the study plan reflect the motivations of most authors discussed in this thesis: in

the ministry’s vision, children at the end of the course will have deeper knowledge of the history

55 This is the meaning of the words ciclo diversificado in the study plan’s title. 56 Ecuador. Ministerio de Educación Pública. Historia de límites, 1. 57 Ecuador. Ministerio de Educación Pública. Historia de límites, 3. 58 Ecuador. Ministerio de Educación Pública. Historia de límites, 6.

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of the conflict, they will be more consciously patriotic, and most significantly, they will

“understand the need of national unity” to defend the Patria and achieve progress.59 Whereas

Tobar y Borgoño’s program coincided with and contributed to the earliest official efforts to

popularize the subject of the territorial conflict, the 1969 plan is the expression of the successful

integration of that discourse into national consciousness.

One year after the Ministry of Education published its plan for a new course on Historia

de límites, a one-time Socialist deputy called Julio H. Santamaría published a book called La

gigantesca figura de Atahualpa y sus generales. La agresión del imperialismo peruano. This

book consists of two articles related to the Ecuador-Peru conflict, the first of which discusses in

detail an aspect of the discourse on the Ecuador-Peru conflict often overlooked or oversimplified in the main narrative, the role of Inca Emperor Atahualpa in the genesis and defense of

Ecuadorian nationality.60 The civil war between Atahualpa and his brother Huascar did appear in

other sources as an antecedent of the Ecuador-Peru conflict, usually in works that stress the

teleological narrative of Ecuadorian victimization and Peruvian imperialism, as well as in those

sources that discuss the historicity of the legendary, Pre-Hispanic Kingdom of Quito.61 However,

the title of Santamaría’s work suggests that Atahualpa was more than a remote antecedent to the

conflict. According to one historian, the figure of the Sapa Inca had become, by the early

twentieth century, a household name in Ecuadorian history and culture thanks to the systematic

discussion of his legend in schools and through printed sources, resulting in his incorporation

into the national public memory, and in the village of Caranqui, north of Quito, gaining a

59 Ecuador. Ministerio de Educación Pública. Historia de límites, 2. 60 Julio H. Santamaría, La gigantesca personalidad de Atahualpa y sus generales. La agresión del imperialismo peruano (Quito: CYMA, 1970), 11. MCYP-MUÑOZ-LM1904. 61 Jaramillo Alvarado, La Presidencia, 310. Tobar Donoso, La Invasión Peruana, 3. Also see Nicola Foote, “Reinventing the Inca Past: The Kingdom of Quito, Atahualpa, and the Creation of Ecuadorian National Identity,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 5, no. 2 (2010): 115-16.

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reputation as his birthplace.62 Unlike earlier authors, who usually dedicated a chapter or two to

the Pre-Hispanic era to show that Peruvian expansionism had existed for a long time, Santamaría

aimed to turn the Emperor into a national hero because of his and his generals’ contribution to

the defense of the country’s sovereignty, that is, to what he considers the earliest stage of the

Ecuador-Peru conflict.63 In other words, whereas the last pre-conquest Inca already was

decidedly important in the Ecuadorian nationalist narrative, the former legislator added the

dimension of the territorial conflict to his legend, just as other key figures of Ecuadorian history,

including Antonio José de Sucre, Gabriel García Moreno, and Eloy Alfaro, had been.64 Like other heroes from the Independence and Republican stages of the conflict, Atahualpa had defended the Ecuadorian territory from a Peruvian invasion, in this case the armies of his brother

Huáscar.65

Julio Santamaría’s book, like Mora’s article, is concerned with current issues, in his case local affairs regarding an urban project in Quito. In 1962, he presented a bill to the Senate for the construction of a monument to the memory of Atahualpa and his generals in Quito, a project that he argued would serve to strengthen the civic spirit of children.66 Moreover, he intended the

monument to be part of a commemorative park dedicated to national unity, and to place it at the

top of El Panecillo, a hill that sits at the southern end of the city’s historic centre.67 Besides the

62 Bustos, El culto a la nación, 350-51. Caranqui or Inca-Caranqui is a town and archaeological site located some 100 km north of Quito. The site does contain imperial Inca structures, but there is no evidence to indicate that it was the birthplace of Atahualpa. Tamara L. Bray and José Echeverría Almeida, “The Late Imperial Site of Inca- Caranqui, Northern Highland Ecuador: At the End of Empire,” Ñawpa Pacha 32, no. 4 (2014): 194. In Quito, a multipurpose sports stadium inaugurated in 1951, a neighbourhood, and an important thoroughfare are also named Atahualpa. 63 Santamaría, La gigantesca personalidad, 11. 64 The controversy with Leonor del Carmen’s textbook, discussed at the beginning of the chapter, was related to the place accorded to Eloy Alfaro in the history of the conflict. 65 Santamaría, La gigantesca personalidad, 49. 66 Santamaría, La gigantesca personalidad, 111. 67 Santamaría, La gigantesca personalidad, 112.

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commanding position that such a location would give the monument, the reason for placing it in

El Panecillo was to counter a rival project for building a monument in that place, a replica of a famous Colonial-era sculpture of the Virgin Mary, Bernardo de Legarda’s Virgen de Quito.

Santamaría agrees that the other project also had nationalistic intent, given that the sculpture of the Virgin is closely linked to Quiteño and Ecuadorian identity. Nevertheless, he argues that his project would be more effective at inspiring patriotism, and notes that some members of society might consider a religious monument disrespectful.68 Santamaría’s project did not succeed, as an unnamed senator opposed his idea, and the massive Virgin greets Quiteños and tourists to this day. For the former legislator, this was proof of lack of patriotism from the authorities who did not support him, although he acknowledges that the project for the Virgin statue was older than his own.69 In the end, the episode is significant for the development of the dominant discourse of the territorial conflict for two reasons. First, it shows the success of the dominant discourse on the territorial dispute, in this case of the teleological narrative that made Ecuador and Peru eternal rivals. If this were not the case, neither Santamaría nor the people who supported him in the Senate would have made a serious effort to formulate a large-scale project to memorialize

Atahualpa, a figure only circumstantially linked to the Ecuador-Peru conflict, as a hero of

Ecuadorian sovereignty. Second, it shows that the nationalist discourse discussed throughout this thesis, which puts the conflict at the centre of national life, was not the only vision for the nation that existed at the time, and that at one time it had to compete with a project that invoked the colonial and religious legacy of Quito for public space.70

68 Santamaría, La gigantesca personalidad, 111. 69 Santamaría, La gigantesca personalidad, 113. He states in 112 that the senator had mentioned the other project was older. 70 Bustos discusses the competing Catholic and secular visions of Ecuadorian nationalism in the second chapter of El culto a la nación, 97-145.

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Julio Santamaría published his work on Atahualpa at a time when discussion of the

territorial conflict lost much of the urgency of previous decades. The reasons for this decline are

found in the political and economic situation of the time in Ecuador and throughout the region.

On one hand, an oil boom that started in the seventies brought unprecedented, albeit fleeting,

prosperity for the country. Velasco Ibarra’s final presidency ended in 1972, when he was

overthrown in a coup that installed General Guillermo Rodríguez Lara in power.71 The new

regime proved far more progressive and nationalistic than its predecessor, as it revised the

contracts of foreign oil companies, created a state oil corporation, and made the country a

member of OPEC.72 Another military coup overthrew Rodríguez Lara in 1976, and a triumvirate

of military commanders reaped the results of the newfound oil wealth, while also abandoning the

reformist and nationalist projects of the previous regime.73 On the other hand, the late sixties

marked a new era of integration in the Andes. Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, and Chile

agreed in 1969 to establish the Andean Pact, today known as the Andean Community, to

integrate and industrialize their economies through a common market, reduction of tariffs, and

control of foreign investment.74

Economic integration did not lead Ecuador and Peru to solve their border dispute, but it

did show willingness to work together despite their difficulty in finding a diplomatic solution in

the Cordillera del Cóndor. Meanwhile, a new discursive nemesis appeared in the country, the

United States, which partly displaced Peru as the main threat to Ecuadorian sovereignty. In one

case, the perceived threat of the two countries was discussed together. In 1977, Manuel Medina

71 Anita Isaacs, Military Rule, 11. She discusses how controlling the new oil economy was one of the main factors behind the coup in 24-25. 72 Agustín Cueva, “El Ecuador de 1960 a 1979,” in Vol. 11 of Nueva historia del Ecuador, ed. Enrique Ayala Mora (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1991), 167-68. 73 Cueva, “El Ecuador de 1960 a 1979,” 177-78. 74 Steven J. Hirsch and Alfonso W. Quiroz, "Andean Pact." In Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, ed. Jay Kinsbruner and Erick D. Langer, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008), 173.

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Castro published La responsabilidad del gobierno norteamericano en el proceso de mutilación territorial del Ecuador with the aim of proving the responsibility of the United States in the process of territorial loss that culminated in the Rio Protocol of 1942.75 Throughout the study, the author, who was a member of the Chilean and Ecuadorian Communist Parties, suggests that the economic and geopolitical interests of the United States have played a key role in determining the outcome of many events in the long territorial dispute. For example, he explains the crisis and war of 1859-60 within the context of the expansion of that country’s interests in

Asia, and of its political and territorial expansion throughout the Americas.76 Moreover, he argues that, just as filibuster William Walker’s actions in Nicaragua and Honduras were the precursors of American expansionism in Central America, there had been similar plans for the

Amazon.77 Regarding the crisis that followed the failure of the Spanish arbitration in 1910, during which Argentina, Brazil, and the United States offered to mediate for the first time,

Medina Castro points out that there had been a more serious reaction to what local elites interpreted as imperialistic intentions hidden behind the supposed goodwill displayed by the continental powers.78

Medina Castro does not offer any documentary evidence or even a detailed explanation of what the imperialistic designs of the United States for Ecuador had been during either of the crises. Instead, he limits his analysis to pointing out the context of openly expansionistic foreign policy during which they had taken place, suggesting that the Peruvian aggressions of both eras had taken place at the instigation of the Colossus of the North.79 More significantly, the author of

75 Manuel Medina Castro, La responsabilidad del gobierno norteamericano en el proceso de la mutilación territorial del Ecuador, 2nd ed. (Guayaquil: Departamento de Publicaciones Universidad de Guayaquil, 1980), 7. MCYP-MANOSALVAS-MS0799. 76 Medina Castro, La responsabilidad del gobierno norteamericano, 44-45. 77 Medina Castro, La responsabilidad del gobierno norteamericano, 46. 78 Medina Castro, La responsabilidad del gobierno norteamericano, 73. 79 Medina Castro, La responsabilidad del gobierno norteamericano, 47, 74.

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La responsabilidad del gobierno norteamericano is aware of this issue, but he does not think it

affects the strength of the central argument. He thinks that there is national consensus that the

Americans have played a role in Ecuador’s history of territorial loss. This book is significant for

the development of the dominant discourse on the conflict because it shows that at a time when

the Ecuador-Peru relationship was clearly changing, the theme of the conflict had become widely

accepted, it was possible to venture different explanations that integrated the new international

situation to the central narrative of victimization without questioning its basic premises.

Medina’s original contribution resides in his ability to create a narrative that linked together the

century-old discourse of the conflict with the Ecuador’s relationship with the United States. The relationship between the two countries already has received scholarly attention elsewhere, but it is worth pointing out that during the 1960s and 1970s, a series of diplomatic incidents threatened

to jeopardise their relations. The most significant were the so-called “Tuna Wars,” a controversy arising from conflicting views on territorial sea extension and fishing rights off the coast of

Ecuador. The controversy originated in a 1952 declaration by Peru, Chile, and Ecuador of a limit of 200 miles for their territorial sea, and it was only solved in the late eighties, after the UN created the maritime exclusive economic zone for all countries.80 By the time Medina Castro wrote his study, the controversy led to the seizure of over one hundred American fishing vessels, while the United States retaliated by cutting Ecuador’s access to credit and military equipment.81

Medina Castro does not mention any of these incidents in his narrative of victimization, likely because they are not related to the territorial conflict with Peru. However, it would have been easy for his audience to draw comparisons between the author’s argument of American support

80 Ronn Pineo, Ecuador and the United States: Useful Strangers (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2007), 174-75 81 Pineo: Ecuador and the United States, 177.

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of Peruvian expansionism, and the tensions at sea, as both were related to a special and

economically important part of the national territory.

In 1979, two years after Medina Castro first published his patriotic indictment of the

United States, the Foreign Ministry organized an essay contest to mark the sesquicentennial of

the Treaty of Guayaquil, the treaty that ended the Peru-Gran Colombia War, for a long time

considered the foundation of Ecuador’s rights to the Amazon.82 There were two winning essays,

one of them by a “prestigious internationalist” and historian named Rafael Euclides Silva, the

other by María de Lourdes Rodríguez de Alvear, the third woman to publish anything related the

territorial dispute.83 These essays are important for the Ecuadorian discourse on the conflict

because they represent a scholarly and officially approved re-working of many of the themes traditionally present in previous authors’ works, and because they link the events of 1829 – themselves the origin of the Ecuador-Peru conflict – to the genesis of the nation and its history of victimization and resistance.84 Moreover, the thematic focus of the essay contest was the Treaty

of Guayaquil, but both authors spent considerable time discussing the colonial antecedents of the

territorial dispute of which the 1829 war and treaty were considered the beginning. For Silva, the

colonial relationship between Quito and Cusco constitutes the earliest manifestation of the

Ecuador-Peru rivalry.85 In addition, he characterizes the Colonial era as one marked by Lima’s

constant desire for centralist control of the Audiencia de Quito, which was partly due to a desire

to revive the Inca Empire, and partly due to expansionist ambitions over Guayaquil.86 These

82 Already in 1860, Moncayo considered it the starting point of the conflict, as well as the key to its resolution. Cuestión de límites, 37. 83 Rafael Euclides Silva, El Tratado de Guayaquil 22 de septiembre de 1829: su significado histórico-jurídico (Quito: Banco Central del Ecuador, 1980), inner front cover. MCYP-MANOSALVAS-MS1530. Rodríguez de Alvear, Significado histórico-jurídico, i. 84 Silva, El Tratado de Guayaquil, 9. Rodríguez de Alvear, Significado histórico-jurídico, 1. 85 Silva, El Tratado de Guayaquil, 13. 86 Silva, El Tratado de Guayaquil, 19-20.

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ambitions resurfaced during the Independence era, when San Martín and Bolívar “raced”

towards Guayaquil with the intention of annexing it to Peru and Gran Colombia, as well as in the

Peruvian annexation of Jaén and Maynas, the casus belli of the Peru-Gran Colombia War.87

Meanwhile, Rodríguez de Alvear is more positive in her approach, in that she looks at Ecuador’s

rights rather than its victimization and losses. She spends considerable time discussing the nature

of the Uti Possidetis principle, its relevance for the defense of Ecuador’s territorial rights, and the

colonial titles on which it rests. Nevertheless, she concludes that Peru has constantly victimized

Ecuador, displaying disregard for law and justice while the latter had been pacifist and legalistic,

but inconsistent in its foreign policy.88

In retrospect, the most interesting part of the story of the Foreign Ministry’s essay

contest, and of its two winners, is the treatment that Silva and Rodríguez de Alvear’s studies

received afterwards. Ecuador’s Central Bank – a long-time patron of culture and the arts –

published Silva’s essay as a standalone book the year after the contest, part of a self-imposed goal of helping spread “knowledge of the realities and issues of the Patria” that also included patronage of the country’s National Museum.89 Rodríguez de Alvear’s book was not published

until two years later, in 1981. Moreover, as the author of the introduction acknowledges, the

Central Bank published it that year precisely because the Paquisha conflict took place, implying

that the book may not have been published otherwise.90 Such editorial decision could have had to

do with the greater academic prestige of Silva, who authored a dozen historical monographs

between the 1940s and the 1970s. The Foreign Ministry considered both essays to be equally

worthy of the first prize, as they reflect on the significance of the Treaty of Guayaquil from the

87 Silva, El Tratado de Guayaquil, 23. 88 Rodríguez de Alvear, Significado histórico-jurídico, 68. Her calls for consistency in foreign policy are in 69-70. 89 Mauricio Dávalos Guevara, Foreword to El Tratado de Guayaquil, 3. 90 Rodolfo Pérez Pimentel, Foreword to Significado histórico-jurídico, i.

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point of view of nation-building, while still adhering to the traditional narrative of victimization.

However, for the Central Bank, only one was worthy of publication until the events at the

Cordillera del Cóndor made it relevant and useful for the promotion of the institution’s own

patriotism.

Analysis of private authors who wrote on the conflict from the two decades after the

declaration of nullity revealed two simultaneous but related phenomena, which in turn revealed the significance of these authors in the development of the Ecuadorian discourse on the territorial dispute. On one hand, these authors adhered more closely to the dominant narrative, at least when compared with their more famous counterparts from the same period. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that this shows that Mora, Santamaría, Silva, Rodríguez de Alvear, and

Leonor del Carmen, were simply following the narrative established by diplomats, politicians, and historians from previous decades. Instead, their contributions presupposed knowledge of the history of the conflict according to the dominant narrative. From that starting point, they each strived to come up with their own perspective or thematic focus. The second phenomenon, directly related to the first one, is that the works of these authors became, in more than one case, a platform for discussing matters that went beyond the strict topic of the Ecuador-Peru conflict.

More broadly, the writings of some of these authors hint at social and political phenomena not limited to the conflict narrative. This is clearest in the case of Leonor del Carmen, Julio H.

Santamaría, and María de Lourdes Rodríguez de Alvear. In the case of the historian nun, the intense criticism she received after the first edition of her textbook had to do with the treatment she accorded a major character in the larger narrative of Ecuadorian history, Eloy Alfaro. The size of the controversy and the government’s response–to confiscate all copies of the textbook– shows the existence of larger issues of sectarian politics and possibly gender. Santamaría’s study

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of Atahualpa as a major figure in the conflict and for Ecuadorian sovereignty was at once a traditional discussion of the dispute discourse, the author’s “patriotic contribution” to the defense of the country, and an explanation of his unsuccessful bid to convince authorities to build a monument to the Inca in Quito. The larger issue alluded to in Santamaría’s book is the existence of different and sometimes conflicting views of the history and heritage of Quito and Ecuador, the other one being the religious perspective, thanks to which the monument to the Virgin of

Quito stands in El Panecillo today. Finally, the case of Rodríguez de Alvear, the delayed publication of her prize-winning essay shows how the prestige and experience of one of the winners of the essay contest resulted in an editorial decision to initially publish only Silva’s essay, even though his and Rodríguez de Alvear’s are very similar works. It is not possible to know if there were gender considerations in this editorial decision, but it is intriguing to see that this was precisely the second published work from a female author, this time a scholarly contribution and not a textbook. Finally, the Ministry of Education’s study plan for a course on the history of the conflict is an official, state-sanctioned source, as a team of experts working for the state developed it for a State institution. However, unlike the sources discussed in the previous section, it is not intended to contribute to, challenge, or revise the dominant conflict discourse. Much to the contrary, as an official program of studies, its goal was to direct the teaching of the subject in schools, thereby ensuring that it corresponded to a larger vision of using the history of the conflict to achieve greater national unity. As such, it is closer to the works of Leonor del Carmen and the winners of the Foreign Ministry’s essay contest, all of which somehow are related to promoting and strengthening the conflict narrative that had developed in the previous century.

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Jaime Roldós, Paquisha, and the Discourse on the Conflict in the Early 1980s

An old and shaky but intelligible YouTube video titled “Último discurso de Jaime Roldós buen audio,” originally a 1981 televised transmission, shows the young President solemnly proclaiming to an audience in the tens of thousands that Ecuador is “Amazonian, always and forever,”91 Two years before, the military junta that took power in 1976 passed a new constitution and called free elections, which resulted in the victory of populist Roldós by a landslide.92 The words in which he proclaimed Ecuador’s Amazonian status came at the end of a speech during a ceremony to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Pichincha–an important event of the Wars of Independence in Ecuador–that also included a homage to soldiers who fought in the Paquisha conflict of January and February of that year. These words later became the

President’s political testament and a nationalist slogan, in large measure because they were the last ones he delivered in public before dying in an aviation accident the same day. When analyzed alongside the video of another address from three months earlier, a message to the nation to discuss the ongoing Paquisha conflict, Roldós’s final speech shows that the dominant discourse on the territorial conflict had acquired, by the early 1980s, a definitive form. This form is the one I encountered in my childhood, during the Cenepa War of 1995 and the subsequent peace process of 1995-98. Roldós’s speeches reflect the development of the Ecuadorian discourse on the territorial conflict in several ways. First, non-verbal interactions between the

President and the audience during his final speech show the unifying intent of authors who had written on the conflict since the nineteenth century. Second, the Oriente or Amazonia occupies the symbolic centre of the nation, especially as it relates to the “territorial loss” of the Rio

91 Vision 360, “Último discurso de Jaime Roldós,” May 23, 2014, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brYNdYdM-Sg. 92 “Roldós 895.038 Durán 398.480,” El Universo (Guayaquil), April 30, 1979. Isaacs, Military Rule, 119.

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Protocol of 1942. This refers to the teleological narrative thanks to which historical events such

as the Peru-Gran Colombia war of 1829 supposedly showed the perpetual rivalry that had existed between Ecuador and its southern neighbour. Finally, analysis of the political and economic situation facing Ecuador in the early 1980s shows how the theme of the conflict with Peru had become a common, even opportunistic way, to achieve political support, something evident in the non-verbal interaction between Roldós and the audience in his final speech of May 24.

Throughout his final speech, Roldós calls on Ecuadorians to focus on worthy things such

as paying homage to the heroes of the Wars of Independence, or to those fallen in the recent

conflict, which took place in the non-demarcated section of border with Peru in the Cordillera del

Cóndor. The President refers to Ecuador as a nation standing eternally united in territorial defense, capable of “imparting lessons in humanism, work, and freedom.” These words, arguably standard for a speech on a patriotic holiday, come after the President discussed a set of deeply unpopular measures to counter the mounting economic crisis the country had been experiencing since the return to democratic rule in 1979. The audience responds to the economic measures with intense jeers and boos, but these turn into applause as soon as he mentions Paquisha,

Machinaza, and Mayaycu, the names of the three military outposts at the centre of the conflict in

January and February. Because the speech took place during a national holiday, and because

Paquisha was only a few months old, Roldós likely had planned to mention it from the

beginning. However, the spontaneous and easy way in which the public shifted from hostile jeers

to sympathetic applause when the subject of the conflict came shows the great success of

Ecuadorian politicians and other members of the ruling classes in elevating their view of the

conflict to the status of national myth. This was at least partly the result of decades of editorial

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efforts by scholars and political leaders, whose publications aimed to “convince” citizens that the

Oriente had been severed in 1941 because it had been Ecuadorian from the Colonial era.93

Three and a half months before the patriotic commemoration of May 24, Jaime Roldós

gave another televised speech in which he discussed the conflict with Peru. This speech was

meant to inform audiences in Ecuador and abroad about his government’s position regarding the

Paquisha conflict, and it summarizes the nature and elements of the dominant discourse on the

conflict. It takes place in a controlled environment, likely a room in the Presidential Palace, in

which the President appears surrounded by close to two-dozen people standing in two rows.94

Among them is Vice President and future President Osvaldo Hurtado, and Roldós’s younger

brother León, who was President of the Monetary Board and the country’s Vice President after

the death of Jaime. Also present are a military officer in full regalia, Defense Minister Marco

Subía Martínez; Rodrigo Paz, Minister of Finance and future Mayor of Quito; and Minister of

Social Welfare Inés Arrata, the second woman ever to occupy a ministerial office in Ecuador. It

is possible see the silent group of people as a symbolic representation of national unity. These

men and women were members or leaders of many of the state’s institutions, including the armed

forces, and although they are not precisely common people, their offices made them

representatives and servants of all citizens. The silent presence of these men and women works

as a visual reminder that people closely associated with the government contributed to and

strived to control the dominant discourse on the dispute with the most consistency, even if the

nation-building dimension of the discourse on the conflict involved all citizens.

93 Luis A. Parodi refers to this phenomenon as the “production of an enemy,” necessary for the creation of territorial consciousness in both Ecuador and Peru, and fully in place at the beginning of the Cenepa War of 1995. Politics of South American Boundaries (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), 77-78. 94 Archivo Jaime Roldós Aguilera, “Cadena nacional – invasión peruana,” December 10, 2014, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFPv7SZWF8w.

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More than a statement of foreign policy, the message to the nation of is a summary of the historically hegemonic of view the territorial dispute, many of whose elements are apparent in

Roldós’s words. First, he stresses that the ongoing hostilities are part of Peru’s expansionist policy, which he says date back to the war of 1829 and the battle of Tarqui. Moreover, instead of mentioning the long and complex history of treaties, arbitrations, negotiations, and border skirmishes that characterized the dispute, the President characterizes Peru’s position as one of constant military and diplomatic aggressiveness culminating in the invasion of 1941 that led to the “unjust severing” of much of Ecuador’s territory. By grouping the victory of Gran Colombia over Peru in 1829–a positive event for Ecuadorian nationalism–and the country’s military defeat of 1941 together under the banner of Peruvian expansionism, the President alludes to the narrative of the conflict in which authors stressed Ecuador’s perpetual righteousness and Peru’s wickedness. The related idea that the country has been the more peaceful and legalistic one in the dispute appears both in his opening address to “Ecuadorians and other Law-abiding men,” and in his characterization of Ecuador as the small, pacifist, and legalistic victim of Peru.

Roldós's characterization of the Rio Protocol of 1942 as an “unjust severing” of territories builds on and refers to the changing role of the Oriente in the Ecuadorian discourse on the dispute. For nineteenth-century authors such as Fernando Alomía and Francisco Andrade Marín, the dense jungles of Amazonia were a frontier far from civilization, its inhabitants merely savages, not full citizens. Nevertheless, these and other authors did imagine the semi-legendary

Amazonia as Ecuadorian, but in the past there had been more room for negotiation on the significance and nature of those territories. During the Spanish arbitration process, diplomats from both countries came up with Colonial and Independence-era titles showing ownership of the same lands, in the case of the Pedemonte-Mosquera Protocol with dubious authenticity. This

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suggests that the conflict was about self-definition of the nation and territorial consolidation,

which translated into a competition for having the stronger claim to the disputed frontier, legally

and through colonization. In contrast, Roldós’s claim that the Protocol was an “unjust severing”

implies that the same territories were no longer a disputed frontier, nor had they ever been, but instead were construed inalienably Ecuadorian from the beginning. It is possible to see here the work of post-1941 authors, among them President Velasco Ibarra and the various government offices and officials, who consistently spoke of the Ecuador-Peru conflict in terms of a premeditated victimization on the part of Peru, and of Peru and the guarantor states after 1942.

Finally, the vocabulary used to refer to the Rio Protocol, a severing of territories, has graphically emotional connotations that recall the 1961-booklet Martirio Ecuatoriano’s use of imagery to

convey its message to wider audiences.95

Jaime Roldós’s televised speeches during and after the Paquisha incident of 1981 are

relevant for the development of the dominant Ecuadorian discourse on the territorial dispute

because they represent the finished product as it reached the consciousness of most people who

lived to see the end of the conflict, myself included. I was born two years after the events

discussed in this section, but the propaganda related to the President and the Paquisha conflict

became common ways to teach children about the conflict. A song called “Paquisha” by

Ecuadorian group Pueblo Nuevo – a nueva canción group with nationalist and leftist leanings –

had become, by the time of the Cenepa conflict of 1995, an unofficial anthem of patriotic

commemoration commonly taught to schoolchildren.96 I remember learning its lyrics, which call

95 See chapter 2. The word in Spanish is cercenamiento, also translatable as dismemberment. 96 This song is found in Juan Vera, “Pueblo Nuevo-Paquisha,” April 30, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzE7NM9S41c. In 2010, the municipality of the Paquisha canton, in the province of Zamora-Chinchipe, declared the song its official anthem, “Canción 'Paquisha', nombrada himno de cantón fronterizo,” El Universo (Guayaquil), October 26, 2010.

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for martial strength and the commemoration of fallen soldiers while insisting on national unity aimed at achieving peace, just in time for the “Flag Adjuration” that took place every year in the

Sierra and Oriente regions on the anniversary of the Battle of Tarqui of 1829. The ceremony took place in 1995, during my last year of elementary education. It also happened that year that the

Cenepa War was taking place at the same time, and it effectively ended a day after the civic holiday. For children my age, the Pueblo Nuevo song, the Flag Adjuration, and Roldós’s final public statement had a sense of immediacy not necessarily present during peacetime.

Conclusions

The two decades that separate José María Velasco Ibarra’s declaration of nullity, and

Jaime Roldós’s famous words calling Ecuador “Amazonian always and forever,” can be characterized as an era of consolidation of the dominant discourse on the Ecuador-Peru dispute.

No significantly new additions such as the nullity thesis appeared. Much to the contrary, even the nullity thesis seems to have fallen out of favour as official government position, which allowed authors such as Carlos Palacios Sáenz to challenge it in subtle ways. Even Velasco Ibarra, the original proponent of nullity, abandoned the radical position for a more moderate one. Other authors who challenged the dominant discourse at the time also did it in small, subtle ways, for example Francisco Urrutia, who suggested that the War of 1829 was an insufficient basis for the country’s claims to the Amazonian basin. These challenges did not lead to the formulation of a different narrative on the conflict, or a radical reformulation of the country’s foreign policy.

Instead, the basic narrative of Ecuadorian victimization and foreign wickedness was left unscathed, even strengthened by authors who wanted to improve the country’s claims, not destroy them. In other words, the sources from the 1960s and 1970s continued the work of creating and maintaining a dominant discourse on the dispute that their counterparts from earlier

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decades had started, although by this time they had much less space to introduce radically new

perspectives or elements to this discourse.

Comparison of the writings of the group of elite authors discussed in this chapter with

their counterparts from the previous two decades reveals that the authors’ intentions changed

substantially, but not completely. They were still preoccupied with finding explanations for the

War of 1941 and Rio Protocol, but instead of pointing the finger at specific individuals or

institutions, their answers looked to long-term causes, including the historical context in which

the events of 1941-42 took place. This was especially the case of Luis Larrea Alba, who

discussed the unique opportunity for an attack that resulted from the situation inside and outside

Ecuador’s borders, including the war raging in Europe and Peru’s motivations arising from its

defeat against Chile in the War of the Pacific. Former Army Commander Francisco Urrutia and

Foreign Minister Gonzalo Escudero, who were both were close to the country’s military and

diplomatic establishment during key moments in the history of the conflict, saw themselves as

contributing to the discussion with their unique perspective as actors and close spectators of the

events. This allowed them to claim that their narratives possessed “the most severe faithfulness”

needed to uncover the truth regarding the most difficult chapter in the history of the conflict.97

However, rather than making shocking revelations that could change the narrative of the conflict, they sought to exculpate themselves and their institutions by explaining their roles, the constraints imposed on their actions and decisions. In this sense, these works are similar to Julio

Tobar Donoso’s 1945 book La invasión peruana y el Protocolo de Río, which also explained the diplomat’s actions while providing an overarching narrative of the conflict. Finally, Luis Anda

Viteri’s case is somewhat different. Although he was a member of the diplomatic establishment,

97 Escudero, Justicia para el Ecuador, 7.

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the Consul of Ecuador in southern Colombia, he was not directly involved in the events of 1941-

42 in the same way as Escudero and Urrutia. His work is reminiscent of the propagandistic books and pamphlets that appeared during and after the war, and during the fourth presidency of

Velasco Ibarra, which ended the year before he published Un tratado inexistente.

In contrast to the authors closer to the establishment from this period, others tended to stick more closely to the dominant narrative of the conflict as it had been developing in the previous decades. Instead of offering new information or insights into the nature of the conflict or one of its episodes, the works of these authors are relevant because they reveal other issues besides the discussion of the conflict itself. Leonor del Carmen’s unpopular, if likely accurate, view of the role of Eloy Alfaro during the crisis of 1910, together with her status as a member of the Catholic Church that Liberal governments attacked, and possibly her status as the first woman to publish on the conflict, earned such harsh criticism for her work that the government seized all copies of her textbook in 1967. Julio H. Santamaría’s study, besides elevating the Sapa

Inca to the status of hero of the conflict, is an account of an unsuccessful attempt to secularly

“consecrate” Quito to Atahualpa through a monument that would have dominated Quito’s skyline. When compared to its successful, religiously-oriented counterpart, Santamaría’s project shows that there were alternative visions of the importance of history and heritage besides the nationalist, secular, conflict-oriented perspecive that Santamaría appealed to with his project.

Regarding Silva and Rodríguez de Alvear, the winning authors of the Foreign Ministry’s contest received different treatment by the Central Bank, the institution that published them. While

Silva’s essay was published soon after the contest, only the Paquisha War of 1981 made publication of Rodríguez de Alvear’s work desirable. In any case, these authors counted on at least some knowledge of what had been said about the conflict, its importance for nation-

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building, to make their individual cases. The Central Bank decided to publish Rodríguez de

Alvear in 1981 because it knew its audience understood that a publication on a topic related to the conflict was a way of showing the institution and the author’s patriotism, or as many authors had put it in the past, to contribute to the defense of Ecuador’s rights. In other words, each of these authors counted on the success of the dominant discourse on the conflict to make their cases.

Regarding President Roldós and his two speeches from 1981, they constitute the definitive form of the discourse whose development I have traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century. The enduring fame of his words calling the country “Amazonian, always and forever” is largely the result of their unintended status as the President’s final words in public.

They are also the result of over one century of debate and discussion on the conflict, and as such they reflect the themes that characterized the discussion of previous decades. The most important and enduring of these themes is the victimization of Ecuador in the hands of its neighbours, especially but not exclusively Peru. Another theme that is closely linked to the theme of victimization of is the teleology of the conflict, the view that Ecuador is the more righteous of the two sides in the conflict, and that this has been the case even before Ecuador or its colonial predecessor existed. The words of Roldós represent the final, definitive narrative of the conflict.

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Felipe Zurita and Ulpiano Vela, two men from Riobamba aged ninety-three and ninety-

seven respectively, are likely two of the last remaining Ecuadorian veterans of the War of 1941.

In a 2017 video interview of both men, Zurita reveals that in 1941 he was a seventeen-year-old teenager living in Guayaquil and attending weekly army exercises when the first attacks in El

Oro took place. He joined the army soon after and remembers that the rifles he and other recruits received were obsolete, and that they were dispatched to the war zone almost immediately, seemingly without any training other than the weekly exercises. Vela, meanwhile, spends some time describing the shortcomings of the Ecuadorian Army in a way that is reminiscent of the critiques by several of the authors described in this thesis. More importantly, the veteran shares the anger toward the Arroyo regime that characterizes several of these authors’ works.

Subsequently both Zurita and Vela invite the audience, especially young viewers, to rescue what they consider to be the lost values of patriotism and honesty. It is not clear from the video what their thoughts are regarding the peace process and the new era of Ecuador-Peru friendship, but for them, there is something to be learned from a time when defending the Patria in this secular conflict was the most important contribution a citizen could make to his country.1

The findings of this thesis can be summarized as three: the relative stability in the

structure of the discourse of the conflict; the dominance of elite authors in the construction of the

narrative, from the 1860s to the 1970s; and the increased control of the structure, contents, and diffusion of the narrative of the conflict by the state, which allowed non-elite authors to make

their own contributions. When considered together, these findings show that the conflict became

1 La Prensa Riobamba, "La Prensa Riobamba - Posts: Rendimos un caluroso homenaje a los héroes de la Guerra del 41," Facebook video post, October 11, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/prensariobamba/videos/vb.412892222115125/1659473574123644/?type=3&theater.

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an avenue for formulating, discussing, and propagating ideas of nationality and citizenship.

Some of these ideas, such as the territorial victimization of Ecuador, existed entirely within the

context of the conflict, but others were part of or depended on the larger discussion of the nature

of nationalism and the Ecuadorian nation that took place in many of the same learned circles in

which the conflict was discussed. This was the case for the framing of the Amazonian region as catalyzer of the Ecuadorian nation, which depended on a utilitarian view of its economic importance. The role of Amazonia as catalyzer of Ecuadorian nationalism also depended on the

discourse of mestizaje, given that the claim of Quito as discoverer of the río mar implied a

paternalistic view of the native inhabitants of the jungle, and implied that the region and its

natives were potential receptacles of Ecuadorian, Spanish, and Western civilization.

Background of the Authors

Throughout the decades during which the discourse on the Ecuador-Peru conflict

developed, members of the country’s elite consistently set the tone and determined the contents of the discussion about the significance of the conflict.2 Diplomats, military officers and

commanders, former presidents, politicians, people from different levels and branches of

government, and even members of the Catholic Church, published books and pamphlets related

to the conflict, from the time of the crisis of 1859-60 to the 1970s. In the nineteenth century, they

were without a doubt the only ones interested or able to publish books and pamphlets related to the territorial dispute. These individuals were all males, and often they developed an interest in discussing the conflict because of their direct involvement in the country’s foreign policy, or for their work in the disputed area of the Amazon basin. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the conflict became a “national theme,” which made it both more difficult to solve in

2 For a discussion of the meaning of “elite” as it appears in this thesis, see note 2 in the introduction.

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“maximalist” claim to the entirety of the lands north of the Marañón, which depended on the debatable view that the Audiencia de Quito had been in possession and control of them before independence, made unacceptable the relatively advantageous arrangements of the failed 1890

Treaty and the Spanish Arbitration. Eloy Alfaro capitalized on popular support for this claim in in 1910, with the slogan “Tumbes, Marañón o la guerra.” Throughout the twentieth century, members of or people associated with the diplomatic, political, and military establishment weighed in on different aspects of the conflict, often justifying their works as their personal–or institutional–contribution to the cause of the conflict, which was the cause of the Ecuadorian nation itself.

One possible explanation for the greater participation of members of the elite in the development of the discourse on the territorial conflict is that, up to the mid-twentieth century, literacy was limited to no more than half of the population. Printed sources such as the ones analyzed in this thesis, which require at least some knowledge of history and politics, some of which dealt with complex legal concepts, were aimed at a limited audience of educated people.

Consequently, the increasing number of publications by non-elite writers is also attributable to the dramatic growth of literacy of the second half of the twentieth century, which made the knowledge needed to write about the conflict more available to common citizens. As more people from the lower classes obtained formal education, they acquired the skills and the interest to research, write, and publish books on the history of the conflict. Besides the educational background needed to write on the conflict, another explanation for the greater presence of elite authors among the sources is related to whether the conflict was considered a legitimate subject of discussion beyond the diplomatic and political spheres. By the 1970s, the Ecuador-Peru

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dispute had been the subject of debate and discussion for decades, since the second half of the

nineteenth century. Most importantly, various state institutions and organizations increasingly

had taken charge of the task of promoting the country’s foreign policy goals outside and

especially inside its borders. One way in which these organizations did this was through formal

education, and through various publications of diverse quality, and with different audiences in

mind.

State Control

Besides the participation of elite authors in the development of the discourse of the

conflict, this thesis has revealed a pattern of increased state control of the discussion and diffusion of this discourse. Because in many ways the territorial conflict was always an issue of the State, it was not the case that at some point its institutions simply took over what previously had been the sole efforts of private citizens with an interest in the country’s foreign policy and the Amazonian region. To the contrary, interest in the Amazon had been a concern of the state and its officials since Pedro Moncayo’s Cuestión de límites (1860), which was published under the auspices of the government. However, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such interest was limited at best, as the state’s economic and coercive power had been aimed elsewhere, towards controlling the economically vital Pacific coast. Sometimes the timing of a publication makes it possible to guess the reasons behind the publication of a book or pamphlet.

This was the case, for example, in the works by Colombian scholar Jesús María Yepes, whose study of the nullity of the Rio Protocol was published during the fourth velasquismo. Works such as this one acquired, therefore, a somewhat propagandistic character, as they served to promote

the aims of a particular institution, or of the Ecuadorian government in general. In other cases,

authors included quasi-official endorsements of their works in the shape of decrees and letters

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approving the contents or the intent behind a book or a textbook. More importantly, starting in

the 1920s the Ecuador-Peru dispute became part of the country’s educational curriculum, which shows a more explicit interest in controlling the contents of and the way in which the discourse about the conflict reached the general population. This effort was successful not because the discourse on the conflict had any influence on actual foreign policy, but because it established the victimization of Ecuador as the only legitimate narrative of the complex history of the

Ecuador-Peru relationship. As the role of the state in controlling the discourse of territorial

victimization grew, a new class of scholars of the conflict appeared, one whose members were

not part of the state apparatus, but simply people interested in writing about legal and historical

aspects of the territorial dispute. These authors usually did not possess the same intimate

knowledge as someone directly related to the political, diplomatic and military establishment;

their works sometimes expressed the interests or views of the institution to which they belonged,

be that a professional association, the military, or the Catholic Church.

Foucauldian Analysis and the Discourse on the Conflict

Although the dominant discourse on the Ecuador-Peru conflict went through a process of diffusion and consolidation in the public sphere, culminating in its full integration into the culture and education of the country, the contents of the discourse stayed relatively consistent throughout the period studied. In general, authors who wrote about the conflict studied, on the one hand, its history as a nationalist history of Ecuador, and on the other hand, the legal arguments on which Ecuador’s claims to the disputed region rested. These two approaches often went together, as looking into Ecuador’s titles regarding possession of the Amazon necessitated a look into the colonial history of the Audiencia de Quito. In the twentieth century, it became more common for authors to discuss the Pre-Hispanic era, as they often claimed that the Ecuador-Peru

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rivalry, and especially the latter’s expansionism, had started during the time of the Incas and the

legendary Kingdom of Quito. The War of 1941 and the Rio Protocol introduced a new element of debate to the narrative, but as with the Pre-Hispanic era, they did not substantially modify the discourse, as the narrative of invasion and victimization had been present in some form before the war. If anything, the shock of the War of 1941 and Rio Protocol made the conflict even more of a national theme than before, and the authors’ feelings regarding the injustice of these events led them to formulate the theses of inexecutability and nullity, behind which the population quickly rallied.

I chose to analyze the development of the Ecuadorian discourse on its territorial conflict with Peru from a Foucauldian perspective partly because it allowed me to insist on its historical contingency, that it was a product of the circumstances of the long dispute, as well as the larger context of Ecuadorian and Latin American history. I grew up in an environment in which the idea that Ecuador had always been the victim of Peru’s territorial depredations was one of the key elements of how many Ecuadorians imagined the nation, but also when this idea effectively ceased to the most important way of conceiving Ecuador and its territory, largely–but not exclusively–thanks to the peace settlement of 1998.3 This thesis followed the development of the

Ecuadorian discourse on the conflict over a period of more than a century, from the middle of the

nineteenth century to the last quarter of the twentieth, effectively showing that the genesis of the

discourse depended on the input of individuals who acted on their own behalf or that of their

3 This change in the view of the national territory also had to do with the fact that the Indigenous Movement, which disrupted and shook the foundations of mainstream Ecuadorian politics in the 1990s, looked to vindicate longstanding issues regarding the use and property of the land. These lands were the old haciendas theoretically broken up in the Land Reform of the 1960s, but also the Ecuadorian land as a whole, as a territory that defined the nation and its inhabitants, for example questioning the neoliberal extractivism that guided exploitation of the country’s oil reserves in Amazonia. Maximilian Viatori, whom I discuss in the Introduction, analyzes the racial implications of the discourse of the white-mestizo elite during several Ecuadorian border crises of the twentieth century.

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institutions and social groups, not all of whom agreed with the dominant view of the conflict.

Consequently, there was nothing natural or necessary in the nature and eventual dominant status

of the discourse, something proven by relating specific developments in the history of the

discourse, such as the introduction of the nullity thesis, to events in the conflict and in

Ecuadorian society. However, the best indication that the victimizing discourse of Ecuador

regarding the territorial dispute is the very fact that it ceased to be the dominant view of the

conflict, that a new discourse of Ecuador-Peru friendship and integration has consistently informed the relations of the two countries in the last two decades.4

Nationalism

Throughout the period studied in this thesis, authors have employed implicitly or

explicitly the subject of the conflict as a space in which to negotiate a particular perspective or

opinion directly or indirectly related to the discourse on the conflict, and to the Ecuadorian

nation, of which the victimization discourse was an important element for a long time. In a way

The controversy surrounding Leonor del Carmen’s textbook constitutes an encounter between coexisting and competing visions of the historical role and importance of Eloy Alfaro, both as a head of state whose actions in 1910 shaped future Ecuadorian foreign policy, and as a national hero whose works and behaviour became synonymous with ideals of patriotism and unity. The

dominant perspective saw the viejo luchador as the country’s most important leader, someone

whose conduct of the crisis at the end of the Spanish Arbitration process was impeccably

patriotic, subject to emulation by all citizens. Leonor del Carmen represented a somewhat-

uncommon view, one that criticised the Liberal leader and his actions in 1910. Although the

historian nun’s critics accused her of treason for her opinions on Alfaro, it is unlikely that either

4 The Ecuador-Peru rapprochement after 1998 is briefly discussed in the final section of this concluding chapter.

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side considered themselves to favour their Peruvian rivals, or even to radically change the

discourse on the conflict that served as backdrop of this controversy.

If the three decades since the end of the Cold War have shown the continuing global relevance of Benedict Anderson’s assertion that the nation is an imagined political community, this is also true in the case of Ecuador and the discourse on its conflict with Peru. Pedro

Moncayo’s Cuestión de límites first presented the controversy with Peru as a conflict between nations, complete with its own history, precisely after Ecuador experienced the greatest internal and external threat to its existence and integrity. Authors such as Fidel Alomía and many others thought it crucial for a great nation to control or at least be present in the ultimate South

American frontier, the Amazonian jungle. Consequently, when it became clear that Ecuador was unable or unwilling to colonize the Oriente, they saw it as a failure of the nation itself, as a proof

of a supposed status as a “little country,” not as the product of the economic, social, and political

context. The complexity of the conflict did little to change this perception, but the shock of the

military invasion of 1941 convinced writers that Ecuador was a victimized nation whose only

hope for national advancement was to find redress for the perceived injustices of the war and Rio

Protocol, at the same time imagining the nation as strong and united, capable of defending its

territory. By 1981, the discourse on the territorial dispute had become an established vehicle for

imagining the nation, and Jaime Roldós’s famous words, “this Amazonian Ecuador, always and

forever” proclaim–imagine–its existence as a community beyond a specific historical context,

and crucially defining itself in terms of possession of the geographic region at the centre of the

dispute, the Amazon or Oriente.

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Questions and Possible Directions for Future Research

This thesis has traced the development of the discourse on the Ecuador-Peru conflict by focusing on published sources of only two kinds, namely books and pamphlets. It is possible that additional voices or a different narrative could be discovered by looking at periodical sources of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such research would solve the problem of finding voices that were not part of or associated with the state. However, it would not solve the problem of a more diverse authorship in terms of gender, race, or economic status. It is inevitably more difficult to find these voices in archival sources, on one hand because lay citizens are less likely to leave evidence that is not immediately related to their daily lives, and on the other hand, because the conflict is becoming a more distant memory every year, and people who lived through the earlier stages grow older and pass away. It would be possible to design an oral history project related to the discourse on the conflict. Given the fight against time regarding older citizens and veterans from the war of 1941, this project could look at the historical memory of the conflict as it exists today among different segments of the population, including those whose voices do not appear in published or periodical sources. In any case, a research project on the history of Ecuadorian nationalism from a bottom up perspective is well worth the effort.

Another issue that merits further research, which was briefly alluded in the thesis, is the relationship between nation-building and gender in the context of the discourse of the territorial conflict. The voice of women is conspicuously absent in published sources almost for the entirety of the period studied. The two women who published on the conflict, Leonor del Carmen and María de Lourdes Rodríguez de Alvear, did so in the 1960s and 1970s, when the discourse of the territorial dispute was close to acquiring its definitive shape. In addition, such a small sample of female voices cannot be considered representative of the voice of all or even a group

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of women. The best way to find the voices of women might be through an oral history project. It

would also be possible to investigate the relationship between the Ecuador-Peru conflict and

gender through the depictions of gender and the use of (historical or imagined) female figures in

many of the same sources discussed in this thesis. This would be part of a larger area of future

research on the relationship between Ecuadorian nationalism and gender, of the place accorded

to masculinity and femininity, and to men and women as such in the nation, discursively and in

practice.

Epilogue: Ecuador and Peru after the Conflict

In October 1998, the heads of state and Foreign Ministers of Ecuador and Peru gathered

in Brasilia’s Itamaraty Palace to sign the Presidential Act that put an end to their territorial

dispute, with representatives of the four guarantors of the Rio Protocol as witnesses, and the

current and a former President of Colombia in the audience.5 The agreement came after more

than two years of negotiations following the Cenepa War of 1995, and was possible in large

measure because both countries were able to make practical and symbolic concessions to the

other side, allowing them to create a discursive common ground of recognition of the other’s position that had been absent in the previous century and a half of conflict. In the following two decades, the former rivals went through a process of integration on various levels, from periodic declarations of friendship and cooperation between their respective presidents, to more concrete

5 There are two palaces with the name Itamaraty in Brazil. One of them, a neoclassical structure originally owned by the Count of Itamaraty is located in Rio de Janeiro. It functioned as the Foreign Ministry’s headquarters between 1899 and 1970, when the ministry moved to the country’s new capital, Brasilia. The new headquarters, a modernist masterpiece by Oscar Niemeyer, carried the old palace’s name, as it had become synonymous with the ministry itself, much like France’s Quai d’Orsay, London’s Whitehall, and Peru’s Torre Tagle. The 1942 Protocol was signed at Rio’s Itamaraty Palace, and the 1998 Presidential Act at Brasilia’s. Sandra Machado, “O rico acervo do Palácio Itamaraty,” MultiRio, November 10, 2015, http://www.multirio.rj.gov.br/index.php/leia/reportagens- artigos/reportagens/3588-o-rico-acervo-do-palacio-itamaraty. “Visite o Itamaraty,” Ministério das Relações Exteriores, http://www.itamaraty.gov.br/pt-BR/visite-o-itamaraty.

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integration efforts such as the Binational Plan for Borderlands Development.6 In other words, the

governments of Ecuador and Peru of the last two decades have made a conscious and consistent

effort to change the way they approach each other, both symbolically and in practice. An

interesting example is the “Flag Adjuration” traditionally performed in the Sierra and Oriente

regions on February 27, the anniversary of the Battle of Tarqui, an important event for the

Ecuadorian discourse on the conflict, and which I recalled doing in 1995 at the end of the last

chapter. In 2014, the date of the ceremony was changed to September 26, which is National Flag

Day and the date when children from the Costa have always performed the adjuration

ceremony.7 This change of date is symbolically important for a few reasons. First, the Battle of

Tarqui that the ceremony commemorated and celebrated was part of the Peru-Gran Colombia

War of 1829, considered the beginning of the conflict in many of the sources studied here.

Second, the way this date was celebrated as Ecuador’s día del civismo, or day of civic virtue, shows the extent to which the dominant discourse on the conflict had become part of the country’s educational culture, to the point that authorities made historical memory of the

Ecuador-Peru conflict virtually synonymous with citizenship. Third, rather than a superficial consequence of the 1998 agreement, the change of date for the Flag Adjuration was part of the

long process of rapprochement between Lima and Quito, and between Ecuadorians and

6 “Ecuador y Perú, por el desarrollo de las fronteras,” El Universo (Guayaquil), November 8, 2003. “Presidentes García y Correa dijeron adiós a las sospechas,” La República (Lima), June 1, 2007. “Perú y Ecuador, por más integración social,” El Telégrafo (Guayaquil), November 15, 2013. “Lenín Moreno viajará a Perú para revisar la relación fronteriza,” El Comercio (Quito), October 17, 2017. Each country has their own website for the Binational Plan. Perú. Plan Binacional Perú-Ecuador, “Plan Binacional Perú-Ecuador | El Plan Binacional de Desarrollo de la Región Fronteriza Perú-Ecuador (Capítulo Perú) surge con la firma de paz en 1998 e impulsa el desarrollo de la frontera” http://planbinacional.org.pe/. Ecuador. Plan Binacional de la Región Fronteriza, “Inicio - Plan Binacional,” http://planbinacional.gob.ec/. 7 Ecuador. Ministerio de Educación, Reglamento General a la Ley Orgánica de Educación Intercultural, Article 183, Executive Decree No. 366, Second Supplement to Registro Oficial No. 286, July 10, 2014. https://educacion.gob.ec/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2017/02/Reglamento-General-a-la-Ley-OrgAnica-de- Educacion-Intercultural.pdf.

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Peruvians, what Juan Miguel Bákula calls “the normalization of relations.” As he points out,

there had been efforts from both sides of the border to increase economic integration and trade at

least since the signing of the Andean Pact in the late 1960s, if not before. Behind such pragmatic

and institutionalized rapprochement was the recognition of inescapable economic

interdependence between the two neighbours, and of their interdependence with the rest of the

region.8 The change of date signaled readiness to recognize that this process had taken place.

Finally, it constitutes a manifestation of the reformulation of the concepts of state and citizenship

that arguably started with the rise of the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement, and which became

one of the main precepts of Rafael Correa’s Citizens’ Revolution.9 However, this does not mean

that the concepts that formerly shaped ideas of state and citizenship have completely

disappeared, just as differing and dissenting voices existed during its moments of greatest

prominence in the twentieth century. Felipe Zurita and Ulpiano Vela’s interviews show that the

sentiments of anger, patriotism, and nation-building that drove much of the discussion on the conflict in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is still alive, for at least as long as there are people who remember it.

8 Bákula, Vol. 3 of Tiempos y testimonios, 397, 409. 9 Marc Becker, “Correa, Indigenous Movements, and the Writing of a New Constitution in Ecuador,” Latin American Perspectives 38, no. 1 (January 2011): 47.

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