1 ECUADORIANIZING the ORIENTE: STATE FORMATION and NATIONALISM in ECUADOR's AMAZON, 1900-1969 by WILLIAM THOMPSON FISCHER

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ECUADORIANIZING THE ORIENTE: STATE FORMATION AND NATIONALISM IN ECUADOR’S AMAZON, 1900-1969

WILLIAM THOMPSON FISCHER

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2015

To my parents

3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my adviser, Dr. Mark Thurner, for his support and advice throughout the process of writing this dissertation and in my entire graduate school career. The other members of my committee, Dr. Ida Altman, Dr. Carmen Diana Deere,

Dr. Philip Williams, and Dr. Mitchell Hart, all provided valuable support and were influential in helping to shape the scope of my research and scholarly interests. Dr.

Steve Noll was an important source of support and advice throughout graduate school, as was Dr. Jeffrey Needell. Dr. Teodoro Bustamante, Dr. Robert Wasserstrom, and

Maria Eugenia Tamariz were valuable colleagues in research while I was in Ecuador, and their suggestions helped make my research period productive. The Fulbright

Commission of Ecuador and Susana Cabeza de Vaca supported me logistically during my research period. The Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida also provided research funding critical to shaping my dissertation prospectus. My fellow students in Latin American History, particularly Roberto Chauca, Rob Taber, Erin Zavitz,

Chris Woolley and Andrea Ferreira were excellent friends and colleagues. Dr. Jessica

Clawson provided valuable feedback and encouragement.

My parents, Harold and Billie Fischer, were unflinchingly supportive and patient during this long odyssey. My sister, Katie Fischer Ziegler, brother-in-law, Nicholas

Ziegler, and nephew Roland provided needed support and distraction, as did my friends, particularly Peter Zimmerman, Matthew Mariner, Josh Tolkan, Andrew Tolan, and Annaka Larson. Finally, I must thank Emily Larson, who has been my strongest supporter and fiercest advocate in every facet of life for the last year. Without your joy and love, this dissertation would not be finished.

4 TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 7

ABSTRACT ...... 8

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION: ECUADOR’S ORIENTE AS NATIONAL OBJECT OF DESIRE AND SET OF ANCILLARY PROVINCES ...... 10

2 CONSTRUCTING THE NATIONAL OBJECT OF THE ORIENTE, 1900-1948 ...... 56

Giving the Oriente an Ecuadorian Past and Future ...... 58 Intensified Construction of the National Object in the 1920s and 1930s ...... 64 Celebrating a National Object of Desire: The Día del Oriente ...... 92 Struggling with Loss: Discussing the Oriente after 1941 ...... 112

3 “JÍVAROS” AND “YUMBOS”: REPRESENTATIONS OF AMAZONIAN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN ECUADORIAN SOCIETY, 1900-1960 ...... 132

Jívaros ...... 139 Yumbos ...... 166 Proposals for Incorporating New Compatriots ...... 194

4 “SPECIAL LAWS” FOR A SPECIAL REGION: GOVERNING THE ORIENTE, 1900-1948 ...... 205

The Oriente Subject to Liberal Agenda ...... 206 New Reforms, New Governments, and Persistent Problems in the 1920s and 1930s ...... 231 Oriente Administration and Territorial Crisis into the 1940s ...... 262

5 ADMINISTERING ANCILLARY PROVINCES: COLONISTS AND STATE OFFICIALS IN THE ORIENTE, 1940-1960 ...... 280

Sentinels of the Homeland: Oriente Colonists and their Grievances ...... 288 The Oriente’s Appointed Functionaries ...... 301 The Oriente’s Incipient Local Government ...... 320 Political Factions and Administrative Disruption ...... 337

6 TAKING POSSESSION OF THE ORIENTE: LAND TITLING AND CONFLICT AMONG COLONISTS, LATIFUNDISTAS, AND INDIANS, 1940-1960 ...... 357

5 Colonists, Alleged “Latifundistas,” and the Competition for Land ...... 359 The Oriente’s Indians Stake Their Claims ...... 386

7 INDISPENSABLE NON-CITIZENS: THE ORIENTE’S INDIANS IN ANCILLARY PROVINCES, 1940-1960 ...... 426

Yumbos and Patrones in the Northern Oriente ...... 429 Jívaros and Whites in the Southern Oriente ...... 472

8 STILL ANCILLARY: NAPO PROVINCE, 1960-1969 ...... 502

Administrative Efforts for an Ancillary Province ...... 503 Competition for Land in the 1960s and Agrarian Reform ...... 515 Patrones, State Officials, and Indian Workers ...... 543 Concluding Remarks...... 581

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 585

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 597

6 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AGN Archivo de la Gobernación del Napo, Tena

AMG Archivo del Ministerio de Gobierno, Quito

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

ECUADORIANIZING THE ORIENTE: STATE FORMATION AND NATIONALISM IN ECUADOR’S AMAZON, 1900-1969

William Thompson Fischer

May 2015

Chair: Mark W. Thurner Cochair: Ida Altman Major: History

This dissertation traces the political, economic, and cultural means by which

Ecuador’s Amazonian region became over the course of the twentieth century a vital component of the national state. The “Ecuadorianization” of the region had two fundamental components: first, the region was constructed as a national object of desire via the press, popular publications and civic manifestations; secondly, the region came to be administered in patrimonial fashion by the state as underfunded and isolated ancillary provinces. Though they were of strategic importance, these provinces were perpetually a secondary concern to the Ecuadorian government, leading to inconstant attention that could not bring about the desired integration of the region. Nevertheless, prior notions about the region as a national object endured, and these concepts influenced legislative initiatives for the region and the ways different social groups in the

Oriente tended to interact with the state.

In contrast to previous studies of state formation in the frontiers of the Andean region, this dissertation suggests that the national imagining of the territory preceded

8 the territorialization of the state. This imagining, which took place in the “paper space” of the Republic’s major cities, was consequential for the administration of the region in the

“stage space” of colonization and state expansion because it provided rhetoric for colonists, state officials, and indigenous people that was used to establish a modus vivendi and to debate how authority was legitimated. This close association between how the region was imagined and how its integration into the state proceeded signals the importance of cultural production in the national “metropolis” for other cases of frontier state formation. Furthermore, this dissertation contributes to the theory of postcolonial nationalism by problematizing the role of the state in a frontier region. This work demonstrates how state formation in such areas may be characterized by improvisation and influential public-private constellations of power that lead to a situation of internal colonialism over indigenous peoples. As this dissertation describes, the ideas derived from the cultural construction of the Amazon region as an object of desire significantly influenced the way this colonial dynamic was both imposed and contested.

9 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: ECUADOR’S ORIENTE AS NATIONAL OBJECT OF DESIRE AND SET OF ANCILLARY PROVINCES

The Amazonian region to the east of Ecuador’s Andean cordillera is known to

Ecuadorians as the Oriente, which can be literally translated as “the Orient” but which more simply and correctly means “the East.” Despite being a region that received little attention from the Ecuadorian government during the first century of the Republic’s independence, the Oriente is today a critical component of Ecuador. Popularly and officially conceived, Ecuador is a tripartite country, formed of three zones: the Pacific

Costa, the Andean Sierra, and the Amazonian Oriente (the formulation often adds the fourth insular region of the Galápagos). Each zone contributes to the nation’s diversity and wealth. Indeed, each has a critical role to play in the contemporary political arena; the Oriente’s role as the site of oil extraction and political mobilization around indigenous and conservation issues has been growing since the 1960s.

Historian Natalia Esvertit Cobes has argued that the Oriente of much of the 19th century was an “Incipient Province,” a national arena-in-waiting. By the time of Eloy

Alfaro’s liberal revolution of 1895, however, the Oriente had become “an indispensable territory for the conformation of the nation,” thanks to governmental and elite preoccupation with the region’s past, present, and future. Though the degree of state formation and development that actually took place in the Oriente was relatively insignificant, “the bases were laid for its incorporation on the ideological-symbolic level, which later would be carried out in sweeping fashion, at the beginning of the twentieth century.” The fact that the Oriente had become a “unifying ideological referent” in

Ecuadorian politics helped spur on the efforts to incorporate the region in a more

10 physical sense.1 This dissertation describes how the Oriente was taken from the condition Esvertit describes, that is, a promising, “indispensable” but “incipient” part of the nation in symbolic terms, to a condition of vital importance in cultural, political, and economic terms. I trace key elements of how the Oriente was Ecuadorianized during the period between the Liberal Revolution of 1895 the oil boom of the late-1960s and early

1970s.

My work examines the two fundamental aspects of the region’s

Ecuadorianization: the Oriente’s construction as a national object of desire and its subsequent administration as region of “ancillary provinces.” The first part of this dissertation examines how these two elements emerged in tandem in the first half of the twentieth century. Part of Ecuador’s Amazonian frontier history took place not “on the ground,” but in the press and publications about the region that could be read by citizens in the capital, Quito, and in the other principal cities of the Republic. The

Oriente was more than a distant region of the country; it was an object in which national rhetoric and hopes for the future were invested. It was invoked as a project of development and incorporation, a yardstick for Ecuador’s prestige in the international arena, a source of pride for all future citizens, and home to particularly praiseworthy and patriotic “Sentinels of the Homeland” that braved isolation and inclement conditions to make their home there. The Oriente’s indigenous peoples were drawn into this construction of the Oriente as national object of desire. Representations of indigenous peoples in the Ecuadorian press and publishing houses were inextricably linked to the national project. As the region’s Quichua and Shuar peoples (often referred to in the

1 Natalia Esvertit Cobes, La Incipiente Provincia. Amazonía y Estado ecuatoriano en el siglo XIX (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 2008), 247-48. All translations are my own.

11 beginning of the twentieth century as “Yumbos” and “Jívaros”) entered Ecuador’s national cast of characters, their roles were bound and conditioned by the ongoing process of incorporating the Oriente into the national imaginary and territory.

The region was administered by a series of “Special Laws” that sought to make the many hopes for the future of the region come true, mainly by fostering the region’s development and colonization through proper administration. The result of these efforts was a special kind of frontier that arose from the particularities of the situation: the

Oriente was a region of “ancillary provinces” that was not entirely a world apart from the functioning of the rest of country, but suffered in various ways from lack of attention and resources. As noted above, the Oriente in the nineteenth century was an “incipient” province because it was widely believed that its flourishing as an important part of the country lay in the future. In the twentieth century, the Oriente was the subject of decades of preoccupation by state makers and propagandists. It was widely agreed to be part of the nation; nevertheless as a part of the state it did not resemble the provinces of the interior or the coast. It was, for the government, an “extra” or

“additional” piece of national territory that occupied a low rung on the list of priorities for the national budget. It was of ancillary importance because although the Oriente’s existence provided support for national rhetoric about Ecuador’s prestige as an

Amazonian nation, in administrative terms it perpetually came after other governmental initiatives. The Special Laws were not special enough; they sought to re-create, in large part, the governmental system enjoyed by the rest of the Republic. In practice, however, the ancillary provinces of the Oriente maintained the basic structure of Ecuador’s other provinces but lacked the elements necessary for the transformation of the region into a

12 productive and closely linked section of national territory. The desires and aspirations that were components of the Oriente as national object of desire influenced the administration of the region’s ancillary provinces because they set the agenda for the projects attempted in the region. The terms of the national object also offered the yardsticks by which to measure the pace and quality of the attempted development and administration.

The second part of my dissertation focuses on the period of roughly 1940-1969 and it examines the consequences for those who lived there of the fact that the Oriente was both national object, laced with patriotic importance, and also a group of ancillary provinces. The “state system” that resulted was a shadowy and disorganized version of the rest of the Republic due to lack of resources, low population, and poor infrastructure. It was governed by laws that prescribed a system much like that of the rest of the country. In practice, the system was carried out by corrupt officials and influential private individuals who cheated and improvised their way to a modus operandi in the region that did not live up to what was envisioned by statesmen in Quito.

The establishment of private landholdings in the region was a particularly important example of how the national object influenced processes within ancillary provinces, as colonists who sought to make the Oriente their homeland, Indians who sought to maintain access to land, and influential, wealthy individuals engaged the state system to physically take hold of the Oriente’s natural resources. The conflicts that arose from this process were often framed in terms of the Oriente as national object of desire, but the faulty administrative system of these ancillary provinces very often could not provide a definitive solution to these conflicts. The consequences of living in ancillary provinces

13 were particularly important for the Oriente’s Quichua and Shuar Indians. Their labor was essential for the functioning of the state system and agriculture in the region, but they were not full citizens. They were subject to the machinations of public officials and private patrones whose motivations often swept the indigenous people into webs of exploitation and personal rivalry.

As a group of ancillary provinces, the Oriente provides an example of “internal colonialism.” Mark Thurner has cited the “devastating consequences” of “Creole nationalist ‘internal’ settler colonialism” in postcolonial Spanish American republics.

These nationalist efforts differed from the “imperial” colonialism of Spain and in some cases had more significant effects upon native societies and different regions within these republics.2 Peru’s effort to “bring ‘savage’ Amazonia and its valuable resources under the civilizing sway of the republic” was not a continuation of Spain’s program of expansion, but rather a Peruvian national project to dominate national territory as “heir to Inca civilization.”3 In the Oriente of Ecuador, this settler colonialism was carried out by the aforementioned “Sentinels of the Homeland,” colonists who went to the region in search of land and lucre, and by petty state officials who were tasked with carrying out the Republic’s laws in these ancillary provinces that lacked resources and communications. The effects upon the Oriente’s native societies could be, as will be shown, similarly devastating.

Within the ancillary provinces, an “internal colonialism” arose that shares features with what Pablo González Casanova described in the 1960s; with the replacement of

2 Mark Thurner, “After Spanish Rule: Writing Another After,” in Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero, eds., After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 28.

3 Ibid., 44-45.

14 “foreign” (that is, imperial) domination of a region or society, “natives” to the country in question come to dominate other “natives.” In this case, and in the Mexico that

González described, “creole” or white-mestizo citizens dominated different groups of

Indians.4 For González, and other thinkers about “internal colonialism,” the phenomenon describes an arrangement of class and ethnic relationships that subordinates certain groups to the benefit of others in a national society. Generally, discussions of internal colonialism treat these relationships divorced from particular regions; rather, they are a broad description of the nature of ethnic stratification across a given country.5 But González’s observation that low standards of living, the exploitation of cheap labor, and the use of violence uncommon in the national

“metropolis” characterizes internal colonialism holds true for the ancillary provinces of the Oriente.6 Furthermore, González describes the “plundering” of Indian land and labor that stems from linguistic domination by “ladinos,” or Spanish-speaking white-mestizos, and “colonial attitudes” held by “local functionaries.”7 The Oriente was an “internal colony” of Ecuador for these reasons, too. Rodolfo Stavenhagen’s account of internal colonialism also bears out the pattern of “authoritarian” or “paternalistic” treatment toward Indians by ladinos, as well as the latter group’s belief that Indians hold

4 Pablo González Casanova, “Internal Colonialism and National Development,” Studies in Comparative International Development 1, no. 4 (1965), 27.

5 See for example Julio Cotler “The Mechanics of Internal Domination and Social Change,” Studies in Comparative International Development Vol. 3, no. 12 (1967-68), 230-246; Erwin H. Epstein, “Education and Peruanidad: ‘Internal’ Colonialism in the Peruvian Highlands,” Comparative Education Review Vol. 15, no. 2 (June 1971), 188-201; Robert J. Hind, “The Internal Colonial Concept,” Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol. 26, no. 3 (July 1984), 543-468; Kelly Hoffman and Miguel Angel Centeno, “The Lopsided Continent: Inequality in Latin America,” Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 29 (2003), 363-390; John R. Chávez, “Aliens in Their Native Lands: The Persistence of Internal Colonial Theory,” Journal of World History Vol. 22, no. 4 (December 2011), 785-809.

6 González Casanova, “Internal Colonialism,” 31.

7 Ibid., 35.

15 characteristics, such as their aptitude for manual labor, that makes them well suited to a subordinate position.8 Ecuador’s Oriente was an example of, as Stavenhagen describes, the colonization of Indians by “strangers” who were exponents not of an overseas metropolis, but of a national society that sought to exert more control over national territory. These “strangers” in the case of the Oriente were the colonists and petty officials who were “bearer[s] of ‘national culture’ and member[s] of ‘national society’” who entered into confrontation with Indians in the ancillary provinces of the

Oriente.9

The ancillary nature of the Oriente’s provinces is evidenced by the characteristics shared in common with states that cannot impose a homogenous regime of law and order across the entirety of the country. As explained by the political scientist Guillermo

O’Donnell, one must recognize that states do not necessarily have similar effectiveness

“throughout the national territory and across the existing social stratification.” O’Donnell noted in the early 1990s that Ecuador was one country “close to the pole of extreme heterogeneity” in the functioning of the state across national space. This was true also for the period under study in this dissertation, and O’Donnell’s observations about the consequences of this fact provide a way to talk about the Oriente of approximately

1900-1969. As O’Donnell stated, “Provinces or districts peripheral to the national center...create (or reinforce) systems of local power which tend to reach extremes of violent, personalistic rule.” Minority populations suffer especially for the state’s inability to “implement its own regulations.” In such areas, “power circuits” may exist that

8 Rodolfo Stavenhagen, “Classes, Colonialism, and Acculturation,” Studies in Comparative International Development Vol. 1, no. 6 (1965), 68.

9 Ibid., 71-73.

16 “operate according to rules which are inconsistent, if not antagonistic, with the law that supposedly regulates the national territory.” Describing such places as “brown areas,”

O’Donnell notes that they usually have the “trappings of the state” such as elections, political parties, and a network of local officials such as governors. However, in brown areas the “components of democratic legality and, hence, of publicness and citizenship, fade away at the frontiers of various regions.” Furthermore, disadvantaged groups are less likely to be able to receive fair treatment and services from state institutions to which they are legally entitled.10 The Oriente, then, was a “brown area” of the

Ecuadorian state; it was a group of ancillary provinces that were also a site of internal colonization and colonialism.

For all of these phenomena in the ancillary provinces of the Oriente, the importance of the region as national object of desire was paramount. The ideological aspect of the Oriente as a vital part of the nation provided colonists, state officials, and

Indians a set of rhetorical tools they could use to seek redress of grievances. Indeed, invoking the national object of the Oriente was done at all levels as an attempt to

“bridge the gap” between the few resources actually available for the region and the widely agreed upon notion that the Amazon represented the future of Ecuador. This dissertation demonstrates that the national imagining of the Oriente preceded the territorialization of the region by the state, and therefore greatly influenced how administration and colonization proceeded. My work contributes to scholarship on the

Amazon and other frontiers in Latin America by signaling the importance of cultural and civic activity in the national “metropolis” when examining state formation in the frontier

10 Guillermo O’Donnell, “On the State, Democratization and Some Conceptual Problems: A Latin American View with Glances at Some Postcommunist Countries,” World Development Vol. 21, no. 8 (1993), 1358-61.

17 and other regions outside of a given nation’s “central axis.” Furthermore, this research contributes to the study of postcolonial nationalism by problematizing the nature of the state during periods of national territorial expansion. As I demonstrate, state formation proceeded with a great deal of improvisation and with significant influence by public- private constellations of power that resulted in a system of internal colonialism over the

Oriente’s indigenous peoples. The ideas derived from the cultural construction of the region as a national object of desire affected the nature of this colonial dynamic and how it was contested. This case helps illuminate the consequences of governmental projections of a system of administration when they are imposed without sufficient funding and infrastructural support. The research here also illuminates an example of

“postcolonial colonialism,” which historian Alberto Harambour-Ross in a recent dissertation described as a postcolonial state’s attempt to “close the material gaps of its founding judicial fiction.” That is, postcolonial Spanish American republics were forced to confront the fact that they could not impose uniform consent to their rule across all of national territory.11 To address this, they relied on the “continuity of colonial/imperial structures and ideologies re-enacted by independent national institutions”12 as colonists and state officials moved into territories from which they hoped to remove the status of

“no man’s land,” home to “barbarism and wilderness.”13 As stated previously, cultural production in Ecuador’s major cities provided the colonial and imperial impulse to extend the reach of the state, as well as the ideas state officials held about the Oriente’s

11 Alberto Harambour-Ross, “Borderland Sovereignties. Postcolonial Colonialism and State Making in Patagonia. Argentina and Chile, 1840s-1922,” (PhD diss., Stony Brook University, 2012), 43- 44.

12 Ibid., 81.

13 Ibid., 44.

18 characteristics as “wilderness” zone, home to different groups of “savages.” Finally, this dissertation also describes in detail the modus vivendi in the Oriente that lay the groundwork both for the arrival of multi-national oil drilling operations and the emergence of the Amazonian wing of Ecuador’s indigenous movement which by the

1980s would be among the most significant in Latin America.

Other authors have considered how Ecuador came to control its national space.

Jean-Paul Deler has described the Ecuadorian state as stemming from the “rules of the game” that were elaborated between the different regions and socioeconomic groups as they cemented the “continuity of a quiteño space” in the republican period.14 For Deler, the Oriente was a periphery of national space, due to the persistent lack of an “effective economic interest” for much of Ecuador’s existence as an independent state.15

Nevertheless, Deler does note that by the 1950s the Oriente had become the destination for great numbers of internal migrants from the Sierra.16 My dissertation, then, describes how the Amazonian frontier became part of Ecuadorian national space, both in ideological terms, and in terms of its administrative structure.

Ann Christine Taylor has also examined the role of the Oriente in Ecuador’s history, though her contribution to the volume edited by Juan Maiguashca, Historia y región en el Ecuador: 1830-1930, was a last moment inclusion. As Taylor, an anthropologist, describes, the study of “peripheral forests” such as the Oriente falls traditionally to anthropologists while historians tackle the “dynamic of the central axes.”

14 Jean-Paul Deler, Ecuador: del espacio al Estado nacional (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 2007), 13.

15 Ibid., 175.

16 Ibid., 321.

19 The Amazon region, Taylor states, was marginal in sociological, economic, and political terms for the period covered by the volume.17 Taylor formulates a cyclical pattern for the

Oriente’s history, with brief periods of attention based on commodity extraction, such as a gold rush in the sixteenth century, or the rubber boom of the late nineteenth century, alternating with prolonged periods of inattention. For Taylor, the period 1900-1940 was one of relative inactivity; it was a continuation of nineteenth-century patterns characterized by the dominance of white-mestizo patrones controlling Indian labor in the region. The last phase of Ecuador’s Amazonian history begins, for Taylor, in 1950 with the appearance of a salaried workforce in the region and the resulting entrance of the

Amazon into the twentieth century.18 However, as she notes, a wave of immigration to the region and burgeoning economic activities based on petrol exploration, agriculture, and livestock began earlier in the twentieth century.19 The cementing of these dynamics led to the introduction of money into the region and “the integration of the Indians to the commercial economy,” which became “definitive and irreversible beginning in the years

1950-1960.”20 This dissertation examines this process while keeping in mind that it took place in ancillary provinces of the state, rather than a “central axis”; the Oriente was an arena distinct from that of the highland Sierra or the Pacific Costa.

Marco Restrepo has also cited midcentury as a critical era for the Oriente. Prior to 1950, he argues, the state “delegated its inherent responsibilities” to missionaries and

17 Anne Christine Taylor, “El Oriente ecuatoriano en el siglo XIX: ‘el otro litoral,’” in Juan Maiguashca, ed., Historia y región en el Ecuador: 1830-1930 (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1994), 17-18.

18 Ibid., 20-21.

19 Ibid., 47.

20 Ibid., 60.

20 private individuals, and formulated laws for the Amazon that “revealed a misunderstanding of its particularities.”21 But the arrival of “poor campesinos” from the

Sierra and Pacific lowlands provided a “motor of commercial capital” in the region that transformed the area.22 My research illuminates this process, as a main focus of the work is the establishment of colonists in the region and their economic and political activities. Restrepo has also noted the symbolic importance of the Oriente in nationalist terms at midcentury; as he states it, in 1941, as war with Peru broke out, the Oriente

“begins to exist for the Ecuadorian State.” In the view of this dissertation, the Oriente was an important national object before the war with Peru. In Restrepo’s view, the formalization of the territorial losses with the 1942 Rio de Janeiro Protocol caused the state and society to see the Amazon as “an integral part of national territory,” which led to increased efforts to build roads to the region, as well as the promulgation of more legislation designed for the region.23 As this dissertation shows, the Oriente was an object of legislation and projects for development in previous decades as well, which contributed to its status as both a national object of desire and a collection of provinces ancillary to the concerns of the state.

Jorge Uquillas, in a brief overview of Ecuadorian colonization of the Amazon, stresses the importance of the 1920s contract with the Salesian Catholic order to establish missions in the southern Oriente, which helped lay the groundwork for

21 Marco Restrepo G., “El Proceso de acumulación en la Amazonía ecuatoriana (Una breve visión histórica),” in Lucy Ruiz M. ed., Amazonía nuestra: una visión alternativa (Quito: CEDIME, 1991), 143.

22 Ibid., 144.

23 Marco Restrepo G., “El problema de la frontera en la construcción del espacio amazónico,” in Lucy Ruiz M., ed., Amazonía: Escenarios y Conflictos (Quito: CEDIME, 1993), 160.

21 colonization. Additionally, the work of Royal Dutch Shell in exploring for petroleum in the

1940s contributed to the infrastructure of the central portion of the Oriente in significant fashion. Construction of roads in this period and new legislative efforts meant that “[the] scenario for a major invasion from the sierra and costa was gradually forming.”24 Like

Uquillas, Paul E. Little, in his discussion of Ecuador’s Amazonian history, also takes the

1920s to be an important era in the region’s history, for in this period “Amazonia finally began to be integrated into the political-administrative structure of the Ecuadorian state” thanks to new legislation and increasing mission activity.25 Indeed, this dissertation notes the acceleration of the processes, both governmental and literary, that constructed the Oriente as a part of the Ecuadorian state and nation beginning in the

1920s.

This dissertation takes up Esvertit’s finding that the Oriente had become

“indispensable” by the beginning of the twentieth century and demonstrates that the period prior to 1950 was not “dead time” in the history of the region, but was in fact a period of increasing attention paid to the region by the government in Quito, by the press, and by publishers of literary, scientific, and popular material. According to

Benedict Anderson, the various devices of print capitalism such as the novel and newspaper presented “[the] idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time,” which was a key component of the construction of

24 Jorge Uquillas, “Colonization and Spontaneous Settlement in the Ecuadoran Amazon,” in Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood, eds., Frontier Expansion in Amazonia (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1984), 266-67.

25 Paul E. Little, Amazonia: Territorial Struggles on Perennial Frontiers (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 46-47.

22 the imagined community of the nation.26 From the early part of the twentieth century, the

Oriente was Ecuadorianized as a national object of desire in published materials that sought to impart knowledge of the region and its peoples to wider Ecuadorian society, thereby bringing it fully into the imagined community. As Anderson notes, “nationality” and “nation-ness” are cultural phenomena that share more in common with kinship and religion than with political ideologies like fascism or liberalism.27 The devices of print capitalism I interpret here sought to extend Ecuadorian nation-ness, and the familiarity of kinship, to the Amazonian region. In these materials, the Oriente came to be constructed as a site that was not just fully part of the Ecuadorian nation; it was also key to Ecuador’s prestige in the concert of all nations, thanks to its unfathomable wealth and available land for Ecuadorians from the highlands. The Oriente therefore came to be an essential component of Ecuadorian patriotism and civic celebration, especially as the nation approached midcentury and conflict with Peru over the region’s borders loomed.

The corpus of scientific, literary, and popular production about the Oriente, as well as

Quito’s press, contained a tension between the view of the Oriente as a fantastical and romantic place, in which fortunes could be easily made, and a more hardened view, stripped of undue optimism and more in touch with the actual situation “on the ground” in the region. In general, books, magazines, and press reports about the Oriente that sought to extend the kinship of nation-ness to the region became increasingly grounded in reality as the twentieth century progressed. Nevertheless, notions of the Oriente as holding the key to the nation’s future, and offering abundance to those who traveled

26 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 26.

27 Ibid., 4-5.

23 there, remained present throughout the time period examined. Though the Oriente, officially, was Ecuadorian territory, my dissertation shows that much continued to be done to bring the Oriente and its people into the Ecuadorian imagined community.

Press reports, magazine articles, and novels about the Oriente reported on the region’s customs, events, comings and goings. The sources examined here show an ongoing effort to present the Oriente as already a fully national region in the face of some perspectives that it was still something of an “other,” lacking the elements of nationality needed to bring it into harmony with the rest of the Ecuadorian community.

The Oriente was not an “empty” place at the beginning of the twentieth century, despite the fact that some of the propagandistic accounts of the region seemed premised on that assumption. In fact, Ecuador’s Amazon was (and is still) home to many groups of indigenous peoples. The Ecuadorianization of these people was a recurring preoccupation in the published materials examined here. Like the tension between the view of the Oriente as, on one hand, a fully national and livable place, and on the other hand, a daunting and inhospitable region, the materials examined in this dissertation presented a similar view of the region’s Indians. As with indigenous people in other postcolonial Spanish American republics, at times the Oriente’s Indians were domestic and helpful compatriots-in-waiting, while at other times they were portrayed as dangerous and untrustworthy obstacles to national progress. This tension was never fully resolved. Although the Oriente’s Indians and white-mestizo residents increasingly interacted with one another as the twentieth century progressed, there was no single, consensus view in the published materials examined here of their degree of integration into the Ecuadorian imagined community. But all of these views of the region’s Indians

24 were influenced by the fact that they lived in a region that was a national object of desire. In this case, discussions about the Indians frequently invoked them as constructed categories with which to critique the actions of the state and the pace of the

Oriente’s incorporation into the Republic at large. The ideological importance of the

Oriente as national territory and as project for integration affected how its indigenous people were understood by wider society.

A great degree of Ecuadorianization, then, took place outside of the Amazon itself, in the press and publications read by wider Ecuadorian society in the capital,

Quito, and elsewhere. In short, these writings constructed the Oriente as a national space, traveling through “homogenous, empty time” along with the other sections of the

Republic. Newspaper accounts about the region imparted their readers with a notion of

“simultaneity,” as Benedict Anderson describes it, about the settlements in the Amazon and their inhabitants. Just as people in Quito celebrated national holidays, for example, so too did the colonists of the Oriente; their calendrical participation in such events fostered a feeling of temporal coincidence between the Oriente and the interior of the

Republic. This contributed to the feeling of nation-ness and kinship between

Ecuadorians in the major cities and those in the distant provinces of the Amazon.28 The production of a corpus of information about the Oriente preceded and conditioned the region’s transformation into an arena for the actions of the state and private

Ecuadorians who moved there to seek subsistence or economic success. Materials published about the Oriente therefore influenced the making of what historian Raymond

Craib has called a “stage”; that is, a “space” in which certain actions and kinds of

28 Ibid., 24.

25 agency are condoned and in which “science, statecraft, and political economy” may operate.29 The published materials examined in this dissertation formulated the Oriente as a stage upon which Ecuadorian history would unfold, and that would be subject to

“circulation, possession, and control” by Ecuadorian statesmen and colonists.30 The goals of good administration, colonization, agriculture and natural resource extraction were among the most important of the imagined activities for colonists and petty officials. These imaginings molded the subsequent creation of “stage space” for administration.

But the description of the “stage” and its “players” was only part of the task facing the Republic that sought to incorporate its Amazonian region into the workings of the state and the economy. This dissertation also describes the laws promulgated, infrastructure projects pursued, and colonization undertaken in the Oriente from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1960s. These efforts resulted in the creation of the Oriente not as a fully integrated section of the Republic, but as a group of ancillary provinces that only partially resembled the governmental system of the rest of the country. The same general structure of appointed officials existed in the Oriente, as did the division of the provinces into cantones and parishes. The government projected a constitutional system of administration onto these ancillary provinces without providing the funding, communication system, and oversight necessary to ensure that the region would transform in the manner imagined by its construction as a national object of desire. These shortfalls meant that the effectiveness of the state was inconsistent at

29 Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 5-6.

30 Ibid.

26 best, and the consequences of the internal colonialism that took place in the region were exacerbated by the local and personalistic power structure that resulted.

Effective administration of the Oriente’s people and lands was a preoccupation of

Ecuadorian governments throughout this period, but it was rarely given high priority.

Pilar García Jordán has argued that Eloy Alfaro’s Liberal Revolution of 1895 was little concerned with the Amazon. Like Esvertit, García notes that the Amazon was a

“fundamental ingredient of Ecuadorian nationalism,” but it was “little more” until the

1920s, when the government created the Dirección General de Oriente and signed a mission contract with the Salesian order.31 The attempt to connect the region to the

Sierra through road projects proceeded in fits and starts, and a consistent vehicular connection was elusive until the 1940s. Nevertheless, the Oriente’s colonist population grew, thanks mostly to the efforts of spontaneous settlers from the Andean region, although several large-scale colonization projects were tried. To understand these efforts, I draw upon ministerial reports, laws, reporting in Quito’s daily El Comercio, and unpublished documents, including communications between Oriente officials, records of

Oriente municipal government, petitions from Oriente colonists and Indians, and legal records. These sources reveal the dynamics of state formation in a context of limited resources, difficult geography, and a heterogeneous population. The region was home to several interested parties who each engaged the state and each other in order to secure access to land, labor, and political authority. My dissertation investigates this process most extensively for the period from approximately 1940-1969, during which time the wave of immigration from the Sierra intensified and the Oriente was sub-

31 Pilar García Jordán, “Misiones, Fronteras y Nacionalización en la Amazonía Andina: Perú, Ecuador y Bolivia, (Siglos XIX-XX),” in Pilar García Jordán and Núria Sala i Vila, eds., La nacionalización de la Amazonía (Barcelona: Publicacions Universitat de Barcelona, 1998), 34.

27 divided into new provinces, thereby increasing the presence of the state in the region and creating new political constituencies. This period also saw accelerating administration at the local level, as new parish and canton government bodies were constituted to collect revenues and spend on infrastructure projects. The

Ecuadorianization of the Oriente “on the ground” in the growing towns and cities of the upper Amazon basin was a process undertaken by officials from Quito as much as it was by influential landowning patrones, religious missionaries, and colonists who cleared the land and engaged in a variety of economic activities. This dissertation examines the maturing of the system of administration in the ancillary provinces of the

Oriente on the eve of the oil boom of the 1960s that massively increased the region’s population and economic significance.

The transformations described above were, in essence, Ecuador’s frontier history. By the end of the period under study, the Oriente had gone from being a region that was marginal in political, economic, and nationalist terms, to a maturing section of the nation. Though it remained a group of ancillary provinces, the system in place was entrenched over time. Many changes were yet to come, as the oil boom had far reaching consequences beginning in the latter part of the 1960s. But for those sections of the Oriente that were most closely connected to the Sierra and that saw the greatest growth in population before the oil boom, their status as a “frontier” by the late 1960s was in question. We should now consider how other studies of frontiers and regions in

Latin American history inform this project.

The definition of “frontier” is imprecise and, as David J. Weber and Jane M.

Rausch argue, “ideological,” because it implies that a given geographic space is

28 somehow not central.32 Ecuador’s Oriente, like most frontiers, was home to people for whom the Oriente was certainly central, namely, the various indigenous groups such as the Quichua, Shuar, Achuar, Huaorani, and others. This dissertation, due to its focus on the exponents of the state in the region, studies actors who held the perspective that the

Oriente was not a central axis. For the region’s colonists and administrators, the feeling that it represented something of a “vanguard” of nationality was present for much of the period studied here. This notion was a central component of the Oriente as national object of desire; it was home to particularly patriotic citizens enacting a nationalist project of importance. Its connection to the center (Quito and the other highland cities) improved over time with roads, mail service, and telephones, but the region’s difficult geography did not cease to be a factor. So the region can be counted among those frontiers that, for Weber and Rausch, “are places where cultures contend with one another and with their physical environment to produce a dynamic that is unique to time and place. As such, frontiers represent both place and process, linked inextricably.”33

The case of Ecuador’s Oriente shows that part of this process lay outside the region itself, taking place instead in the published materials and civic celebrations from which the rest of society learned about the region and its people. The Oriente also demonstrates the importance of specific actors and institutions, from legislation to missionaries to local elected officials, in directing access by colonists and Indians to land and resources, and thereby in shaping the maturing political and economic system of the Oriente at the beginning of the oil boom. This dissertation takes up Weber and

32 David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch, “Introduction,” in David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch, eds., Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History (Wilmington: SR Books, 1994), xiii.

33 Ibid., xiv.

29 Rausch’s charge that, since frontiers “contain so many cultural and environmental variables,” their study “must include considerations of frontier peoples and institutions at specific times and places.”34 For Ecuador’s Amazon, these particularities resulted in a frontier that was composed of ancillary provinces, frequently relegated to secondary importance. But this frontier was also a national object in which patriotic prestige and hopes for the future were invested.

This project, like other studies, considers the impact of the frontier on national identity. As mentioned above, the Oriente factors significantly into the formulation of

Ecuador as a tripartite nation of three ecological zones. The ecological diversity of the region has been lauded in recent years as one of Ecuador’s great points of attraction.

But the Oriente also contributed a national frontier “type,” as the residents of the Oriente were often seen, and actively portrayed themselves, as “Sentinels of the Homeland.”

They claimed to be unusually patriotic and hardworking in the face of difficult geography and remoteness from the center of the nation. These views were vehemently disseminated in literary production on the Oriente and were claimed by colonists themselves in petitions and communications to government officials. Though the

Oriente colonist may not have had as large a cultural impact as the bandeirante of

Brazil or the gaucho of Argentina did in those countries’ imaginings of nationality, the

Oriente did engender important romantic notions. The Oriente must be placed among those frontier cases in Latin American history that, as Weber and Rausch argue, “forged important features” of national identities.35

34 Ibid., xxiii.

35 Ibid., xxvii.

30 As the Oriente is a part of the Amazon, we must also consider Paul E. Little’s observation that Amazonia has seen something of a cyclical frontier history; several distinct phases of penetration into the Amazon by outsiders took place over the centuries, often tied to periods of resource extraction. As Little observes, “Modernity has broken onto its shores for centuries, and Amazonian peoples have responded in so many ways that Amazonian social history is a fragmented quilt of time frames.”36 The

Amazon never had a single frontier, but several, pursued in different time periods, and by different social actors such as Conquistadors, missionaries, nation-state administrators, and foreign economic interests. Little’s use of the concept of momentum is a good way to analyze the unfolding of the frontier process in the Amazon. As he writes, “Each social group [in the Amazon] establishes its own demographic and spatial momentum, the force of which is greatly responsible for the degree of political power achieved and the magnitude of environmental effects produced in the region.”37 This study is informed by Little’s formulation as it considers how influence was wielded in the

Oriente by Catholic missions, wealthy private individuals, poor colonists, and state officials, and how the relative influence of each changed over time. The Oriente’s indigenous inhabitants certainly affected the way these groups exercised influence, and were also themselves factors in how influence was shared and contested. For example, the government’s efforts to protect Indian peoples and lands could provide justification for the actions taken by missionaries, while seeking to rule out possible actions by landowners. All of this took place within a region that was not a fully integrated part of

36 Little, Amazonia, 1.

37 Ibid., 3.

31 the state; rather, these ancillary provinces had much potential for corruption, evasion of the rules, and the triumph of private forces over public prescriptions.

Anna Luiza Ozorio de Almeida has examined the colonization of the Brazilian

Amazon and its frontier history. In her analysis, frontiers are not fixed places—instead, the “frontier” is a stage in a process “whereby specific new territory is incorporated into an economy. It takes on different characteristics according to how each area becomes linked to the rest of the economy. In turn, a frontier changes the society it joins.”38

Ozorio narrates the processes by which most land available in the Amazon came to be privately held as large estates, forcing the initial small farmers onto a new frontier, and re-starting the process. The advance of roads and other infrastructure into the frontier areas accelerated these processes. This study of Ecuador’s Oriente focuses on similar phenomena that brought especially those settlements and towns closest to the Andean cordillera into closer contact with the rest of the Republic. These links did not fundamentally alter the nature of the economy or administration in those ancillary provinces, however, and such changes did not take place in uniform fashion in all parts of the Oriente. Robin Anderson, in her own study of Amazonian colonization in Brazil, establishes some “criteria of success” for frontier colonies. The development of social services, self-sufficient agriculture and attendant networks of trade, economic diversification, some light industry, and local governance are all signposts for an established community. The political maturity of these locales, including the entrance of residents into state and regional power networks, as well as a stable and growing population, are also important criteria. Additionally, the community’s social and cultural

38 Anna Luiza Ozorio de Almeida, The Colonization of the Amazon (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992), 7.

32 needs must be met, the local power structure must be capable of solving problems, and the economy must establish linkages beyond the local level.39 The degree to which the communities of the Oriente had achieved success was debated in the Ecuadorian press, popular publications, and among Oriente officials and colonists themselves. In general, the success of the Oriente was judged on terms derived from its construction as a national object of desire, as the region’s development was seen as vitally important for the country as a whole. Patriotic displays from within the Oriente and its closeness to the cities of the highlands, making it available for tourists and colonists alike, were all used to argue that the region had achieved a degree of incorporation into the wider

Ecuadorian community.

Emilio Willems’s comments on the Latin American frontier offer an important lens with which to judge a frontier’s status. As Willems describes, a frontier is simply an area

“into which migrants have moved to exploit some of its known resources.”40 Certainly, the Oriente’s colonists were aware of the kinds of economic activities in which they hoped to engage, thanks to the published accounts of the Oriente available in the press and elsewhere. Similar to Jean Paul-Deler, Willems asserts that the exploitation of resources “is competitive and requires the establishment of a system of rules by which the new society proposes to live.” The time period examined in this dissertation, thanks to the increasing colonization, new laws, and new bureaucratic units created, was an intense time of competition and establishing of rules. According to Willems, “The frontier

39 Robin L. Anderson, Colonization as Exploitation in the Amazon Rain Forest, 1758-1911 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999), 126-127.

40 Emilio Willems, “Social Change on the Latin American Frontier,” in Weber and Rausch, eds., Where Cultures Meet, 213.

33 society is…characterized by anomie and social disorganization, meaning that differing value systems and modes of behavior are pitted against each other. Once the resources are distributed and the emergent society has found a modus vivendi, the area begins to lose its frontier character.”41 My research illuminates the modus vivendi struck between state administrators, local elected officials, colonists, missionaries, and Indians as Amazonian land and resources were vied over. Willems also presents a typology of frontiers: those that become successfully integrated into the wider economic system are contrasted with the “unsuccessful or anonymous frontier” that offers “conditions of survival superior to those that prevailed” in the migrants’ previous homes but very limited economic success. These frontiers in fact are characterized by a greater degree of cultural exchange between different cultures than more successful frontiers.42 The sources examined here do not demonstrate a great degree of cultural borrowing by colonists from Indians; however, as this dissertation will show, Indians strategically engaged local officials and high-ranking state administrators to maintain access to land and a degree of cultural autonomy. These petitions often were framed in terms that reaffirmed notions about the Oriente and the Indians themselves articulated in the published works of Quito and the highland cities. And the limits placed on administration due to inconsistent communications and distance meant that the behavior of actors in the Oriente followed the “loose” structure described by Willems, in which “a wider range of alternative ways of behavior is open to the individual frontiersman.”43 This was a key

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid., 214.

43 Ibid., 217.

34 feature of the Oriente that indicates it remained a group of ancillary provinces, rather than an integrated part of the governmental system prescribed by the Ecuadorian

Constitution and laws.

The Oriente frontier experience was not an equal experience for the various social groups entering the region. The degree of “success” enjoyed by the region’s colonists varied considerably, and not all settlements grew into cities that still exist in the

Oriente today. Valerie Fifer has examined the eastern Bolivian frontier, to which she applied some criteria of evaluation of success. In her findings, success on the frontier meant “obtaining assistance, finding markets, voicing demands, forming pressure groups, seeking comfort and outside the kinship framework,” and “discovering how to prosper rather than merely to survive.” These achievements are obtained at the local level and through “increasingly non-violent means” as the frontier matures, leading eventually to the frontier’s absorption by the larger networks of the non-frontier society.

In some cases, however, the frontier “fails” because political and economic integration with the wider society fails to take hold.44 By these criteria, the ancillary provinces of the

Oriente were a mixed bag during the period under study; towns such as Tena, Puyo,

Mera, Macas, and Zamora saw the establishment of local government and civic life and growing population in the period under study. Infrastructure projects linked these cities to the highlands and the creation of new provinces in the Oriente brought new opportunities for political mobilization in these areas. However, economic success remained elusive for many of the region’s colonists, and conflict over resources was a constant preoccupation of state officials in the region. Sections of the Oriente more

44 J. Valerie Fifer, “The Search for a Series of Small Successes: Frontiers of Settlement in Eastern Bolivia,” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 14, no. 2 (November 1982), 407-408.

35 distant from the Andean cordillera would not develop similarly until the oil boom period in which economic success was more widely ensured. The fitful development of the region, including the stagnation of some areas, does not mean its dynamics are not an illuminating frontier case study. Hal Langfur, writing about the Brazilian frontier, argues that the incorporation of new territory is a process that involves “not only conquest but also…successful resistance, cooperation, mediation, and negotiation…that produced prolonged periods of stalemate and equilibrium. To confine frontier history to only those periods when colonists succeeded is to write history from the limited perspective of the intruding society.”45 The unpublished documents used in this dissertation from the

Oriente and from Quito, including communications between officials, petitions by colonists and Indians and legal documents, reveal the efforts by social actors in different parts of the Oriente to find economic success and to establish a degree of local control and the obstacles they encountered. Certain Oriente settlements became successful poles of attraction for further immigration, while others languished in isolation. The explanations for these differences lie not just in the region’s difficult climate and geography, but also in the actions of Indians, missionaries, poor colonists, wealthier landowners and state officials. These are the processes that took place inside ancillary provinces where the laws on the books could be bent and broken without much fear of effective punishment or correction.

My study of the development of Ecuador’s Oriente frontier exists alongside similar studies of frontier expansion in Latin America. Catherine LeGrand has described the expansion of the Colombian frontier as a two-stage process in which peasant

45 Hal Langfur, The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750-1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 5.

36 families initially occupy frontier lands, and are then absorbed by wealthy land entrepreneurs as tenant farmers. The struggle between these two classes on the frontier was shaped by economic, social, and political conditions, and both sides engaged the government strategically.46 My research broadly bears out this pattern, but

I focus more closely on the transformation of the frontier into a national space, tracking the kinds of national rhetoric at play in the interactions between colonists, wealthier landowners, and state officials. Regardless of class, actors in the Oriente framed their efforts and their petitions in terms of their patriotic contributions; as “Sentinels of the

Homeland” they sought legitimacy of land title and argued that they deserved state aid.

Unlike on the Colombian frontier, Catholic missionaries and Indians were significant actors in the articulation of the Oriente as a national, that is, Ecuadorianized, space.

The intervention of missionaries and the attempts by Indians to maintain access to land and the survival of culture meant that the transformation of the Oriente was more complex than a struggle between a peasant class of colonists, on one hand, and wealthy landowners on the other.

Jane M. Rausch has also studied the Colombian Llanos frontier in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.47 Her studies show that the Llanos, like the Oriente, held romantic sway over Colombian statesmen due to their promise of untapped wealth.

Furthermore, the developments on the frontier were not divorced from wider political trends in Colombia. In particular, Rausch examines the efforts of Colombia’s liberal

46 Catherine LeGrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia, 1850-1936 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), xvi.

47 Jane M. Rausch, The Llanos Frontier in Colombian History 1830-1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993) and Colombia: Territorial Rule and the Llanos Frontier (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999).

37 twentieth century presidents as they sought to more closely integrate the Llanos with the rest of the nation. These efforts largely failed, and in fact exacerbated La Violencia in the second half of the twentieth century. As she concludes, “Fifty years later the

Llanos continue to beckon to Colombians, but the myth has yet to become a reality.”48

Ecuador’s Oriente, on the other hand, was a more successful case of frontier integration, even before the oil boom that began in the 1960s. This is especially true for those parts of the Oriente nearest the central cities of the Andean sierra that were connected by roads, such as Tena, Puyo, Macas, and Zamora. As previously mentioned, however, integration did not proceed equally or in homogenous fashion. The ability of certain social actors to mobilize labor and natural resources, and to maintain meaningful political connections, meant that development in the Oriente resembled what David McCreery, writing about Goiás, Brazil in the 19th century, has called a

“Swiss cheese” frontier. In such a case, each frontier settlement remains somewhat isolated from the rest, and forges a unique relationship to the environment and to the state.49

Pilar García Jordán’s work on the nationalization of the Peruvian and Bolivian

Amazon also informs the current study. Specifically, García focuses on the efforts of

Catholic missionaries in those republics, who were relied upon by the Peruvian and

Bolivian governments to carry out three important tasks: to transform the regions’ Indian population into productive subjects; to in turn create new citizens out of those same

“savages” and to strategically occupy the Amazonian space so it could be integrated

48 Rausch, Colombia: Territorial Rule and the Llanos Frontier, 219.

49 David McCreery, Frontier Goiás, 1822-1889 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 209.

38 into the wider republics.50 As in Ecuador, the nationalization of Peru’s Amazon required infrastructural development, the promotion of colonization, and political-administrative changes to increase the visibility of the state in the region.51 Bolivia pursued similar goals, but with less success than Peru due to the lack of determination on the part of statesmen and the fact that elite economic interests lay elsewhere.52 The role of

Catholic missions in Ecuador’s Oriente was also significant; this dissertation examines their efforts through missionary publications and communications. In Ecuador, something of a “mission impulse” was shared even by secular actors in the Oriente.

Secular authors published articles that offered ideas on how to make the region’s

Indians into productive citizens. Local officials attempted to bring the Quichua, Shuar, and other groups into the economy and administrative structure in an ordered fashion.

The notions held about these groups, the origins of which are in published accounts of

Amazonian Indians from the first part of the twentieth century, affected the kinds of policies writers and administrators sought to implement. The frontier process as concerned the administration and integration of the region’s Indians, then, took place both in published accounts from Quito and the highlands as well as the actions of petty officials and colonists in the Amazon itself.

If the Oriente as a whole was a “mission” undertaking, then the biases of the mission perspective should be kept in mind. Although writing about the Catholic missions of the colonial era, David G. Sweet’s recommendations for researchers are

50 Pilar García Jordán, Cruz y arado, fusiles y discursos. La construcción de los Orientes en el Perú y Bolivia 1820-1940 (Lima: IEP, 2001), 17.

51 Ibid., 190.

52 Ibid., 442-443.

39 applicable to the case of the Oriente: “Mission histories should be primarily concerned with the effects of the mission on the Indian inhabitants over the short and long term.

What ‘conversions’ were undertaken, what ‘civilization’ was imparted, what ‘exploitation’ went on?”53 My investigation of petitions and lawsuits from the Oriente reveals the subaltern perspective of the region’s transformations during its frontier stage, including the perspectives of Indians who used the state resources available to resist the encroachment of outsiders and the exploitation of landowners. This helps me to take up

Sweet’s charge that “[the] social history of missions needs to be freed from…the anti-

Indian bias that it embodies. Nothing about the mission enterprise is self-evident; and in view of its terrible consequences for the Indian populations it was designed in principle to benefit, nothing about it should still be taken for granted or at face value by serious historians.”54 The period under study was one of accelerating dominance of non-Indians from outside the Oriente at the cost of Indians’ access to land and freedom from state control; indeed, the maturing of the ancillary provinces of the Oriente and its peopling by colonists brought these negative consequences for the region’s indigenous peoples.

Precisely because they were ancillary to governmental concern, characterized by scarce resources and confusion, the laws designed to protect the Indians of the region were carried out with great difficulty. Furthermore, as with other cases of internal colonialism, the dominance of Spanish in the workings of the state put the Indians at an inherent disadvantage, as the evidence in this dissertation will show.

53 David G. Sweet, “Reflections on the Ibero-American Frontier Mission as an Institution in Native American History,” in Weber and Rausch, eds., Where Cultures Meet, 91.

54 Ibid., 95.

40 In examining the subaltern perspective of the Oriente’s history, whether that of

Indians or colonists, my research engages the questions of state formation and the creation of subjectivities particular to time and place. Ana María Alonso’s study of

Mexico’s northern frontier and the serranos who lived there demonstrates that the hegemony of the Mexican government did not go unchallenged on the frontier; instead,

Alonso describes how “power circulates throughout the social body and is not simply concentrated in government structures.” Furthermore, she notes that “subaltern forms of resistance often focus on the constitution of social subjectivities, redefining the ways in which power is embodied.”55 In northern Mexico, the legitimacy of authority was tied to waging warfare against Indians, demonstrating that the hegemony of the state acted in part through “its ability to make the very identity and status of subjects hinge upon only certain uses of force.”56 Alonso’s work follows Philip Abrams’s suggestion that the

“state” is in fact more of a “system” and also an “idea”: on the one hand it is a set of structures and institutions, and also an “ideological artifact” that attempts to convince people of the legitimacy and moral correctness of government.57 My own study of the

Oriente shows that the workings of the state were shared by different actors, such as missionaries, petty officials, landowning patrones, municipal governments, and military officers. They all variously articulated the national ideas about the Oriente that had been developed in the press and other publications in preceding decades. Subaltern actors, such as poor colonists, bought into many of these notions that undergirded the “state

55 Ana María Alosno, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1995), 10.

56 Ibid., 49.

57 Abrams is quoted in Alonso, Ibid., 115.

41 idea” that conferred legitimacy of authority in the Oriente. As the Oriente was brought into closer contact with the rest of the during the period under study, the state system as well as the state idea changed. The influence of white, landowning patrones came to be shared with new state officials, soldiers, and local elected governments. The presence of colonists who petitioned for redress of grievances meant that legitimacy of authority was contested in ways it had not been before. The increasing politicization of the region, in which elections were held more regularly and for a greater number of elected positions, added yet another factor to how legitimacy was debated and development priorities for the Oriente were established. Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood have examined the competition for resources in Amazonia and the importance of ideological discourse in these power plays. Different actors on the Amazonian frontier have “formulated and strategically deployed idea systems to strengthen their position.”

Among these ideas are modernity, patriotism, national security, and the “virtues of self- sufficiency,” all of which are mobilized to prop up claims of legitimacy of action.58 These ideological weapons were employed in the communications, petitions, and lawsuits examined in this dissertation. Many of these ideological weapons were derived from the construction of the Oriente as a national object of desire, with all the patriotic notions and yardsticks of progress and international prestige it implied. Analyzing these sources helps explain the conditions under which such tactics succeeded or failed in securing access to resources and economic and political integration with the rest of the Oriente and with wider Ecuadorian society.

58 Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood, Contested Frontiers in Amazonia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 15.

42 Joe Foweraker’s study of the Brazilian pioneer frontier in the twentieth century also recognizes that the “State” is a key player in the mediation of conflict over resources on the frontier, but it is not “monolithic” because its agents are themselves subject to the interests of class struggle.59 Foweraker’s book explains that violence on the Brazilian frontier was a result of this class struggle, and was in fact caused and supported by the state in its mediation of the struggle over resources. The result of this struggle was generally the expelling of peasants in favor of the monopoly of landholding by capitalists.60 In his analysis, the Brazilian frontier was characterized by stages of accumulation that eventually integrated the region into the national economy.61 These stages see the engagement of the legal-administrative system by peasants and capitalists alike, while the latter group is buttressed by greater access to resources62 and even the tacit endorsement by the state for use of private violence.63 The Oriente also demonstrates a case in which capital vied with labor for access to resources and influence. Unlike Foweraker’s Brazilian case, the Catholic missions and Indians of the region were additional elements to consider. The latter group’s unfamiliarity with

Spanish and Ecuadorian institutions gave them a distinct disadvantage when dealing both with the state and with private individuals. The colonists to the region were, in general, poor and uneducated, but they enjoyed a greater degree of familiarity with the

59 Joe Foweraker, The Struggle for Land: A Political Economy of the Pioneer Frontier in Brazil from 1930 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 10-11.

60 Ibid., 25.

61 Ibid., 27.

62 Ibid., 104.

63 Ibid., 182.

43 legal system and with the nationalist ideas that underlay the state’s and wider society’s approach to developing the Oriente. Additionally, colonists increasingly formed organizations to work for their interests, and were voters in the elections for local officials. My research helps shed light on the importance of cultural differences and access to state institutions during the maturation of the Oriente’s economic and political system. Certainly, the results were not egalitarian; in most sections of the Oriente, local politics and labor were largely controlled by certain wealthy individuals, and documentary sources from the Oriente clearly display the sway they held in legal proceedings and in the selection and appointment of political officials.64 All of this took place according to the realities of the Oriente as a group of ancillary provinces, where the lack of resources and poor communications made any effort to see society governed by laws from Quito a very difficult one.

In regards to the ideas held by colonists, Paul E. Little’s examination of an

Oriente community in the 1980s and 90s offers a more contemporary view of how

“sociocultural identities” were formed in a “new cultural space,” namely, the town of

Tarapoa, in Sucumbíos Province.65 This community is in a region that lies somewhat outside the geographic and chronological scope of this dissertation; it is much more distant from the Andean cordillera and did not become heavily populated until well into the oil boom period. The citizens of Tarapoa, in Little’s findings, display a heightened

64 Alida C. Metcalf’s study of families on the Brazilian frontier reaches a broadly similar conclusion: that the frontier offered a degree of subsistence and survival to migrants, but the planter class maintained most political and economic control, against which peasants and Indians could not compete. Alida C. Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil. Santana de Parnaíba, 1580-1822 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

65 Paul E. Little, “Identidades amazónicas e identidades de colonos. El Caso de Tarapoa, Ecuador,” in Lucy Ruiz, ed., Amazonía: Escenarios y Conflictos, 547.

44 patriotic consciousness and a sense that they had personally extended the reach of the

Ecuadorian nation to distant Amazonian space.66 They display a very clear sense of

“colonist” identity, and they share the ideology of national development. This

“developmentalist” identity positions them as clients of the state, which has the duty to satisfy their minimum necessities in return for their efforts to develop the region.67 My research finds that a shared “developmentalist” attitude existed many decades before the time of Little’s fieldwork. In fact, these attitudes find their origin in press and literary production about the Oriente from the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as in civic celebration of the Oriente in the time before the war with Peru. In short, they derived from the construction of the Oriente as a national object of desire. The Oriente’s colonists used rhetoric in their petitions to the government that displayed a clear belief that they were acting on behalf of the nation as a whole as well as providing for their own livelihoods. This pioneering mentality is part and parcel of the “Sentinel of the

Homeland” frontier type that the Oriente added to Ecuadorian national identity. Its significance was felt both in publications about the Oriente as well as in the actions of the Oriente’s residents themselves.

More broadly, Little also examines how the Oriente as a national space was transformed during the twentieth century. Little uses the term “cosmography” to describe “the collective, historically contingent identities, ideologies, and environmental knowledge systems developed by a social group to establish and maintain human

66 Ibid., 550.

67 Ibid., 560.

45 territory.”68 The “spatial and temporal superimposition of cosmographies” typifies frontier environments and accounts for the high degree of conflict in spaces like the Oriente.69

Ecuador’s Amazon was something of a “hybrid space” due to this overlap. It was in this sense like other territories in which the cosmographies held by local groups (such as indigenous peoples) encountered the cosmographies of nation-states that sought to extend the reach of their homelands or “patrias.”70 This dissertation describes the creation of the Oriente as a national object, which included the development of beliefs about the Oriente’s people, lands, and resources in published materials to be read by wider Ecuadorian society, and in civic celebrations about the Oriente. The social groups present in the Oriente derived their identities in part from the way the Oriente was defined in this national discourse. As this dissertation will show, the assumptions inherent to the “cosmography” of the Oriente influenced the interactions between the different social groups and the ways in which the region’s pre-existing patterns of culture and human settlement came to be absorbed or eliminated by the Oriente as national Ecuadorian space. Ideas related to the national object, that is, affected how things played out inside the ancillary provinces of the Amazon.

The Oriente’s transformation from an “incipient” but “indispensable” frontier to a region that was maturing politically and becoming integrated economically by the beginning of the oil boom of the 1960s and the 1970s was carried out by multiple social groups, from the Indians that confronted and contested the state and outsiders in the region to the influential white landowners and state officials that could mobilize labor

68 Little, Amazonia, 5.

69 Ibid., 7.

70 Ibid., 70-72.

46 and economic resources toward achieving their envisioned Oriente of the future.

Additionally, the transformation occurred in two places: in “paper space,” that is, the presses of Quito and other major cities, and in “stage space” for administration and colonization of the Amazon’s growing towns, agricultural settlements, missions, and

Indian communities. The mutual influence between the two sites shaped the form the

Oriente would take as a vital part of the Ecuadorian nation.

Part One of my dissertation uses published materials about the Oriente, including the press, periodicals, and scientific literature, to explore the process by which the region was constructed as a national object of desire, from the late nineteenth century until midcentury. Much of the history of Ecuador’s Amazonian frontier took place in this

“paper space” of print capitalism. Quito’s daily newspaper, El Comercio, was an important source because it frequently published informative and propagandistic accounts of the Oriente’s importance for the nation, as well as accounts and events from the region itself. Additionally, the magazines El Oriente Dominicano and

Miscelánea provided a missionary and secular perspective, respectively, about the region that informed readers about the region’s significance, its people, and its envisioned role in the future.

Chapter 2 focuses specifically on the published accounts of the Oriente that described the region to wider Ecuadorian society. It also addresses the role of voluntary organizations and civic celebration in symbolically bringing the Oriente into the

Ecuadorian national community. These literary and performative efforts constructed the region as a national object of desire; they provided the set of ideas and rhetorical tools about the region that could be invoked by lawmakers, state officials, and colonists to

47 argue for particular policies or for their own interests. The literary and popular construction of the Oriente as a national space presented it as a region in which

Ecuadorian citizens could make their home and contribute to the nation’s future.

Furthermore, it also made the case that the Oriente had a fully national history; this gave legitimacy to Ecuador’s territorial claims to the region in the face of Peruvian intrusion and heightened a sense of Ecuadorian national prestige around its Amazonian territory. This construction of the Oriente as a national object also presented the

Amazonian region not just as a space, but also a shared project among Ecuadorian citizens and government officials. This chapter describes the celebration of the Día del

Oriente in detail, which was laced with ideological messages about the vital importance of the region and the praise due to the people who worked for its incorporation into the state and nation. The chapter also interprets the reaction to Ecuador’s loss of a large portion of its Amazonian territory in the 1941 war with Peru that was formalized by the

1942 Rio de Janeiro Protocol. This loss was a large blow, but it did not put the importance of the Oriente as national object of desire into question. Instead, it provided another component of the object: the Oriente could now be invoked to promote national redemption and regeneration after the embarrassing war.

Chapter 3 considers how the Oriente’s indigenous people, particularly the

Quichua Indians of the northern Oriente and the Shuar of the central and southern

Oriente, were described to wider Ecuadorian society through published accounts.

Again, El Comercio, El Oriente Dominicano, and Miscelánea played a large role in this, but so did novels, scientific works, and travel accounts. This chapter argues that the construction of the racial categories of “Yumbo” and “Jívaro,” as the two groups were

48 known in this time period, was a process that cannot be considered apart from the

Ecuadorian national context. That is, they are inextricably linked to the fact that the

Oriente was a national object: a patriotic project that was a desired stage for action.

Both the Yumbos and Jívaros were understood in terms of their relation to the ongoing process of incorporating the Oriente into the Ecuadorian state and national identity.

Most accounts emphasized their degree of usefulness to this project. There was no consensus view of either group; though the Yumbos were generally considered to be docile, while the Jívaros were believed fearsome warriors, both of these views were subject to modification as the citizenship qualities of each group and their entrance into the national community were debated. The chapter closes by discussing published proposals for Indian education and policy which reveal the assumptions that underlay those who considered how these groups would become permanent members of the state and nation.

Chapter 4 turns to the Ecuadorian government, which passed a series of “Special

Laws” for the Oriente. These laws were intended to bring about the region’s integration into the state structure and national economy. They were based on the assumptions that derived from the ideas present in the corpus of literature and popular publications that promoted the Oriente as a national object of desire that was the key to the

Republic’s prestige and prosperity. Focusing primarily on the years 1900-1948, this chapter describes the Oriente as an object for policy within the ministries of the central government, which passed it from department to department in a manner that interrupted institutional memory and prevented the development of a coherent strategy for administration and incorporation. The region remained severely under-funded and

49 relatively isolated due to poor communications networks. This situation improved only marginally in five decades. Despite this, the region continued to be described by lawmakers as one of vital importance for Ecuador’s international prestige and future prosperity. Nevertheless, the deficiencies of government policy in this period guaranteed that the Oriente would be only a group of “ancillary provinces” rather than an integrated section of the Republic like any other. Though it was governed by “Special

Laws,” in fact the administrative regime imagined did not differ significantly from that of the rest of the Republic. The Ecuadorian government essentially tried to re-create the characteristics of normal state administration in a region that was sparsely populated and difficult to communicate with. This chapter ends with a description of the Junta

Nacional Pro Oriente, a voluntary organization designed to coordinate public and private efforts to provide the Oriente with a better road network. This chapter uses laws, ministerial reports, and published accounts from the press to examine the various initiatives attempted in the region and Ecuadorian state makers’ priorities throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

Part Two of my dissertation turns to the Oriente as a stage for administration and colonization, examining a frontier case in which the region in question was both an object of desire in which ideas about territory carried the weight of national and patriotic importance, and also a group of ancillary provinces in which the lack of resources and oversight meant that the administrative system was a shadowy and disorganized version of the rest of the state. This section of the dissertation focuses on the years

1940-1969; this span of time began with Ecuador’s loss of a great portion of its

Amazonian territory to Peru. Nevertheless, life in the Oriente continued, as did the

50 peopling of the region by colonists from the highlands and the implementation of laws and administration designed to bring the territory into concert with the rest of the

Republic. This period ends with the discovery of oil and the beginning of drilling operations by North American petroleum companies. This development would lead to the cementing of the Oriente’s place in the national economy in the 1970s. The period under study here set the stage for this transformation and established a modus vivendi between state officials, colonists, and indigenous people. The ancillary provinces of the

Oriente were a site of internal colonization that was shaped by administrative defects and the motivations of private individuals such as colonists and large landowners. The sources for this part of the dissertation come from the Archivo del Ministerio de

Gobierno in Quito, and the Archivo de la Gobernación de Napo in Tena, in the Oriente province of Napo. These sources include reports by state officials, communications between them, petitions by colonists and Indians, and other unpublished documents from approximately 1940 to 1969.

Chapter 5 describes the elements of the state system in the Oriente, which was composed of appointed officials and bodies of elected local government, from approximately 1940-1960. The colonists in the region who interacted with these officials self-consciously identified as a national Oriente type; they were “Sentinels of the

Homeland” who were deserving of support and praise for their active participation in the project that the construction of the Oriente as national object of desire had long called for. They were agents of “Ecuadorianization” and they petitioned for redress of grievances as such. The administrative system they confronted, however, was plagued by the consequences of the fact that the Oriente was ancillary to the concerns of the

51 central government, lacking sufficient resources and communications to maintain a system based more on law than on personal motivations by individual state officials.

This chapter describes the corruption and malfeasance of these officials in detail, as well as that of local elected bodies of government. Although the “state” in the Oriente could be described as “weak” because it did not adequately enforce the Republic’s laws, the importance of appointed positions of power should not be underestimated, as these officials’ personal connections and rivalries determined how resources were used in the region. Many of these state officials also invoked the national object of the Oriente when explaining their actions or seeking additional support. This chapter also addresses the growing politicization of the region during the time period in question, and how this dynamic functioned in under-resourced and isolated ancillary provinces.

Chapter 6 tracks the processes by which the Oriente’s lands came into private ownership during approximately 1940-1960. A number of laws were to govern this process, but the characteristics of the region as a group of ancillary provinces meant that the decisions of petty officials, at times motivated more by personal concerns than legal prescriptions, were an important factor. During this time period, colonists battled alleged “latifundistas,” or wealthy land speculators, and employed rhetorical tools provided by the Oriente as national object of desire. In this frontier case, class conflict was laced with patriotic ideas related to the history of the region in question as a vital component of the Republic’s future. This chapter also examines the struggle waged by the region’s Quichua and Shuar Indians to maintain access to land. The consequences of living in ancillary provinces were particularly important for them, who did not have the same access to the levers of the state operated by petty officials due to their

52 unfamiliarity with Spanish and Ecuadorian culture. As the original inhabitants of the lands in question, they could not easily invoke the same rhetorical yardsticks of progress and incorporation of a new territory that colonists from outside the region could. In this case of internal colonization, nationalistic ideas that originated in the paper-space of the capital and other major cities proved to part of the dynamics of colonial domination of the Indians by relative newcomers.

Chapter 7 explores the consequences of living in ancillary provinces of the

Ecuadorian state for the region’s Indians in areas other than the acquisition and maintenance of land. During the decades under study, the Ecuadorian state attempted to lessen the influence of white, landowning patrones that held Indian workers as debt peons. The lack of resources and the weak ability to levy force on the part of the government meant that this system of private control continued. As a “brown area,” the state’s ability to impose even its own regulations was limited. For the Indians, the

Oriente was a region administered only partially by law. The patrones could often count on the negligence or active collaboration of state officials in their efforts to maintain a large, unfree workforce. The region’s state officials and colonists continued to view the

Indians in terms of their helpfulness to the development of the Oriente as a national space and functional part of the state. Persistent stereotypes about their laziness or ferocity continued to influence the actions these officials took. Many individual state officials did make a significant effort to curtail the abuses of the patrones and see that the Indians’ human rights were respected. The general fecklessness of their efforts demonstrates that the region remained an under-resourced and disorganized set of ancillary provinces. For their part, the Indians actively engaged state officials to seek

53 redress of grievances, while also adopting rhetorical strategies that presented themselves as having characteristics in line with the ones they were understood to have by wider Ecuadorian society.

Chapter 8 revisits the themes of the preceding three, but focuses specifically on

Napo Province, in the northern Oriente, from approximately the years 1960-1969.

During these years, the Oriente’s administration continued to suffer from a lack of resources, meaning that laws remained under-enforced. A lack of police officers was particularly troublesome for the province’s Jefes and Tenientes Políticos. Confusion and disorganization continued to characterize such arenas as the land tenancy process. In short, the province continued to be ancillary; it was an extra, secondary stage for administration when compared to the provinces of the Sierra and Pacific coast.

However, work for wages, rather than to pay off debts, became an increasingly important and common activity for the region’s Indians, and they actively sought the aid of state officials in seeing that their wages were paid. New institutions were established to oversee the distribution and titling of land, including the Instituto Ecuatoriano de

Reforma Agraria y Colonización set up by the military junta that seized power in 1963.

Though these institutions’ functioning was not always reliable, a greater component of the land tenancy process was done within the region itself, thereby cutting down on delays and confusion. The intervention of the state officials remained necessary however, in this and other arenas. They often turned to “Acts of Accord” or “Acts of

Conciliation” between disputing parties in order to provide temporary or permanent solutions to conflicts arising from land or personal enmity, especially among the province’s Quichua inhabitants. By the end of the decade, the arms of the state were

54 firmly established as a principal factor in the social and economic relations of the province. This is the arena into which North American petroleum companies moved to begin oil-drilling operations. This chapter closes with a brief set of concluding remarks.

55 CHAPTER 2 CONSTRUCTING THE NATIONAL OBJECT OF THE ORIENTE, 1900-1948

The Oriente, Ecuador’s vast Amazonian region, lying to the east of the Andean cordillera, received minimal attention from the state for nearly a century after Ecuador’s national independence in 1830. Despite the lack of a cohesive, centralized development plan, various Ecuadorian state and regional actors did elaborate projects for the colonization of the region, for the construction of infrastructure linking it with the highlands, and for exploiting the region’s mineral and vegetable wealth, including rubber during the height of that product’s boom. As historian Natalia Esvertit Cobes has argued, by the end of the 19th century, the Oriente occupied an important place in

Ecuadorian politics and national discourse. As Esvertit states, the region, which had been simply an “incipient province” at the beginning of Ecuador’s existence as an independent state, became an “indispensible territory for the conformation of the nation,” and this process continued with greater intensity in the twentieth century.1 A component of this transformation was the “elaboration of a national imaginary about the

Oriente,” a key component of the “symbolic incorporation [of the Oriente] to the national

State.”2 This chapter describes how the continuation of this process in the twentieth century resulted in the construction of Ecuador’s Amazonian frontier as a national object of desire. This object would continue to be known as the Oriente. A significant portion of the Oriente’s history, then, took place not inside the Amazonian region itself, but in

“paper space”; that is, in the publications and imaginings about the region that were available to citizens in Ecuador’s capital of Quito and other principal cities.

1 Natalia Esvertit Cobes, La Incipiente Provincia, 247.

2 Ibid., 264.

56 The press, published books, and other periodicals, such as El Oriente

Dominicano and Miscelánea, were principal tools with which Ecuadorian authors constructed the national object of the Oriente. This construction was also done by voluntary citizens’ organizations and committees that sought to increase public interest and concern for the region. Civic celebration also contributed to this popular and ideological construction. As a national object, the region was both an ideological tool for

Ecuadorian state makers who argued for greater attention to be paid to the region, and a patriotic yardstick by which to measure Ecuador’s prestige. The nationalization or

“Ecuadorianization” of the Amazon prepared the region in the minds of citizens for its use as a stage on which Ecuadorian history would be played out. These future endeavors would include, in the minds of those who contributed to the construction of the national object, colonization, resource extraction, agriculture, industrialization, and the founding of new and flourishing cities that would make Ecuador a greater and more prestigious nation.

This chapter examines how the national object of the Oriente was fashioned during the first half of the twentieth century as state-led and private efforts to develop and incorporate the region both accelerated. These efforts increased particularly during and after the 1920s. This period also saw increasing colonization of the region by

Ecuadorians from the highlands and the Pacific coast; this transformation led to the modification of the “national imaginary” about the Oriente to more fully include the

Ecuadorian citizens who braved myriad difficulties to fly the national flag in the Amazon.

Another important phenomenon was the intensified popularization of the Oriente as a component of civic pride and patriotic identity, thanks to its increasing prominence in

57 national publications and in public celebration. The celebration of the Día del Oriente

Ecuatoriano in 1939 and subsequent years offers a clear, crystallized view of the

Amazonian region’s symbolic incorporation into the national imaginary and furthered the construction of the region as a national object of desire. Additionally, the constant tension with Peru over territory in the Oriente, and the 1941 war that removed a large portion of Ecuador’s Amazon, affected patriotic discourse about the Oriente. The threat of war made the need for attention paid to the region seem urgent. Furthermore, the acute feeling of loss occasioned by the war became integrated into the national imaginary about the region. As a national object, the Oriente was tied to the prestige of

Ecuador on the international stage.

Giving the Oriente an Ecuadorian Past and Future

In order to examine how the Oriente as a national object was constructed during and after the 1920s, we must first understand the state of the “national imaginary” about the Oriente at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. An important component of Ecuadorian discourse about the Oriente at this time was the justification of the region’s deep national and purely Ecuadorian past. Given the fact that

Ecuador's neighbors, especially Peru, were encroaching on Amazonian territory claimed by Ecuador during the time period in question, Ecuadorian authors and statesmen found it necessary to find a place for the disputed territory in Ecuador's history, and indeed, pre-history, in order to give historical justification to their territorial claims. Like other postcolonial nations, Ecuador aimed to give a deep national past to a political entity of recent creation. Mark Thurner has discussed the way in which Peruvian historiography in the nineteenth century sought to establish a "transhistorical subject 'us'" of Peruvians

58 that was tied to "a timeless place with a proper name."3 In the Peruvian case, this involved recovering the Inca past as part of national narrative. For Ecuador's Oriente, however, the historical narrative of territorial integrity depended on the recovery of

Spanish colonial antecedents. Conquistadors and colonial officials were cast as

Ecuadorians, discovering territory in service of Ecuador, despite the fact that such a geopolitical entity would not exist for centuries. In a pamphlet addressed to the

Congress of 1894, José Mora López, a promoter of colonization in the Oriente, argued that the bases for legitimacy of territory between Ecuador and its neighboring countries were the sixteenth and seventeenth century explorations of Conquistadors such as

Gonzalo Pizarro and the subsequent political and juridical administration of the Real

Audiencia of Quito.4 For Mora López, these lands represented a vital source of wealth for Ecuador's future, and their proximity to Quito made them governable, while their distance from Lima made Peruvian claims untenable.5 Famed Ecuadorian geographer and mapmaker Enrique Vacas Galindo gave a speech at the University of Quito in 1905 to promote the construction of a railway to the Oriente, in order to take advantage of lands that derived their legitimacy from the discoveries of Francisco de Orellana and

Juan de Salinas, the pacification of Amazonian tribes by missionaries from Quito throughout the colonial period, and the treaty of San Ildefonso that established the border between Spanish and Portuguese Amazonian territory in 1777. In this way, the patriot Vacas Galindo argued that Ecuadorian "señorío nacional," or national dominion,

3 Mark Thurner, "Peruvian Genealogies of History and Nation," in Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero, eds., After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003), 142.

4 José Mora López, Límites del Ecuador y Proyecto de Colonización (Cuenca: Imprenta del Autor, 1894), 11-12.

5 Ibid., 18.

59 could be traced back nearly four hundred years.6 In 1916, in an address to the Governor of Chimborazo Province and other leading citizens of Riobamba, D. R. Astudillo, speaking on behalf of the Junta Colonizadora del Oriente, recounted the sixteenth- century explorations of the Oriente that had Quito as their base of operations. The history of the various Amazonian pueblos founded by the Spaniards constituted, for

Astudillo, "our primitive times," and Spanish missions in the Amazon "made effective our sovereignty."7 A similar note was struck in a speech given at the Universidad de Loja in

1921, in which Joaquín S. Eguiguren discussed the colonial-era efforts in the Amazon by missionaries and soldiers from Quito in terms of the suffering and sacrifice of "our" national heroes.8 In 1923, Julio Veintemilla wrote a brief geographic history for the youth of Ecuador so that they might take an interest in the Oriente and work for the greatness and territorial integrity of the Patria.9 Like other authors, Veintemilla presented the exploration of the Amazon as an Ecuadorian achievement, given the importance of

Quito and Guayaquil in the efforts of the explorers.10 These efforts to narrate the territorial history of Ecuador previous to its existence as a sovereign state mirrored the efforts of "official nationalists," as described by Benedict Anderson, to represent

"specific, tightly bounded territorial units" in historical maps. As Anderson argues,

6 Enrique Vacas Galindo, Conferencia acerca de la Importancia del Ferrocarril del Oriente (Quito: Imprenta Nacional, 1905), 2-3.

7 D. R. Astudillo, El Oriente Ecuatoriano: Conferencia dada en la sala de sesiones del Concejo Municipal de Riobamba (Guayaquil: Librería e Imprenta Gutenberg, de Elicio A. Uzcátegui, 1916), 9-11.

8 Joaquín S. Eguiguren, "Algo sobre límites y Oriente," Crisálida: Ciencia-Literaria, Órgano del Centro Local de la Universidad de Loja 1, no. 1 (October, 1922): 12-13.

9 Julio Veintemilla M., Geografía del Ecuador: Apuntes sobre el Oriente Ecuatoriano y sus Límites (Quito: Tipografía de la "Prensa Católica," 1923), 7-8.

10 Ibid., 26-28. See also Modesto Chávez Franco, Cartilla Patria: Epítome de Historia y Geografía referentes a las fronteras entre Ecuador y Perú, de 1531 a 1921 (Quito: Imprenta de “El Día,” 1922).

60 geographical representation is an important component of building an imagined national community.11 Emilio Murillo Ordóñez, professor of geography at the Colegio Nacional

Benigno Malo, echoed this notion in a speech in 1927, arguing that popular

"geographical conscience" was in fact the basis for "national conscience" and the

"conscience of the state."12 This book and similar publications represent an effort to clearly demonstrate and convince Ecuadorians of the fact that the Oriente was a fully national space; by showing that the nation’s past had been performed in part on that stage, then the nation’s future could, also.

It was one thing to prove that the Oriente was legitimately Ecuadorian; to fully integrate the region into the state and into national discourse, it was necessary to take possession of the region and its resources. It was time to act upon the national stage the Oriente represented. The importance of colonization and the general exploitation of

Ecuador's Amazon was a constant theme for many decades in Ecuadorian publications.

Ecuadorian government, economic, and academic elites imagined the Oriente as both a source of untold wealth for the nation, and a solution for the crises of land and poverty in the highlands and on the coast. In 1876, Rafael Villamar published a short piece of

Oriente propaganda that presented the Ecuadorian Amazon as the key to rescuing the nation from scarcity and misery; in his view, proper roads into the Oriente would present

Ecuador with the means to tap the richest areas of the whole world.13 Villamar described the mineral and vegetable wealth of the Oriente in detail, and imagined a

11 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 174-75.

12 Emilio Murillo Ordóñez, "Conferencia," Revista del Colegio Nacional Benigno Malo 1, no. 7 (November, 1927): 15.

13 Rafael Villamar, Oriente (Quito: Tipografía de F. Bermeo, 1876), 1-3.

61 future in which Ecuador's Oriente would be a productive commercial hub, visited by river steamships from all parts of the world.14 Francisco Andrade Marín, another important

Oriente propagandist, in 1884 echoed the sentiments of many of his contemporaries by arguing that the ungoverned state of the Oriente was a sign of Ecuador's backwardness, caused by "inertia" that was an "organic sickness."15 However, he believed that the Oriente was destined to become the "inexhaustible source of wealth" for the nation,16 and he, like many of his contemporaries, exhorted scientists to discover the secrets of the forest that would become commercial products in the near future.17

José Mora López, who in 1894 argued for the legitimacy of Ecuadorian claims based on the explorations of the Conquistadors, also argued that the Oriente could be compared to the Atacama Desert, another South American region that was ignored until its riches were discovered, and then became the site of violent conflict over its mineral resources.18 Ecuador should exploit the resources of the Oriente, he argued, before it was too late.

Quito’s daily newspaper, El Comercio, also included articles about the Oriente and the significance that its occupation and colonization held for the whole nation. The newspaper printed accounts of how national holidays were celebrated in the Oriente, thereby furthering the Ecuadorian identity of that region in the minds of its readers. In

October of 1909, El Comercio printed a letter from José Anotnio Garcés, from a new

14 Ibid., 11-14.

15 Francisco Andrade Marín, La Región Oriental del Ecuador (Quito: Fundición de tipos de M. Rivadeneira, 1884), 2.

16 Ibid., 5.

17 Ibid., 39.

18 Mora López, Límites del Ecuador, 3-4.

62 settlement in the Curaray River region. Garcés described the efforts by the people in the settlement to celebrate Ecuador’s national independence on August 10th, even though they lacked some essential elements for civilized life. The celebration was carried out by the “Curaray Oriente Committee,” which oversaw the building of houses in the new settlement, called García, the construction of a boardwalk on the river, and the construction of a “commemorative arch” in front of the local public office. On the eve of the Independence Day celebrations, the settlers and committee members did a general illumination of the settlement and made gritos to independence and Ecuador’s national heroes. On the 10th, a chorus of children performed the national anthem under the commemorative arch, and local Indians performed songs and dances. Later, there were regattas in canoes and the Teniente Político (a parish-level appointed state official) married several Indian couples. For this Oriente correspondent, Garcés, the inauguration of this new settlement was the placing of a stone of civilization and progress in the Oriente. In Garcés’s view, “if the government does not waste this and if it gives corresponding aid, this will later be the lever that raises our Homeland to the level of the most prosperous and advanced nations through its commerce, industry, and agriculture.” The founding of a new pueblo in the Oriente was particularly appropriate for celebrating the occasion; Garcés stated that it is “the best offering of gratitude that we could have presented in the Homeland’s First Centenary, to those men who, from the first cry of Independence, then through constancy of force were able to give us Liberty and Homeland.”19 In the view of this Oriente settler, then, there was a connection between his own labor in solidifying Ecuadorian nationality in the Oriente and the

19 “Del Oriente,” El Comercio, October 6, 1909.

63 achievement of Independence. The colonization of the Oriente was a national project to be celebrated alongside the achievements of Bolívar and Sucre.

Intensified Construction of the National Object in the 1920s and 1930s

The 1920s saw an important increase in the amount of information about the

Oriente available to Ecuadorian citizens, as well as new legislative initiatives aimed toward the region. In September of 1919, the Ecuadorian Congress was considering the creation of a Consejo de Oriente, or Oriente council, to be part of the Ministry of the

Interior in order to coordinate efforts for the Oriente. The legislature also considered creating the position of Director de Oriente, or Director of the Oriente.20 By January of

1920, Congress had indeed taken up this latter idea, and Pío Jaramillo Alvarado was named as the first Director. The legislative and administrative efforts toward the region will be treated at length in Chapter 4. Along with these new efforts came more reporting on the Oriente in Quito’s press. These reports described everything from roadwork to legislative projects under discussion to the achievements of the Catholic missionaries in the region. Some of this reporting also tended to cement the region’s place as a component of patriotism and national identity. A letter written from the Oriente to El

Comercio’s director in March, 1921, for example, discussed recent road progress in such terms. “Ecuadorians truly interested in the country,” the author wrote,

can now exercise their energies in this beautiful region, with total confidence that their efforts will be generously recompensed; and I do not doubt that with the influence of these two supreme loves in life— Homeland and family—they will be able to transform these solitary forests into an emporium of comfort and prosperity.21

20 “Consejo de Oriente,” El Comercio, September 14, 1919.

21 “Trocha del Napo al Puyo,” El Comercio, March 17, 1921.

64 In this light, working for the progress of the Oriente was more than just a good opportunity for individual families, but a chance to contribute to the betterment of the nation as a whole.

Articles in El Comercio also tended to present the progress of the Oriente as a question of national prestige, especially in contrast to Peru’s own efforts in its Amazon and in lands claimed by Ecuador. In May, 1924, El Comercio published a translation of a story from the New York Times concerning Peru’s plans to colonize its Amazon with

80,000 European immigrants.22 El Comercio’s editors opined that this plan should serve as a wake up call for Ecuadorians; learning of Peru’s plans should push Ecuador’s own government and citizens to be stronger, more decisive, and to act in unity along the tracks of progress in the Oriente.23 In March of 1925, El Comercio lamented the abandonment of the Oriente and the stagnation of the Directorio de Oriente

(Directorship of the Oriente). But a letter from “a bank dweller on the Bomboiza,” written from the southern Oriente, argued that although the government might not be praiseworthy, Ecuadorian citizens in the region were. The letter detailed the works undertaken by “landholding colonists” in the area with their own capital in the face of

Peruvian encroachments. “They are, then,” stated the author, “truly patriotic people” who would soon see the benefits of their toil in the exuberant and fertile forests.24

In October of that year, El Comercio published a series of articles titled

“Propaganda Oriental,” which promoted the notion that preoccupation with the

22 “La Publicación Sobre Concesiones Peruanas a un Sindicato Americano,” El Comercio, May 22, 1924.

23 “La Colonización de Huallaga,” El Comercio, June 1, 1924.

24 El Comercio, March 21, 1925.

65 Amazonian region was part of one’s patriotic duty. A contribution to this series by A.

Augusto del Pozo was addressed specifically to the Ecuadorian proletariat, and exhorted this class to help extend the Ecuadorian flag to all those places it should be flown. “I repeat,” Pozo writes,

if you want to be a patriot…if you want to be a martyr of democracy, father of the people, hear my call…. Ecuadorian: if you want to save your Homeland, stop being a caudillo, enough with political parties, enough with honorific ambitions of vainglory: listen, do you want to be an Orientalist?25

Later that year, El Comercio celebrated an “Official Day of the Oriente” on December

18th, and featured an article written by “Liberto” that discussed the importance of the region for the future of the nation. “Without danger of falling into error,” the author wrote,

“it can be categorically affirmed that the future and greatness of Ecuador is found in the extensive lands that constitute the Oriental Provinces.” Lamentably, he opined, the laws designed for the region were either poorly conceived or poorly carried out, and the nation had seen a series of contracts for infrastructure projects that had led nowhere.26

Similar sentiments were echoed in an article by “A Patriot,” written that same month from the Napo River region and published in El Comercio in February of 1926. The author complained that the benefits and “regeneration” promised by the July, 1925 revolution, which brought a military government to power in Quito, had not reached the citizens in the Oriente. “Are we not citizens with right to republican guarantees?” asked the Oriente dweller. “Are we not Ecuadorians? For, if we are, then attend to us.”27 It was the patriotic duty of Ecuadorian citizens to work for the Oriente, just as it was the duty of

25 “Propaganda Oriental,” El Comercio, October 18, 1925.

26 Liberto, “Día Oficial del Oriente,” El Comercio, December 18, 1925.

27 Un Patriota, “Del Oriente Ecuatoriano,” El Comercio, February 17, 1926.

66 the state to see that those citizens were protected and aided in their efforts in the region.

An article from April of 1926 furthered the notion that the Oriente was a fully national region, and as such, deserved more attention from the state and from other

Ecuadorians. The article, titled “The Napo, And Its Aspirations, Its Wealth and

Progress,” began with a review of all the forest products that were found in the Napo

River region, as well as the successful crops that already flourished there. But the Napo

Region demanded closer ties to the rest of the nation: “Patriotism compels us, then, to the duty of opening communication routes” to the Oriente, where 42,000 people live in

Napo Canton alone. This high population meant that Napo deserved representation in

Congress by a diputado and senator. The author of the article argued that the Oriente formed “an integral part of the State, with all its prerogatives and rights, as more than four hundred compatriots have manifested, who…are populating that vast territory and defending, practically and energetically, the integrity of the soil of the Ecuadorian

Homeland.”28 In this view, the Oriente was more than an “incipient province”; it was a region home to compatriots that deserved to be full participants in the nation and state.

Those who undertook to contribute to the Oriente’s population growth and development were also acting patriotically in the best interests of the nation. A letter published in El Comercio from the president and secretary of the newly-formed “Comité

Pro-Oriente de Cayambe” (Cayambe pro-Oriente Committee), in the northern Sierra, stated that their project to colonize the Oriente would give an example of honorability and true patriotism to any “communists” who stirred up trouble by complaining of unequal distribution of lands in the Sierra: in the Oriente, lands were available and

28 C. R., “El Napo, Y Sus Aspiraciones, Sus Riquezas y Progreso,” El Comercio, April 7, 1926.

67 abundant.29 The same committee later wrote a letter, also published in El Comercio, that stated their intention to “serve as sentinels of national integrity, with the laudable aim to promote at the same time the wealth of the country, giving great impulse to agriculture, industry, and commerce.”30 The use of the word “sentinel” to describe those who colonized the Oriente was very common, and would remain so for decades to come. It implies that the Oriente colonists were especially patriotic and valuable for their quasi-militaristic attitude toward the development and defense of the Oriente. The

Oriente was not just a fully national region; it was filled with citizens who had taken on a special mission. El Comercio distinguished between the private efforts of citizens and state schemes to foment colonization in November of 1926 when it criticized a new presidential decree for creating new fiscal employees without giving practical aid to colonists themselves. The article stated that the decree “keeps confusing these two notions that should be different: that of employees and that of the colonist.” The

Cayambe committee’s members were true colonists, who organized themselves without any official support. Also, a group of workers from Guayaquil who spontaneously went to the Oriente with their families formed “a new patria chica, with the desire to form small populations, nucleus and germ of future cities.”31

Groups of citizens frequently formed colonization enterprises in this period, as was the case with the Sociedad Obrera Colonizadora del Pastaza, or the Workers

29 Humberto Maldonado, “El Comité Pro-Oriente de Cayambe,” El Comercio, April 7, 1926. A later editorial in El Comercio praised the Cayambe Committee precisely because their plans for colonization would not take lands away from any legitimate owner, unlike some groups of campesinos motivated by “communism.” Of course, this editorial does not consider the indigenous people of the Oriente whose lands were the target for the Cayambe Committee’s plans.

30 Heriberto Maldonado, “Nota que el Comité Pro-Oriente dirige al Comité Central de Colonización,” El Comercio, April 9, 1926.

31 “Decreto de Colonización,” El Comercio, November 1, 1926.

68 Colonization Society of the Pastaza. In February, 1927, the society’s directors published letters in El Comercio written to the Provisional President of the Republic and the

Minister of Social Precaution, detailing their aspirations. According to their letters, they formed the society to help resolve the difficult economic situation in the country; their nucleus of 10 families and 70 individuals would alleviate social pressure in the Sierra and contribute to the development of the Oriente. They argued that colonization of the

Oriente should be promoted among national citizens, rather than foreigners, above all, because Ecuadorians were “the only ones who in truth will go to undertake works of patriotism, and will ensure the ineludible rights of Ecuador in the present and future in the rich and extensive territory.”32 El Comercio’s editors later opined that there should be a “patriotic Orientalist league” to aid all the various private efforts at colonization, such as those undertaken by the Cayambe committee and the working families from

Guayaquil.33 The paper echoed these sentiments again in March of 1929, insisting upon the importance of aid to groups of patriots, like the Cayambe group, who were working on road projects into the Oriente: “Road work and access to the Oriente is a theme of territorial integrity and practical civic-mindedness.”34

Correspondents from the Oriente itself also expressed similar views and informed El Comercio’s readers of the patriotic sentiments that existed among the region’s inhabitants. One such entry, from April of 1929, lamented the lack of government response to Peruvian encroachment on Ecuador’s wealthy Oriente in the

32 Rafael Quintero Borja, “Un núcleo de ciudadanos Ecuatorianos quiere formar una colonia en el Oriente,” El Comercio, February 9, 1927.

33 “Colonización Oriental,” El Comercio, June 1, 1927.

34 “La vialidad y el Acceso al Oriente,” El Comercio, March 7, 1929.

69 Pastaza River area. Nevertheless, Ecuadorian colonists in the area responded by raising the Ecuadorian flag in the Dominican missionary settlement of Juanjiris, and held a patriotic celebration in which whites and Indians alike saluted the flag and shouted

“vivas!” to Ecuador. The local Dominican priest gave a patriotic speech in which he

reminded [the audience] of the sacred duty that all good Ecuadorians have to integrally conserve and defend the Ecuadorian Homeland. He also made the indigenous masses comprehend, in their own language, that the Ecuadorian Tricolor would indifferently cover all the sons of the country, and therefore, although they were inhabitants of jungle, they were legitimate children of Ecuador, and as such, they had the duty to defend the land of their birth.35

El Comercio’s readers could see, then, that the patriotic task of developing and defending the Oriente was being carried out by citizens inside and outside of the

Oriente.

The campaign to make the Oriente a component of Ecuadorian patriotism and national identity was given another important outlet when El Oriente Dominicano was founded in 1927. This magazine was a publication by Dominican priests and served primarily to report on the progress of the Dominican missionary settlements in the

Apostolic Vicariate of Canelos, in the central Oriente, extending from the settlements of

Mera and Puyo, near the Andean Cordillera, eastward to the frontier with Peru. It was founded on the fortieth anniversary of the 1887 restoration of the Dominican missions in the region. The first issue proclaimed that the Dominicans in the Oriente are motivated not just by their religious faith, but also by patriotism; their goal was the “wellbeing and greatness of their beloved Homeland,” and they sought to make the Oriente echo in the

35 Corresponsal, “El Cantón Pastaza,” El Comercio, April 22, 1929.

70 hearts of their compatriots.36 A slogan that appeared frequently in the magazine’s pages bluntly asked, “Are you a true patriot? Subscribe to El Oriente Dominicano, magazine of national interests.”37

Father José María Vargas, the director of El Oriente Dominicano, wrote an article about the state of things on the occasion of the centenary of Ecuador’s 1830 independence from Colombia. On this important anniversary, Vargas reflected on the wellbeing of the country, and asserted that the happiness of a nation depends on being able to provide for itself as much as possible without foreign commerce. He then repeated the old notion of the Amazonian region as the key to Ecuador’s future: “The eastern region is the future hacienda of the Homeland: from the Oriente will come food articles to satisfy the needs of the people, bread and clothing in abundance.” To achieve this would require the efforts of colonists and Indians alike; the latter group being civilized by Dominicans and other missionaries.38

The colonists of the region were the subjects of praise in many issues of El

Oriente Dominicano. In 1931, the magazine printed a speech by Carlos Alvarez Miño, who represented the Oriente in Congress and would later publish a book on the region.

This speech, given in December of 1930, in the Oriente settlement of Mera, at the foot

36 N., “Oriente Dominicano,” El Oriente Dominicano 1, no. 1 (August-September 1927): 21.

37 El Oriente Dominicano 1, no. 2 (December 1927): 59. The authors featured in the magazine were mostly Dominican missionaries in the Oriente or Dominican priests residing in Quito or other highland cities. The magazine did print articles from secular authors, too, such as Tomás Vega Toral, who in the magazine’s third issue wrote “In Favor of the Ecuadorian Oriente.” In Vega’s view, the track record of the Ecuadorian government as regards the Oriente had been one of total failure. Nevertheless, certain men of superior value had gone to the jungles as true patriots, without the government’s aid, to set up productive haciendas. These hacendados and the Missionaries themselves have been the only defenders of the Oriente. It was high time, in Vega’s view, that the government abandon its “inconceivable imbecility” and aid the heroic citizens of the Oriente with effective road projects and other means. Tomás Vega Toral, “En Pro del Oriente Ecuatoriano,” in El Oriente Dominicano 1, no. 3 (February, 1928): 84-85.

38 José María Vargas, O. P., “Los Misioneros Dominicanos en el Centenario de la Patria,” El Oriente Dominicano 2, no. 14 (May-June, 1930): 76.

71 of the Andean cordillera, accompanied the handing out of honorific diplomas to some of the oldest colonists in the town. Alvarez argued that these men belonged among those historical figures who refused to give up in the face of the impossible, but instead overcame their obstacles and achieved moral satisfaction. Furthermore, these colonists postponed personal aspirations in order to make a path for future generations to follow.

Thanks to these colonists, Mera would soon be the site of a populous city with flourishing industry and tending toward the “resurgence and future of the Ecuadorian

Nation.”39 As for the Indians of the region, the magazine printed their words from time to time, including a speech by the curaca (chief) of Puyu (Puyo), Victor Manuel Vargas, on the celebration of the centenary of Simón Bolívar’s death. “We know that this wealthy strip of the Oriente corresponds…to the inheritance that [Bolívar] achieved with triumph in combat,” Vargas stated, “and for this reason, we who are proud to belong to the Free

Homeland of Ecuador, will courageously defend Ecuadorian soil; strong as the tiger and elegant as the palm trees, we will not permit [this territory] to be sullied by the weakened ambition of our neighbors.”40 Articles like these demonstrated to the magazine’s readers that the Oriente was a vitally important region that was already home to admirable compatriots, both white and Indian.

El Oriente Dominicano commented on its own success in its first issue of 1932, stating that the Oriente was attracting the attention of Ecuadorians like never before.

“The Indians have moved the compassion of the white and they await the compatriot

39 “Discurso Pronunciado por el Señor Carlos Alvarez Miño, En El Momento de Entregar los Diplomas Honoríficos a los tres más Antiguos Colonos de Mera,” El Oriente Dominicano 4, no. 18 (January-February, 1931): 3-4.

40 “Discurso pronunciado por el indígena Victor Manuel Vargas, Curaca del Puyu, en representación de los pueblos del Oriente, en el centenario de la muerte de Bolívar,” El Oriente Dominicano 4, no. 18 (January-February, 1931): 4.

72 colonist, for work to be stimulated by their example and their industry,” declared the editors; “the magazine has readers, the eastern region is becoming more and more known, [and] the missionaries are appreciated.”41 But the magazine did not cease imagining a better future for the region, as is illustrated by the article, “A Patriotic

Dream,” by the Dominican friar Eloy de Manamáipi. Manamáipi imagined an expedition of soldiers to the Dominican Missionary center of Canelos to found a large city, as

Spanish Conquistadors had done previously. They would proceed according to a well- structured plan, including road construction and division of farmland among the soldiers’ families. Manamáipi fantasized about a future in which a similar plan would be followed in all the different Catholic missionary zones in the Oriente, resulting in five “large and opulent cities” filled with citizens who, due to lack of employment in the Sierra, are

“turning into Bolsheviks.” This vision could be achieved, Manamáipi argued, if the

Ecuadorian government took these plans seriously and acted decisively.42 This article reinforces the notion that the Oriente was a promising and wealthy region while questioning the government’s fecklessness as regards the region.

While waiting for the government to take action, the Dominican missionaries continued their patriotic work among the Indians of the Oriente. Jacinto D. Marín, a

Dominican who had worked among Aushiri Indians in the Tigre River area, in his article,

“In a Corner of the Jungles,” exhorted the reader to travel to that region, not just in his mind but, “if it were possible, with your real presence, to take part, personally, in the civilizing process of that race and tribes that belong to us and whom we belong to in the

41 “Tomando Alientos,” in El Oriente Dominicano 5, no. 24 (January-February 1932): 1.

42 Fray Eloy de Manamáipi, “Un Sueño Patriótico,” El Oriente Dominicano 5, no. 25 (March-April 1932): 62-64.

73 sense of history and national integrity.” The Aushiri Indians had a “well developed intelligence” and had adopted moral and practical ideas. The Oriente was, according to

Marín, a theater for “patriotic and religious spirit,” and the task of incorporating the

Aushiris to “Ecuadorian civilization” would create among them powerful defenders of national territory.43 The work of the missionaries, then, was concerned not just with saving souls, but saving the entire nation through defense of its Amazonian territory.

The magazine commented on those moments when the need to defend

Ecuador’s territory was most acute. In 1933, armed conflict between Colombia and Peru loomed over disputed territory in the Amazonian region. José M. Vargas, the magazine’s director, argued that Ecuador “is under the patriotic obligation” to direct its efforts toward the Oriente rather than remain a mere spectator of the international conflict that was ongoing. The prestige of Ecuador as a nation depended on progress in such factors as road construction to the Oriente and agricultural development, both of which would offer employment to out-of-work Ecuadorians and increase national wealth.

Vargas stated that because all the Dominican missionaries were Ecuadorian by nationality, they were natural defenders of the territory, and they awaited other

Ecuadorians as brothers. They worked not for personal interest, but for the Homeland and its future.44 This idea was developed further in a 1937 article titled “Missionary and

Patriot,” which detailed the solitary lives of the missionaries, devoid of friends, confidants, and comforts. However, as the article stated,

43 Jacinto D. Marín, “En un rincón de las selvas,” El Oriente Dominicano 5, no. 27 (July-August 1932): 134.

44 José María Vargas, “El Patriotismo Ecuatoriano hacia el Oriente,” El Oriente Dominicano 6, nos. 30-31 (January-April 1933): 1-2.

74 if some human incentive can sustain the missionary in his labor it is, for us, patriotism. Ecuadorian missionaries in Ecuadorian territory, we feel greater interest and love in working for those who deserve from the Homeland a just and impartial embrace, to which all have right.

According to the author, who was not named, entering the region caused the missionaries to dream of the future of an enlarged Homeland; that day would come when roads were built that could bring the excess of people from the Sierra to the

Oriente, signifying the redemption of Ecuador. These people would find their own land and the

infallible recompense of personal work. There will be no unemployed, because the rich and generous nature will offer the treasures of its breasts to be received by those who do not let their hands rest nor close their eyes with the ashes of sterile pessimism.45

The magazine also instructed its readers in the importance of the Oriente to the patriotism of all Ecuadorians, not just missionaries or colonists. A typical example is from 1935, when the editors argued that patriotism demanded familiarity with all of the land that was Ecuador’s national inheritance, that it be loved like a prized possession, and that it be made to flourish through the physical faculties of Ecuadorians. We should know the borders that belong to our nation and their history, the editors argued, and we should plan for the region’s future. Beyond these reasons relating to territorial defense, though, there was much else to attract Ecuadorians to the Oriente: missionaries could find souls to save and to teach about patriotism and civilization; philologists could study autochthonous languages; and scientists could find new plant and animal species. In short, the nation’s efforts toward the region should not cease until all citizens have easy access to the Oriente in order to make “that green region the true hacienda of the

45 “Misionero y Patriota,” El Oriente Dominicano 10, no. 47 (February 1937): 25-26.

75 Homeland.”46 The following year, José María Vargas repeated the idea that all

Ecuadorians should be familiar with their national borders, especially those in the

Oriente. In an article titled, “Our Border Question,” Vargas began by reviewing the various nineteenth-century treaties that established Ecuador’s right to the Oriente but that Peru nevertheless refused to respect during its frequent incursions into the territory.

The only solution to the problem would consist in Ecuador’s cultivation of every last section of the disputed territory. Doing so, he argued, would see “that we have a true

Oriente of economic redemption, for all those in the Sierra who complain of inequality of fortune, and we will have also, practically, wide and free passage to the Amazon and the Atlantic.”47 Again, the development Oriente was the solution to myriad problems: the international conflict with Peru on the one hand, and economic shortfalls and unemployment on the other.

An important secular counterpoint to El Oriente Dominicano was the magazine

Miscelánea, which was founded in Quito in 1931 with Arturo González Pozo as director.

In its inaugural issue, the magazine proclaimed that it was motivated by “patriotic faith and ardor” and intended to present the Ecuadorian public with the best proposals for national interest.48 The majority of the magazine’s articles were dedicated to the

Oriente, though it did feature sections of general literature, culture, sports, and other topics. González’s editorials in the magazine frequently exhorted his readers to consider the vital importance of the Oriente for the nation. In the magazine’s second issue, the

46 “Patriotismo Oriental Ecuatoriano,” El Oriente Dominicano 8, nos. 36-37 (May-August 1935): 65-66.

47 José María Vargas, O. P., “Our Border Question,” El Oriente Dominicano 9, nos. 43-44 (July- October 1936): 281-282.

48 “Al Comenzar,” Miscelánea 1, no. 1 (January 1931): 3.

76 opening editorial argued that no problem the Republic faced was as “complex and delicate” nor of such “transcendental importance” as the Oriente. The magazine would preoccupy itself with questions of the Oriente’s administration, its needs, and the means to address them. Unlike most of what had been written about the Oriente, which consisted of “fantastic legends” or “erroneous descriptions,” Miscelánea would offer accurate information intended to foment immigration and tourism in the region.

Immigration should be undertaken by “healthy and hardworking elements who know and understand that their mission is a civilizing one and that future generations depend on their labor.” Finally, Miscelánea would seek to maintain enthusiasm and interest about the Oriente, as well as destroy the general feeling of pessimism that surrounded the region, which for so many decades had remained undeveloped.49 Like most subsequent issues, this issue featured photographs of the region, including one of a patriotic demonstration in Archidona, a carpentry workshop run by the Josephine Catholic mission in the Napo region, a football team from Baños on its visit to Mera, and an observation of the anniversary of Bolívar’s death in that Oriente settlement.50

Despite the magazine’s stated aim to combat “fantastic descriptions,” it certainly tended toward the romantic in its discussion of the Oriente, which often portrayed the region as an answer to Ecuador’s various social and economic problems. Consider this description, from an editorial in the magazine’s third issue:

Like a hidden treasure of mysterious fairies; like a splendid promise of wealth and fortune; like the greatest hope of this Ecuadorian Homeland, so deserving of better luck, it rises up bountiful and generous, guarded by the gigantic wall of the Andes, the oriental jungle, so full of riches and enchantment, but at the same time so sown with dangers and difficulties.

49 “El Oriente Ecuatoriano,” Miscelánea 1, no. 2 (February 1931): 3-4.

50 See Miscelánea 1, no. 2 (February 1931): 10, 15, 26, 27.

77 She, with all her cruelties, is the fecund mother that opens her breast offering to her children, poor and rich, the sustenance of life and the comforts of opulence; for all she has open hands, and all can take from her springs the cold and pure water that satisfies and enlivens; all, according to the capacity of their economic and moral elements: he who has much capital and many aptitudes will obtain a thousand fold return on his money and his work; he who has little will achieve little, but in conditions sufficient for life, for sustenance, for comfort. There, effort and work are remunerated with largess; there is enough for all and for everything.

The Oriente, then, offered a way for Ecuadorians to flee the problems of the Sierra and

Pacific coast region and go to a place where “an immense network of abundant rivers” would, like routes of progress, promote commerce and fortune.51 Despite the vague references to “cruelties,” this description promised wealth, or at the very least, a secure existence, for any who moved to the region.

The exhortation to move to the Oriente remained a component of Miscelánea’s output. In 1932, the magazine printed a speech that Arturo González Pozo had given to a gathering of workers in Quito. He began the speech by lamenting the fact that the

Oriente, unlike the Sierra and Coast, was not advancing through civilization; its people were forgotten, and the nation failed to recognize that the Oriente’s dwellers were heroic laborers, and martyrs for the conquest of its most precious national territory. He exhorted the audience to consider that in the Oriente lies “the most propitious arena to demonstrate our patriotism, [it is] a fertile arena for all progressive initiatives, there one can see what progressive ambition and the intelligent activities of governors and the governed are worth.” González finished the speech by detailing all the economic activities available to colonists, from fine wood extraction, to medicinal plants, to

51 “La Selva Oriental,” Miscelánea 1, no. 3 (March 1931): 4-5.

78 livestock, to gold mining.52 Not only was the Oriente an important part of the nation, but it offered all Ecuadorians the opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism and support for the nation as a whole. The normal activities of life, in this view, took on added significance when they occurred in the Oriente because they contributed to the nation’s strength and prestige.

When Miscelánea entered its fourth year of publication, in 1934, González celebrated all the work done to

comply…with all eagerness, with the transcendental patriotic duties of making the great value of our Oriental Region known and the primordial necessities that we must carry out in order to incorporate to civilization and nationality the beautiful and rich jungles, the pretty and beneficent rivers.

In the year ahead, González promised to “intensify our propaganda in favor of the

Oriente, which is almost unknown, forgotten by Ecuadorians—save rare exceptions— and threatened or invaded by…envious neighbors who are not satisfied with the enormous territories they have.” In the magazine’s view, the people and the government both have the obligation to “affirm, with material and moral reality, the Ecuadorianness of the Oriental Region, which belongs to us without doubt.”53 In a subsequent editorial,

Miscelánea commented on the new government of José María Velasco Ibarra and hoped that he would do something about the Oriente. The article cites the fact that the

Spanish discoverers of the Amazon River were guided by Indians from Quito as justification for Ecuador’s claim to the Oriente; subsequent international agreements over the territory had contributed to the widely-held certainty that Ecuador was

52 “Conferencia leída por el Director de esta Revista, señor Arturo González Pozo, ante varias agrupaciones obreras de Quito, el mes de agosto de este año,” Miscelánea 2, no. 15 (December 1932): 9-12.

53 “Al comenzar un año más,” Miscelánea 4, no. 28 (January 1934): 1-2.

79 the republic called by geographical, historical, and ethnological circumstances to colonize and civilize that part of the Amazon in which run the Putumayo, the Napo, the Curaray, the Tigre, the Zamora, the Morona, the Santiago, and other rivers born in the Ecuadorian Andes.

The notion that the Oriente was the future of the nation was well known; Miscelánea exhorted the new government to seriously consider Oriente matters.54

In 1935, Miscelánea and its editor, Arturo González Pozo, continued the campaign to link the contemporary Oriente with both its glorious past and a promising future. After admitting that, in fact, he had never traveled to the Oriente, González recapitulated beliefs about the wealth of the Oriente and its role in the nation’s future:

To speak of the Oriente is to soar in the epoch of legend and reckless adventure, when the audacious Castilian, fierce and ambitious, interred himself in the thickness of the forests, traveling over cordilleras, in search of the legendary El Dorado. The Oriente is the land of promise and the index of the Ecuadorian future. Its landscapes and beauties are worthy of the poets’ lyre and the artists’ brush. Oh, what most enchanting paintings of that region of fabulous marvels, hidden, unfortunately, still for Ecuadorians, due to our own neglect, because we do not construct the means to reach them and enrapture ourselves in contemplation of it.55

González followed this romantic description with his practical suggestions for an effective colonization scheme for the region.56 Lack of due attention to the Oriente meant, for González, that Ecuador was failing to live up to its heroic past. Readers of

Miscelánea could see that by participating in the region’s colonization, they would not only get to experience the beauty of the region, but they would be following in the footsteps of the Conquistadors that defined the nation’s territory.

54 “La Defensa Amazónica,” Miscelánea 4, nos. 36-37 (September-October 1934): 1-3.

55 Arturo González Pozo, “Problemas Orientales,” Miscelánea 5, nos. 45-46 (June-July 1935): 5- 8.

56 Ibid., 9-21.

80 Quito’s daily newspaper, El Comercio, continued throughout the 1930s to print articles that sought to establish the importance of the Oriente to the nation and to exhort its readers to participate in the patriotic effort to develop the region. A January, 1933 article by Domingo Romero Terán, who claimed to have twenty five years’ experience in the Oriente, asserted that the region was so abundant in wealth, especially in terms of gold in its rivers, that it “offers to all poor men…that love work” the chance to “shake off their misery” and “conquer for themselves life and independence.”57 The paper addressed the region’s more symbolic importance by publishing a manifesto from a group of students from Ecuador’s Central University addressing the looming border conflict in the Amazonian region between the two “neighboring and sister nations” of

Peru and Colombia. The students repeated the litany of reasons that Ecuador had claim to Amazonian territory:

by right and by history, by geography, reason and equity, Ecuador is an Amazonian country; for justice and necessity, Ecuador demands convenient passage to the Atlantic on the great route of the Marañón; the justice of its cause is inviolable and undeniable; history cries in favor of our claims, since civilized man gave his first footstep in the Amazonian jungles… since the first drops of blood poured out in those regions.58

Proposals to build roads into the region were usually greeted with similar patriotic celebration; consider a 1934 commentary on a planned road project from Carchi

Province, in the northern Sierra, to the Oriente. Luciano Navarrete Bravo, a contributor to El Comercio, wrote,

all our wealth, all our aspirations and all our desires for the future are in our ORIENTE. It is the land of the future. It is the land of hope. It is the

57 Domingo Romero Terán, “Ofrece una ventajosa colocación a cuantos quieran explotar riquezas del Oriente,” El Comercio, January 3, 1933.

58 Jorge Luna Yepes et al, “El Ecuador es País Amazónico – Manifiesto de los Estudiantes del Grupo Orto, de la Universidad Central del Ecuador,” El Comercio, March 23, 1933.

81 land of promise. And it promises much! Nobody ignores this. Nobody doubts this. But for all of this it is necessary to know how to love it.

Opening new communication routes into the region was, for Navarrete, the answer.59

Similarly, the news that a new population center had been founded in the Oriente provoked an editorial in April, 1935 that expressed the national importance of this development. “A new population in the Oriente,” the author writes,

is a new center of activity in which a civic conscience and patriotic necessity is awakened. …[The Oriente] will not be part of the Homeland until social action, civic thought, and human persistence give signs of a totalizing will. The immense jungle, while it remains vacant of inhabitants, will also be apart from civilization, and isolated effort will amount to nothing when man enters her to sell her, to demolish her.

The new settlement was cause for celebration because

it will do the truly admirable labor of reintegrating to civilization a jungle zone that until now has remained in the hands only…of rough and fierce tropical nature, and it will have the virtue of extending patriotic thought… to those distant regions in which much individual patriotism has been done, but which has remained incomplete in its efforts due to the lack of a nucleus.60

Of course, the author considered the region to be “vacant” because he did not consider the region’s Indians to be worthy of mention. But this article clearly shows the degree to which the peopling of the Oriente could be imagined as a national project that reflected the prestige of Ecuador.

In 1938, El Comercio reported on the formation of a new pro-Oriente committee in Quito, composed of illustrious citizens and Catholic missionaries. On April 4th, El

Comercio re-printed a speech that Father Elías Brito, Salesian missionary, had given on the HCJB radio station. “Thousands of square kilometers of extremely valuable

59 Luciano Navarrete Bravo, “Una Carretera al Oriente,” El Comercio, January 31, 1934.

60 “Poblaciones en el Oriente,” El Comercio, April 20, 1935.

82 territories, true wealth, the true future of our Homeland, almost completely abandoned,”

Brito began, “are being lost due to our fatal inertia.” Thousands of Indians remain ignorant, and thousands of colonists from the Sierra live without assistance or education in the jungle. “To know and to make the Oriente known,” Brito continued, “to love it, to defend it...this is our patriotic desire, and this is the prime reason for the existence of a new Committee, that is clearly distinguished from the others.” Brito then detailed all the myriad projects that the Committee would undertake, from roadwork, to hygiene and sanitation, to agricultural and technical schools for colonists and Indians. All of this was to “unite all Ecuadorians in a noble crusade that erases barbarism and suppresses all the obstacles that impede the exercise of our sovereignty in those expansive regions with which prodigious nature has favored us.” The Committee would work through conferences, films, raffles, lotteries, expositions, and other public manifestations. The members of the committee

will be the sacred lymph that will circulate in the whole Republic and will give us the future we desire, the future that explains our audacity, our activity, the future with which the sacrifice of today will be crystallized in strong and productive colonies that assure our effective dominion in the Oriente and, exploiting its prodigious wealth, will benefit the Nation.

Brito closed by stating that the committee should not act in isolation; rather, he desired that other committees would spring up in other parts of the Republic, calling to “all

Ecuadorians of good will” to aid this moral crusade.61

The new committee was officially inaugurated on August 27th, 1938, with the name of Comité Orientalista Nacional, or National Orientalist Committee. In Quito, with the presence of the Interim President of the Republic, Manuel M. Borrero, the first

61 Padre Elías Brito, “Anhelos y esperanzas del comité nacional Pro-Oriente,” El Comercio, April 4, 1938.

83 president of the committee, Leopoldo Rivas, opened with a speech about all the various projects the committee hoped to undertake with its personnel of various creeds and political ideologies. These members sought, above all, to

ratify and reaffirm the more than one-hundred year old Ecuadorian aspiration that the immense and rich region trod by the Spanish conquistadors be, at last, an effective and very valuable part of the homeland, and that it contribute with the many factors of its natural wealth, until now untapped, to fulfill the mission that corresponds to all civilized peoples in the world.

The Ecuadorian government would have to take part in this, but the action of the citizens was necessary, too. “It is high time, compatriots,” Rivas stated, “that the Oriente stop being something like a patriotic fiction, and become reality.” Too long, Ecuadorians had “invoked the Oriente as though it were a magic word to move the most intimate fibers of patriotism” while condemning it to abandonment with poor policy. “Now or never,” Rivas concluded, after making reference to the country’s national liberators, “if we have the real and true concept of nationality, if we want to show the word obvious proof that we are dignified inheritors of those forceful champions of liberty and effective factors of civilization and progress.”62 The Committee, then, in calling regular

Ecuadorians to do their part in favor of the Oriente, suggested that they would be helping the nation live up to the example of its founding fathers.63

62 “Solemne resultó ayer la inauguración del Comité Orientalista Nacnal.,” El Comercio, August 28, 1938.

63 El Comercio lauded the Committee’s efforts for the rest of the year. In September, the paper reported on a session of the Committee, which had heard reports from “distinguished compatriots” and worked on the statutes of the organization. The members of the Committee were pleased that the national press had been contributing to Oriente propaganda, seeing it as the “vanguard of all patriotic movements.” “Comité Orientalista labora intensamente en pro de la región,” El Comercio, September 6, 1938. Another report was titled “All of Ecuador applauds the initiatives of the National Orientalist Committee,” citing the genuinely patriotic program of action that has made all Ecuadorians who desire to contribute to national betterment enthusiastic. As proof, the article quotes from a dozen or so letters sent to the Committee’s directors by such illustrious figures as the President of the Republic, the President of

84 Toward the end of the year, the National Orientalist Committee published its official statutes using a Salesian press in Quito. The statutes had been officially adopted on October 19th, 1938, and were approved by the interim President of the Republic,

Manuel María Borrero, on October 25th. The goals of the Committee were as follows: to maintain territorial integrity; to convince the government to assign sufficient funds for the development of the Oriente; to foster the construction of roads and other means of communication into the region; to support religious and scientific missions; to support the foundation of technical and agricultural schools for the efficient education of the colonist and for the “reduction of the savage to civilized life”; to improve health in the

Oriente; to foster colonization; and to establish agricultural, mining, and industrial cooperatives.64 The statutes also established thematic commissions within the

Committee, to deal with each of the different goals.65 The final chapter of the statutes stated that there should be committees similar in structure to the national committee in each province of the Republic.66 Father Vargas, the Dominican editor of El Oriente

Dominicano, later commented on the foundation of the Committee, which relied on voluntary contributions from citizens and some assignations in the government’s budget. Subcommittees were indeed formed in different cities and cantons to awaken

the National Assembly, the Archbishop of Quito, and other public and private figures. “El Ecuador entero aplaude las iniciativas del Comité Orientalista Nacional,” El Comercio, September 12, 1938.

64 Estatutos del Comité Orientalista Nacional (Quito: Escuela Tipográfica Salesiana, 1938), 1-4.

65 Ibid., 6. The creation of these seven different commissions within the Committee was finalized on December 12th, 1938, as reported by El Comercio. “Comité Orientalista Nacional,” El Comercio, December 12, 1938.

66 Ibid., 13.

85 patriotism throughout the country. For Vargas, these committees were carrying out an important act of patriotism; as he wrote,

It is urgent that the sentiment of justice and duty that we carry to reclaim our territorial rights be incorporated into the soul of the people. It is necessary that each one of the Ecuadorians have evidence that the defense of our patrimonial district of the Oriente is tied to the future of the Republic.

Vargas hoped that the Committees would collaborate effectively with the national government to see these goals met.67

The Committee launched its own publication, a magazine called Selva, in 1940.

Only two issues were produced, however—one each in 1940 and 1941. Both were published by the press of the Ministry of Government (Ministerio de Gobierno). In the

1940 issue, the editors stated that 32 subcommittees had been founded outside of

Quito, as well as a Ladies’ Orientalist Committee.68 The slogans printed in the magazine illustrate the Committee’s ideology: “To Defend the Oriente is to Defend the Honor and

Future of the Republic”; “The National Orientalist Committee, since its founding, and having moved public conscience in favor of the National Amazonian Region, has realized a very patriotic work, lasting and transcendent”; “The generous ideal of the

National Orientalist Committee has triumphed, because now the whole nation has placed its eyes on it and is interested in it.”69 The content of the rest of the issue closely resembles the contents of any given issue of Miscelánea or El Oriente Dominicano; it is

67 José María Vargas, “Comités Orientalistas Nacionales,” El Oriente Dominicano 12, nos. 72-73 (March-April 1939): 37-38.

68 “Nuestra Revista,” Selva 1, no. 1 (February 1940): 3-5.

69 Selva 1, no. 1 (February 1940): 6.

86 filled with travel accounts, descriptions of Oriente settlements, and discussions of the region’s wealth and promise.70

El Comercio in November of 1938 published two speeches that indicate the tone of the national rhetoric around the Oriente. On November 22nd, the paper reprinted a speech given on the radio by Señora Carlot Félix, who began by citing the “sin” in the nation of having forgotten about the Oriente. Thankfully, she stated, “A group of genteel

Ecuadorian ladies have queried the collective conscience and have obtained the answer: It is necessary to re-conquer the Oriente at all costs.” This group she referred to was the Ladies’ National Orientalist Committee. “The work of this re-conquest must begin with ourselves before all,” she alleged; “National sovereignty cannot just remain a paragraph in the Constitution of a people, rather it must enter deeply into the heart of those who owe their love to the Homeland.” So she addressed the Ecuadorian people

“to tell them to join our ranks that are going to undertake a formidable campaign” for the

“dolorous” and “abandoned” Oriente. She called for infrastructural projects and military garrisons for the region, on the one hand, and on the other, a clearing of the

mental jungle that hides our Oriente. The hedge and the weeds of our ears and incomprehension have caused a monstrous forgetfulness, without realizing that at any moment when we grow tired of such sterile infighting, we can find ourselves pauperized and without any piece of land to sustain ourselves.

Political unity, then, was necessary to prevent the loss of territory that would greatly lessen Ecuador’s ability to be self-sufficient.71

70 The same kind of material fills the pages of the Committee’s second and last issue of Selva 2, no. 2 (February 1941).

71 Sra. Carlot Félix, “En pro de nuestro Oriente,” El Comercio, November 22, 1938.

87 Two days later, another radio speech was reprinted, this one from María Elvira

Yoder, a member of the Ladies’ Orientalist Committee. Her exhortation was directed to other Ecuadorian women, whose patriotism and humanitarian sentiments were, according to her, well known. Her plan for bettering the nation was directed toward a more specific problem: that of the Jívaro Indians who were lured to Peruvian territory through the promise of insignificant gifts. She claimed that it would be both “patriotic” and “humane” to join in her campaign to collect donations from “señoras y señoritas” all over the nation, which would be given to the Salesian Missionaries in the southern

Oriente so they could treat the tropical diseases from which the Jívaros suffered.72 The station that carried Yoder’s speech, the “Palomar,” broadcast speeches on the Oriente on other occasions, too, highlighting the wealth of the region and detailing both the forest products and commercial crops that grow in abundance in the Oriente.73

Many of the attitudes about the Oriente published by Ecuadorian presses in the first part of the twentieth century were crystallized in the “Official Anthem of the

Ecuadorian Oriente,” which was commissioned in 1935 by the director of the Dominican missions in the Oriente, Ceslao Marín. He chose the poet Remigio Romero y Cordero for the task. The Minister of the Oriente, Dr. Atanasio Zaldumbide, approved it for official adoption. Father José Vargas, editor of El Oriente Dominicano, explained the importance of the Oriente having its own anthem. “Our peasants reap wheat to the rustic son of jaichima and even the savages do not throw their lance except for among the resonances of imprecations of bravery and audacity,” Vargas wrote. The other

72 “Doña María Elvira Yoder dirige un llamamiento patriótico a favor de los Jíbaros del Oriente,” El Comercio, November 24, 1938.

73 “En qué consiste la verdadera riqueza de nuestro Oriente?” El Comercio, November 30, 1938.

88 provinces of the Republic had anthems that “awaken enthusiasm and maintain patriotic fervor always alive.” An anthem for the Oriente would push Ecuadorians to follow the rivers birthed in the snows of Cotopaxi, Tungurahua, and Cotopaxi toward the mighty

Marañón River.74 The anthem would feature in patriotic celebrations held in the Oriente in subsequent years.75 In 1939, the National Orientalist Committee ordered the printing of ten thousand copies of the anthem for use during celebration of the Día del Oriente

Ecuatoriano (see below), and asked the director of the National Music Conservatory to compose music for the anthem.76 The anthem features six stanzas, and a chorus that states: “The Pacific pushes the Homeland/ from the Oriente to the warm zones;/ and, pushed, the Homeland advances to the Atlantic/ on the water of the Amazon River.” The first verse recounts the exploits of Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco de Orellana in the

Amazon, while the second describes the rivers that flow from the snows of the Andes toward the basin. The third stanza affirms Ecuador’s right to be an Amazonian nation; the fourth exhorts the nation to civilize the “robust savage,” who awaits the fecund embrace of brothers motivated by Christ. The fifth verse calls Ecuador to be ready to make war if necessary against its neighbors. The sixth and final verse states that while someday a new Republic could form in the Amazon, it would be a “piece ripped away

74 José M. Vargas, “El Himno Oficial del Oriente Ecuatoriano,” El Oriente Dominicano 8, no. 35 (March-April 1935): 36.

75 For example, in a celebration Macas in 1936. “Informe acerca de la Gira Misional y patriótica llevada a cabo en febrero y marzo de 1936 al través de parte del Oriente ecuatoriano por el Padre Jacinto Domingo Marín, Misionero Apostólico de las Misiones Dominicanas del Cantón Pastaza,” El Oriente Dominicano 9, no. 41 (March-April 1936): 218. Another performance took place in Archidona in 1939. “Desde Archidona,” El Comercio, June 12, 1939. In Mera in 1940. “Crónica Misional,” El Oriente Dominicano 8, no. 85 (April 1940): 143. By schoolchildren in Quito in 1946. Delia Moreira Cedeño, “Actividades del Colegio ‘Santísimo Rosario’ en Pro de las Misiones Dominicanas de Canelos,” El Oriente Dominicano 19, no. 160 (July 1946): 131.

76 Arturo González Pozo, “Resoluciones del Comité Orientalista Nacional,” El Comercio, November 13, 1939.

89 from Quito.”77 This official anthem distills many of the components of how the Oriente became a part of Ecuador’s national identity and patriotic project; from the assertion of the region’s deep national past with the Spanish conquistadors, to the great imagined wealth in the region, to the notion that those living in the Oriente were brave and heroic, the anthem encapsulates the role the Oriente played in the national imaginary.

Besides the anthem, Ecuadorian presses continued to publish works about the

Amazonian region. One significant publication was Oscar E. Reyes and Francisco

Teran’s 1939 book, Historia y Geografía del Oriente Ecuatoriano (History and

Geography of the Ecuadorian Oriente), which presented information about the Oriente in an almanac-like fashion. Their book opened with a discussion of the Oriente’s history from the Colonial period to the present, with a focus on the treaties that define

Ecuador’s territorial rights. This was a nearly ubiquitous feature of publications on the

Oriente in the context of tension with Peru over the region’s borders. The authors then went into some detail on the region’s river systems, climate, and flora and fauna. Gold mining received some special attention; the authors claimed that 3,500 miners were

77 Vargas, Ibid., 37. Romero y Cordero’s anthem was not the only one written; in June of 1935, Victor M. Rendón wrote an article in El Comercio to inform the paper’s readers that he, too, had written an anthem for the Oriente. His was written upon the request of Auerelio Guerrero Sanz, a citizen in Archidona, in the Napo River region of the northern Oriente, and was set to music composed by Gugliermo Bussoli. The chorus and first verse both invoke the gold that flows in the Oriente’s rivers. The second and third verses focus on the colonists of the region, highlighting the patriotic task that they are carrying out. As the second verse states: “May the zeal of agricultural people be praised! / Audacious colonists, in arduous labors, / increase, from the fertile, splendid ORIENTE, / in favor of the Homeland, enchantment, workmanship.” The third verse continues in the same vein: “Ardent patriots, take your gaze / to fertile soil and, in your grandiose work, / serve the Progress that will make more valuable / the rich and extensive mysterious Region.” The final verse was an affirmation of Ecuador’s right to the region: “Awaken, ORIENTE, from your deep sleep; / your jungles become populated; your rivers become enlivened; / forever you are ours! May the world repeat it; / go back! Those who impiously dare to tread upon you.” Rendón asserts that each verse was written on themes recommended by the people in Archidona. Víctor M. Rendón, “El Himno del Oriente Ecuatoriano,” El Comercio, June 24, 1935. This was perhaps the himno oriental sung in Puyo at a civic celebration put on by the “Homeland Circle Society” organized by the Dominican missionary, Ceslao Marín, in August, 1934. See Corresponsal, “Crónicas de Oriente,” El Comercio, August 8, 1934.

90 working the Napo River and its tributaries. Similarly high numbers were working the

Oriente’s other river systems, with more than five thousand on the Zamora River in the southern Oriente. According to their estimates, the sum total of gold taken out of the

Oriente’s rivers each year was 3,850 kilograms. Lamentably, though, the vast majority of this gold ended up leaving the country for Peru without ever being taxed or entering national coffers.78 Reyes and Teran cited a total population for the Oriente of 15,265 inhabitants, including both whites and Indians.79 Most belonged to the latter category; nevertheless, they did discuss the region’s major population centers such as Macas, with a history dating back to the 16th century and nearly a thousand residents, and

Mera, which attracted “an intense current of immigration that will soon convert it into a center of much agricultural importance.” Tena had progressed a great deal thanks to the

Josephine missionaries there, and the other, smaller settlements of the region “only await better communication routes to attract an intense colonization.”80 The roads in the

Oriente were a sad story, according to the authors, though they did describe how to reach all of the various settlements.81 In their account, the Oriente was a region with its difficulties, but one that nevertheless promised to soon become an integral part of the nation. They concluded their book by stating, “today, the [Oriente] provinces... are already defined by the political and administrative personality that characterizes their sisters of the Andes, and this will soon permit them to intervene conscientiously and

78 Ibid., 109-112.

79 Ibid., 117.

80 Ibid., 123-124.

81 Ibid., 127-130.

91 with dignity in the concert of national life.”82 The Oriente, then, was not a mysterious and unknown region, but a fully national one, well prepared to participate on equal terms economically and politically with the rest of the nation as long as the infrastructure was improved.

Celebrating a National Object of Desire: The Día del Oriente

Perhaps no effort to make the Oriente a part of the Ecuadorian nation was so clear and concerted as the creation of a holiday to celebrate the region, the Día del

Oriente Ecuatoriano. Although days had been dedicated to the celebration of the

Oriente before, they were one-off events.83 In October of 1938, El Comercio reported on a session of the Comité Orientalista Nacional in which Elías Brito, the Salesian missionary, informed the congressional representatives from the Oriente provinces about the Salesians’ plan of action for the year. Modesto Chávez González, representative for Napo-Pastaza, affirmed the National Assembly’s support for these projects by stating, “It is in the conscience of the whole country that in the Oriente lies our future.” Another Napo-Pastaza representative, Eladio Viteri, stated, “it is time to abandon theory for practice.” Accordingly, he “arranged a secret session of the

Assembly that will certainly adopt a plan for immediate realization. It is not possible that while our territory is usurped we content ourselves with speeches.” Viteri went on to request that the Oriente’s provinces be incorporated to the general legislation of the

Republic (a step that was not fully taken until decades later). Other members of the

82 Ibid., 134.

83 An article about the Josephine Mission in the Napo region in El Comercio in January, 1927 mentions such a celebration, but remarks that the Oriente remains in a primitive state despite that celebration and other efforts at colonization. “La Misión Josefina del Napo,” El Comercio, January 22, 1927. In 1935, an editorial in Miscelánea suggested that the Oriente should have its own festive day, just as other provinces and cities did. The initiative was not carried out at that time. See “El Día del Oriente,” Miscelánea 5, nos. 42-43 (March-April 1935): 1-2.

92 committee weighed in with their ideas: Aurelio Dávila, a former representative from the

Oriente, stated that roads and colonization should be emphasized above all. Lieutenant

Colonel Rafael Arcos Díaz, representative for Santiago-Zamora Province, in the southern Oriente, stated that while committees to help the Oriente in the past were

Utopian in their vision, this committee was composed of good personnel. He opined that civil administration should replace the current system of military administration in the

Oriente in order to awaken civic spirit. In this discussion, the members of the Committee repeated many of the longstanding beliefs about the Oriente as the key to the nation’s future that had been frustrated by inefficient administration. In closing the session, the president of the Committee, Leopoldo Rivas, added to Arcos’s suggestion of awakening civic spirit by officially proposing the creation of the Día del Oriente to be celebrated in the whole nation. Brito supported the idea and stated it should be officially stated in law; the members of the national assembly at the session instructed the members of the committee to draft such a law.84 By February of 1939, the fixing of February 27th as the official Día del Oriente was ready for approval by congress.85

Civic holidays have various meanings; one of their purposes is to, in the words of historian Thomas Benjamin, “strengthen patriotism and social solidarity, enhance the legitimacy of the state, and reinforce the popularity of a leader, a party, or a government.”86 The Día del Oriente certainly promoted patriotism and Ecuadorian unity; the holiday’s messages did not tend to prop up any particular political figure or party.

84 “Sesión del Comité Orientalista Nacional,” El Comercio, October 24, 1938.

85 Aurelio Chiriboga M., “Comité Orientalista Nacional,” El Comercio, February 5, 1939.

86 Thomas Benjamin, La Revolución: Mexico’s Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 99.

93 Instead, it celebrated missionaries, private citizens, and agricultural colonists that dared to make their way in the region despite poor communications and the threat of illness and inclement weather. Many of the speeches and publications around the holiday argued that the day was an occasion for regular Ecuadorians to look to themselves as potential redeemers of the nation through action in favor of the Oriente.

El Comercio did not miss a chance to explain to its readers the significance of this new holiday. “This is not about signaling one more holiday in the national calendar nor adding another rest day to those many that already exist,” the paper opined; “much to the contrary, this date will be one of intense patriotic work and positive good for the country.” As El Comercio’s editors explained, the Comité Orientalista Nacional in creating the holiday intended to raise the patriotic spirit of Ecuadorians by recounting the significance of the Amazon region, with its gold and oil wealth, promising agriculture and fine woods. In addition, it was necessary to demonstrate the damages caused by the Peruvian incursions into Ecuadorian territory. Through the use of conferences, speeches, and articles in the press, the holiday would seek to gain the support of all citizens in addressing the enormous necessities of the region. As El Comercio stated, “it is the duty of each Ecuadorian to cooperate with the State in a generous form: the 27th of February will be a day for a national contribution for the Oriente.” The date chosen was also significant: the 27th of February, 1829, saw the victory of Ecuadorian (and

Colombian) troops over Peruvian invaders at the Battle of Tarqui, an event that helped define the borders between the new republics. In this sense, the Día del Oriente fulfilled another purpose of civic celebrations, which, according to Thomas Benjamin, includes the “transfiguration” and “transmitting” of collective memory “so that the past can better

94 sanction the particular…arrangements of the present.”87 Like many decades’ worth of

Ecuadorian publications about the Oriente, the celebration of the holiday was tied directly to the nation’s past events, from the explorations of Spanish conquistadors to the shaping of national borders in the early republican period. Remembering these events in a public, officially sanctioned manner helped cement the essential nationality of the Oriente and Ecuador’s legitimacy to claim it.88

Although the holiday’s planners made no claim that celebrating the Oriente in this fashion was a longstanding tradition, the holiday nevertheless fits in many ways within the types of “invented traditions” discussed by Eric Hobsbawm that are essential components of nationalism. The holiday’s celebration certainly included “a set of practices…which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.”89 The choosing of the 27th of

February was one clear link to the past; invocations of heroic forebears in the Oriente were others. As Hobsbawm noted, invented traditions tend to come in a time of need or

87 Benjamin, La Revolución, 99.

88 One of Guayaquil’s leading newspapers, El Universo, also commented on the significance of the new holiday and the appropriateness of its date. “Tarqui,” the author began, taking the pen name “A Citizen Teacher,” “in the end is a symbol, to testify to what a people can do, no matter how small it is, when it considers itself offended.” The defense of Ecuador’s rights in the Amazon, according to the author, was an appropriate celebration for the occasion. For this author, the implications of the holiday fell mostly on the shoulders of regular citizens, rather than on the government that is beholden to interests. “Let’s go to the Oriente,” he wrote, “on our own conviction, for love of the land of our birth.” The entire citizenry was obligated to help organize effective systems of colonization of the Oriente. All private and public employees should contribute one day’s wages in each of three consecutive years to the Oriente, and the government ministries in charge should organize permanent schools in strategic positions on the frontier to be adorned with national symbols and staffed by carefully selected teachers. El Universo, February 27, 1939, in “Un Símbolo y un Derecho,” Miscelánea 9, nos. 83-84 (January-February 1939): 19-21.

89 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1.

95 crisis, such as a rapid transformation of society or weakening of social patterns.90 For the Ecuadorian planners of the Día del Oriente, the threat to territorial integrity and national prestige posed by Peru provided the necessity for an “invented tradition” that would reinforce Ecuador’s claim to the Amazon and cement it as a component of national identity. The Día del Oriente celebrations also conformed to the typology of traditions Hobsbawm describes; it certainly promoted “social cohesion” and “the membership of groups” by presenting the residents of the Oriente as full, and laudable, members of the national community. It “legitimiz[ed]” relations of authority by placing

Ecuador’s territorial claims above those of Peru. And it “inculcat[ed]…beliefs, value systems and conventions of behavior” in various ways; above all by promoting the notion that it was incumbent upon Ecuadorian citizens to work for the betterment and incorporation of the Oriente.91 Although the presence of the state and the degree of incorporation of the region into the nation at large were both incipient at the time the holiday was first celebrated, the Día del Oriente can be taken, following Hobsbawm, as

“evidence” of “developments which are otherwise difficult to identify and to date.”92 That is, the civic celebration of the Amazon region was evidence of the degree to which the region had become part of Ecuadorian national identity as well as a component of the imagined future of the state and economy.

The importance of the new holiday was imparted to Quito’s civic organizations, such as the Rotary Club, which hosted the Salesian missionary Elías Brito on February

22nd. Brito reminded the Rotarians that the Oriente was an immense territory of

90 Ibid., 4.

91 Ibid., 9.

92 Ibid., 12.

96 incalculable material value. The celebration on the 27th would evoke all the years of neglect of the region that “we Ecuadorians do not comprehend.” While the rest of the country had suffered pointless revolutions and coups d’état over the years, the people who live in the Oriente had been without any hope for aid or protection, and had become understandably bitter toward the State and the rest of the nation. “The voluntary deafness of the Public Powers is criminal and unexplainable!” Brito exclaimed.

“And unexplainable and criminal that we never direct our eyes to the extensive Oriente and toward the resigned patriots that populate it!” Brito effectively issued a call to arms to the Rotarians; all Ecuadorians, from border to border, would need to be convinced of the immediate necessity of defense of the territory. Brito was optimistic that the defense and regeneration of the Oriente could become an impressive national project:

I am certain that from all corners where the notion of Patria is still not lost, from all the river bends where the tricolor flag flies: from the mangrove and the páramo, from the tropics and from the sierra, from the forest and the plain, we will see with great pleasure a work more practical than mere words; a work that will be manifested as highways, colonization, and, in the end, effective and practical penetration.

The completion of such a project would not just be significant for Ecuador, but for all of

America.93 Brito’s address to the Rotarians relied on the old notion of the Oriente as a fountain of material wealth. But his speech also presented the Oriente as a place that was already part of the national community due to the “patriots” that lived there. The upcoming holiday, then, could have been understood by the Rotarians as an opportunity to re-affirm and strengthen a broader national family that included those compatriots who lived in the distant Amazon.

93 Padre Elías Brito, “Tres quintas partes del Oriente ocupa ahora el Perú,” El Comercio, February 23, 1939.

97 The Comité Orientalista Nacional publicized the upcoming festival in Guayaquil’s

El Universo newspaper and exhorted citizens to participate monetarily. “If you want to be truly practical,” the Committee wrote,

you want to be like the Magi for Jesus, … come, then, on that day of splendor, and all, all without exception, here where there is no politics, nor petty interests, come and deposit as a sacred fund, some of your savings, even if just a cent, in the coffers of the Homeland for its defense, for the fortification of its constantly threatened and invaded borders, for the colonization of its virginal and beautiful jungles, for the increment of its abnegated missionaries, for the efficient work of its byways and roads, through which the fruitful product of its coveted minerals and vegetables will flow in joyous and uncontainable uproar, through which human wealth will filter, which represents the incommensurable human progress of the peoples.”94

On February 27th, El Comercio published a series of articles and photographs of the Oriente. The photographs include the portrait of a Jívaro “in bellicose attitude,” some

“magnificent coffee trees” of the Oriente, as well as a gold miner displaying his batea, or shallow pan. The articles included a review of the history of treaties and scientific explorations that granted Ecuador its legitimacy in the Amazon, and discussion of colonial missionary efforts in the region. The various Orientalist committees in Quito put on a program of civic celebration that began with a display at the monument to Antonio

José de Sucre in the Plaza de Santo Domingo. Speeches were made by María Plaza, from the ladies’ Committee, and other Orientalists. A gathering of secondary students sang the National Anthem. In the afternoon, a series of speeches about the Oriente were open to the public, and included such speakers as Leopoldo Rivas, president of the Comité Orientalista Nacional, and Colonel Joaquín Samaniego, the Chief of the

Fourth Military Department, which was in charge of the Oriente’s administration. In the

94 From El Universo, February 27, 1939, in “Los Ecuatorianos debemos hacer algo por nuestro Oriente,” Miscelánea 9, nos. 83-84 (January-February 1939): 22-23.

98 evening, there was a free showing of the film The Invincible Jívaros of the Upper

Amazon.95 Throughout the city, in each public office, one employee was placed in charge of collecting donations for the Oriente and encouraging his colleagues to wear the national tricolor.96 In session that day, Congress approved new assignations for the

Oriente, including 50 thousand sucres for hospitals in the region, and another four million sucres for roads.97

Celebration of the Día del Oriente took place in the region itself, as reported by El

Comercio’s correspondent in Tena, in Napo-Pastaza Province. The local Comité

Orientalista held a large luncheon for more than forty guests. The president of the committee spoke, as did the Jefe Político of the canton. The province’s representatives in congress, Sergio R. Játiva and Carlos Alvarez Miño, then detailed the funds approved by Congress for works in the region. In Archidona, another city in the province, sixty residents honored the occasion by taking place in a large minga, or communal work party based on local indigenous practice, to improve the road to a nearby hamlet. This was an example to be imitated, according to the correspondent:

“Peoples should receive some gift on their days of celebration…and what better gift than work that not only benefits the pueblo being celebrated, but that reflects the effort in benefit of the whole country that has already gained much with the system of celebrations like that done in Archidona.”98 What this reveals is that the celebration of

95 “El Día del Oriente Ecuatoriano,” El Comercio, February 27, 1939.

96 “Hárase colecta de fondos para la apertura de caminos al Oriente,” El Comercio, February 26, 1939.

97 “Fondos para la colonización del Oriente,” El Comercio, February 28, 1939.

98 VTM, “Crónicas de Oriente,” El Comercio, March 13, 1939.

99 this new holiday offered a way for the people of the Oriente to celebrate their own achievements while also participating in the same kinds of civic demonstrations that were occurring simultaneously across the nation. And unlike other civic celebrations of, for example, Ecuador’s independence on August 10th, the Día del Oriente affirmed that the far-flung portions of the national community in the Amazon were active members of the national community, and ones that the “civilized centers” like Quito looked to in solidarity. Furthermore, celebrating the Oriente was a way to strengthen the nation as a whole. Luis F. Gabela, writing in the pro-Oriente magazine Miscelánea, argued that

February 27th represented a “solemn promise” before the nation to “sustain and defend of the sovereignty of the Oriente in all its vast extension, whatever it costs.” Strength would come in unity, in his view: “If here we sacrifice ourselves in blood and fire among brothers for internal political questions, how will we be lions or Spartans before the eternal and usurping enemy?” It was time, he argued, for Ecuadorians to make themselves respected again, as they once had at Tarqui.99

The celebration of the Día del Oriente in 1940 was grander still, probably due to the greater time available for preparation (the date for the celebration in 1939 was finalized less than a month prior). In January, Sergio R. Játiva, representative in

Congress for Napo-Pastaza, announced to the Comité Orientalista Nacional that the

President of the Republic, Andrés Córdova, had offered official support to the preparations for the festival. In addition the Asociación Deportiva del Napo (The Napo

Sports Association) was preparing a group of athletes to travel to the capital, including

99 Luis F. Gabela, “Ecos sobre el Comité Orientalista,” Miscelánea 9, nos. 83-84 (January- February 1939): 25-26.

100 “authentic Indians skilled in the sport of swimming, of blowguns, and arrows.”100 An author by the pseudonym “Gelves” wrote later in El Comercio that there was much enthusiasm for sports in the Oriente: “It causes true pleasure to see how our brothers that live in the Oriente’s jungles show themselves to be so enthusiastic for all that is progress, both cultural and material, of our un-renounceable land that sits on the other side of the eastern cordillera and that is now and always very much ours.”101 This year, then, Ecuadorians in the capital would have the opportunity to see their Amazonian compatriots in person. Their coming also would provide, as “Gelves” argued, an opportunity to let them know that they were not forgotten by the rest of the nation. The planned sporting events would provide “greater spiritual rapprochement between the inhabitants of our Oriente and those of our populous cities.... The Oriente athletes will bring all the patriotic thought with which the two provinces of Napo-Pastaza and

Santiago-Zamora are saturated.” Among them would be some true “Jívaros” “who with so much tenacity and patriotism defend and are advanced sentinels of our frontiers.

They will come and they will teach us their abilities. They will let us know that civilization has also arrived to where they live.”102 In this view, the Oriente was a region of the nation where patriotism burned bright. The region’s belonging to the nation was without question, as even the fierce, warlike Jívaros (as indeed they were so often described) were not savages but “sentinels” for Ecuador.

100 “El 27 de febrero se realizará en esta ciudad exposición de productos del Oriente,” El Comercio, January 12, 1940.

101 Gelves, “Los deportes en la Región Oriental, El Comercio, January 15, 1940.

102 Gelves, “El Oriente y los Deportes,” El Comercio, January 19, 1940.

101 An author dubbing himself “Canchero” reported just before the Día del Oriente that the visit of the soccer players from the Oriente had unleashed a current of sympathy in Quito. “These brave athletes,” he wrote,

defenders of the most treasured piece of the Homeland, have brought to us the athletic echo of those Oriente zones, in which each gesture of culture is another motive for rejoicing. They are not aces of soccer, but they are aces of patriotism, and for this they deserve the special stimulus of the athletes and fans of Quito. We should go to the Municipal Stadium, not to watch demonstrations of soccer technique, but to express our admiration and care for the fierce Ecuadorian players who, despite the thickets of the jungle, maintain the national flag constantly raised, haughtily claiming our dominion in the Oriente lands.103

“Gelves” later reported that the soccer players from the Oriente were taken on a tour of

Quito’s civic monuments, such as the tomb of Antonio José de Sucre and the monument to Simón Bolívar, and also to the offices of the Fourth Military Department, which was responsible for the Oriente’s administration.104 As in many other nations, sports came to occupy an increasingly important position in Ecuadorian society in the first half of the twentieth century. As Eric Hobsbawm has written, sports are “an expression of national struggle, and sportsmen representing their nation or state, primary expressions of their imagined communities.”105 It is not surprising, then, that athletes from the Oriente featured prominently in the Día del Oriente celebrations. Their inclusion allowed tangible evidence of the vigor of the national community, even in that most distant part of it, the Oriente.

103 Canchero, “Los futbolistas del Oriente,” El Comercio, February 23, 1940.

104 Gelves, “Fútbol local y oriental,” El Comercio, February 25, 1940.

105 Quoted in Benjamin, La Revolución, 110.

102 The Oriente’s soccer was not the only thing from that region on display in Quito around the time of the Día del Oriente celebration in 1940. Andrés F. Córdova,

President of the Republic, inaugurated the exposition of Oriente plant and mineral products on February 24th with a speech reminding the public that in order to make effective Ecuador’s rights in the Oriente, “it is necessary that all Ecuadorians, united and detached from political passions, make a demonstration of their nationality, remembering that they have as norm and duty the exaltation of their only Homeland, cultured and progressive: Ecuador.”106 Apart from that exposition, many other events constituted the celebrations in Quito during the week of the 27th. After the soccer games on the 25th, that evening saw a program in honor of the Oriente put on by the girls of the

24 de Mayo secondary school. The morning of the 26th saw speeches about the Oriente given in all the schools of the capital, based on instructions given by the Minister of

Public Education. That same minister gave a special presentation on the radio station

HCJB, “La Voz de los Andes” that evening, and another girls’ school put on a special

Oriente program. The Día del Oriente itself, the 27th, featured a grand civic parade that went from monument to monument, and featured a speech by Galo Plaza, future president and then-Minister of Defense and Oriente. The evening featured a dramatic presentation in the Teatro Sucre, put on by the male and female version of the Comité

Orientalista Nacional. The following day featured a depositing of flowers in the tombs of

“enlightened Ecuadorians who have labored in and for the Oriente,” followed by a speech on “Oriente topics” by a member of the group of visitors from the Napo region.

106 “El Encargado del Poder inauguró anoche la exposición oriental,” El Comercio, February 25, 1940.

103 The 29th featured yet more sporting events featuring the visitors from the Oriente, for good measure.107

The details of the dramatic presentation at the Teatro Sucre give a sense of how the Oriente was presented to the public that evening. The first performance was a dramatization of Alejandro Ojeda’s novel Etza: The Soul of the Jívaro Race, directed by

Remigio Romero y Cordero (author of the official Oriente anthem) and featuring original music. This portrayal of Jívaro warfare and bravery was followed by a performance of

“The Black Sash” (El Tendema Negra), a play written by Gustavo Vallejo and based on the famous novel Cumandá, a story of star crossed lovers in the Oriente written by the

19th-century Ecuadorian conservative Juan León Mera. The evening also featured dances and music inspired by indigenous forms. The last piece was a dramatic scene performed by “authentic Jívaros” in their own language and attire.108

The nature of the civic celebration and dramatic performances taking place during the week reveals the significance that the events’ organizers sought to impart to the citizenry. An exposition of products from the Oriente gave tangible evidence of the wealth waiting to be tapped in the region. The veneration of monuments to national heroes such as Sucre and Bolívar linked the story of the Oriente to that of the larger national narrative. The inclusion of the gravesites of Ecuadorians who had made their careers in the Oriente suggested that their achievements could be regarded in the same light as those of the more traditional national heroes. All the athletic competitions displayed the vital human capital of the Oriente, including those indigenous people like

107 “Programa General de los Festejos con que el Comité Orientalista Celebrará el Día del Oriente,” Selva 1, no. 1 (February 27 1940): 38.

108 “Velada que se celebrará el Día del Oriente en el Teatro Sucre,” Selva 1, no. 1 (February 27 1940): 35.

104 the Jívaros that were the subject of so many fearsome descriptions in Ecuadorian popular imagination. The performance of Ojeda’s novel Etza at the Teatro Sucre does demonstrate, however, that these more dramatic and fearsome imaginings of the

Jívaros could not be resisted.

The press played a role in telling Ecuadorians how to understand the importance of the Oriente on its special day. Arturo González Pozo, editor of the pro-Oriente magazine Miscelánea published an article in Quito’s El Comercio that amounts to a civic catechism, instructing the paper’s readers on all that the Oriente is and should be, as well as their own role in the nation’s integration of the Amazonian region. González began his article, “Concepts about the Oriente,” with the startling claim that “thousands of millions of productive workers” could find space in the Oriente, and that the region is the “most propitious field to demonstrate our patriotism.” González wrote a series of short, declarative statements, as though he was exhorting his readers to memorize and repeat them. “The profound conviction that the Oriente represents the future and greatness of the country,” González declared, “must take root in the conscience and heart of all Ecuadorians.” The key to defense of the territory consisted in making roads, planting crops, and establishing new population centers. The missionaries must be praised and supported in their work. Schools are doing the honorable work of rescuing the Jívaros from barbarism and integrating them into civilized life. He closed by declaring, “He who denies his cooperation, in any form, to the advancement of the

Oriente, is not a patriot.”109 The Día del Oriente was not just an occasion for civic celebration and sporting events, but a call to action. The publications and celebrations attending the holiday praised the people of the Oriente and the works underway, but

109 Arturo González Pozo, “Conceptos sobre el Oriente,” El Comercio, February 27, 1940.

105 also highlighted the distance between the region’s current state and its imagined future of abundance. All Ecuadorian citizens were called to help bridge that gap in what ways they could.

Some had already answered that call, as Colonel Sergio R. Játiva, president of the Comité Orientalista Nacional in 1940, emphasized in his speech on the 27th to gathered representatives of the government and diplomatic corps. He praised above all the true “sons of the jungle” who had come to Quito to participate in the celebrations and athletics from such places as the “smiling and virile” city of Tena, the “progressive and happy” town of Mera, and the “young and flourishing population” of Puyo, all in

Napo-Pastaza Province. They were, according to Játiva both “representatives of the autochthonous and legendary” Indian races and “descendants of abnegated compatriots who, without any official nor private aid, penetrated the most important region of the Homeland, where they established themselves to develop their energies and activities.” Lamentably, their many appeals to the public powers for help were not answered. Though abandoned, the people of the Oriente, “laborious and honorable,” form the “advanced waves of our nationality, and the only thing these citizens of elevated civic-mindedness and exemplary patriotism ask is that the public powers attend to their deserved and just aspirations.” Principally, they needed better roads, which would allow the flow of civilization and progress. Though the government had much to do, Játiva also emphasized that the maintenance of sovereignty and national honor was a task for the ordinary citizens, too.110

110 Sergio R. Játiva, “El Día del Oriente Ecuatoriano,” Miscelánea 10, nos. 97-98 (March-April 1940): 24-26.

106 The importance of the Día del Oriente and its implications for all Ecuadorians was felt in the highland provincial capital of Riobamba, where the Colegio Nacional

Maldonado marked the occasion with a speech by the secondary student Maria

Antonieta Gallegos. The views of this young woman demonstrate that she was familiar with much of the views of the Oriente and its potential that had been developed over the previous decades, and fundamentally agreed with the notion that the Oriente called the nation to an important duty. She explained her need to give the speech by stating that

“there is a supreme mandate, it is the mandate of Duty when we are conscious of the meaning of Nationality and Homeland.” 111 After reviewing the historical events and treaties that gave Ecuador its legitimate right to the region, she described the lamentable state of Peruvian intrusion and the road system that lacked development. It was high time, in her view, for a movement in the national conscience and spirit in favor of the Oriente, leaving political ambitions aside. Failure to achieve this would constitute treason against the Homeland. By tapping the wealth of the Oriente, Ecuador would come to occupy an elevated position among the prosperous American nations.112

The holiday was observed in the Oriente itself, as it had been in 1939. In Puyo, the local Comité Orientalista de Señoras, or Ladies’ Orientalist Committee, sponsored the celebrations that included musical performances and athletic events. In Mera, the schoolchildren celebrated by singing the national anthem, giving speeches, and performing poetry and “Oriental” dances. The President of the Academia Escolar “Santo

Domingo” in Mera, Genaro Peñafiel, gave a speech that reviewed the national history of

111 María Antonieta Gallegos, En el Día del Oriente Ecuatoriano (Riobamba: Ediciones Siembra, 1940), 1.

112 Ibid., 5.

107 the Oriente. His words of praise for the Oriente’s colonists demonstrate his appreciation for their role as national heroes. “And what of the Ecuadorian colonists?” he asked,

these titans of Ecuador? these national athletes and champions? these men who, motivated by patriotism and with no other goal but to conserve patrimonial territory intact, … have labored and labor still incessantly with love and disinterest, to transform with their sweat the abrupt jungle into a florid and amenable countryside …?

The people of Mera, he affirmed, were among these “titans” because of their sacrifice for the Homeland.113 The Día del Oriente, then, offered those in the Oriente a chance to celebrate their own special role in the nation as “titans,” or, as Játiva stated in his speech in Quito, “advanced waves of nationality.”

The 1941 celebration of the Oriente’s own holiday would be the last before the war with Peru that would ultimately mean the loss of an immense portion of Ecuador’s

Oriente to the enemy from the south. With conflict with Peru looming, in February of

1941 the Jefe Político of Pastaza formed guardias nacionales from among the populace, instructing them in the use of the Mauser rifle. That same month, the Pastaza area, the most militarized area of the Oriente thanks to the presence of an airstrip in

Shell-Mera and a military colony between the Pindo Grande and Pindo Chico Rivers, also saw the formation of a Junta Patriótica in Puyo consisting of the local officials, some missionaries, and schoolteachers. The purpose of the Junta was to promote the advancement of the Oriente in moral and material senses. The Junta also put itself in charge of the Día del Oriente celebrations, planning to inaugurate a new collection of medical supplies for the Red Cross in Puyo. On the 27th, families and visitors from throughout the Pastaza area filled the Dominican mission house to mark the

113 “Crónica Misional,” El Oriente Dominicano 13, no. 85 (April 1940): 141-145.

108 occasion.114 El Comercio of Quito reported that the Junta in Puyo would also use the occasion to inaugurate a new road to the headwaters of the Bobonaza River, which had been worked on by soldiers from the “Patria” Battalion, and to open a new street within

Puyo’s urban area.115 In Tena, in the northern Oriente, a children’s soirée, organized by the teacher in the local public school, took place on the night of the 27th to cultivate her students’ love for the Homeland that was currently threatened by the Republic’s enemies.116

Areas of the Sierra also prepared for the Día del Oriente; Loja, in the southern part of the Republic, prepared a large civic parade to be attended by all public employees, educators, religious corporations, members of the armed forces, and the citizens of Loja in general. The Junta Orientalista of Azuay, based in the city of Cuenca, also planned a civic parade made up of similar elements. During the parade in Cuenca, though, a collection of funds for national defense would be made. La Voz de

Tomebamba, a radio station in Cuenca, broadcasted a special program about the

Oriente that evening.117 With war looming, the celebration of the Oriente and national defense were linked. In the capital, conferences about the Amazonian region took place in all educational in military institutions starting on the 26th of February, with broadcasts

114 “Crónica Misional,” El Oriente Dominicano 14, no. 97 (April 1941): 113-114.

115 DEP, “Una Junta Patriótica se ha formado en El Puyo, la que prepara el programa para celebrar el ‘Día del Oriente,’” El Comercio, February 24, 1941.

116 Guayusa, “Una simpática velada infantil se presentó en Napo celebrando el Día del Oriente Ecuatoriano,” El Comercio, March 12, 1941.

117 “Un selecto programa ha preparado la Junta orientalista del Azuay para celebrar el ‘Día del Oriente,’” El Comercio, February 26, 1941. See also “Resultó suntuosa la celebración del Día del Oriente en Píllaro,” El Comercio, March 3, 1941, for a description of the Día del Oriente celebrations in Píllaro and Ibarra; and “Con varios encuentros deportivos y desfile patriótico celebróse en Alausí el ‘Día del Oriente,’” and “Con un variado programa se celebró en Guaranda el Día del Oriente,” El Comercio, March 5, 1941, for Alausí and Guaranda.

109 on the station HCJB La Voz de los Andes also taking place. Quito’s parade involved fundraising at the tomb of Antonio José de Sucre. As with the previous year’s celebration, there was a meeting of the Comité Orientalista Nacional open to the public and dramatic performances at the Teatro Sucre.118 The Dirección Provincial de

Educación of Pichincha, Quito’s province, had its own program for the holiday, which included speeches by both teachers and students, as well as music, broadcast on the

“Quito” radio station. The director of the “José Martí” school spoke about the gold mines in the rivers of the Oriente and their importance for the national economy. A teacher at the Centro Escolar “Fernando Pons” spoke on the unexploited vegetable wealth of the region. An article by the Salesian missionary Estanislao M. Matusis was broadcast, describing the Salesian missionary settlements of the southern Oriente and their recent progress.119

The Comité Orientalista Nacional published the second annual issue of its official publication, Selva, to mark the Día del Oriente. The festivities of the previous year were, to the editors of the magazine, evidence of what a resolute institution such as the

Comité can accomplish. They argued that there was much to celebrate in the Oriente: for years it had been abandoned and left to the predations of a “bad neighbor” (Peru), but was now filled with schools and military outposts, colonists, missions, and all the elements needed to maintain national sovereignty. The increase in the number of schools in the region, along with new radio station, demonstrated that “eagerness to

118 Ibid.

119 “Programa con el que la Dirección Provincial de Educación solemnizará el Día del Oriente Ecuatoriano,” El Comercio, February 27, 1941.

110 incorporate that region into the national life has surged.”120 The same issue contained an article from Carlos Alvarez Miño, one of the Oriente’s representatives to Congress, titled “Toward the Ecuadorian Oriente.” This optimistic description claimed that nothing could so provoke the spirit of an Ecuadorian as a voyage to the Oriente. Alvarez alleged that many writers before him presented overly exotic and fantastical accounts of the region, which often inspired fear. Those who truly knew the region had found it much more beneficial than that exaggerated version. While travel was no doubt difficult, the grandiosity and magnificence of the jungle was worth the effort. Furthermore, travelers to the Oriente need not face prolonged isolation, as Alvarez wrote,

when you least expect it, you are surprised by small villages that in the manner of our happy and smiling settlements spread light, harmony and beauty and are guarded like coffers of inexhaustible wealth; there live, also, our compatriots who … make the seeds germinate that will give you food and convert that land into fields of economy and work.121

By 1941, there were achievements to celebrate in the Oriente, and the institution of a holiday for the region made Ecuadorians more familiar with the region while also furthering the Oriente as a component of Ecuadorian national identity. The guarantors of national sovereignty cited by the magazine Selva, however, could not stop the large- scale Peruvian invasion of the region in the second half of that year, nor could it prevent the unfavorable outcome of the war that was finalized in January of 1942 with the Rio de Janeiro Protocol.

120 Selva 1, no. 2 (February 27 1941): 1.

121 Carlos Alvarez Miño, “Hacia el Oriente Ecuatoriano,” Selva 1, no. 2 (February 27 1941): 39- 40.

111 Struggling with Loss: Discussing the Oriente after 1941

Reeling from national embarrassment, the Comité Orientalista Nacional did not organize any activities for the Día del Oriente in 1942. María Elvira Campi de Yoder, president of the ladies’ Orientalist Committee, wrote in El Comercio that Ecuadorians ought to gather before the altar of the Lord to ask His blessing for the Homeland that, “if it wants to resurge, must return to the feet of His Cross and search in his Divine heart for the force for a new life.” Her Committee planned to continue its activities to aid

“those brave sentinels of our sovereignty” in the Oriente. “We must,” she wrote,

today more than ever, continue to defend that which remains to us in our Oriente. To aid those who are the carriers of civilization to those rich lands in promises for the future. …The Orientalist Committee that shares in the national mourning, nevertheless does not want that mourning to be converted into discouragement. Ecuadorians! Let’s go forth in the work of our re-birth.122

Other cities did observe the holiday, but with a somber overtone. The settlement of El

Pun at the edge of the northern Oriente had a celebration marked with “seriousness, sobriety, and withdrawal.”123 In Puyo, the mood contained a bit more resolve. As El

Oriente Dominicano commented, “THE ORIENTE, before its horrendous disgrace, should it remain squalid, livid, gaunt, trembling, and fearful? No, never again! In no way!” Puyo, as the magazine pointed out, did not lack for men, as the youth was brave, warlike, and defiant, and the women were gracious. The officers stationed there participated in the celebration of the holiday, as did the girls from the public school and the boys from the mission school. Groups of athletes from different parts of the province came to Puyo for the celebration, which included athletic competitions put on by the

122 María Elvira Campi de Yoder, “Actividades de un Comité Orientalista de Señoras con motivo de la conmemoración del ‘Día del Oriente,’” El Comercio, March 1, 1942.

123 Corresponsal, “Con actos patrióticos y culturales se celebró el día del Oriente en el Pun,” El Comercio, March 19, 1942.

112 Centro Deportivo Social “Pastaza”. After a speech by the head of the Dominican mission, there was a raising of the national flag in which all the soldiers, teachers, children, and representatives of the various delegations swore “that, happily, we are all

Ecuadorians and we promise to love her and defend her even with the sacrifice of our lives.”124 If nothing more, the Día del Oriente in 1942 offered an occasion to lament the recent dismemberment of the Ecuadorian Amazon and also to re-affirm citizens’ commitment to the region.

The celebration of the Día del Oriente in Puyo in 1943, according to El Oriente

Dominicano, was characterized by the “nobility… of the most ferverous and extolling patriotism” in contrast to the funeral-like atmosphere of the 1942 celebration that came so soon after the disabling Rio de Janeiro Protocol. The night of the 26th featured a civic parade and a girls’ basketball game with visitors from Tena. More sports followed on the

27th, as well as plays and speeches. On the 28th, there was a blessing of the first stone building in town constructed by Pastaza Social Circle, followed by addressed from the

President and some members of the Comité Nacional Orientalista. A few miles from

Puyo, in the town of Mera, a sixth-grade boy from the Dominican school there gave a speech on the Día del Oriente to the visiting dignitaries from the Comité. His opening remarks demonstrate his belief that the Oriente was both a vital part of the nation, but also a “Patria Chica” (Little Homeland) with its unique characteristics:

If all nations have their pleasant days of commemoration, then our oriental region should not be left out, that rich and beautiful zone, filled with historical memories, with aboriginal mythologies, of patriotic and missionary sacrifices, filled, above all, with memories and vicissitudes. The Ecuadorian Oriente has, then, … a day of rejoicing, in which united with our Serrano brothers in cordial and fraternal love, with whom we labor

124 “El Día del Oriente en El Puyo,” El Oriente Dominicano 15, no. 108 (March 1942): 76.

113 In this abrupt jungle, we share in one voice in the rejoicing that shelters our hearts.

The young student then reviewed the historical events and treaties that made the

Oriente “definitively Ecuadorian,” which therefore made the 27th of February a day for uniting with compatriots from the Sierra in memory of those who had sacrificed in the

Oriente.125 In this student’s view, celebrating the Día del Oriente was a call to national unity.

The need to reconstruct the nation after the war with Peru and the loss of territory remained a component of the holiday’s celebration in the subsequent years. The editors of El Oriente Dominicano marked the holiday in 1945, calling it a date “to awaken in the generous and abnegated chests of sons [of Ecuador] the burning fire of patriotism.”

Remembering the war and the Rio de Janeiro Protocol, they argued that a great portion of sacred patrimony passed into foreign hands due to untrustworthy Ecuadorians,

“occult maneuvers of denaturalized and criminal sons, without honor nor shame, without dignity nor nobility, without ideals nor conscience, without convictions nor religion, without Homeland and without God.” There was reason for optimism, however, as the highway under construction to the Oriente promised a method for tapping the wealth of the region. And not all that was praiseworthy lay in the future: the Oriente was “already an encouraging reality for those hardworking, constant, and decisive colonists” and the aid given to them by the “heroic” Missionaries who penetrated the jungle and planted the Cross among “barbarous peoples.” The holiday should be for more than just speeches and conferences; rather, “all and each one of the true Ecuadorians must

125 D. E. P., “Comunicaciones de El Puyo,” El Oriente Dominicano 16, no. 120 (March 1943): 71- 73.

114 commit in a virile manner our shoulders to the great work of culturization and civilization, upon the solid fundamentals of our divine Religion.”126 The occasion of the holiday here gives the magazine’s Dominican editors a chance to blame the loss of Oriente territory on “Godless” elements in the government, while praising their own role and that of the colonists who live in the region. Once again, the Oriente was rhetorically tied to “true”

Ecuadorian-ness and patriotism.

1945 was the last year that the Día del Oriente was celebrated on the 27th of

February. The National Constituent Assembly of that year switched the date to the 12th of February in order to tie the holiday to the anniversary of the discovery of the Amazon

River by Francisco de Orellana, who had journeyed from Quito with Gonzalo Pizarro. An article from the Boletín del Colegio Nacional “Teodoro Gomez de la Torre,” from Ibarra in the northern Sierra, illustrates how the date switch was meant to emphasize

Ecuador’s rights in the Amazonian territory in the present. As the article’s author, Juan

Francisco Leoro, writes, the 1541 expedition was fundamentally Quiteño in its makeup.

The discoveries made were “incorporated to the Gobernación de Quito; because to it belonged the men who such a large enterprise reality.” Subsequent generations did not live up to this lofty example, as only “sporadic effort” was directed to the Oriente for many years, and “cowardly” and “inept” governments betrayed the nation. The exceptions were the inhabitants of the Oriente themselves, “who have raised their campaign tents in the very heart of the jungle, to take out its generous fruits.”

Furthermore, they were “valuable guardians of the inheritance that ties us to the spirit and blood of Castile.” Among them, of course, were the missionaries that took bread,

126 “El Día del Oriente Ecuatoriano,” El Oriente Dominicano 18, nos. 143-144 (February-March 1945): 33-34.

115 faith, and literacy to the “humble sons of that esteemed corner of national soil.”127 The same publication marked the holiday in 1948 by reminding its readers that the Oriente’s jungles held “inexhaustible wealth” of animals, plants, and minerals, as well as “native families of aborigines, products of a sober, enterprising, and mighty race, ordinarily peaceful, that protected by current civilization, will develop its own culture, now impassively retarded, in secular form.” This author, Juan I. Merlo, exhorted the

Ecuadorians of his day to recover the same “pure Quiteñismo” that motivated the region’s Spanish discoverers in order to bring a better future to the Republic. While Perú now occupies the left bank of the Amazon that should have been Ecuador’s, it is time to fly the national flag in the Oriente as it flies in the Sierra.128

Though the date had shifted, in both cases the placement of the holiday evoked

Ecuador’s dispute with Peru over territory—first on the 27th of February, the anniversary of the Battle of Tarqui, and then on the 12th, which tied the celebration of the Oriente to the fundamentally Quiteño, and therefore Ecuadorian (as opposed to Peruvian), discovery of the Amazon. The celebration of the holiday was at its most fervent in the years immediately before the war with Peru, but it was observed afterward as a call to recover and reassert Ecuador’s rights in the Amazon against Peru. The holiday’s celebration encompassed many of the longstanding popular notions about the Oriente, such as the view of the region as a great reserve of wealth. The people of the Oriente, indigenous and non-indigenous alike, were celebrated on the Día del Oriente as true patriots whose example should be followed. These celebrations helped cement the

127 Juan Francisco Leoro, “En el Día del Oriente Ecuatoriano,” Boletín del Colegio Nacional “Teodoro Gomez de la Torre” 2, no. 6 (December 1946): 7-9.

128 Juan I. Merlo, “El Día del Oriente Ecuatoriano,” Boletín del Colegio Nacional “Teodoro Gomez de la Torre” 2, no. 8 (June 1948): 28-31.

116 Oriente as a component of Ecuador’s national identity and patriotic spirit. In short, they provided a way in which Ecuadorian citizens could participate in the celebration and construction of the Amazonian Oriente as a national object of desire without actually traveling to the region itself.

The long-predicted loss of Oriente territory to Peru, when it finally came, provoked a great deal of soul-searching and lament among Ecuadorian writers in the press and other publications. Even before fighting broke out, a contributor calling himself “Patricio” published an article in Quito’s El Comercio titled “The Re-Conquest of our Rights in the Oriente.” The author began by suggesting that a great deal of the

Oriente lay in foreign hands because the nation had seen its patriotism satisfied with commemoration of Ecuador’s history in the Oriente and the treaties that gave it claim, rather than with “effective action.”129 He reviewed the history of Ecuador’s efforts to construct a railway to the Oriente through ill-advised contracts, as well as the multiple efforts to build highways into the region that failed due to insufficient funds. The one viable route, begun by the Leonard Exploration Company, from the central highland city of Ambato toward Puyo, advanced too slowly. “We have said it is better to know the naked truth, and we express it that way,” wrote Patricio; “No lyricism, nor euphemisms, on our part. The truth will save us and will push us to find the means to come out winning in our patriotic effort.”130 Those means consisted in the construction of practical routes of communication and the placement of colonists along these arteries. This project was neither “capricious” nor “chauvinistic” because the regions in question were not deserts, but in fact contained “lands of incalculable value” upon which the “progress

129 Patricio, “La reconquista de nuestros derechos en el Oriente,” El Comercio, March 15, 1941.

130 Patricio, “La reconquista de nuestros derechos en el Oriente,” El Comercio, March 16, 1941.

117 of the whole country” depended. Ecuador should do what is necessary to secure the resources for this, including looking abroad for loans. With the culmination of this project, Ecuador would raise statues to the memory of Pizarro and Orellana; not in

Quito, but on the banks of Ecuador’s own Amazon.131 There was a sense of urgency in

“Patricio’s” articles that recognize the tenuous nature of Ecuador’s hold on the Oriente.

The region’s population by Ecuadorians would, in his view, not just secure sovereignty, but would link the region more fully to Ecuador’s national history by putting up new monuments to the colonial-era heroes that the nation claimed as members of its own genealogy.

Fighting with Peru broke out first on Ecuador’s southern border in July, 1941.

There were reactionary shows of patriotism not just in the Republic’s central provinces, but also the Oriente. In Tena, a patriotic parade took place with the participation of all the citizens, schools, and institutions in the city. El Comercio’s correspondent reported that this parade demonstrated that “in the Oriente shines the sun of love and faith in national honor, and the Ecuadorian heart beats strongly.” The nearby settlement of

Archidona formed a National Defense Committee,132 and Puyo held a large patriotic demonstration, and saw their feelings stirred by two telegrams that circulated among the populace. The first, from a local resident to the Senator for Napo-Pastaza, Colonel

Sergio R. Játiva, stated that “Here all our wills are united, ready to do what we can for our beloved Homeland.” The second, from Játiva to Puyo’s local administrators and citizens, praised their “true indignation over the outrages committed by the invader” and

131 Patricio, “La reconquista de nuestros derechos en el Oriente,” El Comercio, March 17, 1941.

132 Corresponsal, “En Tena se realizó un desfile patriótico en el que se protestó por traidora agresión peruana,” El Comercio, July 14, 1941.

118 their readiness to punish them.133 Later in the month, another public event decrying

Peruvian aggression was held in Tena, and a collection of funds was made from among the citizens there and in the nearby settlement of Puerto Napo. The money collected amounted to more than 3,800 sucres, which was put under the control of the local resident José Peláez to be turned over to Senator Játiva. Writing in El Comercio, Peláez described the residents of Tena and Puerto Napo as the “vanguard of Ecuador in the jungle” and praised the “virile and Spartan” souls that motivated their pecuniary contributions.134

Despite the manifestations of patriotism by the Oriente’s citizens, they were powerless to prevent Peru’s successful attacks against Ecuadorian garrisons in different parts of the Oriente. A communication from Ecuador’s Chancellery plainly stated the reasons for Ecuador’s easy defeat. The majority of Ecuador’s garrisons consisted of between ten and twenty men, while Peru attacked with twenty times that many. Peru could rely on air power, a network of navigable rivers for their motorboats, and the nearby center of operations at Iquitos, while Ecuador’s troops were isolated and without any means of rapid transport.135 This report was published for all to see in El Comercio on August 17th, while the Peruvian assaults on Ecuadorians in the Oriente would continue for additional weeks.

133 DEP, “Una grandiosa manifestación patriótica se realizó en Puyo (Oriente),” El Comercio, July 18, 1941.

134 José Peláez, “Los colonos de Tena y Napo contribuyen para la Defensa Nacional,” El Comercio, August 4, 1941.

135 “Casi todas las guarniciones orientales han sido agregidas por los peruanos,” El Comercio, August 17, 1941.

119 The Dominican magazine El Oriente Dominicano began its 1942 series of issues with an article titled, “Lessons of Time,” in reaction to the New Year’s “tragic prologue” of the Rio de Janeiro Protocol. “For many years,” the Dominican editors wrote,

the systematic and progressive occupation of our eastern territory … constituted a fact not unknown by our public powers. If patriotism did not react, it was because neither military commanders, nor administrative functionaries, nor private citizens knew the boundaries of their historic inheritance. Only the missionaries made the voice of their complaint and protest heard before those who were in charge of guarding the national honor and patrimony.

Ecuador’s defeat, then, was through no fault of the missionaries, who made the only efforts to maintain control over the territory. The proper reaction to this defeat would consist in a fuller understanding of patriotic duty among all Ecuadorians:

it is incumbent now to react methodically with a view to the future. From public instruction to military education, from administrative organization to social action, it is urgent that it be understood that all are called to be patriotic and to sacrifice themselves for the Homeland.

Ecuador’s defeat was, in a sense, a “teachable moment,” as the authors state, “The history of these days is making us see how the idea of a defined nationality polishes over party or ideological roughness to realize the wonder of the union of all citizens.”136

This editorial accomplished two things: it lauded the work of the missionaries at the expense of the state and private citizens, implying their inadequacy, while also portraying defeat in the Oriente as a reason to make a renewed commitment to the nation and, specifically, the Oriente as a part of it.

El Oriente Dominicano continued to argue for more attention to be paid to the

Oriente by the state. A typical article in the magazine, titled “From the Pastaza to the

Palora,” begins with a travelogue description of the journey from Mera, at the eastern

136 “Lecciones del Tiempo,” El Oriente Dominicano 15, no. 105 (January 1942): 1.

120 foot of the Andes, throughout the territory of Dominican-founded settlements. The promising nature of the region and the wealth of its forests and rivers was invoked in standard fashion, inviting the arrival of “workers of the saw and the hammer.” The residents already there must be attended to: “Yes, there, in that savage obscurity, there are citizens and patriots who anxiously await the day of their redemption.” For example, the citizens of the small settlement of Arapicos, “a village of great ideals, of golden hopes, of profound Catholic sentiment, of deeply rooted patriotism, despite having a small number of people.” The public powers must

give aid to these forgotten citizens. May their existence in Ecuadorian territory not remain apart from the progress of the Homeland, because in their veins also flows the blood of the conscientious Ecuadorian, of the ferverous Catholic, of the child of a nation destined for greatness, of the lover that has accompanied his Homeland in the hours of agony, as in the days of happiness and hope.137

Not just the magazine’s Dominican editors expressed these views. El Oriente

Dominicano also re-published the views of a traveler from El Telégrafo, a daily newspaper from Guayaquil, titled “The millenarian jungles full of wealth are the fortune of the Homeland and it is necessary to redeem them with full patriotism and work.” The author, Carlos Cisneros Paredes, had been through several Oriente settlements. He found the Upano River area, in the southern-central Oriente, able to accommodate

“many cities with the maximum of comfort and pleasantries.” A road into the area would mean “the redemption of thousands of hectares of land, today uncultured, inhospitable, and fierce.” The area near the Dominican settlement of Arapicos, between the Palora and the Llushín Rivers, is compared to the Tigris and Euphrates area in its fecundity and promise. El Oriente Dominicano also re-printed an article from the Revista

137 “Desde el Pastaza hacia el Palora,” El Oriente Dominicano 17, no. 137 (August 1944): 65-66.

121 Universitaria, “For the Oriente and the Missions,” which lamented the Rio de Janeiro agreement but praised the missionaries while issuing a strong call to arms. “The

Ecuadorian Oriente, since the Rio de Janeiro treaty, as all know,” the Revista

Universitaria author argues,

has been converted into an unredeemed land of martyrs, where the painful shadows of our old missionaries seem to roam silently, as in desolate purgatory awaiting the time in which the aurora of a sun of justice for vilified America finally dawns.

The Rio Protocol was an offense to the “Continent of Columbus” because Ecuador was forced to sign under the pressure of force. The author’s description of the nation’s reaction to this international arbitration is worth quoting at some length for its colorful account of patriotic mourning:

When the Republic in 1941 … ended up submerged in profound stupor, when we were made to endure the supreme punishment for an independent and sovereign people and our sovereignty was threatened and dismembered, and our independence was just a shadow; when we felt where the governments of oligarchic and repugnant mercantilism had taken us, … and civic spirit descended to many degrees below zero, and civic valor was unarmed… it was then the densest shadows settled on Ecuador, it was the black night of the unfortunate, and nowhere could even the smallest light of hope be seen….138

Now, however, it was time to move on with the foundation of new missions: “We must recover the feeling of patriotism beginning with the reconstruction of the Homeland. …

Only then will our Nation be reborn to inscribe on its flag this grandiose motto: ‘Ecuador defends itself.’”139

138 “Por el Oriente y las Misiones,” El Oriente Dominicano 17, no. 138 (September 1944): 97-98.

139 Ibid., 133.

122 The years following the Peruvian invasion and the Rio de Janeiro Protocol were a time of reflection. The nation had been attacked and its shortcomings had been laid bare, and was in need of “redemption,” “reconquest,” and “rebirth.” Blame did not rest, however, with the region’s own inhabitants, but the state that had failed to protect it. The

Oriente already contained the elements for its regeneration, and only needed aid for true patriots. As it had been for many years, Ecuador’s Amazonian region was rhetorically constructed as a rallying point for patriotism and national unity; in the wake of the loss of territory, this construction was more acute. Even after the loss of territory to Peru, Ecuadorian presses continued to promote the Amazonian region. The 1942 travel account published by J. C. Granja, Nuestro Oriente de unas Notas de Viaje (Our

Oriente from some Notes on a Journey), was a call to action. Intended for the youth of the nation, the book sought to increase Ecuadorians’ familiarity with the Oriente in the wake of the traitorous assault and usurpation of Ecuadorian land. “I publish these notes,” Granja wrote, “to try to awaken a wide interest in the new Ecuadorian generations to get to know the Oriental corners of the Homeland, and to know the truth about them.” Granja’s aim was to de-mystify the notions about the Oriente he had grown up with, which included “immense and shadowed forests,” “interminable swamps where infernal snakes abound,” “Bloodthirsty savages who do not accept the presence of other men in their forests”; in sum visions of a “green hell” that were imparted to him as “autos de fé” from older generations. Granja also recognized another view of the

Oriente, which was also exaggerated: that of “rich and seasoned fruit that hangs from the trees, offering itself to the traveler,” “pacific and hospitable Indians that wear painted feathers,” and “forests of fairies.” “I believe the Oriente is neither the hell of the

123 timorous,” he writes, “nor the heaven of the salon propagandists. The Oriente is, simply and plainly, tropical forest…And that’s it!”140

The secular pro-Oriente magazine, Miscelánea, also lamented defeat and rallied patriotism. A 1944 editorial in the magazine, “For the Future of our Oriente,” argued that the current mourning over lost territory could have been avoided if the government had, over the years, given more attention to the Oriente. However, Ecuador made a good showing in the war, as it took many thousands of Peruvians to defeat just a few hundred

Ecuadorians. The duty of Ecuador now lay in multiplying the number of roads and schools, even in the most distant places, and planting colonists throughout the region. It would be necessary to promote industry, commerce, and agriculture, and look for more efficient ways to take advantage of the gold deposits in the Oriente’s rivers. Above all, a more careful selection of employees for the region was paramount. This project would be one for several years, and Miscelánea called on the new government of José María

Velasco Ibarra to improve the Oriente, “which constitutes for the Ecuadorian Homeland its greatest reservoir and future.”141 More than just the government would need to intervene, however; another article in Miscelánea argued that “private enthusiasm that aids administrative action” was a vital component. Private individuals would have to participate in the cultivation of the Oriente’s lands and the extension of commerce and industry. The magazine offered a view based on the belief that Ecuadorians had a

“supreme obligation” to “place at least a grain of sand toward the erection of the national monument there in the jungles and the green ocean: a landmark that indicates our

140 J. C. Granja, Nuestro Oriente de unas Notas de Viaje (Quito: Imp. de la Universidad, 1942), 9- 11.

141 “Por el Futuro del nuestro Oriente,” Miscelánea 14, no. 100 (July-December 1944): 7.

124 direction, our dominion, our property.” “Let us carry in our souls,” the author exhorted in closing, “the vision of the Oriente so we may never forget that a part of the Homeland extends there and is defended with the arm of the Ecuadorians and even with their life.”142

Miscelánea printed information about the region’s citizens in order to provide a model of patriotic endeavor that other citizens could follow, thereby fulfilling the responsibilities the private sector held in seeing the region improve. Miscelánea’s attention to the colonists of the Oriente was an important component of its nationalist propaganda. In 1944, the magazine chose a group of colonists for praise given their

abnegated work, full of sacrifices, in benefit of the Homeland. The men who live in the Oriente pass their days unnoticed, nobody remembers them, and there is nothing more unjust than this. They have gone their abandoning the comfort of their homes, they have gone away from their own lands to look for sustenance and, what’s more, the Homeland’s progress in the distant eastern regions.

The magazine chose three colonists for small biographies: Rafael Valdez, Victor M.

Villegas, and Segundo Montenegro. Valdez was a hardworking, honorable, active, and diligent citizen engaged in agriculture and commerce in Rocafuerte, on the lower Napo

River. During the Peruvian invasion of August, 1941, Valdez and 25 soldiers in the local garrison held off “thousands” of Peruvian soldiers for nine hours, and was eventually taken prisoner. Villegas, or “negrito Villegas” as the Afro-Ecuadorian from the Pacific

Coast region was known, was also a Rocafuerte resident who also suffered from the

Peruvian invasion. He was engaged in transportation work to the benefit of the local administration and military garrison, as well as construction work for the Ministry of

Education. Villegas was distinguished for his “activity, for his honorability, [and] for his

142 “La Visión del Oriente,” Miscelánea 14, no. 100 (July-December 1944): 8-9.

125 patriotism.” Finally, Segundo Montenegro, a native of Quito, had lived many years in

Macas, earning the admiration and respect of the macabeos. Montenegro had held various administrative positions as a model citizen, and currently served as Jefe Político of Morona Canton.143 These biographical sketches reveal the different kinds of activities in which colonists could be involved in the Oriente, and they gave names to the citizens who were most involved in Ecuador’s recent national crisis.

The magazine ran a similar group of biographical sketches in 1946, its penultimate year of publication. Don Fernando Roig, a Spanish immigrant who lived in the lower Napo River region, had gained the respect of his fellow Orientales thanks to his workmanlike spirit and honorability. Roig was principally involved in agriculture and commerce, and had served many times on the Junta Cantonal de Aguarico, or the

Aguarico Canton Council. Joaquín Rosales was one of the few who had visited all sections of the Oriente, holding different posts, from police officer, to Teniente Político, to public school teacher in Sarayacu and Montalvo. At the time of publication, he was involved in commerce. Rafael Picón, another permanent resident of the Oriente, had resided there since 1931. He was first the postmaster of Rocafuerte, on the lower Napo, but was then dedicated to agriculture and commerce. The “correction of his proceedings” had gained him the respect of the other inhabitants of the Napo.144 These biographies reveal the variety of opportunities available to colonists in the Oriente, not just in terms of economic activity, but also participation in public life. The colonists chosen by Miscelánea are all exceptional cases, as not all colonists in the Oriente

143 “Los Colonos del Oriente,” Miscelánea 14, no. 100 (July 1944): 29.

144 “Los Colonos del Oriente,” Miscelánea 16, no. 101 (January 1946): 49-50.

126 would achieve notoriety, let alone a comfortable existence. Nevertheless, Miscelánea showed the Ecuadorian population of the Amazon to be real and relatable.

Miscelánea, over its 17-year publication period (with a three-year gap between

1941 and 1944), contributed to the nation’s knowledge of its Amazonian region through articles discussing the region’s natural features, religious missions, principal settlements, and colonists. These articles were generally optimistic in their assessment of the region’s future; those that were more dour in outlook nevertheless recognized the region’s promise and called upon Ecuador’s citizens and government to do more to help the region. Along with El Oriente Dominicano, Miscelánea helped de-mystify the region, presenting it as fully national space, the integration of which with the rest of the nation was attainable and, in those more developed areas, such as Puyo, Macas, and Tena, already underway.

The Oriente required the efforts of the whole nation, but importantly, it offered much in return. El Oriente Dominicano repeated the decades-old notion of the Oriente as a solution to Ecuador’s problems in 1946, when the magazine’s editors reminded their readers that Ecuador’s cities were full of unemployed men who did not realize that,

behind their backs and not many kilometers away, here in the Oriente, there are extensive and varied uncultivated lands, pure air, and inexhaustible sources of wealth. We hear talk of unemployment, of the social question, of class struggle…as if Ecuador were an old country like those in Europe, where the national territory is becoming tight due to the increase in population.

This should not be in Ecuador, a country in which the people did not even know about a portion of their own territory (the Oriente), and were engaged in fratricidal arguments

“like perpetual children.” “May the exploited peasant, the unhappy worker, the poor employee, all come to search for the fortune that only the vigorous are given,” they

127 argued.145 The Oriente promised, then, not only to create material wealth, but also to smooth over social and political discontent. This view could be repeated even in those years after such an immense portion of Ecuador’s Amazon was transferred to Peruvian control through war and international arbitration.

Readers of the Ecuadorian press and periodicals did not go without good news in the first part of the 1940s. The highway under construction from the highland city of

Ambato toward Mera reached a milestone in October of 1943 when the bridge over the

Topo River, between Baños and Mera, was inaugurated, thus opening that section to vehicle traffic. El Comercio published an article on October 25th titled, “The Highway from Baños to Mera is the beginning of the redemption of the Oriente.” After reviewing the highway’s construction history, which began with the North American Leonard

Exploration Company in the 1920s, passed to Royal Dutch Shell, and was placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Defense and Oriente in 1938 after it had stalled at the village of Río Verde, the article describes the inauguration ceremony. In one moment, according to the article, a “jibarito” received a national flag from the hands of the

Minister of Defense, and the observers “meditated on the profound significance of this act.” The Dominican missionary Sadoc Valladares then gave words of thanks to the

Minister, and reminded the audience “of those other quiteños who journeyed with

Orellana” to the Amazon. Finally, “a mason from the Sierra” gave thanks to the Minister and all those present felt the importance of the event for the “future of the homeland.”146

This article therefore included all of the most important symbolic values of the Oriente:

145 “La Voz de Nuestro Oriente,” El Oriente Dominicano 19, no. 157 (April 1946): 57.

146 “La carretera de Baños a Mera es comienzo de la redención oriental,” El Oriente Dominicano 16, nos. 127-129 (October-December 1943): 279-280.

128 the indigenous population of the region that was coming closer to the national mainstream; the Oriente’s deep national history that goes back to the time of the

Conquistadors; and the promise of the region for the nation’s workers.

Four years later, another highway milestone was reached, brining about another round of celebration. The remaining kilometers to Puyo were finally constructed, and the inauguration of the highway’s arrival in Puyo took place on January 4th, 1947. According to the editors of Miscelánea, this event portended the transformation of the region in to

“flourishing and prosperous populations that will bring wealth and abundance to the entire nation.” The editorial predicted that the route would be used by colonists, tourists, and capitalists, for the betterment of agriculture, commerce, and industry. The editors also patted themselves on the back for Miscelánea’s years of effort promoting such infrastructural projects, and even stated that if the money invested in the ill-fated railroad project to the Curaray River had been put toward this highway instead, Ecuador might not have suffered defeat to the Peruvians in 1941.147 The highway was reported by Oriente Dominicano to already host very heavy traffic between the highland city of

Ambato and the Oriente town of Mera, as well as the nearby Royal Dutch Shell operations base. Between that point and Puyo, the highway reportedly traversed several sugarcane plantations that did not exist when construction commenced, thus demonstrating the highway’s immediate benefits. The highway also reportedly serviced the military colony on the Pastaza River, home to “those old soldiers” who had

formed their families and their properties, and very proudly carry on their labors in those lands that when they first knew them were virgin forests with fierce fauna and millenarian vegetation, and that with tenacity and

147 “La Primera Carretera en el Oriente,” Miscelánea 16, no. 103 (May 1947): 3-4.

129 sometimes with hopelessness, they defeated the forest and transformed it with the miracle of work.148

This view of the highway, then, was not of a route toward a potential future site of

Ecuadorian civilization, but a link to a national space that already existed and was progressing appreciably.

The inauguration featured speeches that were laced with symbolic and patriotic importance. The presence of numerous government officials, including President José

María Velasco Ibarra, as well as the Ministers of Public Works, Defense, and Social

Precaution, and local officials such as the Jefe Político of Pastaza Canton attested to the grandiosity of the event. Miscelánea reported that the landholders along the highway’s length had decorated their respective stretches of road, and that most of the population of Mera and Puyo had gathered to hear the speeches by the President and others. As El Oriente Dominicano put it, Velasco’s visit brought to them the

strong voice of nationality that is lit within them with all the vigor of those who know the high patriotic duty that they have to fulfill the colonization and conquest of the jungle. Those humble peoples had—perhaps for the first time—the opportunity to know how much they mean and how much they represent for the rest of the Ecuadorians; as such, they were proud, completely euphoric like the jungle that surrounds them and the rivers that run between them.149

Velasco had high praise for the people of the Oriente. In his speech in Puyo, he congratulated the citizens there for being removed and uninterested in political agitations and infighting, and rather putting themselves toward “the positive creation of what Ecuador needs, so that the Homeland may be greater and more dignified in the concert of nations of America and the world, that is, the material realization of what is

148 “Carretera Baños-Puyo-Canelos,” El Oriente Dominicano 20, nos. 166-67 (January-February 1947): 6-7.

149 “Inauguración de la Carretera a El Puyo,” El Oriente Dominicano 20, nos. 166-67 (January- February 1947): 4.

130 needed for man to feel more happy and to have more forces to continue with his work.”

Velasco went on to congratulate the colonists of Puyo for their conquest of nature and for having “made the Homeland with your heart alighted with the holy duty to carry out your mission in life, being more men and more Ecuadorian.”150 The new highway would ensure that this work continued.

The arrival of the highway meant that the Oriente was finally becoming the stage for Ecuadorian history that those authors and propagandists who constructed the region as a national object had long desired. Over several decades, the authors of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and newspaper columns had fashioned an Oriente that was not just a stage for Ecuadorian national history, but also a yardstick for patriotic prestige. By making the Amazonian region a national object of desire, these authors also articulated a role for the Oriente’s inhabitants that was especially praiseworthy and important; the

Ecuadorians who lived in the Amazon were “sentinels” that the whole nation looked to as exemplars of patriotism and dynamism. When the Oriente became a component of civic celebration, this status for the Oriente’s citizens was cemented. But white-mestizo colonists were not the only ones who lived in the region; the Oriente’s indigenous people were also a component of the vast amount of literature produced about the region in the first half or the twentieth century. It is to the region’s Indians that we now turn.

150 Ibid., 5.

131 CHAPTER 3 “JÍVAROS” AND “YUMBOS”: REPRESENTATIONS OF AMAZONIAN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN ECUADORIAN SOCIETY, 1900-1960

During the first decades of the twentieth century, Ecuador’s Amazonian Oriente region attracted increasing attention from political and economic elites who used the region as a “national symbolic referent” when arguing for greater national cohesion between Sierra and Oriente.1 Politicians, business leaders, and intellectuals agreed that incorporating the Oriente into the nation at large should be a priority. The imagined wealth that awaited the nation if the Oriente could only be tapped was described in colorful detail by Oriente propagandists. These descriptions were examined in Chapter

2, and they amounted to the construction of the Oriente as a national object of desire that was invested with patriotic prestige and hopes for the future. Propagandistic accounts of the region incorporated it into Ecuadorian national identity and offered many different agendas for its colonization and development.

The Oriente, however, was neither a blank slate nor an empty canvas that

Ecuadorians from the highlands and the coast could simply colonize, develop, and exploit at their will. Extremely difficult geography and inclement climates complicated matters immensely, as transportation was slow and communication sporadic. More importantly, the Oriente was already populated, mostly by diverse groups of indigenous peoples with different languages and cultures that most Ecuadorians little understood.

Most imaginings of the Oriente’s future did not account for the presence of Amazonian indigenous peoples. Their right to the land was not considered. When their presence was acknowledged, whether it was seen as an obstacle or as a potential benefit, in

1 Natalia Esvertit Cobes, "Caminos al Oriente: Estado e intereses regionales en los proyectos de vías de comunicación con la Amazonía ecuatoriana 1890-1930," Pilar García Jordán, ed., La Construcción de la Amazonía Andina (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1995), 330.

132 either case the Indians were judged in terms of their usefulness to the projects of

Ecuadorians from outside the region, and not as equal players in the push to incorporate the Oriente into the Ecuadorian nation. The nineteenth-century Oriente governor and propagandist Francisco Andrade Marín believed that Christian doctrines in the Amazon would prevent Indian rebellions in the region. He predicted that the spread of commerce in the region would gently incorporate Amazonian Indians into

Ecuador’s economic networks, turning them into consumers desirous of white manufactured products who would abandon their traditional ways.2 These predictions seem naïve in retrospect, since, as Juliet S. Erazo and Blanca Muratorio have observed, white entrepreneurs often used the sale of manufactured goods to drive

Amazonian Indians into debt and extract their labor as indebted peons.3 Eudófilo

Alvarez, the early twentieth-century governor and Oriente promoter, suggested that

Amazonian Indians could entertain colonists with their voluptuous dancers and indigenous songs.4 Some of their agricultural techniques could be put to good use by colonists, aiding in their incorporation of the region.5 Julio Veintemilla’s 1923 book about the Oriente written for Ecuadorian youths discusses the different indigenous peoples in the Amazon in terms of their acceptance of or resistance to white culture, and predicts that the European race would come to dominate the region. Immigration to the area

2 Francisco Andrade Marín, La Región Oriental del Ecuador, 26-29.

3 Juliet S. Erazo, "Same State, Different Histories, Diverse Strategies," A. Kim Clark and Marc Becker, eds., Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 186; Blanca Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso: Culture and History in the Upper Amazon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 146-47.

4 Eudófilo Alvarez, Conferencia sustentada en el colegio “Vicente Rocafuerte” sobre el Oriente Ecuatoriano el 12 de Octubre de 1914 (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación Nacionales, 1915), 24.

5 Ibid., 9-10.

133 would help save the souls of what few Indians remained, and these people would certainly become a productive force in construction and agriculture.6 Such views acknowledge the indigenous peoples’ presence in the Amazon while downplaying the extent to which they would affect the colonization and development process in the

Oriente.

Despite the somewhat dismissively optimistic views of statesmen and authors like Andrade, Alvarez, and Veintemilla, the Oriente’s Indians were a very popular topic for Ecuadorian authors in the sciences, travel writers, missionaries, administrators, and propagandists. The works authored about Amazonian Indians by Ecuadorians living in the highlands and on the coast, as well as those writing from the Amazon itself, constitute the corpus of knowledge about the Oriente’s most sizeable population group that was available to Ecuadorian educators, politicians, and eventual colonists of the

Oriente region. It is critical to understand how the rest of the nation understood

Amazonian indigenous peoples, for this shaped their assumptions as they approached the region as administrators, missionaries, military officials, and colonists. The development of the Oriente was widely held as an important yardstick for national progress; the status of Ecuador as an Amazonian nation was a point of national pride.

Ecuadorian national identity would be shaped by the incorporation of the Oriente, as would the inclusion of diverse Amazonian indigenous peoples into the community of national subjects and citizens. Outsiders’ views of Oriente Indians were not monolithic in any sense; they drew distinctions between different indigenous groups, and disagreed about the characteristics of each. Though a wide variety of different kinds of authors articulated certain tenaciously-held stereotypes about the Oriente’s indigenous groups

6 Veintemilla M., Geografía del Ecuador, 35-39.

134 for nearly a century, development in the Oriente over the decades of the twentieth century led to new, less-stereotyped understandings of the Oriente’s Indians and the role they could play in the region’s incorporation into the nation at large. The development of a corpus of knowledge about the Amazonian indigenous peoples among Ecuadorian outsiders and newcomers to the region therefore illustrates the dynamics between the ways that “on the ground” knowledge of a region and its peoples affect the knowledge that is transmitted to the wider society. That knowledge may also affect the way the state functions in the region, as well as the role that region and its inhabitants play in nationalism and national identity.

This chapter will examine popular, scientific, political, and religious writing about the Oriente’s indigenous peoples from the turn of the twentieth century until about 1960; later that decade, the oil boom began in Ecuador’s Amazon, bringing unprecedented levels of colonization and commercial development. It is my contention that the understudied but critical period leading up to the oil boom contributed significantly to the knowledge and assumptions about the indigenous peoples that were brought into contact with the Ecuadorian state and colonists from outside the region more than ever before during the oil boom. This chapter will also contribute to the wider topic of

Ecuador’s relationship with its indigenous population during the liberal period after 1895, which has been studied far more for the highland indigenous communities than for the

Amazonian communities. Today, CONAIE, the Confederation of Indigenous

Nationalities of Ecuador, affirms that there are six distinct cultures in the Amazonian

Oriente: the Quichua, the A’I or Cofán, the Siona-Secoya, the Huaorani, the Shuar, and

135 the Achuar.7 However, the vast majority of Ecuadorian authors from the period under study wrote about two groups above all: the “Yumbos,” or Quichuas, and the “Jívaros,” the latter term being applied to both the Shuar and Achuar peoples. The Yumbos primarily lived in the northern and central sections of the Oriente, while the Jívaros

(often spelled “Jíbaros”) lived in the central and southern sections. These appellations are archaic and do not reflect these groups’ preferred nomenclature; however, these terms predominated among Ecuadorian writers for many decades. The views detailed about these groups in the literary production of Ecuadorians writing in a variety of fields reveals both how popular opinion about these groups was shaped and how, over time, increasing development and colonization in the Oriente modified outsiders’ and newcomers’ understandings of these groups and their potential role in the nation.

An important theme in Ecuadorians’ representations of Amazonian indigenous peoples is the use of these groups as a discursive tool for discussing the effectiveness of the Ecuadorian state; the condition of these groups, and the degree of their integration into white-mestizo society in the Oriente, is a measure of government policy in the region. In these descriptions, we can also find justifications for policies of state control of the indigenous population, of which various were attempted throughout the period under study. As historian Natalia Esvertit Cobes has noted, Ecuadorian understandings of the Amazon’s indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century were principally centered on an axis between “savagery” and “civilization.” The Jívaros, she argues, were understood as “savages” that resisted civilization violently.8 This chapter

7 CONAIE, “Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador,” The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), December 12, 2012, http://conaie.nativeweb.org/map.html.

8 Natalia Esvertit Cobes, La Incipiente Provincia, 263.

136 contends that Ecuadorian understanding of the Jívaros was more complex in the twentieth century, as they were often imagined as valuable members of the national community. Esvertit’s work shows that Quichua Indians were seen as able to be assimilated in the nineteenth century.9 This view remained in the twentieth century, but with more detailed discussion of the Yumbos’ cultural characteristics and an appreciation for their positive attributes, as well as some distinction drawn between distinct groups of Quichua-speaking Indians. This chapter also contributes to scholarship on Ecuadorian views of that nation’s indigenous population, as advanced by

Mercedes Prieto. In her study of liberal discourse about Ecuador’s highland indigenous population in the first half of the twentieth century, she argues that political, scientific, and popular authors developed a view of Indians as deserving of certain rights, but also prone to behaviors that made their “governability” difficult, resulting in what she terms a

“liberalism of fear” among the upper classes as regarded the Indians of Ecuador’s rural

Sierra.10 Prieto’s work does not discuss the Indians of the Oriente. This chapter finds a similar preoccupation among Ecuadorian authors with the Indians’ governability in the

Oriente; despite a minority of authors who believed the Yumbos and Jívaros to be beyond help, the predominant view was that both groups could be productive members of the nation and contributors to the development of the Oriente with more public and private attention to their condition.

As has been argued already, the Oriente was incorporated into the Ecuadorian state and identity as a national object of desire that was constructed largely outside the

9 Ibid.

10 Mercedes Prieto, Liberalismo y temor: imaginando los sujetos indígenas en el Ecuador postcolonial, 1895-1950 (Quito: Abya-Yala, 2004), 30-31.

137 region itself, in the press, books, periodicals, and in civic celebration. This process was also critical for the way that the region’s indigenous peoples were understood by the wider Ecuadorian community. The categories of Jívaro and Yumbo are not easily separable from the fact that the region in which they lived was one in which national imaginings and hopes for the future were invested. The Oriente was a national object that was tied to patriotic prestige. The Indians of the region, especially the categories of

Jívaro and Yumbo, were also national objects that were fashioned in the paper space of print capitalism. As Guillaume Boccara has noted, “frontiers” are constructed places; to see a given territory as a “frontier” requires a perspective that it is somehow not central.

As this dissertation has argued, the Oriente frontier was constructed in the press and popular publications, as well as civic celebration. Races and ethnic groups exist within national contexts; Ecuadorian concern for the Oriente’s development and incorporation, with all the notions that entailed, was a major component of the context in which the wider national community learned about the Indians that lived there. A major preoccupation in the descriptions of these groups is their role in the national project that the Oriente represented; naturally, their degree of usefulness in that project colored how they were perceived. The Oriente bears out Boccara’s observation that frontiers are zones in which “both the ‘other’s’ otherness and the colonizer’s own identity are constructed.”11 What this dissertation makes clear as that this construction also occurs in the corpus of publications about the region and peoples in question that is consumed by wider society. Just as Ecuadorian colonists were constructed as “Sentinels of the

Homeland” and other patriotic types, the region’s Yumbos and Jívaros were constructed

11 Guillame Boccara, “Rethinking the Margins/Thinking from the Margins: Culture, Power, and Place on the Frontiers of the New World,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 10, no. 1 (January 2003): 60.

138 as participants with particular characteristics in the story of the Oriente’s incorporation.

This chapter shows that the Indians of the Amazon were used as images and tools in national-level debates just as highland Indians had been in the previous century. As

Andrés Guerrero has noted, during the nineteenth century, Ecuador’s Indians were featured in some descriptions that did “not aspire to present the real life of the Indians.”

Rather, they featured “a group of stereotypes as a function of an implicit aim,” which in the nineteenth century could be the promotion of liberal policies regarding Indians as opposed to conservative ones. In such debates, Indians were most useful as a

“symbolic artefact” with “stylised features.”12 This chapter shows that in the twentieth century, also, Ecuador’s Indians, in this case those residing in the Oriente, were used as symbols to promote ideas and policies regarding the Amazonian frontier.

Jívaros

Although state formation, development, and colonization in the Oriente did not begin in earnest until the twentieth century, the region was nevertheless an important preoccupation of statesmen and regional elites during the nineteenth century.13 The diffusion of knowledge about the region’s indigenous inhabitants, therefore, was underway during the early republican period. The first governor of the Oriente province,

Manuel Villavicencio, wrote a chapter about the Oriente in one of the first major works of

Ecuadorian geography, based on his journeys in the Amazon during the 1840s and

1850s. Villavicencio is among the first prominent Ecuadorian men of letters to articulate a particular view of the Jívaros that would be repeated for more than a century.

12 Andrés Guerrero, “The Construction of a Ventriloquist’s Image: Liberal Discourse and the ‘Miserable Indian Race’ in Late 19th-Century Ecuador,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29, no. 3 (October 1997): 579.

13 For a comprehensive discussion of the importance of the Oriente during the nineteenth century, see Esvertit, La Incipiente Provincia.

139 Villavicencio affirmed that the Jívaros lived in a continual state of war, making them among the most bellicose and suspicious people in the world. “It can be said,” wrote

Villavicencio, “that the savage [Jívaro] lives only by arms, does not blink without fearing that an enemy will surprise him, does not take one step without fearing a trap.” These savages, he argued, recognized no authority except their own patriarchal leaders.14 In a contrast that would also be repeated by writers on Amazonian Indians that followed

Villavicencio, the “Indios” of the northern Oriente, meaning the Yumbos, did recognize the white governor and Tenientes Políticos in the region, as well as obey the designated

“gobernadores de indios,” or Indian governors, appointed by the state officials.15 By using the generic term Indio to refer to the Quichua people, Villavicencio implied a certain similarity between these Indians and the Indios that the Ecuadorian population of the highlands would have been familiar with. He also highlighted their governability as opposed to the warlike Jívaros. Villavicencio’s view of the Jívaro conforms with a general nineteenth-century “Occidental” view of the Jívaro as a particularly warlike and independent group among the wider category of Amazonian Indians which, according to historian Anne-Christine Taylor, were considered a generic category without particular ethnicities.16 Blanca Muratorio has described the ways in which the white-mestizos of

Ecuadorian society at the end of the nineteenth century dominated the terms on which

14 Manuel Villavicencio, La Provincia de Oriente (Quito: Empresa Editora de la Compañía Anónima “El Comercio,” 1964), 25-26.

15 Ibid, 32.

16 Anne-Christine Taylor, “Una categoria irreductible en el conjunto de las naciones indígenas: Los Jívaro en las representaciones occidentales,” Blanca Muratorio, ed., Imágenes e Imagineros: Representaciones de los indígenas ecuatorianos, Siglos XIX y XX (Quito: FLACSO, 1994), 75.

140 the Indian was represented and by which the national community was defined.17 The white-mestizo architects of the vision of Ecuador’s indigenous populations preferred to project an image of “ideal” and “domesticated” Indians, such as the Otavalo people of the northern highlands, to the international community at World’s Fairs; the Jívaros were seen as unsuitable for representation on an international stage.18 As this chapter will show, however, such a view of the Jívaro was not the only one held by Ecuadorian authors, especially not as development and colonization progressed in the Oriente through the twentieth century.

Pío Jaramillo Alvarado was a prominent pro-Oriente propagandist and academic who promoted administrative reforms in the region throughout his career, during which he also held the position of Director del Oriente during the 1920s. He has also been called the “founding father of Ecuadorian Indigenismo.” His 1922 book, El indio ecuatoriano on the Indians of Ecuador, was very influential in Ecuadorian politics, art, and society, and for the “imagining of the nation,” according to historian Sergio Miguel

Huarcaya.19 It included a chapter on the Amazonian region, in which he described the

Jívaro as the “true lord of the jungle” who adapted only those aspects of civilization that benefited him personally. The Jívaro may have accepted the friendship of whites, but never considered himself their inferior. They were talented and vigorous, but fiercely

17 Blanca Muratorio, “Nación, identidad y etnicidad: Imágenes de los Indios ecuatorianos y sus imagineros a fines del siglo XIX,” Muratorio, ed., Imágenes e Imagineros, 177.

18 Ibid., 125.

19 Sergio Miguel Huarcaya, “Imagining Ecuadorians: Historicizing National Identity in Twentieth- Century Otavalo, Ecuador,” Latin American Research Review 49, no. 3 (2014): 70.

141 independent.20 In Jaramillo’s estimation, the missionaries in the Oriente could not be asked to form pueblos among the Jívaros because of their “fierce element”; rather, they would have to limit themselves to reducing warfare among the Jívaros and promoting civility in their relations with the whites.21

Foreigners who traveled in the Oriente were also struck by the Jívaros’ characteristics. Joseph H. Sinclair and Theron Wasson, representatives of the North

American Leonard Exploration Company, traveled in the Oriente to search for oil and examine potential routes for future roads. Their accounts were published as a separate volume in 1924 by El Comercio, one of Quito’s leading newspapers. According to

Sinclair and Wasson, the Jívaros were strong, clean, and intelligent. As many others would, Sinclair and Wasson described the polygamy that existed among them, and their practice of reducing the heads of slain enemies and keeping them as trophies. They found them unwilling to do manual labor, and unfaithful to white property owners in the area.22 Their account is one of a somewhat impressive, but fearsome and intractable race. The same year, El Comercio also published Rafael Karsten’s book about the

Jívaros titled Bloody Revenge. As many authors did, Karsten discussed the Jívaros’ destruction of the Amazonian Spanish cities of Sevilla del Oro, Logroño and Mendoza in

1599 as revenge for the oppression and tyranny of the Conquistadors. The Jívaros were portrayed as the most noteworthy warriors of all South American Indians, engaging in

20 Pío Jaramillo Alvarado, El Indio Ecuatoriano: Contribución al Estudio de la Sociología Nacional (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación de la “Editorial-Quito,” 1922), 45-46. Facsimile republished 1979 (Guayaquil: Departamento de Publicaciones de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas).

21 Ibid., 47.

22 Joseph H. Sinclair and Theron Wasson, Exploraciones en el Ecuador Oriental (Quito: Folletin de “El Comercio,” 1924), 31-32.

142 endless warfare motivated by “superstitions, beliefs, witchcraft, and spells” or to “satisfy inherited revenge or to comply with an oath of extermination between two or more tribes.”23 Karsten asserted that they were “impulsive and choleric by nature” and sought revenge at the first opportunity rather than accept any offense with humility.24 A detail that would be particularly worrisome to future administrators, soldiers, and colonists in the Oriente would be the fact that Jívaros did not “individualize” their desire for revenge; they commonly killed not only the individual responsible for some offense, but also their relatives.25

Books were not the only medium in which views of the Jívaros were presented to

Ecuadorians outside of the Amazonian region. In 1926, a film crew under the direction of Salesian missionaries in Méndez, in the southern Oriente, produced The Invincible

Shuars of the Upper Amazon- Grandiose Film of the Ecuadorian Oriente. A pamphlet accompanying the film’s release spoke to the difficulties the crew encountered in trying to film the “arrogant, proud, indomitable,” and “suspicious” Jívaros that fled from the camera that they considered an implement of witchcraft. The film’s goal was to “awaken in all Ecuadorians a lively, burning love, crystallized in beneficial works, for their beautiful, enchanting Oriente.” The film of 500 scenes shows the Jívaros in their domestic duties of basket making and hunting. Later, it shows the “Fiesta de la

Tzantaza” in which the reduced head (tzantza or tsantsa) of an enemy brujo, or witch doctor, is prepared and celebrated. This part of the film also portrays Jívaros in their

23 Rafael Karsten, Venganzas Sangrientas, guerras y fiestas de la victoria entre los indios jíbaros del Oriente Ecuatoriano (Quito: Folletín de El Comercio, 1924), 1-2.

24 Ibid., 13.

25 Ibid., 19.

143 preparations for killing, with nighttime conversations, nocturnal spying, assaults by moonlight, combat, and the burning of houses. The final part of the film illustrates the work of the Salesian missionaries among the Jívaros, their evangelization, as well as agricultural schools and roadwork. The pamphlet states that this final part of the film convinces the spectators “to appreciate the prodigious force of nature, and, above all, to profoundly esteem the Jívaro race and the heroism of the missionaries that fatigue themselves to bring it toward world civilization.”26 The viewer of the film is taught on the one hand to recognize the admirable qualities of the Jívaros, while on the other hand to appreciate the work done by the missionaries to mitigate their bad qualities. The progress of Ecuador in the Amazon, therefore, is largely due to the missionaries’ efforts at infrastructural improvement and the re-shaping of the Jívaros into a useful member of the national community. An article in El Comercio praised the film and affirmed that anything done for the civilization of the Jívaro deserved the blessings of humanity.27

According to El Comercio, various government ministers and foreign visitors attended the film, which was hosted by the Salesian priest Carlos Crespi. Crespi also announced that a second showing, at “popular prices,” would be held, and the funds gathered would go toward a planned hospital for Jívaros. In the same year as the film, Crespi contributed to a volume of geography and history about Azuay, the highland province adjacent to sections of the southern Oriente inhabited by Jívaros, and offered a very optimistic view of that race. He wrote that the Jívaro was “progressive,” representing

26 Los Invencibles Shuaras del Alto Amazonas- Grandiosa film del Oriente Ecuatoriano. Pamphlet held in Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pólit, bundled with other items, call number 262.13 / S163 / 10. No pagination, no date.

27 “Película cinematográfica de la Región Oriental,” El Comercio, January 14, 1927.

144 “absolutely no obstacle to the advance of civilization.” The Jívaro, he argued, desired to become more like whites and to possess the same tools, and would be a genuine cooperator in the “regeneration and conquest of the Oriente.”28

Much of what Ecuadorians living outside the Oriente could learn about the

Jívaros came from missionary literature. Friar Fernando Jaramillo, writing about the

Franciscan mission in Zamora, in the Catholic Ecuadorian Almanac, which was published by El Comercio in 1928, described Jívaros as a category separate from that of “indios,” or the more familiar Quichua-speaking Indians (Yumbos) of the highlands or the northern Oriente. Jaramillo, like many authors, discussed the destruction of Spanish cities in the Oriente in 1599, and praised the Jívaros for the refusal to be slaves rather than condemn them for their ferocity. They lived primitively, but independently, with the

“undeniable fame of being invincible, indomitable, brave, and warlike.”29 Jaramillo described the Jívaros as ceremonious, alert, delicate, affectionate, and generous with guests and friends, but fierce, bloodthirsty, and revenge-seeking with enemies. When dealing with “civilized people” they were fallacious and always sought to serve their own interests, believing they had the right to anything they like. They avoided fulfilling their agreements whenever it benefited them.30 They had other noteworthy qualities, such as

28 Carlos Crespi, “El Oriente Azuayo,” Luis F. Mora et al, eds., Monografía del Azuay (Cuenca: Tipografía de Burbano Hnos, 1926), n. pag. The view of Jívaros as “progressive” is echoed by Alfonso Rumazo González in his 1934 Album-Guide to the Ecuadorian Oriente Region. He paraphrases Crespi’s judgment of them as having aspirations to better their position and attain white manufactured goods. He also quotes from Crespi’s work, including his assertion that “if a strong colonization begins the pacific conquest of the Oriente, the Jívaros, in only a few years, will be absorbed by the new energies, and without radically changing their customs, will be converted into a new truly productive force for the nation.” Alfonso Rumazo González, Album-Guía de la región oriental ecuatoriana (Quito: Editorial Artes Gráficas, 1934), 15-17.

29 Fr. Fernando Jaramillo, “La Misión Franciscana en Zamora,” Almanaque Católico Ecuatoriano 1928 (Quito: Talleres Gráficos El Comercio, 1928), 107-108.

30 Ibid., 112.

145 excellent memories for recounting events.31 Their language was also admirable, and

“without exaggerating it can be affirmed that the Jívaros are the best orators in the world.”32 Another missionary, Jacinto D. Marín, in his 1938 travel account of the

Amazon, related several anecdotes about the Jívaros that focused on their warlike tendencies. But the Jívaros’ tendency to talk over issues at length also proved important for tempering their violent instincts; in one story, a Jívaro curaca, or chief, convinced his fellow tribesmen to put down their lances because an enemy group was most likely hoping to scare them into an imprudent attack.33 The Jívaros, in this account, were instinctually violent, but also subject to reason.

One of the most important periodicals about the Oriente was missionary in nature: El Oriente Dominicano was published beginning in 1927 by the Dominican order, which had missionaries in the central Oriente. In just the second issue of the magazine, Domingo Romero Terán published an article that described the various races of the Dominicans’ missionary zone, including the “jíbaros” who were described as “tall, muscular, agile, lively, warlike, and indomitable.”34 The same issue of the magazine, however, offered a different view: the missionary Luis M. Caillet, in a description of his journey from the missionary settlement of Arapicos to the larger settlement of Macas, described encountering a Jívaro named Tzrembo who expressed a desire to found a new missionary pueblo and that his children be taught Spanish. Another Jívaro named

31 Ibid., 124.

32 Ibid., 130.

33 P. Jacinto D. Marín O. P., Al través de la selva oriental ecuatoriana (Quito: Editorial <>, 1938), 75-76.

34 Domingo Romero Terán, “Apuntes para la Historia,” El Oriente Dominicano 1, no. 2 (December 1927): 45.

146 Antonio dissuaded the priest of his skepticism toward this willingness to assimilate by saying, “our fathers, it is true, did not want this, but they have died and now we want and desire that our children be placed in the culture of the whites and that they be good

Christians.” Caillet even reported that the Jívaros expressed a desire that white colonists settle nearby so they could learn the white language and customs.35

Readers of El Oriente Dominicano would have had ample opportunity to understand that not all groups of Jívaros in the Oriente agreed on the value of having whites nearby, however. In 1929, Padre Jose M. Vargas, another Dominican missionary, published an article on the various road projects planned for the Oriente.

Vargas stated that a fellow missionary related the common belief among the Jívaros that the jungles of the Oriente should remain their own territory. These missionary priests gleaned from the Jívaros the notion that since they do not travel to the cities of the highland to beg, then whites should not come to seek their lands in the jungle. As

Vargas remarked, “This philosophy of the Indians is not easily refutable!” According to

Vargas, the Jívaros believed themselves to remain what their fathers before them were: the effective lords of the jungle, by right of nature and continuous occupation. They viewed the whites as jealous outsiders who sought to take what was theirs.36

Quito’s daily press also informed society about the Jívaros of the Oriente. El

Comercio in 1910 published a brief account of Jívaro history, including their rebellions against the Spaniards during the 16th and 17th centuries, and subsequent recurring attacks against the settlement of Macas. These attacks, however, did not signify that the

35 Luis M. Caillet, “De Arapicos a Macas,” El Oriente Dominicano 1, no. 2 (December 1927): 66- 67.

36 José M. Vargas, “Caminos y Misioneros,” El Oriente Dominicano 2, no. 10 (September-October 1929): 72.

147 Jívaros were “very terrible, nor that we have to fear them: they are rather large children, ignorant of the first degree of civilization.” They lived without any notion of duty or government, and were so reduced in numbers that they no longer signified a threat to whites as they did during the colonial period. In fact, they preferred to live close to whites so they could acquire the objects they need.37 But as with many others, the supposed ferocity of the Jívaros and their warfare proved irresistible topics to El

Comercio’s contributors, especially when it had international implications. El Comercio on March 9, 1913 reported an attack by Jívaros in the Tenencia Política of Macas against an intruding encampment of Peruvian soldiers. The Jívaros, according to the newspaper, were not acting without reason, but instead were responding to legitimate grievances against the Peruvians such as their kidnapping of Jívaro women and their demands on Jívaro labor. “The jíbaros,” the article states, “contrary to our Government, that passively views the Peruvian usurpation, have made justice for themselves, in a cruel manner, it is true; but they have not consented to the violation of their rights and prerogatives.” Subsequent articles reiterated the international significance of this event and the fact that the Jívaro attacks were justified.38

Those reports suggested that the Jívaros were defenders of their own families and therefore defenders against foreign invaders, if perhaps not conscientious citizens of the patria. But other articles printed in El Comercio reiterated the notion of Jívaros as senselessly warlike and dangerous to civilization. A correspondent from El Comercio in

Macas, in 1917 contributed a long and detailed description of Jívaro warfare that

37 Julien Fabre, “Nuestra Región Oriental,” El Comercio, November 24, 1910.

38 “El asalto de los Jíbaros,” El Comercio, March 9, 1913; “El ataque de los Jíbaros,” El Comercio, March 11, 1913; “Los sucesos del Morona,” El Comercio, March 12, 1913; “Los sucesos del Morona,” El Comercio, March 13, 1913.

148 invoked the “proverbial cruelty among these monsters of the jungle.” The article disabused readers of the notion that the fighting between Jívaro tribes is “warfare” in the conventional sense; rather, it consisted simply of murders, “terrible occasions meditated and perpetrated with all the cunning, all the perfidy that can awaken the bloody instincts of a feline;” “The pen resists describing the scenes of horror and refined cruelty that characterize the wars of these uncultured beings who lack sentiments of commiseration and humanity toward their peers.” Women, the young, and the old were murdered with the same furor. The article ended with a call to action to better the ethnic conditions of this “degenerate race,” calling on the government to use what means necessary to put an end to these killings.”39 In 1919, an article printed in El Comercio featured one suggestion for how to do this. The newspaper published a letter from a group of

Dominican priests from the central Oriente to some Salesian missionaries in the southern Oriente. The letter included a description of the characteristics of the Jívaros in the area around Arapicos, a missionary settlement, and the need to plant some white families among them “so that they may serve as an inexpungible defensive wall… and a norm of civilized conduct for the Indian, as more than doctrine we need example.”40 In this view, the Jívaros were a group whose undesirable characteristics defined them; their future was imagined in terms of the coming wave of white colonists that would undertake the important national project of incorporating the Oriente and, at the same time, transforming the region’s Indians into potential citizens.

These negative and fearsome qualities of the Jívaros could be given a positive spin by El Comercio’s contributors when cross-border relations with Peru were

39 Corresponsal, “De Macas,” El Comercio, November 28, 1917.

40 Padre León et al, “Por el Oriente- Las misiones de Canelos,” El Comercio, August 1, 1919.

149 concerned, however. An article from March 17, 1925 lamented Peru’s continuing expansion into the Ecuadorian Oriente while Ecuadorian politicians bickered. Though the Jívaros could do nothing to aid the overall diplomatic situation, given their “absolute lack of the idea of patria,” they could serve admirably to submit reports on Peruvian movements. As the author noted, perhaps referring to the 1913 attacks discussed above,

A few years ago, for reasons apart from the concept of nationality, motivated just by jealousy, [the Jívaros] exterminated a Peruvian garrison in one night… Has it ever been considered to use the Indian as something more than a beast of burden and a chair?41

In this view, the Jívaros may not be prepared to be conscientious citizens, but their warlike nature could make them a useful blunt instrument in realpolitik with the invading

Peruvians.

The view of Jívaros as unrefined but praiseworthy due to their strength and propensity for action was a common one. Seen this way, the Jívaros were a foil for the feckless Ecuadorian government. A comic article written by “Jack THE RIPPER” in

March of 1928 clearly illustrates this. The author began by describing the Jívaros as

“great lords of the jungle, strong and warlike, free and fierce like primitive men.” The

Jívaro life was enviable, according to the author, thanks to its carefree nature, distant from taxes, laws, and modern headaches. The article centers on a Jívaro chief, named

Tumbalá, who was visited by a white government official, the Minister of Social

Precaution. Tumbalá asks one of his subordinates how many men this white man has killed, misunderstanding the cultural differences between Jívaro society and the

Ecuadorian state. Despite this, Tumbalá orders that a great feast be prepared for the

41 “Los Peruanos en nuestro Oriente,” El Comercio March 17, 1925.

150 minister’s arrival, with plenty of manioc chicha. He even orders that more tzantzas, or shrunken heads, be prepared, in order to impress the minister. Tumbalá is shocked to learn that the minister does not come bearing arms, nor does he gather the heads of his enemies. He asks his subordinate, Garabito, if the minister’s people have enemies.

“They do,” replies Garabito.

“And do they wipe them out?” asks Tumbalá.

“Never,” replies Garabito.

“Then what kind of people are they, Garabito?”

“They are what is called civilized people.”

Garabito goes on to explain that the whites do not live well, for all requires money and nobody has it. They have poor laws that ruin humanity. “What do they say of us the

Jívaros,” asks Tumbalá, “who are free, who possess immense forests full of flavorful game, who always defeat our enemies, who always keep fire on our pots and the pitcher full of delicious chicha?”

“They say we are barbarous and they have the great task of coming to civilize us.”

“In that case, my son,” says Tumbalá, “go on the road and tell the minister wherever you find him that it’s better that he does not come, because the barbarous ones are not in the Oriente, but in the Occidente.”42 In this fictionalized account of a

Jívaro chief, El Comercio’s readers were offered a view of the Jívaros not based on firsthand knowledge, but a deliberately stereotypical view meant to highlight the deficiencies of the Ecuadorian government through ironic contrast to the “barbarous”

42 Jack THE RIPPER, “Cuento del día,” El Comercio, March 27, 1928.

151 Jívaros. While the Jívaros’ customs may be “primitive” and warlike, they are admirably effective when compared to the feckless state.

El Comercio did give its readers a chance to meet a real Amazonian chief in

1932: Pastor Severo Vargas, who was the leader of several tribes in the central Oriente and came to Quito as part of a commission representing those interested in road construction projects to the region. Vargas met with the Minister of the Oriente about the needs of the “indios” in the Oriente and agreed to see that the assigned funds for road construction were handed over. After this meeting, Vargas spoke with an El

Comercio reporter. The reporter described him as “a beautiful example of the indigenous race that lives in the mountains and valleys of the exuberant Oriente region.”

His gaze was that of the “astute hunter of the jungles,” but he was dressed in a western suit jacket. Though Vargas was fifty years old, the author affirmed he looked no older than forty. Vargas spoke of his desire for more schools in the Oriente, for he recognized the cost his children paid by remaining ignorant and illiterate. He also desired more roads, to give work to his people, so that they were not tempted to leave Ecuadorian territory to seek work from Peruvians. Vargas also desired that a ban on barbasco, a toxic plant extract used for fishing in rivers, be lifted so his people can more easily provide for their own sustenance. Vargas stated that he did not fear the whites, and recognized that good relations between the two races was necessary. The contrast with the fictional Tumbalá, from the article only four years earlier, could not be starker.

Nevertheless, a certain inclination to present the Jívaros as a warlike people is evident, especially as Vargas departed the interview to change into his “warring insignias” before making an exhibition to the police authorities of some “spectacles of his rude, savage,

152 and reckless life.”43 Though Vargas had come to Quito for reasons related to the prosaic needs of his community, and had in fact praised the coming of more whites to the region, he also participated in the exhibition of his community as exotic and warlike. The interview as published does not really allow us to know Vargas’s own opinion on the benefits or drawbacks of presenting his people this way.

The story of Pástor Severo Vargas did not end there, however. In May of that same year, the Puyo correspondent for El Comercio wrote an article about the dangerous atmosphere created in the area by Vargas and his associates. According to the correspondent, Vargas and his followers were placing obstacles to white colonization of the area and boycotting the whites’ products, accusing them of usurping their lands. Reportedly, police authorities in Ambato (the highland city closest to Puyo) were undertaking to arrest Vargas for these disturbances and his attempted murder of the Dominican missionary Ceslao de Jesús Marín. “Given the strong passions of the

Jívaro,” wrote the correspondent,

their natural hatred for the whites, the circumstances of these wilderness peoples are more than dangerous for their life and development. For this reason, it is hoped that the authorities adopt all the necessary means so that Vargas and company do not return to the Oriente and that they make these guarantees to the Tenientes Políticos and the white inhabitants.44

Readers of El Comercio did not often read of specific Amazonian Indians, as reporting usually referred to the Jívaros in general, or to certain tribes. Pástor Severo Vargas appeared in El Comercio first as a partially assimilated leader willing to work for the incorporation of the Oriente into wider Ecuadorian society; only a few months later he

43 “Una entrevista con el Curaca Pastor Severo Vargas, jefe de diez tribus orientales, que se halla en Quito,” El Comercio, January 22, 1932.

44 Corresponsal, “Crónicas Orientales,” El Comercio, May 20, 1932.

153 was reportedly a leader of a dangerous insurrection who resisted the establishment of outsiders in the Oriente. This widely varying picture of Vargas is representative of the polarized fashion Jívaros were represented to Ecuadorian society in a variety of forms of literature. More importantly, they crystallize the fact that the region’s Indians were judged in terms of their relationship to the ongoing effort to incorporate the region into the nation at large and transform it along the lines imagined by the Oriente’s construction as a national object of desire.

Secular publications besides the daily press, such as Miscelánea, a pro-Oriente magazine begun in 1931, also contained accounts of the Jívaros. In the inaugural issue,

A. Peñaherrera wrote that the Jívaros “are of a valuable character, very inclined to war, intelligent, and generous with their peers.” They made poor parents and husbands, however, and their superstition and belief in curses led to the large-scale killings that were common among them.45 A later contributor to Miscelánea argued that the Jívaros were the most industrious and intelligent of all the Indians in the ethnically diverse

Pastaza River area, especially compared to the “degenerated” Quichua Indians.46 A later ethnography of the Jívaros, also published in Miscelánea, advised that the Jívaros were prone to laziness and lacked ambition because the abundance of the Oriente meant that Jívaros were supplied with all they needed to survive and thrive without having to work very hard. One Miscelánea contributor described the Jívaros’ reduced heads in some detail, as this was no doubt a macabre but popular subject for the magazine’s readers. This author, Francisco de las Barras de Aragón, argued that the

45 A. Peñaherrera, “Geografía Oriental. Río Corrientes,” Miscelánea 1, no. 1 (January 1931): 29- 31.

46 Francisco Estrella G., “Reseña Monográfica del Cantón Pastaza,” Miscelánea 2, no.10 (February 1932): 34.

154 Jívaro possessed many good qualities alongside their more bloodthirsty tendencies, and posed a difficult question:

Will civilization be able to conserve the elemental virtues of these people, removing from them only the ferocity? Until now the facts demonstrate that contact with the civilized is fatal for peoples of primitive lives, who quickly and easily acquire the vices that rapidly destroy them.47

Lengthier treatments of the Jívaros published in Quito also examined their alternatively admirable and fearsome qualities. Carlos Alvarez Miño’s 1934 book, The

Jungles of the Ecuadorian Oriente: Customs of the Jíbaro, has as its front cover a vivid etching of a Jívaro standing atop a decapitated corpse, with the head as a trophy in one hand and a spear in the other. Other bodies lie around, with huts in the background on fire. According to Alvarez’s account, Jívaros were the absolute kings of the jungle, despotic and indomitable. They were intelligent and ingenious, as many facts of their life showed. And despite the bloodthirsty image on the cover, they would be beneficial to the nation in the future: “many Jívaros are characterized by a rare predisposition for the cultivation of some arts and sciences and, carefully taking advantage of them, Ecuador could have in them positive exponents of culture and progress.” Alvarez argued that well-planned colonization of the Oriente would incorporate the Jívaro to “our civilization” just as occurred with the Indian from the Sierra.48 Certainly, though, readers would have found things to fear about the Jívaros as well as admire in Alvarez’s book; he, like many

47 Francisco de las Barras de Aragón, “Los Indios Jíbaros y las cabezas reducidas,” Miscelánea 4, no. 28 (January 1934): 31. Miscelánea featured many more articles over the years about Jívaro characteristics; for a discussion of the Jívaros’ ferocity and independence, as well as their intelligence, bravery, and prospects for incorporation into “civilization”, see also Leopoldo Rivas B., “Condiciones Etnológicas de los Jíbaros, Costumbres e Idioma,” Miscelánea 5, no. 41 (February 1935): 18-22; Alfonso Rumazo González, “Un mes en la Selva Oriental,” Miscelánea 5, no. 44 (May 1935): 9-14; Mary Corylé, “Oriente,” Miscelánea 8, nos. 70-73 (December 1937 – March 1938): 82-89.

48 Carlos Alvarez Miño, Las Selvas del Oriente Ecuatoriano: Costumbres del Jíbaro (Quito: Editorial Artes Gráficos, 1934), 34.

155 authors, discussed the production of tzantzas and even mentioned that the shrunken heads of whites had been found in the Jívaros’ possession.49

Oscar E. Reyes and Francisco Terán, in their History and Geography of the

Ecuadorian Oriente offered a description of the Jívaros that also highlights their contradictions. In their view, the Jívaros stand out when compared to the Yumbos of the northern Oriente. Unlike those Quichua-speaking Indians, the Jívaros were fiercely independent and brave. Of all the Indians in the Oriente, the Jívaros were

the most industrious and intelligent, but the most resistant to civilization due to the repugnance they feel upon entering in society with the white, whom they consider a being worthy of compassion, subject to multiple necessities, and, above all, lacking in perspicacity and resistance for life in the jungle.50

J. C. Granja, his travel account, published in 1942, found the Jívaros to be a “haughty, intelligent, hospitable, and good race.” Unfortunately, they felt any work besides hunting, fishing, and making war was undignified, and engaged in excessive polygamy and drinking.51

The Jívaros were featured in Ecuadorian works of fiction, perhaps most famously in Juan Leon Mera’s 1879 novel Cumandá, about the star-crossed love affair between a

Christian Indian woman and a white man from the highlands. Doris Sommer argues that this novel, set in 1808, is chiefly a parable in support of the conservative political cause, defending the role of the Jesuits in Ecuador’s history through a story of reconciliation

49 Ibid., 99.

50 Oscar E. Reyes and Francisco Terán, Historia y Geografía del Oriente Ecuatoriano (Quito: Talleres Gráficos de Educación, 1939), 120-121.

51 J. C. Granja, Nuestro Oriente de unas Notas de Viaje, 44.

156 between whites and Indians after the tragic death of Cumandá.52 As historian Natalia

Esvertit Cobes has noted, Cumandá was for many years assigned in Ecuadorian schools, and had a notable influence on commonly held images of the jungle and its indigenous people.53 Alejandro Ojeda stated that his 1935 novel, Etza, or the Soul of the

Jívaro Race, was firmly grounded in the details of the Jívaros in his own period.54 Ojeda advised his readers that the novel, which he described as a “simple account of a Jívaro war caused by love,” was not exaggerated; as proof, he cited the authority of Pío

Jaramillo Alvarado, who was Director of the Oriente and who published a book, The

Ecuadorian Indian (El Indio Ecuatoriano), which included a chapter on the Jívaros. He also cited his own experience in the Oriente, as secretary for the Intendente General of

Pastaza and Zamora Cantons between 1911 and 1913, and as Governor of the southern Oriente province in 1925 and 1926. Ojeda, like many before, described the

Jívaros as intelligent, dominating, superior, indomitable, bellicose, and constituting a

“bastion” in which the “civilizing action of the State” had not arrived. But like many others, Ojeda believed that the Jívaros held great potential for the nation; they were capable of spiritual expressions that the Republic should take advantage of to make them a “vigorous factor of progress.”55

The novel tells the story of Etza, a brave Jívaro warrior in the service of the chief

Tungui. War breaks out between Tungui and his subordinate tribes against the chief

52 Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 237-41.

53 Esvertit, La Incipiente Provincia, 261.

54 Alejandro Ojeda V., Etza o El Alma de la Raza Jívara (Quito: Editorial Artes Gráficas, 1935).

55 Ibid., 12-15.

157 Cugusha and his allies over the refusal of Noria, Tungui’s daughter, to marry Cugusha.

Cugusha vows to exterminate his enemies and have Tungui’s head as a tzantza in revenge for this slight.56 After a series of intrigues, sneak attacks, use of the psychoactive drug natema to evoke visions, and open warfare, Tungui’s forces triumph and Etza, naturally, ends up with Noria. The novel’s climactic scene evokes the stoicism and honor among Jívaros, as Cugusha sacrifices himself upon a burning house in order to deny his intact head to his rival Tungui, who would have made it into a tzantza.57 The novel is mostly set purely among the Jívaros, but one chapter is set in the city of Macas, in Morona Canton. Ojeda describes the “macabeos” as a kind of hybrid type: they are not Jívaros, but they are the product of the rough life in the jungle, and are adept at particular skills like swimming and forest navigation.58 The novel features one Macas resident in particular, Gabriel Zavala, who makes his living partially by engaging in commerce with the Jívaros. Zavala does not accede to the Jívaros’ request that he join the war against Cugusha. Ojeda uses his description of life in Macas to comment on the state of the Oriente as compared to the rest of the nation, and the qualities of

Ecuadorian policy. Gabriel Zavala expresses consternation at the sadness and isolation of Macas’s women, for example, and the lack of modern conveniences, such as good roads that unite the nation’s people and allow a communion of commerce and social relations. One of the Jívaros, Charupe, asks Zavala if the President ever comes to visit.

Zavala replies that he does not, so Charupe comments, “In that case he’s not your friend, he doesn’t love you.” Zavala replies that the president’s representatives do

56 Ibid., 55.

57 Ibid., 260.

58 Ibid., 173.

158 come; but Charupe comments that, since they don’t bring anything useful, Zavala should opt instead for the free life of a Jívaro. Zavala replies, “Great liberty do you have, that keeps you naked, miserable, buried in warfare, submerged in ignorance and killing one another without anyone to prevent or punish it.” “And the Christians, do they not kill one another?” asks Charupe.59 After the Jívaros depart, Zavala is left unsure whether he should continue to supply them with shotguns, powder and other war materials. He reflects that he and the people of Macas,

despite how poor the aid received from the Public Powers may be, are less unfortunate than those savages, who lived a life apart from the law and maintained themselves immersed in the most profound ignorance, to the point of believing that their mission on earth was no other but extermination.60

Etza, then, criticizes the feckless Ecuadorian government that has abandoned the

Oriente’s white inhabitants to isolation and poor services, while the Jívaros continue to engage in senseless conflict that condemns to death large numbers of intelligent, strong, and potentially useful members of the national community.

Nicolás Jimenez commented on Etza in El Comercio shortly after the novel’s release, praising the work for its reliance on the “concrete facts” about the Jívaros rather than abstract ideas. Jimenez predicted great success for the novel.61 Another contributor El Comercio, in response to the novel, commented that Jívaros were susceptible to certain noble sentiments, despite the fact that popular imagination saw them only with the bloody and destructive instincts of war. The same contributor stated

59 Ibid., 184-186.

60 Ibid., 189.

61 Nicolás Jimenez, “El alma de la raza jívara,” El Comercio, February 4, 1935.

159 that all public authorities and citizens should take on the humanitarian task of redeeming the Jívaro tribes as “high patriotic work.”62

Later in the 1930s, missionaries continued to produce works about the Oriente that commented on its Jívaro inhabitants. The Dominican father, Jacinto D. Marín, in

1938 published his account of the Dominican regions of the Oriente in Al través de la selva oriental ecuatoriana (Across the Ecuadorian Oriental Jungle), which described not just the life of the Indian settlements founded by members of his order, but also provincial officials who worked in the region. According to Marín, the Teniente Político of

Curaray Parish, Sergio E. Sáenz, was an “enthusiastic citizen, who constitutes a guarantee for all the colonists; his wife, who for months had been in charge of the incipient school at ‘El Porvenir,’ had made an impression for the culture of her dealings and her competence in the arduous labor of teaching.”63 Marín also described the

Indians of the region as eager to fall into the rhythms of settled villages, abandoning their old ways. At the Tenencia Política of El Tigre Parish, ten “indigenous” and “Jívaro” families (thus distinguishing between Quichua-speaking Indians and Shuar), on the suggestion of the local Teniente Político were “leaving aside their ancestral customs of war and polygamy” and seeking to form a new settlement as “advanced sentinels for the reconquest of our territorial rights.” “How beautiful and worthy of applause,” Marín wrote, “is this patriotic sentiment that animates the children of the jungle!”64 This view of the Jívaros framed them in terms of their contribution to the national project of

62 “El alma de la raza jívara,” El Comercio, November 12, 1934.

63 Jacinto D. Marín, O. P., Al través de la selva oriental ecuatoriana, 31.

64 Ibid., 36-37. For a similar description of Dominican settlements in the Oriente, see Raimundo Maria Monteros, O. P., Narración Histórica y Compendiosa del Pueblo Misional de Arapicos (Quito: Editorial Chimborazo, 1938).

160 colonizing and establishing Ecuadorian possession of the Oriente. The racial characteristics of the Jívaros, in this view, were giving way to characteristics that made them good citizens and collaborators with whites in the region.

Popular publications about the Jívaros continued to come from Ecuadorian presses through the middle of the twentieth century. During the 1950s, leading

Ecuadorian statesmen also contributed to popular perceptions about the Oriente’s indigenous peoples, including the Jívaros. Alberto Sarmiento was a leading pro-Oriente propagandist, founding a magazine on the topic, before he became a member of congress, representing the Oriente province of Napo-Pastaza. He did not establish permanent residence in the Oriente, but published at least three books about the region.

In contrast to his somewhat pathetic estimation of the Yumbos of the northern Oriente,

Sarmiento described the Jívaro as the “genuine man of the Oriente…characterized by an irresistible love for liberty and by a combative and sometimes fearsome spirit.” The

Jívaro tribes, despite maintaining their distance from civilization, were disappearing slowly due to sicknesses and internecine wars.65 Those Jívaros that remained, however, often traveled to the cities of the Oriente, even to Quito, because they were impressed by civilization and desirous of it.66 In his estimation, the Jívaros were a race in harmony with nature, knowing its secrets without needing to be taught. They were voluble and strong, and lacked for nothing. This contentedness, however, was an obstacle to their incorporation into the nation, as “necessities are that which motivates

65 Alberto Sarmiento, Biografía del Río Napo (Quito: Editorial “Tirso de Molina,” 1955), 128.

66 Ibid., 137.

161 progress and civilization.”67 Other observers argued that progress was possible, such as

Tomás Vega Toral, who published an account of Gualaquiza Canton, in the Southern

Oriente, the same year as Sarmiento’s work. Vega agreed that the Jívaros were a fiercely independent race prone to violence; however, the missionary schools had been successful in teaching them the rudiments of civilized life and preparing them for citizenship.68 Nevertheless, they lacked needed concepts of social organization, and were ignorant of the basic aspects of government.69 All of these accounts shared in common the notion that the Jívaros had beneficial qualities, but their incorporation into the nation as citizens was a difficult prospect, requiring governmental and missionary efforts that ran the risk of eliminating those admirable qualities as they transitioned into civilized life.

The Jívaros of the central and southern Oriente, then, were seen by wider

Ecuadorian society in a contradictory fashion: violent, but progressive; lacking in ambition, but intelligent; fiercely independent, but educable. The accounts of their ferocity would have fostered apprehension among administrators and colonists in the

Oriente, but affirmations of their vigorousness and adaptability would have made them seem promising collaborators in the incorporation of the Oriente and estimable members of the national community.

These views were reflected in state documents, including correspondence between residents of the Oriente itself and state officials. The optimistic view of the

67 Alberto Sarmiento, Monografía Científica del Oriente Ecuatoriano (Quito: Dr. Alberto Sarmiento, 1958), 57-58.

68 Tomás Vega Toral, Algunas consideraciones sobre nuestro Oriente Amazónico y Monografía del Cantón Gualaquiza (Cuenca, Ecuador: Editorial “Don Bosco,” 1958), 67-68.

69 Ibid., 90.

162 Jívaros, of a progressive race, willing to change and become productive members of the nation, was held, or at least expressed, by Angel A. Costales, a Riobamba resident familiar with the southern Oriente, in his letter to the President of the Republic in 1948.

Costales affirmed that the settlement of Chiguaza contained an “endless number of

Jívaro tribes predisposed in their jungle environment, though it seems paradoxical, to the betterment of customs and getting closer to whites.” As evidence, he cited the

Jívaros’ willingness to help the white authorities in Chiguaza to build a cable car for crossing the Sangay River and other buildings in the parish. With support from the president, Costales affirmed that with the government’s aid in stimulating, protecting, and civilizing the Jívaros, they would be converted into “positive factors in our Oriente in defense of our national integrity.” Costales claimed that the reason for the persistence of bad customs was the lack of a civilizing mission in the area; he proposed to found such a mission among the three or four thousand Jívaros in the area, to be run by three trained whites, that would instruct the Jívaros in civic, social, and hygienic life. The aim would be to make them love Ecuadorian soil, making them protectors of the Oriente.70

Costales was asking for money from the government in this letter, but his appeal relied on particular notions about the Jívaros and their potential to contribute to Ecuador’s territorial integrity.

The state officials of the Oriente also had their views of the Jívaros shaped by the Jívaros themselves. In 1951, a functionary in the Ministerio del Gobierno (Ministry of

Government), which was responsible for the Oriente at that time, forwarded a complaint to the Jefe Político of General Plaza, in the southern Oriente. The complaint was from

Antonio Molina Sive, a Jívaro who signed the letter with a thumbprint rather than a

70 Angel A. Costales Morales to Presidente de la República, Riobamba, October 4, 1948, AMG.

163 signature. According to Molina, the previous month his brother was killed by other

Jívaros, who cut off his head on the orders of two whites, one of whom was the brother- in-law of the assassins. The victim’s head was made into a tzantza that came into the power of another Jívaro named Antonio. In demanding that justice be done, Molina wrote, “My brother was not a dangerous element, as he was civilized.” He further mentioned that his brother had been working in gold mining.71 Molina’s letter indicates his familiarity with the notion that Jívaros were considered dangerous, and he was careful to contrast his brother’s participation in mainstream life against that of his enemies. The fact that he had to appeal to the authorities for the investigation of the crime suggests the limited reach of the state in that area, and the importance that presenting one’s self as a Jívaro unlike the warlike characters common in popular discourse may have had.

Despite the infamy of the Jívaros for their fearsome characteristics, those qualities could be forgotten entirely in the communications between state officials. In

1954, Victor A. Ulloa, the Teniente Político of Méndez, in the southern Oriente, wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno in regard to complaints by Jívaros in Chiguaza—the same place in which Angel A. Costales sought to found a civilizing mission among Jívaros six years prior. According to Ulloa, some Jívaros were being victimized by “certain soulless and abusive people who have taken the name of the government to mistreat, persecute, and even shoot them.” Apparently, the authorities in Chiguaza, which was outside of

Ulloa’s own jurisdiction, refused to do anything to aid these Jívaros, so he appealed to the ministerial authority in Quito to protect these Jívaros “that are so useful in the jungle and who give services to those citizens who desire to visit our Oriente lands.” The

71 Dr. Wilson Vela to Jefe Político of General Plaza, Quito, June 18, 1951, AMG.

164 particular injustice committed was robbery, and was actually carried out by other Jívaros on the orders of the whites Rafael Jerbusons, Jesus Bernal and Manuel Zuñiga.

According to Ulloa, “these ringleaders go around saying that they have orders from the government to kill all the Jívaros and take all their houses.” Ulloa stated that he believed the government could never give such an order against a “defenseless race.”72

Certainly, the vision of the Jívaros as a strong, dangerous, and independent race was widespread; nevertheless, Ulloa’s letter to the Ministro de Gobierno demonstrates that provincial officials in the Oriente did not necessarily accept that view when it came to the actual dynamics in the areas of their jurisdiction. In Ulloa’s view, the Jívaros were not “kings of the jungle” but victims of the machinations of non-Jívaros and in need of protection.

Documentary evidence from the Oriente itself, then, reflects the notions about the

Jívaros that had been a feature of the Ecuadorian press and popular publications for many decades. Like those popular notions, however, the view of the Jívaros held by

Oriente colonists, petty officials, and even the Jívaros themselves were not monolithic, and were affected by the Jívaros’ contact with the state and outsider colonists. This evidence demonstrates that the Jívaros were understood in terms of their relationship to the “national object” of the Oriente and the ongoing project of incorporation of the region that was a component of it. The category of “Jívaro,” therefore, itself came to be a fully national description due to its close association with the Oriente region and the efforts to govern and colonize the Amazonian frontier. Debates about the Jívaros, touching variously on their savagery or their readiness for citizenship, were influenced by broader national concerns related to Ecuador’s prestige and projects of state formation.

72 Victor A. Ulloa N. to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Méndez, February 3, 1954, AMG.

165 Yumbos

The “Yumbos” of the northern Oriente at the beginning of the twentieth century did not live in some primordial state, untouched by “civilization” from the outside world.

Ecuadorian authors were keenly aware of this; the effects of the Rubber Boom in the

Amazon basin were devastating for the Yumbo population. The ramifications of the demographic decline they suffered would come to characterize them as a group, in the view of many who wrote about them. A 1909 petition addressed to President General

Eloy Alfaro from a white resident on the Río Napo, later re-published as a pamphlet, called the president’s attention to the “infeliz” or miserable Yumbo. According to the petitioner, Miguel A. Román, the Indian pueblos of the Napo region had previously been rich and flourishing, but now scarcely 4,000 of the 15,000 Yumbos remained, due to their enslavement by rubber exploitation companies. “Pity,” Román exhorted,

for the miserable sold Yumbo Indians. These compatriots live a life of slavery, far from the land of their birth, from their jungle, from their dear wives and children. Can there be a worse crime than to abuse the innocence of a savage, like that of a virgin?73

Román’s characterization of the Yumbos painted them as helpless and innocent, in need of protection. But they were, after all, “compatriots”: part of the national community, but certainly not members ready for full participation as citizens. Román also cited an account from Coca, also in the northern Oriente, that painted Ecuadorian state authorities in the region as “cowards” and “drunkards” who mistreated the

Indians.74 This petition, later published as a pamphlet, then, is also an example of how the Yumbo Indians’ living conditions could be used as a way to evaluate the

73 Miguel A. Román, A La Nación Ecuatoriana (Quito: Imp. Minerva, 1909), 1-2.

74 Ibid., 8.

166 effectiveness of Ecuadorian authority in the region. Indeed, this points to an important function of the Amazonian Indians in the literary production of Ecuadorian observers for many decades: the wellbeing of the Indians as yardstick for national progress and incorporation of the region.

Travelers to the Oriente such as Vicente M. Bravo, whose travel account of 1906 was published in 1920, recognized that Indians were the key to wealth and development in the region. He observed that for those whites who had moved to the region to establish haciendas or other extractive activities in the jungle, their income depended upon the number of “peons” they controlled: “the wealth of the proprietor is evaluated by the number of Indians submitted to his dominion.”75 Bravo decried the abuses and trickery of proprietors and missionaries alike, and described such barbaric incidents as the branding of Indians by whites (“What sarcasm for the civilization of the twentieth century!”).76 The cycle of abuse even meant that white proprietors fell into a decadent lifestyle, marked by polygamy and absolute control over Indian women when their husbands were away working. The patrones of the haciendas, he alleged, used the pretty Indian women as sex slaves, while the ugly women were condemned to endless work. He did cite some humane patrones by name, but it was clear that they were the exception.77 Here, Bravo reinforced the view of Yumbos as helpless and passive, but also used them to point out the shortcomings of Ecuadorian administration in the region.

75 Vicente M. Bravo, Viaje al Oriente. Segunda Parte- En la Región del Curaray. 1906 (Quito: Imprenta del E. M. G., 1920), 117.

76 Ibid., 127.

77 Ibid., 171-72.

167 Pío Jaramillo Alvarado, Oriente administrator and promoter, was something of a polymath who published a work of sociology in 1922 with his El Indio Ecuatoriano.

Jaramillo, like other authors, noted that the Yumbo was not so different from the Indians of the Sierra with which his readers would have been familiar. He described the Yumbos as “patient, domesticable, and favorable for servitude.”78 Unlike the Jívaros further south, who had successfully defended themselves against the whites, the “savages” in the Putumayo and Napo region (the Yumbos) were killed and exploited by the rubber explorers. Furthermore, the nineteenth-century Jesuit missionaries on the Napo left behind a bad record of despotism that meant the Indian “was reduced to the most absolute servitude, which has later facilitated their exploitation by hacendados and caucheros who exploit the aborigine, insult him and sell him like an animal.”79 The

Yumbos’ suitability for work would have been an important consideration for many

Ecuadorian statesmen and business leaders, as the early twentieth century saw numerous schemes for improving the infrastructure of the region and its connection to the highlands. Particularly relevant for those readers would have been the 1924 account by Joseph H. Sinclair and Theron Wasson, representatives of the North American

Leonard Exploration Company. For them, the salient characteristic of the Quichua- speaking “indios Napos” was their lack of communal organization. They found them

78 Jaramillo, El Indio Ecuatoriano, 45. Later works on the Oriente would characterize the Yumbos by their similarity to the Indians of the Sierra. Oscar E. Reyes and Francisco Terán, in their 1939 survey of the Oriente’s history and geography, wrote that the “indios quechuas” on the upper Napo, the Coca, and the upper Pastaza, “share great similarity with those of the Sierra, with the special characteristic of having adapted to the jungle. These Indians, submissive, passive, are under the patronage of the whites, whom they call, like their brothers of the Sierra, patrones. Thanks to the exploitation of which they are victims, the whites have amassed their fortunes there. Commonly the rivalries that develop between colonists have their origin in the greater influence that each of them wishes to have over these Indians.” Reyes and Terán, Historia y Geografía del Oriente Ecuatoriano, 119-120.

79 Ibid., 47.

168 mostly under the domination of white patrones, passively subject to their whims and competition. They found that hard work was outside their “sphere of action,” and that whites from highland cities would therefore be needed to build roads in the area.80

A countervailing view was provided by the administrator of the Josephine

Catholic mission on the Napo River, Monsignor Emilio Cecco. In a speech given in

Ambato in 1925, which was later re-printed in the Boletín Eclesiástico, Cecco argued that the Indians were in need of protection because they possessed a potential that

Sinclair and Wasson did not seem to notice. Cecco believed that the Indians in the

Napo area could be counted on to defend Ecuadorian territory against Peruvian advances, just as England and France had relied upon Indians during their colonial period in the Americas. Cecco emphasized that the Indians of the Napo were not

Jívaros, and that they were “humble, gentle, rational, and already rather close and inclined to civilize themselves.” He believed that a battalion of soldiers could quickly raise companies of Indian volunteers ready to defend their land, their children, and their families. These Indians, Cecco noted, raised troubling and difficult questions for the

Ecuadorian state:

How are Indians of the Oriente considered here? Are they free? Are they slaves? If they are free, what are their rights as Ecuadorians, what are their duties? Does the government know what goes on there? How certain hacendados treat their indebted Indians?81

Cecco’s view of the Yumbos, while still maintaining that they were somewhat humble and meek, was more optimistic than that of his contemporaries like Sinclair and

80 Sinclair and Wasson, Exploraciones en el Ecuador Oriental, 30-31.

81 Monseñor Emilio Cecco, “Conferencia de Monseñor Emilio Cecco, Administrador Apostólico de la Misión del Napo, Sobre el Oriente Ecuatoriano, Pronunciada en Ambato el 13 de Diciembre de 1925,” Boletín Eclesiástico 23, no. 1 (January 1926): 31-32.

169 Wasson. He cited their potential as useful defenders of the nation, and warned that this potential could be lost if the government did not better monitor the actions of white- mestizo landowners in the area.

Quito’s daily press, as it did for the Jívaros, brought to its readers impressions of the Yumbos that populated the Napo River region of the northern Oriente. However, the physical, cultural, and ethnographic details of the Yumbos did not feature as prominently. This was in large part because wider Ecuadorian society regarded the

Yumbos as less exotic than the Jívaros. There are some exceptions; for example, a

1923 article in El Comercio, titled “The Oriental Indian,” did offer some ethno-historical context for the Amazonian indigenous peoples. The article’s author wrote that the Indian of the Oriente was never subject to exploitation during the colonial period, as Indians from the Sierra were. Also, these Indians were not a “nation” and never had a proper government. Like many others, this author stated that the Yumbo was not so different from the Indians of the Sierra; the Jívaro, the “true lord of the wilderness,” was described in much greater detail.82 Another exception is a travelogue published in El

Comercio in January of 1928. This account of a trip from the central highland city of

Ambato to Tena, capital of Napo-Pastaza Province, reported on the region’s rivers, flora, and fauna. The author, upon encountering a group of Indian families fishing, wrote,

how distinct these Indians appear to me, seeing them in their native land, compared to those who travel to Quito or Ambato, where they more appear caricatures of savages than anything else, dressed as they are in ridiculous clothing and almost always shivering with cold; here they are

82 Pío Jaramillo Alvarado, “El Indio Oriental,” El Comercio, June 17, 1923.

170 presented in all the beauty of their naked and muscular bodies, free of the bonds of clothing imposed by civilization.83

In this view, the Indians of the Napo area were not simply copies of the Indians of the

Sierra.

More commonly, however, the Yumbos appeared in the pages of El Comercio not as objects of careful study, with interesting characteristics, but in regards to their relationship with the white Ecuadorians and foreigners in the region. An article from

1914, for example, reporting that more missionary priests were to be sent to the

Oriente, reported that the Indians were people who feared whites as cruel tyrants who exploited and demanded sacrifices of them. This had caused the de-population or abandonment of many Oriente villages.84 The theme of de-population frequently provoked reporting on the Indians of the Oriente: in 1919 El Comercio argued the need for more missions by reporting that the “ignorant tribes” of the Amazon required a soft approach to attract them to civilization, as they could be lured away by Peruvians who had invaded Ecuadorian territory.85

In September of 1927, the paper published a recapitulation of a speech given by the visiting foreign dignitary, the Marquis de Wavrin, at the Central University in Quito to the Rector, members of the press, the Vice President of the Republic, and other leading citizens. Wavrin recounted details of his recent trip to the Napo River region, describing the rivers rich in gold, the agricultural and forest products, and the state of the Indians.

This latter subject was somewhat disheartening due to the Indians’ abuse of alcohol and

83 N. G. Martínez, “Diario de un viaje rápido de Ambato al Tena,” El Comercio, January 5, 1928.

84 “Misiones para el Oriente,” El Comercio, October 17, 1914.

85 “Las Misiones en el Oriente,” El Comercio, September 20, 1919.

171 their slavery to certain private individuals. However, there was much promise in the

Indians, as

liberated from their ancestral oppressions, it is possible to get efficient labor from them in those areas, because they are able knowers of that land, and their condition as natives makes them resistant in work and they do not feel the effects of the climate.86

The audience at Wavrin’s speech and the readers of the newspaper would therefore gain the notion that the Oriente’s Indians were in need of assistance, but potentially very beneficial for aiding colonization in agricultural and infrastructure work.

At times, El Comercio’s discussion of the Indians of the northern Oriente overlapped with its discussion of policy for the region. In January of 1934, the newspaper reprinted a petition sent to the President of Congress by Gustavo E. Cornejo

H., a white resident of the Napo River region. Cornejo’s main concern was controlling the Indian population and putting it toward productive work. Gold panned in the

Oriente’s rivers was fetching too high a price, according to Cornejo, meaning that

Indians made enough money off of this work to lose themselves in drunkenness and idleness. Indeed, this was their reversion to a “primitive” state of atavistic laziness, according to Cornejo. To remedy this, the government should fix a maximum price for gold. Cornejo praised the traditional Indian control carried out by patrones in the area; without this, the Indian never gave any service. The lack of sufficient numbers of whites to serve as patrones was causing de-population of Indians and therefore lack of progress in the development of the region. The government should therefore study a more efficient way to prevent de-population and also encourage the emigration of more whites to the region. Cornejo also asked that the government in Quito authorize the

86 Sr. Marques de Wavrin, “Por el Oriente ecuatoriano,” El Comercio, September 8, 1927.

172 Provincial Council of Napo-Pastaza to make a regulation that would divide each area’s

Indian population in two, earmarking half for service on government projects, and half for the service of private (white) individuals.87 The following day, El Comercio printed an editorial in full support of Cornejo’s proposal. The author opined that agricultural work could only be carried out by Indians; as such, the Indians’ commitment to this work must be guaranteed through the reforms suggested by Cornejo. After all, as the author stated, “The Indian was created for the service of the white and above all formed expressly for rural work.”88 This was a view of Oriente Indians devoid of any cultural or ethnic characteristics, apart from a certain propensity for idleness that required whites for correction. The Yumbos described here were not potential citizens, but simply a permanently subordinate and almost servile group that full citizens were called to administer and control. Most importantly, they were seen as tools for the ongoing national project of incorporating the Oriente, and were judged according to their effectiveness in this.

Secular publications besides the daily press also contributed to Ecuadorians’ understanding of the Yumbos of the northern Oriente. An editorial from the pro-Oriente magazine Miscelánea in 1939 expressed a view similar to that of Monseñor Emilio

Cecco in his 1925 speech, discussed above. The author in Miscelánea lamented the lack of effective incorporation of the Oriente through roads and colonization. But until that could be achieved, he argued that there was one element already in the Oriente that was established and prepared to pave the way—the Indian. “This [the Indian] is the basis of colonization,” the author argued, “the fundamental element for the oriental life

87 Gustavo E. Cornejo H., “De Oriente,” El Comercio, January 30, 1934.

88 “El indígena de la Región Oriental,” El Comercio, January 31, 1934.

173 of the colonists, and it will always be the most efficient guide and companion for the new inhabitant.” The Indian was the “knower of the mysteries of the jungle” and could teach colonists about useful plants and animals. They could not fully take care of themselves, however; they were like children and should be treated as morally and physically weak beings without means of defense and progress. It would be the work of various generations to attract Oriente Indians to civilization, changing their customs, beliefs, and aspirations. The Indians, the author noted, were docile, but carried with them a mass of ancestral prejudices that needed calming. Adult Indians needed paternal treatment that would assist in learning about good customs and how to work the land. Children needed

Spanish instruction and practical education. The authorities who would carry out this civilizing project should of course be moral people who planed to make the Oriente their definitive home. Substantial salaries would ensure their success.89 For this editorialist, the Indians were not obstacles, but potential boons to progress. However, they were afflicted with certain characteristics that would require ironing-out by good governance and education. Like Cecco, this author saw the Indians’ potential for the nation.

Unlike Cecco, other members of the clergy were not so optimistic. Friar José

María Vargas visited the Canelos area, inhabited by Quichua Indians who lived on or near the Dominican mission there. His account was published in Quito in 1931. His picture of the Indians was one of indolence and utter lack of ambition. They were attracted to religious ceremonies and festivals, but quickly disappeared into the forest once they were over. He asserted that they lived this way due to their lack of needs and desires. As he argued,

89 “Por el Indio Oriental,” Miscelánea 9, nos. 89-90-91 (July-September 1939): 1-3.

174 the current criteria to judge the civilization of a people is the sum of comforts that suppress the coarseness of life.... Judging by this norm, it is clear that the Indians of the Oriente are barbaric, ignorant, and useless to the Homeland; excepting their appreciable value in continuity of territorial occupation.

They had all that they wanted, so they did not work to achieve any additional comfort.

As Vargas and many others would allege, Indian fathers were very indolent, caring little whether their children lived or died. Children were raised poorly for they were taught to follow instinct rather than rational influence. “In sum,” Vargas wrote, “the Indians of

Canelos are masculine, but rough; Christians, but abusive; respectful, but distrustful; poor, but satisfied…idle, but without ambition or pride.”90 Vargas did not seem to notice the irony in his desire to instill more necessities and want for comfort among the Indians in Canelos, as the sale of manufactured tools and products from cities is precisely the method by which many Quichua Indians were indebted to landlords and subjected to a cycle of abuses.

The Dominican magazine, El Oriente Dominicano, as with the Jívaros, was an important outlet for spreading knowledge of the Quichua or Yumbo Indians of the

Dominicans’ jurisdiction in the Oriente. Beginning with its first issue, the magazine sought to familiarize its readers with the Oriente by reporting on the progress of its settlements and the features available to tourists and colonists. The magazine’s inaugural number featured an article by the Dominican missionary Jacinto M. Yépez titled “Puyu and its Customs,” which described a harmonious settlement of 80 inhabitants, all of whom spoke Spanish thanks to the Dominicans’ instruction, and who

90 Fr. José María Vargas, O. P., Impresiones de un Viaje a Canelos (Quito: Imprenta de Santo Domingo, 1931), 3-4. Views like Vargas’s were expressed in other media and in other genres. Jorge E. Barra y Pino wrote a poem on the occasion of the “Día del Oriente” on February 27th, 1939, titled, “To the Indians of the Napo.” The poem paints a picture of a figure worthy of pity—treated like an animal, knowing all the cruelties of slavery, living a life never emboldened by ambition. See Jorge E. Barra y Pino, “A los Indios del Napo,” Miscelánea 9, nos. 83 - 84 (January-February 1939): 24.

175 attended church dressed like civilized people. Four white families lived in harmony with the local Indians, and all Puyenses, white and Indian alike, happily contributed to communal projects such as roadwork. In sum, Puyu (usually spelled “Puyo”) offered “a flattering perspective toward a rapid and effective progress” due to the fertility of the soil, the benign climate, and the character of its people.91 The same issue of the magazine featured a more hard-nosed assessment in Friar Humberto M. Mejía’s article about the Dominican settlement of Sarayacu. This, the most numerous settlement in the

Dominican territory in the Oriente, was home to six hundred inhabitants and a promising industry in rubber, peanuts, manioc, plantains, and other crops. Unfortunately, the

Indians of Sarayacu held the unfortunate custom of the purina, in which they absented themselves from the village at all times when a missionary priest was not present.

Furthermore, the Indians there were aware of rumors that a large number of whites planned to come to the region and take their lands. Mejía was concerned to disabuse the magazine’s readers of the notion that the Oriente was a paradise in which one merely had to extend one’s arm to collect its fruits. There was a lot of wealth to be had, but it required hard work. In the past, colonists had abandoned the region upon realizing the degree of difficulty involved. To form a colony in the Oriente was a noble mission because it brought the torch of civilization and progress; but Ecuadorians should not ignore the degree of sacrifice and privation required of its members, which must be “of masculine soul, habituated to work, haughty and strong.”92 What is important to note

91 Jacinto M. Yépez, O. P., “El Puyu y sus Costumbres,” El Oriente Dominicano 1, no. 1 (August- September 1927): 6-7.

92 Humberto M. Mejía, O. P., “Sarayacu,” El Oriente Dominicano 1, no. 1 (August-September 1927): 9-11.

176 here is the way in which the Indians are evaluated according to their involvement with the colonization and development of the Oriente. In this view of the Quichua-speaking

“Yumbos,” their racial characteristics were intertwined with their usefulness in the national project of incorporating the Amazonian region.93

A common theme in that magazine’s articles was the importance of brujos, or witch doctors, among the Indians. The missionary priest Humberto María Mejía in 1932 wrote an article in which he stated that “the brujo presides over the destines of the

Oriente Indian, is the Sultan of those forests, in whose hands is the happiness or disgrace of his peers: death itself.” He described the process by which young children were apprenticed to a brujo at a young age, who taught them “malignant practices.” The apprentices, upon returning to their people, were greeted with fear. Unfortunately for the missionary fathers, the brujos enjoyed very high stature among the people, and took advantage of the priests’ visits to the different villages to augment their power. By describing certain Indians as villainous and corrupting of others, Mejía highlighted the need for more and better priests in the Oriente.94 A few years later, Jacinto D. Marín, another Dominican in the Oriente, wrote an article on witchcraft in the Oriente that demonstrated the effects of the brujos not just among Indians but in the Indians’ relationship to white authorities as well. Marín, like Mejía, described the brujos as

93 A similar note was struck in El Oriente Dominicano in 1932, when Father Ceslao de Jesús Marín promoted the settlement of Pastaza area as an ideal destination for tourist and colonist. As Marín wrote, “Thanks to the constant labor of the Mission,” the Indians of Puyo, Pastaza’s principal settlement, “have lost their fierceness, and converted to religion, this has totally changed their sentiments of savagery and united them to the rest of the civilized inhabitants of the Republic.” Some of the Indians knew how to read and write, he reported, but despite this civilized change, they had not lost their abilities as skilled swimmers and excellent rowers of canoes that could safely conduct visitors from one settlement to the next. Padre Ceslao de Jesús Marín, O. P., “Sección Turismo,” El Oriente Dominicano 5, no. 28-29 (September-December 1932): 173-174.

94 Humberto María Mejía, O. P., “Abusiones de los Aborigenes de Nuestras Selvas Orientales,” Oriente Dominicano 5, no. 24 (January-February 1932): 22-24.

177 having disproportionate power among the Indians of the Oriente. According to Marín, the Indians did not believe in death by natural causes, but instead blamed the machinations of brujos for misfortunes. In one case, a brujo was consulted after the drowning death of a young child; this brujo blamed another brujo, and dispatched an assassination squad to exact revenge. After killing the rival brujo, one of the killers was taken to the jail in Ambato, in the highlands adjacent to the scene of the crime. The brujo’s influence, however, was strong enough to see the killers go free and justice remain unfulfilled. Later, those same killers became varayos del pueblo, a sanctioned position of authority among an Indian community. This position granted them the influence needed to see the Teniente Político of Juanjris, a Dominican-founded settlement, removed from office. They even asked the ministry responsible for the

Oriente to remove certain Dominicans from the region. They boasted of their victory over the authorities to the Indians in the area and claimed that no more white soldiers or colonists would come to live among them. All of this led Marín to argue that all the settlements in the Oriente could become similarly difficult if the Supreme Government did not carefully select the administrators and teachers who would work in the region, and if it did not increase its support for the missionaries who attracted “savages that find themselves on the margin of all civilization” to form settlements.95

When compared to the Jívaros of the southern Oriente, the predominant view of the Yumbos is of their closeness to civilization. Blanca Muratorio has addressed this tendency, writing that white Ecuadorian men viewed the Quichua-speaking Indians of the Napo River region as “almost completely acculturated and evangelized.” In the white

95 Jacinto D. Marín, O. P., “Costumbres Orientales- Brujería,” Oriente Dominicano 8, no. 39 (November-December 1935): 135-36.

178 view, these indigenous people remained “apathetic and submissive throughout the heyday of white domination in the Oriente.”96 In the pro-Oriente magazine Miscelánea,

Francisco Estrella’s 1932 description of Pastaza Canton, in the central Oriente, argues that the customs of the various indigenous groups in that diverse area were largely the same, except for those of the Quichua, who were more civilized and who were adopting white customs due to their long history of interactions with priests and white commercial agents. “The Quichua,” he wrote, “is somewhat degenerated, due to the drunkenness and sensuality that dominates them through effects of idleness.” Nevertheless, they were “intelligent and very agile.” Their intelligence may not have matched that of the

Jívaro, the most industrious and intelligent of all Indians, but their inclination to civilization made them a more useful category of Indian at this time.97

Although the Yumbos may have been closer to civilization, not all who observed them agreed that they were ready or able to interact with civilization in a productive fashion. Readers of Miscelánea in 1932 could also read an excerpt from Rafael

Alvarado’s report to the National Assembly during his time as Director del Oriente from

1928-29. In his estimation, the Yumbos’ salient characteristic was their distrustfulness toward whites. They were constantly afraid of trickery, making any gestures of cordiality or generosity toward them useless. This, of course, was due to their long experience with whites from outside the region, from the Conquistadors to the rubber explorers who killed and enslaved them. Where for Friar Vargas the Indians he observed had grown close to the whites thanks to prolonged contact, the secular authority Alvarado believed

96 Blanca Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, 1. Muratorio’s book attacks this stereotype by describing Quichua culture’s various forms of resistance to white domination.

97 Francisco Estrella G., “Reseña Monográfica del Cantón Pastaza,” Miscelánea 2, no. 10 (February 1932): 32-34.

179 the opposite. For Vargas, the Yumbos were a yardstick by which the progress of the government in the Oriente could be measured; the distrustful nature of the Yumbos and their indolence was a sign of the failure of previous administration to effectively control the territory. Alvarado called for a long, slow, and constant process of “regeneration” to make the Indian an “advantageous element or moderately useful.” Schools, hygiene, new protective laws, and limiting the power of the missions were all a part of this process.98 The Yumbos here were part of his argument to change the balance of power between secular and religious authorities in the Oriente. Like many others, Alvarado emphasized the Yumbos’ humility and domesticity when compared to the fierce

Jívaros.99

Some travelers in the Oriente also noted the good characteristics demonstrated by certain groups of Quichuas and their potential for the nation. J. C. Granja, whose travel account was published in Quito in 1942, warned that the Indians, subject as they were to difficult work mining gold on the Oriente’s rivers, their indebted state, and their high rates of infant mortality, were “on the road to extinction.”100 Nevertheless, in his estimation the Indians living in Canelos (those same Indians given a poor evaluation by

Vargas a decade earlier) were “the most civilized Indians of all in the Ecuadorian

Oriente. Strong, hardworking, they like to dress as the whites do. The language of these

Indians is Quichua. Nearly all the men speak Spanish. These Indians do not recognize

98 Rafael Alvarado, “Los Indios. El ‘Yumbo’ de la Región Oriental,” Miscelánea 2, no. 14 (October- November 1932): 16-18.

99 Ibid., 19.

100 J. C. Granja, Nuestro Oriente, 38.

180 any patrones.”101 In general, Granja alleged that the Yumbos lived without social organization, and were essentially “abusive, superstitious, and fetishistic” in their belief system, regardless of whether they had converted to Catholicism or not.102 Like other observers, Granja noted their similarity to the Indians of the Sierra due to the system of patronage that had been established among them. “Submissive and pacific as they are,” he wrote,

they have always been moored to the yoke of their amos [patrones]: rubber, first, gold later, and until today, they have these miserable pariahs sold to the most pitiless exploitation. Sold for astronomical and unknown rates that the Indian knows as ‘debts’. Debts that are never canceled, and that are transmitted from parents to children.

There was hope, however, that the development of infrastructure between the Sierra and the Oriente jungle “will give birth in the Yumbo’s conscience his true place in the national concert, as a free citizen. His work will be for himself and for his Patria, not for his executioners.”103 In this view, the Yumbo was a member of the national community that was waiting in the wings; their benefit to the nation could only be realized once progress was made on other fronts. Once again, the condition of the Yumbo was a yardstick for what Ecuador hoped to achieve in the Amazon.

Moysés Segundo Mosquera published several articles over a period of some years in the Dominican magazine, El Oriente Dominicano, but he was not a missionary priest himself; rather, he was a schoolteacher willing to share his personal experiences with the Yumbos in various parts of the Oriente. Mosquera’s article, “My Friends the

Yumbos,” from 1939, begins with a discussion of the etiquette generally observed

101 Ibid., 50-51.

102 Ibid., 77-78.

103 Ibid., 82.

181 between Yumbos and visitors from outside their social group. Mosquera described the

Yumbos as a bit melancholy, and substantially ignorant. They were hypocrites and deceivers, but were a proud race that held their own civilization in high regard. They were patient, industrious, and were satisfied by few possessions. In their home life, pastimes, and personal relations, “we will find more similarities than differences with ourselves.”104 Mosquera had an optimistic view of the Yumbos’ chances for incorporation into Ecuadorian society, as he said, “It is not difficult for them to acquire our civilization, but it is difficult to dominate the barbarous character of the Yumbo.”105 In a later article for the same magazine, Mosquera compared the Yumbo to the Jívaro.

Tourists in the region could not at first tell the difference, he affirmed, but nevertheless there were important distinctions, both physically and culturally. The Yumbos were

“reserved and somber” while the Jívaros were “voluble and talkative”; this indicated a difference in their moral disposition. The Yumbos, in fact, considered the Jívaros to be superior to them. This despite the fact that the Yumbos had completely adopted monogamy, thanks to the efforts of the missionaries, in contrast to the polygamous

Jívaros.106

Mosquera continued his discussion of Oriente Indians in the pages of the

Dominican magazine in 1943, with his article, “Psycho-analysis of the Oriente Indians.”

He divided the Amazonian Indians into two basic types, with thirty separate races among them. The Yumbo type inhabited the full extent of Napo-Pastaza province and

104 Moysés Segundo Mosquera Z., “Mis Amigos los Yumbos,” El Oriente Dominicano 12, no. 78 (September 1939): 175.

105 Ibid., 196.

106 Moysés Segundo Mosquera Z., “Diferencias entre el Jíbaro y el Yumbo o Quichua,” El Oriente Dominicano 15, no. 116 (November 1942): 307-08.

182 were of medium height, with cinnamon- or copper-colored skin, wide faces, and large lips. They had a lively intelligence, particularly during their youth. Their laziness was

“proverbial,” but they possessed a profound attraction to justice, were of sound judgment and cordial character. Their knowledge was somewhat rudimentary, as they could not count except with their fingers, and did not make exact distinctions of months, years, and decades. As other writers noticed, the Yumbos lived under the sway of the brujo, who was their doctor, teacher, and lord, believed to have fantastic powers.107 Of the second major Oriente type, the Jívaros, Mosquera repeated many of the traditional tropes about the group. While they were not too physically distinct from the Yumbos, and shared some customs, such as the consumption of chicha (a drink made from fermented manioc), they were distinguished by the overbearing spirit of revenge that moved them to engage in constant warfare and take tzantzas (shrunken heads) as trophies.108

Mosquera recognized certain subdivisions among the Yumbos and Jívaros but did not elaborate on the differences between these groups. Some Dominican contributors to El Oriente Dominicano did, however, describe the distinct qualities of certain Oriente peoples. The missionary priest Bernardo M. Espinosa wrote an article in

1943 about the Indians who lived in the village of Sarayacu that did not conform to all of the stereotypes about Yumbos or Jívaros. Father Espinosa stated that robustness was the salient characteristic of the Sarayuqueños, and their women rivaled creole women of the Sierra for their beauty. The Indians of Sarayacu were not frozen in time; in

107 Moysés Segundo Mosquera Z., “Psico Análisis de los Indios Orientales,” El Oriente Dominicano 16, nos. 123-124 (June-July 1943): 169-170.

108 Ibid., 171.

183 Espinosa’s description, these people, who had mixed with Jívaros and also whites over the years, had seen their lives essentially transformed in the previous fifty years. The source of these changes was the coming of more whites from the Sierra and the Shell

Petroleum Company, whose oil explorations in the area had given work to the

Sarayuqueños. They dressed elegantly, with good shoes, and appeared in their best on

Sundays and during festivals. Espinosa was impressed by their defense of their way of life and their independence. They openly protested the presence of the Ecuadorian military detachment in their territory, the soldiers of which invaded their homes and imposed burdensome labor.109 Their material necessities were few, but important; namely, they were suffering from the rising prices of clothing because their work no longer earned them enough money to buy vestments. Among the Sarayuqueños, there was no class division nor ambition for material wealth; “there is only the conformity of a people with enormous pride in the destiny of their race and their few material necessities.”110 The brujos were probably the most troublesome ill in Sarayacu society, according to Espinosa, as they possessed disproportionate power, and were able to deprive an Indian in their debt of all their possessions. Despite the importance of brujos in their society, however, the desired a more permanent missionary presence among them and more guarantees from the state for their freedom, their work, their women, and their property. They also desired that better civil authorities be sent, not simply more “caciques” (chiefs). In Espinosa’s view, “the resolution of their still-latent

109 Bernardo M. Espinosa, O. P., “San Antonio de Sarayacu,” El Oriente Dominicano 16, no. 123- 124 (June-July 1943): 177-178.

110 Ibid., 179.

184 nomadism depends on these three aspirations being attended.”111 Espinosa’s account of the people in Sarayacu is important because it paints them not just as Yumbos of a general sort, but as a distinct pueblo with particular traditions and goals. Their objection to certain state policies, such as the military garrison, and their acceptance of others, such as the Dominican missionaries, showed them to be a group that state policy could not simply be acted upon.

The article written that same year, by Juan Manuel Vaca Obando, titled “The

Oriente pueblo of Canelos,” also discussed a particular group of Indians, who lived in and around the missionary center of Canelos. The Canelos tribe, in Vaca’s view, was a

“sovereign and free tribe like their rivers and mountains,” but was also a “defeated race” principally characterized by sadness and melancholy, which was shown off in their propensity for getting drunk off of chicha. Their sad condition was not entirely their fault, however; rather, civilized society and the government were to blame, for ignoring the region and for failing to hear the cries of the “savage.” In contrast to the opinion of the

Sarayuqueños as described by Mosquera, Vaca believed that the presence of the nearby military garrison was a positive good, despite some complaints lodged against it.

He saw the labor of the soldier who “lives the life of the Indian” as admirable, and praised the soldiers’ construction of buildings and repair of roads.112 The Canalenses’ potential, it seems, must be tapped through their contact with whites and the works of the state.

111 Ibid., 179-180.

112 Juan Manuel Vaca Obando, “El Pueblo Oriental de Canelos,” El Oriente Dominicano 16, no. 127-129 (October-December 1943): 281.

185 A different view of the Canalenses was offered by the Dominican Father Agustín

María León, who in 1945 contributed the article, “My Happy Memories of the Dominican

Mission of Canelos.” For León, the Indians of Canelos were more impressive than the natural phenomena of the Oriente. They stood out above the peoples of Napo,

Archidona, Pacayacu, and Sarayacu for their “lively, bellicose character” and for their sharp observations of nature. Like philosophers, they made analogies and comparisons between the customs of whites from different highland cities, making both confusing and clear deductions about them. León stated that the Canalenses had a consciousness of their origins as a people, stating that they came from Riobamba, in the central highlands, where they labored in obrajes (textile mills) in a previous era. Like Vaca,

León saw that the Canalenses yearned to be free and independent. They detested white authorities and resisted even the authority of the Dominicans. Nevertheless, they had acquired notions about a Supreme Being thanks to their “liberal character,” their

“reasoning,” and their “rich fantasy, their tenacious memory.” The Canalenses did not passively accept knowledge, however: they were great arguers, and struggled to explain why some whites in the area could be bad if God was good. Some qualities of the Canelos Indians were lacking, especially the propensity for idleness among the fathers. They were prone to drinking too much, which posed a major challenge to the priests. They did, however, govern themselves to a certain degree, thanks to the

Indigenous authorities, or varayos, that governed with respect for the freedom of their associates, mutual aid, concern for internal disturbances, and vigilance that the pueblo was not attacked by its enemies. They directed festival days and narrated stories of the past, and discussed their philosophy and the intelligence of the tribe. In León’s

186 estimation, the missionaries had to work very carefully among these people, taking many years to sow the seeds of civilization and culture. He closed by commenting on a planned trip to the Oriente by the President of the Republic:

the Dominican missionaries have worked as champions of Christian Civilization, such that the Canelos people accept the grandiose ideals of our enlightened current President. His providential visit to the Dominican Oriente would form a glorious page, he would see with his own eyes how much we have lost, how much we have to work in these rich, beautiful, and heavenly zones.113

In referencing what was “lost,” León referred to the years of relative neglect of the

Oriente by the state authorities. This article sought to convince the magazine’s readers that there was great potential in the Indian pueblos of the Oriente; his view of the

Canalenses as intelligent, educable, and proud painted them as potentially productive citizens, but only if the region received the requisite attention from other missionaries and the state alike.

El Oriente Dominicano generally expressed the optimistic view of Padre León more often than the notion that the Oriente’s Indians, whether Jívaro or Yumbo, were unredeemable or negative factors in the national community. An editorial from 1946 argued that the Indian from the Oriente deserved given special consideration when discussing the incorporation of the Indian into the Ecuadorian family. The Oriente was populated by tribes that were as varied as they were numerous, each with their own customs, special manner of life, and dialects. “In fact, what is the Oriente Indian for the patria?” the editorial asked. “Simply, he is an Ecuadorian. But he is such as a social element that demands compassion and charity to be incorporated to the conscious

113 Padre Agustín María León, “Mis gratos Recuerdos de la Misión Dominicana de canelos,” El Oriente Dominicano 18, nos. 146-148 (May-July 1945): 149-150.

187 citizenry.” The editorial recognized the changes taking place in the Oriente with the increasing presence of outsiders, and highlighted the special role of the missionaries:

to the Oriente goes the colonist, the soldier, and the missionary, all with Ecuadorian spirit, but with different aims. The colonist is interested in creating his economy; the soldier, to defend the territory and keep order; only the missionary cares for the condition of the Indian and above all that of his soul.

The Indians needed schools, certain guarantees to be able to live safely with the white, and good examples to follow out of his “uncertain and primitive life.” Policy toward the

Indians of the Oriente must be different from that for Indians of the Sierra, as the latter type of Indians “carry the scar of defeat by the stronger” while the former were “free in their barbarism.” A union of efforts was needed to convince the Oriente’s Indians to live a hygienic, economic, and religious life, with conscious and cultivated love for country.

This was not merely the task of the missionary: “it is necessary that all, on the impulse of sincere cordiality, give us [the missionaries] a hand, to later extend it to the Indian of the Oriente, who more than any Ecuadorian, requires the preoccupation and aid of the

Patria.”114 In this view, the Indians of the Ecuadorian Amazon were a project for the entire national community. They were themselves “Ecuadorians,” but not yet fully ready to participate as citizens. Since they did not “carry the scar of defeat,” their potential was perhaps greater than the Indians of the Sierra with whom most Ecuadorians would have been familiar.

The views of the Yumbos cultivated by secular and ecclesiastical authors were echoed by state officials in the Oriente itself in their private communications. In April of

1953, the governor of Napo-Pastaza Province, Victor Hugo Chiriboga Dávalos, wrote to the Minister in Quito who oversaw the Oriente’s administration. Chiriboga gave a report

114 “Indigenismo Orientalista,” El Oriente Dominicano 19, no. 155-56 (February-March 1946): 25.

188 on his voyage of inspection along the banks of the Napo River, in territory inhabited by

Quichua-speaking Yumbo Indians. His journey was provoked by reports from white colonists in the region that a certain white colonist formerly from the Napo region and now residing in Colombian territory, along with some Indians under his sway, were trafficking Indians out of Ecuadorian territory to work for Colombian interests on the promise of money, tools, and supplies. The Governor’s response to this problem reflected his beliefs about the Indians in question. “The indigenous class,” he wrote,

simple and credulous, has shown favorable reception, and enthusiastically has been disposed to abandon the patronos that populate the banks of the Napo, emigrating en masse and dangerously depopulating the few properties of whites that currently…exist in Aguarico Canton.

The governor feared that Indians would be particularly susceptible to anti-Ecuadorian propaganda spread by outsiders. He went to different Indian settlements and told those he encountered that leaving national territory would be severely punished, and warned against diseases in foreign areas. He informed the Indians that if they leave their patronos, “they will have to lament all kinds of disgraces that will befall them, because when one abandons the Homeland which is the place where one was born, they are punished by God and by man.” He used a variety of means to convince them to remain content and tranquil with their patronos, and heard confessions from certain indigenous leaders that had planned to leave the territory. He convinced them that if they left the

Napo area, they would certainly go to disaster and death. “It was necessary to scare them a bit,” he wrote to the Minister, “to achieve the complete stability of the Indians.”

The governor’s main concern was to prevent a depopulation of the Napo region like what had occurred in the Aguarico region decades earlier, where the lack of attention by authorities meant that the population of both Indians and white colonists was reduced

189 by three quarters.115 The Governor’s letter displays the extent to which the progress of the Oriente depended upon the Indians of the region. The Indians were not, however, seen as a dynamic force in this; rather, they were the necessary labor force, “simple and credulous,” and prone to believing exaggerated claims from white officials. They were necessary but not trustworthy, and the Governor’s actions toward them were hardly those of an official toward full citizens.

Political and religious leaders continued to shape popular perceptions of the

Yumbo Indians in the 1950s. Readers hoping to learn about the efforts of the Josephine missionaries in the Napo region could consult the priest Pedro I. Porras Garcés’s biography of Bishop Jorge Rossi, the second Apostolic Vicar of the Napo. The work is mostly an account of Rossi’s life and deeds in the Oriente, but it also contains a wealth of information about the Yumbos among whom Rossi lived. Porras described the

Yumbos as nomads, perfectly adapted to a jungle environment; their big toes were almost prehensile.116 They were indolent, passive, and took pleasure at the misfortune of others. They were stoic, and curious like children. Despite some bad qualities, then, the Yumbos had certain qualities that “Ecuador and the prudent missionary should take advantage of in the task of regenerating the tribe.” Like earlier observers, Porras wrote that the Yumbos were without ambition, and were contented by only meager possessions. Even those converted Yumbos were unconcerned about the afterlife and

115 Victor Hugo Chiriboga Dávalos, Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza, to Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, May 6, 1953, AMG.

116 P. Pedro I. Porras Garcés, C. S. J., Entre los Yumbos del Napo: Recuerdos y Anécdotas del Obispo Josefino Mons. Jorge Rossi, Segundo Vicario Apostólico del Napo (Quito: Edit. Santo Domingo, 1955), 144.

190 religion, with animistic beliefs about the jungle, rivers, trees, and animals.117 Porras advised future missionaries in the region that they faced a difficult task of wresting the

Indian’s soul away from such superstitions; indeed, it would be easier to deal with pagans than with the pseudo-Christian Yumbos.118 Many of Porras’s chosen anecdotes about Bishop Rossi would suggest to his readers that the Yumbos were capable of learning better ways, especially from such figures as Rossi. According to one anecdote, some “propagandists of a certain heretical sect” purchased a hacienda and its indebted

Indians in the Napo region. Rossi convinced the Indians that they had a right to free choice in education, so they refused to attend the heretical school on that hacienda, opting instead for the school at the Josephine Mission.119

During the 1950s, leading Ecuadorian statesmen also contributed to popular perceptions about the Oriente’s indigenous peoples, including the Yumbos. Alberto

Sarmiento, Oriente propagandist and congressman, did not devote much space to describing the Yumbos in his first book; like many before him, he alleged that they had much in common with the Indians of the Sierra, except for their “evident backwardness in civilization.”120 His later work, Scientific Monograph of the Ecuadorian Oriente, from

1958, gave the Indians of the Oriente a lengthier treatment. His descriptions pointed to the indelible nature of certain negative views of the Yumbos. Furthermore, his general comments about the Indians of the region described a people living as a relic of a bygone age. As he wrote, “their soul does not live at the rhythm…of our civilization,

117 Ibid., 148-150.

118 Ibid., 154.

119 Ibid., 251.

120 Alberto Sarmiento, Biografía del Río Napo, 137.

191 rather they appear to live in the past; for this reason they are taciturn and sad.”121

According to Sarmiento, the Yumbos considered the Jívaros to be their superiors. The

Yumbos, of all the different indigenous races in the Oriente, were

the most abandoned, at the margin of all the progress of contemporary civilization, sunken without remedy to possible future salvation, in the abyss of the most shocking misery, like shipwrecked beings lost on a deserted and inhospitable island far from all shipping routes.

They were passive, submissive, unconcerned with the future, fearful of whites, and prone to drinking and sensuality. They indebted themselves to patrones for their protection, but did have certain virtues such as fidelity, bravery, and nobility.122 As a member of Congress, Sarmiento promoted legislation to benefit the Oriente region; from these descriptions, it seems clear that Sarmiento did not see the potential in the

Yumbos that others did.

By the late-1950s, cities in the Oriente had grown to the point that they could produce popular publications of their own, thereby controlling to a degree how the region’s inhabitants were understood by readers in other parts of the nation. One example was the magazine Arrebol, published in the northern Oriente city of Tena as an organ of the Colegio San José, which was jointly run by the government and the

Josephine mission. In 1959, the magazine ran an article called “This is What the

Yumbos are Like (Así Son los Yumbos)”. The article described the Yumbos’ submissive or apathetic nature that allowed patrones to mistreat them to an incredible extent.

However, unlike Sarmiento’s description, the article suggested a great deal of their potential. The Yumbos were gifted in the manual arts, and effectively used medicinal

121 Alberto Sarmiento, Monografía Científica del Oriente Ecuatoriano, 10.

122 Ibid., 50-51.

192 plants against all classes of malady. Yumbo children were often smarter than their white contemporaries, but the vices that still predominated in their household eventually caught up to them. Civilized Yumbos liked to dress well, and in general “the mentality of the Indian has changed so much that centers of primary, secondary, and professional education find themselves materially assaulted by Indians desiring culture.” The magazine’s propagandistic nature is clearly seen in its exclamation: “what human capital of top quality has Ecuador in the Oriente!”123

Another magazine published in Tena, Oriente, also sought to spread knowledge about the indigenous inhabitants of the area. One contributor, Rodrigo Mendoza Vega, praised the qualities of the Yumbos. In a reversal of Sarmiento’s statements about the comparison between Sierra and Oriente Indians, Mendoza wrote that the Yumbo was

“more awake and alive than the Indian of the Sierra.” He was an admirable artisan, capable of masterworks. Still, he was indolent, without foresight, uninterested in the future, and lacking a desire to better his condition. Children risked losing the progress they made in school by returning to their home where poor customs reign. Like others, he noted that Yumbos made terrible fathers, and that women were treated merely as domestic laborers.124 Bruno Rubio, another contributor to the same issue, described the

Yumbos as having a happy, carefree nature, characterized by laughing at the misfortune of others. They were satisfied by very little, and had a very literal view of the world. As he explained, “I do not exaggerate when saying that the Indian’s mentality is mysterious; for him there is no abstract nor complex notions; everything is real, material; there are no mysteries.” Rubio concluded on a very optimistic note, however:

123 “Así Son los Yumbos,” Arrebol 9, (1959): 30.

124 Rodrigo Mendoza Vega, “Las Razas y su Ubicación,” Oriente (February 12, 1961): 32.

193 despite all these prejudices, we believe that the Indian can become civilized and becoming civilized will come to be a valuable element in the future of the region; but it is necessary for the government to take greater interest; we believe also that their [the Indians’] numbers deserve attention and that they are the basis of the economy of the region.125

In Rubio’s view, the Indians were somewhat eccentric and challenging members of the national community, but promising ones nonetheless. Like other authors, he used their potential as a way to exhort the government to give more attention to the region.

Proposals for Incorporating New Compatriots

Ecuadorian writers did not merely observe and describe the “Yumbos” and

“Jívaros” of the Oriente. They also proposed programs that they believed would help incorporate these groups into the national community. These proposals show the influence that prevailing notions about Amazonian Indians could have on policy; the dissemination of these proposals in turn repeated but also modified these notions. In some cases, civic organizations were the authors of such proposals. In September of

1927, the Quito’s daily newspaper, El Comercio, published an article from Carlos

Alberto Flores, in Guayaquil, about the statutes of the Comité Patriótico Orientalista de

Señoras, or, the Ladies’ Patriotic Orientalist Committee, of that city. The Committee existed to “sponsor the foundation of schools of arts and trades, institutions that will awaken in the Indian love for work and civilization, keeping in mind that the Jívaro is himself hardworking and industrious within the imagination of his primitive, natural state.” As evidence for these characteristics, Flores cited the recent exposition of Jívaro handicrafts that took place in the city of Guayaquil under the direction of the Salesian missionaries. The Committee also planned to work with the same missionaries toward

125 Bruno Rubio, “Usos y Costumbres,” Oriente (February 12, 1961): 35-37.

194 the construction of roads and bridges. The benefits of this collaboration would be significant; as the article states,

the imagination expands, mentally contemplating the opulent collection of agricultural products that ferocious nature can offer in the Oriental region, when the autochthonous Indian, well instructed and directed, knows and dedicates himself to the exploitation of his fecund and admirable wilderness.

In Flores’s view, by civilizing the Indian, the ladies of the committee were responding to the imperative of their “racial superiority,” and even continuing the work begun by

Bartolomé de Las Casas by taking the Indian out of the “slavery of ignorance.”126 This article contained several currents of thought in Ecuadorian society about the Amazonian region and its indigenous peoples. The improvement of the region was seen as a duty not just for state officials, but for private individuals. The Jívaros were a race with great potential, but needed to be rescued from themselves by the work of outsiders. When that was done, the benefits to the nation in general, in this case thanks to agricultural wealth, would be incalculable.

The magazine Miscelánea also contributed to the discussion of policy to be enacted in the Oriente, publishing a series of articles over two years written by Zoila

Rebeca Andrade as a re-printing of her thesis to become a licensed instructor at a normal school. Previously, she had been a teacher in the Napo Canton in the northern

Oriente. She recognized the difficulty of convincing Indians to attend school and religious services, so recommended increasing the number of civic and religious festivals in Oriente cities. “These are opportunities,” she wrote,

that should be taken advantage of to cultivate new manners, or excite the Indians to imitate what the white does, how the white dresses and lives. If

126 Carlos Alberto Flores, “El Comité Patriótico Orientalista de Señoras,” El Comercio, September 24, 1927.

195 we augment the number of festivals with attractions that maintain interest, we will have better opportunities to place [the Indian] in an adequate place for his acculturation.

The festivals should include music, as Andrade reasoned: “If one can tame reptiles through music, what will we say about its influence over a human that despite being savage is superior to them [?]”127 This is rather faint praise; Andrade was not blind, however, to the history and social conditions that led to the Indians’ unfortunate state.

“Until today,” she wrote, “the Indian has only been like an animal of production, like a mule for the transport of baggage and mail,” subject to the tyranny of whites. She argued that illiterate people could not resist the grave complications that life presents; the state, therefore, should take interest in their education. The whites in the Amazon were largely to blame for the Yumbos’ poor state:

certainly the Indian is considered an inferior race, but it is due to the absurd egoism of the civilized man that has the pretension of conserving the category of social classes, without allowing him [the Indian] to reach his rightful place, to dress like he [the white] dresses, to live like he lives, to drink what he drinks.

Andrade believed that, intellectually, the Indians had positive and negative attributes.

On one hand, they had supreme knowledge of their jungle environment and excellent memories; on the other hand, they were somewhat incapable of analytical and synthetic reasoning, finding it difficult to compare and to criticize.128

Like many authors, Andrade recognized certain essential differences between the Oriente’s indigenous groups. The Yumbos were easily domesticated and frequently lived in contact with white culture. The Jívaros were the opposite, preferring to live

127 Zoila Rebeca Andrade, “Las Escuelas de Oriente,” Miscelánea 2, no. 12 (May-June 1932): 54.

128 Zoila Rebeca Andrade, “La Escuela en el Oriente Ecuatoriano,” Miscelánea 2, no. 13 (July- August-September 1932): 10-11.

196 hidden in the jungle, hating the Yumbo, and practicing primitive customs. In Adrade’s view, the Jívaros were incapable of being civilized; the Oriente’s schools, therefore, should focus primarily on educating the Yumbos. This education would be directly related to the environment in which the Indians lived, with class schedules formed in relation to climate, and with instruction given about cultivation and manual labor. The aim would be to improve the Indians’ homes, customs, diets, clothing, and to eliminate superstitions.129 Andrade recognized that many Indians would be reluctant to send their children to school. It was therefore vital to make school seem a “necessary institution,” and to convince the Indians

that the knowledge their children gain in school will serve them in terms of better production of their crops, and also their industries and handicrafts. To me it does not seem convenient to obligate them to send their children to school under threat of fine; they should do it for interest and necessity.130

The education of the Indian, in her view, would serve a double purpose: to improve the conditions of the Indians and make them more productive members of the national community, and to reduce the pretensions and egoism of white colonists who have feelings of superiority. Andrade’s recommendation to have mixed classrooms of both

Indian children and the children of colonists was made with an aim to establishing mutual relations of equality.131 Andrade’s proposals for Indian education in the Oriente repeat many of the common tropes about the Yumbos’ personalities and mentalities, yet she does point out their positive characteristics and seems convinced of their ability to become more productive members of society, with the same potential as white colonists

129 Ibid., 12.

130 Zoila Rebeca Andrade, “La Escuela de Oriente- Organización de la Escuela,” Miscelánea 2, no. 14 (October-November 1932): 12.

131 Zoila Rebeca Andrade, “Las Escuelas de Oriente,” Miscelánea 3, no. 16 (January 1933): 16.

197 in the region. Like other authors, her estimation of the Yumbos was inextricably tied to her evaluation of white colonists and officials in the region, who were largely responsible for denying the potential of the Yumbos as a member of the national community.

Carlos Alvarez Miño, whose book The Jungles of the Ecuadorian Oriente discussed Jívaro culture at length, did not agree with Andrade that the Jívaros were beyond the help of education. In Alvarez’s view, the purpose of educating the Jívaros was to incorporate them “to the life of society’s machinery” and to achieve “the betterment of customs.” Teachers of Jívaros should be required to pass a special test, and should foster social activities outside of the classroom by visiting the homes of students to make sure they are provided with the necessities to improve social life.

Awakening the civic spirit would be one of the great duties of the teacher, as well as fostering relationships between their students and students in “civilized centers.” 132

Alvarez recommended also that the Ministry of Education provide one scholarship per

Oriente province for an Indian student to study in Quito or the nearest industrial school.133 The Jívaros, therefore, were not only educable, but could also benefit greatly from greater familiarity with the wider Ecuadorian nation.

Civic organizations in the Oriente also published their proposals for Indian education, such as the “Napo-Pastaza pro Indian Education Committee.” The committee was founded in November, 1933, with the goals of “making hygienic the soul and body of the Indians, with the aim of making them factors of greater utility for the

Patria, banishing their vices and superstitions and creating in them economical and moral habits, and thus knowing the necessities of life, they will in time engage in

132 Carlos Alvarez Miño, Las Selvas del Oriente Ecuatoriano, 43-45.

133 Ibid., 47.

198 honorable work.” The committee’s pamphlet, called Preparing the Citizens of Tomorrow, describes various schools in the Napo area and their materials, including movie projectors and large dormitories. Their curriculum included primary and moral instruction, physical education, and agricultural and livestock techniques. Indian girls would be taught to sew, to clean, to iron, and to cook. One necessity the committee cited is the collaboration of the government in forcing Indian parents to send their children to school, as well as requiring patrones to see the Indian children on their haciendas off to school. In the committee’s optimistic view, “within ten years, at most, the fruits of this labor will be cultivated and there will be more conscious and free citizens.” They affirmed that “in the brain and in the heart of the Indian there are true riches that, when developed, can serve as a basis for greatness of the nation.” Their pamphlet concludes by exhorting all Ecuadorians to contribute to this “important work,” indicating the proper address in Quito to which monetary donations could be sent.134

The magazine Miscelánea published more than just educational proposals. The magazine’s contributors believed that government intervention was needed in other arenas as well to improve the condition of the region’s Indians. Manuel María Rosales

P., a resident on the Napo River, published an article in 1935 lamenting the influence of the brujo, or witch doctor, among the Yumbo Indians of the Napo River area. Rosales asserted that the Indians’ belief in the powers of the brujo was a “second nature” that subjugated their rational side. “The belief in the brujo,” he wrote, “is the inseparable companion of his existence and oppressing or destroying his spirituality or reason, it makes him the most unfortunate and fatalistic individual.” Rosales believed that health

134 Comité Napo-Pastaza pro Educación Indígena, Preparando los Ciudadanos del Mañana, no publisher, no date, no pagination. In Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pólit, call number 915.2 / C733p.

199 services, including well-supplied hospitals, were a needed remedy that could gradually achieve the moral betterment of the Indian. Beyond simply establishing more hospitals, however, a disposition was needed that would make obligatory the Indians’ treatment and isolation in the hospital in case of sickness. He called upon the Jefes and Tenientes

Políticos of the region to enforce this disposition using police officers when necessary, forcibly taking sick Indians to the hospital. “When the Indian realizes that the medical assistance and care that the hospital provides gives him health,” Alvarez concluded,

“the sagra (brujo) will lose his influence and, now free from this superstition, the Indian will be, without doubt, better than he is today.”135 Rosales’s proposal illustrates how notions about Indians’ belief systems could convince non-Indians of the necessity for an interventionist state policy and an increase of state presence in the region.

The discussion of policy toward the Oriente’s Indians continued into the 1940s.

Throughout 1946, the Dominican magazine El Oriente Dominicano printed a long treatise on Indian education by Gabriel Garcés. These articles treat the question of educating the Indian in Ecuador more broadly, and do not focus specifically on the

Amazonian region. Garcés proposed that the policy approach to Indian education should be more holistic, focusing on the social and economic conditions of the Indians rather than viewing the school as an end in itself. Without land, a thriving economy, and a good system of work, a school for Indians would not solve the “problema indigenista ecuatoriano.”136 Garcés argued that the task was not to assimilate or incorporate the

Indian into white society forcefully. Instead, he argued, “we should make sure that the

135 Manuel María Rosales P., “El Indio Brujo y la Sanidad en el Oriente,” Miscelánea 5, no. 40 (January 1935): 25-26.

136 V. Gabriel Garcés, “Educación Indígena,” El Oriente Dominicano 19, no. 157 (April 1946): 58- 59.

200 Indian, in his own environment and life zone, improves completely and widely; that the

Indian crystalize his own energies and use means within his reach—education—to begin new phases of betterment.”137 According to Garcés, the life of the Indian was tied to the land and fundamentally agrarian, so Indian education should be grounded in the skills and needs of this lifestyle. Schools were a means rather than an end, so they should be tied to the systems of socioeconomic transformation that the Indian encountered in the rural environment.138 Garcés eventually turned to the Indians of the

Oriente, “whose number is considerable and constitutes, at least, a good portion of the sad and desolate Ecuadorian humanity.” He noted that their ethnic and social characteristics were distinct from those Indians of the Sierra, and that there was little scientific understanding of these peoples. He argued that most knowledge about those

Indians came from tourists, and even foreigners, and was subject to exaggeration and fantasy. He could only list the schools in the region without giving details, and admitted to his ignorance about Indian education “in that unsociable and fierce human environment that is the jibaría,” although as he wrote, “I presume that the savage Indian that accepts school is that who has left his savageness in the jungle!” Garcés painted a rather grim picture of the history of contact between Oriente Indians and outsiders.

Rubber traders had exploited the labor of the Oriente Indians while nothing had been done for their benefit. “Furthermore,” he wrote,

the penetration of colonists, whites and mestizos, brings with it the penetration of the indispensable commerce of alcohol taxes that serve magnificently to achieve the inexorable destruction of their race. It has

137 V. Gabriel Garcés, “Educación Indígena,” El Oriente Dominicano 19, no. 158-159 (May-June 1946): 94.

138 V. Gabriel Garcés, “Educación Indígena,” El Oriente Dominicano 19, no. 160 (July 1946): 141.

201 never been considered to defend the vitality, to defend the human permanence of these Indians that run the risk of disappearing.139

Garcés’s treatise demonstrates an understanding that the assimilation of the Indian was not necessarily a worthwhile or achievable goal, and that the social and cultural characteristics of Ecuador’s Indians should be taken into account when designing their schools. But his work demonstrates also the degree of ignorance about the Oriente and its peoples that could still exist among Ecuadorian thinkers, even as late as 1946 when the colonization of the Oriente had proceeded at an increasing rate, and publications such as the same Oriente Dominicano had published articles about the region’s inhabitants for many years. One of Garcés’s only impressions of the Jívaros, for example, is that of ferocity and intractability. He also conveys the distinct impression of the Amazonian Indians as defeated and endangered races that are unable to cope with the changes taking place in the region.

Unlike Garcés, others with more direct knowledge of the Indians of the Oriente also contributed to the discussion on Indian education. Arrebol, the magazine published in the northern Oriente city of Tena, commemorated the tenth anniversary of the founding of the San José secondary school with a special issue in 1959. The author of the article, “The Indian and Education,” argued that there were

two powerful reasons to preoccupy ourselves with eagerness about the problem of the Indian: the first is that this humble and under-valued race for many is like the common denominator of the American nationalities…and secondly, there is no reason to distrust its progress, because it is a powerful race, capable of any cultural, industrial, and technical advance, like any other in the world.

139 V. Gabriel Garcés, “Educación Indígena,” El Oriente Dominicano 19, no. 161-162 (August- September 1946): 167-168.

202 The author strongly affirmed that the Indians were a valuable part of the nation, citing two important national figures with Indian blood: Eloy Alfaro, leader of the 1895 Liberal

Revolution, and the painter and sculptor Eugenio Espejo. The Indians’ perceived backwardness could be ascribed to the ambitions of landholders and “slavers” in the

Oriente and to the inferiority complex held by many Indians. Like many before, this author also cited the Indians’ unfortunate passivity, seen especially among Indian mothers who are “the most clumsy and apathetic picture of conformity.” In a view that called for a collaborative project toward the Indian’s progress, the author wrote,

the Indian can rise, but not alone. He needs the hand of the state and of the Catholic Church. These two forces are those that will graft culture into his mind, culture that will be the awakening of this mighty race that, far from being an inert weight for the national economy, as they are now, will be an example of glory and progress.

Legislation aimed at bettering the Indian in the Oriente, the author noted, had been largely ineffective. Schools, especially rural schools, both public and private, had been the source of progress. The results, the author affirmed, could not be better: “The Indian children in the first years of primary school, once they have learned Spanish, go in parallel to the white children in cultural achievement, with the advantage of being more able in graphical and manual activities in general.” Schools also saved the Indian children from the intellectually disabling effects of alcoholism, premature sexual corruption, and drug usage that reign in their households.140

These proposals for school reform repeat many of the traditional stereotypes regarding Oriente Indians’ passivity and cultural defects. Nevertheless, they are premised upon the Indian’s potential as a productive member of the national community, and therefore offer a more positive view than many of the contemporary

140 “El Indio y la Educación,” Arrebol 9 (1959): 14-16.

203 descriptions written by travelers, statesmen, and missionaries. These proposals also engage the arms of government and contribute to the notion that the progress of the

Ecuadorian state and nation in the Amazon was tied to the progress of the region’s indigenous inhabitants. This demonstrates that Ecuadorian perceptions of these people were greatly affected by how they were imagined as participants in the incorporation of the Oriente into the nation. The Oriente, as argued above, was a national object of desire in which hopes for the future and patriotic prestige were invested. The categories of Indian that lived there were also desired national objects because they were understood more in terms of their usefulness in this national endeavor than in terms derived from careful and close anthropological study.

204 CHAPTER 4 “SPECIAL LAWS” FOR A SPECIAL REGION: GOVERNING THE ORIENTE, 1900- 1948

As Ecuador entered the twentieth century, the Oriente was already a vital part of the national imaginary; it was a “national symbolic referent” in debates about public policy. Much had been said, and would continue to be said, about the wealth the region held. Its role in Ecuador’s future welfare was discussed in the press and other publications. As a national object of desire, the place of the Oriente grew more significant in public celebration and narratives of national history. A corpus of literature about the region’s indigenous people existed that described their ethnic characteristics in terms of their participation in the great national project of incorporating the Oriente into the state and nation. The administration of the region did not live up to these grand ideas, however. Rather than become a fully integrated section of the Republic, the

Oriente suffered from its status as a collection of “ancillary provinces,” which were meant to resemble the other provinces of Ecuador in form, but in reality were underfunded and disorganized. This led to five decades of near stagnation in the region as the government’s projection of provincial structures, with governors and other officials, failed to bring about the desired transformation. Although Ecuadorian statesmen, pushed by national imaginings about the promise of the Oriente, prescribed laws for the region, these laws could not function effectively given the conditions of the region. The laws passed provided, in the words of political scientist James C. Scott, a “schematic” for an intended social order. But as this chapter, as well as the following Chapters 5-7, based on archival evidence from the Oriente itself will show, this schematic was insufficient because it did not sufficiently take into account the conditions of the region.

205 A great amount of improvisation was required to establish a modus vivendi in the region, and the result was unlike what lawmakers envisioned.1

The Oriente Subject to Liberal Agenda

Statesmen and officials in Quito at the turn of the last century knew that the kinds of heady predictions spoken by Oriente propagandists were not coming true with any appreciable speed. Comparatively little had been done from a legislative point of view to make all these wishes for the future of the region come true. The region was subject to a series of “Special Laws” since the period before the Liberal Revolution of 1895, in which Eloy Alfaro seized power ahead of a coalition of the coastal bourgeoisie based in

Guayaquil that controlled the nation’s cacao export sector. The first of these laws was issued in 1885, providing for the basic administrative structure of the region, headed by a governor working in concert with subordinate Jefes and Tenientes Políticos, just as in other provinces.2 In 1894, the Ley Especial was modified to subdivide the Oriente into two provinces, each headed by a governor. It also provided for plots of land of not exceeding 200 hectares for colonist families, as well as monetary incentives for planting cash crops like rubber, cacao, and quinine.3 During the liberal period after 1895, the

Oriente attracted newfound attention from Ecuadorian political and economic elites, thanks to the continuing rubber boom in the Amazonian region, new liberal efforts at the consolidation of state power through the creation of new ministries and organs of

1 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 6.

2 El Congreso de la República del Ecuador, “Ley de la Provincia Oriental,” Leyes y Decretos de los Congresos de 1885 y 1886 y Decretos Ejecutivos de la Misma Época (Quito: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1887), 11-14.

3 “Reformas a la Ley Especial de Oriente,” Diario Oficial no. 294 (August 25, 1894): 2398.

206 government, and the interest paid by regional interest groups, such as those in the highland cities of Ambato, Riobamba, and Cuenca, toward adjacent sections of the

Oriente.4 This regionally based interest in the Oriente was perhaps reflected by the

1900 reform to the Ley Especial that divided the Oriente into four departments, each headed by a Jefe Político. This reform also stipulated that the police forces in the

Oriente were to work alongside the tax collectors in preventing contraband merchandise, as well as preventing the typical white abuses of Indians such as forced sales and debt peonage.5 The Ley Especial was modified once again in 1904, this time re-establishing a governorship with jurisdiction over the whole territory, now invested with some judicial and military authority.6 These modifications to the Ley Especial increased the number of officials in the Oriente and re-emphasized the Government’s desire to protect national territory and prevent the abuses of white commercial explorers against the region’s Indians. Overall, though, the liberal period did not see significant investment in the Oriente region. As historian Linda Alexander Rodríguez has explained, the Ecuadorian governments of that period did not develop effective taxation or fiscal policies, relying instead on the coastal banks related to the cacao export sector for revenue. This reliance on the export sector made the economy volatile, and prevented the accumulation of surplus.7 As Rodríguez argues, the liberal governments

4 Natalia Esvertit Cobes, "Incipiente Provincia: La Incorporación del Oriente ecuatoriano al Estado nacional (1830-1895)," (Ph.D. diss., Universitat de Barcelona, 2005), 426.

5 “Ley Especial de Oriente,” Registro Oficial no. 1257 (October 31, 1900): 9413-9417.

6 “Ley para el gobierno de la región Oriental,” Registro Oficial no. 925 (October 29, 1904): 9495- 9496.

7 Linda Alexander Rodríguez, The Search for Public Policy: Regional Politics and Government Finances in Ecuador, 1830-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 2-3.

207 did not invest in the Oriente at any significant level because the national population in the region remained low while parts of the Pacific coast region remained under- populated.8

Sources from the various government ministries that oversaw the Oriente during the liberal period help illustrate the various reasons that the modifications made to the

Ley Especial did not lead to that region’s success in administrative or economic terms.

The lack of adequate roads to the Oriente was a perennial problem; according to the

Minister of the Interior in 1903, the Oriente remained a “distant El Dorado” that was an

“unrealizable dream.” This made the implementation of the Special Laws impossible, according to the Minister; the prosperity promised by the “inexhaustible resources” of the region could not be achieved.9 According to the Secretary of Public Education, Mail

Service, and Telegraphs, the reform to the Ley Especial of 1904 had had little to no effect on the ground in the Oriente due to the lack of roads, both from the highland cities into the Amazonian region, and between different Amazonian settlements. According to this official, the needed laws were on the books, but there were not enough good public employees to carry them out. Even if there were, the slow communications in the

Oriente meant that they could do little to prevent abuses of Indians or invasions by

Peruvian commercial explorers. Nor could the administration in the Oriente properly prevent or punish public employees that broke the law.10 The next Secretary of Public

Education in 1906 highlighted the major difficulty the Oriente’s administration faced vis-

8 Ibid., 10.

9 Informe del Ministro de lo Interior y Policía, Obras Públicas, &a. al Congreso Ordinario de 1903 (Quito: Imprenta Nacional, 1903), 12.

10 Memoria del Secretario de Instrucción Pública, Correos y Telégrafos, etc. al Congreso Ordinario de 1905 (Quito: Tipografía de la Escuela de Artes y Oficios, 1905), XXXII-XXXIII.

208 à-vis the region’s Indian inhabitants. Given the scarce number of colonists from the highlands and the Pacific coast who had successfully established themselves in the

Oriente, public administration relied on the Indians for mail service, transportation of goods and travelers, road repairs, and construction of public buildings.11 Despite how much public officials relied on the Indians of the region, however, the Secretary highlighted the fact that the region’s Indians were prone to fleeing from the authorities, taking refuge in remote parts of the forest where the state’s presence was lacking.12

Given the history of abuses committed by both public officials and private entrepreneurs, as well as the punitive measures enacted by previous administrations, the Indians’ tendency to flee the government’s zone of influence in the Oriente is not surprising.

Other factors also kept the Indians away from the sphere of influence of the

Oriente officials and the Ley Especial. In 1907, Carlos A. Rivadeneira, a public official posted in the Napo River area, echoed a common complaint by Oriente officials that the rubber boom had led to the serious de-population of the Ecuadorian sections of the

Amazon. According to Rivadeneira, nearly all the rubber trees growing in Ecuadorian territory had been used up, leading white caucheros to take large numbers of Indian men out of Ecuadorian territory in pursuit of untapped trees. This usually led to the destruction of Indian families. To prevent this occurrence, he suggested a new law mandating that all Indian workers be required to return to their native areas at least once a year. He was also concerned that the Indians in his sphere of influence were not

11 See also Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso.

12 Memoria del Secretario de Instrucción Pública, Correos y Telégrafos, etc. á la Convención Nacional de 1906 (Quito: Tipografía de la Escuela de Artes y Oficios, 1906), XXVIII.

209 learning “civilized” habits quickly enough; they failed to send their children to school and failed to set up revenue-generating farms on the white model. He proposed a number of regulations on Indian behavior toward these ends, and added that, “for all of this, Señor

Ministro, it is necessary to use violence, because it is not possible to govern semi- savage people with the same laws as civilized people, and for this I urge a new Ley

Especial for the Oriente.”13

Beginning in the year of its founding in 1906, El Comercio, a daily newspaper published in Ecuador’s capital of Quito, contributed to the public discussion about policy for the Oriente. In March of that year, El Comercio published an exposition for the

Council of Ministers authored by the cleric and historian Enrique Vacas Galindo. Before making recommendations, Vacas Galindo reviewed the history of the Oriente, and argued that the current situation was worse than it had been in the past when the region was attended to by a larger number of Catholic missionaries. The Jesuits who had operated in the northern Oriente, however, had left during the Liberal period of Eloy

Alfaro, leaving only the Dominican mission in the Pastaza River region of the central

Oriente and the Salesian mission in Gualaquiza and Santiago, further south. Vacas

Galindo argued that the re-establishment of missions and higher funding for existing

13 Carlos A. Rivadeneira, “Informe del Cantón Napo correspondiente al 30 de Junio de 1907,” Informe del Ministro de Instrucción Pública á la Nación (Quito: Imprenta Nacional, 1907), n.p. Two years later, he would be serving as governor of the whole Oriente, and in his report to the Ministry of Public Education (which was responsible for the Oriente) about Indian education, he stated, “For the Indians I believe that the only system is forced interment, to which the Indians of 10 to 12 years should be subject, and remain in school until they have been civilized and have acquired a profession and rational understanding of agriculture, and forgotten the vices and superstitions that impede the betterment of this race.” He added that the children in this system could be used to construct government buildings and schoolhouses. Informe del Gobernador de la Provincia de Oriente al Ministerio de Instrucción Pública, Oriente, etc. 1909 (Quito: Tipografía de la Escuela de Artes y Oficios, 1909), 30-31.

210 missions should be the government’s first step to incorporate the Oriente.14 He also recognized that the state would have an important role to play, urging the establishment of civil authorities among the indigenous people in the Napo and Pastaza River regions.

He suggested a roster of public employees, from a governor residing in the Napo region down to a corps of police officers with sufficient salaries. He noted the distrust that many Indians felt about white authorities, as they believed that they would become oppressive, so he suggested that the Tenientes Políticos, or the top officials at the parish level, should themselves be Indians.15 To people the region, Vacas Galindo recommended the creation of four pioneer agricultural colonies comprised of poor white families with experience in farming. Each family would receive a monthly stipend to ensure success. Public authorities would be placed near each colony to legalize and coordinate the land tenancy.16 In the view of Vacas Galindo, the Oriente would be more fully integrated into the national economy through the flourishing of smallholding farmers in the fertile lands along the region’s rivers and incipient roads.

El Comercio’s editors promoted other kinds of projects for the Oriente as well.

For example, in July of 1906, the paper urged the government to accept the proposal of one patriotic private individual to build a telegraph line to the Curaray River, in the central Oriente. This was necessary to ensure the territorial rights of the nation in the face of Peruvian ambitions. But it would also help curb the abuses frequently committed by the Oriente’s public officials who took advantage of isolation and lack of

14 Fray Enrique Vacas Galindo, “Memorandum al Excmo. Consejo de Ministros acerca de la Organización del Oriente,” El Comercio, March 3, 1906.

15 Fray Enrique Vacas Galindo, “Memorandum,” El Comercio, March 4, 1906.

16 Fray Enrique Vacas Galindo, “Memorandum,” El Comercio, March 7, 1906.

211 communication.17 El Comercio frequently highlighted the dismal quality of the Oriente’s state officials, and would do so for many years. Later in July, 1906, El Comercio’s editors criticized not only the region’s officials, but the entire structure of the Ley

Especial that was to govern the Oriente. As they stated, each of Ecuador’s provinces had improved since independence except for the Oriente. The Ley Especial, rather than promote justice in the region, had just given shelter to the state officials that were “true despots” who interpreted laws according to their whim and sought only to enrich themselves. For better results, El Comercio suggested dividing the region into two or three provinces with a greater number of public officials and higher salaries for each.

Such a transformation would allow the wealth of the region to be tapped and territorial integrity to be secured.18 As readers of El Comercio would see, good governance in the

Oriente was not just about protecting the region’s inhabitants from abuses; rather, it was the path to economic prosperity and international security and prestige.

Indeed, the actions of Peru in its own Amazonian region, and its encroachment into Ecuador’s, were often seen as a foil to Quito’s efforts in the region. In 1907, El

Comercio observed that any public official who accepted a post in the Oriente was committing a truly patriotic act; the employees there were subjected to “all sorts of calamities” as they lived in isolation among “ignorant and savage” Indians. The low pay they received was particularly problematic; Peru’s state officials in the Amazon, El

Comercio stated, were well supplied and amply remunerated.19 In 1908, news of

17 “Telégrafo al Curaray,” El Comercio, July 4, 1906.

18 “La Región Oriental,” El Comercio, July 17, 1906.

19 “El Gobierno y los Empleados del Oriente,” El Comercio, February 23, 1907.

212 Peruvian encroachment into Ecuadorian territory prompted El Comercio to call for a planned colonization project that would lead to the foundation of a genuine pueblo in the

Oriente to serve as the “axis on which the institutions of a future civilization turn, that will be a factor of wealth and progress and a guarantee of security for the whole nation.”

The current situation in the Oriente settlement of Archidona, in the Napo River region, was unacceptable, for the place had only thirteen houses inhabited by white citizens, including those of the Teniente Político and a missionary priest. Colonization by hardworking citizens was needed so that it could serve as an example for the Indians of the region.20

Such projects could only be accomplished with adequate funding set aside for the Oriente in each year’s Presupuesto, or budget. The liberal period after 1895 saw a tripling of government revenue, mostly thanks to customs duties gained from the booming cacao export sector.21 This did not, however, satisfy Oriente officials’ desire for more funds for administration in the Amazon region. In 1910, El Comercio reported that the sum of 100,000 sucres destined for the Oriente that year was far too low to ensure adequate salaries for the region’s state officials. The covetous gazes of Ecuador’s neighbors, and the fact that the future prosperity of Ecuador lay in the Oriente, were

20 “En el Oriente,” El Comercio, May 30, 1908. El Comercio’s readers would be well aware of the vital role that the region’s Indians played in the working of the state. As the paper reported in 1909, mail service in the Oriente was carried out exclusively by Indians who were forced to leave their families and endure the long journey from the Napo River region, over the Andean páramo, to reach Quito at great personal risk. As El Comercio suggested, new post offices should be established along this route so that no Indians were forced to make the entire journey. The difficult tasks imposed by the Oriente’s public officials were the reason that the Indians viewed whites with distrust and fear. “Correos del Oriente,” El Comercio, August 18, 1909.

21 Enrique Ayala Mora, Historia de la Revolución Liberal Ecuatoriana (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1994), 279.

213 cited by El Comercio to contextualize this problem of lack of funds.22 The Minister of

Public Education, whose ministry was responsible for the Oriente’s administration, in his

1912 report to Congress spoke frankly about the budgetary situation in the region. As he stated, “all Ecuadorians look to the Oriente; all think about the brilliant future that time reserves for this rich and privileged portion of the national territory; all yearn to see it converted into a civilized and prosperous country.” According to the minister, a lack of ideas was not what kept the Oriente from living up to its potential, but simply a lack of funds. He stated that the budget for the year only provided the “miserable sum” of

100,000 sucres—which he noted was used up completely in only the payment of employees’ salaries, leaving none for bridges, roads, government buildings, farms, colonies, and other necessities. Government officials in the Oriente at that time did not even have canoes or riverboats with which to visit the different areas of their jurisdiction.

The minister issued an ultimatum: either the Government finally assign a quantity of at least 200,000 sucres for the Oriente, in addition to fully funding a new road, passable by horse carts, or Ecuadorian statesmen should simply cease discussion of the “great problem” of the Oriente.23

Eudófilo Alvarez, who was Intendente General del Sur de Oriente in July of 1912, wrote to his superiors to complain that, in fact, the budget for the Oriente should be one million sucres, and should provide for the construction of, among other things, wireless telegraph service in the region. He noted that Peru had already surpassed Ecuador by

22 “El Presupuesto del Oriente- Sus Omisiones,” El Comercio, January 5, 1910.

23 L. Becerra, Informe del Ministro Secretario de Instrucción Pública, Correos, Telégrafos, etc. a la Nación 1911-1912 (Quito: Tip. De la Escuela de Artes y Oficios, 1912), 35-36.

214 adding wireless service in that nation’s own Amazonian region.24 The Jefe Político of

Pastaza Canton, in his letter to Alvarez, reiterated the importance of Indian labor for the government’s operations in the Oriente, asking that the budget provide funding for the purchase of bolts of cloth with which to pay Indians for road work and construction of government buildings. His near complete reliance on the Indians for carrying out his responsibilities is illustrated by his request for money to buy canoes; normally, he depended on the use of Indian canoes to carry messages, but when Indians were away from centers of provincial authority, he was left without the means to enact the Leyes

Especiales in any settlement other than the one in which he was stationed.25

Vías de comunicación, routes of communication or roads, were of primary concern to Ecuadorian statesmen, as they would facilitate contact between the capital and the Oriente settlements, would allow the export of commercial products through

Ecuadorian ports, rather than through Peruvian customs houses in Iquitos (further down the Napo River), and they would facilitate the immigration of colonists from the highlands and the coast into the Amazonian lands. But the need for canoes, cloth, and public buildings detailed in the communications above make clear that roads were not necessarily a panacea. Other needs were many and pressing; Luis N. Dillon, Minister of the Interior, in 1913 related that the area around the Morona River in the Oriente was suffering from an outbreak of various dangerous illnesses, and completely lacked a store of medicine, let alone a doctor, to treat the Indian and white residents of the area.

24 Eudófilo Alvarez, in Informe del Ministro Secretario de Instrucción Pública, Correos, Telégrafos, etc. a la Nación 1911-1912, 318.

25 A. Ramírez, in Informe del Ministro Secretario de Instrucción Pública, Correos, Telégrafos, etc. a la Nación 1911-1912, 322.

215 The budget for the Morona region was sufficient only to pay the public employees, but not to provide the resources necessary to assure the health and safety of the people in that jurisdiction.26

The same Minister of the Interior, in his report to the Congress of 1913, made clear his feelings about the Leyes Especiales and their value for incorporating the

Oriente into the nation at large. Importantly, he points out that a lack of funding was not the only problem with a set of laws that were flawed to the core. In noting the “sad abandonment” in which the Oriente languished, he called attention to the

manifest absurdity of that Ley de Oriente which, instead of facilitating and making efficient the management of the affairs related to that region, has done nothing except make it clumsy, in all respects, to the point that the administration of the Oriente is more complicated and bothersome.

To illustrate this fact, he noted that the process for appointing a police officer in the

Oriente was much lengthier and more complicated than in any other part of the nation.

He also convoked a meeting of officials familiar with the Oriente and decided that, in order to stretch the 89,000 sucres assigned that year as far as possible, it would be better to reduce the number of employees in the region to the absolute minimum, so that they would have some money left over to pay for repair of bridges, public buildings, and some canoes.27 Other ministerial reports, and communication from Oriente officials reveal a similar series of complaints about the effectiveness of the Leyes Especiales and the difficulty of both controlling the abuses of white commercial explorers and

26 Luis N. Dillon, “oficio No. 102,” April 21, 1913, in Informe Anual que Luis N. Dillon, Ministro de Instrucción Pública, Correos, Telégrafos, &, presenta a la Nación en 1913 (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación de la Escuela de Artes y Oficios, 1913), 652.

27 Luis N. Dillon, Informe Anual que Luis N. Dillon, Ministro de Instrucción Pública, &., presenta al Congreso de 1913, Vólumen I (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación Nacionales, 1913), CVII-CX.

216 convincing the region’s Indians to adopt more “civilized” ways and thereby participate in the government’s efforts at state formation in the Amazon.

The need for roads was a frequent topic in El Comercio as it was in the official reports of the government ministries. As the newspaper reported in 1913, the inhabitants of the Napo River region, aware of the “sad abandonment” in which the government had left them, and desiring to foment colonization in order to defend against

Peru’s encroachments, had raised from among themselves nearly twenty thousand sucres to be put toward road construction. Unfortunately, after they handed the sum over to the Ministry of Public Works, nothing had been done. In the meantime, their public officials sought only “personal lucre” by exploiting the Indians and oppressing the colonists, and by investing state funds in personal projects.28 In 1914, El Comercio’s editors argued that responsibility for governing the Oriente should be shifted out of the hands of public employees and vested more fully in the hands of missionaries like the

Jesuits who, before their expulsion, maintained “flourishing” settlements that could have been commercial centers of great importance. Political sectarianism, particularly liberal distaste for Catholic missions, ended this golden period and led to a situation in which the Indians viewed whites purely as tyrants and exploiters. The current corps of governors, Jefes and Tenientes Políticos were all people who could not find work anywhere else, and turned to the jungle to enjoy a salary and lack of oversight that permitted them to engage in exploitation of Indians.29

Complaints from various officials subordinated to the Ministry of Public Instruction illustrate the kinds of challenges they faced in administering the Oriente during the time

28 “Por el Comité Napo,” El Comercio, February 14, 1913.

29 “Misiones para el Oriente,” El Comercio, October 17, 1914.

217 period that the region was the responsibility of that ministry. Documents included in the

Ministry’s report to Congress demonstrate that state formation in the Amazon was vested in the hands of a relatively small number of public employees who were underfunded and under-resourced. In 1912, the Governor of the Oriente received instructions from the ministry to address the frequent problem of officials abandoning their post in the region. He was also instructed to order each Teniente Político, the highest parish- level state official, to cultivate a certain number of hectares of manioc, plantain, and rice, so that the Teniente Político and his subaltern employees could avoid purchasing food from “private individuals.”30 This assumed that these state-appointed officials actually existed, which was not always the case. In 1913, the Jefe Político of Napo

Canton, Alejandro E. Sandoval, wrote to the Ministry to report that the “Special Laws” for the Oriente could not be faithfully complied due to the lack of resources. The lack of funding meant that many parishes were without any state officials at all, which allowed

Peruvians seeking Indian labor for rubber tapping to de-populate the region. As he reported, his jurisdiction had once been home to “numerous tribes” living in the settlements of Archidona, Tena, and Puerto Napo. But the attraction of Peruvian and

Brazilian rubber enterprises had caused many Ecuadorians to emigrate, taking Indian families with them.31 The Indians, unfortunately, were subject to “twentieth century slavery” through “clandestine” work contracts signed by the rubber explorers. According to this Jefe Político, the many legislative and executive decrees for protection of the

30 L. Becerra to Sr. Gobernador de Oriente, Oficio No. 172, August 5, 1912, in Informe Anual que Luis N. Dillon, Ministro de Instrucción Pública, Correos, Telégrafos, &, presenta a la Nación en 1913 (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación de la Escuela de Artes y Oficios, 1913), 656.

31 Alejandro E. Sandoval, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Ministro de Oriente, Tena, May 30, 1913, in Luis N. Dillon, Informe Anual que Luis N. Dillon, Ministro de Instrucción Pública, &., presenta al Congreso de 1913, Vólumen I (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación Nacionales, 1913), 612-13.

218 Indian had had no effect in the region: the Indians’ “atavism” and “rusticity” moved them to accumulate large debts from the acquisition of manufactured objects, consigning them to perpetual servitude to the whites who took advantage of their knowledge of the

Indians’ characteristics. Those few Indians remaining in his jurisdiction without any ties to white patrones refused to engage in government work, such as mail service or road maintenance, out of fear of repercussions by the influential white colonists. From this

Jefe Político’s report, one can see that the lack of support for state employees in the

Oriente was a factor in causing the depopulation of the region’s Indians. This lack of

Indians undermined the mail service and transportation in the region, two factors necessary for the state to function properly. The Jefe Político suggested as a solution that the Congress of 1913 pass a colonization law that would bring people from the

Sierra into the region, filling the void left behind by the Indians and providing the manpower necessary for the various arms of the state to function.32

The Congress that year did quite the opposite, however. As the Minister of Public

Instruction reported in 1914, the Congress had left the Oriente out of the budget for

1914 entirely, initially supposing it possible to suspend administration of the Oriente altogether. So the Ministry of Public Instruction and the Ministry of Hacienda were forced to cobble together a “Special Budget for the Oriente,” securing a mere 46,256 sucres for the region, only about half of the amount assigned for the previous year.

Even though the Ministry had been able to advance some work on a road passable by horse carts from the eastern slope of the Andes toward the Napo River, in the Oriente, and had been able to re-establish the presence of a Teniente Político in some parishes

32 Ibid., 614-15.

219 in Napo and Pastaza Cantons, the minister insisted that a budget of at least 200,000 sucres was necessary for the following year; an amount that he and all of his predecessors had requested.33

At the outset of the First World War, then, Ecuador’s government had spent more than two decades pursuing an Oriente policy based on the implementation of “Special

Laws” for the region. The Amazonian portion of Ecuador would continue to be treated in this way by subsequent administrations; that is, as an object of policy distinct from the normal activities of administration that could be found in the Andean Sierra and the

Pacific Coast. For decades, responsibility for the Oriente would be passed from ministry to ministry, thereby preventing the development of institutional memory about the region’s problems and needs. Government officials would continue to cite a similar set of problems year after year, namely: the lack of adequate personnel for administration in the Amazon; the need for roads into the region; the desire to people the area through colonization; the need to establish a regime of personal property for the region’s land; and the campaign to both protect the region’s indigenous people from exploitation and at the same time bring them into “civilization.” As we will see, lack of funds and frequent changes in administrative responsibility for the Oriente made tackling these problems very difficult. Throughout, the Special Laws for the Oriente were applied with great difficulty to frustrating results. Fundamentally, these laws sought to establish an

33 Informe que Manuel María Sánchez, Ministro de Instrucción Pública, Bellas Artes, Correos, Telégrafos, &.. presenta a la Nación. 1914 (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación Nacionales, 1914), 92-94. The Ministry’s report in 1915 was much the same: 200,000 sucres were once again requested, and the region still lacked adequate resources. For example, the Minister cited the frequent “barbarous” killings between different tribes of Indians; it was impossible to punish those crimes due to lack of police forces. Only by raising the budget could the different administrative services in the Oriente be improved thereby providing a basis for the “so desired project of colonization and exploitation of our jungles.” Manuel María Sánchez, Informe del Ministerio de Instrucción Pública etc. 1915 (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernacion Nacionales, 1915), 203-205.

220 administrative system in the Oriente that, with a few differences, re-created most of the elements of administration in the highland and coastal provinces of the Republic. On paper, the Oriente had the parishes, cantons, and state officials of the rest of the country. In practice, these additional, extra, or “ancillary” provinces of the state were nothing more than an under-resourced and dysfunctional mirror image of the interior of the nation. A lack of funding and a failure to provide laws that adequately addressed the region’s needs accounted for this.

The 1916 report about the Oriente from Manuel María Sánchez, Minister of

Public Instruction, began by questioning the efficacy of the “Special Laws” for the

Oriente. In his view, they were not special enough: the political, administrative, and judicial organization they prescribed was practically the same as that of the interior of the country. The legislatures that had crafted the Ley Especial de Oriente did not appreciate the region’s particular conditions well enough to craft adequate laws. As

Sánchez wrote, “if laws, according to Montesquieu’s expression, must derive from the nature of things, it is logical to deduce that it is an anomaly to apply precepts that suppose a determined culture to territorial circumscriptions that lack it absolutely.”

Rather than try to re-create the administrative regime of the rest of the country as closely as possible, it was necessary to simplify the duties of state officials in the

Amazon, giving them only those attributions that were essential and freeing them up to follow their own initiatives. This might help state officials crack down on the abuses of patrones of Indians who kept their workers in virtual slavery. Also, the budget for the previous three years had remained at the paltry sum of 46,256 sucres. This had meant almost complete stagnation, as no roadwork, scientific studies, nor colonization

221 preparation had been carried out. The issue of funding was critical: being a public employee in the Oriente required not just “patriotic abnegation,” but also initiative, sagacity, and energy. Such employees deserved higher salaries.34

Sánchez’s 1916 report included a vision for a program of administration and incorporation of the region’s Indians into the nation. Sánchez reduced the region’s

Indians into two categories: “semi-savages,” who maintained some commercial relationships with the state authorities and the colonists, and the “savages” who lived deep in the jungle, “tenaciously conserving their primitive customs and the ferocity of their instincts.”35 The latter group engaged in polygamy and continuous warfare; the former group did not share these two unfortunate customs, but were otherwise very similar. This division into two groups reflects the division of the region’s Indians into the categories of “Jívaro” and “Yumbo,” as discussed in Chapter 3. Sanchez detailed how some Indians had proven useful in helping colonists with agriculture and roadwork, but generally preferred to spend their time hunting, fishing, and maintaining their weapons.36 “As you can see,” Sánchez wrote, “the situation of the Indians is lamentable.

To pull them out of extermination and to make them apt for civilized life is a project that cannot be postponed.”37 The solution he offered, based on advice from the various

Jefes Políticos of the Cantons of the Oriente, was to foment colonization by all means possible, as these colonies would teach agriculture and industry to the Indians, serving

34 Manuel María Sánchez, Informe que el Ministro de Instrucción Pública, Bellas Artes, Correos, Telégrafos, etc. presenta a la Nación en 1916 (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación Nacionales, 1916), CXXIII-CXXIV.

35 Ibid., CXXVI.

36 Ibid., CXXVII.

37 Ibid., CXXVIII.

222 as a model to be followed. A greater presence of colonists from the Sierra and greater funding for state officials would also help prevent abuses by patrones, allowing the

Indians to enter into healthy, productive commercial relationships with colonists. More funds were needed, though, to make this reality, including at least 50,000 sucres for road repair alone.38

The following year, 1917, was the last in which administration of the Oriente was assigned to the Ministry of Public Instruction. Little was done to change the administrative approach to the Oriente or increase its funding. The Minister cited the urgent need for the Legislature to fund a good road from the Sierra into each of the sections of the Oriente, without which any plan to exploit the wealth of the region would be disappointing and inefficient. Only 40,000 sucres were budgeted for the region, which was barely enough to sustain the personnel of the Jefaturas Políticas, the canton- level administrative centers.39 The Minister’s subordinates, in their reports to him, made it clear that a general sense of stagnation reigned in the Oriente. According to the Jefe

Político of Napo-Curaray Canton, in the northern Oriente, his jurisdiction had not really had any “administration” in the strict sense of the word. All 14,760 sucres assigned to it were spent entirely on employees’ salaries. Without money for working on roads, it was impossible to administer justice, as the state officials had no way of reaching the various places of their jurisdiction. The local indigenous population continued to dwindle as caucheros continued to raid the area for workers.40 The Teniente Político of Morona, in

38 Ibid., CXXIX.

39 Informe que el Ministro de Instrucción Pública, Bellas Artes, Correos, Telégrafos, etc. presenta a la Nación en 1917 (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación Nacionales, 1917), LX-LXI.

40 Coronel S. Franco, Jefatura del Cantón Napo-Curaray to Sr. Ministro de Oriente, Tena, May 30, 1917, in ibid., 231-32.

223 the south-central Oriente, complained that the road near Macas, the area’s main settlement, was nothing more than a “savage path.” In his jurisdiction, the Indians engaged in ferocious violence, but he did not have the sufficient number of police officers to do anything about it. As for the population of his jurisdiction, there was not really anything to report. He had managed to convince one Jívaro family to settle near the small government building by providing food. This was one of the few positive notes in his report, which was mostly full of necessities and complaints, such as the lack of medicine to combat the many endemic diseases.41 As El Comercio observed in April of

1917, the very fact that the Oriente was assigned to the Ministry of Public Instruction undermined the political and administrative regime established by the Constitution and proved that the region was viewed in government circles with secondary importance.42 It would not have been surprising to El Comercio’s readers that region’s budget was so low and its administration so ineffective. As the newspaper described, the “Problem of the Oriente” was due to the small number of isolated, feckless public officials who could do nothing to keep the region’s Indians from fleeing the tyranny of whites. Along with a small budget, this meant that the Oriente had regressed in the previous decade from an era in which there were flourishing settlements and an appreciable level of commerce.43

During the time that the Oriente was the responsibility of the Ministry of Public

Instruction, government officials articulated a view of the Oriente as rich and full of potential; however, that potential was squandered due to lack of funding and an

41 Carlos Romero A., Tenencia Política de la parroquia Morona to Sr. Ministro de Oriente, Morona, May 31, 1917, in ibid., 234-35.

42 “La Sección del Oriente,” El Comercio, April 14, 1917.

43 “El Problema del Oriente,” El Comercio, April 18, 1917.

224 inadequate number of state officials. The region’s Indians were in need of protection so that they could become useful collaborators with the project to incorporate the Oriente, during which they would become more civilized. Roads and colonization were the key to achieving this, but little progress was made. The goal was to make the Oriente into a full part of the nation; the Leyes Especiales prescribed how the arms of the state would accomplish this. But the Oriente occupied a low rung on the list of priorities for government attention and funding, despite the amount of attention paid to the region by propagandists and its place in national consciousness as an indispensable region.

El Comercio frequently lamented the deficient nature of government action while also reporting on signs of national enthusiasm for the region. In May of 1917, the editors praised the formation in Guayaquil of a Junta to promote colonization of the Oriente. As they stated, each provincial capital should form such an organization, as Ecuadorians could not watch Peruvians advance into national territory with their arms crossed indifferently.44 The editors also stated that enthusiasm for the construction of new roads, studying natural conditions, and exploring productive industry in the Oriente was palpable. In their view, indifference was giving way to action among Ecuador’s citizens.

But official support was lacking.45 Evidence for this came in a letter addressed to the

Minister of Public Instruction that was published by El Comercio. One señor Guerrero, the Teniente Político of Loreto Parish in the Napo River region, stated that as an authority in the region, it was his duty to preserve territorial integrity, prevent the emigration and poor treatment of Indians, administer justice, promote colonization, and

44 “Junta Colonizadora del Oriente,” El Comercio, May 3, 1917.

45 “Por el Oriente,” El Comercio, May 10, 1917.

225 foment agriculture. For all this, he demanded compensation; he could not accept such responsibilities ad-honorem and demanded the government pay him.46

In 1918, the Oriente’s administration had passed to the Ministry of the Interior. In that Ministry’s report to Congress, the myriad problems of the Oriente were reviewed anew, and initiatives and ideas were laid out. The Minister reviewed once again all the great wealth the region promised, and observed that all the “good will and patriotism of the Public Powers [had] crashed upon the great, insuperable reef that is the lack of funds.” Like his predecessors, the Minister put his faith in new road construction, stating that they would prove to be the arteries that tied together the inter-Andean region and the Oriente.47 But he also had to review some bad news: when he took over as Minister, there were various reports of infractions and bad discipline among the Oriente’s public employees, forcing him to take verbal and written action to secure a situation which most authorities, with some rare exceptions, followed the law.48 The budget for the whole region remained at only 40,000 sucres, enough only to cover the costs of employees’ salaries, and nothing more.49 He also had to order the Jefes Políticos in the northern Oriente to clamp down on all forms of concertaje, or debt peonage, which was

46 A. Guerrero S., “Por el Oriente,” El Comercio, May 24, 1917. Other articles in El Comercio seriously questioned the actions of the Oriente’s public officials. In February of 1918, the editors stated that they had received many letters about the abuses, extortions, and crimes the officials habitually committed under the shelter of isolation and difficult communications. Allegedly, these authorities’ abuses against white colonists undermined their rights as Ecuadorian citizens, and their oppression of the region’s Indians caused many of them to travel all the way to Quito to present complaints to the President of the Republic. The Oriente was an integral part of Ecuador, the present and future of which were topics of great interest for all Ecuadorians; something needed to be done to address the actions of the region’s “detainers,” the public employees. “En el Oriente Ecuatoriano,” El Comercio, February 14, 1918.

47 Informe que el Ministro de lo Interior, Policía, Obras Públicas, Municipalidades, etc. Presenta a la Nación en 1918 (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación Nacionales, 1918), XLV-XLVI.

48 Ibid., XLIV.

49 Ibid., XLVII.

226 resulting in the de-population of the region and the loss of any labor force with which to harvest “the abundant fruits of that privileged soil.”50

The Minister formed his opinions in part based on reports from his subordinates, such as the Jefe Político of Pastaza who wrote in June, 1918 that there were nearly four thousand “savage” Indians in his jurisdiction, whose killings went unpunished due to the lack of public officials in the area. Many of the few police officers that did exist were constantly sick, unable to attend to public affairs nor to their own subsistence crops.

What could these few police officers do, asked the Jefe Político, when surrounded by hundreds of violent “Jívaros,” many of whom were armed with Winchester rifles they had gotten from Peruvian merchants based in Iquitos? This lamentable situation was all because the Congress had assigned only 40,000 sucres for the whole region. In a comparison that would be particularly cutting, given Peru’s repeated incursions into

Ecuadorian territory, the Jefe Político noted that the government in Lima had set aside one million soles for their Department of Loreto, which was in fact smaller in size than

Ecuador’s Oriente. With the long asked-for 200,000 sucres, Ecuador could finally promote colonization and road construction in the short term. The road from Ambato, in the Sierra province of Tungurahua, to Pastaza Province, in the Oriente, would be particularly important because it would allow many families from the highlands to pour into the Amazonian region, escaping the control of large landowners in the Sierra.51 In the Jefe Político’s view, it was not just a lack of funds, but fundamentally deficient laws that held the Oriente back. The Ley Especial vested the region’s Jefes Políticos with far

50 Ibid., XLVIII.

51 Manuel de J. Bejarno, Jefe Político del Cantón Pastaza to Sr. Ministro Secretario de Estado en Despacho de Oriente, Sarayacu, June 30,1918, in ibid., 551-553.

227 too many responsibilities; at the same time, the lack of funds meant that not every canton even had a Jefe Político, meaning that a multitude of administrative functions were in nobody’s hands at all. It was high time for a new, more simplified Ley Especial, in his view.52

A new law did not come in the following year, but the budgetary allocation for the

Oriente was doubled, to 80,000 sucres. The Minister of the Interior that year, José

María Ayora, stated that progress in the Oriente

constitutes one of the most just and promising aspirations of the present, which, once realized, will transform, in a very favorable sense, the agricultural, industrial and commercial conditions of the country, through the easy exploitation of the innumerable sources of wealth that the Ecuadorian Oriente encompasses in its rich and immense breast.53

The expectations of the Oriente were considerable; the Minister’s view was not unlike the heady pronouncements of many generations of Oriente propagandists, stretching back to the nineteenth century. But the attention paid to the region by the government would not be commensurate with such high expectations. José María Ayora concluded his 1919 report with the strong and urgent recommendation that the budget for 1920 should include 35,000 sucres for each of the roads from the northern highlands to the

Napo River and from the central highlands to Canelos Parish, in the Pastaza River area.

These roads were needed because they would give Ecuador “effective and material possession of the immense zones that belong to us there.”54 He ended his report by

52 Ibid., 557.

53 José María Ayora, Informe que el Ministro de lo Interior, Policía, Obras Públicas Municipalidades, etc. presenta a la Nación en 1919 (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación Nacionales, 1919), LI.

54 Ibid., LXIV.

228 stating that the total budget for the Oriente should be raised to the amount of one million sucres.55

But in 1920, the Ministry of the Interior once again made do with only 80,000 sucres, which was supplemented by an additional 10,000 sucres from a tax on telegraph service. Of all this, 60,000 were put toward administrative costs, 20,000 toward the road from Tumbaco, near Quito, over the Andes and toward the Napo River region, and the remainder on the road to Puyo, in the Pastaza region of the central

Oriente.56 The efforts on road construction had borne some fruit: reportedly, it was now possible to travel from Mera, an Oriente settlement in Pastaza Canton, to Baños, a highland city in Tungurahua Province of some importance, in only eleven hours, using a combination of foot and horse travel. Such a journey had in years past required four days. These developments were enough to proclaim that the Oriente was no longer a

“region situated in inaccessible distance…; rather our territory, complete and fertile” could be reached “after a voyage of two days from Quito, by rail to Pelileo, and by a road that now gives us total facility, and with a small cost more, will give us, very soon, all kinds of comforts.” This new reality would certainly open the door to colonization on a

55 Ibid., LXIX. Meanwhile, El Comercio continued to report on the region’s poor public officials. In July, 1919, El Comercio stated that the region’s employees, due to relative isolation, believed themselves to be free of all responsibility, giving rise to all kinds of abuses. Most of the state officials there were people who could not find a job in the Andean region or on the Pacific coast. To rectify this, it was necessary to pay the authorities as much as possible, so honorable people would seek the positions. “Por el Oriente Ecuatoriano,” El Comercio, July 3, 1919. Later, El Comercio published a letter sent by some of these Indians to the Minister of the Interior. They claimed that, even though they lived in the Oriente and did not know Spanish, they were still Ecuadorians, and should enjoy the same guarantees of protection as any other group. They demanded that the Jefe Político be fired immediately for his abuses, which included blocking the Indians’ freedom to travel to different places and forcing them to work on the road. Isidro Padilla et al, “Por el Oriente,” El Comercio, October 3, 1919.

56 José María Ayora, Informe que el Ministro de lo Interior, Policía, Obras Públicas, Municipalidades, etc. presenta a la Nación en 1920 (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación Nacionales, 1920), 181.

229 grand scale.57 But 80,000 sucres were still not enough; the Minister once again requested 200,000 sucres for the region. A portion of this would go toward a colonization project that the Ministry was preparing for executive decree. This project would aim to place families of colonists along the road from Baños to Puyo on the left bank of the Pastaza River. It would provide all the tools, seeds, and animals necessary for the colonists, along with a monthly stipend for each family. The colonists would in turn be obligated to help maintain the roads, or lose possession of the parcel of land they had been assigned. The Minister also planned for military colonies to be established in similar fashion.58 This plan to people the region with colonists makes clear that the government hoped that colonists could supplement the work of public officials in state formation in the region. Rather than simply rely only on Indian laborers for road maintenance and other duties, colonists offered the potential to improve the region’s infrastructure while also, presumably, contributing to its commercial exploitation through agriculture and livestock.

The next Minister of the Interior, Delfín B. Treviño, who presided over that

Ministry during its last year of responsibility for the Oriente in 1921, declared that the

“problem” of roads to the Oriente appeared to be resolved, finally, thanks to the contract signed with the North American Leonard Exploration Company in May. The Company, in return for exclusive rights to petroleum exploration in the region, agreed to construct a road passable by automobiles into the Oriente. Therefore, Treviño assured, the problem

57 Ibid., 178.

58 Ibid., 181-183.

230 of consolidating the Oriente territory was a problem of administration.59 A sign of the

Oriente’s status, perhaps, is the fact that neither of the Oriente’s provinces could fulfill the legal stipulation that each province in the Republic be represented by both Senators and Diputados in the Chamber of Deputies. The electoral processes were to be run by

Municipal Councils, none of which existed in the Oriente. Minister Treviño stated his desire that the process for forming such municipal bodies be simplified and expedited in the Oriente so that those provinces could benefit from Congressional representation.60

More importantly, though, like his predecessor, Treviño called for a “methodical colonization” of the extensive territories by “healthy, industrious, and hardworking people.” Following from the establishment of colonies would be the need for more police officers, and higher pay for those already in the region. Congress would also have to regulate the parceling and titling of the “vacant lands [terrenos baldíos]” in the Oriente, which at that time were not subject to any rational system adequate to the conditions of the region.61

New Reforms, New Governments, and Persistent Problems in the 1920s and 1930s

1921 was the first year in which the Oriente was subject to a reformed Ley

Especial in accord with changes approved by the Congress and president José Luis

Tamayo in 1920. Most importantly, this reform divided the region into two provinces:

Napo-Pastaza in the north, and Santiago-Zamora in the south. Each would be administered by the Ministry to which the Oriente was assigned, through the “Director

59 Informe que Delfin B. Treviño, Ministro de lo Interior, Municipalidades, Policía, Obras Públicas, etc., presenta a la Nación en 1921 (Quito: Imprenta y Encuadernación Nacionales, 1921), CXIV-CXV.

60 Ibid., CXVI.

61 Ibid., CXXI-CXXII.

231 de Oriente,” and by a governor for each province. The law also assigned a number of technical officers, such as engineers and topographers, for work on roads and other public works in the region. There were to be at least three hundred police officers in the region, but this was seldom fulfilled. The law strictly prohibited the forced labor of

Indians, or their removal from national territory without permission from the governor.

The role of Jefes Políticos and Tenientes Políticos, the top canton and parish authorities, respectively, remained unchanged.62

During the period from 1917 to 1921 in which the Ministry of the Interior was responsible for the Oriente, a lack of funding meant that only incremental progress was made on the roads into the region, and the number of state officials on the ground did not increase appreciably. The Ministers continued to cite the region’s great promise, however, and could foresee that colonization, roads, the titling of land, and the protection and incorporation of the region’s indigenous people were issues that needed greater attention from the executive and legislative branches. The next year, however, responsibility for the Oriente passed to the Ministry of Foreign Relations, bringing a new set of opinions and trimming what institutional memory had accumulated prior.

In his 1922 report to Congress, the Minister of Foreign Relations, Nicolás

Clemente Ponce, emphasized the “defective” nature of the system of laws that governed the Oriente. In short, the Ley Especial attempted to impose a system of administrative, municipal, and judicial order that was too similar to the general laws of

62 El Congreso de la República del Ecuador, “Reformas a la Ley Reformatoria de la especial de Oriente sancionada el 27 de octubre de 1904,” Registro Oficial 1, no. 68 (November 30, 1920): 1-3.

232 the rest of the Republic.63 The “capital defect” of the 1904 Ley Especial that remained largely in effect, despite the reforms passed in 1920, consisted of

attributing to the employees of the Oriente, in each order, the same faculties that the common laws establish for the administration of the other provinces of the Republic, and in subjecting them, for their exercise, to the same limitations, obligations, and responsibilities. The only special thing was to reunite in a single person two or more positions; but these were to be exercised in conformity with the common laws.

This resulted in government and administration for the Oriente that was “not only very difficult, but rather almost totally impossible.” His ultimate recommendation was to make the administration of the Oriente directly subordinated to the executive branch, and not subject to any of the general laws of the Republic. This was the same administrative system enjoyed by the Galápagos Islands at that time.64 Like all of his predecessors,

Clemente Ponce also lamented the paltry budgetary assignations for the Oriente; the base budget was 80,000 sucres, which was supplemented by 50,000 sucres from a tax on telegraph service and aguardiente, and another 15,000 sucres from other tax sources. But that total of 145,000 sucres was well short of the 558,697 which he stated was the total cost of the Oriente’s administration and public works projects.65

Clemente Ponce’s report to Congress also included the report he had received from Pío Jaramillo Alvarado, who was the “Director of the Oriente,” a position subordinate to the Minister of Foreign Relations that was created in 1919 and tasked with overseeing the Ministry’s official action in the region. Jaramillo was a longtime

Oriente propagandist who had long studied the region’s need for better administration

63 Nicolás Clemente Ponce, Informe del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Junio de 1921-Junio de 1922 (Quito: Talleres Tipográficos Nacionales, 1922), 205.

64 Ibid., 209-10.

65 Ibid., 211.

233 and roads. Jaramillo’s report described the need for a more efficient system by which colonists in the Oriente could receive title to land; the current system, Jaramillo stated, was slow and clumsy. Furthermore, he argued that it was time for the two provinces of the Oriente to have their own representation in Congress. He reminded the Minister that the Amazonian areas in Peru and Colombia had enjoyed congressional representation in Lima and Bogotá for a long time. Jaramillo agreed with the Minister in that the Ley

Especial for the Oriente was not, in fact, special enough, and that the executive branch required a freer hand in the region. Also, he brought up the old, recurring problem of the difficulty keeping public employees in the region. The government should find some way to provide chacras (small farms for subsistence) and houses for all public employees, he opined. Payment was also irregular, which should be addressed.66

El Comercio continued to publish updates from the Oriente. As the paper’s editors noted, these updates were often repetitive. As they observed in July of 1924, the news coming out of the Oriente was usually of two kinds: new Peruvian encroachments into national territory, or the poor actions of public authorities. Indians throughout the country were subject to the oppression of despotic white officials, but this was especially true in the Oriente because of distance and isolation. If the Jefes and Tenientes

Políticos of the region treated Indians humanely and grouped them into civilized pueblos, working to awaken in them love for homeland and making them understand that they were part of a larger Ecuadorian community, then national sovereignty in the

Amazon would be much stronger. As El Comercio’s editors stated, none of the races of

Indians in the Oriente were resistant to civilization. “Even the ferocious Jívaro,” they argued, “has instincts that suppose the idea of property, love for home and the land of

66 Pío Jaramillo Alvarado, “Informe de la Dirección General de Oriente,” in ibid., 251-53.

234 his birth.” The Oriente needed public authorities with uncommon qualities of abnegation who treated the Indians well.67 In this view, the issues of territorial integrity and humane treatment toward Indians were linked. Indians who were well treated would be willing to join the Ecuadorian national community and defend it. But this depended on a corps of capable public officials.

El Comercio would continue to criticize the Oriente’s administration. In December of 1924, it reported that the northern Oriente was suffering from the lack of a governor and many Jefes and Tenientes Políticos, who had all abandoned their posts.68 A few months later, El Comercio lamented the fact that nobody had been named for the post of Director de Oriente in seven months, leading to administrative interruption. “The

Director de Oriente,” the editors stated, “has in his hands the direct administration of regions that, now more than ever, should be the object of our special attention, because

Peru has redoubled its efforts of occupation and colonization.”69 When in July, 1925, responsibility for the Oriente passed to the Ministry of Government, El Comercio decried once again the tradition of keeping the Oriente underfunded, staffed with poor personnel, and lacking a comprehensive plan of development. It called for a new set of laws that would recognize the region’s “peculiar circumstances” and prevent the bad practice of paying state officials and public school teachers to live in places without any appreciable population.70 Later El Comercio published an opinion from “An Old

Orientalist” who stated that the Dirección General de Oriente was an unnecessary

67 “Por el Oriente,” El Comercio, July 23, 1924.

68 “El Abandono del Oriente,” El Comercio, December 26, 1924.

69 “La Dirección del Oriente,” El Comercio, April 28, 1925.

70 “Por el Oriente Ecuatoriano,” El Comercio, July 29, 1925.

235 entity. The administration of the region needed updating in order to reflect the true distribution of population. The 1920 reform of the Ley Especial designated Tenientes

Políticos for parishes that were in fact uninhabited, while failing to provide any public officials for important centers of population.71

Dr. Gonzalo Córdova was elected president in 1924 through the fraud that had characterized the liberal period in Ecuador since the revolution of Eloy Alfaro in 1895.

Political tumult threatened the nation, as the conservative leader Jacinto Jijón y

Caamaño led an armed revolt after this election. In this context, 1925 saw the formation of the “Liga Militar” which aimed to save the country from chaos. This group led a successful military coup on July 9th, 1925, toppling Córdova and the traditional liberal power brokers.72 The “July Revolution” was the result of widespread social opposition to the oligarchic order, and the young military officers aimed to modernize the state apparatus.73

With the triumph of the military revolution, El Comercio’s editors considered that the administration of the Oriente should follow suit. Perhaps it would be a solution to the old problem of poor public officials. In the past, they stated,

it was believed that, since these were nearly abandoned regions with a scarce population of primitive customs, it was sufficient to send any individual there, without initiative or energy, when instead, precisely because those lands deserved colonization…they needed entrepreneurial and organized characters to plant, form, and create populations and districts.

71 Un Orientalista antiguo, “Algo Sobre el Oriente,” El Comercio, August 1, 1925.

72 Enrique Ayala Mora, “De la Revolución Alfarista al régimen oligárquico liberal (1895-1925),” Enrique Ayala Mora, ed., Nueva Historia del Ecuador, Volume 9 (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1988), 164-66.

73 Wilson Miño Grijalva, “La economía ecuatoriana de la gran recesión a la crisis bananera,” in Enrique Ayala Mora, ed., Nueva Historia del Ecuador, Volume 10 (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1990), 41.

236 Perhaps the staffing of the Oriente with military officers, with qualities of discipline, was needed to incorporate the region into the Ecuadorian homeland. Military colonies could also help ensure territorial integrity against Peru, which was itself undertaking military colonization of the Amazon.74 Even with the military guiding the nation’s fortunes, however, old problems persisted. In October of 1925, El Comercio reported that the public officials of the Oriente had not received any salary since January.75 In December, the paper published an interview with Armando Llori, an inhabitant of Napo-Pastaza province. According to Llori, the region was full of promising commercial products and agricultural possibilities, but the administrative system was completely inadequate. The region’s conditions required a set of special laws (more special, presumably, than the

Ley Especial). The budget was also too low; raising it significantly could mean that within two or three years, the Oriente would produce a surplus to benefit the whole state.76 Later that month, a columnist for El Comercio stated categorically that none of the authorities in the Oriente were able to understand nor apply the Ley Especial; a powerful director of all Oriente affairs was needed. In the meantime, the government should establish civilian and military colonies throughout the region. The provinces of the Oriente also deserved representation in both houses of Congress; the Amazonian regions of Peru and Colombia had enjoyed this for some time.77

A citizen calling himself “A Patriot” wrote to El Comercio in February of 1926 to complain that the benefits of the military revolution of the previous July 9th had not

74 “Región Oriental,” El Comercio, August 2, 1925.

75 “Sueldos del Oriente,” El Comercio, October 6, 1925.

76 “Las Riquezas de la Región Oriental,” El Comercio, December 15, 1925.

77 Liberto, “Día Oficial del Oriente,” El Comercio, December 18, 1925.

237 reached the Oriente. “Are we not citizens with rights to republican guarantees? Are we not Ecuadorians”? he asked. He demanded, “like always,” patriotic, honorable, and disinterested public officials who would know the laws and how to properly administer justice.78 The editors of El Comercio commented on this letter by observing that in the seven months since the revolution, there had been three different General Directors of the Oriente, meaning there was no continuity of action. Public authorities had been replaced, new offices created, funds set aside for roads and bridges, but nothing had come of it. More than anything, the Oriente needed a streamlined, centralized administration to undertake a decisive program of action.79 Columns in El Comercio described administration under the military regime as anything but streamlined: according to one report, the government had removed Tenientes Políticos from populated, important places, and created new offices in settlements with only “a dozen

Indians.”80 Others used the pages of El Comercio to criticize the actions of the Director de Oriente, Colonel Puente, directly. According to one man who had lived in the Napo

River region, Puente’s chosen Teniente Político for Archidona would cause great harm to the settlement. Other officials that he maintained in place frequently forced Indians to work without pay, leading to their emigration. The depopulation was so severe that some Tenientes Políticos could not find even one Indian to carry out mail service, road repair, and other state activities.81

78 Un Patriota, “Del Oriente Ecuatoriano,” El Comercio, February 17, 1926.

79 “La Región Oriental,” El Comercio, February 18, 1926.

80 A. Chavez, “El Oriente Ecuatoriano,” El Comercio, April 9, 1926.

81 Enrique Paredes Larrea, “Algo sobre El Informe del Sr. Director de Oriente,” El Comercio, June 28, 1926.

238 The military regime that took power in July, 1925 did not publish any official reports about the Oriente that year, or in 1926, when the regime transferred power to

President Isidro Ayora. But reports in El Comercio make clear that the situation in the

Oriente was largely unaffected by the changes in government; the same complaints and deficiencies persisted. A report from Napo Canton, in the northern Oriente, from

October of 1927 painted a familiar picture. A correspondent there wrote to El Comercio to state that there was little to report regarding the region’s administration; like always, the public officials there were frequently replaced. According to this author, Napo

Canton had seen Tenientes Políticos and secretaries that could barely read and did not know what to do in any judicial proceedings. State officials should know Quichua, he affirmed, as their job called them to interact with the region’s Indians on a daily basis, helping them avoid the trickery and exploitation of their white patrones.82 Clearly, the military regime and the first year of Isidro Ayora’s administration did not significantly affect a situation in which a set of laws inappropriate to the conditions on the ground were inadequately applied by a corps of underpaid and untrained state officials. The region’s indigenous people, therefore, continued to live without protection from a state structure that was intended to secure both their incorporation into the nation and also their labor in the projects of state formation such as mail service and road construction.

In November of 1926, responsibility for the Oriente again passed to a new ministry. This time, the “hot potato” of Oriente administration fell into the hands of Pedro

Pablo Egüez Baquerizo, the Minister of Social Precaution and Labor. He did not issue any report to Congress on the Oriente until 1928. Although the Oriente was a very important responsibility, he stated, administration was hampered by the lack of any

82 Corresponsal, “Del Cantón Napo,” El Comercio, October 15, 1927.

239 good road network or infrastructure of communication to connect the region’s sparse population. Furthermore, the public employees in the region were of “doubtful intellectual probity.” Life in the Oriente was hard, as “solitude and abandonment” were the most “secure companions” of anyone who lived there. These factors, and the small salaries paid to public employees, explained why government ministries had had such a hard time finding good citizens to serve there. Instead, the Oriente’s employees had been people seeking maximum personal advantage in a place with few signs of civilization.83 Since his Ministry took over, Egüez stated, he had worked hard to see that these problems were addressed. He had made more effort to hire only people with

“administrative honesty and patriotic spirit” as public employees in the region, and had been able to raise their salaries, with some reaching a level twice what they had been in

1926. He affirmed that, with perhaps a few exceptions, the Oriente’s administration was staffed with “honorable and patriotic citizens.”84 A major problem, in Egüez’s view, was that the Oriente was largely an unknown region in many respects. The government needed a better source of knowledge about the geographic, anthropological, vegetable, and mineral wealth of the region, in order to better understand how to formulate a plan of colonization for the region. Egüez personally went on a tour of the Oriente, from north to south, to that end.85 His journey led him to the conclusion that a new Ley Especial de

Oriente was needed that codified and centralized all the various dispositions about the region from the previous decades. This would highlight the contradictions between the

83 Informe que presenta a la Nación, el Sr. Dr. Pedro Pablo Egüez Baquerizo, Ministro de Previsión Social y Trabajo. 1925-1928 (Quito: Imprenta Nacional, 1928), 49-50.

84 Ibid., 52-53.

85 Ibid., 56-57.

240 various legislative and executive decrees that made administration clumsy so that they could be eliminated. In general, the thrust of Egüez’s recommendation was that the laws on the books were too similar to those of the wider Republic.86

For several years in a row, the ministerial officials in charge of the Oriente recognized that Ecuador’s government put the cart before the proverbial horse in the

Amazonian region. Instead of providing a model for state formation in a frontier region that lacked adequate infrastructure, the Leyes Especiales sought to re-create in most essential aspects the Ecuadorian state of the inter-Andean region and the Pacific littoral. The burden for doing this rested on the shoulders of public employees who were underpaid, isolated, and, in some cases, of “doubtful intellectual probity” who sought only personal gain. In the meantime, the government did not have any systematic plan for colonization of the region, and colonists in the region faced a slow, inefficient process for obtaining definitive title to land. And for several years, the ministerial reports to Congress had made little mention of the region’s indigenous people who formed an overwhelming majority of the region’s population.

The next report to Congress on the Oriente by the Ministry of Social Precaution came in 1930, authored by the new minister, Dr. Francisco J. Boloña. The Oriente had been one of his principal preoccupations, he stated, since “everybody knows that our

Oriente offers an ample and beautiful future for the future generations, and for this reason is called to play a very important role within national life.” Despite a persistent lack of due attention from the government, the Oriente was now home to some settlements of relative importance, “nuclei of apt and capacitated social elements for the exercise of all citizens’ functions which will serve, of course, as a basis for the

86 Ibid., 61-62.

241 flourishing of that whole region.” But the overall lack of good roads meant that millions of hectares of fertile and exuberant lands were still untouched.87 Much of his report questioned the optimistic words of his predecessor on the selection of good public employees for the region. According to Boloña, most of the Oriente’s officials were people who had nowhere else to go. He had been forced to replace several employees that failed to do anything to “regenerate and elevate the moral level” of the settlements in the Oriente. Lately, the region’s Indians had had to fear not just the private individuals, or patrones, that held them as debt peons for agricultural labor, but also the public employees that used similar methods to force Indians to work on roads and on their private properties. The Oriente was therefore home to a public-private system of exploitation that gravely harmed the Indians of the region.88

The Dominican missionary magazine, El Oriente Dominicano, occasionally included reports about and suggestions for state administration in their jurisdiction in the central Oriente’s Pastaza River region. In 1929, Alvaro Valladares, one of the missionary priests, urged the government to adopt a better method for processing claims to land made in the area, and to keep in mind that the Indians, too, should be able to receive definitive title as they were the most legitimate possessors of land in the region. As Valladares reported, the Indians living near Puyo were actively preparing

87 Dr. Francisco J. Boloña, Informe del Ministro de Agricultura, Previsión Social, etc..a la Nación, 1929-1930 (Quito: Talleres Tipográficos Nacionales, 1930), 83.

88 Ibid., 86-87. Boloña also reported that the Ministry had published a compendium of all the laws and decrees that had been issued about the Oriente in order to clear up, somewhat, the “true chaos” created by the quantity of reforms and dispositions that created much administrative confusion. He urged Congress to adopt a new Ley Especial that reflected the truly “special situation” of the region. Happily, elections for Senators and Diputados had taken place in both Oriente provinces for the first time, a development that would “raise the civic spirit of the inhabitants” and “give them representation in Congress that will make an effort to better their situation.” The budget for the Oriente remained paltry, and had in fact been cut from 240,000 sucres in 1929 to 218,000 sucres in 1930, which had forced the elimination of some Tenientes Políticos, the top parish-level authorities, as well as the entire budget for office supplies in the region. Ibid., 87-88.

242 their formal petitions and were eager to obtain legal possession.89 The magazine also reported on the various ways in which the mission contributed to the work of the civil authorities in the Oriente. For example, later that year the magazine described how the building for the Tenencia Política for Canelos Parish was being constructed by the

Dominican Mission after receiving 200 sucres for the purpose from the government.

Unfortunately, the public offices recently built in Río Tigre and Montalvo Parishes were done using forced labor imposed on the Indians by the civil authorities. The Teniente

Político of Río Tigre, one Sr. Borbúa, could not get away with such “tyrannical” methods in the Sierra, the Dominicans opined.90

In 1930, El Oriente Dominicano published a letter from the priest Jacinto D.

Marín to the Director de Oriente explaining the actions of the mission in the region.

Speaking for all the Dominicans in the region, Marín affirmed that they were perhaps more convinced than anyone of that the true future of Ecuador lay in the Oriente. To secure this promising future, they had as their primary goal that the Indians in their jurisdiction establish permanent residence in settlements run by the missionaries and the Jefes and Tenientes Políticos of the Province. Unfortunately, they had gotten little help from the Jefe Político of Pastaza in ending the Indian custom of periodically returning to the forest, known as purinas. The missionaries were also working to prepare the area, and the Indians, for the arrival of colonists from outside the region.

They aimed to establish a system by which colonists could acquire lands formerly inhabited by Indians only when the Indians failed to comply with a set of rules intended

89 Fr. Alvaro Valladares, “Cartas sobre las Misiones Dominicanas en la Región Oriental del Ecuador,” El Oriente Dominicano 2, No. 8 (May-June, 1929): 20.

90 “Crónica,” El Oriente Dominicano 2, No. 10 (September-October, 1929): 105-06.

243 to make them live a more settled, permanent life. All this would only work if the

Tenencias Políticas of the region were kept in permanent operation and staffed by

“competent authorities” who could be “faithful guardians of order and individual security.”91 As collaborators with the state in the Oriente, the Dominican missionaries in the Pastaza region shared many of the same goals as statesmen in Quito, particularly the protection of Indians and the peopling of the area with colonists from the Sierra. But as many others did, the Dominicans launched critiques and demanded more of the government’s functionaries in the Oriente itself.

El Comercio also continued to highlight the deficiencies of Oriente administration during the period that the Ministry of Social Precaution was responsible for the region.

In May of 1930, the paper reported that many of the region’s Indians were fleeing into the forest due to the “strong hostilities” they encountered from white citizens. It was not clear whether these acts were committed by private individuals or the state officials. If it was the former, why did the authorities not prevent such abuses? If the latter, why were these employees using dictatorial methods? The editors also highlighted the difficulty of governing the region’s Indians; they lived in an “antisocial” state, each family with several “irreconcilable enemies” with whom they engaged in bloody killings. All of this demonstrated the fact that the authorities’ actions were “null.” While the Oriente was a promising region, the public employees could not impede bad behavior nor make practical the guarantees of the laws.92

91 Fr. Jacinto D. Marín, “Contestación a la Circular del Sr. Director de Oriente,” El Oriente Dominicano 3 No. 16 (September-October, 1930): 185-86.

92 “En Tierras de Oriente,” El Comercio, May 22, 1930.

244 A letter sent by several white inhabitants of Napo to the Director de Oriente in

August of 1930 gives some insight into the social environment in which the state officials attempted to apply the Ley Especial. In the estimation of these citizens, the Jefe

Político of Napo Canton, Washington Palacios, was one of the poor authorities that had been sent to the Oriente for decades. The thrust of their complaint was that Palacios was too protective of the Indians in the region. They understood that the Indians should be guarded from abuse, but with Palacios, the Indians had become completely lazy. As they explained, the Indian of the Oriente was not like the Indian of the Sierra: they did not “feel necessities” and were content only with their small subsistence plot, living in the middle of the jungle. The Jefe Político prevented any effort by the area’s white citizens to use Indians to harvest crops, carry cargo, or repair words under the pretense that it was “not possible to obligate the Indian.” This policy was leading to a depopulation of the area, as the Indians found no reason to remain near white settlements, which in turn led to the freezing of all progress due to lack of labor. The public plaza in Tena was in disrepair, as were several bridges in the area. As the petitioners explained, they wanted a Jefe Político that would not lead to their ruin through a poor policy of Indian protectionism that only resulted in the Indian’s

“corruption” and failure to adopt civilization.93 This letter reveals that the Oriente’s

Indians were a vital component of any effort to incorporate the region into the nation at large, from working the crops to feed the colonists to maintaining the infrastructure along which state orders could be carried out. But the terms on which Indian labor was

93 Héctor E. Garcés et al, “Los pobladores del Napo, Tena y Archidona protestan contra el demasiado proteccionismo al Indio de Tena,” El Comercio, August 6, 1930.

245 brought to bear was a source of contention, as private individuals struggled with state officials for control over this labor.

1931 saw massive student and popular demonstrations that brought about the end of the Isidro Ayora government and the military regime ushered in by the 1925 revolution.94 The magazine Miscelánea, edited by Arturo Gonzalez Pozo, was launched in that year to serve as an organ of propaganda for the Oriente. As Gonzalez stated in an editorial in the magazine’s first year, the periodical was intended to support the thousands of compatriots living in the Amazon by echoing their requests and working for their fulfillment. One of the main problems the region faced was its administrative framework. The Leyes Especiales vested the region’s public employees with too many attributions. This meant that political, civil, judicial, military, and other functions were carried out by “unscrupulous authorities” who were resisted strongly by the region’s citizens. As Gonzalez wrote, perhaps the law was appropriate when its first version was written at the century’s beginning, but in 1931 there were already “populations of significant importance, the number of inhabitants grows progressively, civilization and culture are spreading gradually, but in a very sensible form.” It was high time that the legislature enact sweeping reforms to the Ley Especial in order to ensure the rights of the region’s citizens.95

In 1931, the Oriente’s administration passed to the Ministry of War. The first report to Congress issued by Minister C. A. Guerrero resembled, in large measure, those of all the other ministries that had taken their turn with the Oriente. The overriding

94 Agustín Cueva, “El Ecuador de 1925 a 1960,” in Enrique Ayala Mora, ed., Nueva Historia del Ecuador, Volume 10 (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1960), 97.

95 “La Región Oriental- Ley de Oriente,” Miscelánea 1, no. 4 (April 1931): 1-2.

246 factor making administration difficult in the Oriente was, in Guerrero’s view, the lack of roads. Another significant problem, however, was the fact that, due to the Ley Especial de Oriente, political, legislative, judicial, and military authority were all concentrated into the hands of a small number of public employees, a fact which had led to the lamentable “despotic tendencies” exhibited by many officials. One of the first necessities, in his view, was that these multiple attributions be divided up. In the meantime, his ministry had attempted a better selection of individuals and had dismissed poor authorities to make way. He urged the issuing of a decree that made an exemption for the Oriente whereby military officers would be allowed to hold the civilian positions of Jefes and Tenientes Políticos, which was not permitted in other provinces of the Republic.96 Guerrero highlighted many of the projects undertaken by the region’s religious missions and praised their “civilizing labor” of education and road construction.97 He ended his report by observing that the budget for the Oriente had actually been shrinking over time, from nearly 300,000 sucres in 1928 to only 235,000 in

1931, with risk of reducing further. The Oriente was already being run only with the most vital services, so there was no room for further cuts.98

In 1932, the Minister of War could report that the Oriente was attracting the gazes of Ecuadorians more than ever, but that its wealth remained unexploited due to the lack of roads. He suggested that highest priority be given to the construction of the road from Quito over the Andes, through Baeza and Quijos, and to the settlement of

96 C. A. Guerrero, Informe del Ministro de Guerra, Marina, Aviación, Oriente y Archipiélago de Colón (Quito: Imprenta Nacional, 1931), 77-81.

97 Ibid., 82-84.

98 Ibid., 85.

247 Archidona, in the Napo River region. This road, in addition to the road into the central

Oriente under construction by the Leonard Exploration Company, would finally provide

Ecuador with two great routes of penetration that could serve as the basis for colonization on a large scale.99 Otherwise, most of the signs of progress he could cite were accomplished by the region’s missions, as was true the previous year, also. He closed the 1932 report by calling for the centralization of all activities having to do with the Oriente in the Ministry of War’s Oriente Department. As it stood, each of the

Ministries of Public Instruction, Public Works, and others had some hand in deciding matters of schools, road construction, land titling, and other activities in the region. In his view, the Ministry of War should attend to these matters directly.100

That Department, according to a column in El Comercio, was a source of perpetual disappointment. While the whole Republic fixed its gaze upon the Oriente, full of wealth waiting to be tapped, the region was home to authorities without adequate preparation. The Dirección de Oriente was created to build roads, found colonies, select good personnel, and promote commerce, but in its ten years of existence, the Dirección had not secured any of this hoped-for progress. El Comercio’s editors urged a careful selection of all functionaries, from the Director de Oriente to the Tenientes Políticos.101

Soon after, El Comercio recommended an overhaul of the Ley Especial. The fact that the Oriente had gone from ministry to ministry over the years meant that its administration was diffusely spread across several different government entities.

99 Informe que el Señor Ministro de Guerra, Marina, Aviación, Archipiélago de Colón y Oriente, Presenta a la Nación (Quito: Imprenta Nacional, 1932), 83-84.

100 Ibid., 88-89.

101 Orientalista, “Dirección de Oriente,” El Comercio, December 25, 1932.

248 Currently, its principal relationship was with the Ministry of War, but other ministries continued to manage some aspects of its development, such as the road construction still overseen by the Ministry of Public Works. A complete centralization of the administrative aspects of the Oriente was needed.102

Later in 1932, El Oriente Dominicano also published an evaluation of the current administration of the Oriente. Ceslao de Jesús Marín, one of the missionaries, stated that all of Ecuador took great interest in the jungles of the Oriente that represented,

“with all their natural wealth, the future of Ecuador.” But the legislature had never prescribed any truly “efficient and practical” labor for the region. Marín argued that all the laws passed for the Oriente had not been in accord with the area’s special circumstances. The layering of multiple attributions upon single state authorities made the administration of justice and other matters “null,” in Marín’s view. Administration needed a freer, more versatile hand in the region; for example, any police officer should be allowed to carry out inscriptions in the Civil Register of the various parishes. The missionaries themselves should be authorized to undertake such civil actions, too.

Marín also called out for more money for road construction, without which all other projects in the Oriente would amount to “castles in the air.” The two major routes from

Quito into the Napo region and from Mera to Canelos, in the Pastaza region, themselves needed at least 200,000 sucres per year. In light of the worldwide economic crisis and the growing number of unemployed in Ecuador’s cities, the government

102 “Las Provincias Orientales,” El Comercio, March 22, 1933.

249 needed to foment colonization by providing families that intended to colonize the

Oriente with at least 50 sucres a month to guarantee their success.103

As Marín described, the Pastaza region of the Dominican mission was already a welcoming area for colonization. The highway into the region from the central Sierra, under construction since 1926, would soon allow easy access to the settlements of

Mera and Puyo. The latter settlement was widely recognized as the best place of all for colonization, thanks to its fertile soil, good climate, and location at the center of a network of incipient and planned roads. Importantly, it was home to facilities already established by the Dominican Mission, such as a large and comfortable church. It was up to the government to pass laws that would facilitate the colonists’ arrival, and “give life to poor families, that later will bring glory to the homeland.”104 Readers of Oriente

Dominicano, then, could share in the view of the Oriente as the future home and salvation for poor families from the rest of the country. They would be welcomed and comfortable thanks to the work of Catholic missionaries in the region. But this vision depended upon the government’s effective collaboration.

In 1933, readers of the report by the Minister of War to Congress may have felt that those responsible for the Oriente’s administration, year after year, sounded like a broken record. The Minister began his report by lamenting that while, in the past, “some unscrupulous citizens thirsty for personal gain” had been named for the Oriente’s public employee positions, leading to many abuses and underdevelopment in the region, the new corps of employees “[responded] to the confidence deposited in them” and worked

103 Padre Ceslao de J. Marín, O. P., “Tópicos sobre Administración de Oriente,” El Oriente Dominicano 5, no. 27 (July-August 1932): 117-118.

104 Padre Ceslao de J. Marín, “Colonización,” El Oriente Dominicano 5, no. 27 (July-August 1932): 128-129.

250 hard to overcome the problems stemming from the lack of good roads. Also, the budget for the region was too small; the 253,480 sucres assigned was insufficient, especially given the fact that responsibility for vacant lands [tierras baldías], public works, and colonization in the Oriente had been added to the Ministry (as had been requested the previous year).105 The Minister stated that the low budget meant that the Oriente

Department would not attempt to formulate any large-scale colonization plan for that year. Instead, it would attend to the “basis” of colonization by repairing and maintaining the region’s existing roads.106 Much of the progress achieved in the region in terms of education and infrastructure, such as radiotelegraph stations, were due to the efforts of the Catholic missionaries, whom the Minister praised. Their achievements were especially noteworthy considering that the missions had not received any monetary assistance from the government since 1931.107

105 Informe del Ministro de Guerra, Marina, Aviación, Archipiélago de Colón y Oriente, a la Nación (Quito: Imprenta Nacional, 1933), 57-58.

106 Ibid., 62.

107 Ibid., 64-65. El Comercio in December of that year continued to lament the fact that the guarantees of justice and protection were still not extended to the region’s Indians, victims as they were of bad treatment and exploitation. The Oriente had gone from ministry to ministry without much progress achieved on the project of its incorporation to “national culture and progress.” This would not happen until a “conscientious plan” of development was adopted, extending roads into the Oriente and setting up “those services without which civilized life cannot be conceived.” “Administración del Oriente,” El Comercio, December 12, 1933. El Oriente Dominicano that year published a letter to the Director de Oriente, urging him to attend to the maintenance of existing colonists, even if perhaps new projects of colonization were not possible due to budget constraints. As Jacinto D. Marín stated in his letter, the colonists living on the Peruvian frontier at Río Tigre were maintaining the nation’s territorial rights. Defying poor weather and threats from Peru, they were “sentinels of the Homeland” who deserved all the help possible. Worthy of equal praise were the “Indian and Jívaro” families who had recently formed a new settlement, San Jacinto del Tigre, thanks to the efforts of one local Teniente Político. The government should aid these efforts, above all, by establishing new schools so that white colonists would not abandon the region due to a lack of education for their children. The state should also properly fund mail service to these far-flung settlements so that the people there could acquire provisions and stay in touch with the rest of the nation. “Comunicaciones Oficiales,” El Oriente Dominicano 6, no. 32 (August 1933): 36.

251 The following year’s report by Minister of War Colonel Alberto C. Romero did not differ substantially from the one before. Again, the Ministry made efforts to appoint good public authorities for the region. Again, the low budget prevented much progress on road construction, or on the construction of public buildings and schools, or the acquisition of canoes for river transport.108 El Comercio reported that many of the

Oriente’s people were abandoning the region, not due to Peruvian advances, but due to the lack of a good policy of development. Part of this was the fact that the administration of the Oriente was carried out by people who could not find a job anywhere else. The paper did report, though, that the time necessary to travel from Quito to the Napo River had been reduced to only two days from six. If Ecuador had just managed to build even one kilometer each year of roads into the Oriente since independence, and had established an administration that did not treat the region like a “colony for unmerciful exploitation,” then there would be nothing to fear from Peruvian encroachment as territorial integrity would be assured.109

Another article from that month published a petition sent to Congress from a citizen interested in the progress of the northern Oriente. He urged the legislature to speed up construction of the road from Quito to the Napo River using all available funds in order to promote colonization. Like many others, he demanded good public authorities. Specifically, he asked for authorities that could exercise good control over the region’s Indians. As he explained, the lack of control meant that Indians were leaving the areas settled by colonists and returning to the forest. In the past, the state

108 Coronel Alberto C. Romero, Informe del Ministro de Guerra, Marina, Aviación, Archipiélago de Colón y Oriente A La Nación, Julio de 1934 (Quito: Talleres Tipográficos Nacionales, 1934), 101-03.

109 “La administración de nuestro Oriente,” El Comercio, January 19, 1934.

252 officials controlled the Indian labor force, doling them out for work on roads and agriculture and construction of roads. Without this control, the Indians “never render any service” and “return to their state of primitive savagery.” Alternatively, some Indians became indebted to private individuals, working exclusively for them and never on projects of benefit to the general public.110 Good public authorities were needed, then, not just to eliminate abuses and quarrels with colonists, but also to effectively channel the Indian labor force toward regional development.

El Comercio’s editors elaborated on this question of Indian labor and public authorities. In their view, the promotion of basic human rights for the Indians brought the negative consequence of labor shortage. As the Indians acquired some idea of the

“rights that should be conceded to a person pertaining to the human race,” they naturally worked to avoid the methods of force that public employees used to gather laborers. Soon the Indian would “disappear as an agricultural instrument” due to rising economic position and aspirations; but in the short term this would bring a crisis of agricultural production. So the editors recommended that more whites should colonize the region, not to serve as agricultural labor themselves, but to serve as patrones who could gather Indian laborers. The Provincial Council of Napo-Pastaza, in their view, should issue a decree stating that half of the Indians in the jurisdiction be assigned to government work, and the other half to private individuals. As they stated bluntly,

the Indian was created for service for the white and above all formed expressly for work in the field. The day in which the Indian does not want

110 Gustavo E. Cornejo H., “De Oriente,” El Comercio, January 30, 1934. The petitioner also asked the Executive Branch to issue a decree setting a maximum price of gold. Those Indians who panned for gold in the Oriente’s rivers were becoming too rich, making them lazy and unproductive.

253 to work in the countryside, crops will go uncultivated and this will be the greatest freezing of all time.111

In this view, the Indians of the Oriente were capable of understanding that they had the right to freely choose when and where to work, but the urgent need for progress in the

Oriente meant that a matrix of white public and private individuals should, in the meantime, continue to exercise as much control of Indian labor as possible. Avoiding a catastrophe of falling production was more important that the Indians’ ability to work or not work as they saw fit.

Later in 1934, El Comercio reported that the Oriente was, in some respects, taking on a life of its own. In Macas, an important settlement in the south-central

Oriente, there had been some disturbances of “political character,” showing that “citizen life” was establishing itself there. The roads under construction and the chance to pan for gold in the rivers had brought many new inhabitants from the Sierra and Coast who had begun cultivating the land. All this highlighted the need for a rationalized system for exploiting the land and establishing legal ownership. The editors of El Comercio praised the idea of the Director de Oriente that year to carry out a census of all properties in the

Oriente, to establish what lands, exactly, were in private hands, and which still belonged to the state. As El Comercio observed, the spontaneous fashion in which colonization had taken place in the Oriente meant that few who lived there would have legal title.112

A few days later, El Comercio reported that the Director was planning to instruct all public authorities in the Oriente to demand property titles, as it was well known that many did not have them. He would also act to crack down on the abuses that both

111 “El indígena de la Región Oriental,” El Comercio, January 31, 1934.

112 “Las Propiedades en el Oriente,” El Comercio, February 27, 1934.

254 public and private individuals had been committing against “defenseless Indians” and remind private patrones of their obligation to bring their Indians into civilization through education and care. Finally, the Director planned to revoke any powers or privileges extended by the Oriente’s public employees to their friends and relatives, which had been a common abuse of power.113

As for the politicization of the Oriente, in May of 1934, El Comercio reported that the elections that took place in the Oriente had failed to go off smoothly. There were widespread reports of voter fraud. Furthermore, the Oriente’s settlements were too far apart to create the “civic contact” to form opinions and hold debate. The population was also just too small, to the point that “the vote of a single family…made Senators that have gone to our Congresses to represent the public opinion of those [Oriente] pueblos.” The Oriente, the editors opined, should only have representatives once there was sufficient public life there to be able to elect a native of the Oriente. In the meantime, the electoral results there could be adversely affected by public officials who illegally participated in political propaganda, or by the votes of entire military detachments posted in the region that supported a single candidate.114 A subsequent article elaborated on the difficulty of having the Oriente send representatives to congress. As El Comercio reported, the Oriente required representatives who were well acquainted with the needs of the region, and should be natives if possible. But currently, the Oriente’s settlements were too far apart to form proper civic spirit, and therefore susceptible to “intrigue and propaganda.” In fact, all the candidates for Senator and

Diputado in the Oriente provinces where people who did not have even the most remote

113 “Se procederá a la reforma de la administración de Oriente,” El Comercio, March 1, 1934.

114 “Las Elecciones en el Oriente,” El Comercio, May 14, 1934.

255 relationship with the area. In the past, the former Director de Oriente, Pío Jaramillo

Alvarado, had represented the Oriente in Congress, as had Aurelio Dávila, who owned a hacienda in the region. In 1934, though, the “citizens’ exercise” in the Oriente was a pathetic pantomime. This would continue to be the case as long as the region lacked roads and good means of communication.115 The problems holding elections and finding worthy candidates were a sign that the Oriente remained a region apart from the political and civic system established in the rest of the country, even though the laws prescribed a very similar system for the region. The poor actions of public officials were a reason for this.

El Comercio in October, 1934 reported that the government was considering transferring responsibility for the Oriente back to the Ministry of Foreign Relations. As the editors explained, the Dirección de Oriente had been ascribed to nearly every different ministry. These changes occurred according to what was believed to be the most pressing issue for the region at the time. The Ministry of Government took over when it was believed that careful selection of employees was the most critical need; the

Ministry of Public Works took over in order to elaborate a plan for road construction. The

Ministry of War took over according to the idea to send military colonies to the region; now, preoccupation with border security motivated the idea to switch it to the Ministry of

115 “Las Elecciones en el Oriente,” El Comercio, July 10, 1934. For their part, the inhabitants of the Oriente used El Comercio to make their opinions about the state of administration known. In September, a correspondent from Morona Canton, in the south-central Oriente wrote to express his dismay along with other inhabitants that the Director de Oriente planned to leave his post for another position in government. He lamented the frequent changeover in functionaries for the Oriente and the tendency to name as local authorities people without “a mere idea of how to make public welfare and work for national greatness.” These appointments were done according to “favoritism,” selecting people who sought only to fulfill “personal necessities, converting the money for the Oriente into a welfare chest.” It was the job of the Director de Oriente to prevent these kinds of abuses; the government should consider men like Pío Jaramillo Alvarado, who had held the position honorably and had made extensive personal tours of the region. Corresponsal Oriental, “Rendición Oriental,” El Comercio, September 30, 1934.

256 Foreign Relations. In the editors’ view, it was best that it remain with the Ministry of War, as the selection of all the region’s Jefes and Tenientes Políticos was better left to the military officials. “What we need, before all,” they opined, “is to avoid this continual separation of the Dirección de Oriente from one Ministry to annex it to another, because this interrupts the continuous action that a Department can carry out in the administrative regime of those regions.”116 And, as always, the Director de Oriente needed to select employees for the region after a careful study of their background; too often public positions were given to people who had previously been fired from a similar position for committing abuses. The custom of considering a job in the Oriente as the last resort for poor individuals who could not find work anywhere else had to end.

Precisely because of the difficult situation public officials encountered there, due to poor communication and dangerous illnesses, better preparation and remuneration was needed.117

In 1935, the new Minister of War, Colonel Astudillo, affirmed that national sovereignty in the Oriente was more acutely perceptible thanks to modern means of communication, which “enormously facilitates” political administration.118 But other factors left much to be desired, such as the adjudication of land title to colonists. The head of the Oriente Department, Alfonso Rumazo González, discovered that most of the formal petitions submitted by colonists to obtain definitive title had not been

116 “La Dirección de Oriente,” El Comercio, October 26, 1934.

117 “Empleados para el Oriente,” El Comercio, November 1, 1934. The Director de Oriente responded in the pages of El Comercio the following day, stating that public employees in the Oriente would be required to pass an examination before being given the job. He stated that his Dirección considered serving the Oriente as a “great act of patriotism.” Alfonso Rumazo González, “Aclaración del Director de Oriente,” El Comercio, November 2, 1934.

118 Coronel Astudillo, Informe del Ministro de Guerra, Marina, Aviación, Archipiélago de Colón y Oriente, A La Nación, Julio de 1935 (Quito: Talleres Tipográficos Nacionales, 1935), 137.

257 processed, for no apparent reason. Also, in the Minister’s view, the ability for the

Ministry of War to act decisively in the Oriente remained hampered by the fact that portions of money set aside for the region were not managed by his subalterns, but by officials in the ministries of Education, Public Works, and Government. Greater centralization was still needed.119

El Comercio printed an article in September, 1936 that made poetic use of those modern means of communication that had been established in the Oriente. An author taking the name “A Traveler,” from Tena, reported being awoken one morning by the sound of an Indian yelling. Looking out his window, he saw “a beautiful example of the jungle” standing in front of the radio office, believing that his words would be transmitted back to the Jefe Supremo of the government, Federico Páez. His opening, spoken in

Quichua, was translated by the author as, “Listen well, machine-letter of the wind; scrupulously tell the Jefe Supremo what I’m about to say.” The Indian went on to complain about the “injustices of the whites” who did not pay them for transporting cargo. He cried out for the sending of good authorities, instead of “rude, uncultured, abusive, ambitious, and even criminal people, whose aim is none other than the exploitation and oppression of the Indian.” The colonists were also committing injustices, and he asked that there be some criteria for selecting them, too. As the author of the article concluded, “what a shame that the radio apparatus could not find sympathy for that improvised orator of the jungle, and that his message could not reach the ears of the Jefe Supremo!”120 It is not clear exactly what mixture of fact and fiction is

119 Ibid., 140-42.

120 Un Viajero, “Indio del Oriente grita ante el radio para que le oiga el gobierno,” El Comercio, September 8, 1936.

258 contained here, but it is yet another public statement that the state officials of the

Oriente failed to establish good government in the region as far as its Indians were concerned.

Later that year, El Comercio published an article that criticized the government’s ability to provide for the region’s colonists, too. In October, a correspondent from Puyo gave an update on an agricultural colony near Puyo, in the Pastaza River region. Six months prior, the Dirección de Oriente had promised to subsidize the new colony, at a place called Zandalia, with transportation costs and tools, so that the colony’s members could go and be “quasi-sentinels of the homeland in the fertile and healthy pampas around Zandalia.” All Ecuadorians viewed their efforts well, as that group of citizens with

“abnegation and sacrifice” had undertaken “the conquest of true laurels.” But the government did not hold up its end of the deal, as public support never came. After doing some clear-cutting, all but six colonists had abandoned the project. All the dangerous diseases of the Oriente demanded more aid from the Public Powers with health services. Transportation in the region was suffering, so the tamberos, or public employees charged with road maintenance, needed greater support.121

El Oriente Dominicano that year published an exposition from the missionary priest Jacinto De Jesús Marín about what the Oriente needed in order for it to be transformed into the future source of wealth for the nation that was long desired. The work the Dominicans were already doing by forming Indians into “sentinels of the

Homeland” who lived in settlements in frontier areas was a good start.122 But the

121 Corresponsal, “De la Región Oriental,” El Comercio, October 27, 1936.

122 Padre Jacinto D. Marín, “Crónicas de Oriente,” El Oriente Dominicano 9, no. 42 (May-June 1936): 246.

259 government needed to play a larger role in seeing that the Indians obtained definitive title to parcels of land near colonist settlements, so that their own chacras could supply colonists and military detachments alike. Furthermore, the government needed to set aside more money for schools, so that Indians could be given more civic instruction and could come to understand their place in the Ecuadorian nation. Marín suggested that

Ecuador follow the model of Peru in using making extensive use of military colonies in the Amazon, and even establish obligatory military service among the region’s

Indians.123

As Ecuadorian lawmakers set about their work in August of 1937, a correspondent for El Comercio from the Napo River region urged them to attend to the administrative re-organization of the Oriente, seeking a social, political, commercial, and agricultural improvement that would permit the “gradual incorporation of the Indian to social wellbeing.” The correspondent asked for a Ley de Oriente that was not antiquated and inapplicable like the current Ley Especial, but was “in conformity with the environment and the current need and circumstances.”124 A new Ley de Oriente was not forthcoming, however. But a decree from Jefe Supremo General G. Alberto Enríquez did centralize all budgetary assignations for the Oriente in the Ministry of Defense, which replaced the Ministry of War and would from that date coordinate all activities related to the Oriente including civil and military administration, immigration, colonization, the parceling of lands, public works, hygiene, and education.125

123 Ibid., 247-48.

124 Corresponsal, “Crónicas de Oriente,” El Comercio, August 23, 1937.

125 “Centralízase en el Ministerio de Defensa todas las actividades referentes a la Región Oriental,” El Comercio, November 13, 1937.

260 El Comercio reported some signs of progress with the new military administration. For example, in September of 1938, the paper praised the new Jefe

Político of Napo Canton, Jorge H. Burbua. He was of the “class of authorities” in the

Oriente that had kept the local roads in good service, as well as maintained the telephone lines. Such good authorities also made sure that the Indians of the region fulfilled their expected role in developing the Oriente, as “work is a sacred obligation and the Indian must work because idleness in him is more dangerous than in others.”126 In

October, El Comercio included an account of a session of the National Orientalist

Committee in Quito, attended by the Salesian priest Elías Brito as well as the Diputados for Napo Pastaza in Congress, Modesto Chávez González and Eladio Viteri. According to Chávez, the fact that the Oriente represented the future of the country was in the

“conscience of the whole nation,” and the Assembly had formed a Special Commission to study the region’s needs. Viteri stated that it was “time to abandon theory for practice”; in order to react to Peru’s ambitions on Ecuadorian territory, he urged that the

Oriente provinces lose their special status by being incorporated into the general legislation of the Republic. Other members of the Committee called for large sums for road construction and colonization.127 In December, El Comercio reported that another

Diputado for Napo-Pastaza, Carlos Alvarez Miño, had given an extensive speech before the National Assembly to recommend that the military authorities in the Oriente be replaced by civilians. As he explained, due to the “idiosyncrasy” of the region’s Indians and colonists, the “military elements” did not inspire confidence. In many of the better- populated areas of the Oriente, civil authorities would be better acquainted with the

126 Corresponsal, “Crónicas de Oriente,” El Comercio, September 14, 1938.

127 “Sesión del Comité Orientalista Nacional,” El Comercio, October 24, 1938.

261 relevant laws for quotidian matters. A legislative commission was formed to study the matter.128

Oriente Administration and Territorial Crisis into the 1940s

Early in 1939, El Comercio featured a troubling article about Peruvian encroachment into the region. As the Día del Oriente of February 27th approached, which was recently approved by the Extraordinary Congress of 1939, a Rotary Club session in Quito discussed the fact that three-fifths of Ecuador’s Oriente was occupied by Peru.129 On the 27th, El Comercio’s editors opined that regarding the border issue with Peru, Ecuadorian statesmen had put too much faith in the justness of their cause and had neglected the practical work needed to establish Ecuador’s administration over the disputed territories. Year after year, the government had “relegated to the last position” all Oriente work while Peru took advantage of this “criminal blindness” to consolidate possession of their fraudulent acquisitions. The “problem of the Oriente” revealed Ecuador’s ineptitude on the matter. The plan to raise funds from among the citizens for roads to the region during the Día del Oriente was a good one, but it was not sufficient. Roads must occupy a higher priority for government spending and policy, as well.130 This continuous pushing aside and delaying of action on Oriente matters is

128 “Insinúa el cambio de autoridades militares por civiles en el Oriente,” El Comercio, December 6, 1938. Some articles in El Oriente Dominicano also called into question the efficiency of military administration in the region. That year, a group of Indians presented a formal complaint to the civil and military authorities of Pastaza that some soldiers had violently invaded their homes and stolen many objects of value, including chickens, food, and even gold. “Crónica Misional de El Puyo,” El Oriente Dominicano 11, nos. 58-59 (January-February 1938): 258.

129 Padre Brito, “Tres quintas partes del Oriente ocupa ahora el Perú,” El Comercio, February 23, 1939.

130 “Nuestro Oriente,” El Comercio, February 27, 1939.

262 evidence that the region remained a group of ancillary provinces, secondary in concern to those of the Sierra and Pacific Coast region.

The next Minister of Defense was Galo Plaza, future President of the Republic.

His 1939 report was markedly optimistic. He reported that the centralization of all duties relating to the Oriente in the Ministry had made it possible to begin an “organic, colonizing, cultural and military labor in the Oriente Region, for which we have kept in mind the past experiences and immediate necessities.” But in Plaza’s view, the territorial division of the region was fundamentally flawed, leading to poor administration. Some settled places in the Oriente were large enough to deserve the status of parish, while some parishes were virtually abandoned. Furthermore, the form of government that was prescribed for the Oriente still resembled too much that for the rest of the country.131 He stated that legislative reforms were needed to address these deficiencies. In 1940, Plaza stated that the 21 months during which the Ministry of

Defense had controlled the administration of the Oriente had seen more progress than at any time since the Colonial era.132 But a fundamental re-working of the territorial division of the Oriente was still needed. In Plaza’s view, the most heavily populated parts of the Oriente at the foot of the Andean Cordillera should be annexed to the adjacent Andean provinces. For example, the settlements in the northern Oriente of

Baeza, Tena, Archidona, Puerto Napo and others should be added to Pichincha

Province (home to Quito). Puyo and Mera, in the Pastaza River region, should be added

131 Galo Plaza, Informe a la Nación del Ministro de Defensa Nacional Sr. N. Galo Plaza (Quito: Talleres Gráficos del Colegio Militar, 1939), 59.

132 Sr. Dn. Galo Plaza, Informe a la Nación del Ministro de Defensa Nacional Sr. Dn. Galo Plaza (Quito: Talleres Gráficos del Colegio Militar, 1940), 66.

263 to Tungurahua; Macas should be added to Chimborazo Province; Méndez added to

Cañar; Gualaceo added to Azuay; and Zamora added to Loja.133 In Plaza’s view, the governments of these Andean provinces could govern the adjacent sections of the

Oriente much more efficiently. As things stood, none of these Oriente settlements had a population large enough for provincial government to work effectively. The more distant sections of the Oriente and those areas lying on the borders of Peru and Colombia would become “Regional Districts” under direct military command. This change would benefit the Oriente’s major settlements because they would be attended to by all the

Ministries of the government, just like any other city or rural area in Ecuador.134

That year, El Comercio reported on the conditions of the Oriente itself. According to a correspondent in Puyo, in the central Oriente Pastaza River region, Puyo was flourishing in commercial and agricultural terms, and promised to be a “population of great interest” once the road passable by trucks from the central Sierra reached the settlement. But Puyo confronted a serious Indian problem. The Indians of the area offered all kinds of useful services as agricultural workers, guides, and transportation of cargo. But the whites of the area frequently took advantage of these services without pay. Recently, a white colonist had complained to the Ministry of Defense about the abuses of this type committed by the Jefe Político in Puyo. Unfortunately, the Ministry did not make justice, but simply sent all the complaints back to the very same Jefe

Político, who then cracked down on those making complaints. Some of the complainants were the very Indians whose labor was being abused. In reaction, the

Indians left their lands near Puyo to “take refuge in some other river where they are not

133 Ibid., 68-70.

134 Ibid., 70-71.

264 so molested.” According to the correspondent, a commission of Indians led by Isaac

Vargas planned to go to Quito to lodge their complaints directly with the central government. Hopefully, the correspondent wrote, the government would pay attention not just to reports from the appointed authorities, but from the Indians who braved difficulties to travel to the capital.135

Another major concern in the Oriente was its peopling with colonists from outside the region and the formalization of their establishment in the region. In November of

1939, El Comercio published an exposition by Arturo González Pozo, long-time Oriente propagandist and publisher of the periodical Miscelánea, which was devoted to spreading information about the Oriente and encouraging its development. As González argued, the worldwide Depression meant that it was a propitious time to begin colonization of the Oriente on a grand scale. But poor campesinos from the Sierra and unemployed laborers from the cities could not simply flood into the area without preparation; in order for them to have some chance for success, the government had to prepare the ground for their arrival. Maintaining existing roads and building new ones was critical. So was sending small groups of publicly supported tamberos who would attend to the roads and to travelers. They would be “sappers of progress,” forming nuclei of future populations. This could only work, though, if the current system of adjudicating vacant lands, which González called “defective,” was reworked. The current system gave rise to “latifundismo” in which private individuals claimed large extensions of land without any real intention to work them. Colonization of the Oriente would not be accomplished by large capitalists, but the workers themselves. In

González’s view, the concession of private property should be limited to parcels of a

135 “Desde el Puyo,” El Comercio, August 28, 1939.

265 small size. And it would begin with the tamberos placed every two or three kilometers along the most important routes into the region.136 No such system was adopted, but El

Comercio’s publishing of González’s piece shows the concern with how, exactly, the vast lands of the Oriente would come to be owned and formalized by Ecuadorian citizens. His article also indicates the preoccupation with the problem of latifundismo, which would continue for decades and will be treated more extensively in Chapter 6.

As for Galo Plaza’s proposal to fundamentally alter the administrative structure of the Oriente by handing its populated areas over to adjacent Sierra provinces, the idea remained alive and was known to residents of Mera and Puyo. In July, 1940, El

Comercio reported that they were against the idea. They had “struggled” to beat back savage nature in the region and through “personal sacrifice,” abandoned the Sierra to

“form the true future of the homeland,” and had “constituted themselves as advanced sentinels.” As they were subject to the Ley Especial, they were free of tax obligations. If they were to join Tungurahua Province, their economic interests would suffer greatly as any capital they had gathered for agriculture and small-scale industries would be absorbed by tax obligations. Upon learning that they might no longer be governed by the Ley Especial de Oriente, nearly 400 citizens in both pueblos sent a formal note of protest to the government.137

Plaza’s proposal was a radical re-imagining of the place of the Oriente within government policy. Rather than have special laws and special budgetary allocations for

Oriente’s most heavily populated areas, they would be incorporated by fiat into the

136 Arturo González Pozo, “Colonización y tierras baldías de la Región Oriental,” El Comercio, November 10, 1939.

137 “Mera y Puyo no quieren pertenecer a la provincia de Tungurahua sino al Oriente,” El Comercio, July 29, 1940.

266 Republic’s general system. The problem of roads and accessibility would have fallen, at least in part, to each of several different provincial governments, as they would have to administer Oriente populations that were still only accessible by several poor, incomplete roads. Plaza’s successor as Minister of Defense, Dr. Vicente Santistevan

Elizalde, also recommended that Plaza’s new territorial division be adopted. In the meantime, he stated that his Ministry had attempted to supply all the Oriente’s settlements with competent public employees, given that unsatisfactory authorities remained a perennial problem.138 This problem was exacerbated by the fact that the current budget made absolutely no provision for police officers in the Oriente, so the authorities on the ground did not “find sufficient help to back up their orders.” A special allocation was needed to create a police force that could act on the orders of the region’s authorities.139 Unfortunately, colonization in the region had been reduced lately, and a recent law for the titling of vacant lands actually made the situation worse, because the provincial juntas in charge of processing the requests for title acted too slowly, or not at all.140

This law, the “Law for the Titling of Oriente Lands,” was promulgated in

November of 1940. It was designed to respond to the fact that hundreds of petitions for land in the Oriente Department of the Ministry of Defense had not been resolved. The law stated that the possessors or occupants of lands in the Oriente could claim title by submitting an official report with details about the land to a junta of state officials.

138 Dr. Vicente Santistevan Elizalde, Informe que el Ministro de Defensa nacional, Oriente y Deportes, presenta a la Nación, 1941 (Quito: Talleres Gráficos del Colegio Militar, 1941), 33-34.

139 Ibid., 38.

140 Ibid., 44.

267 Military engineers in the Oriente were to provide technical assistance in surveying the land and making a detailed map. But the junta was to meet in the major cities of the

Sierra, not the Oriente itself.141 Given the difficult transportation network of the region, it is not surprising that, as Minister Santistevan stated, the processing of these requests was extremely slow.

In 1942, this law was replaced. The new law similarly stipulated that colonists in possession of land could submit a detailed report to receive title, provided they had cultivated at least one fourth of the land claimed. In this version, however, the request would be submitted not to a junta in the Sierra, but one located in the Oriente itself, at the nearest Municipal Council, Canton or Parish Junta. This body would study the request for approval, but it still had to be sent on to the Ministry of Defense in Quito for final issue of title. Definitive title to land still could not be obtained entirely inside the

Oriente itself. The law stipulated that no request could exceed 50 hectares, and that requests could not be made on behalf of other family members (that is, a father could not submit a request in his son’s name in order to accumulate more than 50 hectares for himself).142 Both of these laws represent efforts by the government to promote colonization by assuring colonists that their ownership of a piece of the Oriente could be fully legalized. Nevertheless, the region’s difficult infrastructure was a serious obstacle to the smooth functioning envisioned for the process.143

141 “Ley de Titulación de Terrenos del Oriente,” Registro Oficial no. 74 (November 29, 1940).

142 “Nueva Ley de Titulación de Terrenos del Oriente,” Registro Oficial no. 645 (December 20, 1942).

143 Information published in El Oriente Dominicano makes clear that the acquisition of land and its legalization was a pressing matter. As the Dominican priest Jacinto Dávila stated, immigration to the Pastaza region had been increasing for seven years in an “extraordinarily overwhelming and sweeping manner,” resulting in a current of new capital and the clear-cutting of the forest. Unfortunately, the

268 In 1941, Peruvian troops invaded Ecuador on two fronts: in the south, reaching the major highland city of Loja, and later, in the Oriente, where Peruvian soldiers easily absorbed half of Ecuador’s Amazonian territory by defeating what few small garrisons of

Ecuadorian soldiers they encountered. This conflict “smelled of oil,” as Peru’s actions were motivated by its ties to Standard Oil and that company’s designs on Amazonian exploration. The Rio de Janeiro Protocol, signed in January of 1942, formalized the loss of territory. The Ecuadorian statesmen who subscribed to the document acceded to the demands of “hemispheric unity” in the war against Japan.144 During the fighting,

Ecuadorian President Carlos Arroyo del Río withheld elements of the Ecuadorian military from the conflict in order to maintain his regime against popular protest.145 The humiliating defeat was not enough to bring down his government, however. The loss of territory did not feature prominently in ministerial reports the following year.

The Minister of Defense in 1942, Colonel Alberto C. Romero, focused on the problem of public employees in his annual report. Administration, at the moment, was deficient precisely because it was impossible to ensure that good employees were placed in each post. The fundamental reason for this, of course, was the low monthly salaries the budget provided. Tenientes Políticos, the top authority in each parish, earned only 200 sucres a month, while their secretaries earned only 100. In most places, this was barely enough money to feed one’s self and to buy some medicine.

“original and autochthonous” Indians of the area were fleeing into the forest in the face of this. Dávila urged the government to pass a set of laws intended, on the one hand, to prevent whites from taking possession of lands owned by Indians, and on the other hand, prohibit Indians from selling. This would ensure that the Indians remained in place, alongside newly arrived whites, so they could join the “current of civilized life.” “Comunicaciones Oficiales,” El Oriente Dominicano 14, nos. 98-99 (June-July 1941): 189.

144 Enrique Ayala Mora, “El arroísmo y el conflicto territorial,” Enrique Ayala Mora, ed., Nueva Historia del Ecuador, Volume 10 (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1990), 107-08.

145 Cueva, “El Ecuador de 1925 a 1960,” 106-07.

269 The Ministry had had to fire several authorities, and at the same time wade through a stream of complaints made against them by the inhabitants of the region.146 These public authorities were the very ones upon whom too much responsibility was laid. In the Minister’s view, the Ley Especial did not truly distinguish the special conditions of the region. Justice was supposed to be carried out in the Oriente very much as it was in the rest of the Republic, but without the corps of judicial officials that the provinces of the Andes and Littoral enjoyed. Instead, judicial proceedings were to be done by underpaid public employees who often did not understand the respective laws.147 The region still lacked an adequate number of police. In response to this, three of the

Oriente’s representatives in Congress had proposed a budgetary assignation of

120,000 sucres a year to fund a corps of 100 officers for the region; the Minister urged the approval of this measure.148

In March of 1942, Arturo González Pozo again took to the pages of El Comercio to call for greater attention to the Oriente’s colonization, health services, and vacant lands. The system for establishing title was still very deficient. As he reported, very few of the colonists of the Oriente had obtained legal title; they remained as mere

“possessors” susceptible to the machinations of “gamonales” or powerful individuals that could seek to remove them from their land. And, as always, the Oriente needed

“adequate men” for its public employee positions. González admitted that this was

146 Coronel Alberto C. Romero, Informe que presenta a la Nación el Ministro de Defensa Nacional, Oriente, Archipiélago de Colón y Deportes, acerca de las labores desarrolladas en el año de 1941 a 1942 (Quito: Talleres Gráficos del Colegio Militar, 1942), 82-83.

147 Ibid., 84.

148 Ibid., 88.

270 difficult to do, given the very low salaries of these officials, but hoped that this inconvenience could be rectified with good will.”149

Minister Romero reported in 1943 that low salaries still meant that the Oriente did not have the public officials it deserved. Although the Tenientes Políticos had received a raise to 250 sucres per month (with Jefes Políticos earning 350), it was still not enough given the unforgiving climate, transportation, and isolation of the region.150 The civil authorities’ tasks were made more difficult by the ongoing lack of police; the previous year’s proposal for a new corps of 100 officers was never approved.151 As for the titling of land, Romero reported that the Ministry had received 300 new petitions for title, many of which had been finalized. The Ministry was also interested in further aiding the

“hardworking colonist” who “sacrifices himself in the jungle” by planning a project for colonization that would create an agricultural bank in the region to coordinate capital and administrative assistance.152

With the return of José María Velasco Ibarra to the presidency in 1944, El

Oriente Dominicano reported on how this news was received in the Oriente. Velasco’s stated intention to promote the development of the region along with the protection of its

Indians was particularly welcome. Too frequent were the complaints by Indians that some whites were trying to remove them from their lands. Velasco, along with his subalterns, the Director de Oriente and the military officials responsible for the Oriente,

149 Arturo González Pozo, “Tópicos Orientalistas,” El Comercio, March 16, 1942.

150 General Alberto C. Romero, Informe del Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, Oriente, Archipiélago de Colón y Deportes, al Honorable Congreso Nacional de 1943 (Quito: Talleres Gráficos del Colegio Militar, 1943), 93-94.

151 Ibid., 100.

152 Ibid., 102-03.

271 promised an improved situation.153 Velasco’s arrival in power was also awakening civic spirit among the Oriente’s inhabitants, leading to many popular assemblies to discuss how to improve the region, and to work on the roads and other projects. People in Puyo wanted to see the creation of a new Ministry of the Oriente to centralize the government’s efforts in the promotion of colonization, industry, hygiene, infrastructure, and roads. Furthermore one article even suggested that each canton in the Oriente should be a province in order to acquire more public officials and resources.154

In the same issue, the magazine published an exposition by someone who simply took the name “Ecuadorian” about the place of the Oriente within the Ministry of

Defense. Most of the residents of the Oriente desired that all the government ministers who took part in the region’s administration make their decisions according to special circumstances of the Amazon in order to “give the zone all the importance it deserves.”

It would be more efficient if all the decisions regarding the Oriente were centralized within a single government department. The author also highlighted, as many had before, the fact that the region’s Jefes and Tenientes Políticos were burdened with an excessive number of responsibilities, making their jobs very difficult. Also, more roads and more colonies should be planted in the Oriente right away. As the author reported,

Peru had already filled those sections taken from Ecuador in the war with colonies with schools, civil authorities, and military garrisons.155 A certain amount of optimism was

153 “Voces de la Población de El Puyo,” El Oriente Dominicano 17, no. 138 (September 1944): 114.

154 “De El Puyo,” El Oriente Dominicano 17, no. 38 (September 1944): 115-16.

155 Ecuatoriano, “El Oriente Ecuatoriano y el decreto de la Administración Militar,” El Oriente Dominicano 17, no. 38 (September 1944): 124-25.

272 palpable with Velasco’s return to power, but at the same time, the distance between the

Oriente’s current state and its hoped for development was still quite clear to observers.

For decades, the ministries responsible for the administration of the Oriente had issued reports to Congress about the region. The themes of these reports did not change much during the first five decades of the twentieth century. Each minister urged road construction; year after year, they could not report that the Oriente was finally connected to the various sections of the interior with fast, secure routes of penetration.

Most ministers stated that they were taking steps to procure better administration for the region, only to have poor public authorities prove a perennial problem. No efficient method for extending definitive title to land was decided upon, and although numerous projects for colonization were proposed, none of any significance were actually established in the region. The protection of the region’s indigenous people received little attention by the ministries, despite the fact that they remained a large majority of the region’s population. Throughout this period, some version of the Ley Especial de

Oriente remained in effect, as it would until 1969. Year after year, an under-staffed and underpaid corps of state officials attempted to administer the region on a model that many ministers explained was too similar to that of the rest of the Republic. The political-administrative regime for the Andean and Pacific coast provinces was inappropriate for the vast, under-populated Oriente that lacked a dependable system of roads and communications. In the government ministries of Quito, the Oriente was an extra, “ancillary” group of provinces that were of secondary concern at best.

The population of the Oriente that originated outside the region continued to grow in the 1940s thanks to colonization. As Miscelánea observed in 1946, colonization was

273 the key to tapping the wealth of the region and cementing its status as national,

Ecuadorian territory. Large-scale colonization schemes, however, were difficult and costly. Before considering such projects, it was necessary to attend to the region’s

Indians, who were the “basis of colonization” and the “most efficient guide and companion of the new inhabitant” of the Oriente. They knew the “mysteries of the jungle” including which plants were beneficial and harmful. They were excellent navigators, great hunters, and able fisherman. But many were fearful of whites due to a history of bad experiences in which newcomers to the region exploited them greedily.

Good legislation and good public officials were needed to protect the “childlike” and

“docile” Indians, while a program of education would teach them modern methods of healthcare and agriculture. In order to protect the Indians as the “basis” of colonization and Ecuador’s ultimate success in the Amazon, only men of proven morality should be made state authorities. Only men looking to establish definitive residence in the region should be chosen, as they would be serve the “role of father of the tribe” for the Indians in their jurisdiction.156

In 1947, responsibility for the Oriente was transferred to the Ministry of

Government, where it would remain for two decades. This ministry’s first report about the region was issued in 1948 by Minister Juan Tanca Marengo. As he stated, the

Oriente had never been attended to as it deserved, which was major factor in explaining why Ecuador had lost such a great portion of the territory to Peru in the war of 1941, as formalized by the Rio de Janeiro Protocol of 1942. Since then, the Oriente still had not joined the “civilizing current” of the rest of the country, and had remained for most a

“remote and imprecise” notion rather than a part of national patrimony. In the Minister’s

156 “Por el Indígena Oriental,” Miscelánea 16, no. 101 (January 1946): 6-8.

274 view, a campaign of “realistic” Oriente propaganda was needed to counteract false, fantastical notions about the region and to instill in all Ecuadorians the “conviction that one of the fundamental duties that patriotism imposes is to go to the Oriente with the sacred goal to increment private property and the subsequent exploitation of wide territories that await the work of man to hand over [the Oriente’s] exuberant wealth.”157

Tanca Marengo stated that the primary necessity for “saving” the Oriente was the promotion of colonization. This was an “old and well-known” truth, but it bore repeating until it rested in the “mind and heart of all Ecuadorians.” The Ministry had drawn up a plan for approval by Congress that included the formation of new agricultural centers, means of transport, aid for colonists, funds for the completion of roads, and other steps.

The collaboration of the religious missions was a fundamental assumption of the plan.158 No such grand project was approved that year, however.

But 1948 did include one momentous development for the Oriente: the creation of the Junta Nacional Pro Oriente, or JUNO as it came to be known. The organization was created by an executive decree from President Carlos Julio Arosemena. The decree cited the state’s duty to work for the “development of all the territorial sections of the Homeland” so that they could “incorporate themselves into the general rhythm of progress of the Nation.” It also cited the “profound preoccupation” in the country to

“stimulate national production, in all its aspects, in order to give it the essential conditions for its better welfare and place it at the height it deserves in the concert of the people of the Continent.” In these respects, the decree condensed and repeated the

157 Dr. Juan Tanca Marengo, Informe a la Nación 1948 (Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1948), 48-50.

158 Ibid., 51-52.

275 decades-old image of the Oriente as a treasure trove of national prosperity and a solution for economic, social, and political problems. The JUNO was to unite the efforts of the entire nation, including government officials, public and private institutions, and the “citizenry in general.” It would be a “Consultative and Executive Organism,” the decisions of which would be carried out with approval from the Ministry of Government

(to which the Oriente’s administration remained ascribed). It was to have a crystalline structure, with a Central Committee located in Quito and an analogous committee in each province. The Central Committee was composed of the President and Vice

President of the Republic, the Presidents of each legislative chamber, each of the

Senators and Diputados from the Oriente provinces, and several other dignitaries such as the Archbishop of Quito, the Rector of the Central University, and the President of the Supreme Court. The goals of the JUNO were to “propel, foment and coordinate national activities tending toward an effective improvement of the economy and culture of the Oriente region,” and to “stimulate the development of a civic movement in the whole Republic, which in a profound and lasting manner, maintains interest among the current and future generations for the progress of the Oriente region.” The actual means by which the JUNO could achieve these ends were not terribly concrete: the JUNO was to use “negotiation” [“gestión”] with government officials and public and private institutions to obtain “greater national cooperation” for Oriente development. The JUNO would also organize campaigns of civic propaganda and fundraising for the region.159

The JUNO was given some teeth in December of that year by the creation of the

Cédula Orientalista, or “Orientalist Certificate.” This new instrument of fundraising was

159 Carlos Julio Arosemena, “Decreto Ejecutivo No. 1245-a,” Registro Oficial 1, no. 251 (July 19, 1948): 2000-2001.

276 approved by Congress, which cited the fact that “one of the most sacred duties of every

Ecuadorian is to defend the Oriente provinces by constructing penetration routes that foment its colonization in effective form.” The new law required that every inhabitant of the country of eighteen years or older must obtain a cédula, which could be purchased for the value of one, three, five, seven, and ten sucres per year, according to the economic status of the buyer. Indigenous people native to the Oriente itself, residents of the Galápagos Islands, and the indigent were excused. The money would be gathered by the treasurers of each municipality in the nation and deposited in an account in the

Central Bank that would be accessible to the JUNO. The funds gathered were to be used exclusively for roads into the Oriente. Initially, 40% of the funds were destined for the road between Puyo and Napo, 40% for the road from Paute in the southern Sierra to the Morona region, in the south-central Oriente, 10% for the road from Riobamba in the central Sierra to the Morona, and 10% for the road from Pun in the northern Sierra to

San Miguel de Sucumbíos, a corner of the Oriente on the border with Colombia.160

In his report to Congress in 1949, the Minister of Government, Eduardo Salazar

Gómez, stated that the results obtained so far from the Cédula Orientalista were

“deficient” because the sales numbers were underwhelming. He had sent circulars to the various governors of the country urging them to promote the sale of the Cédula, to little effect. Most of those who had obtained the certificate bought the one-sucre version.

As Salazar explained, the manufacture of the document itself cost more than one

160 El Congreso de la República del Ecuador, “Establécese la Cédula Orientalista obligatoria para todos los habitantes de la República,” Registro Oficial 1, no. 97 (December 29, 1948): 773-776.

277 sucre!161 He also cited other, more general problems with the administration of the

Oriente. Like many of his predecessors, Salazar stated that the Oriente was fundamentally different from the rest of the country, and therefore needed special legislation. As evidence, he cited the fact that the Governor of Napo-Pastaza, Antonio

Jijón Gangotena, had actually requested that his own position of Governor be eliminated, along with all the Jefes and Tenientes Políticos in the region, to be replaced by a body of “special agents of the Executive Branch coordinated with the Ministry of

Defense.”162 As Jijón stated in his report to Salazar, local government bodies in the

Oriente like those elsewhere in the Republic, such as the Provincial and Canton

Councils, were of no benefit. The region did not have a population high enough to support them and fill them with honorable members. These bodies generally spent all their available funds on salaries for employees, leaving public works of general benefit neglected. Squabbling over these payouts disrupted the harmony among citizens, to the detriment of agricultural colonization. One cause of this trouble was the fact that, as ever, the salaries for public employees in the region were far too low.163 Given all this,

Salazar urged Congress to approve a new reform of the Ley Especial that took the exceptional conditions of the Oriente into account.164 The governor of the southern

Oriente province of Santiago-Zamora, Angel Miguel Arregui, did not request a radical administrative reform as his counterpart Jijón did. But he did cite the need for more

161 Eduardo Salazar Gómez, Informe a la Nación 1948-1949 (Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1949), 47-51.

162 Ibid., 45.

163 Antonio Jijón Gangotena to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Quito, June 3, 1949, in ibid., 325-27.

164 Ibid., 45.

278 schools and a more efficient way to see that money budgeted for his province was handed over quickly and carefully. He also noted the need for a simpler method for granting title to vacant lands in the province; with the current system of making petitions to the Ministry of Economy, almost none of the colonists and natives of the province had legal title. He suggested a law or decree that would allow the Governor of the province to take responsibility for the adjudication of land and granting of title.165 These reports make clear the fact that the prescribed administrative model for the Oriente was inapplicable. It relied far too much on offices and processes that were fundamentally the same as those in other parts of the Republic where population was higher, roads were better, and communications quicker.

The administrative efforts toward the Oriente for several decades had been influenced by the ideas about the region as articulated in its construction as a national object of desire. The importance of the region for the nation’s future was widely agreed upon. But the kinds of administrative deficiencies detailed in this chapter, stemming from lack of consistency and scarcity of funds, guaranteed that the Oriente remained a group of ancillary provinces rather than an integrated portion of national territory along the lines of what statesmen and propagandists had envisioned for decades.

165 Angel Miguel Arregui to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, June 10, 1949, in Eduardo Salazar Gómez, Informe a la Nación, Segunda Parte, 1948-1949 (Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1949), 7.

279 CHAPTER 5 ADMINISTERING ANCILLARY PROVINCES: COLONISTS AND STATE OFFICIALS IN THE ORIENTE, 1940-1960

Despite the loss of a vast amount of Ecuador’s Amazonian territory to Peru with the 1942 Rio de Janeiro Protocol, life in the Oriente continued. The humiliating defeat was widely mourned, for it represented the severance of potentially rich lands upon which national aspirations had been built for decades. Nevertheless, those same decades had seen the founding of Ecuadorian cities and towns in the parts of the

Amazon nearer to the Andean cordillera and to Ecuador’s major highland cities. The nearer Oriente that was not lost was home to several different indigenous groups, colonists from the highlands, influential landowners, state officials, and missionaries.

The numbers of those groups that originated outside the Amazon region would continue to grow after 1942 until their numbers exploded with the beginning of oil drilling operations in the late 1960s. The oil boom, like previous “booms” of resource extraction in the Amazon, brought unprecedented numbers of outsiders, infrastructure development, and economic investment to the region. Even before the oil boom, however, Ecuadorian state makers and citizens made significant efforts to incorporate the Oriente into the national imaginary, the economy, and the state structure. This chapter examines those efforts from approximately 1940 until 1960 in the provinces of the Oriente, comprised first of Napo-Pastaza Province and Santiago-Zamora Province.

In 1954, the southern Oriente was divided into the provinces of Morona-Santiago, with its capital at Macas, and Zamora-Chinchipe, with its capital at Zamora. After 1959, the northern Oriente was divided into the provinces of Napo and Pastaza. During these decades, colonists from the Andes continued to enter the region in search of land and opportunity, and local governing bodies expanded their abilities to exert influence at the

280 level of parish and canton. Furthermore, petty officials appointed by government ministries in Quito attempted to see that the nation’s laws were implemented and that the state gained control over the region’s people and resources. The Oriente remained a group of ancillary provinces, governed by laws that resembled in large part the general administrative structure of the rest of the nation. The scarce budgetary resources available for administration and the difficult transportation and communications network meant that these laws were not effectively carried out. This chapter will examine in detail the consequences of living in such a “brown area,” to borrow the phrase from political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell,1 for the region’s petty officials, bodies of incipient local government, and colonists.

To study the effort to bring the Oriente more fully into Ecuador’s wider political and economic structure is to study a particular case of state formation in a frontier zone.

The state’s presence in the 19th century was limited, and remained so for the first decades of the twentieth century. However, the “momentum” of the state, to borrow

Paul E. Little’s usage of the word, increased after the 1920s, and especially during the

1940s and 50s.2 As Little describes, “each social group [in the Amazon] establishes its

1 O’Donnell, “On the State,” 1359.

2 See Paul E. Little, Amazonia, 1. Little has stated that the 1920s marked the beginning of the era in which “Amazonia finally began to be integrated into the political-administrative structure of the Ecuadorian state” thanks to new legislation and increasing mission activity. See ibid., 46-47. Jorge Uquillas has cited the 1920s for the contract with Salesian missionaries in the Southern Oriente as an important development that laid the groundwork for further colonization. He also cites the infrastructure work done by Royal Dutch Shell in the 1940s for preparing a “major invasion from the sierra and costa.” See Uquillas, “Colonization and Spontaneous Settlement,” 266-67. Marco Restrepo has signaled the importance of the 1942 loss of territory as the event which caused the Ecuadorian state to see the Amazon as “an integral part of national territory,” leading to increased efforts to build roads in the region and to promulgate specific legislation. See Restrepo, “El problema de la frontera,” 160. Restrepo has also stated that the mid-twentieth century saw, on the one hand, the state move away from the “[delegation] of its inherent responsibilities” to missionaries and private individuals, and on the other hand, the arrival of “poor campesinos” from outside the region that transformed the region by bringing “commercial capital.” Restrepo, “El Proceso de acumulación,” 143-44. Ann Christine Taylor has described the period of 1900-

281 own demographic and spatial momentum, the force of which is greatly responsible for the degree of political power achieved and the magnitude of environmental effects produced in the region.”3 Those actors that were most closely associated with the

“state” in the Oriente were the political officials, such as the governors, Jefes Políticos and Tenientes Políticos appointed by various government ministries to which administration of the Oriente was assigned. However, in frontier environments, the functioning of the state tends to be shared among different social actors; as Ana María

Alonso has noted in her study of the northern Mexican frontier, “power circulates throughout the social body and is not simply concentrated in government structures.”4

Furthermore, the “state” is not so much a single, identifiable artifact, but a system of power relations and ideas that are expressed through the actions of both public and private individuals.5 Historian Jean-Paul Deler has described Ecuador’s early

Republican history as the hammering-out of a set of “rules of the game” between different regions and economic groups that sought to extend “quiteño space.”6 This period of the Oriente’s history included its own rules of the game; this time, however, they constituted the extension of the Ecuadorian state and society into the Amazon. In short, it was the Ecuadorianization of the region, which was a set of ancillary provinces, as described in Chapter 4.

1940 in the Oriente as one of relative inactivity in which patterns from the nineteenth century, dominated by white-mestizo patrones who controlled Indian labor, continued. But the region’s entrance into the 20th century began by 1950 with the appearance of a salaried workforce. See Taylor, “El Oriente ecuatoriano en el siglo XIX,” 17-18. Finally, Jean-Paul Deler has also noted that by the 1950s, the Oriente had become the destination for great numbers of internal migrants from the Sierra. See Deler, Ecuador, 321.

3 Little, Amazonia, 3.

4 Alosno, Thread of Blood, 10.

5 See Alonso, ibid., 115, for her discussion of this idea from Philip Abrams.

6 Deler, Ecuador, 13.

282 In the Oriente of the 1940s and 50s, the functioning of the state, and

Ecuadorianization as well, depended on the collaboration of influential landowners as well as Catholic missionaries and colonists who originated outside the region. Subaltern groups, such as the region’s indigenous inhabitants, engaged this web of social actors through petitions and complaints in order to maintain access to land and community traditions. The ideas that underlay the state in the Oriente drew upon notions about the region and its place in the nation that had been developed in previous decades in the press and other published accounts. Civic celebrations about the Amazonian region that were observed in highland cities and in the Oriente itself also played a role in the construction of the Oriente as a national space and cultural artifact. Colonists in the region frequently cited the patriotic mission they were carrying out as “Sentinels of the

Homeland” in order to seek redress of grievances or to lodge a complaint against a private or public individual. Their petitions to local officials and to ministries in Quito reveal the beliefs they held about how legitimacy of authority was obtained in the

Oriente. These petitions also illustrate the power dynamics in the region that determined who could most successfully maintain access to land and labor, and who could provoke state officials’ intervention on their behalf. The functioning of the Ecuadorian state in the

Oriente, then, was not so much the automatic expression of the Republic’s laws in action, but rather the decisions made and actions taken by individuals who confronted limited resources, difficult communications, and various challenges to their authority, both from other state officials, as well as from mestizo, Spanish-speaking citizens and the region’s indigenous people. Emilio Willems has stated that a frontier is simply an area “into which migrants have moved to exploit some of its known resources.” The

283 Oriente bears out Willems’s observation that frontier societies feature “anomie and social disorganization,” but move toward a modus vivendi that signifies the waning of frontier status.7 This chapter shows the conflicts, rivalries, and rhetoric that came to bear over two decades as the Oriente became more fully Ecuadorianized with a more entrenched state system.

This chapter will begin by examining the rhetoric used by the Oriente’s colonists in their communications with state officials, demonstrating that the efforts in previous decades to turn the Oriente into a component of national identity had a real effect on these inhabitants’ understanding of their place in the nation and therefore the language with which they engaged the state. A component, then, of the “idea” of the state in the

Amazon was the creation of a particular “colonist” subjectivity, entailing the belief that their interests deserved protection because they were “Sentinels of the Homeland,” enduring sacrifice on behalf of the nation as a whole. The colonists displayed a precursor version of what Paul E. Little has described as “developmentalism” in his study of Amazonian colonists in a much later period, namely, the 1980s and 90s. Just as Little’s subjects in the post-oil boom period did, the colonists of the 1940s and 50s displayed heightened patriotic consciousness and a belief that they were personally extending the reach of the nation.8 In short, they were agents of Ecuadorianization.

Their rhetoric and the ideas about the importance of the Oriente were derived from the construction of the region as a national object of desire, invested with patriotic importance and hopes for the future. This construction took place in the press and other publications, which was disseminated to wider Ecuadorian society.

7 Willems, “Social Change on the Latin American Frontier,” 213.

8 Little, “Identidades amazónicas e identidades de colonos,” 160.

284 I will then discuss the role of the Governors, Jefes and Tenientes Políticos of the

Oriente who held both political and judicial attributions in the region, and were frequently the targets of complaints of corruption. These cases of malfeasance demonstrate the degree to which administration in the Oriente suffered from limited resources and the influence of alternative sources of authority, such as influential landowners or patrones.

Furthermore, the multiple attributions held by each state official could, on the one hand, create confusion over legitimacy of action. The vesting of multiple responsibilities in a single individual often meant that none of the several responsibilities were carried out particularly well. On the other hand, this system meant that each individual appointed official could wield significant influence, with multiple arenas in which their action or deliberate inaction could have consequences for the people in their jurisdiction. This confusion was a significant consequence of the fact that the Oriente remained a set of ancillary provinces, suffering from the lack of resources and communication.

The 1940s and 50s also saw the growing importance of local government in the

Oriente, as these bodies, such as Concejos Cantonales y Municipales could levy taxes and spend on infrastructure projects. An examination of these organisms’ budgets reveals the priorities they set and the interests to which they catered. Accusations of mismanagement of funds and other forms of corruption also plagued these institutions, which again shows the challenges posed by limited resources. Nevertheless, these institutions had access to the rhetorical tools wielded by other white-mestizo colonists in the region. They could position themselves as legitimate prosecutors of a critical patriotic task, that is, the development or Ecuadorianization of the Oriente. By citing the important mission they were carrying out by administering the Oriente, these bodies

285 borrowed from the Oriente as national object of desire in an attempt to “bridge the gap” between the disappointing state of the region and the resources assigned to it, and the high patriotic importance the region held in national terms. Next, I will discuss the politicization of the region during the presidencies of Galo Plaza Lasso, José María

Velasco Ibarra, and Camilo Ponce Enríquez, from 1948 until 1960. Political factions and rivalries proved to be another layer of complexity and conflict laid upon the network of individuals called to see that the Republic’s laws were enforced in the Oriente. Those three presidents each served full, four-year terms. This period of relative stability in

Ecuadorian politics saw a fuller integration of the Oriente into national political trends in terms of the importance of political parties and the effects that political changes in Quito could have at the local level, even in the frontier region of the Oriente. The region became more fully Ecuadorianized in the sense that political networks of power reached outside the region, to adjacent highland cities and to the capital, Quito.

A shared dynamic among all these themes is what could be simply called corruption. The pervasiveness of this calls into question the nature of the state in the

Oriente. In an ideal sense, the state ought to function according to an automatic expression of the Republic’s laws. It is clear from the evidence here that the working of the state on the Ecuadorian Amazonian frontier was far from ideal. The Oriente was a relatively new arena for the functioning of the state; the combination of the Republic’s laws, the officials meant to carry them out, and the conditions on the ground resulted in a unique modus vivendi to time and place. This is the system that existed within the

Oriente as ancillary provinces for the Ecuadorian state. As David Weber and Jane M.

Rausch have noted, frontiers “contain so many cultural and environmental variables”

286 that their study “must include considerations of frontier peoples and institutions at specific times and places.”9 This chapter suggests that the particularities of the Oriente, including a lack of oversight, limited resources, political rivalries, and the efforts of colonists motivated by a “Sentinel” mentality resulted in a state that was weak in terms of its resemblance to the ideal form prescribed by the Ecuadorian constitution and

Quito’s official efforts to incorporate the Amazon. However, certain exponents of the state were strong because its petty officials wielded considerable influence in the region, as did the small governmental bodies allowed for by the state. As this and subsequent chapters show, the representatives of the state in the region made a real difference. They did so, however, not as exponents of the government and constitution, but as individuals with personal motivations and alliances that favored particular uses of state resources over others. In an ancillary province, then, the modus vivendi derives from a combination of the Republic’s laws, weakly enforced, and the motivations of those individuals who enjoyed a lack of oversight.

Given the weakness of the state in terms of its resemblance to what Ecuador’s laws imagined, Philip Abrams’s comments about the nature of the state should be kept in mind. As Abrams observed, the state is largely an “ideological thing” which sets the terms for how “subjection is legitimated.”10 My contention is that in the context of insufficient resources and relative isolation, the administration of the ancillary provinces of the Ecuadorian state Oriente relied upon ideological notions of its own legitimation that stemmed from how the region was constructed as a national object of desire. This

9 Weber and Rausch, “Introduction,” xxiii.

10 Philip Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (March 1988): 68.

287 is reflected in colonists’ petitions for redress of grievances, the communications of appointed officials, and the actions of incipient local government. These were all components or “institutions” of the “state system,” in Abrams’s description, that partially relied on a coercive function to carry out the ideological project of the state.11 In the

Oriente, there was in fact “a palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure centred in government” which made up the “mask” of “political practice” that Abrams argues is the essence of the state itself.12 This chapter and those that follow illustrate how Ecuador’s frontier history in the Amazon, characterized by a diversity of social actors, under-resourced appointed officials, and a toolkit of national ideas about the region in question combined to produce a case of state formation that demonstrates the importance of national rhetoric upon the working of the state.

Sentinels of the Homeland: Oriente Colonists and their Grievances

The colonists of the Oriente were keenly aware of the distance they lived from the major cities of the Republic, as well as the difficult infrastructure that made communications very slow and insecure. Nevertheless, they demanded that their rights be respected as Ecuadorian citizens. A key component of how the Oriente was brought more fully into the Ecuadorian nation was the demand by its residents that they be recognized both as citizens like any other, and also as people whose efforts in the tropical environment of the Amazon deserved special recognition. A typical version of this view was expressed by dozens of residents of Puyo, calling themselves “authentic colonists of this Oriental Region,” in December of 1948 as they wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno (Ministry of Government) to suggest a candidate for the post of Governor

11 Ibid., 76.

12 Ibid., 82.

288 of Napo-Pastaza Province. They stated that the Oriente had suffered under a long tradition of poor public authorities, and claimed,

these pueblos of the Oriente…now more than ever, no longer desire that the naming of its authorities and functionaries be done with evident disregard for what they, the pueblos, are and signify in the national conglomerate, and they believe and are certain that as an integral part of the national territory, they have right to spontaneous and free determination of their destinies.

Furthermore, they would no longer accept the notion that had existed among government authorities, that “for nothing more than the Oriente, any person is fine, no matter how incapacitated nor unqualified he may be.”13 These colonists, then, argued that the Oriente should not be considered a secondary region to the rest of the country in any sense, and that they therefore deserved equal treatment to those in other sections of the Republic. Other colonists sought redress of grievances by claiming special status due to the difficulty of their lives and the sacrifice that living in the Oriente constituted. In May of 1949, dozens of colonists from the Puyo area wrote to the

President of the Republic to demand more attention for the region’s infrastructure. This group of “genuine colonists” stated that they had “lost the best years of their lives struggling with the inclement weather, the bad roads, the high prices of sustenance, the tropical diseases, etc., etc.” They wrote to the President as “men who work the land to gain sustenance for our families, with sweat on our foreheads and sometimes with our blood.” In their view, colonization of the Oriente would fail if the strategy consisted in simply sending small contingents of colonists with a small salary, but without continuing material and infrastructural support from the government. They appealed to patriotism by stating that effective colonization was the only way to maintain “our territorial rights,”

13 Auténticos colonos de esta Región Oriental to Sr. Ministerio de Gobierno y Oriente, Puyo, December 19, 1948, AMG. All translations are my own.

289 and that better roads and river navigation was needed, like those of the “enemy of the south,” Peru. All of this was prologue to a very specific objection: they criticized ongoing plans to change the route of a road between the city of Puyo, in Pastaza Canton and the Napo River because the changes would benefit only “certain people” at the cost of public good.14 The rhetoric of these colonists includes an appeal to their somewhat extraordinary status as individuals whose sacrifices go above and beyond those of most citizens. Furthermore, those sacrifices are directly related to the nation’s patriotic endeavor to maintain territorial integrity in the face of Peruvian aggression.15 Here, these residents of the Oriente recognized the deficiencies inherent in the fact that the region remained a group of ancillary provinces. To remedy this situation, they turned to the discourse of patriotism and progress provided by the fact that the Oriente had been constructed as an important national object of desire.

The appeal to the special status of citizenship held by the Oriente’s residents could be made in the southern Oriente as well, in the Province of Santiago-Zamora. In

1947, Blanca López, the president of the “28 de Mayo” committee in the settlement of

Sucúa wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to ask that ten thousand sucres be

14 Multiple signers to Excelentísimo Señor Presidente de la República, Puyo, May 18, 1949, AMG.

15 This rhetoric was commonly used by the region’s colonists, but similar appeals to patriotism and the glory of the Homeland were made by the Oriente’s petty officials who claimed to speak on behalf of the Oriente’s citizens. One example can be found in a letter from December, 1948, from the Teniente Político of Arajuno to the Ministro de Gobierno—an appeal for monetary aid for his parish was justified by stating that “colonization of this beautiful piece of the homeland, that would be the betterment of the nation, which no Ecuadorian ignores, demands that the Supreme Government without delay return its attention to these regions. We Ecuadorians want to defend our rights but as such we desire that we be given facilities to do so.” See J. Tancredo Herrera Ibarra to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Arajuno, December 6, 1948, AMG. A similar note was struck by the Ministro himself, Eduardo Salazar Gomez, in a letter from August, 1949, in which he requested that the Director of the Junta Central de Asistencia Pública send supplies to medical personnel in Puyo. “The colonists that struggle to defend our national patrimony in the Oriente zones,” the Minister wrote, “exhaust their efforts arriving in many cases to sacrifice, and it is very just that we bring them relief each time we can.” See Eduardo Salazar Gomez to Director de la Junta Central de Asistencia Pública, August 5, 1949, AMG.

290 transferred to her committee’s control for work on a new trail from Sucúa to another settlement. She asked that this donation be done in memory of Arcesio González, a colleague that had been attacked by a “tiger” while working on the path. “So, Señor

Ministro,” she wrote, “we hope of your Excellency that the generous blood spilled in the interest of exalted patriotism of this self-denying martyr not be without fruit,” and that the funds needed be sent quickly.16 González’s unfortunate end was not like any other accident because it occurred in a special region of the nation and was therefore of heightened patriotic importance. A similar note was struck by the residents of Chinchipe

Canton, in the far southern section of the Oriente, as they wrote to President Galo Plaza

Lasso in 1949. According to the petitioners, Chinchipe was located in the corner of the nation that was the “hope of the homeland”; it was a piece of territory that “extends in front of Peru like a gigantic watchtower, like a valiant sentinel, like a symbol of national sovereignty.” Furthermore, the residents of Chinchipe had been living in a “forgotten and abandoned place” due to geographic circumstances; they were left out of the

“human consortium” but nevertheless desiring to “occupy a decent place in the lap of our beloved homeland.” In the face of “centuries of neglect,” the petitioners demanded that the local governing Junta Cantonal be granted the autonomy to spend on road projects as its members saw fit. As such, their appeals to patriotism and to the Oriente’s special status as a national object are a rhetorical tactic in their struggle to see that infrastructural development in the region proceed according to their desires, and not those of the owners of large haciendas who “have nothing to do with the progress of

16 Blanca Lopez v. de Gonzalez, Presidenta del Comité 28 de Mayo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Municipalidades, Sucúa, June 9, 1947, AMG.

291 Chinchipe Canton.”17 Being in the Oriente raised the patriotic and national stakes on a dispute over the assignation of funds.

The fact of being in the Oriente could also be used to raise the stakes on the appointment of state officials. This was the tactic used by members of the colonist cooperative “Vanguardia Oriental” who had formed a settlement on the left bank of the

Pastaza River at Arapicos and wrote in 1949 to ask that certain members of the cooperative be made Guardias Civiles in the parish. To justify this request, they stated that their efforts of colonization were dedicated to the “progress of the Oriente and the greatness of the homeland.” Their members were young family men who sought to

“attract [other] conspicuous compatriots who resolve to rehabilitate themselves with the politics of the hatchet in the promising lands of the Oriente.”18 Simply being an Oriente colonist was enough to demand that requests made to the government be given special consideration. Inhabitants of Sucúa Parish made this very clear when approximately one hundred of them wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno that same year. They noted that the families of soldiers who perish in battle were given economic aid by the government; they argued, “We believe that we are also soldiers of the Homeland, fencing with the hatchet, the machete, and with other instruments of labor; and that the titanic struggle with the jungle well deserves to be classified as heroic.” They regularly faced a lack of comfort, “deficient food,” and “unhealthy dwellings.” Furthermore, their children did not have adequate schools and they “vegetate miserably like human rags.”

“Nevertheless,” they argued, “we are the advanced sentinels of territorial integrity in the

17 Moradores de Zumba to Sr. Gala Plaza Lasso, Zumba, February 15, 1949, AMG.

18 Cooperativa Colonizadora Agrícola “Vanguardia Oriental” to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Arapicos, July 1, 1949, AMG.

292 small part that the usurper [Peru] has left to us.” All of this was the ideological justification for their demand that the government cancel the debt faced by the family of one Donato Hiturdo, who had recently died in a plane crash as he was returning to work on the airstrip in Sucúa.19 The Oriente’s colonists regularly sought to engage the levers of the state so that money could be disbursed in benefit of their settlement or its connecting roads. Their petitions constructed the Oriente as a vital region for the nation as a whole, and they constructed themselves as particularly patriotic and deserving

“sentinels” and “martyrs” on its behalf. Once again, the notions inherent to the region’s status as a national object of desire provided the rhetorical tools by which colonists sought to address the deficiencies inherent to the fact it was still a set of ancillary provinces.

In 1950, Nelson Rodríguez, president of the Centro Agrícola Cantonal in Pastaza

Canton, headquartered in Puyo, wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno with the suggestion that the Ley Especial de Oriente, which was a piece of national legislation that made special instructions for the region’s administration, make funds available for his organization, as was the case for similar organizations in the Sierra and Costa.

Appealing to the widely held notion of the Oriente as a vital component of the nation’s future, Rodriguez wrote, “You will not ignore, Sr. Ministro, because you are a good agriculturalist, the need for Centros Agrícolas in these Oriental sections, that are called to carry out a preponderant role in the future.”20 Similar ideas were expressed by those who had not yet gone to the Oriente, but planned to. In September of 1950, a group of

19 Habitantes de la parroquia Sucúa to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Sucúa, July 25, 1949, AMG.

20 Nelson Rodriguez to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, September 5, 1950, AMG.

293 journalists from different sections of the Republic formed an agricultural colony and set their sights on lands along the road from Puyo to Napo. They wrote to the President of

Congress to ask for economic aid, citing their belief that working the land is “highly noble,” and, furthermore, that it was a “patriotic function to cultivate the lands of our

Oriente zone, to increase agricultural production, [and] to organize the sources of provisioning for the advanced frontier posts.”21 These future colonists of the Oriente were conscious, then, that their efforts would somehow contribute to national security and territorial integrity.22

The recent loss of territory to Peru continued to loom large in the minds of colonists, and their language in addressing the authorities reflected this. The director of a colonist cooperative in Sucumbíos Canton, in the far northern section of Napo-

Pastaza, wrote in August of 1951 to the President of the National Congress to ask that a road be built to their parish of Puerto Libre so they could bring their families into the region. As the Director wrote, their colony was formed ten years prior with the desire to

“serve as sentinels of our beloved Homeland; in those times the Peruvian neighbors, in a barbarous and cowardly manner assaulted our garrisons that were on the Oriental frontiers.” But, for ten years, he stated, their need for a road had not been addressed.

The arrival of their families on a new road would help to fortify the Oriente and see that the Ecuadorian tricolor was flown proudly.23 It is difficult to know precisely how important

21 Periodistas to Sr. Presidente del M. H. Congreso Nacional, Quito, September 27, 1950, AMG.

22 A similar argument had been made in 1948 by colonists in the settlement of Huigra, in Santiago-Zamora Province. In asking for 500 thousand sucres to provide supplies to the colonists, they stated that they would help detain the “passive invasion” being undertaken by “ferocious” Peruvian “usurpers.” Francisco Ochoa to Juan Tanca Marengo, August 23, 1948, AMG.

23 Tobias Guevara Rivadeneira, Director de la Cooperativa ‘Atahualpa’ to Sr. President del Congreso Nacional, Huaca, August 21, 1951, AMG.

294 being a “sentinel of the Homeland” was to this individual or to the other members of his cooperative; however, citing this special category of citizen was a rhetorical tactic available to poor colonists like those in a far-flung corner of Sucumbíos Canton.

News of Peruvian incursions into Ecuadorian territory were common; in 1951,

Angel Alberto Costales Morales, president of the “Vanguardia Agraria” cooperative responded to the news of Peruvian activity by writing to the President of the National

Congress with a proposal motivated by the conviction to take the action that the

Homeland required. “In our Oriente,” he wrote, “there are aboriginal natives separated from and incoherent in civilization.” These tribes were ignorant of the principles of defense and of their own “Ecuadorian-ness [ecuatorianidad].” The state, in defense of national integrity, had the duty to “catechize those natives in the religion of ‘homeland’” and to “baptize them as citizens” so that they were “always ready to serve the homeland” and not be “dispersed tribes” that could be easily subjugated by the “evil neighbor,” Peru. Costales therefore offered himself “in Ecuadorian fashion

[ecuatorianamente]” to visit the various tribes as a state authority and undertake civic and military instruction among them. The purpose of his letter was to receive appointment as Teniente Político, the parish-level state official that will be discussed in greater detail below. Detailing his plan to spread Ecuadorian values among the Indians of the region as part of his request reveals the importance of the region in terms of border security and as a symbol of the Ecuadorian nation’s prestige. The loss of territory to Peru and the continuing threat posed by that neighbor was used by the Oriente’s residents to seek money, state positions, and special consideration. This derives from the region’s importance as a yardstick of national progress, which was a vital

295 component of its construction as a national object of desire in the preceding decades.

Costales’s letter also conforms with Blanca Muratorio’s observation that many whites in the Oriente came to conceive of themselves as “devoted nationalists providing the economic foundations for the state’s consolidation of its presence on the frontier.” Like others, Costales viewed the Indian as “an instrument enabling the whites to achieve those ‘noble tasks.’”24 This conforms with the discussion in Chapter 3 of how the Indians themselves became “national objects,” regarded in terms of their usefulness to the task of incorporating the Oriente.

Colonists of the Oriente often adopted the title of “Orientalista,” which they employed as though it were a particularly patriotic and praiseworthy category of citizen and agriculturalist. In 1951, Victor M. Rivera, a resident of Quito who nevertheless adopted the title of “authentic Orientalista colonist” because of his past experience in the region, wrote to the Ministry of Government on two occasions to urge that more economic aid be handed over for colonists on the eastern slopes of the Andean

Cordillera, the beginnings of the Oriente. Progress on the road through the town of

Baeza, in particular, would signify a large step in the progress of the Homeland over all, because it would help hundreds of unemployed Ecuadorians gain parcels of land.

Rivera’s letter reveals that whether or not someone was a “true colonist” was a rhetorical tactic to demonstrate which groups in the Oriente deserved assistance and which did not. Rivera condemned the members of the Colonia Agrícola San Juan as

“false colonists” who exploited new members and never worked the land, while “true colonists” were “personally in the jungle, working in silence.” He closed one letter by

24 Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, 157.

296 urging the Minister to seek reports from the appointed Oriente officials about which colonists belong in which category.25 In another letter, Rivera used the common tactic of appealing to territorial security against Peru; the economic salvation that would promote better security could not be achieved unless a reform was made to the reigning Ley

Especial de Oriente preventing Oriente petty officials from entering into godparenthood with any residents in their jurisdiction, as such relationships in the past had created obstacles to justice and administration, thereby preventing “authentic Orientalismo” from flourishing.26 “Orientalismo,” then, was a term that could be invoked to distinguish those who had the interests of the region at heart from those who did not. Promoting economic development and national security were among the marks of a true

“Orientalista.”

Colonists’ own personal sacrifice and contribution to the nation as a whole remained important components of their rhetoric into the mid-1950s. For example, in

1954 colonists from El Chaco wrote to the Minister of Government to complain about their Teniente Político. The substance of these types of complaints will be addressed at greater length below; what is important here is the prologue to this particular complaint that reveals how the colonists positioned themselves as subjects particularly deserving of attention. In their exposition, they described themselves as families who decided to leave behind the “comforts progressively given by the Metropolis” to form a “harmonious human collection in the wilderness [plena monte]” that was working to see that the

“millenarian jungle” is transformed to the “El Dorado of the Homeland, the great legacy

25 Víctor M. Rivera E. to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, July 20, 1951, AMG.

26 Víctor M. Rivera E. to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Quito, August 17, 1951, AMG.

297 for future generations; we will be the strong arm that will break the shameful chain of

Peruvian invasions.”27 These colonists in El Chaco appealed to the notion of the Oriente as a vital component of the nation’s future, as well as to the close association between the Oriente and Ecuador’s national security.

The security of colonists was a common theme in their petitions to the authorities, but it was not always Peruvian soldiers that were feared. In 1955, María

Esther Sevilla, a landowning resident of Puerto Napo wrote to the Ministerio de

Gobierno to raise the government’s awareness of the threat of “savage tribes” of Indians from the left bank of the Napo that had been crossing the river to attack colonists on the right bank. “For many years,” she wrote, “I have been established in the Ecuadorian

Oriente, in Puerto Napo, where in company with many self-sacrificing and patriotic

Ecuadorians we are doing an effective labor of ecuatorianidad (Ecuadorian-ness) in colonizing the Oriente.” If the government did not take some action to prevent these attacks on colonists, however, “the colonists have stated that they will find it necessary to abandon Ecuadorian territory to seek refuge and undertake the colonization of the

Section of the Putumayo under the protection of the Government of Colombia.” She closed by seeking permission for the colonists to somehow “remove [desalojar]” the savage tribes that have usurped their lands and that constitute a threat for all

Ecuadorians in the Oriente.28 In this formulation, the colonists appealed to the patriotic associations of the Oriente in order to seek the right to use violence against the region’s indigenous inhabitants, who themselves, according to Sevilla, had been violently seeking to expel the colonists. Being a colonist, then, implied certain rights to self-

27 Colonos y Nativos to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, El Chaco, July 25, 1954, AMG.

28 María Esther Sevilla to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, May 27, 1955, AMG.

298 defense; if those rights were not recognized by the government, they threatened to leave Ecuadorian territory altogether.

Being a colonist could also imply rights to fiscal aid, at least in the minds of those who hoped to settle in the Oriente. Consider the case of one Enrique Bueno, who claimed in 1953 to have obtained legal title to 100 hectares of land on the banks of the

Morona River. Residing in Quito, he wanted to return to his Oriente claim and begin to work the land, but he lacked any funds to travel there or to acquire agricultural materials. As a “true colonist and agriculturalist, but with out economic means…to begin my journey” he asked the Junta Nacional Pro-Oriente for four thousand sucres. His justification reveals his belief that he was taking part in a great patriotic mission:

I am poor and I want to work; I want to prove that the Oriente is a land of promise and future greatness for the Homeland; I want to show that when there is aid by one party and constancy and resolution by the other, triumph is inevitable.29

Time and again, the rhetoric employed by the Oriente’s colonists and officials invoked a patriotic partnership between the state and the citizen; the state had the duty to offer financial assistance while the citizen who made his way into the Oriente sacrificed and toiled for the greatness of the homeland. Colonists could chastise the state for not holding up its end of the deal, as the director of a public school in Rio Blanco, in the southern Oriente did in 1956. As the director wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno,

we live on this piece of ground, of national inheritance, and we make homeland in this corner of the Oriente, anxious to conserve the integrity and the solidarity of the Amazonian Basin; however we have been unattended in our just petitions by the public powers that guide the destines of our nation.

29 Enrique Bueno to Sr. Dr. Dn. Camilo Ponce Enríquez, Quito, September 20, 1953, AMG.

299 Nevertheless, they had “continued in the struggle” even while receiving nothing when compared to “other regions of our homeland.” As the director, Domingo Rivadeneira wrote, “The children of the Oriente are children like all children of Ecuador, and they also feel the civic imperatives of our nationality in their blood, in their conscience, in their hearts.” All of this was to demand money and supplies to form a library and medicinal supply for the school, and to acquire a national flag for display.30 Equal attention was due to the children in his community, especially given the extraordinary sacrifice and difficulties faced by their parents who were “making homeland” in far-flung corners of the frontier. The construction of the Oriente as a national object of desire had established that peopling and developing the region was a vital project. This notion provided Rivadeneira and other inhabitants with the justifications they needed to seek redress of grievances that arose from the fact that the region remained a set of ancillary provinces.

Appealing to their special status as colonists remained a component of how the

Oriente’s residents engaged the state into the 1960s. Take, for example, a letter from

Nuevo Rocafuerte, far down the Napo River, written by the Director of “Movimiento

Orientalista,” a group of local residents committed to promoting material progress. The author, Jorge E. Añazco, stated that he and all colonists of the Oriente were eagerly anticipating the creation of a new ministry dedicated to the Oriente and the Galápagos

Islands. The ministry would, according to Añazco’s take on it, “centralize and plan decisive action in benefit of our jungle.” “It is time, Señor Ministro,” he wrote, “to think that this task not fulfilled by our ancestors, cannot be forgotten by us, given the danger

30 Domingo Rivadeneira, Director de la Escuela Fiscal “Reino de Quito” de Rio Blanco to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Chigüinda, October 29, 1956, AMG.

300 of being systematically annihilated by the invasive policies of Peru.”31 Nearly two decades after the loss of territory to Peru, the threat of further losses continued to serve as a point of argument in favor of supporting the Oriente’s colonists. In 1961, appeals to the special characteristics of colonists could still be used when complaining about local officials, as was done by Celiano Cáceres, a resident of Puyo, and 34 co-signers of his letter. Cáceres wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to complain that the Jefe Político had jailed him without cause and sought to remove him from Puyo. This was particularly offensive as Cáceres wrote that he arrived “with the healthy proposal to establish myself definitively to be another sentinel of our beloved Oriente.” In his view, authorities like the

Jefe Político were not fit to govern “those of us who sacrifice in the Oriente.”32

The Oriente’s Appointed Functionaries

The Jefes and Tenientes Políticos in the Oriente at the beginning of the 1940s were appointed by the Ministerio de Defensa Nacional y Oriente, according to the updated Ley Especial de Oriente that was promulgated by the Congress and approved by President Arroyo del Río in November of 1940.33 The Jefes were installed in each canton in the Oriente, and those in the provincial capital (which for Napo-Pastaza was the city of Tena, and Macas for Santiago-Zamora) held the functions of provincial

31 Jorge E. Añazco R., Director del Movimiento Orientalista, to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Nuevo Rocafuerte, September 26, 1960, AMG.

32 Celiano Cáceres and 34 others to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, El Puyo, January 4, 1961, AMG.

33 The Oriente’s administration was switched from the Ministerio de Defensa Nacional to the Ministerio de Gobierno in 1943. See El Congreso de la República del Ecuador, Registro Oficial 4, no. 946 (October 25, 1943): 6129-30.

301 governor.34 The position of governor was restored by the end of the decade, however.

The Jefes Políticos of the provincial capitals held the functions of Jueces del Crimen and Jueces Cantonales y Provinciales, meaning that they were the top judicial authority in the province. Those Jefes Políticos in Napo-Pastaza not residing in Tena or Macas exercised judicial functions in their particular canton, and were to undertake periodic visitations of their jurisdictions and generate reports for the Ministry in Quito. The Jefes

Políticos were to watch over all other state employees and ensure that all laws of the

Republic were carried out correctly. The Tenientes Políticos of the Oriente’s parishes were to act as police commissaries and be acquainted with “all the affairs of their jurisdiction” including the breaking of laws. Furthermore, the Tenientes Políticos were to see that any orders given by the Jefes Políticos were carried out, watch over the security and health of the public, and conserve all public transportation routes.35

In practice, the functioning of the region’s Tenientes and Jefes Políticos was rarely smooth. These personnel, who were the most direct representatives of the government in Quito in the Oriente, were the subject of near constant complaints by their peers and their subjects in the parishes and cantons of Napo-Pastaza Province.

The evidence at hand demonstrates a persistent lack of resources, temptation to engage in inappropriate behavior, and a general inability to carry out the laws of the

Republic in an orderly fashion. This is the clearest evidence that the region remained a

34 The office of Governor was restored to each provincial capital in the Oriente by a reform to the Ley Especial de Oriente in 1953. See El Congreso de la República del Ecuador, “Las siguientes reformas a la Ley Especial del Oriente,” Registro Oficial 1, no. 117 (January 20, 1953): 1035-41.

35 El Congreso de la República del Ecuador, “Ley Especial de Oriente,” Registro Oficial 1, nos. 68-69 (November 22-23, 1940): 367-372. The functions of the Jefes and Tenientes Políticos are further clarified by the general administrative laws of the Republic. See El Congreso de la República del Ecuador, “Ley de Régimen Político-Administrativo de la República,” Registro Oficial 2, no. 368 (November 17, 1941): 2-16.

302 set of ancillary provinces, with its incorporation into the general administrative structure of the Republic largely superficial.

In 1946, the Jefe Político of Pastaza Canton, which was centered in the city of

Puyo, wrote to the Governor of the Province to complain about the authorities in his jurisdiction. Two of the parishes in the Canton, those of Sarayacu and Montalvo, were suffering from the lack of “suitable personnel” for the role of Teniente Político. In his view, the salaries for those positions and for their secretaries were far too low to ensure that qualified individuals would be willing to take the job. The sad truth, he affirmed, was that “the cost of life in the Oriente is so high that no salary is sufficient, certainly not the ridiculous amount paid to the public employees.”36 Similar complaints were common among the communications between the Oriente’s officials and with their superiors in

Quito. Accusations of malfeasance perhaps stemming from the low salaries were also common. Consider the letter sent to the Ministro de Gobierno in 1947 from Francisco

Tapia, in Mera, one of the oldest colonist settlements in Pastaza Canton. According to

Tapia, the local Teniente Político, José Calero, had repeatedly covered the costs of his trips to and from Quito by inappropriately using the funds of the local Junta Parroquial.

Furthermore, he had recently used 400 sucres for a “revelry (farra)” in his public office.37

The following month, Calero wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno with his resignation, but

36 Luis Véjar Quintana to Sr. Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza, no date, 1946, AGN. In 1949, the Teniente Político of Montalvo, Pedro Manuel Vega, was accused by residents of the parish of having pocketed more than two thousand sucres intended for the construction of a new office; his accusers claimed that Vega arranged only for the construction of a very small building using three “indígena” workers to be paid only 150 sucres each, thereby leaving most of the money unaccounted for. The incident was investigated by the Teniente Político of another parish in the Canton, who gathered testimony and passed it on to the Ministerio de Gobierno. The documentary evidence in the Archivo del Ministerio de Gobierno does not clarify what action was or was not taken in response. Carlos Vitery to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Montalvo, January 20, 1949, AMG.

37 Francisco Tapia to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Mera, February 20, 1947, AMG.

303 he also told his side of the story: namely, the Jefe Político of Pastaza, headquartered in

Puyo, had in hostile fashion colluded with members of the Junta Parroquial, who were

“personal enemies” of Calero, to seek Calero’s removal from his post.38 The Archivo de la Gobernación de Napo, in Tena, and the Archivo del Ministerio de Gobierno, in Quito, are filled with these kinds of accusations and counter-accusations by and against the

Tenientes and Jefes Políticos of the Oriente, meaning that few of the Oriente’s settlements enjoyed much consistency of administration. Instead, there were frequent changeovers in the officials that were to see that the Republic’s laws were fairly applied in their jurisdiction. The negative effects felt by the colonists of the region are illustrated in letters like the one sent from approximately 18 “Colonists in the Oriente Region” who in 1949 wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to complain about how so many officials in the Oriente were people “foreign to the region who only come with the desire for lucre” and who cared nothing about the progress of the region. Specifically, these complainants cited the behavior of Gabriel Márquez, Jefe Político of Pastaza, who fomented disharmony among the citizens, feuded with the municipal council (Concejo

Municipal) and the steering committee for roadwork, and with other public authorities.

They even blamed Márquez for decreasing the amount of tourism and commerce in the region. They suggested that the Teniente Político of Puyo, Carlos Saá Chacón, be raised to the post of Jefe Político.39

The autoridades of the Oriente, for their part, sought to deflect these complaints by calling into question the legitimacy of the complainants. For example, the Jefe

38 José Ignacio Calero R. to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Mera, March 10, 1947, AMG.

39 Colonos de la Región Oriental to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno i Oriente, no date, 1949, AMG.

304 Político of Zamora, in the far southern Oriente, Luis Polibio González, in 1947 wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to warn that a colonist living in the settlement of Cumbaratza named Victoriano Apolo was “dedicated to conspiring… against the authorities” by gathering signatures of people less than ten years old in order to attach them to formal complaints. His aim was nothing more than to see that his relatives became public officials and to “sow intranquility” among the colonists.40 Other officials sought to make themselves look good by comparison, in the face of complaints and punishments. After being removed from his post as the Jefe Político of Morona Canton, in the central- southern Oriente, Humberto Jácome Villagómez made his case to the Ministro de

Gobierno. He stated that he had served in the Oriente since 1942, and had always fulfilled the judicial duties of a Jefe Político with the collaboration of lawyers from the highland city of Cuenca. Unlike him, most of the authorities of the Oriente “do nothing but earn their salary while doing nothing beneficial.” While he had made significant progress on the airstrip for Macas, the principal city of Morona Canton, other authorities had allowed the airstrip to become overgrown with weeds.41 Jácome’s self-defense is typical of the arguments made by many Oriente employees who were the subject of complaints or who had been fired. They generally sought to make themselves seem to be one of the few public officials who actually fulfilled their duties and promoted the region’s development.

40 Polibio González, Jefe Político de Zamora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, March 2, 1947, AMG.

41 Humberto Jácome Villagómez to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, June 25, 1947, AMG.

305 Evidence from the southern Oriente province of Santiago-Zamora indicates that abuses and malfeasance were, in fact, widespread among the public officials in the province. At times awareness of these incidents leaked out to the wider Republic; in

1948, the Ministro de Gobierno ordered the Jefe Político of Santiago Canton to investigate the Teniente Político of Huambi Parish. His request was prompted by an article in the Quito daily El Nacional reporting that the Teniente Político in question had been pursuing the settlement’s women in an aggressive fashion, and were it not for the intervention of the citizens, “we would have had to lament some disgrace.” Furthermore, the Minister stated that “various people who go through that place have affirmed that the dealings of this authority leave much to be desired.”42 A letter received by the ministry in

1949 from a parish in Santiago-Zamora, signed by more than 50 colonist complainants, distills many of the common complaints against the Tenientes Políticos of the Province’s parishes. According to these complainants, the lead authority of their parish manipulated elections at the local level by requiring all suffragists to show him their ballots before they could be deposited. Additionally, he used his office to promote political propaganda. The role of the Oriente’s employees in political affairs will be discussed at greater length below; the other complaints in this particular letter detail the more quotidian types of violations that the Oriente’s colonists were subject to by state officials. Supposedly, the Teniente Político ordered the parish’s residents to participate in compulsory road work on routes that led to his own properties; he had attacked a colonist and injured him badly; he commonly imposed illegitimate fines on colonists; he was an “active contrabandist in panela (processed sugar)” and other products; he was

42 Guillermo Alarcón Franco, Ministro de Gobierno to Sr. Jefe Político de Santiago, Quito, December 18, 1948, AMG.

306 “extremely rude in his dealings with us the colonists”; and he did not “make any positive effort in favor of the betterment of the parish center.”43 Most of the complaints against the Oriente’s public servants would take the form of one or another of these grievances.

An incident that occurred in the city of Zamora that same year illustrates how petty the public authorities’ actions could be. The Teniente Político, Gonzalo Córdova

Pozo, imprisoned three teachers from the public school there after a children’s dramatic and musical performance. The reasons given included the failure to pay an arbitrary fine of ten sucres, the failure to obtain permission for the performance to take place, and for the satirical element of the children’s performance that made fun of police officers.44

Córodva’s superior, the Jefe Político of Zamora, Luis Polibio González, later confirmed the teachers’ account. According Polibio, Córdova was a habitual drinker whose behavior was “getting worse every day.” As the Jefe Político argued, the Oriente was no place for those “not adapted to the bureaucracy of the rest of the country; here as in the rest of the Oriente we need personnel who cooperate…with the moral, cultural, and material collective welfare.”45

Though Teniente Político Córdova may have been in the wrong for his actions against the teachers, the numerous responsibilities held by the Oriente’s officials made their jobs difficult and potentially confusing. In May of 1949, the Jefe Político of Morona

Canton, based in the city of Macas, Luis F. Jaramillo, wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno after he had been made aware of existing complaints against him. Jaramillo lamented

43 Colonos to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Santiago-Zamora, received March 30, 1949, AMG.

44 Santiago Chanchay P., Tomás Gustavo Rodríguez, Ricardo Vargas Pérez to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Zamora, May 28, 1949, AMG.

45 Luis Polibio González to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Zamora, June 20, 1949, AMG.

307 the fact that he had to carry out judicial functions at the provincial and canton level, for both civil and criminal matters, and was occasionally called on to serve as police intendant as well. As he explained, “frankly this situation of having so many attributions and powers means that often this Authority must necessarily suffer the consequences of gratuitous enmities and perhaps, on more than one occasion, of calumny.” Jaramillo assured the Ministro that his behavior had been correct and that he could certainly explain away any particular complaint.46 It seems that Jaramillo was the object of the ire of the elected mayor of Macas, Telmo I. Robalino, who complained that Jaramillo struck a citizen in the face with a bottle of aguardiente but had not suffered any consequences due to his holding so many judicial attributions. Robalino insinuated that the citizens of

Macas would have to take justice into their own hands, “returning to the Jívaro custom,” as he described it.47 The governor of Santiago-Zamora province later weighed in on the dispute between Jaramillo and Robalino; according to the governor, Robalino had held a grudge against Jaramillo ever since Jaramillo had begun investigating the fact that the siblings of Robalino’s fellow elected officials in Macas seemed to be the ones receiving all the contracts for public works projects paid for by the elected Junta in Macas.48 The illicit activities of local elected governing bodies in the Oriente will be addressed below; for now, the dispute between Jaramillo and Robalino illustrates the potential for abuse and confusion arising from the multiple responsibilities held by the state officials, as well as the personal disputes that could arise between different public officials and lead to

46 Luis F. Jaramillo N. to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, May 23, 1949, AMG.

47 Telmo I. Robalino P. to Sr. Subsecretario de Gobierno, Macas, June 10, 1949, AMG.

48 Angel Miguel Arregui, Gobernador de Santiago-Zamora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, June 13, 1949, AMG.

308 administrative difficulties. This tendency toward confusion and conflict characterized the administration of the Oriente as a set of ancillary provinces; a shadowy and disorganized version of those in the rest of the Republic.

The illicit actions of Jefes Políticos drew the ire of poor colonists as much as they did other high-ranking officials like the mayor Macas. In the latter part of 1949, around two dozen residents of Méndez Parish wrote to complain about the “many arbitrary actions and abuses” committed “daily” by the Jefe Político of Santiago Canton, Agustín

Emiliano Izquierdo. He had used his position of authority to become a “great businessman (negociante)” who bought and sold both agricultural products such as rice as well as parcels of land. “Every dispute among colonists,” the complainants alleged,

“is settled according to his whim, with out any justification or law.” Every time the citizens needed to process any paperwork, Izquierdo found a way to increase his

“personal lucre.”49 Worse for colonists than individual authorities were those that formed interconnected networks with other state officials and police officers. In one illustrative case, a colonist from Méndez Parish named Víctor Antonio Ulloa was arrested and detained, against his “constitutional rights,” according to Ulloa, by the Teniente Político of Huambi Parish, Luis Asunción Jaramillo. Jaramillo had apparently done this because of a debt that Ulloa owed to another colonist, but in Ulloa’s view, the imprisonment was beyond the pale. Ulloa chose to write directly to the Ministro de Gobierno because

Jaramillo was well connected with all the higher Canton authorities, meaning that his complaint would fall on deaf ears.50 Consider also the case of José Luis Pastrano

49 Pobladores de Méndez to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Méndez, September 2, 1949, AMG.

50 Víctor Antonio Ulloa to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Méndez, received September 14, 1949, AMG.

309 Pazmiño, a teacher in a public school in Sucúa Parish. According to Pastrano, the

Teniente Político there had on more than one occasion taken the money meant for teachers’ salaries and used it for his own purposes. His complaints about the matter had only earned him the enmity of the Teniente Político. Pastrano’s personal matters also moved the local authorities against him: a previous relationship with a señorita had ended after “destiny had guided [his] path in another direction.” Unfortunately, the woman’s brother-in-law was the chief of the police garrison in Sucúa, and along with the

Teniente Político the police officers had begun to attack Pastrano in various ways. He asked for “safe conduct” from the Ministro de Gobierno against the Parish authorities that were conspiring against his rights as a citizen, in his view.51

In 1950, a series of accusations and counter-accusations revolving around the

Jefes Políticos of Santiago-Zamora occupied the attention of the Ministerio de

Gobierno. A group of citizens from Gualaquiza Canton wrote in January to state that their Jefe Político, José Mario Madero Jaramillo, was an obstacle to colonization because he did not give support to the “efficient development of the agricultural activities of the colonists, who are always under the constant fear of the removal of their properties.” Madero was, in their view, far too young for the post; nevertheless he acted

“like a little tyrant, like a caricature of Hitler.” He had become a “Torquemada” in the canton due to his “inquisitorial methods in his system of sanctions; late at night he ordered some humble drunk prisoners to bathe in a cement tank, running the danger of lung congestion.” Beyond these outlandish actions, he simply failed to fulfill his normal duties; according to the complainants his office was full of land claims and other judicial

51 Lic. Gustavo Darqueo Terán to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Quito, October 10, 1949, AMG.

310 proceedings that had been denied due to the lack of “sufficient oil to lubricate the heavy gears of his justice.” The complainants believed all this was evidence that Jefes

Políticos held too many responsibilities in the Oriente. This had led Madero to “publicly manifest that in Gualaquiza he rules with the power of a God…that nobody can remove him from his post and that he would leave only when he wanted.”52 Madero answered these charges by saying they were nothing more than false imputations. His personal and public proceedings had always been correct, and it was clear that his accusers were liars or had been paid off. According to Madero, the signatures on the document of complaint were clearly from “people with hardly any instruction, indigenous people and children, who are very easy to trick.”53

Around the same time, a group of citizens in Zamora Canton demanded that their canton authority, Luis Polibio Gonzalez, be removed from office for his various abuses.

In their view, Polibio was unable to manage the several legal attributions that came with his position without engaging in illicit behavior. He engaged in arbitrary detention of citizens and mismanaged the funds of the elected Junta Cantonal. The consequence of all this was that families were leaving the Oriente due to the insecure environment the

Jefe Político had fostered. As the letter writers stated, “Zamora is a canton that deserves careful and preferential attention from the Public Powers because it is one of the most representative regions of our national patrimony;” the canton was composed of settlements “in formation that guarantee and will guarantee our territorial rights.”

52 Vecinos del Cantón Gualaquiza to Sr. Presidente de la República y Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Gualaquiza, January, 1950, AMG.

53 José M. Madero Jaramillo to Sr. Subsecretario de Gobierno, Gualaquiza, January 29, 1950, AMG.

311 Lamentably, these settlements suffered under authorities like Polibio who were “true dictators with no respect or regard for the rights” of the colonists.54 These complainants were joined in their efforts by the Jefe Político of the highland city of Loja, the major city closest to Zamora despite lying outside the Oriente. According to this Jefe Político,

Miguel Angel Velez, Polibio was a person of “poor antecedents” who conspired with the head of the military detachment there to sow panic among the people.55

As was common, however, Polibio had defenders that rallied to his cause. In

February, a letter with dozens of signatures arrived in the Ministro de Gobierno from

Zamora to plead Polibio’s case. According to the writers, “traders [comerciantes] and citizens of this forgotten corner of Ecuadorian Territory,” Polibio held the gratitude of the people for the many public works projects he had completed, unlike any of his predecessors. Among these accomplishments were the construction of a new public building, the purchase of an electric motor to provide artificial light in town, construction of bridges strong enough for trucks, public restrooms, and a basketball court, and the organization of festivities for the Día del Oriente on February 12th. These citizens implied that any complaints against Polibio must be subjected to careful scrutiny, and that his recent removal from office should be reconsidered.56 It seems this group of

Polibio’s supporters had their way; by May Polibio was still in office, only to receive a round of fresh complaints about his charging of a tax on the introduction of supplies into

54 Colonos de Zamora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Zamora, January, 1950, AMG.

55 Miguel Angel Velez, Jefe Político de Loja to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Loja, January 29, 1950, AMG.

56 Centro Cultural “Amazonas” to Sr. Guillermo Ramos Salazar, Ministro de Gobierno i Oriente, Zamora, February 18, 1950, AMG.

312 Zamora by mule drivers.57 For his part, Polibio argued that the tax was not overly burdensome, was used for collective benefit, and was similar to taxes that existed in other places. The mule drivers had never complained about the tax before Polibio arrived; they were simply seeking his removal from office, in his view.58 These scandals revolving around the Jefes Políticos of Gualaquiza and Zamora demonstrate the ways that groups of citizens measured the effectiveness of their public authorities and how they sought to move the levers of the state against them if they felt the actions of appointed officials were inimical to their interests.

In many cases, the poor quality of the public authorities was seen by the

Oriente’s residents as a commentary on region’s place within the larger Republic. Later in 1950, some complainants in Santiago-Zamora Province wrote to the Ministro de

Gobierno:

we have a clearly democratic government, but that democracy, which would be support for all the citizens, does not reach these confines due to the poor authorities that have been sent to us; authorities that are the largest shame for us and for our President; authorities that are the true octopus that oppresses us morally and economically.

Specifically, they complained that their Jefe Político, in concert with the governor, only attended to the property claims of those who would pay them five hundred sucres. The governor had recently raped a child of fifteen years named Daraliza Canqui, “daughter of a poor peasant, whom he paid one hundred sucres to not say anything.” He also engaged in contraband commerce with the various Jefes Políticos and made large sums of money. If the authorities were not changed, they threatened, then they would

57 Colonos del Cantón Zamora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Zamora, May 31, 1950, AMG.

58 Luis Polibio González to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Zamora, June 8, 1950, AMG.

313 take matters into their own hands, and the Supreme Government in Quito would be responsible for the consequences.59

In 1953, complainants in Santiago-Zamora also invoked the state of the Oriente and its administration as a way to evaluate national prestige. More than one hundred citizens in Macas wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno to complain about the governor, who had turned his office into an “Electoral Club” in support of particular candidates for the national congress. He had also fired good public servants only to replace them with people with “dictatorial airs” who became like a “satellite of the Governor,” committing abuses and even incidents of violence because of political rivalries. All of this was particularly unjust for Macas, as the complainants explained:

Macas, a centenary population that since its foundation has been the sentinel of Ecuador in the Oriente, suffering the most absolute abandonment, its population decimated by diseases, isolated from the rest of the Republic in an unjust and even criminal fashion, was never attended to as this population should have been, that without asking nor obtaining any thing from the central powers has been flying the National Tricolor.

Despite their sacrifice, they had always been sent the worst public authorities, “like a punishment for the misfortune for which we are not responsible.”60 The rhetorical devices available to colonists related to the Oriente’s special status as a national object of desire within the Republic, and their special status as “sentinels” of the homeland, could also be mobilized against the web of public authorities whose abuses and malfeasance, inherent to the deficiencies of the ancillary provinces of the Oriente, made their lives difficult.

59 Colonos de Santiago Zamora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Santiago-Zamora, July 15, 1950, AMG.

60 Colonos de Macas to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, no date, 1953, AMG.

314 These and similar complaints also show the various ways in which these appointed officials used their office to exert influence in the region. These dynamics were as common in the northern Oriente province of Napo-Pastaza as they were in

Santiago-Zamora. In 1952, the Governor of Napo-Pastaza received a letter full of complaints about the Jefe Político of Pastaza, Carlos Joaquín Camacho, who had been demonstrating ignorance about the laws of the Republic and abusing his office.

Allegedly, Camacho ran a cantina out of his house with his wife, who was also appointed as the agent for the state’s monopoly on liquor in the region, a clear conflict of interest. He spent his time attending to “personal and political revenge” rather than the duties of his office. For example, he had imprisoned another citizen simply for not having promoted the election of the current President of the Republic, José María

Velasco Ibarra. Furthermore, he intervened in matters beyond his purview, and made enemies with the local Dominican Missionaries, the local Red Cross, and the citizens of

Puyo in general.61 Other complaints against officials did not cite specifics; typical is the letter from earlier in 1952, in which the previous Jefe Político of Pastaza, Carlos Saá

Chacón, wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to ask that the Teniente Político of Puyo be removed for repeated incidents of drunkenness and absence from his post, and for the general series of complaints from citizens he received regularly.62 In another letter, Saá wrote to the Ministry to complain about the Teniente Político of Mera, Benjamín

Mancheno, who had sexually abused the wife of Gonzalo Tapia, and then offered to make amends by appointing Tapia as a Guardia Civil in the parish. Another citizen,

61 Dr. Jorge Ortiz, Subsecretario de Gobierno, to Sr. Gobernador de Napo Pastaza, Quito, December 5, 1952, AMG.

62 Carlos Saá Chacón to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Puyo, June 11, 1952, AMG.

315 Segundo Reinoso, complained that Mancheno attempted to convince Reinoso’s sixteen year-old daughter to marry him, and that she would be well taken care of because of his position in the parish. Upon the refusal of the girl’s father, Mancheno denied him payment he was due and made violent threats against him. Furthermore, according to the Jefe Político Saá, Mancheno was an illicit producer of aguardiente.63 Eventually, the official testimony of both Tapia and Reinoso was passed along to the Governor of

Napo-Pastaza, who recommended Mancheno’s removal to the Ministerio de

Gobierno.64 Meddling with the region’s mail service was another way that petty officials could abuse their power, as the Teniente Político of El Chaco allegedly did. As Virgilio

Rivera, a colonist in El Chaco wrote in May of 1952, the mail usually arrived opened or tampered with. Furthermore, the Teniente Político, Rodrigo Benítez, was accused of confiscating a bull from one citizen and generally creating “complete dictatorship [plena dictadura].” The Teniente Político’s removal was, in Rivera’s view, a pressing matter: “If the Ecuadorian Government does not scrupulously administer our Oriente, it will result that despite all creative initiatives of colonization by patriotic citizens, the government will be directly cooperating with the disintegration of national territory.”65 Here one can again see how colonists could appeal to patriotism and matters of national security to

63 Carlos Saá Chacón to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Puyo, January 22, 1952, AMG.

64 Crnel. Enrique Páez to Sr. Subsecretario de Gobierno, Tena, March 12, 1952, AMG.

65 Virgilio César Rivera Erazo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, El Chaco, May 1, 1952, AMG. Rivera’s name would continue to appear in letters to the Ministerio de Gobierno about the authorities in El Chaco. In 1955, three residents of El Chaco wrote to the Ministro to complain about Carlos Corella, the Teniente Político, whom they accused of cheating and abusing the poor residents of the parish by illicitly extracting money from them for personal use. As a replacement, they suggested Virgilio Rivera. José Joaquín Mamallacta, Manuel J. Porencio Alulema, and José Cardenas to Sr. Ministro do Gobierno, El Chaco, November 26, 1955, AMG.

316 seek redress of grievances. In this case, it was due to the corruption of an appointed official.

In addition to overt abuses of power, or sins of commission, sins of omission by appointed officials also generated complaints. In some cases, these officials demanded a quid-pro-quo in order to carry out their responsibilities. In August of 1953, Regina

Vega de Mendoza, who was the mail administrator for Mera, wrote to the Governor of

Napo-Pastaza and to the Ministro de Gobierno to complain about the Teniente Político of Mera. Vega reported that a month prior, more than three thousand sucres had been stolen from the post office for which she was responsible. She reported this to the

Teniente Político so that investigation of the crime could begin, but he had done nothing. According to Vega, the Teniente Político “is accustomed to being paid for any small job or whatever diligence that is required by law,” as was the case when her husband had been physically attacked but the Teniente Político demanded one hundred sucres to investigate the crime.66 According to a letter signed by approximately thirty residents of Mera, the Teniente Político was also known for engaging in commercial

66 Regina Vega de Mendoza to Sr. Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza and Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Mera, August 18, 1953, AMG. Another example of a public official charging citizens unjustly comes from Puyo, when in September of 1954, it was reported to the Ministro de Gobierno that the Jefe Político there, Hugo González, had charged certain parents with children of school age between 40 and 80 sucres for sending them to school. Three authors to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Puyo, September 21, 1954, AMG. An example of appointed officials dragging their feet in the execution of justice also comes from Puyo, in which Alfonso Hervas wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno to complain that the Jefe Político of Puyo had failed to do anything in response to Hervas’s assault by several others. “It is not possible,” Hervas wrote, “that an Ecuadorian man inspired in the proposal to pursue the greatness of the nation be attacked like an animal of prey.” This, then, is another example of how the Oriente’s citizens could appeal to patriotic reasons for redress of grievances. Alfonso Hervas to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Puyo, November 29, 1954, AMG. A similar example comes from Mera, where in 1955 Segundo Hidalgo wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno to complain that the Jefe Político of Pastaza had failed to investigate an attack by Angel María Flores upon Hidalgo, causing the latter to be gravely wounded and to lose his job. Segundo E. Hidalgo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Mera, February 8, 1955, AMG.

317 transactions with the money that rightly belonged to the Junta Parroquial.67 The

Teniente Político had his supporters, too, however: the next month, a letter signed by 36 residents of Shell Mera, a settlement nearby, accused Regina Vega and her husband of being the ones who predated on the people of the area, especially their Indian employees who “are victims of their continual savage and inhumane proceedings.”68

Another letter signed by approximately 100 individuals rallied to the Teniente Político’s defense, stating that “individuals of bad antecedents” were colluding to get the Teniente

Político removed purely because of their personal ambitions. The letter listed all the

Teniente Político’s accomplishments, including some infrastructure projects and public works in Mera.69 Finally, the Jefe Político of Pastaza wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to argue that in fact, the mail administrator Regina Vega de Mendoza’s complaints were motivated by continuing bitterness over her own husband’s previous removal from the post of Teniente Político, and that she was an otherwise corrupting influence and a poor public employee.70 These quarrels illustrate how control over public offices in the

Oriente could lead to the division of the citizenry into rival factions and discord between different public employees.

The removal of public employees was frequent enough that its negative effects could be acutely perceived in the Oriente. In 1954, Jorge Rodriguez wrote “A Brief

Reading for the Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente” about Aguarico Canton, in which he

67 Colonos de Mera to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Jefe de la Sección Ministerio i Oriente, Mera, September 2, 1953, AMG.

68 Thirty-six authors to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Shell Mera, October, 1953, AMG.

69 Multiple authors to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Mera, October 29, 1953, AMG.

70 Joaquín Carlos Camacho Jijón to Sr. Subsecretario de Gobierno, El Puyo, October 15, 1953, AMG.

318 lamented the discontinuity of administration provoked by the removal of Jefes and

Tenientes Políticos. He began his letter by noting the difficulty the “numerous white families” and the “indigenous personnel that help them in their agricultural labor” had in traveling to different parts of the canton, thus highlighting the need for constant attention to public works. Unfortunately, the series of ignorant and ill-prepared authorities sent by the ministry constantly feared their removal from office due to complaints and the

“leverage [palancas]” of the complainers. As a result, the Jefes and Tenientes Políticos did not attempt any projects of importance for the region. Rodriguez demanded that new appointees be kept in their post long enough to learn the needs of the area and to see projects to completion, such as a planned airstrip for the canton. Doing so would allow the Oriente to become the “future economic power” that was long hoped for.71 In essence, Rodriguez recognized that part of the promise of the Oriente as a national object of desire was not coming true with appreciable speed. To remedy this, he demanded more efficient administrators that would make the region less a group of ancillary provinces and more in line with the general administrative structure of the

Republic’s other provinces.

When Tenientes Políticos were themselves the ones committing crimes, some citizens chose to enlist the aid of people from outside the region. At the end of the

1950s, the Teniente Político of Sucúa, in the Southern Oriente, had victimized at least two women in his jurisdiction. The Ministro de Gobierno was made aware of this by a

“Modest traveler who resides in Cuenca,” who also reminded the Ministro that articles about the criminal actions of the Teniente Político had recently been published in the

71 Jorge I. Rodriguez R., “Una Breve Lectura para el Señor Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente,” November 29, 1954, AMG.

319 press.72 As one victim, Emilia Mora, explained, she had gone to the office of the

Teniente Político, Ruben Abad Torres, to process some “judicial arrangement.” Torres agreed, but the following day demanded that she give him her “person” in exchange.

Upon her denial, Torres refused to help her and even threatened to “take the honor of” her daughter, who was a minor.73 Another victim, who in 1960 signed her complaint as

“L. M. Cho. de López,” described a very similar incident in which Torres came to her home and demanded sexual favors in exchange for processing some judicial matter.74

Even into the 1960s, then, the appointed state officials of the Oriente took advantage of a lack of oversight and relative isolation to abuse the privileges of their office. Women who engaged the state system in the Oriente occasionally confronted an abusive and sexist environment; the colonists of the Oriente in general were forced to navigate a system rife with corruption and malfeasance.

The Oriente’s Incipient Local Government

The Jefes and Tenientes Políticos were not the only state officials in the Oriente, nor were their offices the only entities that controlled public resources. The Ley Especial de Oriente also provided for Juntas at the parish and canton level, composed of the respective Jefe or Teniente Político, a secretary, a treasurer, two local citizens named as members (vocales), and two supplemental members. In the chief cantons of each

Oriente province, there was to be a Concejo Municipal composed of five members elected by the local citizens according to the stipulations for municipal elections in the general laws of the Republic. The Juntas Parroquiales and Cantonales were to meet

72 Modesto viajero que reside en Cuenca to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Sucúa, January 9, 1960, AMG.

73 Emilia Mora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Sucúa, December 27, 1959, AMG.

74 L. M. Cho. de López to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Sucúa, January 8, 1960, AMG.

320 weekly, and were to formulate regulations (reglamentos) annually that would be approved by the responsible ministry in Quito. These “municipal corporations” were entrusted with the right to levy certain taxes: a one-thousandth share of the tax on all rural properties in the respective province valued over ten thousand sucres (of which

60% would go to the parish in which the property was located); one sucre for each head of cattle exported on the fluvial ports of the Oriente provinces; one sucre for each liter of aguardiente consumed in the province; fifty cents for each carton of foreign cigarettes brought into the Oriente; and five cents for each carton of domestic cigarettes. In addition, the Concejos Municipales of the provincial capital and the Juntas Parroquiales of each canton would receive the product of the sale and rent of parcels of land within the urban sector of the different cities. These Juntas and Concejos were permitted to create new taxes with the approval of the Council of State in Quito (Consejo de Estado).

The Ley Especial stipulated that no more than thirty percent of the budget of any Junta

Cantonal or Parroquial could be put toward the salaries of public employees.75

Examining the budgets of the Concejos Municipales and the Juntas Cantonales and Parroquiales of the Oriente reveals an important aspect of how the state functioned in the region. They reveal each municipal body’s sources of income, including taxes and other allowances, as well as their spending priorities. For example, in 1949, the Concejo

Municipal of Pastaza, in the city of Puyo, controlled 91,600 sucres from ordinary sources of income, including the taxes detailed above as well as fines levied by local police, “public spectacles,” payments for electricity consumed by private homes, and other sources. Among their “extraordinary” sources of income were 150,000 sucres

75 El Congreso de la República del Ecuador, “Ley Especial de Oriente,” Registro Oficial 1, nos. 68-69 (November 22-23, 1940): 367-372.

321 from the national government for use on potable water projects and roads, and 25,000 sucres of other “unforeseen income.” In total, the Concejo Municipal of Pastaza had a budget of 266,600 sucres for the months of March to December of 1949. The Council planned to spend 45,100 sucres on administrative costs, including the salaries of the

Council’s members and technicians for the local electrical and waterworks. An additional 15,347 sucres were to be spent on “service costs” including office supplies and transportation allowances; 18,740 sucres on education; 17,000 on hygiene; 10,000 on urbanization; 10,000 on electricity; 80,000 on potable water projects; 55,000 on road projects; 10,000 on general supplies (abastos); and the remaining 5,413 sucres for unforeseen costs. The road costs were split between several different local routes that connected Puyo to neighboring parishes and to various agricultural colonies (colonias agrícolas), which were often lived on by colonist cooperatives. A portion of the costs for potable water were also put toward road projects, reflecting the high priority that roadwork tended to have among the members of these bodies and the colonists in the region.76

The Junta Cantonal of Gualaquiza, in the southern Oriente province of Santiago-

Zamora managed similar economic resources. The total funds available to that body in

1949 amounted to 219,368.02 sucres, gotten from the national government in Quito for roads and potable water projects, from state monopolies, and from taxes, fines, and income (such as rent paid by entities occupying public buildings) at the local level. Of that, more than half was to be spent on potable water projects and the construction of roads in the canton. Other expenditures were to go toward bridges, health services,

76 Gabriel Márquez de la Plata, Jefe Político de Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Municipalidades, Puyo, May 23, 1949, AMG.

322 office supplies, public employees’ salaries, and various other miscellaneous costs such as repairing public buildings, feeding prisoners, the municipal library, and public festivals.77 Zamora Canton, in the far southern Oriente, in 1952 had a budget of

191,850.83 sucres; the major categories of spending were road construction, potable water, and other expenditures similar to those in other Oriente cantons.78 In 1954, the

Concejo Cantonal de Macas, in Morona Canton, enjoyed a budget of more than 1.4 million sucres, thanks largely to funds acquired from the national government to be put toward potable water and road projects, and from other funds from ministries in Quito to be used for an electrical plant. Like other Oriente cantons, most of this money went toward roads, public services, construction projects, and other aspects of local infrastructure and administration.79

The members of these bodies felt it was their duty to represent the interests of the Oriente’s inhabitants, or at least claimed to have those interests in mind. In

November of 1948, the President of the Junta Cantonal de Gualaquiza, José M. Madero

Jaramillo, asked the Ministro de Gobierno to attend to several petitions for aid to

77 La Junta Cantonal de Gualaquiza, “Ordenanza de Presupuesto para el Ejercicio Económico del Año de 1949,” January 17, 1949, AMG. For comparison, in 1952, the Junta Cantonal in Gualaquiza had a total budget of 196,012.94 sucres. The largest amounts were spent on roads, potable water, and the canton’s airstrip. Other large units of spending were for the electrical plant, local construction projects, and local salaries. La Junta Cantonal de Gualaquiza, “Ordenanza de Presupuesto Ordinario, Para el Ejercicio Económico del Año de Mil Novecientos Cincuenta y Dos,” January 15, 1952, AMG.

78 La Junta Cantonal de Zamora, “Ordenanza de Presupuesto Económico de la Junta Cantonal para el Año de 1952,” January 12, 1952, AMG. In 1953, Zamora had a total budget of 200,124.85 sucres, to be spent on a similar distribution of local infrastructure and services. La Junta Cantonal de Zamora, “Ordenanza de Presupuesto Económico,” March 27, 1952, AMG. In 1954, the spending priorities were largely the same, but the budget was much higher: 666,444.26 sucres were counted on, thanks to a higher-than-expected 480,000 sucres from tariffs. La Junta Cantonal de Zamora, “Reforma a la Ordenanza de Presupuesto Económico del Año 1954,” June 14, 1954, AMG.

79 El Ilustre Concejo Cantonal de Macas, “Ordenanza de Presupuesto para el Ejercicio Económico de 1954,” May 1, 1954, AMG.

323 Gualaquiza that he had been sent. Madero included photographs showing the

Gualaquiza area, and wrote, “we Ecuadorians have no right to indifferently cross our arms before the destructive avalanche that has undermined progress in the populated

Oriente.”80 In June of 1949, Luis Molina Celi, the President of the Concejo Municipal of

Pastaza, wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno to say that

there is manifest interest among all the inhabitants of the Oriente that the regional problems be treated for once by those truly interested in them, as are the colonists or their legitimate representatives, the Municipios or Juntas Cantonales, not just by those who profess interest in Sectional progress but are not sufficiently acquainted with the necessities that affect the region, meaning that often instead of giving us a solution they have created greater difficulties for us.

Furthermore, Molina appealed to the Oriente’s special status in the Republic, and argued that it deserved better: “it is high time that the peoples of the Oriente feel that they are an integral part of the Ecuadorian Nation and not just mere colonists of a region that has been forgotten for a long time.” All of this was prologue to Molina’s suggestion that there be a general conference of all the representatives on the

Concejos Municipales and Juntas Cantonales in the Oriente to discuss the problems of the region and present a detailed set of suggestions to the Congress in Quito. He asked for authorization that would allow all the region’s Jefes Políticos to attend, and for monetary support.81 His suggestion did not go very far, however: the Subsecretario de

Gobierno answered that for economic and other reasons, functionaries like Molina could not convoke such conferences.82 It seems that limited resources were partially

80 José M. Madero Jaramillo, Presidente de la Junta Cantonal de Gualaquiza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Gualaquiza, November 15, 1948, AMG.

81 M. Luis Molina Celi to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno i Oriente, Puyo, June 14, 1949, AMG.

82 Gustavo Vásconez H., Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Jefe Político de Zamora, Quito, July 4, 1949, AMG.

324 responsible for preventing a meeting to address the problems posed by limited resources.83

The municipal bodies jealously guarded their ability to spend on the region’s transportation network, as can bee seen in the objections by the Vice President of the

Concejo Municipal de Pastaza, Jorge Enrique Lopez, in his reaction to an Executive

Decree in 1950 that aimed to transfer all control over road construction to the

Ecuadorian military’s engineers. Given the large portion of the budget that roadwork generally occupied, this objection has some merit in that it would take away a significant element of these local organizations’ prerogatives. Lopez argued that municipal autonomy would be undermined, thus violating the democratic principles enshrined in the Republic’s laws. The military engineers, he feared, could become “small dictators,” sowing discord between the civil and military authorities in the region to the detriment of governance and progress in general. Lopez did not object to the military’s control over the construction of the highway between Puyo and the Napo River, which enjoyed special budgetary assignations. His ire came from the suggestion that the smaller roads between neighboring parishes, the “caminos vecinales,” would also come under the

83 The budget for the Concejo Cantonal de Napo, in the city of Tena, from 1949 shows similar sources of income and spending priorities. This municipal body had a budget nearly three times higher than that in Pastaza, however, with 683,127.07 sucres available for spending. The difference is largely due to a much higher income from tax on potable water, the spending budget of which was separate from that of the other sources of income. For the latter funds, the Concejo set aside 14,887.26 sucres for service costs, 13,017.64 for general administration and 6,508.00 for education. The potable water funds were spent on materials, tools, office supplies, mules, and travel allowances. The largest items of spending by far were for a bridge over the Tena River and another over the Cosanga, for which 202,232.52 and 20,000 were spent, respectively. An additional 90,000 sucres were spent on road projects. As in Pastaza, the Canton’s infrastructure and transportation was a high priority. Sebastian Narvaez A., Alcalde del Concejo Municipal del Canton Napo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, June 14, 1949, AMG. The budget for the Concejo Cantonal of Aguarico Canton in 1949, further down the Napo River, does not show as much emphasis on roadwork, perhaps due to the greater importance of river transportation in that canton. That budget’s largest spending category is “Service Costs,” which includes office supplies, maintenance of the radio station, electrical plant, cemetery, and public plazas, construction of a jail, and other costs arising from public services and institutions. Hugo Chiriboga D., Jefe Político del Cantón Aguarico to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Aguarico, April 11, 1949, AMG.

325 military’s control according to the decree. These roads are what local citizens depended on to reach their farms and to reach the city of Puyo, where their elected representatives sat on the Concejo Municipal. This fact lends some credence to Lopez’s argument that full military control of all roads undermined the will of the citizenry.84

The budget from the Concejo Cantonal in Napo for 1952 reveals that control over local roads was back in the hands of the elected municipal bodies by 1951, so the executive decree’s function was short lived. The Napo body’s 1952 budget and its review of 1951 also illustrate the views of these local elected officials on local governance, their priorities, and their opinion of the attention the Oriente received from the national government. The Semester Report (Informe Semestral) for the latter half of

1951 and the budget for 1952 was published in Quito as an illustrated pamphlet and was authored by Cesar Augusto Rueda, the Mayor (Alcalde), who was the elected head of the six-member Concejo. He described himself as a “native colonist of the region” who aimed to publicize the activities of the municipal body he presided and work for the

“future of our beloved Patria chica, the Oriente, which is the only desire of all and each of the municipal acts.” He issued a call for all residents in the canton to put aside their squabbles, for only then would they forge “an environment of peace, serenity and progress” for their children who live in the Oriente that was cursed by the isolation stemming from the lack of roads and colonization.85 The total funds available for the

Concejo Cantonal de Napo in 1951 were 478.597,22 sucres, far fewer than the more

84 Jorge Enriquez Lopez to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Municipalidades, El Puyo, January 9, 1950, AMG.

85 Informe Semestral de las Labores Municipales del I. Concejo Cantonal del Napo y Presupuesto Ordinario para el Ejercicio Económico del Año 1952 (Quito: Publicidad Quito, 1952), 3-4, AMG.

326 than 600.000,00 sucres available in 1949. As Rueda commented, “these figures, by themselves, are the manifest demonstration of the economic capacity of the incipient

Concejos Cantonales of the Oriente that carry the heavy burden of being the handkerchief (paño de lágrimas) in all orders, within their jurisdictions.” Appealing to the

“conscience of the Oriente colonist,” he boldly declared,

the Oriente, as long as it does not have its own income (rentas propias), as long as there is no sacrifice also from its inhabitants in the economic sphere, will not rise from its current prostration. It is no longer possible to expect everything from the government, we must be consistent with ourselves, giving signs of better self interest and collective dignity.86

Rueda, then, lamented the limited resources with which the body he presided could function, but also called on his constituents to make a greater contribution to the collective good. Rueda cited the lack of roads as the reason for the current “stagnation” of the Oriente,87 so it is not surprising that roads constituted three quarters of the spending planned for the 743,392.45 sucres the Concejo Cantonal hoped to have available in 1952. The rest was to be spent on education and sports, hygiene, the canton’s Juntas Parroquiales, and other miscellaneous costs.88

The municipal bodies of the southern Oriente also called attention to the

Oriente’s problems and sought to excite the patriotism of those who could help. In 1951, municipal representatives of Morona Canton composed a letter to the President of the

National Congress to request financial assistance for their jurisdiction. The letter stated that “the whole country” knew of the “absolute delay in which the Oriente region lives, in all its aspects: material, moral, and economic.” The causes of this stemmed from the

86 Ibid., 5.

87 Ibid.

88 Ibid., 21-25.

327 “complete abandonment and isolation in which has been placed this true reserve of our nationality, this fecund land, which constitutes the sentinel of our patrimony while being the permanent ambition of our secular enemy [Peru].” They cited the lack of production at a national level as the fundamental cause of Ecuador’s troubles; this problem existed also in the Oriente, because the region’s residents lived at subsistence level, producing only for themselves. The solution to this problem was transportation; roads connecting

Macas and its surroundings to the highlands would provide the necessary push to make the Oriente a thriving productive center. All of this was prologue to the request for

500,000 sucres for road construction and an additional 100,000 for the construction of a public building and a hydroelectric plant for Macas.89 Like their counterparts elsewhere in the Oriente, these representatives of local governing bodies traded upon the notion that the Oriente was of utmost national importance, playing an essential role in territorial defense and the future economic prosperity of the whole country. By using ideas derived from the construction of the Oriente as a national object of desire, they sought to address the deficiencies inherent in the fact that it remained a group of ancillary provinces.

The local bodies of government in the Oriente took advantage of the disposition of the Ley Especial de Oriente that allowed them to create new taxes to gather funds for use in local contexts. The Junta Cantonal of Aguarico Canton, in the town of Nuevo

Rocafuerte, in December of 1952, recognizing all the different forest products existing in the territory, from precious woods and resins to game animals, imposed variable rates of tax on the export of these products out of national territory, that is, downriver to

89 Dr. Alberto Littuma Arízaga, Procurador Síndico de la Ilustre Municipalidad del Cantón Morona et al to Sr. Presidente del Honorable Congreso Nacional, Quito, September 24, 1951, AMG.

328 Peru.90 In 1955, the Junta Cantonal of Quijos, located in the town of Baeza, at the western edge of Napo-Pastaza Province, created a tax on persimmons and fine woods to be invested in equal shares for roadwork and for urban improvements in town. The

Junta Cantonal noted that the burden of these taxes would fall on the “merchant

(comerciante)” rather than on the “producer, that is, the colonist.”91 The Juntas

Parroquiales were in some cases as active in local projects as the canton-level bodies.

The Junta Parroquial of Mera, one of the oldest colonist settlements in the region located at the entrance to the Oriente in Pastaza Canton, was among these parish-level entities that gathered some revenue and spent on improvements. The Junta’s income came from taxes on state monopolies, such as aguardiente, consumption of beer, electrical fees, fines, taxes products from sugarcane such as panelas and syrups, a persimmon tax, and other miscellaneous sources. The total income for the year was predicted at 105,350.71 sucres. The Junta’s items of spending included the salaries of local technicians, education, including scholarships for local students, sports, sanitary services, office supplies, and transportation allowances. Local road projects also received funding, amounting to approximately one-third of all spending.92 As other documents from the Junta Parroquial of Mera make clear, most of this spending took the form of contracts signed with local residents for road improvements, urban constructions, or other technical services. In 1957, the Junta Parroquial of Mera made

90 Decreto del Junta Cantonal de Aguarico, December 15, 1952, AMG.

91 Junta Cantonal de Quijos, “Exposición de Motivos” and “Ordenanza para el Cobro de las Contribuciones que se Indican, sobre el Comercio de la Madera y la Naranjilla que se Producen en el Territorio Cantonal de Quijos y se Exporta a los Mercados Exteriores,” Baeza, August, 1955, AMG.

92 La H. Junta Parroquial de Mera, “Ordenanza de Presupuesto Ordinario Para el año 1954,” Mera, March 8, 1954, AMG.

329 28 work contracts, totaling 82,425 sucres, of between 150 and 5,895 sucres each with approximately a dozen different contractors.93 These activities of the Junta Parroquial in

Mera, and those in the other parishes of Napo-Pastaza Province, illustrate how these local government entities played an important role in the redistribution of monetary resources in the region to private individuals, and how they determined which roads, public works, and other projects received preferential attention.

The Juntas Parroquiales and Cantonales, and the Concejos Municipales in the larger settlements, then, helped set the agenda of state formation in the Oriente, and were a local incarnation of the Ecuadorian state, especially given their control over resources. But, as the Ley Especial de Oriente stipulated, the Jefes and Tenientes

Políticos of the Oriente were members of these bodies. The charges of corruption they faced often extended to these local government bodies, and the financial resources they controlled raised the stakes of these charges. Audits of these Juntas and Concejos were fairly common, such as the one that took place in 1953 of the Junta Cantonal de

Aguarico. The auditor sent by the Ministerio de Gobierno found numerous problems, including the failure to receive approval for budgets, accounting errors, and extraordinary use of travel allowances for personal benefit of the Junta’s members. The auditor concluded that the improper use of funds had left no money remaining for the canton’s urgent needs. The auditor concluded his report by invoking the Oriente’s special status: “the Oriente deserves unconditional support of all Ecuadorians. Its

93 Fr. Esteban Flores A., C.P., Presidente de la Junta Parroquial de Mera to Sr. Dr. Dn. Jorge H. Merlo V., Ministro de Gobierno i Oriente, Mera, January 24, 1958, AMG. In 1958, the Junta Parroquial of Mera entered into 33 work contracts with many of the same contractors from 1957, for a total cost of 68,891 sucres. “Contratos de las Obras Realizadas por la H. Junta Parroquial de Mera en el Año 1958,” Mera, 1958, AMG. In 1959, the Junta Parroquial spent a total of 125,378.42 sucres on 55 different contracts. “Contratos de Labores Realizadas por la H. Junta Parroquial de Mera en el Año de 1959,” Mera, 1959, AMG.

330 monies should be sacred.” Government action was necessary to correct these errors

“for the advantage of the country and those who consecrate their lives at the service of the rigors of the jungle.”94 Commenting on the report, the chief of the Oriente section of the Ministerio de Gobierno wrote to the Minister, “the audit of the Junta Cantonal del

Aguarico has given us the sad and certain experience of what more or less happens in all the local governments of the Oriente.” As he explained, “the scarcity of honorable personnel, the presence of large sums of money, the difficulty of control due to lack of communications and administrative dispersion, create an acute problem in the Oriente, of which the Junta of Rocafuerte is only a sign.” As a solution, he suggested better selection of personnel for the Juntas and Concejos, a requirement that all budgets be approved by the Ministerio de Gobierno and that monthly economic reports be required, and finally that the Juntas not manage such large sums of money. Instead, they would only enjoy a “small rotating fund, for daily costs.”95 Though these recommendations were not carried out, the letter speaks to a general distrust of local government in the

Oriente and the frequency of mismanagement of funds.96

Others continued to see the local bodies as one of the Oriente’s problems, rather than a factor of progress. In the latter part of 1954, the chief of the Oriente section of the

Ministerio de Gobierno wrote to the Minister to comment on a proposed total reform of

94 Carlos Egas J., Visitador General to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, December 10, 1953, AMG.

95 César Fernández C., Jefe de la Sección Gobierno y Oriente to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Quito, December 28, 1953, AMG.

96 Perhaps the auditors themselves were not always trustworthy. In July 1952, the Governor of Santiago-Zamora Province complained to the Ministerio de Gobierno that the municipal funds in Macas had been poorly managed, and the local government was truly bankrupt. A group of auditors had come in April, but they seemingly just wasted more money as they stayed in the house of the mayor, daily throwing parties and doing an improper audit. Lic. Gustavo Darquea Terán, Ministro de Gobierno to Sr. Contralor General de la Nación, Quito, July 31, 1952, AMG.

331 the Ley Especial de Oriente submitted by one César Fernández to the Congress.

Among the proposals were the elimination of all the Concejos in the Oriente and a general centralization of administration and funding. These proposals were not adopted; however, as the section chief, Enrique Cobo Barona, wrote,

experience has conclusively demonstrated the negative work of the Municipios, Juntas Cantonales y Parroquiales, especially in the management of funds, in which one can appreciate with midday clarity that the works completed do not correspond to the economic capacity and the payments made by these sectional organisms.

There were “frequent” proven cases of economic malfeasance. However, the section chief also stated he felt that Fernández’s proposals had little chance of being adopted, in part due to the large influence of the representatives of the Oriente’s provinces in the national legislature, who were totally against the idea of centralization.97

Another case of malfeasance arose in 1955, this time involving the Concejo

Cantonal del Napo, which had allegedly mismanaged more than 100,000 sucres with full knowledge and indifference of the local authorities and citizens.98 A representative of the Concejo Cantonal wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno to defend the entity after the ministry had ordered that the members of the Concejo be brought up on charges.

According to him, the 100,000 sucres were not misspent at all; they were, in fact, spent according to the Ministry’s orders. To further explain how the funds were used, he wrote that the Concejo had to serve as “father and mother” to the people in the canton given

97 Enrique Cobo Barona to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, September 23, 1954, AMG. Letters in the Archivo del Ministerio de Gobierno illustrate the kinds of reasons that officials in that ministry might have had to distrust the Oriente’s Municipios’ management of funds. For example, in October of 1955, the Ministro de Gobierno César Plaza complained that some 36,000 sucres the national government given to the Concejo Municipal del Napo, destined for repairs to the road from Papallacta, high in the Andes, to Baeza, at the entrance of the Oriente, had never been used. Tnte. Crnel. César Plaza M. to Sr. Vicepresidente de la JUNO, Quito, October 17, 1955, AMG.

98 Antonio Palacios to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, November 4, 1955, AMG.

332 the persistent lack of resources in the region. “As the protective hand of the State has not reached these places,” he explained, “all have to come to the Municipio in demand of work and help, as nobody else can give it to them.” This, he implied, explained all the unexpected and miscellaneous costs that the Municipio regularly faced. He ended his letter by listing the Concejo’s recent accomplishments, such as the construction of a hydroelectric plant in Tena, a children’s park and the main park in the same city, bridge and road repairs along the Misahuallí River, and the installation of a municipal medicinal supply.99

The Concejos of Pastaza and Napo continued their advocacy for their respective communities in communications to the Ministerio de Gobierno in the latter part of the

1950s. This advocacy was often couched in terms that alluded to the Oriente’s special role in the nation. In 1956, the presidency of the Concejo Municipal of Pastaza was held by Hernán Coloma Verdesoto, who stated that Puyo was then among the most flourishing and progressive places in the Oriente. But he lamented the lack of funds assigned to Pastaza from the taxes generated on state monopolies. Puyo needed these funds, which were to be used on road projects, more than most places in the Oriente because of its central location and its proximity to the cities of the Sierra. As he explained,

there is no objection if we say that Puyo…and its parishes represent the most populated part [of the Oriente] and the effective demonstration of what an Oriente pueblo can be with the effort of its sons. For this reason with justice we claim that which by right belongs to us, because effort should have its recompense.

99 Dr. Gonzalo Egas Arias, Procurador Síndico Municipal to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Municipalidades, Quito, November 22, 1955, AMG.

333 The Concejo’s request for 50,000 sucres for urbanization projects corresponded to the fact that Puyo was the most visited city in the Oriente, by both foreign and national tourists, and therefore well positioned to show these visitors “the advancement and progress of the pueblos of the Region that is a symbol of our nationality and to which all

Ecuadorians are constantly and permanently obligated to support.”100 These sentiments demonstrate the belief that the Oriente deserved support from the national government, while at the same time demonstrating that the region’s development was due in large part to the efforts of its own inhabitants. The communications and records of the

Concejos and Juntas of the Oriente generally demonstrate a belief that development was the result of a partnership between national and local government; the former was to provide monetary support while the latter could set the priorities for local projects.

Charges of corruption and dishonesty continued to dog these local bodies, however. Sometimes, complaints came not from the higher authorities in Quito, but from the Oriente residents whose interests were supposed to be attended by the Concejos and Juntas. In March of 1956, more than 40 “colonists and inhabitants” of Quijos

Canton, in the western part of Napo-Pastaza Province, wrote to the Ministerio de

Gobierno to complain about the President of the Junta Cantonal, Carlos Edmundo

Landázuri, who they claim did not even live in the canton and had been removed from the Concejo Cantonal of Napo for failing to establish local residency. Furthermore,

Landázuri allegedly did all management of funds in secret, failed to pay local teachers, and levied fines and charges the product of which was put to no apparent use. The other members of the Junta were useless, as they apparently left all the Junta’s

100 Hernán Coloma Verdesoto, Presidente del Concejo Municipal del Cantón Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Puyo, January 24, 1956, AMG.

334 business to the president alone.101 Shortly thereafter, however, Landázuri and the other members of the Junta wrote to the ministry to protest their having been attacked by a group led by the former Jefe Político of the Canton, who ransacked Landázuri’s office and demanded Landázuri’s resignation from the Junta. According to Landázuri, the attacking group’s motives were political, for they intended to use the Junta’s resources for an electoral campaign.102 Shortly thereafter, Landázuri resigned amid accusations that he, in fact, had been using the office of President to promote a particular political party.103 An election was held in Quijos in June for new members of the Junta Cantonal; only the secretary remained from the previous group.104 The influence of political parties in the administration of the Oriente will be discussed below; suffice it to say that the case of Quijos shows how local government in the Oriente could be the site of factionalism and conflict that could lead to the misuse of public funds. More than a year later, complaints again reached the Ministerio de Gobierno from the people in Quijos about the actions of the Junta Cantonal, which they claimed was not investing funds in specified road projects and gaining the antipathy of the citizens, who refused to participate in mingas, or communal work parties, to improve the roads. The President of the Junta Cantonal claimed that all available funds were going toward debts from the

101 “Colonos y moradores del Cantón” to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quijos, March, 1956, AMG.

102 Junta Cantonal de Quijos to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Municipalidades, Baeza, March 28, 1956, AMG. According to the budget for the Junta Cantonal de Quijos from April of 1956, the Junta counted on 274,201.36 to spend that year, of which nearly 60% was planned for roadwork. In April, Carlos Acosta, one of the Vocales under Landázuri, had become acting president of the Junta, after Landázuri’s resignation. “Presupuesto de la Junta Cantonal de Quijos, Para el Ejercicio 1956,” Baeza, April 23, 1956, AMG.

103 Rubén A. Baca to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Quito, March 19, 1956, AMG.

104 Francisco Ruiz Franco, Presidente de la Junta Cantonal de Quijos to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Baeza, June 7, 1956, AMG.

335 previous year, but, according to the subsecretario of the Ministerio de Gobierno, this excuse was not justified because the previous year had also been characterized by the

“most lamentable negligence and what-does-it-matter-to-me-ism (quemeimportismo).”

The frustration of the Ministry is evident in that it ordered the General Comptroller

(Contralor General) to undertake an audit of the Junta Cantonal de Quijos.105 These squabbles and misdirection of funds were not just frustrating, but, in the case of Quijos, seemingly endemic.

The Jefes and Tenientes Políticos of the region, along with the members of the

Juntas Cantonales, Parroquiales, and the Concejos Municipales in the larger cities like

Tena and Puyo, then, played a large part in determining how the resources of the state were allocated in the Oriente. They were, in short, one component of the state system in the region, entrusted with carrying out the laws of the Republic and channeling its fiscal expenditures. The reality on the ground was far from orderly and harmonious, as the evidence above demonstrates. Conflict, discontinuity, and corruption repeatedly interfered with the road projects and other public works that were sought by the region’s inhabitants. These factors characterized the region as an underfunded and isolated set of ancillary provinces. In the 1940s and 1950s, another growing factor contributed to these difficulties: the growing politicization of the Oriente as it was connected to the electoral cycles of the whole Republic.

105 Renato Pérez Drouet, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Contralor General, Quito, August 7, 1957, AMG. A month later, another audit had to be ordered, this time of the municipal treasury, post office, and Agricultural Center in Puyo because, “according to reports they are being managed by a single family that practically controls the economic life of the canton.” Renato Pérez Drouet, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Contralor General, Quito, September 12, 1957, AMG.

336 Political Factions and Administrative Disruption

The communications sent between the Ministerio de Gobierno in Quito and the

Oriente’s officials clearly demonstrate the increasing politicization of the region, with factionalism and rivalries playing a large part in determining who held administrative positions in the provinces of Napo-Pastaza and Santiago-Zamora. An early sign of this factor’s importance can be seen in the 1949 letters from several dozen colonists in Mera to the Ministerio de Gobierno in which they complained about the actions of the local

Teniente Político, Enrique Lugo Ramírez. In addition to his immorality, evidenced by his living with two women, he also had the tendency to imprison people arbitrarily and impose fines for illegitimate reasons. He impeded members of the Junta Parroquial from obtaining title to their parcels of land, and appointed his incompetent friends to jobs at the local electrical plant.106 Furthermore, Lugo was a member of the Comité

Conservador, and was always bothering (“fastidiando”) those in Mera who were supporters of the current president, Galo Plaza Lasso. He allegedly found any reason to impose fines and prison sentences on the “Placistas” in his parish.107 Lugo’s abuse of his authority as Teniente Político was not abnormal in the Oriente, as we have seen.

However, he seems to have singled out political rivals for his machinations, demonstrating that political allegiances could affect one’s ability to interact with the state system and its representatives in the Oriente.

Similar cases from Santiago-Zamora bear out the ways that political rivalries could affect the functioning of state officials and local elected governing bodies. In

106 Colonos de Mera to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno i Oriente, Mera, May 16, 1949, AMG.

107 Colonos de Mera to Dr. Carlos Terán Gómez, Mera, received June 16, 1949, AMG.

337 December of 1949, the President of the Electoral Tribunal of Santiago-Zamora complained that the mayor of Macas, capital city of the province, had unjustly intervened in the election for the Municipal Council, over which the mayor, Telmo I.

Robalino, presided. More than half of the eligible citizens in Macas had voted, demonstrating their civic fervor and “the interest that [the people] have had in the immediate change of the current Council personnel”; however, the mayor’s meddling had discouraged many of the voters, who opted to cast blank votes of protest.108 For his part, Robalino protested to the Ministerio de Gobierno that his actions had been totally correct, and that in fact it was the Governor of Santiago-Zamora, Angel Miguel Arregui, who held some grudge against the Municipal Council of Macas since that body had refused to collaborate with the governor in promoting the election of certain candidates for the National Congress. The governor, Robalino alleged, spitefully ordered an audit of the Council, citing “incorrect actions by the mayor.” The General Comptroller, however, had found nothing amiss in their audit.109

At some point before March of 1950, Arregui was replaced as governor by

Manuel Herrera Cevallos. But the charges of political meddling did not go away. A group of citizens wrote to Quito citing their bona fides as supporters of the current president, Galo Plaza Lasso, and as people who desired to “make a new homeland” in the Oriente. Unfortunately, they were cursed with poor authorities such as the governor who had turned the province into a “total dictatorship.” They charged Herrera with

108 Pedro Pablo Jaramillo N., Presidente del Tribunal Electoral Provincial de Santiago-Zamora to Sr. Gobernador de Santiago-Zamora, Macas, December 29, 1949, AMG.

109 Telmo I. Robalino P., Alcalde Municipal del Cantón Morona to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, January 6, 1949, AMG.

338 participating in contraband trade with various property owners in the province.

Furthermore, he had recently been working to promote the candidacy of certain citizens of Cuenca, a major highland city, who were of “Socialist political ideology.”110 Herrera was then replaced by José F. Acuña Martínez as interim governor, who had his own troubling news to share with the Ministerio de Gobierno. According to him, it was members of the Electoral Tribunal itself that were causing problems, as they were promoting a list of candidates headed by one Dr. Alberto Littuma Arízaga who was of

“communist affiliation.” The members were abusing their positions of authority in various ways in an attempt to guarantee electoral success for that list.111

The following year, Santiago-Zamora had yet another governor, Hugo Chiriboga

Dávalos. One of his letters to Quito makes clear the fact that political rivalries continued to affect the province. In his description, the principal political factions were the conservatives, who had the support of many of the Salesian missionaries in the area, a

“Nationalist” group with communist tendencies, and a third group calling itself

“Independent.” All three were sowing discord in the province by sending petitions to the government and false complaints seeking the dismissal of certain state functionaries based on pure calumny. Chiriboga claimed that he had been trying to calm down these passions and promote an idea of the “brilliant future of the place; and, the sentiment of

Homeland and brotherhood for those who, not being natives to this place, nevertheless do not cease to be Ecuadorians, with wide-ranging rights to come here” and to promote

“the mixture of races already quite advanced and the attendant guarantee to assure

110 Ciudadanos de Macas to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, March 12, 1950, AMG.

111 José F. Acuña Martínez, Gobernador Accidental de Santiago-Zamora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, April 28, 1950, AMG.

339 cultural and moral exchange of the people.” Toward this end, Chiriboga explained that he found it necessary to ask for the dismissal of certain authorities. He assured the

Ministerio that these changes were not based on false accusations but on the truth.112

The following year, 1952, was a presidential election year, and evidence suggests that Chiriboga’s efforts to calm political passions the year before could not prevent politicization from affecting the administration of the province in the midst of national political changes. The new governor, Luis F. Pinto, in April complained to the

Ministerio de Gobierno that political candidates were causing public disturbances. As he reported, Dr. Alberto Littuma, congressional candidate (who had been the subject of

Governor Acuña’s complaint in 1950) had instigated “the citizen masses to commit acts of alteration to public order” on the night of April 20th. The next day violent confrontation between a group called “Macas Nacionalista” and its opponents was narrowly avoided thanks to the intervention of a military officer from the local garrison. This group, of

“communist tendency” and headed by Littuma, had been collaborating with the

Municipal Council in Macas to use public funds to promote its candidates, in addition to

“sowing terror and disorder among the pacific inhabitants of this population.” Pinto suggested that the Ministerio order an audit of the Municipal Council, and also warned that Littuma would soon send false accusations to the Ministerio against Pintado and other public authorities, and no doubt these would be signed by “interested and irresponsible elements, whose declarations are self-contradictory.”113 The tradition of

112 Hugo Chiriboga Dávalos to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, July 12, 1951, AMG.

113 Myr. Luis F. Pinto G. Gobernador de Santiago-Zamora to Sr. Ministerio de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, April 23, 1952, AMG.

340 gathering questionable signatures to lend credence to complaints was well known to

Pintado, apparently.

The Ministro de Gobierno at that time, Gustavo Darquea Terán, apparently followed this advice and ordered an audit of several Municipal Councils that were alleged to be using public funds to support certain lists of candidates. According to

Edmundo Carvajal, a Diputado for Santiago-Zamora, a group of citizens in Macas had told him that, indeed, Dr. Alberto Littuma was collaborating with the Municipal Council to promote his own candidacy. Furthermore, they were using the truck that belonged to the municipality to drive political candidates all over the canton and to distribute electoral propaganda.114 Unsurprisingly, the Municipal Council wrote to Quito with its own version of events. As the Mayor of Macas, Leonardo Rivadeneira wrote, it was public knowledge that the Governor, Pinto, and all his employees were very partial and interfering in the pre-electoral process. He, according to his wife’s suggestions, had removed many parish authorities simply for refusing to obey his orders in this regard.

He had also ordered all the citizens in Chiguaza and Arapicos Parishes to journey to

Macas and remain there until election day, when they would be required to vote for

Pinto’s preferred list of candidates. In this view, it was the Governor, not the members of the Municipal Council, who were violating the “honesty of proceedings” to the detriment of “collective wellbeing and progress.”115

114 Tcrnel. Edmundo Carvajal F., Diputado por Santiago-Zamora to Sr. Lic. Gustavo Darquea Terán, Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, May 21, 1952, AMG.

115 Leonardo Rivadeneira R. Alcalde Municipal to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, May 30, 1952, AMG. The Ministro de Gobierno Darquea transcribed Rivadeneira’s letter for the Governor, Pinto, with a demand that he explain these charges, but it is unclear if any further steps were taken in the matter. Lic. Gustavo Darquea Terán, Ministro de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de Santiago-Zamora, Quito, June 11, 1952, AMG.

341 Littuma triumphed in the election and became a Diputado for the province, and later in 1952 citizens in Santiago-Zamora expressed their displeasure with his political allies that now held public office. For example, some colonists in Limón-Indanza Canton wrote to complain that the Teniente Político of General Plaza Parish was “semi-illiterate” and only held his position because Littuma had arranged it.116 Later, a group calling itself the “Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Zamoranos” wrote to complain that they, along with the groups who supported the election of José María Velasco

Ibarra in the city of Zamora, had been seeking the restoration of Luis Polibio González to the post of Jefe Político in Zamora. Their efforts had been unsuccessful because Dr.

Littuma and other legislators had prevented it, preferring instead to keep in place

Neptalí Villacís who used the protection of Littuma to commit a series of abuses of office.117 These are only two examples of the very common complaint that poor public authorities rode on the coattails of electoral candidates to the detriment of the Oriente’s citizens. Furthermore, the rivalries between Littuma’s supporters and others continued to provoke incidents of violence, even several months after the election. In June of

1953, Domingo Shacay and Julio Sando, from the parish of Sevilla Don Bosco in

116 Dr. Jorge Ortíz Escobar, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de Santiago-Zamora, Quito, November 5, 1952, AMG.

117 Juan Izquierdo P. Presidente del Comité Pro-Defensa Derechos Zamoranos to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Zamora, November 3, 1952, AMG. The Central “Velasquista” Committee also wrote to protest the removal of Polibio, directing their complaints directly to President Velasco. They appealed to their history of supporting his political career as the reason that he should restore Polibio to office and thereby frustrate the efforts of Dr. Littuma and other legislators who had unjustly had Polibio removed. Presidente del Comité Central “Velasquista” et al to Excelentísimo Señor Presidente Constitucional de la República, Zamora, September 21, 1952, AMG. The complaints against Neptalí Villacís continued throughout 1952, prompting a member of the Junta Cantonal of Zamora to write to Dr. Littuma, now a Diputado, to affirm that those seeking Villacís’s removal were nothing but a group of “unemployed, who have abandoned the activities for which they are qualified, agriculture, business, et cetera,” only to seek to engage the state bureaucracy to satisfy personal passions of revenge.” Vidal Reyes, Primer Vocal de la Junta Cantonal de Zamora to Sr. Dr. Alberto Littuma, Diputado por Santiago-Zamora, Loja, January 7, 1953, AMG.

342 Morona Canton complained to the Jefe Político that a group of “Jívaros” had accused them of being communists and had in cowardly fashion attacked them with rocks and fists. They claimed that these Jívaros had been stirred up by a known opponent of Dr.

Littuma who frequently leveled accusations of communism and atheism against Littuma and his supporters.118

Political rivalries could also affect the good functioning of state services and communications. This was the case in 1952, as evidenced by a letter from the Ministerio de Gobierno to the Minister of Public Works and Communications. The Ministerio de

Gobierno had received a report from the Governor of Napo-Pastaza that postal service in the province was deficient and managed by irresponsible personnel, prompting most of the residents of Pastaza Canton to complain. Letters and mail packets frequently arrived already opened, apparently for political reasons. The members of the Central

Velasquista Committee in Pastaza were particularly affected by this problem. Certain important communications were not sent at all, leading the Ministerio de Gobierno to request that the “bad servants” of the administration responsible be replaced immediately.119 While Velasco’s supporters in Pastaza may have been negatively affected by the political allegiances of the mail operators, they were themselves the subject of other allegations of disturbances of a political nature. In April of 1952, the

Jefe Político wrote a concerned letter to the Ministerio de Gobierno stating that Puyo was home to political factions in support of both the presidential candidates Velasco and

118 Domingo Shacay y Julio Sando to Sr. Jefe Político del Cantón Morona, Sevilla Don Bosco, no date, 1953, AMG.

119 Dr. Jorge Ortíz, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Ministro de Obras Públicas y Comunicaciones, Quito, October 3, 1952, AMG.

343 Eduardo Salazar Gómez. Velasco’s group was giving away free aguardiente, provoking scandals at night, and issuing calls and threats against the current Regime and the local authorities. Furthermore, he knew that Velasquistas had undertaken a letter writing campaign against the public officials in Pastaza, including the Jefe Político himself and the chief of the guardias civiles.120 Later that year, several residents of Puyo telegrammed the Ministerio de Gobierno to complain that a group of citizens calling themselves “Authentic Velasquistas” were stirring up trouble in the city and seeking to have the Teniente Político removed from office for no good cause.121

After Velasco’s triumph, and well into his tenure, political rivalries remained a problem in the Oriente. In fact, the evidence at hand shows the disruptive effects that a change of regime in Quito could have even in the Oriente. Though communications and geography made Napo-Pastaza and Santiago-Zamora distant provinces in some ways, they were very much connected to the political developments that affected the Republic as a whole. An individual’s political allegiances and the state of their relationship to the governing regime in Quito became a factor in whether or not they were given public office in the Oriente. In November of 1952, Guillermina de Camacho, the wife of the

Jefe Político of Pastaza, wrote to President Velasco to state her dismay at the fact that

José Félix Jaramillo was named Teniente Político of Puyo. He was, in her words, a man of “not recommendable antecedents” who was the object of “general repudiation.” She stated that José Rafaél Núñez Naranjo was a much better man for the job; he had the

120 Carlos Saá Chacón, Jefe Político de Pastaza to Sr. Ministerio de Gobierno y Oriente, Puyo, April 2, 1952, AMG.

121 Dr. Jorge Ortíz, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza, Quito, November 18, 1952, AMG.

344 endorsement of the Governor of Napo-Pastaza, and her husband, the Jefe Político of

Pastaza. Furthermore, he was an admirer of Velasco, and Velasco’s triumph in Pastaza was, according to Camacho, largely due to his efforts.122 In December, a citizen in

Putumayo, in the far north of the Oriente on the border with Colombia, stated the fact that he was an “old Velasquista” to give credence to his displeasure with the naming of

Alberto Angulo Muñoz as Teniente Político there. In this citizen’s view, Angulo was a

“semi-literate man of color” who had been fired from that office once before. “If the government of Sr. Plaza [who preceded Velasco in the presidency] fired him for his bad behavior as Teniente Político,” the author wondered, “how can he be named by a new government that aspires to better the administration?” Angulo apparently did not seem to this complainant to be worthy of a place in the new regime of Velasco, that was looking for men to be the expression of national dignity, especially in frontier areas like

Putumayo.123 Just as residents of the Oriente could appeal to the Oriente’s special status as a national object of desire, and their role as colonists of the frontier, in order to seek redress of grievances, the electoral cycle on the national level provided another way for people in the Oriente to express displeasure with their public officials and seek replacements that fit their, and the governing regime’s, criteria.

Those on the losing side in the 1952 election claimed that they had much to fear from the triumphant Velasquistas. At the end of the year, a group of citizens in Puyo, who purposefully did not sign their names for fear of reprisals, wrote to the Ministerio de

Gobierno to describe their ill treatment by the public officials of Velasco’s regime. Based

122 Guillermina de Camacho to Excelentísimo Señor Presidente, Puyo, November 18, 1952, AMG.

123 T. E. Suarez to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Putumayo, December 10, 1952, AMG.

345 on the constitutional guarantees of freedom of thought and expression, they wrote, “we were not velasquistas, but we were very responsible and sufficient colonists, who have come to populate our Oriente, which for more than four hundred years was abandoned and placed at the margin of the rest of the country.” Now, they were the victims of the

“demagogic, oligarchic and dictatorial” government of Velasco, which had named as public officials “who lack the most elemental knowledge of administration.” These public officials were now persecuting “those colonists who live making Homeland and Oriente with our maximum moral and material efforts.” Furthermore, the complainants stated that all public officials in Pastaza who did not actively support Velasco, because of the stipulation that public officials abstain from such things, were automatically considered

“Antivelasquistas” and removed from office, thereby “denying this canton sufficiently prepared, broadly honorable, and dynamic elements that would spare no effort for the general welfare, without political, or worse, personal distinctions.” The current Jefe

Político, Joaquín Carlos Camacho, whom they call “Dictator of Puyo,” is an old, rude, and incapable man, using his wife Guillermina and his drunken secretary to persecute their political opponents. They close the letter with a particularly cutting jab: this atmosphere was causing many families to emigrate to Peru. Furthermore, they were certain that “if we were dependents of Peru, we would be well treated and attended; but now, with this regime and authorities, we are on the road to spite and disgrace.”124 This last statement clearly appeals to the long history of Ecuador’s territorial dispute with

Peru, and in so doing implies that the political factionalism ongoing threatened national integrity.

124 Ciudadanos de Puyo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, El Puyo, December 31, 1952, AMG.

346 In the southern Oriente’s provinces of Morona-Santiago and Zamora-Chinchipe, local elections in 1954 provoked a new round of disturbances stemming from political factionalism. In February, in Zamora, Eduardo Suárez Palacios complained to the

Ministerio de Gobierno that the candidates for the local Junta Cantonal were “in constant anxiety,” following “personalist” interest and the “thirst to manage the interests of the citizens” in an effort to make others vote for them. All of them, according to the complainant Suárez, were sponsored by “communist politicians” who were seeking to be elected as Diputados for the province.125 Further north, in Limón Indanza Canton, the

Jefe Político telegrammed in April that supporters of one list of candidates headed by

Dr. Rafael Cordero Tamariz and Gonzalo Pezantes Lafebre had attacked the current

Diputados, including Dr. Alberto Littuma, who suffered some kind of injury. They also threatened the other public employees, about which nothing could be done due to the lack of sufficient police personnel.126 In May, a “colonist resident in Huambi Parish” in

Morona Canton named Santiago Lafebre Neira complained to the Ministerio de

Gobierno that he and his fellow colonists were the victims of poor authorities who only hold their jobs because of “leverage [palanqueo]” and who, once in position, resort to

“dictatorial proceedings.” The citizens of Huambi had repeatedly asked for the removal of their Teniente Político, Juan J. Nieto, but these requests had been “filed away securely in Macas, because it is convenient for Dr. Alberto Littuma to keep Nieto in this position, due to electoral interest.” Nieto’s job security stemming from his political

125 Eduardo Suárez Palacios to Sr. Subsecretario del Ministerio de Gobierno, Zamora, February 1, 1954, AMG.

126 J. E. Bucheli C., Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Comandante General de la Policía Civil, Quito, April 22, 1954, AMG.

347 connections allowed him to abuse his authority in various ways, including a recent order by Nieto to ransack the home and apprehend a “jíbaro” named Chiriapa over a small debt.127

The presidential election of 1956, in which the conservative Camilo Ponce

Enríquez triumphed over Raúl Clemente Huerta of the Frente Democrático Nacional, caused a new wave of disruption in the administration of the Oriente. In February of that year, when Velasco was still president, the Jefe Político of Pastaza, Roberto Basurí, was under attack by supporters of the Frente Democrático. Unfortunately for him, the

Concejo Cantonal of Pastaza and the commander of the Guardias Civiles were also allied with the Frente. Joaquín Camacho and his wife Guillermina, who in 1952 had been supporters of Velasco, were now his “first enemies” and were, along with the

Frente, trying to place obstacles to “everything having to do with welfare” in Pastaza.

Guillermina, who held the post of Cosignatory of State Monopolies, and her husband

Joaquín, who was a member of the Concejo Cantonal, had recently abused their authority for political ends. During the Velasquista political convention, the Camachos had ordered that Puyo’s electrical plant be turned off so that nobody could listen to

Velasco’s speech on the radio.128 The Napo region saw similar accusations of political revenge seeking in the wake of Ponce’s election. The president of the Provincial

Conservative Directorate (Directorio Provincial Conservador) of Napo-Pastaza Province and a dozen others wrote in December to the Governor of Napo-Pastaza to state that the Jefe Político of Napo Canton, Aurelio Guerrero Sanz, was waging a campaign

127 Santiago Lafebre Neira to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Huambi, received May 19, 1954, AMG.

128 Roberto Basurí R., Jefe Político de Pastaza to Sr. Filimón Barragán, Puyo, February 28, 1956, AMG.

348 against anyone who had supported Ponce’s election. He had ordered the Teniente

Político of Archidona to falsify the birth records in the civil registry of that parish, and was guilty of incorrect actions in the processing of paperwork to the detriment of his rivals, and had even ordered the arbitrary jailing of one individual.129

Political involvement by the Oriente’s public employees remained a source of conflict even in years with no presidential election. In 1957, the Governor of Napo-

Pastaza, Jorge E. Vallejo Mera, worked for the removal of Teodoro Otero, a public school teacher in Archidona, for having openly sponsored a list of candidates in the recent election for the Concejo Municipal of Napo. The Governor also wanted public school teachers in Puyo removed for the same reason. He did not seem to notice the hypocrisy in the pride he took that his “intervention” in the election for the Concejo

Municipal in Pastaza is what ensured the triumph of President Ponce’s allies over the

“socialist” candidates there.130 The following year, some public teachers in Pastaza

Canton were again subject to accusations of political involvement, which was forbidden by law. According to the Jefe Político, J. Hilario Gilbert, and the witnesses from whom he gathered testimony, four local teachers had been putting political posters on the walls of their schools, distributing pamphlets, and generally making rude statements against the supporters of President Ponce and in support of radical ideas.131 Gilbert later heard that the teachers had not been punished; in fact, one of them had stated that

129 Isidoro B. Espinosa et al to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia de Napo-Pastaza, Archidona, December 11, 1956, AMG.

130 Jorge E. Vallejo Mera, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, November 14, 1957, AMG.

131 J. Hilario Gilbert Y., Jefe Político del Cantón Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Puyo, May 29, 1958, AMG.

349 he would fail the children of parents who did not agree with his “ideas of socialist character” or who had not voted for particular congressional candidates in the last election.132 The teacher in question did not work in Puyo, but in the rural parish of

Veracruz, showing that politics could disrupt state institutions even outside of the major cities of Puyo and Tena.133

In the 1960 presidential election, José María Velasco Ibarra returned to power after defeating former president Galo Plaza Lasso and other candidates. The campaign and Velasco’s victory created a wave of political claims and counter-claims in the

Oriente where being an ally of Velasco was now in vogue. In June, shortly after the election, a resident of Mera and president of an agricultural colony wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno to warn him that people in the parish were attempting to have all members of the Junta Parroquial removed. According to the letter writer, this was simply motivated by politics: the Junta’s members had refused to support the political party of those who sought their removal. In fact, they had done a very admirable job on public works and other matters.134 After Velasco took office on September 1st, a wave of letters reached the Ministerio de Gobierno with complaints and demands. From Montalvo, in

Pastaza Canton, one citizen wrote to complain that the local Teniente Político, Sergio

Castillo, was in fact a supporter of the defeated Plaza, but was attempting to hold the

132 J. Hilario Gilbert Y., Jefe Político del Cantón Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Puyo, June 4, 1958, AMG.

133 That same teacher, named Andrés Lema Chasi, remained active in his political campaigning into 1959: that year, the Teniente Político of Veracruz, César Samaniego, wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno to warn him that Lema Chasi was waging a campaign against him, Samaniego, seeking to get him fired by gathering signatures to a complaint he would send to Quito. César A. Samaniego, Teniente Político de Veracruz to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Veracruz, June 24, 1959, AMG.

134 Sixto Guevara Villalva, Presidente de la Colonia Baneña to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Mera, June 27, 1960, AMG.

350 public office “appearing as a Velasquista.” Furthermore, he was a man of “poor antecedents, as all the citizens here know.”135 In a similar vein, several dozen residents in Madre Tierra Parish, also in Pastaza, wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno upon learning that their Teniente Político would soon be removed from office. As they wrote, the

Teniente Político was a good public servant, who had supported them in all aspects,

“physical, economic, and cultural, as the majority of us the authentic soldiers among those who fought on June 5th under the Velasquista flag, in order to proudly hand over the reigns of the State to the secure hands of the great Apostle” Velasco.136 A citizen of

Puyo wrote at around the same time to complain about how many “enemies of

Velasquismo” remained in office in Pastaza and urged that true Velasquistas, native to

Puyo, be named as their replacements.137 Two others wrote to express their indignation that Oswaldo Jara would be named Governor of the new Pastaza Province. According to them, Jara did not have the confidence of the citizenry, had only completed two years of school, and had in fact been a supporter of Plaza who switched his support to

Velasco at the last minute.138 Allegiance to Velasco was not invoked only by those seeking to have an authority removed. In November of 1960, one citizen of Mera who had completed some roadwork in the area wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno to complain that he had not been paid the 1,100 sucres he was owed by the Junta

135 Francisco A. Aguayo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Montalvo, September 7, 1960, AMG.

136 Colonos de Madre Tierra to Sr. Dr. Manuel Araujo Hidalgo, Ministro de Gobierno y Policía, Madre Tierra, September 15, 1960, AMG.

137 Gilberto L. Díaz P. to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno Dr. Manuel Araujo Hidalgo, Puyo, September 14, 1960, AMG.

138 Alfonso Loza and Miguel Hernandez to Sr. Dr. Dn. Manuel Araujo Hidalgo, Ministro de Gobierno, Pastaza, received September 26, 1960, AMG.

351 Parroquial of Mera. As he requested in his letter, “I hope you, Sr. Ministro, will help me in this just petition as I also have the honor of being a militant Velasquista, as the committee in Mera or any person here can attest.”139

Similar kinds of letters were written throughout Velasco’s fifteen-month presidency, which was shortened by popular protest and Congressional opposition in

November of 1961. In February, dozens of colonists from Yacuambi Canton in Zamora-

Chinchipe complained that their local Jefe Político, Joaquín Ortega, the Teniente

Político, Victor Ramón, and the president of the Canton Council, Victor Lozano, were all very poor public servants, “the disgrace of the dignified administration of the

Excelentísimo señor Doctor José Maria Velasco Ibarra and his cabinet.” During the election, Ortega and Ramón had abused their office by promoting Lozano’s election.

Now, these three men protected one another as they abused their respective offices.

The Jefe Político Ortega frequently imposed arbitrary imprisonment and fines on

“honest and honorable citizens” and had recently physically abused an indigenous man during a public works minga because the latter had expressed a desire to go home for lunch. The Teniente Político Ramón had recently forced an ailing indigenous man to participate in roadwork, with threats of physical violence and prison. The complainants asked that the Ministro remove these authorities for the dignity of the Canton.140

In June of that year, Elvira Pérez, president of a pro-Velasco organization in

Pastaza Province, and Héctor Peñafiel, complained about the Junta Parroquial of Mera, the members of which had not been replaced despite the many defects of its

139 José Ulpiano Zurita to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, received November 22, 1960, AMG.

140 Colonos del Cantón Yacuambi to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Yacuambi, February 11, 1961, AMG.

352 administration, including a case of embezzlement of funds that was made public.

According to Pérez and Peñafiel, all of its members had been appointed by Ponce’s administration. Their organization was ready at any moment to suggest new members, as “that Junta should be in the hands of Velasquistas who have the people’s confidence.”141 Peñafiel apparently directed complaints against other public officials in

Pastaza. In August, Oswaldo Jara, who had indeed been appointed Governor of

Pastaza, stated that he was aware of how Hector Peñafiel was sending calumnious accusations to the Ministerio de Gobierno, seeking Jara’s firing. According to Jara,

Peñafiel was not a Velasquista, but an enemy of the government, who took advantage of “humble citizens” by collecting their signatures for letters of complaint using cheats and false offers. Jara claimed that Peñafiel was acting with the support of the Diputados for Napo Province, who had no business intervening in Pastaza’s matters.142

Around the same time, In Morona-Santiago Province, Dr. Alberto Littuma,

Diputado for that province and opponent of Velasco, was allegedly interfering with the appointed officials, seeking to have known supporters of Velasco’s electoral opponents installed as the Tenientes and Jefes Políticos of the region. The directors of the

Velasquista organization in Rosario Parish wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to warn of Littuma’s intervention, and asked that the “honorable, laborious, abnegated” and

Velasco-supporting Aurelio Samaniego be maintained as Teniente Político against

141 Elvira Pérez L. and Héctor Peñafiel, Presidente de la Junta Pro Colonización to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Pastaza, received June 26, 1961, AMG.

142 Oswaldo Jara, Gobernador de Pastaza to Sr. Jefe de la Sección Oriente, del Ministerio de Gobierno, Puyo, August 23, 1961, AMG.

353 Littuma’s wishes.143 Later, in Zamora, Segundo Silva wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno on behalf of the “true Velasquistas” who had worked hard for the previous year’s electoral victory; they all desired that the public administration of Zamora be done by others like them. They decried that the current Jefe Político of Zamora, Adolfo Rodas, has never a supporter of Velasco and furthermore had only had three years of primary school, leaving him barely able to read or write, committing many errors as Jefe Político.

They asked that he be replaced right away.144

Throughout the twelve years comprising the presidential terms of Galo Plaza

Lasso, José María Velasco Ibarra, and Camilo Ponce Enríquez, the Oriente was the site of increasing politicization and attendant rivalries and machinations. Political allegiances became a part of the state system in the Oriente that could be exploited in order to see that favorable individuals were appointed to public office and in order to disrupt the administration of others. Throughout the Oriente, these public offices provided state resources that could be used to the benefit of certain colonists, and abused to the detriment of others.

The state system of the Oriente was prescribed by the Ley Especial de Oriente and other laws of the Republic. In practice, however, the Ecuadorian state functioned in the region as a matrix of individuals who took advantage of the region’s relative isolation in order to abuse their authority and their control over state resources. These factors characterized the Oriente as group of ancillary provinces that resembled in some measure the general administrative structure of the Republic, but were underfunded and

143 Directores del Central Parroquial Velasquista de Rosario to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Rosario, July 31, 1961, AMG.

144 Segundo Silva to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Zamora, September 28, 1961, AMG.

354 isolated. In a sense, the Ecuadorian state in this frontier region was “weak” because the laws were applied inconsistently, if at all, and much of the territory was absent of any state representatives. On the other hand, however, those individuals who were granted positions of state authority made the most of them by forming networks of influence with other state officials and private individuals who were their allies. Being vested with the office of Teniente or Jefe Político gave one the ability to use imprisonment, extortion, and appeals to higher authorities in order to advance various public and private agendas. The Oriente was very much a part of the rest of the Republic when it came to political matters, as national political campaigns became a major component of how these networks of public and private influence were engaged to promote political causes and candidacies to the detriment of others. A consistent feature of all these state officials’ efforts, as well as the political campaigning and projects fostered by local governments, was the national rhetoric surrounding the Oriente as a vital component of the nation and its future. This rhetoric was derived from the characteristics of the

Oriente as national object of desire, which had been constructed in the press and other publications during these and preceding decades. The region itself, as well as its colonists and petty officials, were imagined as “sentinels of the Homeland”; the Oriente and its peoples were simultaneously full, equal parts of the Republic and especially deserving of state aid and attention. The state may not have functioned “according to the rules,” but the national rhetorical effort to incorporate the Oriente was on display in a multitude of ways.

The incorporation of the region needed a physical component, too, beyond just national imagining. The land of the region was occupied and divided under a system

355 that was managed by the complex web of public and private individuals described above, subject to malfeasance and political rivalry. The significance of how the land was divided was interpreted according to the national view of the Oriente as a special, vital region.

356 CHAPTER 6 TAKING POSSESSION OF THE ORIENTE: LAND TITLING AND CONFLICT AMONG COLONISTS, LATIFUNDISTAS, AND INDIANS, 1940-1960

Land tenancy in the Oriente was among the most important and conflict-ridden issues in the decades after the Rio de Janeiro Protocol that saw more colonists from the

Sierra move into the region. These colonists, sometimes organized into agricultural colonies or cooperatives, sought to obtain legal title to their land in the face of competing claims by alleged “latifundistas” or individuals who were not true colonists.

The administrative confusion and corruption that characterized the region as a set of ancillary provinces also made the legalization of land tenancy difficult.

The Ecuadorianization of the Oriente’s “vacant” lands was in part an ideological process because the legitimacy of possession was frequently contested. The colonists who sought title frequently invoked their patriotic sacrifice, displaying once again what could be termed a “developmentalist” mindset like the one described by Paul E. Little for the colonists of the latter 20th century.1 The struggle over the access to land was in fact a struggle over the legitimacy of action on Ecuador’s frontier, where the Republic’s laws were often carried out in haphazard fashion. As Marianne Schmink and Charles H.

Wood have noted, the Amazonian frontier has frequently been the site of ideological discourse in a struggle for resources. A common tactic among Amazonian settlers is the mobilization of ideas such as patriotism, modernity, national security, and the “virtues of self-sufficiency.”2 A feature of the Oriente’s history, then, was the struggle waged by

“colonists,” a new class of Ecuadorian citizen particular to the Oriente experience.

These colonists did not share a common origin, but had in common the effort to obtain a

1 Paul E. Little, “Identidades amazónicas e identidades de colonos,” 560.

2 Schmink and Wood, Contested Frontiers in Amazonia, 15.

357 piece of land in a region that was vested with special national significance. Their opponents were frequently large landowners or “latifundistas” who were also a heterogeneous group. Much of the rhetoric of patriotism and sacrifice was available to them, also, given the special nature of the Oriente as a national object of desire and what its development was believed to represent for the nation.

Once again, the “state” that oversaw this process was vested in the hands of individuals with rivalries and personal agendas. Joe Foweraker has addressed the role of the state in the competition for land on the Brazilian frontier. As he explains, the state is not “monolithic” in any sense because it bends to the interests of class struggle.3 As this chapter demonstrates, the ability of colonists to secure land, or the triumph of wealthy latifundistas, both depended on the active or passive assistance of state officials. These officials’ interventions may or may not have been in accord with the

Constitution or the various laws regarding land tenancy; nevertheless, the resources of their offices determined which individuals could remain on parcels of land. The importance of these officials’ decisions and connections was especially important, given that the Oriente remained a set of ancillary provinces in which the correct application of the Republic’s laws was in serious question.

The case of the Oriente was not a simple struggle between a “peasant” class, perhaps represented by the colonists, and latifundista capitalists. The struggle between these groups took place amid the claims of a third group: the region’s indigenous people. As the evidence demonstrates, Indians in both the northern and southern

Oriente presented their own claims of legitimate possession to the state. The state, for its part, had mechanisms to protect the Indians’ lands and livelihoods. Again, however,

3 Joe Foweraker, The Struggle for Land, 10-11.

358 the personalist nature of the state in the Oriente, vested as it was in the hands of individuals prone to confusion and malfeasance, meant that these protective mechanisms were applied infrequently at best. The white-mestizos of the Oriente mobilized arguments against the Indians’ right to land, as well. These arguments often derived from the ideas of the Oriente as national object of desire. Ultimately, the greater access and familiarity with the state enjoyed by both colonists and latifunidstas was more powerful than the Indians’ frequent claims to possession “since time immemorial.”

Furthermore, whites in the Oriente could deny the Indians’ interests through claims of outside meddling. Though the region was a set of under-resourced ancillary provinces, prone to inconsistency and confusion, its levers and mechanisms were nevertheless more accessible to Spanish speakers than to the majority indigenous population of the

Oriente.

Colonists, Alleged “Latifundistas,” and the Competition for Land

The acquisition of new lands in the Republic was governed by the Law of Vacant

Lands and Colonization (Ley de Tierras Baldías y Colonización), a new version of which was promulgated in 1940. This law stated that any land within the boundaries of the

Republic that did not have any other owner belonged to the state; the state could therefore sell those lands to colonists in small parcels according to a process that would be registered in the records of the respective canton.4 They law did not really address the special circumstances of the Oriente, however, in which the state’s presence was much more limited and there were fewer roads to provide convenient sites for plots. In recognition of the more spontaneous and haphazard nature of land distribution in the

4 Federico Páez, Encargado del Mando Supremo de la República, “Ley de Tierras Baldías y Colonización,” Registro Oficial 1, nos. 7-8 (September 9-10, 1940): 36-40.

359 Oriente, in October of 1942, the Ecuadorian Congress promulgated a new regulation for the titling of lands in the region. Those who “currently have material possession or are occupying lands for cultivation or urban buildings in the provinces of the Oriente” that had no other possessor (or that the previous possessor had abandoned for more than three years) were authorized to solicit property titles. The claimant was to gather documents that proved his possession as well as a description of the land, its crops, and its boundaries, and submit them to a Junta of government officials who would study the petition. The law stipulated that no claim could exceed fifty hectares, and that no individual could get around this stipulation by making land claims in the name of his children or other legal representative. Furthermore, the titling procedures did not apply to “the indigenous tribes of those provinces, who will be respected and aided in every way possible within the zones that they currently occupy.”5 This 1942 regulation was essentially official recognition that colonization in the Oriente had proceeded more according to the spontaneous efforts of the colonists than according to any effort by the state to make a more rational, large-scale colonization scheme for the region.

According to that law, colonists in the Oriente argued that their possession and improvement of the land gave them the right to legal title. In 1943, a colonist in Tena named José Otero wrote to the Ministerio de Defensa (which at that time was responsible for the Oriente) to claim that he had occupied two parcels of land since

1937, and had even asked the appropriate government authorities for official title. He had never received the title, however, so he asked the Ministry to do what was necessary to speed along the bureaucratic process. He sent along a copy of his

5 El Congreso de la República del Ecuador, “Nueva Ley de Titulación de Terrenos del Oriente,” Registro Oficial 3, no. 645 (October 20, 1942): 4065-66.

360 previous petitions as well as a sketch of his property, showing the different crops he had planted and the buildings he had constructed. He even gathered the testimony of other residents in the area, who attested to his uninterrupted possession of the land since

1937.6 The matter became pressing because the Governor of Napo-Pastaza Province,

Sebastián Narváez, had claimed the land for himself. As Otero reminded the Ministry,

“the law prohibits private individuals from violently taking away pre-established possession”; furthermore, he added that the Governor was supposed to see that all laws were followed in his jurisdiction, and not to foment “discord and juridical-legal difficulties.” The Ministerio de Defensa found in Otero’s favor, recommending the definitive granting of title to him.7

The appointed officials of the Oriente were, according to evidence from the

Archive of the Ministerio de Gobierno, which was responsible for the Oriente after 1943, a vital part of the land tenancy process. In 1947, the president of the agricultural cooperative “La Nacional,” composed of more than 100 members who intended to occupy five thousand hectares near Puyo, was having trouble dividing the land into individual parcels for distribution to the cooperative’s members, in part due to the lack of a good road to the land. Certain members of the cooperative were traveling to the

Oriente ahead of the others and “arbitrarily” taking possession of parcels of land, causing discord among the cooperative. The cooperative’s president asked the

6 José Otero and Lucrecia Rosales de Otero to Sr. Ministro de Defensa Nacional y Oriente, Tena, received September 13, 1943, AGN.

7 Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, IV Departamento-Oriente, “Juicio de Adjudicación de un Lote de Terreno Correspondiente a los Señores José Otero y Lucrecia Rosales De Otero, Parroquia de Archidona y Tena, Iniciado el 5 de marzo de 1941, en Quito,” AGN. As this document states, the case was begun in 1941, but some of the related documents bear the date of 1943. It is difficult to know the reason for this discrepancy, but perhaps it is a sign of how slow the processing of these cases could be.

361 Ministerio de Gobierno to order the local Teniente Político in Puyo to inform these members of the cooperative that their actions were illegal.8

The Tenientes Políticos also had a role in finalizing the titles to the parcels of land; their role in this was the subject of some consternation for the colonists who relied on the Teniente Político to fully legalize their claims. In 1949, the members of the colony

Coronel Játiva, in Mera parish, had been trying to get the Teniente Político there to finalize their titles for six months, and had paid him on several occasions for the processing of the claims. As they complained to the Ministerio de Gobierno, the

Teniente Político had been receiving payments from other individuals for claims on the same lands, and his delay and indecision harmed the colonists of the Oriente.9 Similar complaints were heard from the southern Oriente province of Santiago-Zamora. In

1950, Miguel A. Neira, President of the Sociedad Orientalista “Palora” complained to the

Ministerio de Gobierno that the members of his organization had been given legal titles eight years prior to lots of land in Huamboya Parish. Recently, a certain Reinaldo Torres and his son Luis Torres had taken advantage of the temporary absence of the Palora society’s members to invade and claim some parcels of lands for themselves. The

Teniente Político of the parish, they alleged, supported this usurpation, so they asked that this official be removed from office and for aid in having their land returned.10 The next year, the Governor of Santiago-Zamora asked that the Ministro de Gobierno fire the Teniente Político of Sucúa Parish who, in addition to committing mail fraud and

8 Augusto Sevilla to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Ambato, May 1, 1947, AMG.

9 Colonists of Colonia Coronel Játiva to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno i Oriente, Mera, May 20, 1949, AMG.

10 Miguel A. Neira, Presidente de la Sociedad Orientalista ‘Palora’ to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Mera, no date, 1950, AMG.

362 public acts of drunkenness, was also selling vacant state lands for personal profit.11

Land titling was therefore another realm of responsibility for the Tenientes Políticos of the region that could be subject to the kinds of corruption, malfeasance, and negligence described in the previous chapter. Within the ancillary provinces of the Oriente, the division of its land into individual plots was not easily managed by the processes prescribed by law.

The colonists of the Oriente, like those in cooperatives and agricultural colonies, often faced the competition of private individuals who sought to acquire large extensions of land. In 1948, the president of the Concejo Cantonal of Pastaza wrote to the

Ministerio de Gobierno to complain that an organization calling itself the Cooperativa

Agrícola del Puyo, comprised of individuals who did not live in Puyo, had staked a claim on the “fantastic sum” of six thousand hectares, which would deny “many poor people in

Pastaza the possibility to establish themselves on small parcels.” Many had already claimed parcels in the space claimed by the Cooperativa Agrícola del Puyo. The

Concejo’s president stated that he had no problem with the colonization of the region, but believed that the limit of 50 hectares per claimant should be strictly followed.12 The

Ministro de Gobierno, Juan Tanca Marengo, informed the Ministro de Economía (in whose purview lay the Departamento de Tierras Baldías), that the claim by the

Cooperativa would be inimical to the colonists in the area who had made “uncountable efforts” to cultivate the land. Furthermore, a portion of land the Cooperativa sought was to be directly managed by the Concejo Municipal de Pastaza as part of a “a program of

11 Mayor Manuel Herrera Cevallos, Gobernador de Santiago-Zamora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, January 2, 1951, AMG.

12 Humberto Mata Martínez, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Ministro de Economía, Quito, June 8, 1948, AMG.

363 effective colonization that does not harm any legitimate colonist.”13 Describing certain residents in the Oriente as “legitimate” or “true” colonists, as opposed to land speculators or latifundistas was a common tactic in the communications sent by and to the Ministerio de Gobierno in the 1940s and 50s.

Consider the letter from Julio D. Ruales, a representative of the public school teachers in Pastaza Canton, who wrote to the Governor of Napo-Pastaza Province to formally solicit the formation of a new cooperative, the “Barrio Agrícola-Profesores de

Oriente,” which would occupy lands along the Puyo-Napo road. The teachers of the

Oriente, he argued, were poorly paid, exposed to inclement weather, and to the calumny and incomprehension of others. The formation of this cooperative of approximately 20 teachers would represent recognition of their years of service.

According to Ruales, there were many others staking claims on lands in the Oriente who had never been to the region, only to sell the lands later for prices up to one- hundred times higher. The teachers sough parcels of 50 hectares each, with 500 meters of frontage along the road.14

A petition received by the Ministerio de Gobierno in May of 1949 shows how colonists in the region could appeal to the Oriente’s special status in the Republic, painting themselves as patriotic citizens whose actions were significant for the whole country. Several dozen signatories of a complaint to the minister let it be known that

13 Dr. Juan Tanca Marengo, Ministro de Gobierno, to Sr. Ministro de Economía, Quito, July 22, 1948, AMG. Some evidence suggests that local bodies of government in the Oriente did not always act according to the law in regard to the land ownership; in 1951, the Ministerio de Gobierno wrote to the Teniente Político of Baeza in response to a complaint that the Junta Parroquial of Baeza (of which the Teniente Político would have been part) was trying to take land away from a local resident, Segundo Garzón. The Ministerio informed the Teniente Político that Garzón’s ownership of the land was legal, with all records of the parcel’s ownership on file. Dr. Milton Ribadeneira P., Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Teniente Político de Baeza, Quito, July 14, 1951, AMG.

14 Julio D. Ruales M. to Antonio Jijón, Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza, Puyo, May 29, 1949, AMG.

364 certain individuals were staking claims on “hundreds and hundreds” of hectares of

Oriente lands, and then selling them on to “deserving people” who needed Oriente lands to earn food for their families. Through colonizing the Oriente, regular colonists intended to defend the country against the “invaders of the South (Peru) through honorable work, at the cost of sacrifices and suffering” in order to “redeem, perhaps a bit, the hours of anguish, desperation and misery” that Ecuador had suffered in the loss of territory to Peru. They closed by requesting that the Ministerio work with the local

Teniente Político to prevent the individuals they named from acquiring the large amounts of land they intended upon and to see that the fifty-hectare limit was strictly enforced.15 These colonists traded on notions about the region that derived from its construction as a national object of desire, which provided them with the rhetoric needed to argue that their claims were more legitimate than others.

The Ministro de Gobierno himself was aware of the frequency with which complaints cropped up. Also in 1949, Rodrigo Benítez, who was a representative of another agricultural cooperative called the Barrio Agrícola San Juan wrote to the ministry to applaud the fact that the Quito periodical El Día had published a list of people who had filed petitions for large extensions of land with the intention to sell them later at inflated prices. Benítez went on to describe a specific case: Baltazar León had been the owner of immense extensions of land for more than thirty years in Archidona

Parish, and had not cultivated a single portion of it. As Benítez stated, more than two hundred “colonists who love agriculture” could go to León’s lands and “make Homeland in practical fashion (hacer prácticamente Patria).” His own agricultural cooperative had

15 Rosa C. de Orellana et al to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, received May 30, 1949, AMG.

365 more than seventy poor families ready to work the land.16 The Ministro de Gobierno later transcribed Benítez’s letter for the Ministro de Economía, and then added, “There is no doubt that many abnormalities exist in the adjudication of vacant lands…in the extension of the lands adjudicated,” and recommended that the Ministro de Economía, under whose purview fell the department of Vacant Lands (Tierras Baldías), undertake an urgent review of the lands in the Oriente.17

But officials from the Ministro de Economía were themselves the subject of allegations of partiality and malfeasance by colonists in the Oriente. In 1952, members of the “Madre Tierra” colony in Mera Parish wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno with a complaint about the actions of one Jorge Ponce, an employee of the ministry. The colonists described how, three years prior, they welcomed one Señora Abigaíl María

Alvarado and her son as members of the colony, and since then she had been working a parcel of land that was completely vacant. They claimed that this parcel was legally registered by an engineer from the Departamento de Tierras Baldías, but due to her poverty Señora Alvarado had not been able to do all the paperwork necessary to obtain final title. Enter Jorge Ponce, who suddenly sold Señora Alvarado’s parcel of land to

Juan Paredes. The woman had complained to the local authorities, but this had had no effect on Paredes who threatened to attack her and her son with a machete. The

16 Rodrigo Benítez to Sr. Ministro de Defensa, encargado de la cartera de Gobierno y Oriente, Quito, 23 Marzo 1949, AMG.

17 Eduardo Salazar Gomez, Ministro de Gobierno to Sr. Ministro de Economía, Quito, no date, 1949, AMG. The frequency and commonality of land disputes was mentioned by the landowners of the Oriente, also: In 1952, the owner of a hacienda in Mera Parish, Antonio José de Amaral Murtinho, who claimed his legal possession could be documented back to 1854, wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to complain that one Napoleon Herrera had suddenly staked a claim on 26 hectares of his property. As Amaral Murtinho wrote, this “arbitrary and indescribable” proceeding was “very common in our Oriente region” and was prejudicial to those who, like him, had been contributing to the development of the Oriente “in real and effective form on lands and with implements acquired with our money.” Antonio José de Amaral Murtinho to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Policía, Mera, received October 27, 1952, AMG.

366 signers of the letter told the Ministerio de Gobierno that these abuses should be punished and a precedent set, or the Oriente’s lands would continue to wind up in the hands of men like Ponce who “only want to do business with the lands, taking them away from authentic colonists.” The Ministerio de Gobierno ordered the Teniente

Político of Mera to investigate the case.18 Later that month, Jorge Ponce gave his side of the story. According to Ponce, he was actually a member of the Madre Tierra colony, possessor of 10 hectares, the title of which had not yet been certified by the

Departamento de Tierras Baldías. The Governor of Napo-Pastaza had illegitimately ordered his supporter (partidario), Juan Paredes, to vacate the land, because it had been donated to Señora Alvarado. In Ponce’s view, the governor’s actions were illegal and would cause a “horrendous impression” in Paredes, who was simply a “poor man of the country.” The Ministerio de Gobierno then asked the governor to give a report about the facts of the case.19 According to the governor, Ponce was in the wrong as he was cruelly exploiting Alvarado and her family. This was a case like many the governor hard seen in his “many years of Oriental life” in which men like Ponce sought to deny their daily bread to “reliable Orientalists and colonists.” Such men habitually staked claims on large quantities of land, then presented themselves as the legal representatives of humble colonists that trusted them “perhaps because they know how to read a little better and how to do the four operations [of arithmetic].” Men like Ponce would then abandon these colonists while seeking to sell their lands onto a new group of victims.

As the governor said, his efforts to stop such abuses only brought the calumny and

18 Dr. Jorge Ortiz Escobar, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Teniente Político de Mera, Quito, October 14, 1952, AMG.

19 Dr. Jorge Ortiz, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza, Quito, October 30, 1952, AMG.

367 intrigue of latifundistas like Ponce.20 This case demonstrates both the way that colonists invoked the crime of land speculation to protect their claims, and also how both local officials and ministries in Quito could affect land disputes.21

Land speculation and the accumulation of lands by the few to the detriment of the many were sources of frustration in the southern Oriente as well. Roads of penetration from the highlands into the Oriente, so long desired by colonists, could bring unintended consequences. In November of 1952, the Jefe Político of Zamora, principal city of the far southern Oriente, wrote the Ministerio de Gobierno to state that many colonists in his jurisdiction had held their land for 20 to 30 years, many having purchased the land from

“Jívaros” whose claims were legal for more than 80 years. These colonists were engaged in the “titanic struggle against the rigors of the jungle, the elements, and other obstacles of similar risk.” Unfortunately, the construction of the road from Loja, in the southern highlands, to Zamora had awoken “a limitless ambition to acquire lands.” Many groups were being formed to come to Zamora and falsely claim hereditary title to colonists’ lands, expelling them forcefully. A group of more than 50 “padres de familia” requested that a surveying commission be sent to the area to defend their rights as colonists.22 That same month, the Jefe Político of Limón-Indanza Canton, further north, also noted that the road from the highlands into his jurisdiction was becoming the site of

20 Victor Hugo Chiriboga Dávalos, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, November 10, 1952, AGN.

21 Another appeal to the “authenticity” of colonists in a land dispute comes from 1955. Juan José Zurita, a lawyer representing “various colonists in Mera” wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to protest one Alonso Luna’s continual and illegitimate removal of wood from the colonists’ lands. Zurita asked that the Teniente Político be ordered to stop Luna and to “give all possible help and facility to those true colonists who have already registered and surveyed their lands in that zone.” Juan José Zurita to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, received January 11, 1955, AMG.

22 Dr. Jorge Ortíz, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Ministro de Economía y Tierras Baldías, Quito, November 15, 1952, AMG.

368 “latifundismo.” According to his report, for several years, certain people in the canton had made themselves the owners of enormous extensions of vacant land, with the only goal being speculation, thereby sowing “immorality” and preventing “deserving people” from obtaining parcels of land. This process was limiting the potential of the region as a resource for increasing national agricultural production; Limón-Indanza could offer

“great hopes for the future” and “incalculable” wealth, but many “audacious” and

“cynical” colonists were exceeding the ownership limit of 50 hectares with their false claims. Many of them, the Jefe Político reported, had not actually been to the lands they claimed to own.23 In Zamora, the problem of land speculation continued in 1954; the

Governor suggested that the Oriente should have inspectors of Tierras Baldías, or vacant lands, in each section of the region to prevent such problems. As he stated, there were many colonists who resided in the region only for a few years, claiming to own large extensions of land, many of which had no clear-cutting or plantings of any kind. These distrustful few would then “exploit the ignorance” of others who hoped to acquire a parcel of land by charging them “exorbitant prices.”24

As common as the allegations of partiality by the Oriente’s officials were references to the conflict between “colonists” on the one hand and large landowners on the other. In a lengthy report to the Governor of Morona-Santiago sent at the beginning

23 Dr. Jorge Ortíz, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Ministro de Economía y Tierras Baldías, Quito, November 27, 1952, AMG.

24 Eduardo Suárez Palacio, Gobernador de Zamora-Chinchipe to Sr. Ministro de Economía y Tierras Baldías, Zamora, May 30, 1954, AMG. In many cases, the “latifundistas” were alleged to be working in concert with state officials against the colonists of the region. In 1954, 25 colonists in of a settlement called Cusuimi, in Morona-Santiago Province, claimed to have had their property rights violated by the Governor of the province and a latifundista named Manuel González. They claimed that González had begun working on five different lots that the colonists had purchased from Jívaros; the governor had backed up González’s actions and even planned to help him obtain title and re-sell the lands later on. Moradores del caserio Cusuimi to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Huambi, September 29, 1954, AMG.

369 of 1954, the Jefe Político of Morona Canton stated that disputes over parcels of land were the “most spiny and delicate” problems he faced. “Disgracefully,” he explained,

“there are many people who provoke serious problems;…individuals who have an enormous interest in future and even present lucre try to accumulate enormous extensions of lands” and in so doing prevent road construction or other projects. They looked to sell parcels of this land at inflated prices, in many cases kicking out those who were there ahead of time. This occurred “with grave prejudice” to those colonists who came hoping to establish themselves, finding only that they were forced to buy from these “monopolists” at high prices.”25 In 1955, in the parish of El Chaco, on the western edge of Napo-Pastaza Province, a group of colonists were engaged in a dispute with a lawyer named Bolívar León over a considerable quantity of land. In their letter to José

María Velasco Ibarra, President of the Republic, they appealed to his “sense of social justice in favor of the poor colonist” who had a “noble and patriotic desire to populate the Oriente,” but was engaged in struggle with the landowners who were “retainers of national Patrimony” that had never bothered to actually cultivate any of the land they possessed in the Oriente. According to the colonists, Bolívar León only had legal right to

1,100 hectares of land in the parish but was claiming more than 5,000. León, they alleged, had been taking advantage of colonists who had “sacrificed the best years of their lives in the Oriente” while he remained in Quito, using his position as a lawyer to trick “naïve people” into signing land documents that only favored him, León, in the end.

The colonists’ letter exhorts the President to see that the letter and spirit of the Ley de

Tierras Baldías y Colonización was followed, favoring colonists over large landowners.

25 Francisco J. Flor, Jefe Político del Cantón Morona to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia, transcribed in Luis F. Jaramillo N., Gobernador de Morona-Santiago to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, January 7, 1954, AMG.

370 As the colonists reminded the President, the Oriente was the region of the country most in need of Ecuadorians to occupy the national territory. “The right of the colonists is perfect,” they argued, “because they are occupying virgin soil, unexplored wilderness.”26

In short, they were enacting the great patriotic project imagined by those who constructed the Oriente as a national object of desire. Their participation in this granted them legitimacy that deserved protection.

Like Bolívar León was alleged to have done, others in the Oriente used whatever strategies they could to accumulate land. A year after the colonists in El Chaco wrote to

President Velasco, another resident of the same parish, Pedro Coro Cahuatijo, wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to complain about the immoral accumulation of land by one

Jesús Enrique Ribera. According to Coro, Ribera claimed to be a colonist of the Oriente but was in fact nothing more than a “usurper” of lands who acquired lands by exploiting the ignorance and good faith of the region’s Indians, forcing them to enter into transactions against their interests. Ribera was now predating upon Coro’s own land by cutting down his crops and planting banana trees. Coro claimed he had begun judicial proceedings against Ribera, but that they were slow, and in the meantime he required that the local Teniente Político and police officers prevent Ribera from entering Coro’s property. The lawyer who had processed Coro’s land titles was none other than Bolívar

León, illustrating the influence he had in the parish.27 The involvement of the Oriente’s indigenous people in land conflicts will be discussed below; for now, this example

26 Samuel J. Alulema et al to Excelentísimo señor Presidente Constitucional de la República del Ecuador, El Chaco, October 31, 1955, AMG.

27 Pedro Coro Cahuatijo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, El Chaco, received November 6, 1956, AMG.

371 serves to show a way that land could be accumulated by certain individuals in order to exploit the system at the cost of others.

The accusation that a landowner was abusing his power was a common tactic in disputes between property holders in the same parish. Alberto Checa, resident of

Virgilio Dávila Parish in the canton of Quijos, in 1957 alleged that Aurelio Dávila was using his “condition as landowner (terrateniente)” force Checa off the land he legitimately owned. Dávila’s power in part derived from his large number of peons, whom he had ordered to invade Checa’s land and destroy his persimmon trees.

Furthermore, Dávila’s animals had come onto Checa’s property and damaged his land.

“All of this is tremendously scandalous and remains until now relatively unpunished as he is a rich hacendado and I am a poor man of the land,” Checa explained. Enmity between the two of them had begun when Checa was an employee on his hacienda, and was refused payment by Dávila. Checa had no way to seek redress of grievances before the authorities of the parish or canton because, allegedly, all the local authorities were under Dávila’s influence. Furthermore, Checa claimed, Dávila was supported by his personal friendship with the President of the Republic.28 The veracity of Checa’s accusations are hard to determine; the Jefe Político of Quijos, Humberto Carrera, opined that it was all false, as none of the canton authorities had previously heard about any of the incidents alleged. Furthermore, Checa was well known for his tendency to appeal to higher authorities against Dávila, perhaps to distract from an ongoing legal case against Checa himself in Pichincha Province.29 The only testimony gathered by the

28 Alberto Checa to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Virgilio Dávila, received October 17, 1957, AMG.

29 Humberto Carrera, Jefe Político del Cantón Quijos to Sr. Jefe Político del Cantón Napo, Baeza, October 24, 1957, AMG.

372 Jefe Político was from the overseer (mayordomo) of Dávila’s hacienda, who stated that all of Checa’s accusations were false, including the claim that Checa’s son had been attacked by Dávila’s peons. In fact, the overseer said, Dávila had done nothing more than tell the boy to use the public road rather than cut across Dávila’s private property.30

The evidence gathered is not sufficient to judge whether or not all the authorities in the canton were under Dávila’s sway, as Checa alleged. Nevertheless, this case illustrates how residents of the Oriente could appeal to the Ministerio de Gobierno for redress of grievances when unable to get the law to work in their favor at the local level. Accusing a more powerful individual of being an abusive landowner was a common tactic.

Those entrusted with making sure that the Republic’s laws were faithfully carried out in the Oriente were at times the very ones who used their positions of authority for personal gain, especially when the ownership of land was involved. This was a deficiency of administration common in the underfunded and isolated ancillary provinces of the Oriente. The accusations made in December 1956 and January 1957 against the former Jefe Político of Pastaza, José Félix Jaramillo, demonstrate the various ways an appointed official could take advantage of those seeking title to land. Three years prior, according to Filiberto Delgado, Jaramillo had sold him, for 1,200 sucres, a parcel of seven hectares on the Puyo-Napo road. Delgado claimed that he immediately began to work the land, planting groves of persimmons and building a wooden house with a cement roof. However, Jaramillo eventually ordered Delgado to stop all work on his land, threatening prison if he did not comply. As it turned out, the land that Jaramillo had sold to Delgado had a competing claim to ownership, as the same parcel had been sold between two other individuals. Delgado argued that in fact Jaramillo had no right to sell

30 Testimony of Samuel Pérez to Humberto Carrera, Baeza, October 19, 1957, AMG.

373 the land in the first place.31 Another persimmon farmer in Pastaza, Segundo Villacís, claimed that Jaramillo had charged him several hundred sucres to finalize his land purchase from Segundo Ruano. Then, after working on the land for three years,

Jaramillo forced him to stop working, claiming the land belonged to someone else entirely. He then imprisoned Villacís for complaining, calling him “crazy and brutish.”32

Several dozen workers on the Puyo-Napo road added to the charges against Jaramillo, who apparently had come to hold public office again, this time as the Teniente Político of Puyo, despite having been fired from public office on four prior occasions. According to the road workers, Jaramillo had sold off lands along the road that were promised to them because he made some profit off their sale to one Sr. José Olmedo and others.33

Another resident of Pastaza claimed that Jaramillo had unjustly charged him for the surveying of his property, and jailed him for 24 hours when he confronted him about it.34

In July of 1957, yet another complaint about Jaramillo’s mismanagement of land surveying and sales reached the Ministerio de Gobierno, this time from two military officers who had purchased some land along the Puyo-Napo road. The officers forwarded a letter from the Director of Tierras Baldías from the Ministerio de Economía

31 Filiberto Delgado to Sr. Jefe Político del Cantón Pastaza, Puyo, December 20, 1956, AMG.

32 Segundo Villacís to Sr. Jefe Político del Cantón Pastaza, Puyo, January 21, 1957, AMG.

33 Luis C. Benalcázar et al to Sr. Jefe Político del Cantón Pastaza, Puyo, January 20, 1957, AMG.

34 José A. Suarez to Sr. Jefe Político del Cantón Pastaza, Puyo, January 21, 1957, AMG. Yet another complainant about Jaramillo stated that he made sure that all property owners paid him two or three times for the surveying of their land. José Castro P. to Sr. Jefe Político del Cantón Pastaza, Puyo, January 22, 1957, AMG.

374 that concluded that José Jaramillo had once again sold the same parcel of land to two different buyers. The officers energetically asked the Ministerio to sanction Jaramillo.35

In August, another owner of a parcel of land on the Puyo-Napo road, Alfonso

Gallegos y Páez, complained to the Ministerio de Gobierno that others had begun to encroach on his property and claim it for their own, and that all their machinations were done in complete collaboration with Teniente Político Jaramillo.36 Owning a parcel of land on the Puyo-Napo road afforded easy access to transportation and therefore better facility for getting agricultural and other products to market; no doubt, the fact that this was prime real estate meant that Jaramillo’s illicit and repeated interventions in land sales along the road came with the chance to extract a number of bribes. On this particular case, a functionary of the newly-created Instituto Nacional de Colonización

(National Institute of Colonization), weighed in; the Executive Director of the INC wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to state that, indeed, the Teniente Político of Puyo had arbitrarily allowed people without any legal claim to occupy the lands that should belong to members of the journalists’ cooperative “Eugenio Espejo,” of which Gallegos y Páez was a member. The INC official stated that a functionary of that organization would have to travel to the area in order to resolve the issue.37 In this case as in others, the

35 Mayor de Infantería José Alejandro Aillón Tamayo and Teniente Asimilado-Profesor Carlos Alonso Aillón Tamayo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Justicia, Quito, July 27, 1957, AMG.

36 Alfonso Gallegos y Páez to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, received August 1, 1957, AMG.

37 Lcdo. José Gabriel Terán V., Director Ejecutivo del Instituto de Colonización to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, August 8, 1957, AMG. The Instituto Nacional de Colonización was created during the presidency of Camilo Ponce Enríquez as a new part of the Ministerio de Economía. Part of its purpose was to resolve conflict surrounding the adjudication of lands and the granting of their respective titles. It was also authorized to oversee the formation of new agricultural and colonist cooperatives and to give them logistical support. The new INC formally replaced and eliminated the previous Dirección General de Tierras Baldías y Colonización. Función Ejecutiva, “Antecedentes y texto del Decreto Ley de Emergencia, en virtud del cual se crea el Instituto Nacional de Colonización,” Registro Oficial 1, no. 229 (June 6, 1957): 1831-1841.

375 local officials of the Oriente, who were supposed to see that the laws of the Republic were applied in the region, instead created a situation in which higher authorities in

Quito were called to intervene.

The rivalry between small and large landowners, and the intervention of appointed officials on one side or the other, was an important dynamic in the southern

Oriente provinces of Morona-Santiago and Zamora-Chinchipe as well. The appointed officials were a necessary part of the land tenancy process and, ideally, could work to prevent latifundismo and promote the proper registration of land titles. In April of 1955, the Governor of Zamora-Chinchipe wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to state that the newly created parishes of Timbara and Limón urgently needed the assigning of their respective Tenientes Políticos. The presence of these functionaries would “counteract the abuses that are taking place” by “the landowners who monopolize large extensions of lands to undertake some light work and then proceed to their sale at inflated prices…that are prejudicial to Colonists who need legal protection.”38

But the appointed functionaries of the southern Oriente provinces were subject to frequent claims of malfeasance and favoritism regarding the processing of land claims.

In October of 1955, a few dozen inhabitants of Huambi Parish, in Morona Canton, complained that their Jefe Político had been promising for six years to grant definitive title to one Olimpia Molina for her parcel of land. Over the course of that time, he had charged her six hundred sucres, but still had not given her the title. Additionally, the Jefe

Político was preventing one Pedro Orellana from staking his claim on a parcel of land,

38 Eduardo Suárez Palacio, Gobernador de Zamora-Chinchipe to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Zamora, April 18, 1955, AMG.

376 preferring instead that it pass to one Santiago Coraisaca.39 The Governor of Morona-

Santiago, Manuel Moncayo, supported the Jefe Político in this case. According to the governor, Pedro Orellana had only been working the parcel for eight months in illegitimate fashion; Coraisaca was the true owner of the parcel, which had been verified by the Teniente Político of Huambi. As for Olimpia Molina, the Jefe Político stated that the six hundred sucres she had paid were in fact legitimate charges.40 In this case, it is clear that the opinions of the higher canton and provincial authorities regarding land tenancy trumped those claims by the original colonist complainants.

Certain appointed officials did make an effort to promote the interests of the colonists by working against latifundismo. Eduardo Suárez Palacio, Governor of

Zamora-Chinchipe, continued his efforts in 1956, decrying to the Ministro de Gobierno the colonists who, “in their excessive ambition monopolize great extensions lands” only to do a token amount of clear-cutting and agricultural work. They then divided the lands into small parcels and sold them for immense profits, “enriching themselves and accumulating capital for the exclusive and personal defense of themselves.” The

Governor stated that he had written to the Departamento de Tierras Baldías several times, asking that they send an Inspector to each Canton in the Oriente, but nothing had been done.41 Later that year, Juan Izquierdo took over as Governor in Zamora, and the situation did not seem to have improved. In particular, he complained that the Tenientes

Políticos of his jurisdiction mismanaged the adjudication of land parcels by certifying the

39 Moradores de Huambi to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Huambi, October 3, 1955, AMG.

40 Manuel Moncayo F., Gobernador de Morona-Santiago to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, November 2, 1955, AMG.

41 Eduardo Suárez Palacio, Gobernador de Zamora-Chinchipe to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Zamora, April 9, 1956, AMG.

377 existence of cultivation that in truth had not been done and by certifying possession by pure speculators. He had asked for the firing of one Adolfo Rojas from the post of

Teniente Político in Zamora, but was dismayed to discover that this individual continued to receive a salary from the government by using a different name. His efforts to put an end to this had been fruitless due to bureaucratic inertia.42

Political rivalries could also affect the process of land tenancy in Zamora-

Chinchipe. In October of 1956, three self-proclaimed colonists of the Oriente, writing from the highland city of Loja, complained that their lands were being usurped by a newly created agricultural cooperative that was a “known leftist refuge.” They asserted that these usurpers were aided both by “certain lawyers in Loja who propose to sew anarchism” in the Oriente as well as certain political authorities in the area. As the complainants stated, the Departamento de Tierras Baldías y Colonización in 1955 ruled in their favor on the question of the legal possession of the land in dispute; nevertheless, this had not helped their case because the governor, Luis Polibio

González, had been working against them. The cause of this, in their view, was the fact that they had voted for Camilo Ponce in the presidential election, drawing the ire of the

Velasquista Polibio. They asked for justice and for a new Governor, one who would promote colonization “as means for national resurgence, and not as in the current moment in which the labor of the honorable colonizer is attacked and destroyed to give refuge to the pillage that takes advantage of the work and effort of outsiders.”43 These colonists, like many others, alluded to the national significance of their efforts as

42 Juan Izquierdo P., Gobernador Accidental to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Zamora, September 10, 1956, AMG.

43 José Villagomez, José Manuel Cajamarca, Segundo Paccha to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Loja, October 24, 1956, AMG.

378 colonists in the Oriente in order to seek redress of grievances. This significance was derived from the importance imparted to the Oriente as it was constructed as national object of desire in that and preceding decades.

The difficulties surrounding the registration and titling of land parcels in Zamora-

Chinchipe was an endemic problem. At the beginning of 1957, the province had a new governor, Zabulón Rodriguez Castillo. In no uncertain terms, he informed the Ministerio de Gobierno that the largest problem affecting the province was the possession of vacant lands, “which due to its lack of direct administration is taking on very strained characteristics.” According to Rodriguez, many parcels of land had competing claims and many individuals held one kind of title or another.44 It seems much of Rodriguez’s time as governor was spent trying to maintain “stability” and “sectional and national harmony” in the face of the “many and continuous… reclamations over lands of State property.”45 Rodriguez also noted that these kinds of disputes were more the responsibility of the Departamento de Tierras Baldías y Colonización than they were of the Oriente officials, like himself, appointed by the Ministerio de Gobierno; nevertheless many of the colonists believed that the governor’s office was responsible. For this reason, Rodriguez asked that an inspector, dependent of the Dirección de Tierras

Baldías, be sent to Zamora to process land titles. The principal causers of problems in

Zamora, in Rodriguez’s view, where those who had come to “possess immense parcels of lands, with exploitative ends, who only serve to cause intranquility among the

44 Zabulón Rodriguez Castillo, Gobernador de Zamora-Chinchipe to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Zamora, January 28, 1957, AMG.

45 Zabulón Rodriguez Castillo, Gobernador de Zamora-Chinchipe to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Zamora, March 10, 1957, AMG.

379 citizens.” These latifundistas hoped to ignore all previous dispositions from laws having to do with tierras baldías; for this reason, the inspector was badly needed.46

Late in 1957, Rodriguez seemed at wits end about the ongoing difficulties and the lack of any help from the ministry responsible for tierras baldías. Recently, some colonists in Cumbaratza Parish had complained to him that their lands were being usurped by a syndicate with more than seven hundred members despite the established colonists having cultivated them “at the cost of suffering.” But Rodríguez stated that these kinds of problems were the responsibility of the recently created Instituto Nacional de Colonización, and his direct intervention in such matters could have “disastrous consequences.” As he explained, “It is for this reason that I am constantly writing to the

Instituto Nacional de Colonización, asking that by any means possible they establish an

Inspectoría for the revision of State lands, in order to formalize the acquisition of lands.”

This large syndicate, in his view, should look to establish itself elsewhere; however, there were already some complaints from Jívaros that the same syndicate was encroaching on their lands, too. It would be better, Rodriguez stated, if the issue were settled by a commission from the Departamento de Tierras Baldías.47

46 Zabulón Rodriguez Castillo, Gobernador de Zamora-Chinchipe to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Zamora, April 29, 1957, AMG.

47 Zabulón Rodríguez Castillo, Gobernador de Zamora-Chinchipe to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Zamora, December 30, 1957, AMG. Morona-Santiago Province was also the site of land disputes and claims of illicit intervention by state officials. In April of 1957, an official from the Ministerio de Economía wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno regarding a problem arising in Morona Canton. He stated that the Dirección de Tierras Baldías, from the Ministerio de Economía, had asked for the appointed officials of the Oriente to intervene in matters of land tenancy, helping to ensure the proper adjudication and surveying of land parcels, and giving all necessary aid to colonists who had followed all the legal requirements in the matter. Nevertheless, the Ministerio de Economía official complained that they had received multiple complaints from colonists about the proceedings by the appointed officials, who were proceeding arbitrarily and with partiality in most cases. Gonzalo Toro Terán, Subsecretario de Economía to Sr. Subsecretario de Gobierno, Quito, April 23, 1957, AMG.

380 Other evidence, from the northern Oriente, also calls into question the effectiveness of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización. In April of 1958, Virginia Pasos wrote on behalf of herself and her brother-in-law, both residing in Tena, to report that they had owned a parcel of land in Tena since 1956 that was legally registered according to the Ley de Colonización y Tierras Baldías. But it had come to pass that the

Governor of Napo-Pastaza, Jorge Vallejo, was abusing his position by trying to remove them from a portion of land they legally owned in order to sell it to his nephew.

According to Pasos, she had already informed the INC about this, which had ordered the Governor to cease his actions. Her letter to the Ministerio de Gobierno indicates that the Governor was not convinced by the INC’s warning.48 In October, five members of the agricultural colony Presidente Velasco Ibarra wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to complain that the Tenientes Políticos of Mera and Puyo were collaborating with one another in an illegal and immoral fashion as regarded the concession of parcels of land, to the point that they had “virtually ceased to be employees of the Executive at the service of the collectivity” and had transformed into “private commercial agents at the service of their own interests, supported by the administrative function that they still hold.” According to these complainants, these officials, Lorenzo Quintero and Edmundo

Asisclo, were able to ignore the regulations required by the INC with impunity, becoming

“omnipotent distributors” of vacant lands.49 That same month, eight residents of Virgilio

48 Virginia Pasos to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, April 10, 1958, AMG.

49 Homero García J. et al to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, received October 10, 1958, AMG. In 1959, Ernestina Carrillo de Moscoso complained to the Ministerio de Gobierno that the Teniente Político and Jefe Político of Puyo were collaborating with two individuals who were usurping her property in the Matriz parish of Pastaza Canton. Allegedly, they continued to usurp her lands with the support of the officials in Puyo even after they had been sanctioned by the criminal court in Tungurahua, the neighboring Sierra province. Ernestina Carrillo de Moscoso to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Guayaquil, February 16, 1959, AMG. For his part, the Jefe Político of Puyo claimed that in fact it was Carrillo and her family that were in the

381 Dávila Parish in Quijos Canton, who had recently organized a new agricultural colony and had properly declared their parcels of land to the INC, complained that the Jefe

Político of Quijos was preventing them from taking possession of their land on the grounds that it already belonged to one Paulino Sarria and his son Rafael Sarria. The authors of the letter argued that the land was completely vacant and had never been owned by anybody previously. Furthermore, Sarria had not cultivated even one-fourth of the land he did own. “The truth of it all,” they wrote, “is that in our Oriente the Señores

Sarrias have made themselves owners of an extensive quantity of land without allowing it to be worked or allowing new families to enter to colonize and work it.”50

The INC did weigh in on certain cases, however. In December of 1960, Valentino

Scacco, the owner of a small farm in San Francisco de Borja Parish, in Quijos Canton, wrote that Rafael Albuja, in concert with the local Jefe Político, was trying to gain possession of his land. He asked the Ministerio de Gobierno to intervene somehow so that Albuja as well as the local officials in Quijos would respect the document he and

Albuja had signed together, in the presence of the previous Teniente Político, over the division between their properties.51 The Ministerio asked the new Teniente Político for a report about the matter, and according to him, the Jefe Político had formally requested

wrong regarding the property, and that he was not guilty of any such interference. J. Hilario Gilbert, Jefe Político del Cantón Pastaza to Sr. Subsecretario del Ministerio de Gobierno, Puyo, April 11, 1959, AMG. Another complaint about the authorities in Puyo arose in June of 1959, when Carlos Alonso Villafuerte claimed that the Teniente Político, César Augusto Samaniego, was attempting to “make business with the lands of the state” by illegitimately charging for land claims, which Villafuerte claimed was a common practice by Samaniego. Furthermore, he did not follow all the requirements of the land registration procedure, using “suspicious names” as witnesses to the surveying procedure. Carlos Alonso Villafuerte to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Puyo, June 15, 1959, AMG.

50 Eulogio M. Ampudia S et al to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Virgilio Dávila, October 6, 1958, AMG.

51 Valentino Scacco to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, San Francisco de Borja, received December 3, 1960, AMG.

382 that the INC send a commission to study the dispute. The commission determined that in fact Rafael Albuja was in the right, as he held definitive title to the land in question.

The document that Scacco and Albuja had signed was not binding, but merely provisional; the judgment of the INC was needed to make it final.52 The INC’s ruling, however, was either not clear or not well communicated to those involved. Or perhaps

Scacco thought it could be ignored. A few months later, Scacco again wrote to the

Ministerio de Gobierno to complain about the actions of Albuja, who had recently destroyed Scacco’s fences. According to Scacco, the INC had declared that Albuja’s title was not valid, but that nevertheless Albuja continued to claim lands that did not belong to him with the support of the Teniente Político and the Jefe Político.53 These cases demonstrate that the Instituto Nacional de Colonización did, at least occasionally, send commissions to study land disputes in the Oriente. It cannot be shown, however, that this entity of the Ministerio de Economía decreased the frequency of these disputes or that it could definitely resolve them. The INC’s existence did, however, allow other officials to pass the buck: in response to repeated requests from the president of the

“Velasco Ibarra” agricultural colony that he intervene in land dispute arising among the colony’s members, the Jefe Político of Napo answered that he had received strict instructions that problems arising from vacant lands were to be handled only by the

52 Antonio Aguirre, Teniente Político de Borja to Sr. Dr. Holger del Pozo Herdoisa, Subsecretario de Gobierno, San Francisco de Borja, December 16, 1960, AMG.

53 Valentino Scacco to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Policía, San Francisco de Borja, received March 20, 1961, AMG.

383 delegates of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización, who had offices in each canton’s chief city.54

In Zamora, in the southern Oriente, the situation regarding parcels of land and the actions of state officials remained contentious. In 1960, several dozen citizens of

Zamora Canton complained that the provincial governor habitually charged colonists five hundred sucres for surveying the boundaries between adjacent parcels of land.

Furthermore, to make money, he had frequently taken land away from “old colonists” to hand it over to people of recent arrival. He had also made violent threats against certain citizens. All of this was particularly bad for the chief administrator in a part of the country that could by attacked by the “Enemy of the South” at any time.55 That same year, a few dozen residents of Sabanilla Parish, in Zamora Canton, complained that their Teniente

Político, Rafael Loaiza Sanchez, made no effort to defend them against the “exploiters of humble country people” who were committing various abuses. In particular, they alleged that two men, working on the orders of the “communist” landowner Jaime

Valarezo, had destroyed one of the colonists’ houses and was attempting to usurp his land, using threats of violence. Loaiza had done nothing to investigate and punish this crime, nor had the Governor of Zamora, who was an “accomplice or coverer-up

[encubriador]” of these crimes and similar incidents that happened “daily” in that parish.56

54 Washington Espíndola L., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Subsecretario del Ministerio de Gobierno, Tena, October 17, 1961, AMG.

55 Ciudadanos del Cantón Zamora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Zamora, no date, 1960, AMG.

56 Pobladores de Parroquia Sabanilla to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Justicia, Sabanilla, February 16, 1960, AMG.

384 The next year, a resident of Saraguro Canton, also in Zamora-Chinchipe, complained that land speculation continued unabated, and it was aided and abetted by the local state officials. According to Apolinario Sarango, the Instituto Nacional de

Colonización had ruled that a portion of his land rightly belonged to the Jefe Político of

Yacuambi Canton, José Joaquín Ortega. “In order to take away my land and my crops,” he wrote, “the Teniente Político and [the Jefe Político] are pressuring me with various means, through veiled insinuations, threats, and recommendations that I hand over what belongs to me.” Recently, Ortega and nine other state employees had come to his parcel of land and tried to forcefully remove him, using “thousands of threats and prohibiting me from bringing my livestock into my pastures.” According to Sarango, this was not the first time the people of Yacuambi had suffered these abuses:

it is a generalized custom of some residents of Yacuambi to claim lands worked by others in order to take advantage of someone else’s work, without paying for improvements of any kind, and later, once adjudicated, they don’t even work the lands, rather they sell them immediately, committing a cruel and shameful exploitation.57

The next year, the governor of Zamora-Chinchipe, Segundo T. Pavón, like many of his predecessors, complained about land speculation in his jurisdiction. As he wrote,

currently many people, not with the goal of colonizing but simply to make a business deal, are coming here from Loja; some in arbitrary fashion make small clear cuttings of one or two hectares and immediately make a sale, and what is worse they do it by public scripture in the clerk’s offices in Loja, without those officials knowing whether or not there are any problems in those lands, which caused a series of complaints.

According to the governor, there were plenty of vacant lands available, but unfortunately most claimants simply tried to remove already-established colonists from their lands. In the past, many people had made extensive claims without processing them through the

57 Apolinario Sarango to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Saraguro, received April 24, 1961, AMG.

385 Instituto de Colonización. They then sold them on to “poor people who truly desire to colonize.” The governor had ordered the Tenientes Políticos of his jurisdiction to follow the rules, but unfortunately “in many cases it is they who permit these abuses instead of setting precedents, acting in this way due to personal compromises or due to economic immoralities.” The governor suggested that the Instituto Nacional de Colonización should send a commission to his jurisdiction, including to the areas inhabited by Jívaros.

As he wrote, “these defenseless elements [the Jívaros] are having their properties invaded by ambitious persons,” but at the moment no commissioner had come to their properties because the operating costs of INC surveyors were so onerous.58 As this evidence demonstrates, state officials in Zamora and other parts of the Oriente for many years had recognized that the Republic’s laws regarding the adjudication and titling of lands were not carried out effectively, or were subject to the interference of partial

Tenientes Políticos and other authorities. Their many reports to the Ministerio de

Gobierno and those of colonists themselves did not put an end to latifundismo, land speculation, and contentious disputes over parcels of land. The anomie and disorganization of the Oriente a group of ancillary provinces continued to affect how its residents could acquire parcels of land.

The Oriente’s Indians Stake Their Claims

As seen above, state formation in the Oriente, including the colonization and titling of land, was subject to frequent cases of contestation and conflict, arising from the corruption of state officials and from the struggle between large and small landowners.

The colonists of the region invoked their patriotic struggle as “sentinels of the homeland” in these conflicts against those whom they deemed “latifundistas,” “illegitimate

58 Tnte. Segundo T. Pavón, Gobernador de Zamora-Chinchipe, Zamora, August 4, 1961, AMG.

386 colonists,” or persons of “bad antecedents” unfit to hold public office. But the struggle between those groups was only one aspect of the conflict inherent in incorporating the

Oriente into the Ecuadorian nation. The indigenous people of the Oriente also confronted these elements of the state system, from the large landowners and appointed officials to the poor colonists, in order to maintain their access to land. It is to these conflicts that we now turn.

In 1949, Galo Plaza Lasso, President of the Republic, issued a decree that created the Juntas de Protección Indígena, or Indigenous Protection Juntas, citing the fact that “The Indians of the Oriente regions are the motive of frequent abuses that impede their liberty and the just appreciation of their work” as well as the fact that “it is urgent to surround the Indians of the Oriente provinces with the necessary guarantees so that they transform into valuable elements for colonization, avoiding that they flee from the land of their birth.” The decree stated that each canton in Napo-Pastaza and

Santiago-Zamora would have its own Junta, which would include the local Jefe Político, a missionary, a public school teacher, and an “Indian chief” from the area. The Juntas were to inspect the accounts that all Indians had with any “establishment, farm, industry, etc.” twice yearly to ensure that there was no exploitation occurring. Additionally, they were to “attend to any just complaint” by the Indians and intervene on their behalf before the authorities. They were also to “aid the Indians to carry out organized colonization and the formation of adequate population centers (poblaciones).” The Juntas were to in a “convenient manner” ensure that the patronos of the Oriente, for whom the Indians worked, frequently as debtors, observed humane treatment toward the “peons and

387 Indians” in their charge.59 The decree responds to the decades of domination over the region’s indigenous people that patrones had held in the Oriente,60 especially the system of concertaje, or debt peonage, that still existed throughout the region and which had provoked the de-population of certain areas by the flight of indigenous people into

Colombian or Peruvian territory. The decree does not explicitly address the ownership of land by the region’s Indians, but its disposition that Indians be aided in efforts of colonization suggests a view of them as landowners similar to other colonists in the region.

Before the creation of the Juntas de Protección was decreed, some Indians of the region already knew how to engage the state system in the Oriente when their lands were threatened. In April of 1948, for example, the Indian Vicente Sanda had lodged formal complaint with Eduardo Garcés, Jefe Político of Napo Canton, stating that the white colonist Arturo Chavez was trying to “remove” him from a parcel of land in

Archidona Parish. This complaint moved Garcés to order the Teniente Político of

Archidona to find Chavez and send him to the Garcés in Tena to answer this accusation.61 In February of 1949, the Abraham Duque, the Teniente Político of

Canelos Parish, in Pastaza Canton, wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno after being visited by two Indian “padres de familia,” Javier Santi and Dario Illanes. He included two photographs of the men and their families in his letter to Quito. As Duque reported, a military officer named Jeremías Martínez had made a claim on fifty hectares of land that

59 Galo Plaza, Presidente Constitucional de la República, Decreto No. 529, Registro Oficial 1, no. 102 (January 5, 1949): 808.

60 See Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso.

61 Eduardo Garcés Martínez, Jefe Político del Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de la Parroquia de Archidona, April 16, 1948, AGN.

388 overlapped with the lands worked by Santi, Illanes, and many other Indians from the community. A few months prior, a group of eighteen Indians had come to Duque to complain that a soldier named Andres Jaramillo had tried to prevent them from working in their chacras, as Jaramillo planned to claim fifty hectares there as well. Duque stated that by refusing to give his seal of approval to these claims, he had raised the enmity of the military officers in question and some of their confederates, who were now collecting signatures for a complaint against Duque in an effort to get him removed from office.62

This case demonstrates how the Oriente’s Indians could approach state officials to defend their access to land; it also demonstrates that state officials were not necessarily strong guarantors, as they were subject to the objections and intrigues of others in the region that could also appeal to the ministry in Quito to seek their removal.

The ongoing abuses against the Indians of the region drew the ire of the priest

Francisco Kamaroli, a Josephine missionary in Cotundo, near Archidona. His letter to the public school teacher in Archidona, Juan Santander, relates how he had gone with the Indian couple Paulino Avilés and his wife Rosa Inés Tapuy to the Junta Protectora to protest the usurpation of their land by one Gustavo Rosales. Unfortunately, Kamaroli found the Junta Protectora to be nothing more than, as he wrote in his letter, “SATIRE.”

He felt that only a military governor for the Oriente could stop these kinds of abuses; in the meantime, he planned to form two commissions of Indians to lodge formal complaints both to the Junta Protectora and to various authorities in Quito about the whites in the region he sarcastically called “great colonist defenders of the boundaries

62 Abraham Duque Padilla, Teniente Político de Canelos to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Canelos, February 4, 1949, AMG.

389 of the country.”63 When the teacher Santander passed Kamaroli’s letter on to the

President of the Republic, Galo Plaza, he added his view that “certain Tenientes

Políticos, with their ignorance and created interests, unconsciously push the Indian to a savage uprising that could have disastrous consequences.”64 Santander also composed a letter for the illiterate Paulino Avilés, who complained to the Ministerio de Gobierno that not only was Gustavo Rosales taking advantage of the fact that his brother was the

Teniente Político in order to usurp Avilés’s lands, but that he had also been imprisoned for a few days simply for complaining about this to the Junta Protectora.65 The Juntas were intended to address the fact that the region’s Indians were subject to abuses and predation by state officials and other whites. These incidents were especially likely given the fact that the Oriente remained set of ancillary provinces in which laws were not effectively carried out. That very problem seems to have also undermined the

Juntas themselves.

The ministries in Quito, for their part, occasionally sought clarification on disputes between Indians and non-Indians before granting definitive title to land. In April of 1949, the director of the Departamento de Tierras Baldías y Colonización wrote to the

Governor of Napo-Pastaza about one such case. A woman named Hilde Richter de

Weilbauer had made a claim on 48 hectares of “vacant land” on the banks of the

Misahuallí River, but the Teniente Político of Archidona reported that the claim overlapped with lands “possessed by various indigenous families” and with some on

63 Padre Francisco to Sr. Profesor Santander, Cotundo, May 6, 1949, AMG.

64 Juan Santander to Sr. Galo Plaza Lasso, Archidona, May 20, 1949, AMG.

65 Paulino Avilés to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Archidona, May 20, 1949, AMG.

390 which one Sr. Francisco Mejía had already planted some crops.66 So, the Governor of

Napo-Pastaza ordered the secretary of the Jefe Político of Napo Canton to undertake an inspection of the lands in question. According to the secretary, the lands were just as

Richter de Weilbauer had described on the map and other documents she had sent.

Furthermore, he wrote, “this parcel of land is not prejudicial to second nor to third parties,” and in his opinion, for the good of colonization in the Oriente, no barriers should be placed on Richter de Weilbauer’s acquisition of the parcel. The Teniente

Político of Archidona must have been mistaken, as he was acting on information from

“unfounded claims by persons who do not know the boundaries [of the land in question].”67 In this case, the allegation that Indians would be adversely affected by a land claim was enough to provoke an inspection of the matter. The evidence at hand, however, does not allow an evaluation of whether the inspector was right to conclude that nobody was, in fact, harmed by the concession of land to Richter de Weilbauer.

Another case from 1949 demonstrates that the protection of Indians’ access to land was taken seriously enough to warrant investigation. In December, Guillermo

Ramos Salazar, the Ministro de Gobierno, asked the Departamento de Tierras Baldías to delay processing a land request from a colonist named Eduardo Garcés. The

Ministerio de Gobierno had received a complaint from many Indians from Atahualpa

Parish stating that Garcés was seeking to dislodge them from their cultivated lands on the right bank of the Napo River, as well as on some small islands in the river where they also had been raising crops. According to the Minister, this group of Indians had

66 Jorge Efrain Oña Silva, Director del Departamento de Tierras Baldías y Colonización to Sr. Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza, Quito, April 29, 1949, AMG.

67 Carlos Gustavo Rivadeneyra, Secretario de la Jefatura Política del Cantón Napo to Sr. Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza, Tena, May 19, 1949, AMG.

391 been cultivating these lands “since time immemorial,” a fact that would not be reflected in Garcés’s request, even if it appeared perfectly legal.68 The Ministerio’s desire to delay the case may have originated with a letter that the Governor of Napo-Pastaza received from the Indians of Atahualpa in which they laid out their case against Eduardo Garcés.

Their letter stated that the twenty-two families of Atahualpa were engaged in growing subsistence crops in Atahualpa and on the island “that lies in front”; these crops were in fact “practically the only source of supplies for the people of Puerto Napo, since, it is known that whites don’t cultivate the land, agriculturally speaking, except for one or two exceptions.” For some months, they alleged, Eduardo Garcés had been trying to remove them from their lands, threatening to enlist the aid of witch doctors (brujos) against the pacific families of Atahualpa, and to begin destroying their crops.69 The authors of this letter clearly sought to position themselves as not only law abiding and peaceful, but also vital for the local economy and the whites of the region.

The case was eventually decided in the favor of Eduardo Garcés, however. The lengthy report about the matter from the Gastón A. Solórzano, secretary to the

Governor of Napo-Pastaza and appointed investigator for the case, explains why.

Solórzano’s report, he stated, was based on the interviews he conducted with the local

Jefe Político and Teniente Político and the majority of the people in Puerto Napo. The disputed land in question, located on the island called Cotos, was in fact located six kilometers from Atahualpa, where the complainants lived. Furthermore, Solórzano stated that he was able to trace the ownership history of the land on the island, and that

68 Guillermo Ramos Salazar to Sr. Ministro de Economía y Tierras Baldías, December 12, 1949, AMG.

69 Domingo Cerda et al to Sr. Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza, no date, 1949, AMG.

392 each transfer of ownership, up to and including Garcés’s acquisition of it, was legal. The dispute arose from the fact that a few years prior, one Rufina Cerda, an indigenous woman from among the Atahualpa community, had gone with her family to begin working a piece of land on Cotos with the full knowledge and permission of Sr. Garcés.

Recently, however, Garcés had told Cerda that she could no longer continue living on the island. Cerda then complained to the Jefe Político, who, along with the Josephine missionary Father César Ricci, as the Junta de Protección Indígena, decided to speak with all involved to reach some agreement. Both parties, Garcés and Cerda, agreed that

Garcés would pay Cerda 500 sucres. Problems only arose because Cerda changed her mind at the last minute, and decided not to accept the payment. Solórzano stated that the allegations that Garcés was violently threatening to remove all the Indians of

Atahualpa from their lands was completely false; in fact, it was those in Atahualpa who wanted to remove Garcés from land he rightly owned. “What has happened,” Solórzano continued, “is that certain people who are not from around here have meddled, to induce the Indians, taking advantage of their ignorance, advising them to ask for the removal of Sr. Garcés from Cotos Island before the superior authorities.” Solórzano closed his report by stating that all the authorities of the Oriente had the duty to protect against any abuses committed upon the “destitute race,” as well as to guarantee the rights of the white residents of the area.70 Solórzano did not explain what evidence he had that people were “meddling” with the Indians, convincing them to raise complaints.

It is possible he reached this conclusion after talking to the residents of the area. This was the view of Eduardo Garcés himself, who explained his view of the situation to the

70 Gastón A. Solórzano M., Secretario de la Gobernación de Napo-Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, December 17, 1949, AMG.

393 Ministro de Gobierno in a letter from December. In his account, his pacific possession of the land was only contested because the Indian Miguel Proaño, a known “communist element,” had stirred the other Indians of Atahualpa up against him. He had even gotten a group of Indians to go to Quito in an attempt to sidestep the intervention of the local authorities.71 The Governor of Napo Pastaza presented a similar view of the matter in his report. In his investigation of the matter, he had discovered that the “pacific” Indians of Atahualpa did not know any Spanish, but they were being “guided” by Proaño who was not an Indian from the Oriente, but from the highland area of Cayambe. This

“rebellious” individual, according to the Governor, was well known for his use of witchcraft, and it was his insistence alone that kept the dispute alive.72 The view that the

Indians of the region were fundamentally passive, but prone to manipulation by outsiders, was a common one.

Other cases demonstrate the importance of connections and personal relationships in disputes over land. In August of 1950, Bolívar León (the lawyer who was accused of accumulating too much land by colonists in El Chaco a few years later in

1955, as described above) wrote to the Ministerio on behalf of his godson, José

Mamallacta, whom León describes as a “peoncito” and a “Yumbo,” who resided on the property of León’s father. Allegedly, some colonists led by one Marcelino Quila had arbitrarily come to occupy part of the land belonging to his father and to the eleven

“indigenous families” that lived there. León stated that Quila did not lack for land, as he owned several other properties. Mamallacta had complained to the Teniente Político of

71 Eduardo Garcés Martínez to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, December 16, 1949, AGN.

72 “Informe del Gobernador de Napo Pastaza,” Tena, no date, 1949, AGN.

394 Baeza, who had done nothing. According to León, this was likely due to the fact that the

Teniente Político, Juan Vega, was the godfather to Quila’s children. In León’s view, it was incumbent on the Ministerio de Gobierno to order Vega to prevent Marcelino Quila from usurping the Indians’ land.73 Not all “Yumbos” would have been able to seek the aid of a lawyer in Quito, however, as Mamallacta was able to do.

Sometimes, Indians in the Oriente found their property threatened by a high- ranking state official. This was the dilemma faced by Bartolo Tapui, a “native (natural) of

Archidona,” who claimed that he had owned a property in the center of the parish for more than forty years, which he had inherited from his parents. In a 1951 letter to the

Ministerio composed by his son-in-law, Domingo Cerda, as Tapui was illiterate, he claimed that the Governor of Napo-Pastaza was attempting to remove him from his lands, perhaps motivated by the jealousy the governor felt toward his property “full of plantain trees, sugarcane, yuca, pineapples, barbasco, chontas, etc.” Tapui cited his four decades of hard work, and the fact that the region’s incipient economy was threatened by Peru, as reasons why the case should be quickly decided in his favor. He also stated that the Governor had been abusing the power of his office in the matter:

Tapui had many times asked the local Teniente Político for a copy of the title to his land, but the Teniente Político had refused to hand it over, due to the governor’s influence.74

This case is typical of the many allegations of abuses of authority leveled against officials in the region, and it shows how these behaviors could affect even those indigenous people who had a long history of working a particular parcel of land.

73 Dr. Bolívar León to Sr. Ministro de Oriente, Quito, August 28, 1950, AMG.

74 Bartolo Tapui to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Archidona, received October 15, 1951, AMG.

395 Two years later, in El Chaco Parish, the Indians Julian Alvarado and José

Joaquín Mamallacta wrote to the Governor of the Province to complain that they, along with some similarly “defenseless” white colonists, were the object of Bolívar Ron’s machinations as he sought to remove them from their land to sell it to the former

Teniente Político of the Parish and one Luis Alberto Trujillo. Both men, according to

Alvarado and Mamallacta, were “bothering” them with “bad intentioned threats.” “It is not possible that we live apart” from the aid of the authorities, they explained; “we Indians born in the Amazonian Oriente should be favored by our laws and our government. At the least, we should be sent men of capacity…active and practical in the carrying out of their duties so they may aid us with piety.”75 Around the same time, the aforementioned

Luis A. Trujillo gave his side of the story. Claiming to be the husband of an Indian woman native to the Oriente, he addressed the Governor of the Province seeking

“justice for the Natives (Yumbos) of El Chaco.” According to Trujillo, the colonists José

Elías Puruncajas and Florencio Alulema were working in concert with the Teniente

Político of El Chaco to violently claim his land for their own, using threats of violence.

This conniving Teniente Político, named Vicente Vallejo, had also been distributing land titles to various other colonists, claiming that he had authorization from the government.

As Trujillo explained,

one can suppose that he is making these distributions in disinterested fashion. Echoing the natives, not the colonists from outside the region, I urgently ask that you remove this authority, for being ignorant and partial,

75 Julian Alvarado and José Joaquín Mamallacta to Sr. Gobernador de Napo Pastaza, El Chaco, October 10, 1953, AGN.

396 and who with his impassioned decisions seeks to rile us up against each other.76

It is not clear the extent of Trujillo’s connection to the indigenous people of the parish, but he did trade upon the notion that they were deserving of special consideration against “outsider” colonists.

Another allegation that the Oriente’s officials appointed by the Ministerio de

Gobierno were taking sides in land disputes against the region’s indigenous people comes from 1955 in the area around Baeza, in Quijos Canton. Pascual Mamallacta, who was illiterate, began his letter, composed by his brother-in-law, Cristobal Torres, to the Ministerio by stating, “I am a yumbo, native of the Oriente region. I have lived my whole life in Baeza, where I have possessed and cultivated some plots that I inherited from my ancestors.” Recently, some “whites” led by a Colombian citizen named Cesar

Bolaños had been attempting to remove Mamallacta from his lands by claiming them as their own. One day, Bolaños and other members of his family came to Mamallacta’s house, armed with a shotgun, to threaten him. Cristobal Torres “repelled the raid” with force, for which he was imprisoned by the Jefe Político for four days fined thirty sucres.

“Not content with this,” Mamallacta wrote, “the Jefe Político, absolutely partial to

Bolaños, has decided now to pressure me, threatening me with prison and outrages, if I don’t make a transaction with the supposed owner of my lands.” Mamallacta requested that the Ministerio prevent the Jefe Político from continuing his campaign against him, and that the case be allowed to continue its course through the department of Tierras

Baldías, where it was under review. Mamallacta closed the letter by stating, “I hope that in this case your authority continues to value our rights against the usurpations of

76 J. de Wind, Secretario de la Gobernación de Napo, copy of denuncia from Luis A. Trujillo to Sr. Ministro de Oriente, no date, 1959, AMG.

397 whites.”77 Mamallacta, and his brother-in-law Torres, were probably disappointed by the eventual outcome. The Jefe Político of Quijos wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to report that the local Teniente Político had investigated the case and interviewed witnesses to the supposed incident between Torres and Bolaños; the report stated that in fact Torres’s assault on Bolaños was not justified, so his having been fined and locked up for four days was perfectly acceptable. As to the dispute over the land, however, the officials in Quijos did not give an official opinion; as the Jefe Político wrote, there were many complaints presented in his office involving Cristóbal Torres and

Tierras Baldías, but he had abstained from passing judgment on any of them because only the Departamento de Tierras Baldías y Colonización was authorized to intervene in such matters.78

A case involving the agricultural colony Madre Tierra and the Comuna San

Jacinto shows how the Oriente’s colonists could engage in direct competition with the region’s Indians over access to land. In March of 1955, the President of the Colonia

Madre Tierra wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno, stating that his colony did not want to cause problems or disagreements with any group, “above all with the autochthonous inhabitants of these regions,” but it happened that the Indian community adjacent to their colony was refusing to respect the agreed upon boundaries between each entity’s respective lands. The Indians, the letter’s author alleged, had a total of between eight and ten thousand hectares of land, most of which were uncultivated. In contrast, the colony was composed of “colonists who have abandoned the urban centers and have

77 Pascual Mamallacta to Sr. Director de Oriente, Quijos, August, 1955, AMG.

78 Nicolas Borja Flor, Jefe Político de Quijos to Sr. Subsecretario de Gobierno, Baeza, September 13, 1955, AMG.

398 come to these regions to make them produce.” The colony had recently won a prize at an agricultural fair in Puyo, attesting to the quality and quantity of their agricultural products. Furthermore, they were building a road with their own money and labor, and were planning to apply for their colony to be raised to the status of a parish. Their goal in writing the letter was for the Ministerio de Gobierno to have the Ministerio de

Economía send a commission from the Departamento de Tierras Baldías y

Colonización so that the boundaries between their lands and those of the Indians’ could be definitively demonstrated.79 In this letter, the colony’s president admitted to the fact that they were not natives to the region as the Indians were; however, their efforts to transform their piece of the Oriente into a productive center was meant to demonstrate their worthiness in the view of the government and against the competing claim from

Indians who had not done enough with the land.

The Indians of Comuna San Jacinto wrote to the Teniente Político of Puyo, who then passed it along to the Ministerio de Gobierno, to give their side of things. These

Indians, some of whom signed their names, some of whom used their finger prints to sign, and with a local Dominican priest, Manuel M. Freire as a co-signer, reported that members of the Colonia Madre Tierra had begun to allow “unknown persons” to begin occupying their lands against the orders of the Departamento de Tierras Baldías.80 A month later, the priest Freire wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to further elaborate on what was happening. According to Freire, a commission from the Departamento de

Tierras Baldías had indeed come to Puyo and ordered that both the Comuna San

Jacinto and the Colonia Madre Tierra respect the trail from the Pastaza River to the

79 Colonia Madre Tierra to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, March 31, 1955, AMG.

80 Benjamín Santi et al to Sr. Teniente Político de Puyo, Puyo, June 25, 1955, AMG.

399 settlement of Arapicos as the boundary between their lands. Furthermore, the commission ruled that one disputed parcel of land in particular was possessed by various Indian families, who had grown crops on it, and they would be allowed to continue. The Indians, according to Freire, moved immediately to construct cement markers that would demarcate the boundaries in question, while the members of Madre

Tierra remained opposed to this construction. Since then, members of Madre Tierra had helped “three or four white colonists” go onto the Indians’ land and to start growing crops and building houses, and had even destroyed one of the cement markers. Even worse, recently the Concejo Cantonal of Pastaza had begun to take the colonists’ side in the matter, and had been encouraging more colonists to make claims on the Indians’ land. Freire assured the Ministro that he, as an Ecuadorian, was not opposed to any

“sincere, effective, and nationally fruitful colonization plan, as this would be the salvation of our national territory and the betterment of the economy of the Republic.” But at the same time he wanted to ensure that colonization not become “a pretext for the enrichment of a few who, taking advantage of their white origin, without any other titles perhaps, desire to acquire lands, awaiting a capital gain, and don’t have the sincere desire to move to the place, reside there and obtain the fruits of the land through personal work.” Unfortunately, much of the colonization in the Oriente had followed this latter model, including the dispute in question. Freire stated that the Indians of the region had been largely removed from their ancestral lands in the center of Puyo, but had managed to maintain access to some lands thanks to the orders of President

Velasco Ibarra during his presidency in 1947. Their continued access to the land in question was necessary because many young Indian men were coming of age and

400 forming their own families, with need for subsistence plots as well as land with river access (as had the parcel in question) so they could fish. Freire therefore asked the

Ministro de Gobierno to aid the Indian race, “relegated more and more to the most obscure corner of the jungle,” by seeing that the orders of the Departamento de Tierras

Baldías y Colonización were carried out in this matter. This particular case, Freire described, was occurring while more and more Indians were finding themselves removed from their lands near the center of Puyo by the schemes of whites who would receive payment from the Indians to process their claims to title, then purposefully fail to follow through while other whites actually gained title to the lands in question. A more careful review of all land title requests was needed, Freire suggested.81

In November of that year, the Director de Tierras Baldías y Colonización, Carlos

Jiménez, wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to give an additional report on the case.

This letter confirms Freire’s account that a commission had set the Pastaza-Arapicos trail as the border between the lands in question, and that a subsequent commission had ordered the Colonia Madre Tierra once again to respect the boundary. Problems continued to arise, however, so in early November the Departamento de Tierras Baldías called a meeting between members of the Colonia Madre Tierra, the Concejo Cantonal de Pastaza, and the Indians from the Comuna. Alberto Sarmiento, a prominent lawyer and politician in the Oriente, represented the Colonia at the meeting while the Indians were accompanied the missionary Freire. The representative from the Departamento de

Tierras Baldías once again told all present that the trail from the Pastaza to Arapicos was to be respected as the boundary between the lands; however, the president of

Madre Tierra had the “indescribable audacity” to publicly declare that he would not

81 Fr. Manuel M. Freire, P. O. P. to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Puyo, July 21, 1955, AMG.

401 follow this order, as the Teniente Político of Puyo was himself a member of Madre

Tierra and would therefore make sure that the Colonia could do what it liked. Carlos

Jiménez, citing the policy of the National Government and especially the President to

“protect the Indian race of the Oriente from the abuses that certain white colonists tend to commit, based on their higher intellectual and cultural level,” recommended that the

Ministerio de Gobierno take special steps to ensure that both the Colonia and the Indian community respect the boundaries the Departamento de Tierras Baldías had set.82

There is no additional evidence in the archive of the Ministerio de Gobierno to demonstrate what, if any, further steps were taken in the matter. However, the case clearly demonstrates that the region’s indigenous inhabitants had their advocates in the struggle to maintain access to land, such as the Dominican missionary Freire and the officials of the Departamento de Tierras Baldías y Colonización who wanted to protect the Indian lands in these matters. But the case also shows the way that the orders of the ministries in Quito could be ignored by white colonists who could rely on the support and machinations of appointed officials in the region.83

Since 1949, the Juntas de Protección Indígena had existed in each canton of the

Oriente, at least on paper. In January of 1957, an official in the Ministerio de Gobierno wrote to the Minister on the topic of the Juntas and their role in looking out for the

82 Dr. Carlos M. Jiménez Salazar, Director de Tierras Baldías y Colonización to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, November 14, 1955, AMG.

83 Another letter from 1955 stated that various Indians around Puerto Napo had presented claims to title on certain parcels of land, but were frustrated at every turn in their “efforts of colonization” by whites who could take advantage of connections to state officials. For example, one Sr. Díaz was seeking to remove Indians from their lands in concert with his son who was a police officer in the region. It is interesting to note how the letter writer, Dr. Francisco Acosta Yépez, refers to the Indians as “colonists” even though they were presumably working the lands of their ancestors. This attests to the currency the notion of “colonization” had among state policies toward the region. Dr. Francisco Acosta Yépez to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Oriente y Policía, received 12 Julio 1955, AMG.

402 interests of the region’s Indians as regarded the sale of lands. Maximiliano Spiller, the director of the Josephine Mission in the Napo region, had written to the Ministerio to ask if it could be stipulated that the local Junta de Protección be involved in the review of all land contracts involving an indigenous party. The Asesor Jurídico of the Ministerio recommended to the Minister that all the secretaries of the Jefes Políticos of the Oriente be ordered to pass any land sale involving an Indian along to the local Junta de

Protección, just as Spiller had suggested.84 Like most other institutions in the Oriente, however, the Juntas de Protección could become the site of conflict and allegations of corruption. In 1957, Alberto Sarmiento, who had previously represented the Colonia

Madre Tierra in their dispute with the Comuna San Jacinto and was now the Diputado for Napo-Pastaza to the National Congress, wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno in order to transcribe a telegram he had received from Camilo Aguinda, the indigenous representative sitting on the Junta de Protección in Napo. In the telegram, Aguinda claimed that the local Jefe Político along with two police officers had ordered him to cease working on the land that was the inheritance from his parents. The officials threatened to place him under arrest and remove him from his post on the Junta.

Sarmiento assured the Ministerio that Aguinda was a moral and honest person, and that the case required urgent intervention.85 Later that month, the Ministerio de Gobierno let

Sarmiento know what the Governor of Napo-Pastaza’s view of the matter had been.

According to the governor, it was in fact Camilo Aguinda who was to blame in the matter. Using his position on the Junta, Aguinda had allegedly looked for any excuse to

84 Renato Pérez Drouet, Subsecretario del Ministerio de Gobierno to Monseñor Maximiliano Spiller, Vicario Apostólico del Napo, Quito, January 17, 1957, AMG.

85 Dr. Alberto Sarmiento, Diputado por Napo-Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Policía y Oriente, Quito, March 15, 1957, AMG.

403 stir up trouble involving other Indians and land parcels. The governor said that the Jefe

Político was completely in the right, as he was simply trying to promote peace and harmony among the citizens in the area. He had recently intervened in cases involving disputed lands to the satisfaction of those involved. Furthermore, Aguinda was lying about the threat of prison. The governor added that “persons against the current regime” were meddling with Indians in the region in order to discredit the state officials of the Oriente.86 If Sarmiento and Aguinda are believed, then state officials in the

Oriente could use state resources, in this case the police forces, to tamper with the

Junta de Protección’s members. If the Governor is believed, then the Junta’s advocacy on behalf of Indians in the region was subject to political machinations and personal desires. In either case, the Juntas were not necessarily effective entities in regulating the sales of Indian lands.

The Juntas did issue their reports about ongoing transactions, however. In

August of 1957, the Ministerio de Gobierno ordered the Governor of Napo-Pastaza to make an investigation of the claim against the agricultural cooperative “Ponce Enríquez” by twenty-two Indian families residing near Chicama, in Archidona Parish, who claimed that the cooperative had forcibly removed them from their lands. The Ministerio stated that the governor was to work with the local police to return the lands to the Indians if their allegations were true.87 Two weeks later, the governor wrote to the Ministerio to state that, indeed, there were several families of white colonists residing in the area described in the complaint, but that none of them had done anything prejudicial to

86 Renato Pérez Drouet, Subsecretario del Ministerio de Gobierno to H. Diputado Sr. Alberto Sarmiento, Quito, March 14, 1957, AMG.

87 Renato Pérez Drouet, Subsecretario del Ministerio de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de Napo- Pastaza, Quito, August 1, 1957, AMG.

404 Indians in the area. They had merely established many hectares of pasture on steep ground there, which could not have been done at the cost of any Indian land because steep ground is not suitable for Indian chacras, or subsistence plots. Furthermore, the white colonists had taken the initiative to build a bridge across the Misahuallí River there in response to the recent death of four Indians in the strong current. Their efforts would benefit the more than fifteen hundred Indians in the area, the governor claimed. He owned ten hectares of pasture in the zone, so he ordered the Junta de Protección to undertake a study of the case, to avoid conflict of interest.88 The Junta’s report, signed by Camilo Aguinda as the Indian representative, the Jefe Político Rafael Enríquez, and the Josephine missionary Luis Rizzo, found no wrongdoing by the white colonists. In fact, the report described, several Indian families had spontaneously stated that they had no problem with the white colonists.89

Amid all these conflicts, the appointed officials of the Oriente frequently mediated land disputes to the extent of their abilities. In February of 1957, the Indian Casimiro

Mamallacta asked the Governor of Napo Pastaza, Ricardo Cabrera Vergara, to formally cancel his sale of a parcel of land to the police officer Celso Morales. His desire to stop the transaction arose when another Indian, Antonio César Mamallacta, objected to the sale of this parcel by claiming co-ownership. The governor asked the Teniente Político of Archidona, site of the parcel in question, to investigate the matter.90 Later that month,

88 Ricardo Cabrera Vergara, Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza to Sr. Subsecretario de Gobierno, Tena, August 15, 1957, AMG.

89 Rafael M. Enríquez E., Camilo Aguinda, and Luis Rizzo, “Informe de La Junta Protectora de Indígenas de Napo-Oriente sobre Terrenos en el Sitio Shicama, Jurisdicción de la Parroquia de Archidona,” Tena, August 14, 1957, AMG.

90 Ricardo Cabrera Vergara, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza to Sr. Teniente Político de Archidona, Tena, February 5, 1957, AGN.

405 the matter was still not settled, as Antonio César Mamallacta was still seeking justice. In the governor’s view, Casimiro Mamallacta had proceeded in “bad faith” when he sold the land to the police officer because the land was not fully his to sell. Cabrera ordered the Teniente Político to go to the site in question along with Father Luis Rizzo, a delegate of the Junta de Protección Indígena. Casimiro was to return any money he got from the sale to the police officer, and the lands would return to the possession of

Pascual Mamallacta, Antonio César’s father.91 This case shows that disputes over land could pit indigenous people against one another when sales of parcels went wrong.

The governor, Ricardo Cabrera Vergara, again intervened on behalf of an Indian in the province the following month. As he told the Teniente Político of Puerto Napo, the

Indian Cristobal Pauchi had come into his office to complain that a colonist named

Gerardo Tovar was seeking to remove him from the one-and-a-half hectare plot he had owned for more than 40 years. The Governor’s words give some indication as to the frequency of these disputes: such cases were becoming “customary,” and the governor stated,

I principally desire that the Colonists have all kinds of aid and guarantee from the authorities, but at the same time [I desire] that the Indians be given the same guarantees, and in many cases more guarantees, because we should not allow that the ignorance of these Ecuadorians be abused.

Cabrera ordered the Teniente Político to intervene so that Pauchi’s land was respected, and to order Tovar to keep his livestock fenced in on his own property.92 Though the

Oriente was a set of ancillary provinces, lacking in monetary resources, well developed

91 Ricardo Cabrera Vergara, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza to Sr. Teniente Político de Archidona, Tena, February 25, 1957, AGN.

92 Ricardo Cabrera Vergara, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza to Sr. Teniente Político de Puerto Napo, Tena, March 4, 1957, AGN.

406 infrastructure, and quick communications networks, its appointed officials did intervene in many cases to see that laws were followed and that the rights of the citizens, even

Indians, were respected.

After the creation of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización in 1957, this new bureaucracy replaced the Departamento de Tierras Baldías y Colonización in cases involving disputes over Indian land in the Oriente. In the late 1950s, the indigenous people of Napo Province did indeed seek formal title to land from the INC through the local appointed officials. For example, in September of 1958, Salvador Tapuy formally registered his claim on a parcel of land of 59 hectares in Tena Parish.93 This and similar requests were displayed publicly in the office of the Teniente Político for thirty days so that any objection to the adjudication could be made. The Archivo de la Gobernación de

Napo in Tena contains dozens of other such claims made by indigenous people between 1958 and 1960, for parcels of land of an extension between 9 and 200 hectares. In each case, the Teniente Político typed up a page for public display that would allow objections to be registered within thirty days.

This establishment of this formal process did not prevent conflicts from occurring, however. In November of 1960, an Indian from Archidona named Matías Mamallacta

Salazar presented a request to the Instituto Nacional de Colonización to receive definitive title to the lands he had possessed for “many years” and which were

“exclusive patrimony of my ancestors for more than 150 years.” According to

Mamallacta, the Teniente Político of Archidona had failed to post this request in a public space and had also failed to transmit the documents to the INC. This was

93 Luis Hurtado Dávila, Teniente Político, Cartel y Aviso al Público, Tena, September 5, 1958, AGN.

407 “premeditated,” Mamallacta claimed, because the Teniente Político was working in concert with the Jefe Político and the Governor to profit off the “fervor to acquire lands” that had recently arisen among white colonists entering the region. As it happened, these officials were collaborating with one colonist, Arcadio Basantez, to see that

Mamallacta lost his land to Basantez. Mamallacta was called into the Jefe Político’s office and made to place his thumbprint on a document written in Spanish, which

Mamallacta could not read. He was then given twelve hundred sucres, and later found out that the document had been an agreement to sell his lands to Basantez for that sum. Mamallacta maintained that he had never agreed to sell his land. He reported all of this in a letter to the Ministerio de Gobierno, written on his behalf by Pedro

Huatatoca.94

Local officials as well as the Instituto Nacional de Colonización then wrote to the

Ministerio with their view of the dispute. In the first place, the Governor of Napo

Province, Gregorio Zabala, reported that Matías Mamallacta was certainly acting on someone else’s orders, perhaps some elements of the “frente anti-Comunista” that was stirring up trouble against the current government of president José María Velasco

Ibarra and his appointed officials. “I have always believed,” Governor Zabala wrote,

that the semi-savage Indian is pure and sane, but unfortunately, contact with certain white or mestizo elements has made him untrusting, filled with certain prejudices, due to the traditional fallacy of the whites or mestizos and unscrupulous authorities, absent of honesty and probity. This phenomenon makes the Indian think that all the Authorities are in solidarity at all times with the exploitative whites, because in truth this has happened in the past.

94 Matías Mamallacta and Pascual Huatatoca to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Archidona, no date, 1961, AMG.

408 The intermediary that was manipulating Mamallacta must be some interpreter or perhaps some “small lawyer (abogadillo) or ink-spiller (tinterillo)” as Mamallacta did not speak Spanish. Furthermore, the governor stated that Mamallacta had placed his thumbprint on the bill of sale to Basantez voluntarily, with full knowledge of what the document entailed.95 Around the time he wrote his own letter, Zabala had received a report from Luis G. León Bermeo, Delegate of the INC in Napo Province. León affirmed that indeed Mamallacta had willingly and with full knowledge agreed to sell his land to

Basantez. Only later had Mamallacta, “certainly counseled by someone,” as León opined, begun his complaints and refusal to carry out the terms of his agreement with

Basantez. He then acted in various ways to impede the INC’s official investigation of the matter. He closed his letter to the Governor “in the hopes” that it would “[contribute] to dispel the false accusations of persons who do not act on their own criteria, but according to that of other persons who exploit their ignorance, against which it is very difficult to struggle,” causing difficulties for the “progress of the country.”96 For his part, the Jefe Político of Napo Canton confirmed León’s version of things, stating that

Mamallacta had purposely fled the area in order to delay the solution of the problem, and that “surely the proceedings of the Indian is counseled by someone.”97

Complaints by Mamallacta would continue to occupy the attention of officials in

Napo Province for at least another couple of months. At the end of July 1961, Bolívar

León, a lawyer in Quito, wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno on behalf of Matías

95 Crnel. Gregorio Zabala M., Gobernador de la Provincia Napo to Sr. Subsecretario de Gobierno, Tena, June 15, 1961, AMG.

96 Luis G. León Bermeo, Delegado del I.N.C. en la Provincia del Napo to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia Napo, Tena, June 15, 1961, AMG.

97 Washington Espíndola L., Jefe Político del Canton Napo to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia Napo, Tena, June 15, 1961, AMG.

409 Mamallacta, his brother Sebastián Mamallacta, and Francisco Alvarado, who continued to claim that the authorities in the province were colluding with certain white colonists to remove them from their lands. According to León, the press in Quito had even reported on this scandal, and he was writing to ask the Ministerio what actions had been taken against the authorities involved.98 Governor Zabala answered that Bolívar León was probably motivated by a desire to tarnish the reputation of Zavala as an “authority of the

Velasquista Regime in this Province.” He stated that all of the accusations were false, and that León was working with Mamallacta and the former Teniente Político of

Archidona to stir up trouble. These “pseudo-apostles” of the Indian race were motivated only by personal interests, including the fact that León himself was planning to run for

Representative of Napo Province as the candidate of an opposing party in the next elections.99 These cases show how the allegation that the Oriente’s indigenous people were losing access to land could provoke the attention of the ministries in Quito as well as the action of the local state officials in the Oriente itself. The resolution of these problems often depended on each party’s ability to enlist the support of those who could engage the state using petitions in Spanish, as well as those who may have had personal or political relationships with the officials involved. Within the ancillary provinces of the Oriente, the adjudication and titling of land depended greatly upon these connections, given the inconsistency with which laws could be applied. As largely

98 Bolívar León E. to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, July 28, 1961, AMG.

99 Crnel. Gregorio Zabala M., Gobernador de la Provincia de Napo, “Informe que Presenta el Gobernador de la Provincia de Napo para Conocimiento del Señor Ministro de Gobierno, De Conformidad con lo Solicitado en Of. No. 570-GM,” no date, 1961, AMG. The Junta Protectora de Indígenas made a report in August of 1961 about the lands claimed by Sebastián Mamallacta, and found that he claimed too much land for himself which he did not work, and also prevented others from working their own land. Junta de Protección Indígenas, “Informe que Presentó acerca de la Inspección del Terreno de Sebastián Mamallacta,” Tena, August 17, 1961, AMG.

410 non-Spanish speaking inhabitants of this ancillary province, the Indians were at an inherent disadvantage when laws could not be relied upon to function as prescribed.

The Indians of the southern Oriente, most of whom were “Jívaros” (Shuar), as they were called by colonists and state officials, were also involved in the battle for access to land in the Oriente. They engaged state officials directly and through intermediaries, most commonly the Salesian or Franciscan missionaries in the region, in order to protest the actions of white colonists and poor authorities. In May of 1948, the

Franciscan missionary Pedro R. Oñate, in Zamora, informed the Ministerio de Gobierno that many Jívaros and Jívaras had recently come to him to complain that various “white colonists are arbitrarily invading their lands and removing them from possession, without the respective Civil Authority impeding these outrages by the colonists.” This was occurring on the land of the recently deceased Jívaro “Capitán” named Martín, who before his death had told the Jefe Político he desired that his lands pass to his children.

But, as the priest Oñate wrote, “unfortunately certain authorities that are sent to these places are nothing but opportunists, and are even given to the degrading vice of drunkenness, and, for that reason, have no patriotic aims.” The priest’s letter prompted the Ministerio de Gobierno to order the Jefe Político to investigate these allegations and to “energetically sanction” anyone who was in the wrong. There is no evidence to clarify whether any further steps were taken.100

In the view of some colonists, it was the Jívaros who were in the wrong on the question of land occupation. The same year as Oñate’s letter, citizens in the Zamora region wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to ask that two guardias civiles be sent to 28

100 Humberto Mata Martínez, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Jefe Político del Cantón Zamora, Quito, May 20, 1948, AMG.

411 de Mayo Parish to guarantee the property rights of the Ecuadorians living there because some Jívaros there were trying to expel the colonists from their lands in arbitrary fashion, threatening to “employ the characteristic fury and cunning of the savage Jívaro races.”101 The request for additional guardias civiles was passed along to the Chief of that force in Loja, the nearby highland provincial capital, but it is not clear what steps were taken.102 These accusations by and against Jívaros were characteristic of the period of increased colonization and development in the Oriente provinces of Santiago-

Zamora, and later, Morona-Santiago and Zamora-Chinchipe.

Allegations that the appointed officials of the Oriente were complicit with the white colonists against the Indians of the region were particularly common. In 1951,

Manuel Ignacio Medina, a self-proclaimed member of the Indian race residing in 28 de

Mayo Parish, complained that the Teniente Político there, Honorato Córdova, served as an authority for the whites only, and not for the Indians. He routinely collaborated with whites who abused and tormented the “unfortunate Indians” on their parcels of land.

Lately, one Julio Cabrero, “who acts as a gamonal, due to the support he has” from

Córdova, had been trying to remove Medina from his land by making deadly threats against his family. “For these reasons,” he wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno, “I come to implore commiseration, piety for the unfortunate Indians who are tormented by those of

101 Humberto Mata Martínez to Sr. Comandante General de la Guardia Civil, Quito, September 11, 1948, AMG.

102 Ezequiel Cadena Sierra, Subsecretario Accidental de Gobierno to Sr. Dr. Carlos Arrobo Carrión, Quito, September 16, 1948, AMG.

412 the superior race, as they believe, and ask that you order this employee to make justice, which is all that we ask.”103

At least one of the Oriente’s appointed officials wanted to see the Indians’ rights to land protected. In October of 1951, the Teniente Político of Huamboya, in the region surrounding the provincial capital of Macas, informed the Ministerio de Gobierno that problems were arising between colonists from the Agricultural Colony “Cumandá,” which had been formed eight years prior and composed of people from the highland city of Riobamba, and the “natives” of the region. He stated that the colonists had recently discovered that Indians had been working and growing crops on some of the lands that the colonists sought to make part of their colony. It seems the Teniente Político favored the Indians’ claim; he stated that they had been working the lands since “immemorial times.” He also desired to go to the site of the conflict and survey the situation, but to do so he would need the Ministerio to cover the costs of the journey.104 Three months later, he again wrote to the Ministerio, stating that the “Cumandá” colonists were seeking to expropriate the Indians’ lands. He still needed funds from the Ministerio to cover the costs of his examination of the dispute, including guides, food, and supplies. “I must tell you, Sr. Ministro,” he wrote, “that the natives of this region complain that the authorities do not care about justice for them, as they believe that the authority is in favor of the

‘Cumandá’ colony and its directors.”105 This Teniente Político’s sympathies seemed to lie with the Indians of the Oriente who saw their lands encroached upon by white

103 Manuel Ignacio Medina to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, 28 de Mayo, January 1, 1951, AMG.

104 Teniente Político to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Huamboya, October 4, 1951, AMG.

105 Teniente Político de Huamboya to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Huamboya, January 7, 1952, AMG.

413 colonists; furthermore, he was aware that many Indians believed the civil authorities to be working against them. In this case, it appears that the lack of funds and slow bureaucracy in the Ministerio de Gobierno prevented the Teniente Político from attending to this conflict over land in a timely fashion.

The encroachment on Indian lands in the Oriente took place while some colonists believed that the Jívaros were keeping too much land for themselves. In 1951, a group of colonists, originally from the province of Cañar in the southern highlands, wrote to the

Ministerio de Gobierno about their situation in Sucúa Parish, south of the provincial capital of Macas. They wrote to the Ministerio with “the profound desire to see our

Homeland, which by the rights of justice belongs to us, prosper; we want to say with this, that we are ready to lend our efforts to the colonization of this zone that is destined to be in the future the true port of entry to the Eden of our Oriente.” Like many colonists, they framed their efforts in terms of national value and pride, which derived from the status of the Oriente as national object of desire. “But what surprise,” they continued, “to learn that the majority of these lands are in the power of the Salesians, who, according to a contract with the Supreme Government, have claimed these lands for the Jívaros, who we know do not occupy even one-hundredth of all that is claimed.” This fact was inimical to the whole country, as

with the Contract that we allude to, our Oriente will never be populated, rather it will be the waste of multitudes who, due to the impediment that exists, will never know it, resulting later in the de-population of rich zones, which due to their nature, deserve more attention from the government.

They asked the Ministerio to give a “free pass” to new colonists who “with their effort will bring greatness to the future of a great portion of our Homeland, which until today is in

414 the power of persons who only desire to live in ignorance of the civilized world.”106 In these colonists’ view, the occupation and development of Oriente land by whites from the highlands was equivalent to progress; they presented themselves as agents working for the greatness of Ecuador while the Indians of the Oriente (and the Salesian missionaries who protected them) were obstacles to this. In short, they were carrying out the patriotic project that the national object of the Oriente demanded, while the region’s autochthonous inhabitants were standing in the way.

The Salesians answered these charges shortly after the colonists’ contacted the

Ministerio. The Procurador General of the Salesian Missions, Pedro M. Sagasti, wrote to the Ministro in response to the latter’s calling of attention to the “enormous and disproportionate assignation of land that the Salesian Mission has done.” Sagasti explained that these reserves did not benefit the Apostolic Vicariate of Méndez and

Gualaquiza (the Salesian jurisdiction in the Oriente) in any way; rather their object was

“absolutely just and even plausible: that is, to have reserves for the compatriots of the jungle.” The assigning of lands to the Jívaros as protected reserves was done to

“defend the poor inhabitants of the Oriente jungles from the preponderant abandonment and injustice done by white colonists and certain unscrupulous authorities.” The

Salesians had never given any of these lands to whites, but only to those Jívaros who needed them, according to Sagasti. These efforts were seeking to prevent the Jívaros from being abused and therefore obligated to “abandon our Ecuadorian Oriente to seek guarantees, protection and defense beyond our frontiers, that is to say, under Peruvian tutelage.” Just as the colonists’ argued that their efforts were for the good of the whole nation, so did the Salesians: reserving lands for the Jívaros prevented Peru from

106 Colonos de Sucúa to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno i Oriente, Sucúa, June 25, 1951, AMG.

415 benefiting in that frontier region. Sagasti went on to point out that in fact, there were only

265 square kilometers, divided into seven different reserves, for a total of six thousand

Jívaros. Anyone claiming that the Jívaros enjoyed more land that that must have personal interests at stake, according to Sagasti.107 There is some evidence that the

Ministerio de Gobierno was convinced by Sagasti’s argument; in 1953, an official from the Ministerio ordered the Governor of Santiago-Zamora to give special respect and consideration to the reserves that the Salesians had established for the indigenous groups.108

In the view of some state officials, though, the Jívaros’ claims to large quantities of land caused problems in the Oriente. In October of 1953, Rosendo Alevar Ordóñez, the Jefe Político of Gualaquiza, in the Salesian region of the southern Oriente, informed the Ministerio de Gobierno that he daily received complaints both from colonists who looked to stake a claim on state lands and become latifundistas, and from the Jívaros that resist “conceding any of their exaggerated pretentions.” The legal situation regarding land tenancy was so confusing that this Jefe Político found it impossible to satisfy all sides, provoking the intervention of civil and ecclesiastical authorities. The latter group were called to intervene any time the dispute involved Jívaros. In Alevar’s view, the Jívaro believed himself to be “absolute owner of the entire jungle, and being a nomad, he adduces that he or one of his ancestors occupied either all or a part of the lands that some colonist tries to occupy, this is a thesis that is frequently sustained when claims of this type are presented.” At the same time, “the established colonist

107 Prof. Pedro M. Sagasti, S. D. B., Procurador General de las Misiones Salesianas to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno i Oriente, Quito, August 11, 1951, AMG.

108 J. E. Bucheli C., Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de Santiago Zamora, Quito, October 3, 1953, AMG.

416 signals boundaries that he believes will make him in time a latifundista, none of them has pretentions smaller than fifty hectares of land, with some coming to signal boundaries that encompass hundreds of hectares.” As noted above, laws did in fact exist that determined the procedures for land titling and imposed a limit of fifty hectares; nevertheless, this particular Jefe Político stated that he was unaware of any such law, which speaks to the lack of clarity that state officials faced when attempting to administer the Oriente according to the laws of the Republic. Alevar’s attention was at that time occupied by a case in which three separate parties claimed a particular piece of land: a colonist named Alvarado, who claimed to have bought the land from a Jívaro who left the area in a desire to escape the “exigencies of the Salesian priests”; another

Jívaro named Naranza, who had lived for some time around the land; and a señor

Guillermo Choco, proprietor of the Hacienda “Sacramento,” part of which was the parcel of land in question. In Alevar’s view, Choco’s claim was the most legitimate as the property titles for the Hacienda had been properly registered for fifty years. He told all of this to the Ministerio in order to pre-empt the “poor intentions of some complainant”; it seems he felt that more claims and counter-claims about the matter would reach the

Ministerio de Gobierno in Quito.109

Two years later, Gualaquiza was again the site of some consternation caused by the issue of land possession and the intervention of Salesians and Jívaros. In 1955,

Moisés A. Guzmán Bravo was the Jefe Político; his letter to the Ministerio de Gobierno displays clear frustration toward the Jívaros and Salesians and their intervention in administration. Guzmán lamented that

109 Rosendo Alevar Ordóñez, Jefe Político de Gualaquiza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Gualaquiza, October 11, 1953, AMG.

417 the Oriente is perceived as a herd of savages, Jívaros, that can only make themselves heard through the ‘missionaries.’ It should be understood, once and for all, that the Oriente is inhabited by Ecuadorians who are conscious of their duties and here also, in the middle of the jungle, there are people of sufficient moral and material solvency to carry out an official duty. Lamentably, for a long time here, it has been portrayed that in the Oriente there are only Salesian Fathers and ‘jibaritos.’… But the reality is very distinct. And this has caused many missionary priests, stimulated by certain guarantees that the Ecuadorian state has given them, to invade the arena that belongs exclusively to Ecuadorians, especially if we are carrying out some official function.

Recently, he alleged, the Salesian priests in Gualaquiza had displayed their ignorance of the Republic’s laws and had trampled on the rights of citizens during disputes over land tenancy. “In reference to the possession of lands,” Guzmán wrote, “it is they [the

Salesians] that have become the distributors of public goods. Alleging that they are

‘legal tutors’ of the jíbaros, they impede the processing of the litigious issues between whites and jíbaros by the civil authorities.” They were actively impeding colonization in several different parts of his jurisdiction, making it so that “the whites are corralled by a fence of impassible iron.” Furthermore, any colonist who denounced the Salesians’ interventions was made to seem like “a heretic.” Guzmán implored the Ministro to take steps to ensure that the Salesians would no longer intervene in civil matters.110

Guzmán’s exasperation suggests that the Salesians’ efforts to curtail white occupation of Jívaro lands were a significant factor in how colonization progressed in the region.

Not all the Jefes Políticos in the area expressed the same view as Guzmán, however. Further north, in Macas, Leonardo Rivadeneira, Jefe Político of Morona

Canton, wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno to decry the “repeated abuses that the white colonists are committing against the Jívaros, who are the kings of the jungle and only

110 Moisés A. Guzmán Bravo, Jefe Político de Gualaquiza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Gualaquiza, May 22, 1955, AMG.

418 owners of certain sectors, who have lived more than hundreds of years.” At the current time, he reported, “the white colonists, abusing the poverty and ignorance of the

Jívaros, are dispossessing them of their properties, which they have worked to have the means of support for life.” Rivadeneira reported that he had recently gone to a site where nine Jívaro padres de familia complained that the white colonists Eulalia and

Julia Velín had in “very abusive form” encroached upon the lands that the Jívaros had worked for many years. Rivadeneira stated that the Velín women did not have title to the land. He does not state that the Jívaros had title, either, but their history of occupying and working the land seems to satisfy him of their right to it. He asked the

Ministerio de Gobierno to work with the Ministerio de Economía so that a delegate could be sent to settle the dispute. This was a vital necessity “because, if this continues, the

Jívaros are moving away to settle in enemy territory, that is, to become part of our neighbors to the south, being as a result, direct spies in a not-too-distant future.”111

Again, the issue of national security and the possibility that Jívaros could eventually aid

Peru against Ecuador was used as justification for particular policies of administration in the Oriente.

The Jívaros themselves wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno regarding such matters. As it turns out, the Salesians were not always their protectors. In 1955, sixteen

Jívaros from Huambi Parish, calling themselves “Ecuadorian citizens, in plain exercise of their rights as such, in conformity with the guarantees that our Political Charter offers,” lodged a formal complaint about the situation regarding their occupation of land.

As they explained, they had been living in a place called Nagenvaima for a quarter

111 Leonardo Rivadeneira R., Jefe Político de Macas to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, September 20, 1955, AMG.

419 century, on the left bank of the Upano River. For that time, they had been living in peace, dedicated to agricultural and domestic labor. A few months prior, as they reported, the Salesian Mission solicited and received a concession by the government for the land the Jívaro complainants occupied. Now the Salesians sought to impose

“absolute submission to their orders, even in those aspects having to do with the internal privileges of each person.” They also sought to compel the Jívaros to send their children to the mission school. The writers cited articles from the Ecuadorian

Constitution having to do with the rights of parents over the education of their children, liberty of conscience, and the rights of private property, as evidence that the Salesians were violating their rights as citizens. These complainants sent their children to the school of the evangelical mission in Chupientza, and were all themselves adherents of that faith. They claimed that it was their “ideological principles” that drew the ire of the

Salesians. They closed their letter by making reference to the typical characteristics of

Jívaros with which officials in the Ministerio de Gobierno would have been familiar: “our situation is one of anguish: for, as the Sr. Ministro knows, in the jungle, unfortunately, there are rivalries between tribes, and soon after abandoning our land, which was always ours, we would be surrounded by enemy tribes, and it should be added that it is not reasonable to awaken among us, humble inhabitants of this Ecuadorian jungle, sentiments of religious rivalry, of so much danger.”112 This letter suggests that the

Salesians’ tenacious defense of Jívaros’ access to land did not extend to those Indians who had converted to evangelical Protestantism with one of the several evangelical missions of the region.

112 Shariana Yambañec et al to Sr. Ministro de Oriente, Huambi, September 28, 1955, AMG.

420 The Governor of Morona Santiago, Manuel Moncayo, later weighed in on this matter after the Ministerio de Gobierno asked for his opinion. Moncayo stated that he had issued orders to the Salesian Mission at Sucúa, nearest to Nagenvaima (or

“Najembaime,” as the governor wrote it), telling them to “support the Jívaros in their possessions that they have been possessing for many years” and to leave them free to send their children to whatever school they deem convenient. He wrote that the Padre

Superior of the mission informed him that the Salesians had done nothing more than build a new trail through the Najembaime area; they had not, he claimed, tried to force any Jívaros off their land nor had they tried to prevent any Jívaros from attending the evangelical mission. The governor closed his report by stating that he ordered the

Teniente Político of Huambi Parish to tour the area in order to “establish harmony and solve any difficulty that may come up between the different Jívaros of that sector.”113

Again, the appointed civil officials of the Oriente were called to mediate the disputes between the region’s indigenous people and different groups of outsiders, in this case, two different types of missionary organizations that competed for the religious adherence of the Indians.

Evidence from Zamora-Chinchipe demonstrates that Jívaros were subject to the manipulation of whites in regards to the occupancy of land into the 1960s. In March of

1960, the Jefe Político of Yacuambi Canton, Manuel Cabrera, informed the Governor of the Province about a dispute over some lands that rightfully belonged to one Carlos

Ortega, who had bought them from a certain Rodolfo Armijos. Armijos had worked and improved the land using “mingas,” or communal work parties of the “possessors” of the

113 Manuel Moncayo, Gobernador de Morona-Santiago to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, November 28, 1955, AMG.

421 land, as well as paid workers. Ortega, and Armijos before him, held full legal title to the lands. Prior to that, it had been owned by the Franciscan Mission in the Zamora region; this entity had improved the land from its wilderness condition. Only then did some

Indians come to settle on it, entering “without any scruples” and in face of opposition by the Franciscans and the civil authorities. It became the private property of Rodolfo

Armijos with the consent of the Ministerio and without anyone lodging formal opposition.

So, the Jefe Político Cabrera explained, any Indian’s claim to have possessed the land in question for more than thirty years was false. In fact, these claims were provoked by

“persons interested in money” who had encouraged the Indians to seek the acquisition of these lands. It was all part of a scheme to “take advantage of the ingenuity of the

Indians to exploit them without misery.” The Departamento de Tierras Baldías had previously sent a delegate to settle this dispute, but the Indians, due to their “obstinacy” refused to accept any compromise. This obstinacy, also, was due to the influence of suspicious “counselors” from outside the region who had meddled with the Indians’ affairs. As evidence of this influence, Ortega stated that some other Indians had arrived at “friendly agreements” with Ortega over the concession of the land they occupied.114

Cabrera’s description of the situation reveals a number of assumptions and biases. Principal is the assumption that the land in question, before the arrival of the

Franciscans, belonged to nobody, thereby negating any Jívaro claim to the land in the present. He also judged the Indians who settled on the land while it was in Franciscan hands to have acted “without scruples,” denying the possibility that any may have had ancestral claim to it. Furthermore, when Ortega acquired the land as private property, it

114 Manuel Cabrera C., Jefe Político de Yacuambi to Sr. Gobernador de Zamora-Chinchipe, Yacuambi, March 23, 1960, AMG.

422 was indeed occupied by many Indians; presumably, these were the same “possessors” that worked in mingas to improve the land under Ortega’s direction. He also assumed that the Indians’ attempts to acquire parcels of the land in question could not arise from their own desires; similar to the evidence above, from Napo-Pastaza, this state official felt that suspicious outsiders must have been responsible for Indians’ engagement of state officials toward economic ends. Cabrera’s account portrays the Indians as illiterate in the workings of the state, and therefore especially subject to the predation of whites who sought to acquire land.

A similar report came out of Zamora the following year, this time from the governor, Segundo T. Pavón. This time, the exploiter of Jívaros was himself a Jívaro named Chinguima. He had changed his name to José Antonio Dávila after becoming

“civilized,” and had been “fooling the naïve and innocent Jívaros with the formation of a cooperative called Pangui Nungui.” Along with the complicit Teniente Político of

Cumbaratza Parish, Pacífico Apolo, Dávila had gathered large sums of money from 86

Jívaros and sought a large concession of 32,000 hectares from the Instituto Nacional de

Colonización. After Pavón’s intervention, along with Monsignor Mosquera from the

Salesian Mission, Pacífico Apolo was fired as Teniente Político. The members of the cooperative were then informed that they would each receive 50 hectares, and they were told that nobody could legally demand any money from them. However,

Chingüime (Dávila) was attempting to convince them all that they had been lied to, and that they needed to lodge a new round of complaints with the President in Quito. For this, Chingüime and the former Teniente Político Apolo were exploiting the Jívaros once

423 again, asking for a new round of money.115 Chingüime seems to have relied on the

Jívaros’ unfamiliarity with the state system and the processing of land claims in order to extract money from them. Additionally, he relied on the all-too-common complicity of the region’s appointed officials in illicit proceedings for personal financial gain.

The struggle over access to land in the Oriente was waged in the context of the existing beliefs about the Oriente and its significance for the nation that were derived from the region’s construction as a national object of desire in those and preceding decades. Colonists, alleged latifundistas, and Indians (or those acting on their behalf) employed ideological justifications for their land claims against those they deemed illegitimate. The yardstick of progress as concerned the Oriente was generally the most important factor. National security was also a significant justification, as seen in the arguments that made reference to Peru’s designs upon the Oriente’s lands and Indians.

This was a class struggle particular to time and place; the colonists, alleged latifundistas, and Indians used the rhetorical tools the Oriente as national object provided and interacted with a state system composed of individuals with multiple administrative responsibilities, a phenomenon that was itself a product of the Oriente’s status as a group of ancillary provinces. The representatives of the state responded to each group’s efforts as individuals; their preference for one land claim or another was not necessarily predictable. But as with other aspects of the Oriente’s administration, the connections, jealousies, and ambitions of these individuals determined the outcome of disputes. The Indians of the Oriente were at a distinct disadvantage in this regard.

This was a significant consequence of the fact that the region remained a disorganized

115 Tnte. Segundo T. Pavón, Gobernador de Zamora-Chinchipe to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Zamora, September 1, 1961, AMG.

424 and under-resourced group of ancillary provinces, in which private networks of power and corruption prevented the smooth functioning of a system based on laws.

425 CHAPTER 7 INDISPENSABLE NON-CITIZENS: THE ORIENTE’S INDIANS IN ANCILLARY PROVINCES, 1940-1960

As the non-indigenous population of the Oriente increased in the 1940s and 50s and as the appointed officials of the state varyingly pursued an application of the

Republic’s laws and their own personal interest and jealousies, it was not just Indians’ access to land that was brought into question. A more general system of control over the indigenous population was exerted by the region’s landowners, colonists, and the

Tenientes and Jefes Políticos that were involved in so many different aspects of administration and justice in the Oriente. The labor of the region’s indigenous population was relied upon for both private and public projects, a fact that led to a great deal of conflict and predation upon the region’s Indians by those from outside the region. The

Oriente remained a set of ancillary provinces; they were under-resourced and disorganized versions of those in the rest of the country. In such a situation, the Indians of the region confronted a state system that was only partially based on the laws prescribed for the Oriente and the Republic in general. In these isolated ancillary provinces, private networks of power combined with complicit or incompetent state officials to exert a great deal of control over the lives of the Quichua and Shuar indigenous people of the region. A salient characteristic, then, of the Oriente as frontier in this period was the way in which a modus vivendi between Indians and colonists, landowners, and state officials was hammered out in the absence of an efficient legal system and judicious oversight by those seeking to enforce the “Special Laws” of the

Oriente. These ancillary provinces were an internal colony that bears out the characteristics of “internal colonialism” as described by Pablo González Casanova and others, who noted the domination of white-mestizo or “ladino” social actors over Indians

426 through linguistic domination and the brining to bear of “colonial attitudes” by local functionaries.1

The Quichua-speaking Indians of the northern Oriente, often referred to as

“Yumbos,” as well as the Shuar peoples of the southern Oriente, known as “Jívaros,” both contested the increasing presence of Spanish-speaking, white-mestizo Ecuadorian citizens in the region. The Ecuadorianization of the Oriente included a contentious process of determining the citizenship status of the region’s Indians. As the evidence shows, there was no consensus about this question; they could be viewed (and could identify themselves) as citizens like any other, deserving of the same guarantees under the Constitution as anyone else. On the other hand, notions about their ethnic characteristics continued to influence the assumptions of colonists and state officials, making the Indians seem more like outsiders, or at best, citizens-in-waiting. Andrés

Guerrero has discussed certain characteristics of the “architecture of citizenship” in postcolonial republics like Ecuador, in which a certain group (in this case, white-mestizo colonists and patrones) wields social, political, and economic power over another (in this case, the Indians of the Oriente). This power is wielded through a “habitus of practice” that is influenced by assumptions about the dominated group’s racial characteristics.2 Guerrero has also noted that the actions of petty functionaries are sites where “common sense” notions about the dominated population can be inserted.3 It is my contention that “common sense” for the Oriente’s Jefes and Tenientes Políticos

1 González Casanova, “Internal Colonialism,” 35.

2 Andrés Guerrero, “The Administration of Dominated Populations under a Regime of Customary Citizenship: The Case of Postcolonial Ecuador,” in Thurner and Guerrero, eds., After Spanish Rule, 274.

3 Ibid., 295.

427 derived from the descriptions of Amazonian indigenous peoples imparted to wider

Ecuadorian society, as described in Chapter 3. The ways the Indians were viewed were inseparable from the ongoing project to develop and incorporate the Oriente as part of the Ecuadorian state and nation. The Indians were frequently viewed as obstacles or at least limiting factors in this project, even while their labor was relied upon for it. While there were state institutions to protect the Indians from predation and illegitimate control by white-mestizos, these institutions lay in the hands of compromised individuals. The state-system that the Indians faced was a hybrid, public-private one. The Tenientes

Políticos and other such appointed officials were meant to guarantee their protection, but these officials were often part of personal networks dominated by wealthy, influential landowning patrones that sought, above all, to maintain access to Indians’ labor through debt peonage. Andrés Guerrero has argued that in highland Ecuador during the nineteenth century, “everything having to do with Indian people was decentered toward the limits of the state, ending up in the realm of a nebula of powers located either in the plexus of the private sphere (that is, the hacienda) or in the blurred threshold of the public (that is, in the hands of petty functionaries who confuse the public with the private, the personal, and the domestic).” The system of domination exercised over the

Oriente’s Indians in the twentieth century followed this pattern; it was perhaps made even more acute by the fact that the Oriente remained set of ancillary provinces in which institutions that were designed to protect the Indians did not function regularly or effectively. It was an arena in which the state system functioned not according to

“technologies of rule” like legal codes, but by “diffuse knowledges of domination…that

428 do not leave written traces.”4 This chapter seeks to illustrate the multiplicity of ways in which this occurred in the Oriente.

The Ecuadorianization of the Oriente was in some senses a missionary undertaking, carried out both by actual missionaries, both Catholic and evangelical, as well as secular actors that looked to extend Ecuadorian nationality and citizenship to

Yumbos and Jívaros. While examining this “mission impulse,” however, it is vital to keep in mind that the frontier mission is laced with what David G. Sweet has called an “anti-

Indian bias.” Furthermore, “nothing about the mission enterprise is self-evident,”5 and the interests of colonists and large landowners tended to triumph thanks to the passive and active complicity of state officials. For the Indians, the region in question was not the Oriente; it was not east of anywhere to them. But as the Oriente was brought more fully into the Ecuadorian nation and state, a system based on the Spanish language and the dominance of Ecuadorian citizens who originated in the highlands came to have significant and inimical consequences for those Indians who could only engage that system in limited ways. In these ancillary provinces of Ecuadorian state, Spanish- speakers and those with connections to state officials dominated, as the laws intended to protect the Indians’ interests could not be reliably enforced.

Yumbos and Patrones in the Northern Oriente

In the two decades after the loss of territory to Peru by the Rio de Janeiro

Protocol, the Ecuadorian state waged a campaign against the influential, landowning patrones (alternately referred to as “patronos”) of the Oriente for access to indigenous

4 Ibid., 296-97.

5 Sweet, “Reflections on the Ibero-American Frontier Mission as an Institution in Native American History,” 91.

429 labor and to establish laws to govern this population in ways that were not dominated by the patrones. These patrones were, as Blanca Muratorio describes, largely comprised of white Ecuadorians from the highlands who had come to the northern Oriente region in the 1920s and earlier. They engaged in a number of economic activities like cattle ranching, the raising of cash crops like coffee, and subsistence agriculture. They relied on a workforce of Indians controlled either through debt peonage, established using the forced sale of goods, or through obligations imposed by Indian authorities known as varayoqs who worked in concert with the patrones.6 These influential whites often competed with each other for Indian labor, and many were able to establish sizeable zones of influence in which nearly every indigenous person worked for a particular patrón.7 Despite folklore beliefs about the hardworking nature of Oriente colonists,

Muratorio argues that these patrones largely avoided any manual labor of their own, given their control of the Quichua-speaking workforce.8

The state’s struggle for influence over the patrones was underway even before the war with Peru, as evidenced by the letters sent between Oriente officials in the Napo region. For example, in August of 1940, the Teniente Político of Archidona wrote to his immediate superior, the Jefe Político of Napo Canton, to complain that a landowner in his parish had been paying Indians in the area to convince them not to carry out the work on the region’s roads that was required of them. Furthermore, the landowner, or

6 Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, 143-46.

7 Ibid., 148-52.

8 Ibid., 156.

430 patrón, claimed that he had the Jefe Político’s blessing in this.9 As with other aspects of the Oriente’s administration, residents of the region could claim the support of one or another appointed official in order to justify their actions. The landowners, for their part, used their Indian workers against the local appointed officials. The Teniente Político of

Loreto Parish, also in the Napo region, wrote to the Director General de Oriente in Quito to explain the source of numerous complaints against him and other state officials in the

Oriente. As the Teniente Político alleged, the patrones of the region “trick the natives of these hamlets” into sending letters to the government demanding that the authorities be fired. Six previous Tenientes Políticos had been removed in this fashion since 1933, he claimed. Once the authorities were fired, these landowners then kept the Indians completely “subjected” and did with them as they pleased, including convincing them not to send their children to public schools on the false pretext that the government would conscript any literate Indian boy into the army.10 Later that same year, Loreto had a different Teniente Político who had a similar set of problems: the Indians in the settlement of Avila, in his parish, refused to carry out any work on either the Teniente

Político’s request or that of some other “white” in the area, which put the Teniente

Político in the awkward position of raising the ire of both the indigenous and white inhabitants of his parish.11

The tension over whether Indians would follow the orders of state officials or those of their patrones could lead to violence. In September of 1940, Eloy Baquero filed

9 J. B. Saínz, Teniente Político de Archidona to Sr. Jefe Político del Napo, Archidona, August 28, 1940, AGN.

10 Teniente Político de Loreto to Sr. Director General de Oriente, Loreto, January 15, 1940, AGN.

11 A. Mendoza Crespo, Teniente Político de Loreto to Sr. Jefe Político del Napo, Loreto, November 23, 1940, AGN.

431 a formal statement with the Jefe Político in Tena to declare that the police officer Emilio

Vega had entered the house of the Indian Berna Pisango and physically assaulted then held him prisoner for three days simply because Pisango refused to do roadwork, having already fulfilled his work obligations.12 Vega gave his own testimony to the Jefe

Político in which he stated that the Teniente Político of Archidona had ordered him to make a “general tour” of all the Indians in the parish, “whether they were free or peons of some agriculturalist,” in order to have them go and work on the roads. He arrested

Pisango only after Pisango had threatened him, stating that he hard orders from his patrón to ignore all orders of the authorities.13

The communications of the region’s petty officials reveals their preoccupation with the condition of the Indians in Napo Pastaza Province. In the midst of the war with

Peru in July of 1941, the Vice President of the Napo Municipal Council wrote to the Jefe

Político of Napo Canton to express his dismay that rumors were spreading among the

Indians that they would be forced into the army. As he stated to the Jefe Político,

you, señor Jefe Político, know well the psychology of the Indian of this place, and you will duly appreciate the disastrous consequences for the subsistence of these pueblos that these rumors can cause, making the Indian leave the populated areas, to go and establish himself in the abrupt and virgin jungle, with great difficulty to attract them back to the pueblos they have abandoned.

This Municipal Council official asked the Jefe Político to do what he could to convince the Indians of the canton that there was no threat of conscription, and that they could go on giving their services as transporters of goods and conservers of the public roads. He

12 Eloy Baquero to Sr. Jefe Político Accidental, Tena, September 14, 1940, AGN.

13 Testimony of Emilio Vega to Sr. Jefe Político, September 20, 1940, AGN.

432 also asked that anyone spreading such rumors of conscription be severely punished.14

The Council member’s letter reveals that the Indians were seen as vital for daily life in the Oriente, and rumors of abuse that caused them to flee into the jungle would severely hamper the project of developing the Oriente as a piece of the Ecuadorian state and nation.

The Ministerio de Defensa, which at the beginning of the 1940s was responsible for the Oriente’s administration, did receive a number of complaints from the Oriente about the abuses being committed on the region’s indigenous people. In July of 1941, one official from the Ministerio wrote to the Jefe Político in Tena to state his concern about the way that the Indians were being held subject to the “odious and inhumane custom” of pongos, the taking of Indian children as servants, “which is nothing less than an attack on the liberty of individuals” by whites who would “contract and oblige [the

Indians] in whatever form best suited [the whites’] interests.” The Ministerio had even received reports that the Oriente’s appointed officials, in addition to the private landowners, were paying as little as two hundred sucres to retain an Indian servant until the servant’s “exhaustion (agotamiento).” The authorities were also reportedly forcing

Indians to work on the private lands of the authorities at the cost of the Indians’ own ability to provide for their families. The minister reminded the Jefe Político that the

Constitution guaranteed “absolute equality of rights” for all citizens in the country; in this group were implied the Indians, who could not go on suffering “feudalistic and barbarous” practices. The Ministerio official ordered the Jefe Político of Napo to

14 Aldelmo Rodríguez F., Vicepresidente Encargado de la Presidencia del Concejo Municipal de Napo-Oriente to Sr. Jefe Político del Cantón, Tena, July 27, 1941, AGN.

433 investigate these accusations and do everything in his power to punish them.15 The

Indians were citizens deserving of protection, according to the minister. But it is clear that the whites in the region were able to abuse the rights of the Oriente’s Indians in numerous ways, including taking their children as servants. Since the region remained a set of ancillary provinces, in which laws were easily ignored, the Indians suffered the consequences.

An incident from Loreto Parish in 1944 demonstrates another way that whites could exert control over the region’s Indians for their own benefit, and at the expense of the government’s initiatives. According to the Teniente Político of Loreto, a former police officer named Alfonso Mendoza had recently arrived in the parish with his family. Since his arrival, he had been waging a campaign against the Teniente Político because that official sought to prohibit certain “customary abuses.” Mendoza had as “peons” two

“famed brujos,” or witch doctors, that he employed to oversee the account books that

Mendoza held with his other Indian workers. Mendoza took advantage of the “fear that an Indian has before a brujo” to ensure that they would remain indebted to him permanently. With the threat of witchcraft, Mendoza charged his workers inflated prices for basic goods that they would never be able to pay off. Furthermore, Mendoza sought to convince other Indians in the Parish to refuse to provide any labor on government projects, thereby harming the development of agriculture and infrastructure. The

Teniente Político asked for the governor’s help, and stated that he could do nothing about these abuses as there was only one police officer in the entire parish.

Furthermore, he could not easily communicate with his superiors as there was no mail

15 Coronel R. H. Rosales, el Jefe del IV Departamento to Sr. Jefe Político del Tena, Quito, July 3, 1941, AGN.

434 service. “Sir,” he pleaded, “until when are we going to live in abandonment; without mail service it appears we are in exile.”16 This was a situation characteristic of the Oriente as a set of ancillary provinces; the lack of police control and poor communications meant that influential private individuals could shirk the laws and accumulate wealth and indebted peons.

As that and many other cases show, the good intentions of certain state officials and ministers could not be carried out easily. These problems persisted when the

Oriente’s administration had passed into the hands of the Ministerio de Gobierno. The situation was bad enough to provoke the Governor of Napo-Pastaza, Arturo Orcés, to send a letter to all the Tenientes Políticos of his jurisdiction that was to be posted in a public place in each parish. In the letter, Orcés transcribed a telegram from the

Ministerio de Gobierno, which stated that in regards to Indian labor, “It is fundamental that the Indians be free to work where they like.” Furthermore, all Indians should be allowed to pay off their debts to the patronos, as the Código de Trabajo (Work Code) that governed such matters in the rest of the Republic applied just as well in the Oriente.

Orcés added that he would be “inflexible” with any Teniente Político who “strayed one millimeter” from these instructions.17 He had earlier written the Ministro de Gobierno to thank him for clearly stating that “the law is above custom when it comes to the indigenous problem.” He indicated that this clarification had caused a “commotion”

[“revuelo”] among the patronos of the province, who were accustomed to “exploiting” and “living exclusively on the basis of the work of the Indian.” Orcés predicted

16 Teniente Político de Loreto to Sr. Gobernador de Napo Pastaza, Loreto, December 29, 1944, AGN.

17 Arturo Orcés, Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza, Circular, Tena, June 27, 1945, AGN.

435 optimistically that strict application of the Código de Trabajo could put an end to all these problems within one year. After this, the Indian would have the “right to life, to culture, to betterment,” and would develop a “new mentality that will be the definitive basis for the reconstruction of the Oriente.” Orcés did not doubt that he would receive many complaints about this effort, but it was necessary for the “vigor of our future nationality.”18 The Oriente was a region laced with national importance and patriotic ideas. The loss of territory to Peru, still a recent memory, indicated the need for the region’s “reconstruction.” In the governor’s view, the Indians of the region were to play a fundamental role in this. Special effort was needed to overcome the administrative deficiencies inherent to the ancillary provinces of the Oriente, characterized by a lack of resources and the significant influence of wealthy patrones that could abuse the laws and their Indian workers at will.

A month later, Orcés was clearly frustrated with the people who “have not understood or who do not want to understand the instructions about the relations between Indian workers and patronos that were recently given.” In a circular to all the

Jefes Políticos of the province, Orcés reminded them of Article 141 of the Constitution, which prohibited slavery and concertaje and which provided penalties for discrimination based on race. He clarified that he did not intend to cancel all debts existing between

Indians and patronos, but only that the state authorities had the right to verify the legitimacy of all such debts. As he explained, “the Indian is free as are all Ecuadorians.

As such, like all Ecuadorians, he has rights and obligations, which are established by the Constitution and the laws. The fact that the Indian owes a debt does not mean that

18 Arturo Orcés, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, June 1, 1945, AGN.

436 for this mere fact he has lost his liberty.”19 Orcés declared that the laws of the Republic should function in the Oriente as they did anywhere else. The realities of the region, however, meant that the Indians of the region could not truthfully be considered as free and equal citizens. They were subject to private control beyond the scope of what the

Constitution and laws prescribed.

Another indication of the influence that private individuals wielded over their

Indian workforce came from the Teniente Político Elías Andrade Chacón, who in

November of 1945 complained to his superior, the Jefe Político of Napo, about certain

“unscrupulous merchants [comerciantes]” who manipulated the Indians of his parish to their will. Recently, these men had convinced a number of Indians to travel to Quito to formally oppose the construction of a school in their parish. Their white manipulators convinced them to do this in order to maintain the “absolute ignorance of the Indian for their personal advantage.” They also hoped to go on indebting Indian children, who would work on their personal projects rather than attend school. The machinations of these “false apostles” of the Indian race would result in the degradation of the settlements of the parish into a “state of savagery.” Andrade predicted that his attempts to work against these whites would bring a “wave of enmity and rancor” that would no doubt result in people seeking his removal from his post as Teniente Político. He asked for the Jefe Político’s support in the matter.20 Andrade’s enemies took advantage of the lack of personnel and oversight that characterized the ancillary provinces of the Oriente to accumulate a large Indian workforce based on debt peonage and to advance their

19 Arturo Orcés, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza, Circular No. 675, Tena, July 30, 1945, AGN.

20 Elías Andrade Chacón, Teniente Político to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, November 23, 1945, AGN.

437 personal projects at the cost of government initiatives, such as public education.

Despite the concern that may have existed among certain public authorities, it is clear that the region’s Indians continued to live and work according to a system of labor that was neither free nor transparent, dominated more by private individuals than by the

Republic’s laws. This was a fundamental result of the fact that the Oriente, due to isolation and to lack of resources and personnel, remained a set of ancillary provinces.

Despite the significant influence of patrones in determining how and where

Indians worked, the state’s own projects did come to bear in important ways. The

Indians’ obligation to work creating and repairing roads in the region remained important, as can be seen in the orders of the Governor of Napo-Pastaza, who in May of 1946 wrote to the local police chief to remind him that none of the Indians in and around Tena were allowed to leave the area until they could demonstrate that they had fulfilled their roadwork obligations. If they could not, the police were authorized to hold them captive to force their compliance with the road conscription laws.21 The region’s patrones helped enforce the roadwork requirements when they chose to; a few months later, Manuel Rosales, the owner of the hacienda on the Napo known as “El Shandia” wrote to tell the governor that “the debtor peons of the author belonging to this fundo are currently engaged in road conscription service, as I have taken good care to make them understand that just as they have rights we must respect, they also have duties with which they must comply.” This was prologue to his complaint that two other patrones in the region never had their Indians comply with the roadwork requirement,

21 Victor Hugo Sanmiguel, Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza to Sr. Capitán Jefe de la Compañía de Guardias Civiles, Tena, May 21, 1946, AGN.

438 “as if we were not equal before the law.”22 Perhaps Rosales had some ongoing dispute with these other patrones; regardless, it is important to note how the Indians’ service on the roads was conceived as an obligation both for them and for the patrones who would be unable to count on their labor while they were working on the roads. Those patrones who refused to collaborate with the road conscription remained a problem for the

Tenientes Políticos whose job it was to see that the Indians carried out the work. Also in

1946, The Teniente Político of Puerto Napo, Eudaldo Rodríguez, sent an exasperated letter to the Governor about the patrón Guillermo Rivadeneyra. While most of the residents of Puerto Napo with Indian “personnel” had complied with the Governor’s orders and were willing to send their Indians to Tena for labor on public works,

Rivadeneyra had refused in a completely disrespectful manner.23 In Rivadeneyra’s view, the request for Indian workers from the Concejo Municipal of Tena was “totalitarian” because it would cause him to lose six days of work from those Indians who lived nearby and eighteen days from those who lived furthest away.24 The Teniente Político

Rodriguez continued to have a difficult time with Rivadeneyra and other patrones in the area. In October, he wrote to the Governor that he had

at all times tried to get the patrones who have indigenous personnel to make them turn up in this Tenencia Política, to be able to send them to the Illustrious Concejo Municipal in order to comply with the Law of Road Conscription; despite repeated insinuations and admonitions and appealing to pacific means, it is not possible to get them to voluntarily comply with these dispositions.

22 Manuel M. Rosales P. to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia Napo-Pastaza, Rio Napo, El Shandia, August 27, 1946, AGN.

23 Eudaldo Rodríguez, Teniente Político de Napo to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia, Napo, September 21, 1946, AGN.

24 E. G. Rivadeneyra to Sr. Teniente Político de Puerto Napo, Rio Napo, Misagualli, September 21, 1946, AGN.

439 He asked the governor to intervene in the matter by sending police officers to force the patrones to comply.25 The struggle between civil authorities and influential private individuals over the region’s indigenous people characterized these decades of state formation in the Oriente. This struggle was waged in ancillary provinces where the weak enforcement of laws aided the private individuals’ efforts.

The case of the Indian Juan Condo illustrates how the weak enforcement of laws could aid white colonists to the detriment of the region’s Indians. In January of 1947,

Condo filed a complaint with the Jefe Político of Napo that Amado and Eduardo Cox had recently invaded his house and injured him with a machete. The Cox brothers were seeking to forcibly take Luisa Siquia as a servant, but they did not find her there.

Instead, they took Ramón Condo after gravely injuring him with a club. In addition, they stole a number of tools and other items from Juan Condo’s house. According to the Jefe

Político, the Cox brothers were well known for their “bad proceedings.” Nevertheless, the Teniente Político of Loreto Parish, where the crime occurred, had not begun an investigation of the matter or arrested the perpetrators. The Jefe Político Luis Hurtado

Dávila ordered the Teniente Político to rectify this immediately.26 He also asked the commander of an army battalion stationed nearby to call Amado and Eduardo Cox into his office, and to see whether Ramón Condo had died of his injuries.27 It is not clear what the final disposition of the case against the Cox brothers was, but in August of that

25 Eudaldo Rodríguez, Teniente Político de Napo to Sr. Gobernador de Napo Pastaza, Tena, October 19, 1946, AGN.

26 Luis Hurtado Dávila, Jefe Político Accidental del Cantón Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de la Parroquia Loreto, Tena, January 26, 1947, AGN.

27 Luis Hurtado Dávila, Jefe Político Accidental del Cantón Napo to Sr. Comandante del Batallón Oriente, Tena, January 27, 1948, AGN.

440 year, the Teniente Político of Tena, Luis Hurtado Dávila, complained that a police officer had recently let the Cox brothers out of jail so they could have some drinks in a bar owned by Mercedes Rueda.28 In this case, two white citizens were alleged to have committed a serious crime against Indians in the region, but the wheels of justice did not respond to the crime until the Jefe Político of the canton chastised the Teniente Político for his delay. Furthermore, once the perpetrators were apprehended, they could easily manipulate the circumstances of their confinement.

As with other aspects of the Oriente’s administration, the conduct of state officials in regards to the Indians was subject to constant complaints and allegations of corruption. At times, these problems provoked concern among high-ranking state officials that expressed dismay in terms that related to Ecuador’s relationship with Peru.

In January of 1947, an official from the Ministry of Foreign Relations informed the

Minister of Government that Peruvian soldiers were waging a successful campaign to convince Ecuadorian Indians to cross the border and serve as workers and soldiers for

Peru. The Peruvians reportedly convinced them that Ecuadorian state officials were hostile, exploitive, and prone to violating Indian women. The Foreign Relations officials asked the Ministro de Gobierno to impart orders to all civil authorities to abstain from

“offensive and insulting practices” with the “jíbaro colonists that constitute the primordial human element for the development and progress of those rich deserted regions.”

Rather, the civil authorities should promote the Indians’ “attraction to civilized life and their integration into the bosom of Ecuadorian nationality.” This official from the Ministry of Foreign Relations mentioned the Jívaros of the Southern Oriente because he based

28 Luis Hurtado Dávila, Teniente Político de Tena to Sr. Capitán Comandante de la GG. CC., Tena, August 5, 1948, AGN.

441 his report on some information from an Ecuadorian military officer that was inspecting the southern border region. Nevertheless, the Ministro de Gobierno transcribed the

Foreign Relations official’s letter for the Governor of Napo Pastaza, and ordered him to make sure all the Tenientes Políticos in his jurisdiction abstained from abuses against the Indians.29 In the decades of publications that had constructed the Oriente as an important national object of desire, the Indians of the region were frequently described in terms of their usefulness to the important project of developing and incorporating the

Oriente. In order to ensure that the Indians could carry out this role, these state officials recognized the need to improve the administrative situation in the ancillary provinces of the Oriente by curtailing abuses by state officials.

Orders like the one above did not put an end to abuses, however. In 1948, the

Ministerio de Gobierno wrote to the Governor of Napo-Pastaza after receiving concerning reports that the Teniente Político of Loreto had been abusing the Indians of his jurisdiction by forcing them to sell him agave fiber at artificially low prices.30

Presumably, the Teniente Político in question then used the agave fiber for his own purposes, or sold it on for a profit. That same year, the Ministerio informed the Teniente

Político of Loreto directly that they had received a complaint from an Indian named

Marcos Jipa that he had been forcing the Jívaros, or Indians of the Shuar ethnicity, to carry the mail from Tena to Loreto for more than a year without pay. The Ministerio

29 Dr. Benjamín Terán Varea, Ministro de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de Napo Pastaza, Quito, February 5, 1947, AGN.

30 Ezequiel Cadena S., Jefe de la Sección General del Ministerio de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza, Quito, August 24, 1948, AMG.

442 elaborated that the Teniente Político was abusing his position as parish authority and taking advantage of the fact that his mother was the mail administrator.31

The mail services were the site of frequent complaints about abuses of authority against the region’s Indians. In 1949, Abraham Duque Padilla, the Teniente Político of

Canelos, a parish inhabited mostly by Indians in Pastaza Canton, wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno in defense of the Indians who were part of a “race that still remains exiled from Constitutional guarantees, being victims of the most inhumane exploitation by certain employees of the government.” According to Duque, the Indians who carried out the mail service in the region suffered greatly on their long journeys, and were the victims of machinations by individuals who sought personal lucre. In short, the government’s mail contractor, Segundo Antonio Cox (whose relation to the aforementioned Amado and Eduardo Cox is not clear), had been abusing these mail carriers by forcing them to make unjust payments to him, and by paying them less than they deserved in turn.32 The Jefe Político of Pastaza, invoking his position as president of the Junta de Protección Indígena there, also wrote to the Ministerio and transcribed an additional letter from Duque that further elaborated on Cox’s malfeasance.33 Cox defended himself against these charges in a letter he sent to the Minister of

Communications, who oversaw mail service in the Republic; according to him, he already paid the Indians the proper amount, and paying them any more was impossible

31 Ezequiel Cadena S., Jefe de la Sección General del Ministerio de Gobierno to Sr. Teniente Político de Loreto, Quito, September 15, 1948, AMG.

32 Abraham Duque Padilla, Teniente Político de Canelos to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Canelos, April 1, 1949, AMG.

33 Gabriel Márquez de la Plata, Jefe Político, Presidente de la Junta de Protección Indígena to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Puyo, May 11, 1949, AMG.

443 as he barely had enough money to pay for food and clothing which cost up to three times as much in the Oriente as it did in Quito. Furthermore, the Indians’ complaints were probably motivated by the Teniente Político Duque, who was trying to interrupt the mail service that he, Cox, had carried out to the satisfaction of all public authorities in the past.34 Cox continued his offensive against Duque by writing to the Director General de Correos that Duque was himself an abuser of Indians. Allegedly, Duque had accused two different Indians of being brujos, or witch doctors, when they refused to give Duque money.35 As mail carriers, Indians served an important role in the region’s communications and the functioning of the state. As with other aspects of the Oriente’s administration, however, they could become drawn into the disputes between rival state employees.36

Segundo Antonio Cox appeared among the signers of a complaint to the

Ministerio de Gobierno in 1950, along with a Dominican missionary in Canelos and several others. In their letter, they claimed that the Teniente Político, Hector Plaza

Dueñas, who had replaced Abraham Duque, was taking advantage of his familial relationship with the President of the Republic to commit a series of abuses against the

34 Miguel I. Saona, Subsecretario de Comunicaciones to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, June 6, 1949, AMG.

35 Francisco Vallejo López, Director General de Correos to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, June 13, 1949, AMG.

36 Segundo Antonio Cox had a lengthy career in the Oriente, going from public office to public office. In February of 1953, Telmo Vargas and several other Indians in Canelos parish wrote to express their dismay over the fact that Segundo Cox would soon be named Teniente Político of Canelos. As they reported, he was an “enemy of the interests of the Indian community,” who treated them like “animals of the forest.” He forced Indians to work as mail carriers for no pay on the threat of jail time. Telmo Vargas et al to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia Napo-Pastaza, Canelos, February 11, 1953, AMG. It appears that Cox actually became the secretary for the Teniente Político of Canelos, as in March of that year, the Governor of Napo Pastaza ordered the Teniente Político to investigate whether his secretary, Segundo Cox, had truly acted in a “hostile and despotic” fashion with the “exploited Indian race.” Victor Hugo Chiriboga Dávalos to Sr. Teniente Político de Canelos, Tena, March 3, 1953, AGN.

444 people of Canelos, white and Indian alike. Plaza had allegedly tried to impose arbitrary fines on the Indians there in order to use the money for personal reasons. He had also used the Indians’ road conscription work on his own private property.37 The civil authorities were apparently not the only ones engaged in abuses against Indians in

Canelos. Later that year, the Indians of Canelos sent a memorandum to the Ministerio de Gobierno to formally protest the actions of a nearby military garrison, whose members had forced Indians from the community to work on military projects, subjecting them to corporal punishment throughout. In addition, soldiers from the garrison had sexually assaulted an Indian woman. Unfortunately, the Teniente Político of the nearby settlement of Montalvo was also acting in an abusive and arbitrary fashion toward

Indians, threatening them with arbitrary prison sentences.38 Cases like these make clear the various ways in which state officials could abuse their authority at the cost of the wellbeing and independence of indigenous people in the Oriente.

The influential patrones who owned the haciendas of the region continued to exert a great degree of control, also. In 1950, Camilo Aguinda, a member of the Junta de Protección Indígena, wrote to the Jefe Político of Napo on behalf of the Indian woman Elena Cerda. She had told Aguinda that the landowner Juana Arteaga was keeping her two minor children, twelve and two years old, in her power as domestic servants. Arteaga refused to return them to their mother, as she claimed the girls’ service was payment for Cerda’s debts to her. But according to Cerda, she had already

37 Fr. Pablo Suárez H. O. P. et al to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Policía, Canelos, February 6, 1950, AMG.

38 Enrique Coloma Silva, Secretario General de la Administración Pública to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, December 14, 1950, AMG.

445 worked for Arteaga for ten months for no pay; in Aguinda’s view, this entitled her to back pay and to the immediate return of her daughters.39 In June of 1950, Guillermo Ramos, the Ministro de Gobierno, wrote to the Ministry of Social Precaution to detail how the

Indians were kept in subjugation by the patrones in cases similar to that of Arteaga and

Cerda. In general, he reported, Indians were never paid in money, but in clothing that was valued at very high prices, despite being of little market value. The handing over of this clothing obligated the Indians to work long hours panning for gold in the Oriente’s rivers. Furthermore, the Indian children were kept as personal servants or “pongos,” who were paid only with slips of paper that they could exchange for certain cheap goods. At times, these children were acquired through kidnapping, as though they were

“prey animals.” The Minister of Government, Guillermo Ramos, asked the Minister of

Social Precaution to urgently send an Inspector de Trabajo to the Oriente to see that the laws of the Work Code were faithfully applied in the Oriente, and, above all, to “insist on the liberty of the Indians as rational beings able to be acculturated (seres racionales y culturizables).”40 These kinds of pressures by the patrones on the Indians could have serious consequences for the region; according to a March, 1951 letter from the

Teniente Político of Montalvo, in Pastaza Canton, the persistent attempts by whites to set up a system of concertaje, or debt peonage, on the Indians in his parish, was causing an exodus of Indians into Peruvian territory.41

39 Camilo Aguinda, Miembro de la Junta Protectora de Indígenas to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, no date, 1950, AGN.

40 Guillermo Ramos S., Ministro de Gobierno to Sr. Ministro de Previsión Social, Quito, June 26, 1950, AMG.

41 C. Zambrano O., Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente to Sr. Comandante General de la Guardia Civil, Quito, March 1, 1951, AMG.

446 Later that year, the Teniente Político from Francisco de Orellana Parish, at the confluence of the Coca River and the Napo, downriver from the provincial capital of

Tena, wrote to describe more abuses by the patrones of the Oriente. As he reported, the patrones in his parish used “ruses to make the authorities appear like the Indian’s executioners, so that the Indians do not approach the authorities with their complaints and claims.” Recently, some Indians of a patrón named Rón came into the Teniente

Político’s office to seek freedom from Rón for his repeated abuses and exploitation; the

Teniente Político, Alfonso González, granted this request and declared them severed of all ties to Rón. Later, however, he happened to bump into the same Indians and learned that they had been forcibly returned to Rón by the assistant Teniente Político, who was partial to this patrón’s desires. He asked that the Ministerio de Gobierno back him up in his aid for the Indians in his parish by ordering the local military authorities to collaborate in seeing that the Indians on Rón’s hacienda, “Providencia,” were not abused. The Ministro de Gobierno took the Teniente Político’s advice and asked the

Ministro de Defensa to help.42 The Ministro de Gobierno’s desire to intervene had begun with a letter he received from one Ernesto Rodríguez, who wrote to report that the

“small landholders” in Francisco de Orellana parish were working together against

Alfonso González. According to Rodríguez, most of the civil authorities who went to the

Oriente were unable to speak Quichua, and therefore unable to interact with the region’s Indians the way that the patrones could. This meant that the civil authorities were therefore subject to the patrones’ machinations, as this latter group sought to maintain their control in an area “where slaves still exist in the middle of the century of

42 Dr. Andrés F. Córdova, Ministro de Gobierno, to Sr. Ministro de Defensa, Quito, October 26, 1951, AMG.

447 freedoms.”43 This dominance of Quichua-speaking influential patrones over the state officials tasked with enforcing the laws was a characteristic of the Oriente as a set of ancillary provinces; the laws prescribed for the region resembled in large part those of the general administrative structure of the rest of the country, but their enforcement was subject to private influences that took advantage of the lack of state resources and relative isolation of the region.

Evidence of the machinations of the patrones comes in the form of a letter sent from people in Francisco de Orellana to the Governor of Napo-Pastaza, who then sent it along to the Ministro de Gobierno. The authors of the letter, describing themselves as

“Ecuadorian citizens, inhabitants of Francisco de Orellana Parish,” listed a series of reasons that the actions of Alfoso Gonzales as Teniente Político left much to be desired. They had no confidence that he processed claims made in his office or that he mailed communications. He had allowed work on the landing strip in the parish to stall, and had allowed a general environment of “intranquility” to take over the parish, causing many residents to leave. This threatened the complete disappearance of Francisco de

Orellana, “as other settlements in the Oriente have disappeared for the same reasons, that is, due to hostility by the authorities toward the inhabitants.” Another of Gonzales’s crimes was the fact that he allegedly stirred the Indians of the parish up against their patrones in order to seek revenge for Gonzales’s own personal reasons. The authors of the letter claim that even the Indians of the parish wanted Gonzales’s removal, because he had the habit of going into their homes and forcing them to sell him food and

43 Ernesto Rodríguez to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Francisco de Orellana, July 10, 1951, AMG.

448 supplies at low prices.44 The governor, for his part, in forwarding this letter to the

Ministerio de Gobierno stated that Gonzales’s removal was an urgent need.45 One official of the Ministerio de Gobierno warned the minister not to take the letter too seriously, however: he stated that some of the letters signers were “proprietors whom the Teniente Político of Francisco de Orellana, on the orders of this Ministry, has had to subject to laws, impeding them from continuing to enslave Indians inhumanely.” He added that the Josephine missionary Padre Mario could give a more truthful account of the situation, and that removing González from office “would give more encouragement to the proprietors of the Coca to extort the Indians.”46 These allegations demonstrate the ways in which the battle to control the region’s Indians was waged; private individuals and state officials both appealed to higher authorities while claiming that they had the best interests of the Oriente’s inhabitants, both white colonists and Indians alike, in mind. While the owners of haciendas or other properties were accused of keeping

Indians in perpetual debt servitude and inhumane conditions that bordered on slavery, the state’s officials were accused of abusing the power of their office in order to extract payment and work from the Indians.

These same allegations were leveled in the Pastaza region, as in the letter by five colonists of Montalvo to the Ministro de Gobierno in September of 1951, in which they stated that the Teniente Político there, Luis Llerena, was using his authority to force Indians to work on his own personal projects, neglecting the roadwork that the law

44 Telmo Llori et al to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia Napo-Pastaza, Francisco de Orellana, September 13, 1951, AMG.

45 Coronel Enrique Páez, Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, October 22, 1951, AMG.

46 Memorandum, Jefe de la Sección de Oriente to Sr. Subsecretario de Gobierno, Quito, no date, 1951, AMG.

449 stipulated. He also preyed on the Indians of the parish in other ways: by leveling arbitrary fines, by stealing chickens, by embezzling tax revenue from the export of animal skins, and by forcing them to illegally open mail packets to revise their contents and destroy them selectively.47 The Jefe Político of Pastaza supported the complaints against Llerena by passing along a letter he had received from another Montalvo resident, Delfín Macías, who claimed that Llerena’s actions were causing whites and

Indians both to abandon the parish. Furthermore, Llerena was protected by the

“palanca,” or leverage, he had with certain higher authorities. With this protection,

Llerena had levied illegitimate taxes on Indians for fishing and had pocketed state funds destined for the construction of public offices.48 Sometime after this letter, Llerena indeed ceased to be the Teniente Político of Montalvo, only to find himself by August of

1952 as the Teniente Político of Francisco de Orellana, site of the dispute involving the former Teniente Político, Alfonso Gonzales, described above. While in that parish,

Llerena received a letter from the Ministerio de Gobierno that transcribed a letter received by that ministry from a military officer in Montalvo. The officer’s letter stated that Llerena had committed a series of economic infractions against Indians there and had stolen a thousand sucres from a colonist named Ramón Olalla. Furthermore,

Llerena had previously been dishonorably discharged from the military for bad conduct.

He was, in the officer’s view, “an individual that in no moment deserves to be a representative of law and justice, especially in these places to where must come individuals of great moral solvency and who are deserving to carry out such an

47 Colonos de Montalvo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Montalvo, September 6, 1951, AMG.

48 Carlos Saá Chacón, Jefe Político de Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Puyo, November 22, 1951, AMG.

450 honorable charge.” The Ministerio de Gobierno asked Llerena to answer these charges in detail.49

Before he had a chance, however, Ernesto and Eduardo Rodríguez, residents of

Francisco de Orellana, wrote to the Ministry of Social Precaution to lodge yet another complaint against Llerena. According to this letter, Llerena had recently gone to the hacienda “Primavera” owned by Jorge Rodriguez where, in a state of drunkenness,

Llerena gathered all the Indian workers there and threatened them with witchcraft, stating that the government and the Ministro de Gobierno had sent him to Francisco de

Orellana to make sure that all Indians remained in a state of complete submission to their patrones, and that he had orders to kill any Indian who attempted to work independently. He then physically attacked one of the workers, who later asked the authors of the letter to make a complaint on his and his fellow Indians’ behalf. According to the authors of the letter, Llerena was named Teniente Político according to the desires of the “four gamonales who monopolize Indians in this parish.”50

The following month, however, Llerena wrote a letter to the Ministerio de

Gobierno that made it appear that he was the true advocate for the Indians in his parish.

As he described, the Indians there were the victims of “inhumane slavery and concertaje” by the patrones of the area, in particular Carlos F. Sanmiguel and Telmo

Llori. Llori had been among those that signed the letter against the former Teniente

Político, Alfonso Gonzales. As Llerena described, Sanmiguel held fifty Indian families in

49 José Icaza Roldós, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Luis Llerena Loza, Teniente Político de Francisco de Orellana, Quito, August 14, 1952, AMG.

50 Dr. Jorge Ortiz Escobar, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de Napo Pastaza, Quito, October 27, 1952, AMG.

451 his debt, Llori ten, all of whom lived in total misery, owing 1,500 or 2,000 sucres to their patrones. Frequently, the Indians worked six or seven months on these men’s properties without reducing the debt to any degree. The Indians could not seek redress of grievances from the local authorities because their patrones could so easily have the authorities removed from office. Llerena requested that a commission be sent from

Quito to witness the ongoing slavery of Indians in the region before they all fled to

Peruvian territory, as many were planning to do.51

A letter from the Governor of Napo-Pastaza in the same month gives another take on whether Llerena had acted in the abusive manner described by Ernesto and

Eduardo Rodríguez. According to the Governor, what they had alleged was completely false. In fact, they were conspiring with one of the Indian workers on the hacienda to provoke a general insurrection against the patrones and the authorities. Llerena had simply come to the hacienda Primavera to investigate the proprietor’s claim that one of his Indian workers, Eusebio Machoa, was planning insurrection. A few months prior,

Ernesto and Eduardo Rodríguez had displayed communist propaganda in public places, designed to turn the Indians of the region against the government and against all whites.52 In fact, Eduardo Rodríguez was the son of Jorge Rodríguez, the owner of the hacienda where Eduardo had allegedly tried to provoke a rebellion. It is not clear why the younger Rodríguez wanted to raise his father’s Indian workforce to insurrection.

However, this exchange of letters demonstrates the currency that reports of abusing

51 Dr. Jorge Ortiz Escobar, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Ministro de Previsión Social, Quito, November 20, 1952, AMG.

52 Victor Hugo Chiriboga Dávalos, Gobernador de la Provincia Napo-Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, November 19, 1952, AMG.

452 Indians could have in petitions sent to higher state officials. The younger Rodríguez had used such claims to call Llerena’s actions and his own father’s retention of Indian workers into question. For his part, Llerena had written to the Ministerio to decry the actions of two other hacienda owners as regarded their treatment of Indians. Charges of mistreatment toward Indians had been leveled against Llerena by inhabitants in two different parishes. Apparently, Llerena’s bad behavior continued, as in July of 1953, the supplementary Teniente Político in Francisco de Orellana wrote to his superior Jefe

Político to report that all the white inhabitants of the parish, along with a large number of

Indians, had personally notified Llerena that they were removing him from office because they could no longer tolerate his abuses and infractions against the

Constitution and the laws of the Republic.53

At some point in 1952, the Jefe Político of Aguarico sent a copy of one of Ernesto

Rodríguez’s supposed “communist” political pamphlets to the Ministerio de Gobierno in

Quito. According to the pamphlet, Rodríguez was the “Secretary of Culture,

Propaganda, and Civilization of the Indian” for a group called the “Revolutionary Oriente

Youth Movement,” the main goal of which was “Liberty for the Indian, to Acculturate

(Culturizarle) him.” One pamphlet, titled “Chain of Good Luck (Cadena de la Buena

Suerte),” authored by “El Jibarito,” lamented the fact that the Ministry of Social

Precaution had not taken any steps to “liberate the poor Indian from the flames of exploitation, by cowardly men, enemies of the Homeland and of the Ecuadorian

Oriente.” The pamphlet goes on to cite “dishonorable, disgraceful and ostentatious caciques” by name: Jorge Rodríguez, owner of the Hacienda “Primavera,” Carlos

53 Pedro Jarrín, Jefe Político Accidental to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Nuevo Rocafuerte, July 22, 1953, AMG.

453 Sanmiguel, Victor Ron, Antonio Llori Murieta, and Marcial Rodríguez, all of whom were

“enslavers” and “thieves.” Furthermore, they had commercial relations with Peruvians

“who dishonor Ecuadorian territory and frontiers.” The pamphlet also decries the

Ministerio de Gobierno’s decision to send a “crazy Teniente Político, that is, a tiger with an insolvent secretary that embezzles from the Treasury.”54 The Teniente Político referred to is presumably Luis Llerena, who would be the subject of the allegations that

Ernesto and Eduardo Rodríguez sent to the Ministerio de Gobierno.

Amidst all these abuses, the Junta de Protección Indígena continued to exist in the law books of the Republic. But, as the Governor of Napo-Pastaza noted near the end of 1951, that Junta only existed in theory, without any practical application. He suggested to the Ministerio de Gobierno that the Governor of each Oriente province undertake a monthly tour of all the populations of their jurisdiction, making use of an airplane from the Ecuadorian armed forces. All of the public authorities in the region should enjoy maximum guarantees in the execution of their duties, in order to prevent

“abuses with the indigenous class.”55 It is unclear whether the Ministerio worked to adopt these recommendations, but it does seem that the highest-ranking state official in

Napo-Pastaza felt there was a need for more resources in working against the endemic predation on the Indians of his jurisdiction. Another sign of official concern came in the new version of the Ley Especial de Oriente that was promulgated in 1953, during the presidency of José María Velasco Ibarra. The new law reflected the fact that the Oriente

54 F. Baquero O., Secretario de la Jefatura Política del Cantón Aguarico, “Cadena de la Buena Suerte - Es fiel copia del original que reposa en el Archivo de la Jefatura Política del Cantón Aguarico,” no date, AMG.

55 Coronel Enrique Páez, Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Tena, November 5, 1951, AMG.

454 had been divided into three provinces, rather than two: Napo-Pastaza, Morona-

Santiago, and Zamora-Chinchipe. The law also included a new general disposition, stating that all work in the Oriente was to be subjected to the general Leyes de Trabajo, and that the appointed officials in the region were to give “special protection” to the indigenous inhabitants of the region.56

Nevertheless, Indians continued to be subject to the machinations of those who, taking advantage of their knowledge of Spanish and Quichua, and their ability to petition the authorities, sought to carry out some personal desire. As the Oriente remained a set of ancillary provinces, new laws and prescriptions intended to protect the Indians and rationalize the system of labor in the region were at best partially enforced. At the end of

1952, the Ministerio de Gobierno received a letter from Carmen Aguinda V. Grefa, an

Indian woman who used a translator, Manuel Vallejo, to compose her complaint.

According to the letter, Aguinda and her whole family had been the subject of repeated threats from the brujo Domingo Grefa, who had bragged that the authorities in the area would never punish him. The authorities in Tena had, in fact, taken him prisoner for “a few hours” but let him go after receiving bribes of chickens, eggs, and pineapples.

Aguinda’s husband, Silberi Grefa, eventually died from the brujo’s witchcraft, leaving her a widow with four children. She closed by asking the authorities to punish the brujo.57

This letter served its purpose, at least in part, as an official from the Ministerio de

56 El Congreso de la República del Ecuador, “Reformas a la Ley Especial de Oriente,” Registro Oficial 1, no. 117 (January 20, 1953): 1035-41.

57 “Arruego de Carmen Aguinda V. Grefa porno saber ler Manuel Vallejo N.” to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Tena, November 4, 1952, AMG.

455 Gobierno wrote to the Governor of Napo-Pastaza to order an investigation of the allegations described.58

What the Governor reported illustrates how the Indians of Napo-Pastaza could be taken advantage of by those who could write in Spanish. The Governor, Victor Hugo

Chiriboga Dávalos, invited Aguinda, Vallejo, and others into his office, and had a different interpreter translate the text of the original letter into Quichua for her. “With the simplicity and frankness that characterizes the Indians,” Chiriboga wrote, “she spontaneously and indignantly manifested that what Sr. Manuel Vallejo had used her name to write was completely false.” It was true, she said, that she feared the brujo

Domingo Grefa, but that she had in fact asked him to cure her husband, who was dying of tuberculosis. The brujo, seeing her husband’s advanced illness, refused to attempt to cure him. As Chiriboga concluded, Vallejo had written the letter for personal reasons, as he was seeking to get the local authorities in trouble for having taken bribes. To settle the matter, Vallejo agreed to sign a statement in which he admitted that “the witchcraft of the Indians does not cause death” and in which he promised to cease these kinds of intrigues against the local authorities.59 Vallejo’s behavior in trying to make the local authorities look bad in the eyes of their superiors was not uncommon in the Oriente.

This case illustrates how people who could write in Spanish and knew where to direct

58 Dr. Jorge Ortíz, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia Napo-Pastaza, Quito, November 11, 1952, AMG.

59 Victor Hugo Chiriboga Dávalos, Gobernador de la Provincia de Napo-Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, November 20, 1952, AMG.

456 their complaints could take advantage of those Indians in the region who were illiterate and perhaps unfamiliar with the state system.60

The Indians of the region frequently relied on interpreters or transcribers in order for their complaints to reach the desk of the authorities in the provincial capital of Tena or in Quito. Occasionally, the patrones filled that role. The anthropologist Theodore

Macdonald, Jr., has described the patrón as the “mediator or broker between the

Indians and institutions or individuals of the non-Indian society.” The Indians of the northern Oriente frequently relied on the patrón’s aid in legal and civil disputes. They did not look to the region’s few police officers, as they believed them to be in the patrones’ employ, anyway.61 The patrones conform to Andrés Guerrero’s formulation of a

“ventriloquist”; that is, one who knows the “rules of the game” and has a relationship with petty state officials, and one who speaks for the Indians and puts their grievances into the “state’s code.”62 One example of this was the complaint from December of 1952 dictated by Celidonio Hualinga and written in Spanish by his patrón, Arcesio Cisneros.

Hualinga, who resided in Sarayacu Parish, in Pastaza Canton, began his complaint by stating that he was happy to provide services to the military garrisons in the region, and

60 There is other evidence that “brujos” continued to be a problem for the Oriente’s Indians and public officials. In March of 1953, the Indian Francisco Tanguila, who lived in Archidona Parish, complained to the Governor that he and many others were the victims of the brujo Bautista Huatatoca, who was a worker for the patrón César Peñaherrera on the Hacienda San Marcelo. In the Governor’s view, the actions of brujos like Huatatoca were intolerable as they harmed “simple and ignorant people.” He lamented the fact that efforts to capture them had amounted to nothing. Reportedly, some police officers had accepted payment from other Indians to capture Huatatoca, but had never done it. Not only were they negligent in keeping public order, but their acceptance of payment from citizens for normal police work was illicit. Victor Hugo Chiriboga Dávalos, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza to Sr. Teniente Político de Archidona, Tena, March 14, 1953, AGN.

61 Theodore Macdonald, Jr., Ethnicity and Culture amidst New “Neighbors”: The Runa of Ecuador’s Amazon Region (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), 53.

62 Andrés Guerrero, “The Administration of Dominated Populations,” 303.

457 even played a part in convincing other Indians to do the same. Unfortunately, lately the military had been abusing them “in every form, certainly because we are Indians and we don’t have anyone to stand up for our rights, in defense of us, and in this way we are victims of all kinds of violations.” Recently, Hualinga had seen four soldiers led by one

Segundo Guerrón come into his house and steal his canoe; other Indians in his community had been robbed of their food and other supplies by the soldiers.

Furthermore, the soldiers forced them to carry their cargo over long distances for very little pay. He closed the letter by stating, “we ask, Señor Ministro, that in the interest of the poor Indians of these regions, our just request be favorably attended, as we are ready to give our services at any time, so long as we are treated well and remunerated justly.”63 A local Dominican missionary, Fr. Gregorio Armijos, backed up Hualinga’s story in his letter to the Jefe Político in Puyo, and added that the local Teniente Político of Sarayacu was unable to do anything about the matter because of the “totalitarian declaration” of the military garrison’s commander that his authority was higher than that of the civil authority. Armijos went on to state, “an Indian is as Ecuadorian as you and I, and the law is just with all Ecuadorians”; however, there existed “capricious and continuous abuse” on the part of the army against the rights of the Indians of the region.

The Jefe Político of Puyo, however, concluded that the Indian’s patrón, Arcesio

Cisneros, must have had some ulterior motives in transcribing and sending Hualinga’s complaint. As evidence, he cited a document written and signed on December 17 between the soldiers of the garrison and Celidonio Hualinga in which both parties agreed to sell the canoe for 600 sucres. Cisneros had not transcribed and mailed

Hualinga’s complaint until December 20; the Jefe Político of Puyo took this to mean that

63 Celidonio Hualinga to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, El Puyo, December 20, 1952, AMG.

458 Cisneros was trying to get him in trouble for the incident which had, according to the bill of sale, already been satisfactorily settled.64 This case once again demonstrates that the

Indians in the region were subject to the arbitrary abuses of the representatives of the state in the region, in this case, the military garrison. But it also shows that Arcesio

Cisneros, the patrón, may have taken advantage of the fact that the state was seeking to curtail Indian abuses by composing a letter in the name of one of his Indian workers in order to cast aspersions on a local official. His ability to write in Spanish and on behalf of the illiterate Hualinga made this possible. The weak enforcement of laws that characterized the ancillary provinces of the Oriente opened the door for this kind of domination of Indians by private individuals, even though at least some in the region viewed them as fully “Ecuadorian.”

At least one of the region’s indigenous inhabitants had come to occupy a position of state authority in Napo-Pastaza. The incident that took place in August 1953 involving

César Lopez Cerda, a civil police officer, demonstrates that holding such a position was no guarantee that one could not still be the subject of abuses due to unfamiliarity with

Spanish and the workings of the state system. One day, Lopez had been resting in the barracks of the Guardias Civiles when his commanding officer, named Hernandez, summoned him to the upper floor and gave him a typewritten document, then ordered him to copy the document by hand. Lopez had difficulty transcribing it, and had to start over several times. This made his commander angry, who said, “you can’t even do this, asshole (pendejo).” When he finally finished, he was ordered to sign the paper. While copying, Lopez believed the document had something to do with his divorce

64 Joaquín Carlos Camacho, Jefe Político del Cantón Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Puyo, January 2, 1953, AMG.

459 proceedings, which were underway. As it turned out, the paper stated that he had given two chickens, twenty eggs, and twenty sucres to the Governor of the Province, Victor

Hugo Chiriboga. When Lopez realized this, he denied that he had ever done such a thing, to which his commander said that he was lying. A few days later, Lopez was summoned to the office of the Jefe Político, thinking it had something to do with his divorce. Instead, the secretary there read aloud the document that Lopez had copied and signed previously. Then Lopez, because he did not understand Spanish well, responded “yes” when asked if he swore to the statement. “When I left the office,”

Lopez narrated,

I began to think and think about what had happened and I got very upset because I saw that they are bringing me into things that they are doing, and since I haven’t given any chickens or eggs I kept thinking and I went to the barracks; I went to the kitchen where the Policía Civil Victor Rivadeneira was located, and I asked him: ‘Why are they making me swear and asking me about chickens and things,’ to this he replied, ‘You have done well, we will help you.’ Today I went to the Jefatura Política to ask about this and why they had made me swear, telling me that I had given some chickens and eggs, something I have never done, and I asked again so that they would explain better, because I don’t understand much and I believed that maybe they were going to do something to me because I am afraid.65

There is no further evidence to clarify what, exactly, the other police officers were drawing Lopez into. It seems, however, that they planned to take advantage of his ignorance of Spanish in order to enact some personal plan involving the higher authorities of the province. This is yet another example of how those familiar with

Spanish and the workings of the state in the Oriente could exploit the region’s Indians to their advantage.

65 Jaime Burgos Montalvo, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Tena, August 8, 1953, AMG.

460 In addition to the predation by civil and military authorities, the Indians of the

Oriente remained subject to the worst kinds of abuses by their patrones. The situation was so bad that in December of 1953, the Ministro de Gobierno and future president,

Camilo Ponce Enríquez, wrote to the Governor of Napo-Pastaza and stated, “it appears unquestionable that the Indians of the Oriente region...suffer from a condition no different from slavery on the part of some colonists, and this is causing a lamentable exodus of those Indians to the neighboring countries.” The minister recommended that the governor do whatever he could to make sure that the Juntas de Protección Indígena

“come to be a reality, as the law has provided.”66 A year had passed since the governor had recommended the exact same thing to the Ministerio, asking for the support of the airplanes of the armed forces, as described above. There is no evidence to suggest that the Juntas de Protección had increased their activities during the time elapsed. For the ancillary provinces Oriente, lawmakers could prescribe institutions to protect the region’s Indians, but this was no guarantee that such institutions functioned efficiently or regularly.

Perhaps Ponce’s letter was motivated by the complaint he had received earlier that month from Maximiliano Spiller, the Josephine missionary and bishop of the

Apostolic Vicariate of the Napo. Spiller’s letter lamented the practice of “debtorism” which reduced the Indians of the region to “perfect slaves,” and sought a prohibition of the practice in the Oriente. He also decried the manner in which many Indians were being taken out of the region by enganchadores who used them as their workforce in other parts of the Republic. While they were away, Spiller reported, the Indians’ families

66 Dr. Camilo Ponce Enríquez, Ministro de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia Napo- Pastaza, Quito, December 23, 1953, AMG.

461 and personal subsistence plots were left abandoned.67 That same month, Alfonso

Ruales, a senator who represented Napo-Pastaza, reported that he had encountered twenty-three Indians from Archidona on the road from Baeza to Papallacta, high in the

Andes on the edge of the Oriente. According to the group of Indians, they were fugitives from Esmeraldas, on the Pacific coast, where they had been kept against their will by the enganchador Blas Rosales. Ruales felt it was his duty as a Senator for Napo-

Pastaza to prevent the exodus of our “brazos Orientales” for the good of the region.68

Early in 1954, the Ministro de Gobierno stated that his office would take the steps necessary to avoid the exodus of Indians from the Oriente under the sway of enganchadores by advising the Tenientes Políticos of Archidona and Napo to watch out for it.69 Rosales continued his enganche into March of that year, at least, as reported by an official from the Ministro de Economía who had received reports that Rosales was still taking out large contingents of Indians, “which would constitute a grave problem for the agricultural production in that region due to the rural depopulation.” According to reports, Rosales had as many as four hundred workers who would not return to their native lands because Rosales offered higher payment than what they could expect in the Oriente.70 The Teniente Político of Archidona could not confirm those reports, however. After investigating the problem, the Teniente Político reported that only very

67 Mons. Maximiliano Spiller, Obispo Vicario Apostólico del Napo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Quito, December 14, 1953, AMG.

68 V. Alfonso Ruales S., Senador to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Quito, December 24, 1953, AMG.

69 Dr. Camilo Ponce Enriquez, Ministro de Gobierno to Señor V. Alfonso Ruales S., Senador de la República, Quito, January 4, 1954, AMG.

70 Dr. José Martínez Cobo, Ministro de Educación encargado de la Cartera de Economía to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, March 3, 1954, AMG.

462 few Indians had left the parish for Esmeraldas, and those that had, had come back to

Archidona upon completion of their work contracts.71 Whatever the degree of the

“exodus,” the ability to use large numbers of Indians as workers remained a preoccupation of the state officials in the Oriente. The Indians, for their part, continued to leave the region, whether voluntarily or not, to work elsewhere.

The situation of those Indians that were still workers for the patrones of the upper

Napo region remained alarming to some of the appointed officials that were to follow the dictates of the Ley Especial de Oriente; especially the stipulation that the Republic’s laws regarding work were to be strictly enforced in the Oriente as they were elsewhere.

These laws were supposed to function in the Oriente as they would in any other section of the country. But the factors that made the region continue as a set of ancillary provinces prevented this. A long letter from the Jefe Político of Aguarico Canton, Jorge

I. Rivadeneira Reyes, sent in March, 1954, details the ongoing system of exploitation, which he described as the “shame of the Ecuadorians.” The Indian, Rivadeneira argued, was the only “true agriculturalist in the Oriente,” as only the Indian actually did the work of clear-cutting the forest and planting, tending, and harvesting the crops. Furthermore, the Indians were the ones who rowed the canoes that provided transportation in the region, and they were also the ones who panned gold out of the rivers. Lamentably, the fruit of all this labor went to enrich only the whites of the region. The system of exploitation generally began when a white from outside the region, or even from Peru, introduced manufactured goods that the Indians were attracted to because of their novelty. The whites would then say, “Take it, take it, man, take what you want,” at times

71 J. E. Bucheli C., Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Ministro de Economía, Quito, March 6, 1954, AMG.

463 forcibly placing the objects in the Indians’ hands. As soon as this occurred, the Indian became “practically property of whoever gave him the merchandise.” Typically, they would then value the merchandise at extremely inflated prices. Rivadeneira reported that, for example, a pair of pants costing thirty sucres in Quito would be recorded as a debt of 120 sucres owed by the Indian. A bar of soap costing three-and-a-half sucres would be valued at twelve. The Indian would then be forced to work on the patrón’s estate to pay off the debt, which was usually impossibly high. Most of the Indians in the region, Rivadeneira reported, identified themselves as belonging to one patrón or another; the number of “free” Indians who had no debts was only a very small number, and they were poorly looked upon by the whites in the area. The Republic’s work laws were simply “dead letter” in the Oriente, due in part to the public authorities of the region who had routinely been the accomplices of the patrones in keeping the Indians in slavery. Rivadeneira stated that he felt a sincere desire to “incorporate the Indian into civilization,” but could find no collaborators among the whites of his jurisdiction as they were all patrones or their allies. Bringing up these facts led people to state that

Rivadeneira was simply envious of the patrones. Others stated that “the Indian is not prepared to live freely,” “the Indian is lazy” or “bad,” and “if you teach the Indian to earn money it will be the end of agriculture.” To this Rivadeneira countered that the Indians would remain in the region happily if they were paid, as they liked the jungle and their chacras. The patrones feared this, however. To illustrate why, Rivadeneira recounted an incident in which a sympathetic military officer paid one thousand sucres to eliminate the debt of a particular Indian. The patrón and other whites complained that this practice would eventually lead to the loss of their entire workforce.

464 Rivadeneira knew that the patrones were required by law to review and liquidate all debts between them and their Indians at least twice a year; however, in Aguarico

Canton, it had been four years since this “pantomime” was done. He called it a

“pantomime” because of the way the practice was usually carried out:

A patrono presents the Indians’ account book; the Jefe Político is present; the secretary reads the account of each Indian, in Spanish, stating what the patrono has recorded as the debt. The Indian who in general does not know Spanish, answers in Quechua, ‘Aparcani’… which means, yes I received… which demonstrates that he does not even understand what is being read; and it is legal, just with this answer by the Indian, the account is accepted, which almost always amounts to thousands of sucres, always in the Indian’s debt.

Rivadeneira stated that he would like to carry out a liquidation of accounts, but he required extra resources and protection from the government. “I know very well, Señor

Ministro,” he wrote, “that any authority who proposes this will raise the enmity and hatred of all the patronos, who are the ones that, with justice, must come out the losers.

But I believe that this must be done…as in it I see the solution to many problems that affect the internal development of our Oriente.”72 Rivadeneira’s letter illustrates the intractability of the problem. While the laws of the Republic may have sought to implant equal protection for Indian workers, just as in the more central parts of the Republic, these efforts were frustrated by the patrones that could count upon the collaboration, or at least the negligence, of the state officials in the region. The efforts by Rivadeneira to put an end to concertaje were exceptional among the elements of the state system in the Oriente. The characteristics of the ancillary provinces of the Oriente, in which laws

72 Jorge I. Rivadeneira Reyes, Jefe Político del Cantón Aguarico to Señor Doctor Don Camilo Ponce Enríquez, Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Nuevo Rocafuerte, March 22, 1954, AMG.

465 were partially and inconsistently enforced, meant that efforts like those of Rivadeneira could only be limited in their effectiveness.

Indian children were subject to arbitrary violence on the part of the patrones as well as their parents. In November of 1957, the Ministerio de Gobierno received a report

“from a responsible person” that three white men had raided the house of the Indians

Elías and Esteban Aguinda and kidnapped them and their children. They then took them to the hacienda “Primavera,” property of Jorge Rodríguez, which had previously been the site of an attempted Indian insurrection, according to reports discussed above.

The Ministerio ordered the Jefe Político to investigate, and also requested that the local military forces aid in the capture of those responsible. As the Ministerio’s letter stated,

this office is resolved to give the Indians all the necessary help to make their rights respected, eliminating forever the practices of concertaje, so common in the upper and lower Napo, and the indescribable abuses of the patrones, incompatible with respect for the human person.73

The investigation seems to have come to an end, however, with a letter from Esteban and Elías Aguinda in January, 1958. Apparently, the accused kidnappers were brought up on charges; but according to the Indians, they had been at Rodríguez’s hacienda since December in a free and spontaneous manner. The report of the kidnapping was completely false. In fact, they had liquidated their debts with Jorge Rodríguez in the presence of the Junta de Protección Indígena, but had chosen to continue working for

Rodríguez once they realized that all the allegations of malfeasance were false. They signed the letter with their fingerprints, as they were illiterate.74 There is not enough

73 Renato Pérez Drouet, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Ministro de Defensa, Quito, November 12, 1957, AMG.

74 Esteban y Elías Aguinda to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, received January 25, 1958, AMG.

466 evidence in the archives of the Ministerio de Gobierno to indicate whether crimes were committed or not; however, other cases have demonstrated the significant amount of pressure that patrones could exert over the Indian workers as well as the influence of translators in shaping communications between the Oriente’s Indians and the higher authorities in Quito. This potential for private intervention in legal proceedings characterized the ancillary provinces of the Oriente in which the correct functioning of laws was in serious question.

The authorities of the Oriente were certainly aware of the problems that the region’s Indians faced. Ricardo Cabrera Vergara took up the post of Governor of Napo

Pastaza in 1956, returning to the Oriente after twelve years in Quito. There is evidence to suggest that Cabrero took the liquidación de cuentas seriously, as in June of 1956 he ordered all the Tenientes Políticos of his jurisdiction to order all the Patronos of Indian workers to undertake the liquidación right away, or run the risk of having all debts canceled by the authorities.75 At the beginning of 1957, Cabrera heard from Father

Rizzo, a priest who sat on the Junta de Protección Indígena, that the patrono Aurelio

Espinosa was holding the Indian Apolinario Tanguila in private prison over a debt of

1,200 sucres that Tanguila inherited against his will from his dead brothers. As Cabrera stated to the Teniente Político of Archidona, where Espinosa resided, the patrono’s actions were “immoral” but unfortunately “very common among patronos.” He ordered the Teniente Político to call Tanguila into his office so he could begin a proper investigation. He reminded the Teniente Político that Espinosa was one of the patronos

75 Ricardo Cabrera Vergara, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza to Sr. Jefe Político del Cantón Napo, Quito, June 14, 1956, AGN.

467 who had refused to show the governor his account books, claiming that he did not have any Indian debtors.76

Cabrera later made his general appraisal of the situation known to the higher authorities. As he wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno, “I can assure you that the Indian has not achieved any progress in the socio-economic aspect, as the pressure of the patrono always has imposed on them a limited life, full of privations.” In the visits he made to the rural parishes in his province, Cabrera noted that the Indians there drank alcohol in excessive amounts, causing “scandals of all kinds.” The local authorities generally paid these problems no mind, so Cabrera ordered that they begin arresting

Indians who disturbed the public peace. For those Indians who could not pay fines,

Cabrera had them work on public projects, such as cleaning the central plazas of the various settlements. He claimed that this method achieved good results, causing the

Indians to drink less. This had provoked the ire of whites in the area, however, who had relied on the tactic of indebting Indians with aguardiente in order to secure access to their labor. Certain “unscrupulous patronos” were now attempting to have Cabrera lift the prohibition on Indian alcohol consumption, which he refused to do. He had also prohibited the practice of certain individuals who sold aguardiente to Indians in exchange for domestic animals, gold, and other items.77 To a limited degree, at least,

Cabrera claimed to have been able to impose the policies of the state on the patronos who were used to controlling Indian labor through alcohol. In so doing, Cabrera had

76 Ricardo Cabrera Vergara, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza to Sr. Teniente Político de Archidona, Tena, January 11, 1957, AGN.

77 Ricardo Cabrera Vergara, Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, January 23, 1957, AMG.

468 seen that Indians worked on public projects, rather than private estates, at least part of the time. But he had likely gained some enemies among the white landowners.78

Vergara may have seen some success in prohibiting the sale of alcohol to

Indians, but his struggle with the patronos continued. In April of 1957, he wrote to the

Jefe Político of Napo Canton to complain that none of the dispositions of the Junta de

Protección Indígena had been put into practice. The Jefe Político, as the president of the canton-level Junta, should immediately call a session and do so at least twice a year. Cabrera informed him that it was his duty to do all that was possible for the defense of his canton’s Indians.79 In October of 1957, he wrote an exasperated letter to the Ministerio de Gobierno, asking for advice on what to do with those patronos who refused to liquidate the debts of their Indians. As the law creating the Juntas demanded, the liquidation was to be carried out twice a year. But as Cabrera stated, only certain patronos complied with this requirement. When he arrived in office, Cabrera convoked a meeting of the Junta de Protección in order to carry out a liquidation, only to hear from most patronos that they did not, in fact, keep accounts of debt for those Indians who provided “occasional” work. Since this first attempt, the Junta had not been able to carry out any further activity. Cabrera had done several “personal investigations” and had discovered that the patronos that had refused to present their accounts were the very

78 Cabrera continued to take steps that he hoped would mitigate the exploitation of Indians by patronos. In February, he informed the Ministro de Gobierno on the progress of the new parish of Ahuano, which had been recently established on the right bank of the Napo River, 45 kilometers from the provincial capital of Tena. The Indians who lived in the new parish were “inhumanely exploited” by patronos and white comerciantes who used alcohol to manipulate them and to trade for the gold that the Indians panned from the Napo River. Alcoholism among the Indians had caused many of them to neglect their subsistence plots, which led to a very high rate of infant mortality. Cabrera hoped that the establishment of the new parish with its appointed officials would help address this cycle of exploitation and neglect. Ricardo Cabrera Vergara, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, February 26, 1957, AGN.

79 Ricardo Cabrera Vergara, Gobernador de Napo Pastaza to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Tena, April 12, 1957, AGN.

469 ones who maintained the system of debt peonage in the region. Recently two Indians from the Hacienda “Primavera,” property of Jorge Rodríguez, had come into his office to ask for protection, as they feared violent reprisals from Rodríguez after fleeing his property. In fact, a commission from the hacienda had searched the area for the missing

Indians, but the commission gave up after learning that Cabrera had declared the

Indians free. Cabrera recommended that the Ministerio impart some order requiring all patrones to show all their account books to the governor’s office, otherwise all their

Indian workers would be declared free of all obligations. Cabrera noted that, in fact, some patrones, few in number, treated the Indians very well and kept accounts correctly. But the greatest abusers of Indians were those patrones in Aguarico Canton, from which many Indians had fled into Colombian territory.80 Despite the efforts of certain state officials like Cabrera who wanted to lessen the influence of the patrones as regarded their indigenous workforce, these communications make clear the relative weakness of the state and its institutions, such as the Juntas de Protección, in the face of the influential landowners who could influence not just their own Indian workers, but the petty state officials in the Oriente’s various parishes and cantons. This weakness was a characteristic of the fact that the Oriente remained group of ancillary provinces in which the Republic’s laws contended with the problems arising from a lack of resources and infrastructure and the efforts of influential private individuals.

Problems arising from the undue influence of patrones over the region’s Indians and the administrative structure continued into the next decade. In August of 1959, the

Governor of Napo Province, Juan Albuja, sent a circular to his subaltern officials

80 Ricardo Cabrera Vergara, Gobernador de Napo-Pastaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, October 23, 1957, AMG.

470 describing how the Indian José Cerda had been waiting for his patrón, Mario Rón, to undertake a liquidación de cuentas. Rón had persisted in his refusal to do this, despite being cited by the authorities of Francisco de Orellana Parish, in Aguarico Canton, where he resided. The governor advised all the state officials in his jurisdiction that they were to give Cerda aid and protection against any kind of abuse from Rón.81 In July

1960, the Teniente Político of Coca Parish, also in Aguarico Canton, wrote to the

Ministerio de Gobierno to describe the difficulties he faced. In the rural parts of his parish, far from the urban center where he and the other state officials resided, many patrones held dozens of Indian families “at their orders.” In these out-of-the-way places, the Indians followed their “custom of long ago” to drink large quantities of chicha. This made them drunk and disorderly, prone to committing “offenses and even crimes that go without sanction because those patrones in order to not lose the Indians’ debt hide these violations of the law, making this a constant danger even for themselves.” The

Teniente Político, due to the lack of transportation and police officers, was unable to investigate these crimes, much less capture the “presumed delinquents.” He requested that the Ministerio send a police officer to help combat these problems, preferably naming someone local to the area, familiar with the jungle and river transportation. “In past years,” he wrote, “illiterate Indians with sufficient preparation have carried out this job efficiently…there are people in this jurisdiction who would accept the charge and could carry it out.”82 Despite years of effort, the patrones remained a significant controlling factor in how the region’s Indigenous people lived, worked, and interacted with the state system in the Oriente. The patrones also placed limits on the state

81 Juan Albuja G., Gobernador de Napo, “AVISO,” Tena, August 25, 1959, AGN.

82 L. Uquillas, Teniente Político de Coca to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Coca, July 25, 1960, AMG.

471 officials’ abilities to see that the laws of the Republic and even the Ley Especial de

Oriente were carried out. The problems that the Oriente faced, stemming from the lack of personnel, resources, and good communications networks, allowed the patrones to insert themselves as a significant element of force in the region, even though the

Republic’s laws sought to curtail this. This insertion of private networks of control characterized the ancillary provinces of the Oriente during these decades.

Jívaros and Whites in the Southern Oriente

The Indians of the southern Oriente, most of whom were of the Shuar ethnicity, or “Jívaros” as they were commonly known, were subject to control, predation, and marginalization by state officials and colonists in the region. Evidence from the Province of Santiago-Zamora, which was sub-divided into Morona-Santiago and Zamora-

Chinchipe in 1954, bears this out. A 1947 letter from Humberto Jácome Villagómez, the

Jefe Político of Morona, illustrates several aspects of the situation regarding Jívaros and the whites of the region at that time. Jácome had given strict instructions to the

Tenientes Políticos in his jurisdiction to abstain from any hostility toward the Jívaros; such “inhumane and anti-patriotic incorrections” would result in their firing and punishment. But in truth, such malfeasance by Tenientes Políticos was rare, in

Jácome’s estimation, with the exception of the Teniente Político of Chiguaza, whose firing he had requested. Those Jívaros who interacted most closely with arms of the

Ecuadorian state were those who worked for the military garrisons as transporters of supplies, for which they were paid with money and food. The real problem in his jurisdiction, Jácome wrote, was the white colonists. “These señores,” he explained,

Many of whom are natives to this place are true feudal lords of the region. They are the owners of the Indians. There are some who have anywhere from five or six Indians to those with eighty or more Indian families, who

472 work for the patrón in the exploitation of rubber, plant fiber [pita], gold, very few in agriculture, and lately in the encampments of the Shell Company, benefitting their patrones with the reward that this Company pays to enganchadores. It is these señores more than the authorities who abuse the Indians and make a situation in which some Indians, out of fear of being punished when they commit some fault with the patrón, or tired of working and never lessening the debt they have contracted with the patrón, go down river as they say in these places, when the Indians emigrate to the south where Peruvian civil and military authorities receive them and attend to them, producing in this fashion the depopulation of our Oriente Region by our Oriente Indians who, abandoning their home and their patrón find better treatment and lifestyle.

That said, Jácome assured the Ministerio de Gobierno that most patrones treated their

Indians well. In fact, these good patrones kept the civil authorities in line: any Teniente

Político who mistreated an Indian would get in trouble with that Indian’s patrón, as the patrones were “influential people in this place.” On the other hand, when a civil authority did mistreat Indians, it was often due to the pressure of a patrón who was perhaps acting out a rivalry with some other patrón by having the Teniente Político treat the rival’s Indians poorly. Furthermore, the patrones of the region often united together to complain about certain civil authorities and seek their removal.83 The situation Jácome described is one in which private individuals occupied a position of influence much greater than that of the Ecuadorian state. Certain white patrones exercised control over not just the region’s Indians, but also over the representatives of the government. Both their Indian workers as well as the hapless Tenientes Políticos were pawns in the system of control run by these wealthy landowners. As in the northern Oriente, the influential and wealthy patrones of the southern Oriente also inserted themselves as

83 Humberto Jácome Villagómez to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, February 22, 1947, AMG.

473 significant elements of force in the state system present in the ancillary provinces of the

Oriente, in which laws were only partially effective.

Religious missions were another factor in this system of control. In addition to the

Salesian missionaries in the Apostolic Vicariate of Méndez and Gualaquiza, there were different evangelical missionary centers, including one located in Sucúa, run by the

North American Frank Drown. According to Drown’s letter to the Ministerio de Gobierno in 1947, many Jívaros felt themselves to be mistreated by the “un-Christian behavior” of the Salesians; their rights as Ecuadorians gave them the freedom to come to the evangelical mission and escape the condition of slavery in which the Salesians held them “on the pretext of being un-civilized.” In the evangelical mission, Drown argued, the Jívaros would become “useful citizens for their homeland, lovers of the land that made them free, and therefore jealous defenders of its territorial integrity.” Drown complained that the Salesians had maintained a campaign of “rumors,” “intrigues,” and

“stupidity” against his organization; the Salesians claimed to be the only organization in the region with the right to direct the colonization, education and evangelization of the inhabitants of the Oriente. According to Drown, the Salesians even claimed that any

Jívaro who desired to move from one place to another in the Oriente must first obtain their permission.84 The religious missions of the region would frequently address the

Ministerio de Gobierno in an ongoing rivalry over the amount of control they would wield over the Jívaros of the region; both sides would claim to be the Indians’ true protectors in the face of the other sect and the white colonists and officials of the region.

84 Frank Drown, Director de la Misión Evangélica de Sucúa to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Sucúa, June 9, 1947, AMG.

474 As with the northern Oriente, the southern Oriente’s natives themselves contacted the Ministerio de Gobierno with their own perspective. In 1948, a man named

Vicente Aguayo, a Jívaro born with the name Cunanchi, wrote the Ministro de Gobierno,

Juan Tanca Marengo. His letter was written, in Aguayo’s words, “for my Oriente and for my race,” and he urged the Minister to take an immediate look at the “administrative organization of the parishes.” Aguayo stated that many of the Tenientes Políticos in the

Oriente had no secretary, guardias civiles, nor tamberos (innkeepers along communication routes who received a small salary from the state). This made the administration of justice a “shameless myth.” He also recommended that the minister prohibit the Tenientes Políticos from engaging in any type of direct or indirect commerce with the Indians of their jurisdiction. “Abusing the solitude of the jungle,” he explained,

the ignorance of the unfortunate tribes, forgetting the principal elements of dignity and administrative decorum, [the Tenientes Políticos] turn into peddlers, greedy of pita fiber, taking the Indian as a beast of burden, burden paid with trinkets. Merchants…remunerated by the State?

In order to remain in office, these Tenientes Políticos then falsely reported that they had built roads, buildings, and schools in their parishes. These state officials, in Aguayo’s view, were responsible for the backwardness of his homeland (the Oriente) and his race. Their rectification was what the Oriente needed most, he informed the Ministro.85

The situation Aguayo described demonstrates that the line between state officialdom and private entrepreneurship was blurred in the region, to the detriment of the Jívaros who faced economic exploiters and officials of justice that could be the same person.

This was a significant consequence for the Jívaros of living in the ancillary provinces of the Oriente.

85 Memorandum, Vicente Aguayo, Jíbaro Cunanchi to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, received August 17, 1948, AMG.

475 A case from Arapicos, in the Palora River region north of Macas, speaks to the frequency this problem. In January of 1949, a colonist claiming to be Eduardo González complained about the local Teniente Político, Jerónimo Jaramillo, whom he alleged was an illicit producer of aguardiente, selling it to Jívaros in such large quantities that many of the indigenous inhabitants had become addicts. Furthermore, he imposed arbitrary fines on the Jívaros and forced them to work on his chacras, or private garden plots. His dominance of the Jívaro language allowed him to keep the Jívaros “in tow,” and he claimed to rule with the power of God in his jurisdiction. He had used these advantages to accumulate a large amount of wealth in land and livestock.86 As it turns out, however, whoever wrote the letter had forged the signature of Eduardo González; the Governor of

Santiago-Zamora, Angel Miguel Arregui, informed the Ministerio de Gobierno that the letter was falsified. The real Eduardo González, a teacher in Arapicos Parish, was shocked to see the letter, and affirmed that Jerónimo Jaramillo was a good public official. “It should be noted,” Arregui wrote, “that abusing the distance and the means of communication that there are in this Province to speak with the central government, it is customary to surprise the ministries with denunciations or complaints against correct functionaries, as in the present case.”87 Nevertheless, the types of abuses the forger included in the letter are very much in line with the kinds of problems the Oriente’s

Indians faced in Napo-Pastaza and in the rest of Santiago-Zamora, as will be seen below. The man who took González’s name to seek the removal of a public official likely

86 Eduardo González to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Arapicos, January 8, 1949, AMG.

87 Angel Miguel Arregui, Gobernador de Santiago-Zamora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Macas, March 28, 1949, AMG.

476 included a description of plausible and common occurrences in order to make his story believable.

A few months later, two Jívaros, Dionisio Yangora and Shuira, citizens

(“vecinos”) of Chiguaza Parish, in the Morona region, sent a complaint to the civil authorities about their Teniente Político, Alberto Moncayo Larrea, and his secretary,

Herminio Bone. Allegedly, Bone had kidnapped both of their wives on different occasions. Dionisio Yangora’s wife was held in Bone’s office for four months. Bone had also kidnapped the wife of a third Jívaro, named Tibirma, and they did not know what had become of her.88 In January of 1950, a Jívaro in 28 de Mayo Parish, further south in

Gualaquiza Canton, complained about the Teniente Político there on behalf of “us of the indigenous race.” The letter stated that the official, named Honorato Córdova, was taking advantage of their “ignorance” and lack of “basic principles of civilization.” But even though they were very humble, they did not deserve a “Cain” like Córdova, who ignored the principles of the Constitution in all his actions. They affirmed that although they were a “defeated race,” they were Ecuadorians, and they lamented that Córdova could act with impunity, free from control by his superiors. They wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno on the hopes that they would receive justice; they could not travel to

Zamora to seek a meeting with Córdova’s superiors because they feared that “terrible authority”; and in the meantime they would be forced to neglect their agricultural work.89

A few months later, a public school teacher in Arapicos Parish, in the Palora River region, informed the Ministerio de Gobierno that the local Teniente Político, Oswaldo

88 Carlos Campuzano F., Jefe Político del Cantón Morona to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, September 14, 1949, AMG.

89 José Francisco Lusaula (?), Urdaneta, January 23, 1950, AMG.

477 Vinueza, was abusing the “unfortunate Jívaros” there, resorting to corporal punishments with whips, fists, and the flat side of machetes. Furthermore, he illicitly distilled aguardiente and distributed it to the Jívaros, promoting vice.90 These complaints typify the kinds of predation and control exercised by the Oriente’s civil authorities over the indigenous population of Jívaros.

There were institutions in place to prevent such things, however. 1949 saw the creation of Juntas de Protección Indígena in the southern Oriente as in the northern province of Napo-Pastaza. Luis Polibio González, the Jefe Político of Zamora informed the Ministerio de Gobierno that there wasn’t much need for such a Junta in Zamora as there were only three Jívaro families in the area. On the other hand, there were many

Jívaros living in other parishes in the canton, such as 28 de Mayo Parish on the banks of the Yacuambi River. The Jívaros in these areas were members of a “race that is disappearing through degeneration (in this region), they are mostly tubercular, which constitutes a threat for the colonization of whites that are establishing themselves with a view to increment agriculture.” In Polibio’s view, the Juntas should be established in these parishes where, along with sanitary officials, they could set up a sanitary refuge.91

In Méndez, further north, the Jefe Político of Santiago Canton informed the

Ministerio that he had named a local Salesian priest, Benvenuto Icapari, a public school teacher, José H. Cárdenas, and the Jívaro chief José Antonio Sharupi to the Junta de

Protección, and had also imparted orders to all the Tenientes Políticos in his jurisdiction

90 Francisco Aguayo, Director de la Escuela Isabel de Godín #64 to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Arapicos, April 14, 1950, AMG.

91 Luis Polibio González, Jefe Político de Zamora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Zamora, March 26, 1949, AMG.

478 to collaborate in “this beneficent labor in defense of the indigenous class” that the Junta represented.92 He later sent along the minutes of the Junta’s initial meeting, in which the

Salesian representative praised the work of the teachers in the region, who had brought thirty Jívaro families to a moderate level of civilization. They could be used to form a new settlement, and should therefore receive properly titled and surveyed parcels of land. The Junta decided to send a petition to the national legislature suggesting a method for granting property titles to these families. The group resolved to “cooperate in an efficient manner toward the betterment of the indigenous class in all that signifies advancement and collective progress within their diverse aspects, as much moral as material, offering positive aid in benefit of colonization, resolving in a favorable manner those problems that perhaps might arise.”93 Protecting the Jívaros was important to the

Junta, but their goals demonstrate that they viewed the Jívaros as people on the path to becoming Ecuadorian citizens like any other, who live in settled locations with individual parcels of land. They clearly hoped to provide protection while also allowing the colonization of the region to continue unabated. The envisioned future seemed to be one of Jívaro assimilation.

Later that year, Agustín Izquierdo, the Jefe Político of Santiago faced a conflict over land and resources involving Jívaros and white colonists. For about a month, a group of colonists had been panning for gold in an area called Patuca without authorization from the civil authorities. The Jívaros who lived there formally complained to Izquierdo about this, and the Salesian priests nearby also protested the colonists’

92 Agustín Emiliano Izquierdo, Jefe Político de Santiago to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Méndez, February 11, 1949, AMG.

93 Agustín E. Izquierdo, Presidente de la Junta de Protección Indígena to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Méndez, May 11, 1949, AMG.

479 actions; Izquierdo then convoked a session of the Junta de Protección Indígena, which resolved to prevent the Jívaros and the colonists both from panning for gold until the

Ministerio de Gobierno could rule on the matter. While waiting for the Ministro’s response, which was slow due to problems with the telegraph system, the Junta and a

“good number of Jívaros” decided in July, 1949, that the colonists could continue panning for gold if they respected a one-hundred meter distance from the Jívaros’ own operations. According to Izquierdo, this ruling satisfied all parties. An official from the

Ministerio de Economía later telegrammed to inform Izquierdo that the colonists could continue their gold operations and that the Salesian priests in the area had no right to prevent them.94

The matter was not settled, however. According to a letter from a month later, in

August, by José H. Cárdenas, the public school teacher who was part of the Junta de

Protección Indígena, the Jefe Político had received orders to remove the white colonists entirely from the Patuca area, but he did not comply. He was even working with the guardias civiles to tell the miners to continue in their activities; recently, more white colonists had arrived and opened new areas of gold exploration. Cárdenas argued that

Izquierdo was completely against the “poor race” of Jívaros and should be fired.95

Shortly thereafter, the chief of the guardias civiles in Santiago-Zamora wrote to his superiors about his actions. As he reported, his officers had ordered the colonists to cease their gold operations after the Jívaros complained to the civil authorities. About twenty days later, the miners were desperate, having spent large sums of money on the

94 Agustín Emiliano Izquierdo, Jefe Político del Cantón Santiago to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Méndez, July 7, 1949, AMG.

95 José H. Cárdenas to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Méndez, August 10, 1949, AMG.

480 mining operations. It was then that an agreement was reached to allow the colonists to keep working, just as Izquierdo reported.96 The miners themselves also contacted the

Ministerio de Gobierno about the situation, and in September of 1949 an official from that ministry wrote to the Jefe Político Izquierdo in response to the miners’ complaint.

The Ministry resolved that a commission composed of the Teniente Político of Méndez, a captain from the nearby military garrison, and a representative from the Salesian mission must draw up a compromise that would establish two separate mining zones in the area: one for the white colonists and one for the Jívaros. There was to be a buffer zone between them to avoid incidents or “unpleasantness between the two classes of miners.” The Jívaros were to receive preference in the drawing up of the distinct zones.97 It seems a final settlement was not reached until October, when the director of the Salesian mission, Padre Luis Bozza, and a captain from the military garrison sent a report to the Ministerio de Gobierno stating that they had held a meeting with twenty- three Jívaros and a number of the colonist miners; they stated that after a simple graphical explanation of the problem using maps, they convinced the two groups to keep a distance of two kilometers between their mining operations.98

The dispute had caused enough of a stir that it was made known in the highland city of Cuenca, where the President of the Junta Orientalista de Cuenca, Dr. Gonzalo

Cordero, issued a report to the rest of the body’s members. Cordero framed the matter in terms of the 1944 contract between the Salesians and the Ecuadorian government,

96 Comandante Heliodoro Sáenz R. to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Policía, Quito, August 23, 1949, AMG.

97 Eduardo Salazar Gómez, Ministro de Gobierno to Sr. Jefe Político del Cantón Santiago, Quito, September 12, 1949, AMG.

98 Agustín Emiliano Izquierdo, Jefe Político del Cantón Santiago to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Méndez, October 9, 1949, AMG.

481 which granted the missionaries the status of legal representatives for the Jívaros in order to reduce “frictions” with whites in the region. The colonists’ operations in the

Jívaro mining area represented an invasion upon the Salesians’ efforts to “defend the ethnographic patrimony” of the region, as such encroachment by whites tended to cause the emigration of Jívaros, so detrimental to Ecuadorian national interests.

Cordero’s address to the Junta Orientalista contextualizes the mining dispute somewhat, hinting at the dangerous consequences those involved might have feared.

“Economic interest,” Cordero observed,

jealousy, in the Oriente perhaps more profoundly than in any other place, generates human activity. The search for economic happiness…unchains passions and provokes problems of transcendental repercussions. Precisely because this struggle is real and because this struggle in the Ecuadorian Oriente is of violent passions, a few years ago, Ecuador had to lament the massacre of an elevated number of white miners in a zone near Gualaquiza Canton.

Cordero noted that the migration of colonists from the highlands to the Oriente’s rivers, in search of gold, continued to cause friction with the Jívaros. He closed his report by hoping that the Ministerio de Gobierno would find some solution to the problem.99

The conflict over the gold mines in the Patuca area demonstrates that the contest between Jívaros and colonists was, in the minds of some at least, fraught with danger.

The Jívaros could be referred to as a “poor” or “defeated” race by civil authorities in the region; at the same time, they were widely believed to have violent, revenge-seeking tendencies. In the web of claims and counter-claims between colonists and civil authorities, Jívaros and their Salesian protectors, the characteristics of the Jívaros as a race played a part in the threats made and consequences feared. These characteristics

99 Dr. Gonzalo Cordero C., “Informe a los Señores Vocales de la Junta Orientalista de Cuenca,” no date, AMG.

482 had been imparted to wider Ecuadorian society in the publications that constructed the

Oriente as a national object of desire, and described the indigenous groups that lived in the region. In April of 1950, a Salesian priest complained to the Teniente Político in

General Plaza Parish that a Jívaro from the missionary center of Limón had been kidnapped by several soldiers from a nearby military garrison. As a result, all the Jívaro tribes in the area had become “alarmed,” and at the time of his writing were maintaining a “threatening attitude against the colonists or ‘whites.’” The priest urged the Teniente

Político to undertake an investigation of this kidnapping in order to “pacify the Jívaros and tranquilize the colonists.”100 The Ministro de Gobierno, Dr. Guillermo Ramos

Salazar, passed along this complaint to the Ministro de Defensa, again citing the fact that the Jívaros had become a constant threat to the colonists in the region because of the consternation over the kidnapping. Furthermore, the local Teniente Político had done nothing to investigate the kidnapping because he feared the influence of the military in his jurisdiction. The matter needed resolving in order to prevent the disorganization of the settlements and to bring confidence back to colonists and Jívaros alike.101

Late in May, the matter had not been settled. According to a Salesian official,

Pedro M. Sagasti, the kidnapper, one lieutenant Herrera, had fled the area without punishment. Another soldier from the garrison also fled, but not before stealing two tzantzas, or ceremonial shrunken heads, from the Jívaros in the area. Sagasti also reported that there was a new complaint about a Lieutenant Garzón, who abused the

100 Prof. Pedro M. Sagasti, Procurador de las Misiones Salesianas del Oriente to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno i Oriente, Quito, May 8, 1950, AMG.

101 Dr. Guillermo Ramos Salazar to Sr. Ministro de Defensa Nacional, Quito, May 9, 1950, AMG.

483 wives of the Jívaros and stole their property. Garzón’s actions had led to fear of a general Jívaro uprising; against this threat, he asked for re-enforcements from a different garrison.102 For his part, the Ministro de Defensa told the Ministro de Gobierno that all these fears of a Jívaro uprising were terribly overblown; in fact, it was all part of an “insidious campaign” on the part of the Salesians against the military. The Jívaro that had been “kidnapped” was in fact detained by the military for suspicious behavior; he had been released shortly thereafter.103 A reply from the Ministro de Gobierno from a few days later suggests that the matter was then settled; he stated his desire that the

Salesian missionaries and the military officials in the Oriente soon re-establish cordial relations in their efforts to “include [the Oriente] in civilization and convert it into a rich contribution for the national economy.”104 It is not clear whether the Salesians felt the matter to be settled. This dispute demonstrates the currency that a view of the Jívaros as dangerous and threatening to the colonization of the Oriente continued to hold. The way the race was understood was intertwined with the great patriotic project of taking possession of the national object of desire that was the Oriente.

The abuses of one civil authority in the Oriente toward Jívaros led to a campaign of accusations and counter-accusations that occupied the attention of the Ministro de

Gobierno and others for several months, concurrently with the case described above. In

March of 1950, one Francisco Aguayo wrote to Vicente Aguayo, who lived in Quito, to describe the actions of Osvaldo Vinueza, the Teniente Político of Arapicos Parish.

102 Prof. P. Pedro M. Sagasti, Procurador de las Misiones Salesianas to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno i Oriente, Quito, May 28, 1950, AMG.

103 Manuel Díaz Granados, Ministro de Defensa Nacional to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, May 31, 1950, AMG.

104 Dr. Guillermo Ramos Salazar to Sr. Ministro de Defensa Nacional, June 5, 1950, AMG.

484 Francisco was Vicente’s compadre, that is, he was the godfather of Vicente’s child. As he described, Vinueza had recently offended Vicente’s father because of the latter’s refusal to carry a load to Shell Mera, much further north, in Napo-Pastaza Province.

Since then, he had been offending many other Jívaros, causing “pain and rebelliousness” among them. Vinueza was the son of a local police officer, meaning that he could commit abuses without fear of police punishment. Francisco Aguayo urged

Vicente to report Vinueza to the President, Galo Plaza, and to the Ministro de Gobierno.

Vinueza did nothing for the betterment of his parish, did not attend to the mail service, and spent all his time working on his own chacras. The police officers also did nothing except receive their “fabulous salaries.”105 Vicente Aguayo took Francisco’s advice and wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno, Dr. Guillermo Ramos. He signed the letter with his

Jívaro name, Cunanchi, and began with a reference to his Jívaro characteristics: “I beg you respectfully to forgive me my frankness…and the energy of my atavism.” He asked the Ministro to punish the “crazy idiot [tontiloco]” Oswaldo Vinueza and his father,

Mesias Vineuza, who offended “my tribes” and conserved “my dear land in complete disaster.” If they were not punished, Aguayo stated, “I will find it necessary to make an immediate journey to my homeland and punish the aggressors with my own hands, letting the civilized world see that cuts to the administration in the Oriente must be done with blood.”106 It seems clear that Aguayo was counting on the reputation of the Jívaros to give his request some added heft.

105 Francisco Aguayo to Vicente Aguayo C., Arapicos, March 12, 1950, AMG.

106 Vicente Aguayo, jívaro Cunanchi to Excmo. Sr. Dr. Dn. Guillermo Ramos S., Quito, March 20, 1950, AMG. Several days later, a woman in Arapicos named Vicenta Jaramillo wrote to Vicente Aguayo to confirm what Francisco Aguayo had told him: his father was treated badly by the Teniente Político after he had refused to carry a load to Napo-Pastaza. Vicenta Jaramillo to Sr. Vicente Aguayo B., Arapicos, April 2, 1950, AMG.

485 Francisco Aguayo, back in Arapicos, continued to make the administrative situation in his parish known among those outside the Oriente. In his letter to one Juan

Santander, who lived in Quito, stated that Osvaldo Vinueza acted like a “gamonal” who believed himself to be king in the region. Vinueza manufactured aguardiente in clandestine fashion, distributed it to the Jívaros and then, once the Indians were drunk, punished them inhumanely in order to make them slaves on his personal property. It seems he wrote to Santander because the latter had some connection to the press. He asked him to use his pen to make the reality of the “humble region” known; he wanted all to know of the “authorities lacking conscience who commit abuses because they are separated from all control by superiors.”107 It appears that there was personal enmity between the Teniente Político Vinueza and Francisco Aguayo; in a subsequent letter to

Juan Santander, Aguayo stated that Vineuza had initiated judicial proceedings against him in revenge for the fact that Aguayo, who was a public school teacher in Arapicos, had cited Vinueza for not sending his children to school. The higher authorities in Macas had been drawn into this, and Vinueza had begun to call witnesses against Aguayo from among the other state employees in the Parish.108

In early May, Osvaldo Vinueza made a trip to Quito. Francisco Aguayo wrote once again to Vicente Aguayo, urging him to take advantage of this convenience to make their grievances known to the highest authorities. Francisco Aguayo urged

Vicente to make it clear that it was not just his father who had suffered the “offenses of this ignorant man,” but all the Jívaros in the Parish. “Make your self feel like an Oriental

107 Francisco Aguayo to Sr. Juan Santander, Arapicos, April 24, 1950, AMG.

108 Francisco Agyauo to Sr. Juan Santander, Arapicos, April 25, 1950, AMG.

486 who loves his race and who feels true affection for them,” Francisco counseled.109

Vicente took his compadre’s advice and wrote a letter to the Ministro de Gobierno. He introduced himself as a member of the Jívaro race who had moved to Quito to study at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios, “longing for personal improvement in order to better serve the Ecuadorian nationality to which I belong.” He explained again the way in which Oswaldo Vinueza had abused his father and asked that he be punished. Aguayo claimed to speak for “all the Jíbaros” of the region in question, who were all subject to the same kinds of abuses at the hands of Vinueza.110

Two months later, Aguayo still felt that no justice had been done. He wrote to the

President of the Republic, Galo Plaza, informing him that the people of Arapicos had presented a formal request asking for the firing of the Teniente Político and his father, the guardia civil, because they had mistreated the Jívaros. On this occasion, Aguayo did not mince words: “I tell you, beloved señor Galo, that if justice is not done, Arapicos will end with Jívaro vengeance.”111 Later, he wrote again to the Ministerio de Gobierno, stating that either Arapicos would see its poor administration dealt with, our it would be

“ended by our hands.” The Ministerio’s failure to do anything about the situation was already causing many Jívaros to flee the parish. “The future of my dear homeland is in your hands,” Aguayo informed the Ministro.112 Aguayo seems to have hoped that his

Jívaro ethnicity and the threat of violence by the other Jívaros in Arapicos would move the bureaucratic wheels of the Ministerio to replace Vinueza.

109 Francisco Aguayo to Sr. Vicente Aguayo, Arapicos, May 8, 1950, AMG.

110 Vicente Aguayo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Justicia, Quito, received May 16, 1950, AMG.

111 Vicente Aguayo to Excmo. Sr. Galo Plaza Lasso, Quito, July 5, 1950, AMG.

112 Vicente Aguayo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Quito, July 27, 1950, AMG.

487 In August, Oswaldo Vinueza’s superiors weighed in on the matter. The Governor of Santiago-Zamora, Manuel Herrera Cevallos, stated that at the beginning of July, someone had sent him a clipping from a periodical called El Ecuatoriano, purportedly written by a correspondent in Arapicos. The article was titled “SETTLEMENT OF

ARAPICOS IS IN DANGER OF BEING EXTERMINATED BY JIVAROS.” Around the same time, he also got a complaint from the public school teacher of the parish,

Francisco Aguayo. His letter, the Governor stated, was signed with “autographs rather than with real an truthful signatures.” Nevertheless, he ordered the Teniente Político of

Chiguaza to go to Arapicos to investigate the matter. This official, named Bolívar

Pazmiño, reported back that the entire case was nothing more than intrigue and calumny on the part of Vicente Aguayo, whom he described as a Jívaro who had lived many years in Quito, catechized by one señor Santander. Presumably, this is the same

Santander to whom Francisco Aguayo had been writing about the situation. In the governor’s view, all these protests against the Teniente Político Vinueza were designed to have a relative of Aguayo named as replacement. He had concluded the press clipping to be false, and assumed the issue over. Learning that Aguayo and others continued to occupy the Ministro’s attention with this matter, he recommend that those

“enemies of honorable administration” be punished.113 The Jefe Político of Morona

Canton, José. F. Acuña, backed up and elaborated on the governor’s view of the situation. According to Acuña, this was not the first occasion on which people had tried to remove Vineuza from office. Furthermore, he stated that Vicente Aguayo had told all of the residents of Arapicos that “some man named Santander” would soon be named

113 Mayor Manuel Herrera Cevallos, Gobernador de Santiago-Zamora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, August 22, 1950, AMG.

488 Teniente Político, with Aguayo himself as secretary. In Acuña’s view, this case was characteristic of many others in the region, in which “ink spillers [tinterillos]” used calumny and forgery to disrupt the administration of the region and seek the replacement of civil officials by individuals who could be “manipulated on their whim.”114

The feud between the Aguayos and the Teniente Político Vinueza demonstrates that references to the dangerous and revenge-seeking characteristics of the Jívaros could still be used as a tactic for engaging the state in the Oriente. The reputation of the region’s civil authorities as abusers of the region’s indigenous people and of the perquisites of their office was also a weapon for those who sought to have the administration changed at the parish level. At the same time, though, the frequency of fraud and calumny in the complaints made by Oriente residents to their civil authorities and to Quito cast doubt on such accusations. In this case, Aguayo’s efforts to construct a picture of Jívaros, united in their grievances and ready to cause violence, were unsuccessful. The evidence cannot show whether or not Vinueza had in fact been abusive toward Jívaros; it is possible that Francisco Aguayo’s personal enmity with

Vinueza was the major factor at play. It is also possible that the conflict of interest between the Teniente Político Vinueza and his father, the police authority, did in fact protect Vinueza’s campaign of exploitation and control of the Jívaros in his jurisdiction.

Even Manuel Herrera, the Governor of Santiago-Zamora who had dismissed the veracity of Aguayo’s charges against Vinueza, recognized that the predation upon

Jívaros in the region was a serious problem. In his view, though, those to blame were the white patrones who took advantage of their knowing the Jívaro language to abuse

114 José F. Acuña Martínez, Jefe Político del Cantón Morona to Dr. Subsecretario de Gobierno, Macas, August 23, 1950, AMG.

489 and exploit the Indians. Late in 1950, Herrera informed the Ministerio de Gobierno that a

Junta de Protección Indígena was operating in each canton of his jurisdiction. They would help in his campaign against the abusers, who, among other crimes, bought and sold the children of Jívaros like “animals or objects.” As a result, many young Jívaros had to be placed in the care of the Salesian missionaries’ boarding schools after being taken away from their “true executioners, the so-called patrones.”115

But complaints from indigenous people against the civil authorities of the Oriente continued. In November of 1951, Francisco Guamán and two others complained that the Teniente Político of 28 de Mayo Parish, in the southern Oriente, abused the Indians frequently by obligating them to undertake roadwork at more than a day’s distance from their homes, forcing them to carry heavy burdens and causing them to neglect their agricultural work.116 The next year, several dozen self-proclaimed members of the

“defeated race” complained to the Ministerio de Gobierno about the civil and police authorities in 28 de Mayo Parish, as well as the Franciscan missionaries. Recently, the guardias civiles had physically attacked some Indians, and the Teniente Político had refused to do anything about it. The Franciscans were using force to obligate them to send their children to the mission school, rather than to the lay public school. They had frequently gone to the Jefe Político of Zamora seeking justice but he, too, had done

115 Mayor Manuel Herrera Cevallos, Gobernador de Santiago-Zamora to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, November 20, 1950, AMG.

116 Francisco Guamán, Jesús Paqui and Angel María Paqui to Sr. Ministro de Economía, Urdaneta, November 30, 1951; transcribed in Hugo Munive Terán, Subsecretario Interino del Ministerio de Economía to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, December 7, 1952, AMG.

490 nothing. They hoped that the Ministro de Gobierno would grant them justice, for “we do not cease being free citizens despite being Indians.”117

Though Indians in the southern Oriente did make reference to their “defeated” race and other self-deprecating characteristics, the Jívaros’ violent tendencies remained a factor in some respects. In March of 1953, the Teniente Político of Chiguaza complained to the Ministro de Gobierno that his parish had only one police officer despite its enormous territory. Furthermore, that police officer was often called to help out in the neighboring parish of Arapicos, which also lacked sufficient police personnel.

As the Teniente Político argued, more police were necessary to help promote colonization in the region and to carry on the struggle against the “ferocious customs” of the “Jívaro class” in the area. He stated that he had to rely on the voluntary aid of colonists in keeping order in his parish.118 The ethnic characteristics of the Jívaros that had been transmitted to wider Ecuadorian society in the press and other publications continued to influence how state officials in the Oriente approached their task of administration of this population.

Other official reports to the Ministro de Gobierno painted a different picture, however. The former Governor of Santiago-Zamora wrote to Quito in May of 1953 with a report on the border region between Ecuador and Peru in order to provide up-to-date information for a forthcoming revision of the Rio de Janeiro Protocol that was to take place in Lima, Peru. The ex-governor, Manuel Herrera, made no mention of Jívaro ferocity or revenge. Rather, he used this report as an opportunity to inform the

117 Indígenas colonos de 28 de Mayo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, 28 de Mayo, received March 18, 1952, AMG.

118 Bolívar Pazmiño, Teniente Político de Chiguaza to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Chiguaza, March 5, 1953, AMG.

491 Ministerio de Gobierno about the “many abuses” committed by colonists and white natives to the region against the Jívaros. As he stated, residents in the provincial capital of Macas and the surrounding area practiced concertaje, or debt peonage, and many held ten or twenty Jívaros in their service without paying any kind of salary. Upon acquiring these “servants,” the colonists would give them a pair of pants, perhaps, or a dress for the women. This would create a debt that the Jívaros would be forced to pay off by working in the jungle, doing clear-cutting, or planting and harvesting crops for the whites. This system had allowed many in Macas to have several different parcels of land each, in different locations, for a total of “hundreds of hectares.” This was another problem: parcels of land were bought and sold like “any other object” rather than according to the rules that governed tierras baldías; this had led to some “bloody dramas.”119 These problems were characteristic of the fact that the Oriente remained a set of ancillary provinces in which the laws prescribed for such matters as the titling of land were subject to being ignored or bent according to the whims of influential private individuals. The Jívaros of the region often suffered the consequences of this fact.

In other parts of the region, however, Jívaros were still involved in bloody dramas of their own. In November of 1953, a North American named Wilburn H. Ferguson, who lived in Sucúa Parish, telegrammed the Ministerio de Previsión Social (Ministry of Social

Precaution) to state that two weeks prior, some “criminal” Jívaros had killed another

Jívaro who was a member of a commune called “Upano.” The members of this commune worked for Ferguson in experimental agricultural projects. After killing the man with a machete, his head was taken to make a tzantza, or ceremonial shrunken

119 Myr. Manuel Herrera Cevallos to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Quito, May 17, 1953, AMG.

492 head. According to Ferguson, “open war” threatened to break out, and the local police officers had not made any effort to stop it.120 A few days later, Ferguson wrote a letter that elaborated on the situation. Along with the Teniente Político of Huambi, Ferguson had disinterred the body of the victim, named Himbicta, to verify that he had in fact been murdered with a machete. Ferguson stated that six elderly Jívaro chiefs in the region had “sinister power” and had been responsible for many killings in the past. They had been jailed briefly, only to be released after thirty days. They boasted that the

Ecuadorian government was incapable of truly punishing them. Since then, they had gone on killing and making tzantzas. Ferguson even alleged that an Ecuadorian was murdered at the rate of once a week so that their shrunken head could be traded for a firearm. The Jívaros living in the “Upano” commune, however, were not like this; they aspired to a life of prosperity and agriculture on their private property. “They are very patriotic,” Ferguson explained, “and they are interested in voting in the elections. They have confidence that the Ecuadorian government can put an end to these killings and they are ready to collaborate with any commission you send to investigate these events.” In Ferguson’s opinion, criminal Jívaros had viewed the Upano commune as an obstacle to their commerce in tzantzas ever since it was founded in 1945. The criminals had threatened to kill Ferguson and others in the commune, as well as a soldier for having taken part in the commission that investigated the crime.121

Later that month, an official from the Salesian missions in the region gave a very different take on the situation. This account emphasized the fact that Ferguson was not

120 Wilburn H. Ferguson to Sr. Ministro de Previsión, Sucúa, November 1, 1953, AMG.

121 Dr. Wilburn H. Ferguson to Sr. Ministro de Previsión Social y Comunas, Sucúa, November 4, 1953, AMG.

493 simply a scientist—he was also an evangelical missionary who worked closely with the

Upano commune, the members of which were also evangelicals. In this report, it is true that one of the commune’s members had been murdered; however, Ferguson and other

Jívaros “gratuitously” blamed the murder on Jívaros from the Salesian settlement of

Santa Mazzarrello, at two hours’ distance. Since the dispute began, evangelical Jívaros from the commune had gone around ransacking the houses of other Jívaros that were not part of the community. As the Salesian report stated, the president of the commune, named Necta, had for a long time been seeking revenge against the Jívaros in Santa

Mazzarrello. A few months earlier Necta’s sister had died of intoxication, and he blamed her death on witchcraft done by the Jívaros in the Salesian mission. Necta was using this opportunity and the help of Ferguson to enact this long-awaited revenge. The

Salesian missions, for their part, had ushered in a long period of peace among the

Jívaros. The Salesians suspected that Himbecta (or “Jembecta”) had actually been murdered by a Jívaro named Chupi because Jembecta had offended his sister. Chupi’s father, Ambusha, had recently complained to the Salesians that the “evangelical jíbaros” were trying to appropriate their lands for no good reason.122

In February of 1954, a high-ranking official from the National Civil Police, Captain

Arturo Suárez Nieto, gave a report about the situation to the Ministerio de Gobierno. At some point before his arrival in Sucúa on February 4th, four Jívaros had been taken prisoner for the murder of Jembecta. He was to take the prisoners to Quito for trial. As

Suárez stated, it was not possible to confirm whether they were in fact guilty of the recent crime, but they “had done their killings” in the past, so both the colonists and

122 Procurador de las Misiones Salesianas del Vicariato Apostólico de Méndez y Gualaquiza, “Datos Acerca de la Muerte de Jembecta,” no date, AMG.

494 Jívaros in the settlement were happy to see them locked up. Suárez spoke both to

Ferguson and the Salesian missionaries, and he concluded that the whole situation had to do with “the struggle between these two religious bands.” As he explained, the evangelicals were accusing the Catholics of having carried out the murder. The dispute arose from conflict over land between the evangelical commune and the Salesian territories. Suárez also reported that the colonists in Sucúa asked that the police presence in the parish be strengthened, as the civil authorities did very little in reaction to these kinds of bloody events. In Suárez’s view, the Teniente Político of Huambi, where the actual murder had taken place, had been “rather negligent” and had done nothing to aid the investigation of the crime. Suárez did verify one of Ferguson’s claims; namely, that some Jívaros in the area did possess a number of firearms and a large quantity of gunpowder they had gotten by trading tzantzas to Peruvian soldiers in the border area. Furthermore, some Jívaros from among the “band opposed to the victim” had indeed threatened to kill those who had helped capture the four Jívaros that were currently incarcerated. After making these threats, they fled to Peruvian territory where they could escape Ecuadorian justice.123

This case demonstrates that the rivalry between evangelical and Catholic missionaries in the Jívaro-inhabited Southern Oriente was contentious enough to lead to violence. There is not enough evidence to suggest exactly what had motivated

Jembecta’s murder, nor who had carried out it. However, Ferguson and the Salesian priests both accused the other side of being the principal troublemakers and promoters of violence. The police official’s report suggests that ongoing violence among Jívaros

123 Cap. Arturo Suárez Nieto, Comandante General de la Policía Civil Nacional to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Policía, Quito, February 8, 1954, AMG.

495 was indeed a serious problem; the involvement of Peruvian soldiers who bought tzantzas was an exacerbating factor. As the case shows, the civil authorities of the

Oriente could do very little to prevent violence, and were ineffective in dealing with the consequences. A report from the Jefe Político in Morona Canton from the beginning of

1954 bears this out: he stated that the issue of Jívaro criminality was the largest problem facing his office. Most of these crimes were committed a great distance from the canton seat of Macas; everybody, including the Jívaros themselves, asked that these crimes be punished, but the canton administration lacked “the essential” resources to carry this out, especially an adequate number of police personnel. Most of the killings between Jívaros had as many as twenty accomplices, and the three or four police officers in the jurisdiction, lacking “experience in the jungle” could do nothing to capture the criminals who usually fled into the depths of the forest. Recently, a group of

Jívaros had come into the city of Macas seeking to commit murder; thanks to the collaboration of some citizens, the Jefe Político was able to prevent the killing but unable to capture the assailants. He requested that the Ministerio de Gobierno authorize him to ignore some of the “legal obstacles” to the execution of justice in his role as criminal judge, one of the many attributions of Jefes Políticos in the Oriente.124

Because the Oriente remained a set of ancillary provinces, suffering from the lack of personnel and good communications networks, the investigation and prosecution of crimes was an inconsistent and faulty process.

A year later, the judicial processing of crimes committed between Jívaros remained problematic. In May of 1955, the Governor of Morona-Santiago, Manuel

124 Francisco J. Flor, Jefe Político del Cantón Morona to Sr. Gobernador de Provincia, transcribed in Luis F. Jaramillo N., Gobernador de Morona-Santiago to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Macas, January 7, 1954, AMG.

496 Moncayo Flores, wrote to the President of the Superior Court of Chimborazo, a highland province bordering Morona-Santiago, seeking clarification about some recent changes to the Ley Especial de Oriente in its rules for the administration of justice. Moncayo noted that the recent reforms took away from the Jefes Políticos of the Oriente their attributions as criminal justices, imparting them instead to the criminal justices or the

Superior Court in Riobamba, capital of Chimborazo. This left the Oriente’s officials lacking in their ability to deal with a persistent problem in Morona-Santiago. “We have in this region especially the problem of the Jívaro Race,” Moncayo explained; “the Jívaros live in continuous killings, due to the inherent superstitions of their race, or due to traditional revenge.” Lately, suspected perpetrators had been set free because the cadaver of the victim frequently went missing, therefore interrupting the legal proceedings. Furthermore, the local Tenientes Políticos were usually untrained and ignorant about proper judicial proceedings, meaning that many crimes go unpunished.

This usually caused an “intensification of the killings”; this was unfortunate because the governor felt there was true need to defend the Jívaros against extinction, “as they are more than just being human beings, they give their aid to the development of agriculture and even to the supplying of the military garrisons on the frontier, etc.” The governor asked the President of the Superior Court to clarify how justice could be more effectively administered; the recent changes to the Ley Especial de Oriente meant that Jefes

Políticos had lost their ability to sentence criminals. The governor did not know to whom that ability had now passed. He also did not know what judicial prerogatives lay with the

Tenientes Políticos or even with himself, nor when certain actions were the exclusive prerogative of the higher court in Chimborazo.125 As many of the cases discussed

125 Manuel Moncayo Flores, Gobernador de Morona-Santiago to Sr. Presidente de la Corte

497 above demonstrate, administration in the Oriente was constantly lacking for manpower, especially as concerned police officers. This letter from the governor makes clear that those few officials who were called to investigate violent occurrences between Jívaros were unprepared and uninformed about their responsibilities.

A letter from the Teniente Político of Méndez Parish provides further evidence that the administration of justice for crimes involving Jívaros left much to be desired. In

February of 1954, four Jívaros from Chiguaza Parish came into his office demanding justice for having been robbed by several Jívaros from a commune in Sucúa. They had gone to their own Parish authorities, but they had done nothing; as the Teniente Político of Méndez explained, the authorities in Chiguaza had “taken the name of the government to mistreat them [the Jívaros], persecute them, and even shoot at them.”

He remarked that the Jívaros were “so useful in the jungle, and they give their services to the citizens who desire to get to know our Oriente lands.” Now they were threatened by a band of Jívaros claiming to have orders from the government to kill all the other

Jívaros and to take their property. The Teniente Político noted that he did not believe the government could impart such an order against “a defenseless race.”126 This letter suggests complicity, or at least indifference, on the part of some state officials in the

Oriente toward ongoing violence between rival factions of Jívaros. Also, in this exchange, the Jívaros are viewed in terms of their usefulness and collaboration in the patriotic and important task of incorporating the Oriente; this task had been laid out for decades by the press and other publications that constructed the region as a national

Superior de la Provincia del Chimborazo, Macas, May 6, 1955, AMG.

126 Victor A. Ulloa N., Teniente Político de la parroquia urbana de Méndez to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Méndez, February 3, 1954, AMG.

498 object of desire. But as was common, the deficiencies stemming from the problems of the Oriente as set of ancillary provinces prevented this national task from progressing as desired.

The civil authorities did support the missionaries of the region in their efforts to

“civilize” the Jívaros. In response to a complaint that the Franciscan missionaries in the southern Oriente had kidnapped a Jívaro girl, the Governor of Zamora-Chinchipe in

December of 1954 responded that the Franciscans had in fact just taken the girl into their boarding school, which was deserving of high praise for the Franciscans’ patriotic efforts. The governor reported that the Franciscans in Zamora did more than instruct the children in basic education; they also taught them trades such as tailoring and shoemaking. The children there were well fed and well dressed, even better than the children of many colonists. The governor warned the Ministerio de Gobierno about the efforts of certain private individuals who, not understanding the Franciscans’ beneficial work, seek to “stir up [inquietar]” the Jívaros for their own personal benefit; they sought to remove Jívaro children from the boarding schools to use them as labor on their own private property. The civil authorities of the region had on many occasions collaborated with the Franciscans in returning such children to the schools. The governor even sought permission from the Ministerio to use his police officers to obligate colonist padres de familia to send their children to the mission to receive the same quality care and education that the Jívaro children did.127

The civilization and nationalization of the region’s Jívaros was a preoccupation of the civil authorities. Rivalry with Peru over the Indians of the region was a factor in these

127 Eduardo Suárez Palacio, Gobernador de Zamora-Chinchipe to Sr. Subsecretario del Ministerio de Gobierno, Zamora, December 19, 1954, AMG.

499 efforts. In September of 1956, the Teniente Político of Huamboya Parish, in Morona-

Santiago, cited the fact that the Jívaros located at the border region of Macuma were under pressure of conquest by Peruvian elements, who used “flattery and promises” to convince Jívaros to move to Peruvian territory or to foster in them “the sentiment of

Peruvian nationality.” The Teniente Político asked the Ministerio de Gobierno for authorization and resources to undertake a census of the tribes in the Macuma area, to

“catechize them in the sentiments of our homeland: Ecuador, and plan a settlement of natives, with the goal that tomorrow they will be the advanced sentinels of our nationality.”128 A letter between two Ministerio de Gobierno officials supported this idea; as one stated, the census of the whole Oriente should be an overriding preoccupation of the government so that the “tribes that inhabit the Oriente acquire the idea of nationality and Homeland, the only way in which in the future they will defend their legitimate territorial rights before the ever-growing advance of our neighbor to the south.” He went on,

it is paradoxical to think that while Peru does everything possible to conquer the esteem and good will of the Ecuadorian Oriente natives, our country shows a total lack of preoccupation for them while, with an accurate and better-directed effort, all the great contingents of Indians, disseminated along the frontier zones, could come to be in the near future the most advanced sentinels of our territorial integrity.129

Here the view of the Oriente as vital to national interests and security is once again repeated; the Jívaros are seen as potentially useful citizens and warriors, playing the role of “sentinel” that many white colonists from the highlands claimed for themselves.

128 Angel Alberto Costales Morales, Teniente Político de Huamboya to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Huamboya, September 2, 1956, AMG.

129 E. Paredes Miño, Jefe de la Sección Gobierno to Sr. Subsecretario de Gobierno, Quito, no date, AMG.

500 The construction of the Oriente as a national object of desire in preceding decades had layered great importance upon the region. This construction also prescribed certain roles for the Indians of the region in this national project. But given the administrative confusion that reigned in the Oriente, the predation upon Jívaros by various public authorities and private individuals, and the feckless system of justice that could do little to prevent violence between rival groups, it is not surprising that the transformation of the Jívaros into Ecuadorian guardians of the homeland had proceeded so slowly. The deficiencies in the region’s administration stemmed from the fact that it remained a set of ancillary provinces rather than a section in which the Republic’s laws functioned with regularity. The consequences of this fact were particularly apparent for the Jívaros of the southern Oriente who continued to engage in violence and continued to be subject to predation by powerful patrones and colonists.

501 CHAPTER 8 STILL ANCILLARY: NAPO PROVINCE, 1960-1969

In his annual address to Congress in 1960, President Camilo Ponce stated that in the four Oriente provinces, “our military garrisons, the missions and more and more numerous colonists are pledging themselves to create a promising reality.” Thanks to the work of the JUNO, 36 kilometers of the highway between Puyo and Napo was opened, and the highway from Loja in the southern highlands down to Zamora was almost totally finished.1 That was the extent of his mention of the Oriente, a region that despite a growing population remained collection of ancillary provinces administered by

Leyes Especiales, which resembled in large part the general administrative structure of the rest of the country. This chapter focuses on the Oriente province of Napo in the

1960s, revisiting the themes discussed in Chapters 5-7 for one particular portion of the

Oriente, inhabited by growing numbers of colonists and Quichua-speaking Indians.

Napo is the province that was the site of oil drilling operations beginning in the latter part of the decade. This development represented the culmination of decades of hope that the Oriente could fulfill its promise as a source of great wealth for the nation. The discovery of viable oil deposits brought unprecedented numbers of colonists into the region, along with capital, infrastructure, and foreigners. This chapter describes in detail the state system that existed in that portion of the Oriente when these transformations began. The network of appointed officials, such as governors, Jefes and Tenientes

Políticos, and the private individuals, such as colonists, large landowners, and Indians, had developed a modus vivendi in the province that lay the groundwork for the changes

1 Mensaje que el Excelentísimo Señor Doctor Don Camilo Ponce Enríquez, Presidente Constitucional de la República dirige al H. Congreso Nacional (Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1960), 97.

502 that occurred as oil drilling increased. By the time this happened, the Oriente’s provinces were still ancillary, rather than fully integrated into the Republic. Nevertheless, the state had become a vital part of economic and social relations in the province, representing a waning of the relative influence of wealthy landowners and an increasing preponderance of more regular, wage-based economic relations between workers and employers.

Administrative Efforts for an Ancillary Province

The Oriente’s administration remained the responsibility of the Ministry of

Government (Ministerio de Gobierno). The Minister, Carlos Bustamante Pérez, in 1960 also praised the JUNO’s efforts that were impressive despite limited economic resources. The program of road transportation it pursued would “permit those territories to be incorporated effectively to national life.”2 But when compared to the efforts of other countries toward their own Amazonian regions, which had spent millions of dollars,

Ecuador could not be said to have spent even one million dollars per year on the

Oriente. The need for more money for the JUNO was clear. The JUNO also cried out for a better solution to an old problem: the titling and acquisition of lands in the Oriente.

Despite the existence of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización, most of the colonists who had worked their parcels of land for a long time still did not have title. In other cases, parcels were claimed by more than one party. All this confusion constrained colonization in the region. The minister demanded a “simple system, with easy processing and without burdensome economic exigencies, through which the colonist can be attended immediately in all his claims.” Such a system would “inspire

2 Dr. Carlos Bustamante Pérez, Informe a la Nación 1960 (Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales), XIII.

503 confidence” and allow the colonists to get on with their agricultural work. The “suffering and sacrifices” of the Oriente colonist meant he deserved this attention; furthermore, well-directed colonization would foment national wealth and provide a solution for a number of social problems.3 The view of Oriente colonists as particularly praiseworthy for their patriotic endeavors in the important Amazonian region still held currency in this ministerial report.

The report from the subsequent minister, Milton Sanchez Barona, in 1961 reiterated many of the same concerns. As Sanchez stated, the Oriente was “not only the future and the reserve of Ecuador. It is also the immediate future for the citizens of the pueblo if we resolve two problems with serenity and true patriotism: roads and colonization.” He asked the Congress to provide the JUNO with 30 million sucres to spend on roads and for funds to undertake colonization projects on a grand scale. In the meantime, colonists still had trouble getting title to their land. In a sort of catch-22, colonists were also unable to get a loan from the Development Bank (Banco de

Fomento) because the bank would not issue loans to agriculturalists without title to land.

He recommended that the INC establish a headquarters in each capital of the Oriente provinces, along with technical offices, so that the procedures for obtaining title could take place entirely within the Oriente itself. In fact, a legislative decree from December of 1959 had authorized this very idea, but it had not yet taken place.4 The minister also

3 Ibid., 122-123.

4 Indeed, INC offices were eventually established in Tena, Puyo, Baeza, Sucúa, Limón, and Zamora. The official position of the INC supported spontaneous colonization, rather than massive planned projects, as the best way to people the Oriente. The Institute also planned to carry out a program of technical, social, and economic assistance in the Oriente, including working with the Catholic missions to build schools, health services, and houses. Ministerio de Fomento, Informe a la Nación. II Tomo (Quito: 1961), 249-257.

504 called for provisions to ensure that the Indians of the Oriente were not deprived of their lands, which they needed for their subsistence and progress.5 The public officials of the

Oriente were still poorly paid; the minister asked Congress to approve a budget line item that would increase salaries.6

The remuneration of public employees had not improved by the next year. The new minister in 1962 included in his report to Congress a letter from the Jefe Político of

Napo Canton, Carlos Donoso Lasso, who stated that the employees in the area were not paid enough. For example, an employee in his office earned only 400 sucres a month, the same quantity assigned by the Congress of 1948. This was not enough to cover the “indispensable necessities of life.” Furthermore, the public officials continued to bear too many administrative burdens. The Tenientes Políticos simply could not handle their responsibilities as judges in civil cases given their many other attributions and low pay. Donoso stated that Congress should create the position of parish judge for such matters throughout the Oriente.7

At the outset of the decade, then, the Oriente continued to experience many of the problems that government ministers had for decades highlighted in the quest to see

Congress and the Executive take decisive, efficient action. Despite being governed by

“Special Laws,” the administrative regime prescribed for the region was similar in most aspects to that in the rest of the Republic. Infrastructure, personnel, and resources were lacking, however; the Oriente remained group of ancillary provinces in which conditions

5 Milton Sanchez Barona, Informe a la Nación 1961 (Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1961), IX-X.

6 Ibid., 33.

7 Carlos Donoso Lasso to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Quito, June 18, 1962, in Jaime E. Del Hierro S., Informe a la Nación 1961-62 (Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1962), 25-26.

505 on the ground were dominated by a state system of public and private individuals that occasionally bent the system and improvised in order to establish a modus vivendi among the region’s colonists and Indians.

The civil administration of the Oriente at the beginning of the decade remained largely in the hands of the Jefes and Tenientes Políticos that carried extra attributions due to being in the Oriente. A typical complaint arising from this fact came from the Jefe

Político of Napo Canton in July of 1960. As he described it, his office was responsible for “five or more” administrative functions that required daily and constant attention.8 As the Governor of Napo Province, Guillermo R. Trujillo stated in his report to the Ministry of Government, the multiple hats the Jefes Políticos wore demanded that they be people of “comprehension and equanimity.” Most of these officials in the province were satisfactory employees, but in a few cases he had had to request their immediate replacement with “competent and suitable” people. The distance between the Oriente’s canton centers and the poor road network meant that the governor was not able to maintain the direct contact he would like with these subalterns. The JUNO’s efforts had greatly improved the routes of penetration into the Oriente from the Sierra, as well as the road from Puyo in Pastaza Province to the Napo River region. But the internal road network left much to be desired; the governor hoped more attention could be given to it by the government. As for the Oriente’s local elected bodies, the situation was disappointing. These municipal organisms did not lack for enthusiasm, but their miniscule budgets meant they could attend only to roadwork, leaving other needs to the

8 Jefe Político del Napo to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Tena, July 15, 1960, AGN.

506 side. For this, too, the governor called for more money from the central government.9 A sign of the difficulties the municipal bodies faced came in 1961, when a financial officer of the Napo Canton Council wrote to the Jefe Político to complain of his body’s scarce income. With these paltry resources, the Council could not attend to the upkeep of the area’s roads, he argued. He asked the Jefe Político to make sure that the Ley de

Caminos was strictly enforced, which required all property owners with land abutting public thoroughfares to maintain the adjacent portion of the road.10

The system of communications, and resources in general, were deficient for other reasons, too. In 1962, the secretary of the Tenencia Política of Loreto Parish resigned due to the lack of good mail service, which made contact with family and civilization impossible. Furthermore, there was no adequate health service in the parish.11 The next month, the Teniente Político wrote to the Governor of Napo to complain that he could not keep any secretary for more than a short time. Due to the low salary, nobody was interested in the position. He suggested naming Ernesto

Calapucha Grefa to the position, even though he did not have a cédula de identidad, or national identity card, which was a requirement for public office. He also requested that

Calapucha be formally hired right there in Loreto Parish, rather than in the provincial capital of Tena as was required, because of the distance and slow journey between the

9 Guillermo R. Trujillo, Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Oriente, Tena, June 29, 1960, AGN.

10 Eudaldo Rodríguez Falconí, Síndico Municipal del Concejo Cantonal de Napo to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Tena, February 18, 1961, AGN.

11 Miltón Rueda C. to Sr. Teniente Político de Parroquia Loreto, Loreto, October 7, 1962, AGN.

507 places.12 The mail service to Loreto had not improved, either, and the parish badly needed some police officers because there were many infractions committed in the parish that went unpunished, such as a recent robbery of money from the Josephine missionary center there.13

A memorandum from the governor to the Ministro de Gobierno that year clarified the kinds of challenges the Jefes and Tenientes Políticos continued to face. Those authorities spent much of their time attending to all kinds of minor judicial cases that would be better handled by provincial judges dedicated exclusively to judicial matters. In the meantime, improving just the most basic needs of public offices would help; as the governor reported, the offices of the Jefes and Tenientes Políticos generally lacked books containing the codes, laws, and decrees in effect, leaving the authorities with no way to consult what their proper course of action should be. Most of the public buildings in the province were in disrepair and in need of furniture. And the main problem remained the road network, which was still limited and slow, and it prevented the public officials from carrying out their duties properly.14

This persistent lack of infrastructure and resources in the region even during the

1960s also meant that the kinds of abuses and conflicts that characterized the previous

12 Andrade Chacón, Teniente Político de Loreto to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Loreto, November 26, 1962, AGN.

13 Andrade Chacón, Teniente Político de Loreto to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Loreto, November 26, 1962, AGN. The lack of a sufficient number of police continued to be a problem for the state officials in the Oriente. In 1965, the Teniente Político of Puerto Napo, whose parish lacked any officers at all, stated that the rising number of passengers and tourists in cars and trucks along the Puyo-Napo road meant that police service was needed more than ever, to control for speeding and drunk driving. Teniente Político de Puerto Napo to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Puerto Napo, December 15, 1965, AGN.

14 Capitán César Cepeda R., Gobernador de Napo, “Informe y Memorandum que el Señor Gobernador de la Provincia de Napo, Presenta a Consideración del Señor Ministro de Gobierno,” no date, 1962, AGN.

508 decades continued. In 1962, an official from the Ministerio de Gobierno wrote a concerned letter to the Governor of Napo in response to a telegram he had gotten from the Teniente Político of Papallacta. Luis Velasco, the secretary there, committed a series of abuses against the citizens, charging them “scandalous sums of money” for paperwork that should have been done free of charge.15 Another typical complaint came in 1963, when the governor wrote to the Ministerio de Gobierno to state that the

Teniente Político of Puerto Napo, Rafael Picón, had proven himself to be a “quite despotic person” in his actions toward the citizens of the parish.16 The municipal bodies of the region were also subject to complaints; in 1964 then-governor Aníbal Borbua complained about the Municipal Council in Tena to the Ministerio de Gobierno.

According to the Borbua, residents of several different parishes had gathered in a meeting to express their discontent with the Council’s failure to undertake any projects of significance. Archidona had been without electric lights for a month and a half due to the Council’s deficiencies, and the road network had fallen into disrepair. Colonists along the roads had formally complained about the “what-does-it-matter-to-me-ism”

(“quemeimportismo”) of the council, which did nothing for the general welfare but whose members enjoyed increasing salaries. The governor requested that the entire Municipal

Council be dismissed for the “tranquility and advancement of these Oriente pueblos.”17

15 Dr. Manuel Orellana Ayora, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Quito, July 6, 1962, AGN.

16 Capitán César Cepeda R., Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Manuel E. Córdova G., Subsecretario de Gobierno, Tena, March 14, 1963, AGN.

17 Aníbal Borbua, Gobernador del Napo to Sr. Subsecretario de Gobierno, Tena, June 22, 1964, AGN.

509 Sometimes, Oriente citizens took matters into their own hands, as in December of 1964 when the citizens of Cosanga, in Quijos Canton, decided to remove their

Teniente Político, Alonso Cruz, from office. As the complainants who wrote to the governor explained, they were a “patient pueblo” but they had reached their limit with

Cruz, who usually failed to show up to his office and was incompetent when he did. As they stated, Cruz had also done a poor job as the Teniente Político of Borja and Chaco parishes. After his removal, Cruz took all the legal books with him, as well as the official rubber stamp of the Teniente Político.18 In 1966, the Teniente Político of Puerto Napo,

Washington Espíndola, was similarly accused of never being in his office. The President of the Parish Junta explained why: he was spending all his time working for a mining company, three kilometers from the parish center. Recently, there had been some deaths that required a formal investigation, but Espíndola’s absence prevented any investigation from taking place. The Junta asked the Ministro de Gobierno for

Espíndola’s immediate firing.19 The public officials in the Oriente province of Napo continued to be the subject of complaints and scandals as they contended with limited resources and difficult transportation while enacting the prescriptions of the Ley

Especial de Oriente, which continued to layer multiple attributions on them unlike those expected of their counterparts in the Sierra or coastal region.

Conflict arising from political sectarianism continued to affect the Oriente in the

1960s. In 1963, a military junta once again seized power in Ecuador amid growing popular mobilization and leftist agitation. The junta removed President Carlos Julio

18 Telmo Baéz, Segundo Huachamai y demás ciudadanos to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Cosanga, December 23, 1964, AGN.

19 Luis E. Chamorro, Presidente de la Junta Parroquial de Puerto Napo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Puerto Napo, December 23, 1966, AGN.

510 Arosemena Monroy and set out to enact a series of structural reforms.20 According to some residents in Quijos Canton, loyalists to Arosemena were causing “limitless damage” to the popular conscience. Among these accused loyalists were the Jefe

Político and the Teniente Político of Baeza, whom the complainants alleged were acting only according to the desire to “profit off of the State from the comfortable position” of the public offices while committing “injustices,” “intrigue,” and “calumny.” They requested that the Governor of Napo Province resolve the “disconformity of the people” there by removing those functionaries.21 In this example, the residents of Quijos petitioned for redress of grievances citing the over-politicization of the public employees that led to their negligence and even hostile administration. It is clear from this case and others that political factionalism continued to interrupt the provision of public services and the continuity of administration in the Oriente much as it had done in previous decades.

Despite the ongoing scarcity of resources and the tendency of state officials to engage in illicit behavior or otherwise be drawn into interpersonal conflicts, factors which demonstrated that the Oriente’s “Special Laws” still had not succeeded in fulfilling the goals for the region that statesmen and propagandists had held for many decades, the Oriente was significantly changed in the 1960s by the beginning of oil drilling operations by North American companies such as Texaco. Even before this, however, state officials in the Oriente confronted new developments unlike those of previous decades. In 1966, the Jefe Político of Napo Canton, Petronio Rivadeneyra, wrote to the

20 Agustín Cueva, “El Ecuador de 1960 a 1979,” Enrique Ayala Mora, ed., Nueva Historia del Ecuador, Vol. 11 (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 1991), 155-56.

21 Colonos, Moradores del Cantón Quijos to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Quijos, no date, 1964, AGN.

511 branch of the Development Bank located in Puyo, in Pastaza Province, to complain that the bank had not sent the Jefatura its share of tax revenue on bars, cantinas, hotels, hippodromes, and other such establishments in the province. These funds were especially needed given that his office, and those of the Tenientes Políticos, were completely devoid of office supplies and adequate furniture.22 Even though a greater number of public institutions catering to consumers and tourists existed in his jurisdiction, public administration still suffered from a lack of resources.

One of the most significant new developments was the arrival of North American petroleum companies. The public officials of Napo Province were frequently called to intervene in problems arising from these companies’ operations. In 1966, the secretary of the Jefatura Política of Napo Canton wrote to Wilson Silvers, a North American representative of the Geophysical Service Incorporated about one of their Ecuadorian employees, Jorge Ruiz. Ruiz had several outstanding debts to “commercial houses” in

Tena, so he asked Silvers to have 400 sucres per month docked from Ruiz’s pay until the sum of two thousand sucres was reached.23 Likewise, Silvers at times called for the

Oriente public officials’ aid; that same month, he wrote to the Inspector de Trabajo in

Napo to state that his company had contracted Luis Troya Páez as a nurse the previous

August. But lately Troya had been negligent, putting the rest of the workers in danger of

22 Petronio Rivadeneyra V., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Gerente del Banco de Fomento Sucursal Puyo, January 17, 1966, AGN.

23 Jorge A. Espinosa Ch., Secretario de la Jefatura Política de Napo to Sr. Wilson Silvers, Tena, April 7, 1966, AGN.

512 illness. Silvers requested that the Oriente public officials sanction Troya and terminate his contract in legal fashion.24

The increase in population due to oil drilling operations outstripped the resources of the state in the region at times. In August of 1967, the Teniente Político of Francisco de Orellana Parish, further down the Napo and close to the site of oil drilling, wrote to the Governor of Napo to state that the human presence in his jurisdiction had

“quadrupled” recently. Nevertheless, there was a total absence of police officers there.

Members of the military at times helped out in the administration of justice, but there were not enough soldiers to capture criminals, who found it easy to escape.25 In the view of Enrique Espinoza de los Monteros, an elected member of the Napo Provincial

Council, it was unjust that the Oriente’s administration remained under-resourced as the dreams about the Oriente as a treasure trove for Ecuador’s economy were finally coming true. As Espinoza wrote to the Governor in 1968,

we are now in the reality of petroleum. …But despite the fact that the explorations and exploitations of petroleum are being done within the territory of Napo Province…the needs of the Oriente are not taken into account; nothing is assigned for the development of the road network, of industry, etc.

Espinoza invited the governor to work with the Provincial Council to convince the government to increase the budget for such things. “We are not begging for budgetary allocations,” he explained, “we want our rights, so that the petroleum companies pay back the benefits they obtain, in at least one-millionth part, giving us what we deserve

24 Wilson Silvers, Jefe de Personal de Geophysical Service Inc. to Sr. Inspector de Trabajo, April 22, 1966, AGN.

25 Teniente Político de Francisco de Orellana to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, August 22, 1967, AGN.

513 for use on public works in Napo Province.”26 A component of the Oriente as national object of desire was finally being realized. For the first time, it appeared that the region really would contribute significantly to the national economy. But the presence of the

Ecuadorian state in the Oriente by 1968 had not increased and strengthened commensurate with the newfound economic importance of the region. Napo Province remained an ancillary province in administrative concerns even as its importance to the national economy was taking on newfound importance.

Petroleum extraction brought negative consequences that public officials were forced to contend with. In August of 1968, the Teniente Político of Francisco de

Orellana Parish, along with the President of the Junta Parroquial, the parish priest, and others, wrote an angry letter to the Governor of Napo. As they described, the “tranquility of the population,” which was home to three hundred children, was disturbed by the arrival of prostitutes that created a “center of immorality and corruption.” The cause of this was arrival of large numbers of workers for the petroleum companies, who under the influence of alcohol wasted their savings in nightclubs. The complainants demanded that at least four police officers be sent to the parish to help the Teniente Político. They also requested that the canoes doing passenger service between Puerto Napo, near

Tena, and Coca, the main settlement in Francisco de Orellana Parish, be required to submit a list of passengers to the authorities. Finally, they asked for a prohibition on the opening of any new nightclubs and bars.27 The next month, the Jefe Político of Napo

26 Enrique Espinoza de los Monteros, Prefecto Provincial de Napo del Concejo Provincial de Napo to Sr. Don Aníbal Borbua, Gobernador de Napo, Tena, May 3, 1968, AGN.

27 Feranando Sanmiguel, Teniente Político de Francisco de Orellana et al to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Francisco de Orellana, August 27, 1968, AGN.

514 Canton wrote to the governor about his trip to Francisco de Orellana to study these problems. As he reported, there indeed was a dire need for more police officers. The parish had become a place comprised almost entirely of the employees of Texaco and other companies, who caused “continuous problems and nocturnal disturbances that the civil Authority cannot do anything about.” The existence of a brothel in town made the situation even worse; he recommended that a prophylactic or sanitary center be established to control prostitutes lest there be an outbreak of venereal disease.28

Competition for Land in the 1960s and Agrarian Reform

As the population of the Oriente increased in the 1960s, one of the most consequential problems to be resolved was the adjudication and titling of land. In Napo

Province, the conflicts that had characterized the 1940s and 50s over land continued. In this new decade, however, there were more arms of the state “on the ground” to attempt to rationalize landholding and resolve conflicts. Due to difficult infrastructure, these entities often did not work as efficiently or as quickly as was hoped. Conflict over land frequently embroiled the province’s public employees, who could be accused of negligence or partiality. Overlapping claims to the same piece of land were very common; in many cases, the claimants were from different social backgrounds, that is, white colonists on the one hand and Quichua-speaking Indians on the other. But conflicts did not simply take place along racial lines; there was no necessary “solidarity” between colonists or between Indians.

28 Alfredo F. Salazar G., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Tena, September 16, 1968, AGN. In 1969, residents of Archidona wrote to the Governor to complain about the prostitutes that had recently come to that town, also. Moradores de Archidona to Sr. Alfredo Salazar B., Gobernador de Napo, Archidona, April 28, 1969, AGN.

515 The Instituto Nacional de Colonización, or National Institute of Colonization, the creation of which was discussed in Chapter 6, was the supreme deciding entity for the adjudication and titling of land. But it did not necessarily respond to requests or complaints in a timely fashion. In March of 1960, The Jefe Político of Quijos Canton wrote to the Governor of Napo to state that while he understood that the INC was the only entity that could resolve problems involving land, it was swamped with too much work. In Baeza, principal settlement of the canton, there were many formal claims to land that faced opposition from a third party. The simple fact of this opposition meant that all processing of these claims was totally stalled. For example, the Municipal

Council in Baeza in 1958 had claimed some land that had counter-claims from colonists who had resided there for eight years. There had been no word at all from the INC on that case in the two years since then.29

When the INC did function normally, its processes demanded the involvement of the Jefes Políticos of Napo Province. In general, once the INC had received all the necessary paperwork from the claimant, including detailed information about the land and a map, it was processed in an office of the INC. If all was in order, the paperwork would be sent back to the Jefe Político of the canton in which the claim was made. The

Jefe Político would then formally present title to the claimant and record it in the public records. Frequently, the Jefes Políticos or their parish-level counterparts, the Tenientes

Políticos, were the first to hear about any problems or conflicts over land, including both the initial acquisition of land as well as the titling process. For example, in October of

1960, José Maria Yépez, a resident of Archidona, complained to the Jefe Político that

29 Jorge A. Endara M., Jefe Político de Quijos to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Baeza, March 8, 1960, AGN.

516 one Alfonso Guerrero, also a resident of Archidona, had committed fraud in selling to

Yépez a parcel of land that was actually occupied by Indian families. Recognizing that he would have a problem obtaining formal title given the competing claims, Yépez asked the Jefe Político to declare the sale null and to order Guerrero to return the 4,500 sucres he had paid.30

In recognition of the difficulties surrounding the acquisition and titling of land, the residents of Napo Canton that had joined the Centro Agrícola Cantonal Del Napo, or the

Napo Canton Agricultural Center, took steps to mitigate these problems. In September of 1960, the Directorate of the Center issued a memorandum that stated its mission and the steps it planned to take. The Center’s purpose was to “promote the tranquility and progress [“buena marcha”] of agriculture and especially to promote colonization.” But for many years, there had been “many abnormalities” in the adjudication of vacant lands, which was causing “various and numerous conflicts of property lines.” This was a problem for the small-scale agriculturalist, as well as for the region’s Indians who were the victims of “hacendados” that sought to possess large tracts of lands. As for the INC, its personnel knew “nothing or very little” about the Oriente, in part due to false and poor-intentioned reports that the entity had received. So the Center launched a campaign to take a census of all the lands adjudicated by the INC so far, to make sure that the requirement that 25% of the land be under cultivation was fulfilled. This rule applied to whites as well as Indians.31 A few days later, the Directorate of the Center asked the Jefe Político of Napo Canton to collaborate in this effort to eliminate “the

30 José Maria Yepez to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Tena, October 6, 1960, AGN.

31 Directorio del Centro Agrícola Cantonal de Napo, Tena, September 29, 1960, AGN.

517 numerous abuses observed in previous administrations.” These abuses were often motivated by bias on the part of the public employees who took part in the surveying and processing of land claims. It was intended that carrying out this census would make the INC’s work easier in the future, so it could attend to the growing backlog of claims.

The Center’s directors hoped that the Jefe Político and all the various Tenientes

Políticos of the parishes in the canton would do their utmost to eliminate conflict between claimants. The Jefes and Tenientes Políticos frequently drew up documents called “Acts of Conciliation” between rival claimants to a parcel of land, in which both sides would agree to some compromise or recognize the rights of the other party and therefore cease cultivating a certain piece of land. This was a very common method for solving conflicts in the province, and will be discussed at greater length below.

According to the Agricultural Center, these resolutions were rarely made public, which unfortunately meant that confusion and conflict over land tenancy could persist even after an Act of Conciliation was signed. So the Center requested that all Jefes and

Tenientes Políticos make copies of these documents for the Center’s archive.32

Later the Center drew up a letter to be distributed to all agriculturalists in the canton. In it, they cited another important reason for the census of properties. The

Center’s directors and many others hoped that the Development Bank would open a branch in Tena, center of the canton and capital of Napo Province. But that bank would only work with farmers who had formal title to their land. In the entire canton, there were not enough titled properties to justify the establishment of the branch. The census campaign would hopefully “eliminate most of the obstacles” to the processing of claims and the issuing of titles. The Center assured the agriculturalists in the canton that the

32 Centro Agrícola Cantonal del Napo to Sr. Jefe Político del Napo, Tena, October 4, 1960, AGN.

518 surveying of their lands would be done completely free of charge. Furthermore, the

Jefes and Tenientes Políticos were ready to make formal Acts of Conciliation, which could be sent along with the other necessary paperwork to the INC in order to speed up the issuing of title as it would demonstrate to the INC that competing claims on parcels of land had been resolved. The Center asked all agriculturalists to submit the name of their parcel, its dimensions, its borders, the number of hectares cultivated, the amount of land yet to be cleared, whether or not they had already submitted a claim to the INC, and whether any competing claims existed to the land.33

The efforts by the Centro Agrícola demonstrate the scale of the problem that existed, namely, that most of the land tenancy in the canton was still informal in nature.

Furthermore, possession of land was often contested, which called for the frequent intervention of the Jefes and Tenientes Políticos in the region. The organization that was to be the final arbiter of such matters, the INC, existed on paper but in practice was largely ineffectual in 1960. Though the laws governing the INC were to apply to the

Oriente as they did to the rest of the Republic, the Oriente remained a region in which many of the state’s efforts were implemented only in a clumsy, haphazard fashion. The

Centro Agrícola’s agricultural census was a response to the fact that the Oriente’s remained an under-resource and somewhat dysfunctional set of ancillary provinces rather than integral zones like any in the Sierra or Pacific coast region.

An important step toward improving this situation was taken in 1961 when the

INC resolved to establish an office in each provincial capital in the Oriente. This would allow the processing of land claims to take place entirely within the region, rather than in

Quito which opened them up to delays due to poor infrastructure and communications.

33 Centro Agrícola Cantonal del Napo, Circular, Tena, October 5, 1960, AGN.

519 In May of 1961, Luis G. León Bermeo, the delegate for the INC in Napo Province, wrote to the Jefe Político of Napo to inform him about this decision, which was made “given the great difficulties that colonists of the Oriente Regions have had to overcome to obtain property titles to lots of vacant land.” As León explained, the new office of the

INC in Tena would be able to issue title to all those claims that did not provoke conflict between rival claimants. In the case of unresolved conflict, however, a decision on the case would still have to be made in the INC office in Quito. The presence of the office in

Tena would also mean that technicians could undertake inspection of parcels of land more easily. León also clarified that any “claimant pertaining to the indigenous race” would be exempt from payment for surveying, but would still have to cover the cost of food for the technician when necessary. White colonists would have to pay additional costs, such as transportation costs for the technician, which they could deposit in the office in Tena.34

Though the establishment of the office in Tena may have made the processing of land claims more efficient, it did not prevent conflict from cropping up in the first place.

For example, in July of 1961, the Jefe Político of Napo received a complaint from Luis

Enrique Caicedo, president of the agricultural colony known as “Velasco Ibarra” which, in Caicedo’s assertion, legally owned a large parcel of land that stretched between

Napo and Pastaza Provinces. He complained that Ruperto Coloma and his family were illegally holding onto 250 hectares and even undertaking clear cutting. This prevented some of the colonists of “Velasco Ibarra” from obtaining the 50 hectares they were entitled to. Furthermore, Coloma’s actions went against the stipulation of the Ley

34 Luis G. León Bermeo, Delegado del INC en la Provincia del Napo to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Tena, May 4, 1961, AGN.

520 Especial de Oriente that was intended to promote efficient colonization of the region.35

In another case, the secretary of the INC office in Tena ordered the Jefe Político to intervene in a conflict between the colonist Ricardo Rueda on one hand and the Indians

José and Manuel Grefa on the other. The INC was undertaking a study of each party’s claim to determine who was in the right; in the meantime, the secretary ordered the Jefe

Político to prohibit any further planting or clear cutting on the land Rueda claimed.36 In

1963, Rolando Guerrero, a resident of Archidona, wrote the Teniente Político of Tena to declare that he formally opposed the claim to 20 hectares recently filed by Antonio

Shiguango, because one hectare of this claim overlapped with his own property.37 Such declarations of opposition were very common. Even in those cases without conflict, the

INC relied on the Jefes and Tenientes Políticos for the titling process. In every case, one of these appointed officials was required to officially issue the title and note it in public records.38

As had been true for decades, the appointed officials of the Oriente were not necessarily trustworthy in their dealings with the INC and with parcels of land. In 1964, the Governor of Napo, Aníbal Borbua, wrote to an official of the Junta Militar de

35 Luis Enrique Caicedo, Presidente de la Colonia Agrícola Velasco Ibarra to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Puyo, July 20, 1961, AGN.

36 Ricardo Baquero, Secretario de la Delegación del INC en la Provincia del Napo to Sr. Jefe Político del Napo, Tena, September 24, 1961, AGN.

37 Rolando Guerrero M. to Sr. Teniente Político de Tena, Archidona, April 6, 1963, AGN.

38 The Archivo de la Gobernación de Napo is full of such requests by the INC for Jefes Políticos. For one example, in 1962, an INC official in Quito ordered the Jefe Político of Napo to finalize the granting of title for one Modesto Cevallos, who legally acquired 166 hectares. Dr. Oswaldo Pazmiño C., Asesor Jurídico de Administración de Tierras to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Quito, March 15, 1962, AGN. In 1963, the Minister of Development, who was also President of the INC, ordered the Jefe Político to intervene on the behalf of the State and the INC in 7 land sales that took place in different parishes in Napo Canton. Lcdo. José Salazar Barragán, Ministro de Fomento y Presidente del INC to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Quito, February 4, 1963, AGN.

521 Gobierno to state that recent complaints made against the Teniente Político of Baeza, in

Quijos Canton, were true. The Teniente Político in question possessed several parcels of land in the parish, but had never obtained legal title to them from the INC. His possessions allowed him to engage in illicit rent-seeking behavior: he was in the habit of charging other colonists in the parish for simply crossing over his land. The governor had been forced to order the Teniente Político to cease in these activities.39

The elected municipal bodies of the Oriente were also accused of abusing their authority in cases involving the acquisition of land. Also in 1964, Luis A. Trujillo, a colonist in Chaco Parish, in Quijos Canton, wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno to complain that the Municipal Council of Quijos Canton was arbitrarily taking away portions of his plot of land that lay within the urban perimeter of Chaco. The Council then handed out parcels of Trujillo’s land to various private citizens. He requested that the Ministerio de Gobierno undertake an investigation of this so that he could receive payment for all the land he had lost.40

This evidence makes clear that the process for obtaining legal title to land was still subject to manipulation by elected and appointed officials in the Oriente. The process remained slow and conflict-ridden despite the establishment of offices of the

INC in the Oriente provinces themselves. 1964 brought the creation of a new entity to govern the titling of land as Ecuador’s military government embarked upon a massive agrarian reform project. The military junta cited the need for agriculture to become a

“truly productive, dynamic, and progressive sector” of the economy, made up of

39 Aníbal Borbua B., Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Coronel Jaime Paz y Miño, Jefe Civil y Militar de las Provincias Orientales, Tena, June 12, 1964, AGN.

40 Luis A Trujillo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno y Municipalidades, Chaco, no date, 1964, AGN.

522 “impresarios and agriculturalists who own the land.” Colonization was to be an

“important contributing action” in the process of restructuring landholding in the country.

An executive decree from July of 1964 created the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma

Agraria y Colonización, or Ecuadorian Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonization.

Tierras baldías or “vacant lands” in the Oriente would be the responsibility of the

IERAC.41 The success of the 1964 agrarian reform was not glowing; the project was overseen by a nine-person government board made up of large landowners. Over the course of the project, 28,262 families in Ecuador received title through the IERAC, but the average size of these holdings was only eight hectares, and the land was often of poor quality. In general, the inefficiency and bureaucratic confusion of the process meant that the goals of democratization and intensification of production were not achieved. In fact, food imports to Ecuador rose considerably in the years after the reform.42 Nevertheless, the IERAC did have an effect in the Oriente during the decade under study: between 1964 and 1970, the IERAC granted 3,373 titles for the colonization of Oriente land, amounting to a total of 124,776.2 hectares. This represented 26% of all titles and 27% of all hectares adjudicated for colonization by the

IERAC in the whole Republic during this time period.43

The IERAC replaced the INC as the final word on the granting of title in the

Oriente. In 1965, the Jefe Político of Quijos Canton, Juan E. Abdo, explained to the

41 La Junta Militar de Gobierno, “Ley de Reforma Agraria y Colonización,” Registro Oficial 297, (July 23, 1964): 1-25.

42 Macdonald, Ethnicity and Culture amidst New “Neighbors,” 69-70. For a full discussion of the 1964 Agrarian Reform, see Osvaldo Barsky, La Reforma Agraria Ecuatoriana (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional and FLACSO, 1984).

43 Numbers cited in Barsky, La Reforma Agraria Ecuatoriana, 304.

523 Governor of Napo what the consequences of the IERAC’s creation were for his own job.

According to Abdo, the arrival of colonists to Quijos was increasing all the time, which brought with it “not just advancement, but also the problems that mostly have to do with borders and possession of land.” These problems were to be resolved by the IERAC, but its creation meant the elimination of the old INC office in Quijos. So once again, the solution of all these problems fell mostly on the shoulders of the Jefe Político, which meant that he had to travel throughout the canton frequently. The Tenientes Políticos, also, had to collaborate, but as Abdo reported, their compliance in this realm was

“acceptable” but not “brilliant,” so he stated that there needed to be some

“readjustments” in the administration of Quijos Canton.44

Evidence of partiality by appointed officials came from beyond Quijos Canton as well. In 1966, Ciro Gutierrez Rueda, who lived near Tena, the provincial capital, wrote to the Governor to ask for help in his dispute over land with one Bolívar Sanmiguel. As

Gutierrez reported, he had possessed some land for many years, and his formal request for title had been processed by the INC. But lately, Sanmiguel had been encroaching on his land and doing agricultural work. The Jefe Político of the Canton would not do anything to prevent this because he was “an interested party.”45 The

IERAC was aware of this conflict, and informed the Governor as much. According to the

IERAC Inspector of Napo, the dispute was under study in the agency’s office in Quito, which was the only entity that could resolve such dilemmas. Both Gutierrez and

Sanmiguel had been informed by the IERAC that they would have to attend a “meeting

44 Juan E. Abdo T., Jefe Político de Quijos to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Baeza, August 30, 1965, AGN.

45 Ciro Gutierrez Rueda to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Tena, August 21, 1966, AGN.

524 of conciliation” in Quito.46 This case shows that, even after the creation of new agencies to resolve land conflict in the context of increasing colonization of the Oriente, Napo

Province’s appointed officials still posed problems for land tenancy due to their intervention with partiality. Furthermore, the resolution of these conflicts still could require action in Quito, meaning that Napo Province could not be self sufficient in such matters.

For the rest of the decade, the appointed officials of Napo Province were called to intervene in conflicts over land, despite the existence of the IERAC. The Jefes and

Tenientes Políticos frequently issued strongly worded letters to the residents of their jurisdiction to prevent usurping or encroachment of land. A typical example is the pair of letters from the Jefe Político of Napo Canton, Jaime Mancheno Albuja, from April of

1967. Francisco Mejia complained that Livio Cabrera Vergara was working a parcel of his land; Mancheno wrote to both men ordering them to stop all agricultural work and to bring any titles they might have into his office. He informed them he would arrange for an inspection of the lands in question, and the party deemed culpable would be sanctioned.47 Later that month, Mancheno had to order one Matilde Baquero to cease all agricultural work because Leonidas Rueda had complained that she was encroaching on his land in her activities. Again, he would have to arrange for an ocular inspection of the boundaries between their two properties to resolve this problem.48

46 S. Ricardo Baquero, Inspector del IERAC en Napo to Sr. José Eloy Baquero L., Gobernador de Napo, Tena, August 24, 1966, AGN.

47 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político y Intendente de Policía to Sr. Livio Cabrera Vergara, Tena, April 4, 1967, AGN; and Jaime Mancheno Albuja to Sr. Francisco Mejía, Tena, April 4, 1967, AGN.

48 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político y Intendente de Policía to Sra. Matilde Baquero, Tena, April 12, 1967, AGN.

525 At times, Mancheno carried out the orders of the IERAC. In September of 1967, he wrote to Plutarco Vasconez, a colonist in Misahuallí, in Napo Canton, on behalf of the secretary general of the IERAC. He ordered Vasconez to cease in his distribution of parcels of land while calling himself an “old colonist.” He reminded Vasconez that the only institution authorized to distribute lands legally was the IERAC. If he continued in this fashion, he would be captured and placed at the mercy of the IERAC authorities for punishment. As Mancheno explained, “any colonist that wants to can acquire a parcel of land, but only when it is to work it, not like what you are currently doing in taking parcels only for usufruct purposes, selling them, trading them, and negotiating with them, which is something, I repeat, against the law.”49 Mancheno continued to have problems with

Vasconez; in October, one Pedro Pablo Rivadeneyra complained that Vasconez was cutting paths on his land. Rivadeneyra had definitive title to his land, as issued by the government; Mancheno ordered Vasconez to stop immediately.50

Mancheno had his critics in the way he approached cases involving parcels of land. At some point in September of 1967, César Ortiz, who owned a parcel of land in

Tena that he claimed was “clearly defined” by his legal title, complained to the Ministerio de Gobierno that Mancheno as Jefe Político, along with his secretary, intended to cause him “grave prejudice” by “pronouncing themselves” against him. Without any motive or just cause, Mancheno was influencing other inhabitants of the canton who lived near

Ortiz’s lands to claim portions of it for themselves. Then, Mancheno charged these people as many as two thousand sucres each to make an inspection of the land and do

49 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político y Intendente de Policía to Sr. Plutarco Vasconez, Tena, September 15, 1967, AGN.

50 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político y Intendente de Policía to Sr. Plutarco Vasconez, Tena, October 24, 1967, AGN.

526 their paperwork. Mancheno had apparently filed a complaint with the IERAC that it was he, Ortiz, who was in the wrong, having forcibly removed more than fifty families from their land. As Ortiz claimed, the supposed victims of this held a meeting in which they stated that it was all a lie by the Jefe Político Mancheno. A delegate of the IERAC communicated the result of this meeting to the higher offices in Quito. Ortiz closed his letter by asking the governor to put an end to Mancheno’s “arbitrary” actions in some fashion.51 It is not clear what the truth of this matter was, but nevertheless, accusations of arbitrary proceedings by the appointed officials of the region continued to interrupt the land tenancy process.

Conflicts over land in Napo Province in the 1960s frequently involved the

Quichua Indians that still formed the majority of the population in the area, despite decades of colonization. In 1960, when the Jefe Político of Napo Canton wrote to the

Governor to discuss the challenges he faced in implementing the Ley Especial de

Oriente, he mentioned that the issue of vacant lands (“tierras baldías”) was taking on larger proportions. As he reported, members of the “Indian race” came into his office

“daily” to seek resolution of conflicts over land. But as Jefe Político, he did not have the power to definitively set the boundaries between properties, or order that violators be forcibly removed from parcels. He found that he generally had to use “convenient, friendly, and comprehensive arrangements” between the litigants, which usually gave the “desired beneficial result.”52 For example, in December of 1960, the Jefe Político,

Washington Espíndola, reported to the Director of the Instituto de Colonización y Tierras

51 César Ortiz to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, transcribed in Dr. Alberto Littuma Arízaga, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia Napo, Quito, October 4, 1967, AGN.

52 Jefe Político del Napo to Sr. Gobernador del Napo, Tena, July 15, 1960, AGN.

527 Baldías that he had intervened in a dispute over land involving fifty Indian families.

Along with the priest of the Josephine Mission in a place called Talag, in Napo Canton, he had drawn up an “Act of Agreement” [“Acta de Convenio”] that settled the matter.

Since then, the Indian families had begun marking the boundaries of their respective parcels of land, so a topographer from the INC was needed to help draw up the maps that would accompany their formal requests for title.53 This agreement demonstrates that state officials such as Espíndola could play an important role in mediating conflict, even if state agencies such as the INC were still needed to formalize land tenancy.

Documents in the Archivo de la Gobernación de Napo clearly demonstrate that the Quichua Indians of Napo Province engaged the state to receive definitive title to their land. Ancestral traditions of possession may have existed, but many Indians knew that the state demanded paperwork. In 1960 alone, the Tenientes Políticos of Tena submitted numerous formal requests for title to the INC on behalf of indigenous residents of that parish. These requests were submitted with a description of the types of agricultural work underway on each parcel, details about the location and dimensions of the parcel, information about existing structures, the affirmation of witnesses, and a report that there had been no formal opposition filed to the claim. Generally, the parcels contained plantings of manioc, plantains, corn, fruit trees, and various types of pasture.

The parcels ranged in size from fewer than ten to more than one hundred hectares.54

53 Washington Espindola L., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Director del Instituto de Colonización y Tierras Baldías, Tena, December 8, 1960, AGN.

54 Consider, for example, the request filed by Petronio Rivadeneira, the Teniente Político of Tena, with the Director del Instituto de Colonización on December 23rd, 1960. The claimant was the “indígena” Clemente Alvarado Andi, who had planted two hectares of pasture, four hectares of plantains, three hectares of manioc and corn, one hectare of coffee, and had constructed a wooden house of 7x6m and two additional cane houses. No opposition had been lodged to this claim during the time it was displayed in public, from November 18th to December 18th. Petronio Rivadeneira, Teniente Político de Tena to Sr.

528 The volume of requests for title indicates the potential for conflict in those cases when Indians or white colonists attempted to gain title to land possessed or claimed by somebody else, or when one party undertook agricultural work on contested land. In

February of 1960, for example, the Teniente Político of Tena, Luis Hurtado Dávila, ordered the Quichua man Benito Grefa to cease cutting paths through the land possessed by Augusto Calapucha, who was also indigenous.55 The following month,

Dávila had to order César Cerda, another Quichua man, to cease cultivating the lands that belonged to Floripe del Águila.56 The Jefes Políticos of Napo Province also issued such orders; in December of 1960, Washington Espíndola, the Jefe Político of Napo

Canton ordered Gabriel Grefa Calapucha to cease his agricultural work because the land in question belonged to Santiago Grefa, who had already formally applied for title from the INC.57 On the same day, Espíndola informed Fausto Vargas Muños, a resident in Misahuallí, a short way down the Napo River from Tena, that the Indians Arcencio and Silverio Siquihua complained that Vargas was working their land. Espíndola ordered Vargas to cease these operations until the INC could send a technician to inspect the land in question.58 In all these cases, the appointed officials of Napo

Province were called to keep the peace in a context in which state agencies such as the

Director del Instituto de Colonización, Tena, December 23, 1960, AGN. The Archivo de la Gobernación de Napo contains at least twenty more such claims from Quichua Indians in Tena Parish, from March of 1960 until December of 1960 alone.

55 Luis Hurtado Dávila, Teniente Político de Tena to Sr. Benito Grefa, Tena, February 20, 1960, AGN.

56 Luis Hurtado Dávila, Teniente Político de Tena to Sr. César Cerda, Tena, March 29, 1960, AGN.

57 Washington Espindola, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Gabriel Grefa Calapucha, Tena, December 24, 1960, AGN.

58 Washington Espindola, Jefe Político del Napo to Sr. Fausto Vargas Muños, Tena, December 24, 1960, AGN.

529 INC did not have the resources to quickly and definitively resolve conflicts over land by issuing definitive title.

Perhaps the most contentious cases were those in which wealthy or influential individuals were at odds with indigenous people in conflicts over land. This was the case in 1960 when the Indians Pedro, Francisco, and Domingo Tanguila lodged a complaint with Rolando Guerrero, the Teniente Político of Archidona Parish. According to the Indians, Ney Estupiñán, former Governor of Napo Province, was attempting to forcefully acquire a half-hectare parcel of their land. The parcel in question was uncultivated, but the Indians relied on it for firewood and building material for their houses. Furthermore, it was located only a few meters from their existing houses.

Estupiñán claimed it was vacant land and refused to follow Guerrero’s orders that he cease clear-cutting the parcel. Guerrero told his immediate superior, the Jefe Político of

Napo that he believed it was “unjust” that these Indians were being usurped of their

“small inheritance” on which they had lived for more than thirty years. As he stated,

Estupiñán had abused his power in this fashion in the past, and he asked for the Jefe

Político’s aid, as well as that of the current governor, to prevent such abuses of private property.59

This conflict continued into 1961. In January, more than a dozen Indians filed a formal complaint with Guerrero, stating that Estupiñán still sought to remove them from their properties. Guerrero had inspected the land in question with a witness, and found it to be planted with coffee, plantains, manioc, and pasture. He found the Indians to hold

“undeniable” possession for more than thirty years. Nevertheless, Estupiñán filed a

59 Rolando Guerrero M., Teniente Político de Archidona to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Archidona, No date, 1960, AGN.

530 claim on these lands to the INC in the extension of 50 hectares. Unfortunately, the INC granted formal adjudication to Estupiñán despite the overlapping possession by many

Indians. Blas Grefa, for example, saw his house and chacras forcibly taken by

Estupiñán one year prior, without payment. Diego Yumbo reported that back in 1953, he saw three hectares of pasture taken away by Estupiñán, who at the time claimed that they belonged to the government. In these and other cases, Estupiñán claimed to have legally purchased the land from the government and therefore did not owe any compensation to the Indians. The victims in “one voice” told Guerrero that they would never relinquish their claim to these lands, on which they were born and near which their children attended school. Guerrero stated that the title granted by the INC to Ney

Estupiñán should be revised, in light of these facts.60 In February, the conflict between

Estupiñán and the Indians continued. Guerrero dispatched a report to the Governor of

Napo, to be carried by the Indians involved in the case, explaining that Estupiñán had destroyed the fences the Indians had built to protect their parcel of land. Furthermore,

Estupiñán had publicly insulted Guerrero during his attempt to make justice in the case; he requested that an order for Estupiñán’s arrest be given, for “this Señor…does not obey anyone.”61

In other cases, whites in Napo Province attempted to take advantage of the

Indians of the area as they sought to obtain title for themselves. According to the

Governor of Napo in September of 1960, Indians of the Province came into his office

60 Ignacio Narváez et al to Rolando Guerrero M., Teniente Político de Archidona, January 19, 1961, AGN.

61 Rolando Guerrero M., Teniente Político de Archidona to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Archidona, February 28, 1961, AGN.

531 “daily” to complain about the fact that all or part of their lands were included within the borders of parcels submitted by white petitioners for title. This was due to the fact that the Indians generally did not clearly mark the boundaries of their parcels. Furthermore, the Indians were frequently the victims of whites who offered to help them draw up their requests for titles, only to see the whites claim the lands in question for themselves, taking advantage of the information the Indians provided. The governor suggested that the INC should not accept any request for title that had not first been inspected by the governor.62 A case like this arose in 1962, when a group of Indians headed by Enma

Calapucha submitted a complaint to the governor, which they signed with their fingerprints as they were all illiterate. They demanded that the governor call one

Gustavo Silva into his office to answer for his abuses. Silva had offered to process their request for title with the INC, and accepted 150 sucres from each to use as payment for the INC. Since that time, Silva had never deposited anything, money or title request, with the Institute. He sought to avoid the Indians and always stated that he had given their money to “someone else.” As they stated to the governor, “we, in light of this injustice that takes advantage of our ignorance, and knowing your elevated spirit of protection for the indigenous element, solicit that you order the relevant authorities to have the indicated citizen [Silva] return the money we gave to him and that he with artifice and evasion refuses to give us.”63 The governor sent this complaint along to the

Ministro de Gobierno, stating that he had attempted to force Silva to return the money, but Silva, a member of the Electoral Tribunal of Napo, claimed to have special privileges

62 Crnel. Gregorio Zabala M., Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Director del Instituto de Colonización de Tierras Baldías, Tena, September 29, 1960, AGN.

63 Enma Calapucha et al to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia, no date, 1961, AGN.

532 that protected him from this requirement. The governor asked the minister for further instructions, in order to benefit “the class most in need of protection and care that is the indigenous race.”64 Ironically, the governor at that time was the same Ney Estupiñán who the previous year had been accused of forcibly taking land from a group of Indians in Archidona Parish. Both Estupiñán and Silva took advantage of their status and connections to proceed against the Indians of the region in matters involving the acquisition and titling of land.

The intervention of whites and colonists from outside the region was not always the source of conflict over land involving the Quichua people of Napo Province. In

December of 1961, Vicente Shiguango, Alonso Shiguango, Bartolo Tunay, and another

Bartolo Tunay complained to the Jefe Político and President of the Junta Protectora de

Indígenas in Tena that they had possessed parcels of land in Churuyacu, in Archidona

Parish, for many years. Recently, however, a group of Indians led by Manuel Tapuy,

Diego Tapuy, and Vicente Tapuy had attempted to remove them from their land, using threats of witchcraft and wielding a shotgun. They threatened to kill them, and then destroyed some plantains, coffee, and peach palm in order to make a pasture. They asked the Jefe Político to inspect the damages, and to send word to the INC not to process any claims to title on the lands in question.65

Time and again, the Jefes Políticos of the province were called to keep harmony in the region while waiting for the INC to act. In November of 1962, Ricardo Baquero,

64 Ney Estupiñan, Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Ministro de Gobierno, Tena, August 28, 1962, AGN.

65 Vicente Shiguango et al to Sr. Jefe Político y Presidente de la Junta Protectora de Indígenas, Tena, December 5, 1961, AGN.

533 the INC Agent for Napo Province, informed the Jefe Político that many Indians had formally lodged complaints with him that one Augusto Rueda was seeking to remove them from their land. Baquero’s attempts to get Rueda to respond to these accusations had come to naught. In the meantime, a commission from the INC headquarters in

Quito had come to the province to ask about the problems common in the area;

Baquero informed them of these cases involving Rueda. In response, the INC commission asked for the Jefe Político’s aid in “putting an end to this class of abuses and seeing that the orders emanating from [the INC] were respected.” Baquero requested that the Jefe Político call Rueda into his office to answer these charges.66

Perhaps he would have better luck seeing that the rules regarding land tenancy and the acquisition of title were not abused.

The civil authorities of the province were limited in their abilities, however. In

1964, a group of Indians complained to a local Josephine missionary priest and to the governor that Esther Sevilla, owner of lands along the banks of the Napo River, was encroaching upon their land. In the governor’s view, the agricultural work Sevilla was doing clearly went against the orders of the INC; however, the authorities of that entity were the only ones with the legal authority to resolve such conflicts, and as governor he could not intervene directly, nor could any civil authority. He had informed Ricardo

Baquero about this case, who passed it along to the central office in Quito. The Indians and the Josephine priest would simply have to wait.67 That year, the INC was replaced by the IERAC, which was also the entity with highest authority in matters involving land

66 Ricardo Baquero, Agente del INC en Napo to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Tena, November 13, 1962, AGN.

67 Anibal Borbua G., Gobernador de Napo to R. P. Cesar Ricci, Tena, May 5, 1964, AGN.

534 conflicts. Again, the civil authorities of Napo Province were called to keep the peace until the IERAC could issue its final decision. For example, later in 1964, the Quichua man Pedro Andi and others presented Ricardo Baquero, now agent for the IERAC rather than the INC, with a formal complaint that one Luis Chamorro was invading the parcel of 61.2 hectares to which they sought title from the Institute. A secretary from

Quito simply ordered the governor to prevent Chamorro from acting further until the

IERAC could issue a decision.68

Despite the existence of the IERAC, the appointed officials of the province, particularly the Jefes and Tenientes Políticos, remained the authorities most frequently called to intervene in disputes over land involving the Quichua Indians of the area. A typical example comes from June of 1966, when Maria Antonia Chimbo went to the governor to complain that Bolívar Cerda refused to respect the boundaries between their properties, and was letting his animals run rampant on Chimbo’s property. In this and similar such disputes, the governor ordered the Jefe Político of the canton in which the problem occurred to investigate along with the Teniente Político, and seek some amicable resolution.69 Often, the Jefes Políticos had to respond to cases in which some interested party objected to the sale of a parcel of land. That same year, a Quichua man named Juan Tunay came into the Jefe Político’s office to protest the fact that Francisco

Tunay (whose relation to Juan is not clear) had sold a parcel of land to Francisco

68 Lcda. Graciela Toscano, Secretaria de Administración de Tierras to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Quito, no date, 1964, AGN. The Governor complied, ordering Chamorro to respect Pedro Andi’s possession of the parcel until final word came from the IERAC. Anibal Borbua, Gobernador de Napo to Srta. Lcda. Graciela Toscano, Secretaria de la Administración de Tierras, Tena, October 27, 1964, AGN. The intervention of IERAC could at times create problems, rather than solve them.

69 J. Eloy Baquero L., Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Tena, June 27, 1966, AGN.

535 Aguinda. In Juan’s view, the sale was totally illegitimate; Francisco Tunay had no title, possession, or any right of property to the parcel in question, while Juan had possessed it for twenty years.70 The Jefe Político, Petronio Rivadeneyra, ordered the Teniente

Político in Archidona Parish, where the Indians in question lived, to call both Francisco

Aguinda and Juan Tunay into his office, where they would undertake a “precise and prolix study” of the problem. Lately Aguinda had accused Tunay of invading his land and destroying his fence.71

It is clear that many of the indigenous citizens of Napo Province appreciated the importance of the IERAC and obtaining title in a timely fashion. One case from April of

1966 demonstrates this clearly. More than twenty Quichua heads of household went into the Jefe Político’s office in Tena to ask for his “valuable intervention” in a case that threatened their interests. According to the group, Silverio Shiguango Grefa and

Domingo Andi, who lived at a place called Ongota, were tenaciously resisting the work of the IERAC topographers who were helping the group establish boundaries to their parcels in order that they could receive title. The group of complainants was worried that the actions of these two individuals could cause the topographic team to simply give up, which would be an unfair and anti-democratic outcome. The situation was so bad that they insinuated they could resort to violence, unless the Jefe Político helped them by calling the two troublemakers into his office and interrogating them about why they were

70 José María Yépez C. to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, no date, 1966, AGN.

71 Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Archidona, Tena, January 11, 1966, AGN. Cases like this were common. For example, in 1967, Alonso and Bartolo Grefa told the new Jefe Político of Napo, Jaime Mancheno Albuja, that their relative, Mariano Grefa, was attempting to sell a parcel of land out from under Alonso and Bartolo, its legitimate possessors. He ordered the Teniente Político call Carlos Mariño, the potential buyer, into his office to prevent the sale from taking place. Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político del Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Archidona, Tena, February 15, 1967, AGN.

536 acting in this fashion. Above all, the group wanted to know who had counseled them to act in this manner. They closed their complaint by stating that it was “not just that the aspirations and rights of dozens of families be harmed by the clumsy and egotistical stinginess of two families that, due to their ignorance, we presume to be poorly advised

[“mal aconsejadas”].”72

Problems involving Ongota’s Quichua families, the IERAC, and the repartition of lands was an ongoing issue. In June, the family of one Ignacio Shiguango, whom the governor described as a “colonist” in Ongota, in Tena Parish, came to the Governor’s office to complain that he had lost ten hectares of land as a result of the surveying done by a topographical team from the IERAC. The governor needed to seek clarification from the IERAC delegate in Napo Province on how to proceed.73 Ricardo Baquero was the IERAC Inspector in Napo Province at that time; at the end of June he wrote to the governor to explain what was going on in Ongota. As he reported, back in March, the

IERAC office in Tena called all the inhabitants of Ongota into the office to inform them that the IERAC would begin to survey their parcels of land. They were told that they would need to help out the topographers so that they could be come the “owner” of the land, which was technically still state property. The problems arose from the fact that the Indians there had very irregularly sized and shaped plots, which made the

72 Carlos A. Dahua P., Gabriel Tapuy et al to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Tena, April 11, 1966, AGN.

73 J. Eloy Baquero L, Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Delegado de la Provincia Napo del IERAC, Tena, June 28, 1966, AGN.

537 topographer’s job difficult and fraught with the potential for conflict. They were forced to proceed as best they could with instructions from the Central Offices of the IERAC.74

But problems persisted, and the Josephine missionary priest Luis Aurelio Villacís took up the cause on behalf of the Indians. He informed the Jefe Político on more than one occasion that the IERAC’s technicians had, in setting certain boundary lines, unjustly removed pieces of land from certain Indian people. Villacís sent a strongly worded letter to the Jefe Político, Petronio Rivadeneyra, reminding him that the rights of citizens to their property should be his first priority as a local authority. Given how many

Indians found themselves gravely affected by the “arbitrary” fashion in which lands were being surveyed and distributed, he urged immediate intervention by higher authorities.

For his part, Villacís stated that he had told the Indians to “present themselves en masse in the public offices, to inform all the authorities of this place about the problem.

We feel ourselves justified to employ other means of defense of the interests of the victims.”75

The Jefe Político Rivadeneyra responded, reminding Villacís that according to the Law of Agrarian Reform and Colonization, nobody but the IERAC’s officials could have a hand in the distribution of land, and as authorities in the matter they could do what they deemed best. Rivadeneyra told Villacís that he was going beyond his duties as a priest and involving himself in things he knew nothing about. He reminded him that

Article 581 of the Penal Code established a fine of between 121 and 246 sucres, and

74 S. Ricardo Baquero, Inspector del IERAC en Napo to Sr. Jose Eloy Baquero L, Gobernador de Napo, Tena, June 30, 1966, AGN.

75 Rev. Padre Luis Aurelio Villacís G., Colegio de Educación Industrial de la Misión Josefina de Napo to Sr. Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político de Napo, no date, 1966, AGN.

538 prison of five to seven days, for any religious figure that preached against the

Constitution or the laws of the Republic.76 Rivadeneyra clearly wanted the problem to go away; he transcribed Padre Villacís’s letter for Ricardo Baquero, the IERAC Inspector and complained that the priest was accusing him of partiality in the problems involving land. Since the IERAC was the only authority that could definitively settle such things, he asked that this be given priority within the agency.77

The next Jefe Político of Napo Canton, Jaime Mancheno Albuja, faced a similar series of problems in 1967. He frequently ordered individuals in the canton, both Indian and white, to cease all agricultural work on disputed lands until the IERAC could resolve the problem.78 But he also mediated conflict using “Acts of Transaction” [“Actas de

Transacción”], in which both sides of a particular dispute would agree to a set of principles or decisions to which they would all sign (or add their fingerprint, in the case of illiterate Indian citizens). For example, in October of 1967, two groups of Quichua men, one headed by Matías Alvarado, the other by Manuel Narváez, were quarreling over a parcel of land in Archidona Parish. As the Acta de Transacción stated, the public authorities in the Oriente were called to “watch out for the interest of the entire indigenous community, so that they live in friendship without having any problems.” With

Mancheno’s mediation, the Indians resolved to fix an imaginary straight line between

76 Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político del Napo to Rev. Padre Luis Aurelio Villacís, Tena, July 14, 1966, AGN.

77 Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político del Napo to Sr. Ricardo Baquero, Inspector de IERAC, Tena, July 15, 1966, AGN.

78 For example, in April of 1967, he ordered Venancio Tanguila to stop work after getting a complaint from Miguel Tanguila. Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político del Napo to Sr. Venancio Tanguila, Tena, April 21, 1967, AGN. In August, he ordered Edmundo Salvador Zarria to suspend his activities, as the Indian resident Andres Alvarado complained that they were being done on his, Alvarado’s, land. Mancheno said that the IERAC would come to sort it out. Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político del Napo to Sr. Edmundo Salvador Zarria, Tena, August 4, 1967, AGN.

539 the parcels in dispute, thus keeping the peace until the IERAC’s topographers could provide a definitive solution.79

At times, the Acts of Transaction did not require the IERAC’s intervention. In

January of 1968, Jaime Mancheno mediated a dispute between Francisco Andi and

Clemente Mamallacta Grefa. According to the statement that all parties signed,

Francisco Andi had planted some crops on Mamallacta’s land without knowing it. He agreed to abandon these plantings, which occupied an extension of 1,500 square meters.80 The next day, in another Acta, it was stated that Cesar Andi Chimbo had unknowingly cultivated a portion of land that had previously been formally granted to

Manuel Licuy Tapuy by the IERAC. Rather than continue quarreling and making threats against each other, the two parties agreed that Licuy would simply pay Andi the sum of

600 sucres, the judged value of the cultivation done.81

Other Actas point to the fact that the IERAC’s granting of title did not necessarily put an end to quarrels and disputes over land as was intended. In July of 1968, the families of Gabriel and Miguel Grefa did not get along at all; they lived in “complete discord, in quarrels and fights” over the land that IERAC had granted them. In front of the Jefe Político Mancheno, they promised to live in peace, with mutual respect, “as good citizens working in mutual collaboration and cooperation as it is customary for the citizens of this place to do.”82 This was not the only such Acta in which the disputing parties agreed to a more moral set of behaviors; in August of 1968, José Huatatoca and

79 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Acta Transaccional, Tena, October 2, 1967, AGN.

80 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, “Acta de Transacción,” Tena, January 8, 1968, AGN.

81 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, “Acta de Transacción,” Tena, January 9, 1968, AGN.

82 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, “Acta de Transacción,” Tena, July 1, 1968, AGN.

540 Elena Huatatoca, each accompanied by their respective children, came into

Mancheno’s office in response to the constant disputes over land that they had been experiencing. They agreed from that day on to decide on the boundaries between their properties until the IERAC could come and grant definitive titles. Furthermore, they would live in “harmony and concord, in healthy peace and tranquility, as being family members, it is not just or logical that they continue fighting for no reason.”83

The Actas signed in the Jefe Político’s office frequently made some reference to the behavior that the parties involved should maintain in order to be good citizens. In

September of 1968, Gervacio Aguinda and Gabriel Tapuy Shiguango had been quarreling over the compensation owed to Aguinda for some work he had done on

Tapuy’s land. In the office of the Jefe Político, Tapuy agreed to pay Aguinda the value of 750 sucres, which was determined by the IERAC. Furthermore, they agreed to renounce any future accusations over land, waiting instead until the IERAC could give each party the definitive title to the parcel of land that each deserved. They would “put an end any disgust between the families of the indicated señores and live in healthy and eternal peace, as is the logical and natural norm for people of this place.”

These Actas de Transacción could not put an end to all disputes. Nor did the actions of the IERAC always leave all parties satisfied. The same month that Aguinda and Shiguango agreed to wait for the IERAC’s intervention in their case, Gustavo Silva, the president of the Agricultural Center of Napo, informed the Governor that there were ongoing abuses of authority against the indigenous people of Napo Canton. Specifically, the IERAC topographer Manuel Carrera had charged several different Indians as much

83 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, “Acta de Transacción,” Tena, August 23, 1968, AGN.

541 as 200 sucres to survey their properties. But he had never given them any receipts, and had since left the area entirely, leaving the Indians without recourse.84 In general, neither the IERAC nor the appointed officials of the province, acting alone, could resolve disputes. Consider how in March of 1969, the Teniente Político of Tena, Mariano Díaz, wrote to the Provincial Delegate of the IERAC in Napo to inform him that several Indian siblings had come into his office to complain about some problem with how the government had partitioned some parcels of land given to them. As Teniente Político, it was not his “responsibility” [“incumbencia”], so he requested that the IERAC act instead.85 This probably would not have filled Napo Province’s Indians with confidence; as anthropologist Theodore Macdonald has observed, in general the IERAC “was infamous for its failure to provide Indians with secure titles to their land.”86

What is clear is that the state in its various forms, from the Tenientes Políticos to the local offices of the IERAC to the higher authorities in Quito, were undoubtedly the mediators of disputes over land in Napo Province between white colonists and indigenous people alike. This modus vivendi developed over the course of the 1960s as the Instituto Nacional de Colonización gave way to the IERAC as established by the military government’s agrarian reform project. As increasing numbers of white colonists entered the region, Napo Province’s Quichua people continued to formalize and legalize their claim to land with the help of state officials. The system was not perfect, and at times it required the “Acts of Transaction” that stipulated disputing parties were

84 Gustavo Silva S. Presidente del Centro Agrícola de Napo to Sr. Gobernador de la Provincia Napo, Tena, September 18, 1968, AGN.

85 Mariano Díaz G., Teniente Político de Tena to Sr. Lcdo Carlos Cano Palacio, Delegado Provincial de IERAC de Napo. Tena, March 21, 1969, AGN.

86 Macdonald, Ethnicity and Culture amidst New “Neighbors,” 63.

542 supposed to wait until higher authorities could act; in the meantime, they would follow norms of behavior befitting good citizens and neighbors.

Patrones, State Officials, and Indian Workers

The 1960s also saw the hammering out of a modus vivendi between Napo

Province’s indigenous inhabitants, white colonists, landowners, and state officials on matters other than land tenancy. The Quichua Indians of the province remained vital to the functioning of the state and the region’s economy. During this decade, their labor was still coveted by public authorities and by landowners alike. Evidence in the Archivo de la Gobernación de Napo demonstrates that wage labor was now a more significant factor than debt peonage in the province, although some remnants of that latter system remained. More than in the 1940s and 50s, though, the Oriente’s public officials intervened in labor disputes on the side of Indians who worked for wages, rather than as conciertos, or debt-peons, of influential patrones. The Indians of the province continued to engage the state on these and other matters, such as family disputes and childcare.

They remained at a disadvantage due to their unfamiliarity with the state system and their reliance on Spanish translators; nevertheless, they demanded equal treatment as workers, family members, and citizens, and frequently engaged state officials to secure their rights as residents of the Oriente.

Deborah Yashar has studied the emergence of the indigenous movement in the

Oriente during the 1960s. Her work notes the importance of the state’s interaction with indigenous people as a catalyst for politicization and mobilization. She argues that the increasing presence of the state intruded upon an arena of relative indigenous

543 autonomy.87 When the indigenous movement fully emerged, it sought to challenge the content of the “regime of citizenship” enjoyed by Ecuador’s indigenous people by seeking protections for cultural practices and economic structures that did not easily fit within the traditional liberal model of citizenship based on individual rights. That is, according to Yashar, it was concerned with changing the nature of citizenship, not extending its boundaries.88 I do not take issue with Yashar’s description of the goals of the indigenous movement. I do, however, argue that prior to that struggle, the Indians of the Oriente indeed worked to see themselves included within the boundaries of citizenship as it existed for white-mestizo residents of the Oriente at that time. The discussion below demonstrates that Quichua Indians in Napo Province engaged state officials to secure their rights as workers, parents, and citizens of Ecuador in the 1960s.

The increasing importance of state officials in the social and economic life of the province meant that Indians frequently interacted with the arms of the state in a way that put their citizenship as Ecuadorians like any other at the forefront. As Yashar notes, when a state’s reach and power is compromised, certain social groups may enjoy unequal access to the benefits of a given regime of citizenship, due to ongoing exclusion and marginalization by the powerful. Indeed, the Ecuadorian state in the

Oriente frequently “fail[ed] to deliver on the promise of unified political communities” because Indians remained dominated in various ways by influential patrones or other whites.89 This was an important consequence of the fact that Napo Province remained

87 Deborah J. Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 8.

88 Ibid., 34.

89 Ibid., 51-52.

544 an ancillary province, in which laws did not function according to the envisioned schematic for the entire Republic. Nevertheless, the evidence here shows that, prior to the emergence of the indigenous movement in the Oriente, Quichua people demanded treatment as Ecuadorian citizens with certain guarantees, and state officials in the region acted according to the assumption that they should live their lives as such.

At the outset of the 1960s, the appointed officials of Napo Province remained heavily involved in the labor relations between Indian workers and their white landowning patrones. In particular, the state officials continued to monitor the liquidation of accounts that was mandated by law. When problems arose, state officials intervened to see that the proper amount of money exchanged hands in order to cancel debts. For example, in August of 1960, the Jefe Político of Napo Canton ordered the Teniente

Político of Archidona to call one Alfonso Guerrero into his office regarding a liquidación de cuentas that had taken place between the Indian worker Venancio Chimbo and his patrón Aurelio Espinosa a year prior. The state authorities, upon reviewing the accounts, determined that Chimbo owed 180 sucres to Espinosa. Alfonso Guerrero was designated as the one responsible to hand that money over to the Jefe Político’s office, but he had never shown up.90 On another occasion, the Jefe Político, Rafael M.

Enríquez B., wrote to the Teniente Político of Loreto Parish on behalf of the landowner

Juana Arteaga, who informed Enríquez that her debtor Sebastián Grefa had fled to

Loreto without paying Arteaga the 1,600 sucres he was found to owe in the last

90 Rafael M. Enríquez B., Jefe Político del Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Archidona, Tena, August 28, 1960, AGN.

545 liquidation of accounts. Enríquez ordered the Teniente Político to find Grefa and send him back to Tena to answer for this debt.91

The state authorities also intervened to make the employer hold up his or her side of things; earlier that year, Enriquez, who also held the attribution of Work

Commissary (Comisario de Trabajo) thanks to the stipulations of the Ley Especial de

Oriente, wrote a letter to the same Juana Arteaga, who owned the hacienda known as

“Latas” on the Napo River. Enríquez had recently heard from Armando Aguinda, one of

Arteaga’s workers who claimed that she had recently raised the amount of debt he owed by an order of magnitude for no reason. Enríquez ordered Arteaga to come into his office with her account books within three days, a “sufficient” amount of time for her

“strict compliance.”92 Earlier that year, Arteaga had received a similar letter from

Enríquez. On that occasion, the Indian woman Juana Grefa told Enríquez that Arteaga never counted a payment in gold that Grefa had paid toward her debt with Arteaga.

What’s more, Arteaga threatened to increase her debt by an additional two thousand sucres. All of this made Grefa very afraid, and so she asked the Jefe Político for help.

Enríquez informed Arteaga of her obligation to come into his office with her account books; as he explained to her, it was inhumane to “abuse the ignorance of the

Indians.”93 On another occasion, Enríquez ordered the Teniente Político of Puerto Napo to call the landowner Esther Sevilla into his office with her account books, as Enríquez

91 Rafael M. Enríquez B., Jefe Político del Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Loreto, Tena, May 30, 1960, AGN.

92 Rafael M. Enríquez B., Jefe Político-Comisario de Trabajo de Napo to Sra. Juana Arteaga, Tena, June 27, 1960, AGN.

93 Rafael M. Enríquez B., Jefe Político-Comisario de Trabajo de Napo to Sra. Juana Arteaga, Tena, March 2, 1960, AGN.

546 had recently received a report that many of her debtor Indians were being unjustly treated in the way that Sevilla had undertaken the liquidation of accounts.94 As these incidents make clear, part of the state officials’ job in Napo Province was to normalize the system of labor between Indians and whites, removing the system of debt peonage to the degree possible and seeing that work was remunerated with regular wages.

While some Indians still relied on their patrones as translators, these cases show that

Indians could also look to the state officials of the Oriente for help in getting out from under the influence of a patrón, or at least to find more favorable conditions.

In December of 1960, Gregorio Zabala, the Governor of Napo, wrote a letter to the Secretary General of Public Administration that made clear the extent of the ongoing problem with debt peonage in his jurisdiction. As he reported, many of the property owners along the Napo River were true “caciques” of the local parishes or settlements.

The Indians who worked for them were still “slaves” as very often they were not remunerated for their work at all. In particular, the governor highlighted the case of

Mario Ron and his Indian worker José Cerda. Cerda worked for Ron for between twelve and fifteen years, after which time Ron refused to undertake a liquidation of accounts, threatening Cerda with violence. The previous governor had tried to make Ron follow the law on may occasions, to no effect; the governor once even resorted to an “almost humiliating” letter in which he begged Ron to treat the “poor Indian” better. All of this was due, Governor Zavala said, to the public authorities’ lack of means to apply force.

The governor’s office did not have enough money to pay police officers to make the two-day journey to Ron’s hacienda and back. Another problem was that the Teniente

94 Rafael M. Enríquez B., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Puerto Napo, Tena, May 18, 1960, AGN.

547 Político of Coca Parish, where Ron resided, was a poor public official, because he took

Ron’s side in these matters. The complicity of the Teniente Político meant that the liquidation of accounts was not carried out properly, ensuring that Indians remained indebted. As the governor reported, the various male members of one Sanmiguel family simply rotated the post of Teniente Político among themselves, perpetuating the system of abuse that took advantage of the ignorance of the Indians.95 The situation the governor described is a clear sign that Napo remained an ancillary province in which the laws prescribed for the Oriente, intended to make it function as a section very much like the rest of the Republic, were instead applied inconsistently or not at all. The state system in Napo Province was based on a matrix of public and private individuals who could take advantage of the lack of state resources and oversight to dominate the region’s indigenous people and undertake their economic activities in extra-legal fashion. In some cases, the state authorities did take action towards ending the system of concertaje that had largely defined the labor relations between Indians and influential white landowners. These efforts could be frustrated, however, by a lack of police officers, or by the machinations of interested parties, as in the case of Ron and the rotating Tenientes Políticos.

The governor continued his campaign against Ron using what methods he could.

In February of 1961, he wrote to the military garrison closest to Ron’s hacienda to ask its commanding officer to have his soldiers capture Ron. He told the commander about the many charges of abuse against Ron, and of the complete lack of resources in the

95 Coronel Gregorio Zabala M., Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Secretario General de la Administración Pública, Tena, December 8, 1960, AGN.

548 governor’s office for using police forces to do this arrest.96 It is clear that nothing happened to Ron on this occasion, however. In August of that year, Ron was still free and Indians continued to complain about his abuses. On that occasion, the governor wrote to the Jefe Político of Aguarico Canton, where Ron resided, and ordered him to call Ron into his office with all his account books. In the meantime, he asked the Jefe

Político to find some work for the Indians who had lodged the latest complaints against

Ron, and to provide for their security. Ron had threatened them with witchcraft and other violence on many occasions, so the governor ordered the Jefe Político to act with

“energy and decision” in the matter.97

The Indians of the province also sought to enlist the public officials on their side in disputes over work and payment. In January of 1961, more than twenty Indians, headed by Bernardo Grefa, complained to the Jefe Político that a year prior they had labored on public works projects for the Napo Canton Municipal Council, but had not been paid.98 It was not always influential landowners who drew the Indians’ complaints, then. At the end of the year, the Indians Silverio and Gabriel Mamallacta appeared in

96 Coronel Gregorio Zabala M., Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Tnte. Coronel Comandante del Batallón de Selva No. 9 Tiputiny, Tena, February 17, 1961, AGN.

97 Coronel Gregorio Zabala M., Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Jefe Político de Aguarico, Tena, August 8, 1961, AGN. It is not clear what eventually happened to Ron. But a letter from the Jefe Político of Napo Canton from two months later suggests that Indian complaints about abuses were a widespread occurrence; the Jefe Político wrote the Josephine priest Padre Rizzo and to Camilo Aguinda, both members of the Junta Protectora de Indígenas, that in light of the many complaints filed by Indians, the Junta should have sessions every week. Washington Espíndola, Jefe Político de Napo to Rev. Padre Rizzo y Camilo Aguinda, Tena, April 15, 1961, AGN. Four years later, Mario Ron was once again the subject of complaints by Indians in Napo Province. He wrote to the Governor of Napo from Francisco de Orellana Parish in September of that year to answer the accusations presented against him by the “defenders of the Indian Pedro Cerda.” Ron tried to evade the accusations by questioning the motivations of Cerda’s allies; he suggested that a North American from the evangelical Protestant mission, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, was motivated by the “dollars of the Institute” to convince Cerda to refuse to pay the debt he owed to Ron. Mario Ron to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Francisco de Orellana, September 8, 1965, AGN.

98 Bernardo Grefa et al to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Tena, January 9, 1961, AGN.

549 the office of the Teniente Político of Puerto Napo Parish, along with one Luis Antonio

Colina. The two Indians had each worked for Colina for five days, at the rate of 10 sucres per day, and were unpaid. Colina explained that he did not have the money at the moment, but promised that he would deposit it with the Teniente Político within 8 days so that the complainants could pick it up there. All parties agreed to this arrangement; in this case, the Teniente Político attempted to mediate the conflict and ensure that an agreement to work for wages was respected.99 Unfortunately for Silverio and Gabriel Mamallacta, Colina was an elusive type. As the Teniente Político reported a few weeks later, Luis Colina had been in hiding for ten days, refusing to pay what he agreed to. The Teniente Político took this occasion to complain to his superior, the Jefe

Político, about the lack of police presence in the parish. This shortcoming was the reason such things as Colina’s avoidance of payment continued to occur in the parish.100 Once again, the shortage of resources in the Oriente meant that its public officials could not enact the laws prescribed for the region. The gap between the reality on the ground and the system envisioned for the region and the rest of the Republic meant that wage work in the province was subject to difficulties and interruptions.101

99 Rafael Picón P., Teniente Político de Puerto Napo to Sr. Jefe Político Accidental del Cantón Napo, Puerto Napo, December 30, 1961, AGN.

100 Rafael Picón P., Teniente Político de Puerto Napo to Sr. Jefe Político del Napo, Puerto Napo, January 17, 1962, AGN.

101 At times, those who owed payment to Indians didn’t avoid that responsibility entirely, but they did dispute the amount. For example, in January of 1962, Mariana Calapucha, an Indian woman, complained to the Teniente Político of Francisco de Orellana that one Napoleón Rivadeneyra had never paid her late husband for work he had done in Rivadeneyra’s pastures. Rivadeneyra, for his part, did not dispute that Calapucha had done work for him, but he stated that the payment agreed on was much less than what the widow claimed. Furthermore, he had given Calapucha two machetes and some clothing, which reduced the amount even more. Rivadeneyra appears to have carried the day in this dispute, as the Jefe Político of Napo informed the Teniente Político that the debt owed was only 75 sucres, not the 400 that Mariana Calapucha requested. Carlos H. Sanmiguel, Teniente Político de Francisco de Orellana

550 Nevertheless, the appointed officials of Napo Province did what they could to regularize the system of wage work. In November of 1962, Aníbal Borbua, the Jefe

Político wrote to Alfredo Grefa, an Indian man who had employed several other Indians on building the highway between Puyo and Napo. The Jefe Político informed Grefa that if he did not pay soon, he would take legal means to punish him.102 Alfredo Grefa told the Jefe Político that in fact it was one Hernan Coloma, of Puyo, in Pastaza Province, who was actually in charge of paying the Indians the five thousand sucres they were owed. This meant that the Jefe Político had to write to his counterpart in Puyo Canton and have him give a check to the messenger to bring back to Tena.103

Though some state officials tried to intervene to see that laws were more influential than private individuals, powerful landowners remained a significant factor in labor relations in the province. In November of 1962, the priest César Ricci, from the

Josephine mission, wrote to the Governor of the Province to complain about the undue influence that Esther Sevilla wielded over her Indian workers and others in the area.

Allegedly, Sevilla was spreading “Protestant propaganda,” taking advantage of the

“totalitarian” influence that she had along the Napo River. She forced her Indians to attend Protestant church services and to attend the Protestant mission schools, in violation of the right of all Ecuadorians, Indians included, to freedom of conscience.

Sevilla made her threats by saying that she had the Governor’s support in her actions.

All of this had created a “religious struggle” on the banks of the Napo; in Ricci’s view, it to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, January 24, 1962, AGN; and Aníbal Borbua, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Francisco de Orellana, February 21, 1962, AGN.

102 Anibal Borbua B., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Isardo Grefa (a) Alfredo, Tena, November 9, 1962, AGN.

103 Anibal Borbua, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Jefe Político de Puyo, Tena, November 29, 1962, AGN.

551 was just another form of the abusive control that certain whites had wielded in the region for a long time. Sevilla’s actions violated the respect that Indians deserved as citizens and Christians. He urged the governor to investigate the matter and take the steps he deemed necessary.104

The following month, the governor received a different view; as the Teniente

Político of Loreto Parish explained, it was the local Josephine missionary there, Padre

Ottorino Zambón, whose actions were causing disruption among the Indians. According to the Teniente Político, everything in the parish was in disrepair because Zambón had been counseling the Indians to refuse to do any work in the parish. Previously, the roads in the parish had been maintained in “perfect state” using mingas, or communal work parties. Now, they were overgrown, subjecting travelers to the risk of venomous snakebite. Furthermore, the priest had told the Indians not to send their children to the local public school. What was needed, above all, were some police officers to keep control over the Indians and prevent the priest from having so much influence.105

Indeed, the appointed officials of the Oriente used police forces to investigate and punish the Province’s Quichua Indians when these resources were available. In

December of 1963, Petronio Rivadeneyra, the Jefe Político of Napo Canton, received the Indians Nicolas Lopes and his wife Laura Aguinda in his office. They informed him that in the settlement known as San Carlos, there lived an Indian named Juanti Vargas who had made repeated threats of witchcraft against them. Rivadeneyra ordered the

Teniente Político of Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola Parish, where this all took place, to

104 Padre César Ricci to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Ahuano, November 7, 1962, AGN.

105 Andrade Chacón, Teniente Político de Loreto to Sr. Ney Estupiñan, Gobernador de Napo, Loreto, December 3, 1962, AGN.

552 call Vargas into his office and undertake an investigation. If he found that Vargas was, in fact, making threats of witchcraft, then he should be punished according to Article 47,

Number 60 of the Police Sanitary Code, which prohibited practicing medicine without a license. As Rivadeneyra stated, this was the customary way to sanction “brujos,” and it carried a punishment of fifty sucres and ten days of prison.106 The Teniente Político wrote back the next day and stated that he ordered the local police officer to bring

Vargas into his office, where he was detained for a short time. Upon interrogation,

Vargas “roundly denied” all these charges. In fact, one señora Enma Guerrero de

Andrade came into the office and defended Vargas against the accusations of witchcraft; according to Guerrero, the charge lodged by Lopes and his wife that Vargas had cursed Armando Mamallacta was not true. Guerrero was a nurse in the parish, and in her treatment of Mamallacta she found he had a naturally occurring liver disease.

When Mamallacta was taken to the hospital in Tena, he actually recovered, and would have been cured had he not returned to drinking alcohol.107 This case illustrates the ways that the application of Ecuador’s laws in the Oriente remained somewhat subject to improvisation. Charges of witchcraft were common among the province’s Quichua

Indians, but in order to combat this, the appointed officials had to apply laws intended for a different purpose. Also, Enma Guerrero employed the discourse of medical science to influence a case that arose from accusations about traditional indigenous practices. The system of administration in the Oriente was a mixture of laws and ideas

106 Petronio Rivadeneyra V., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola, Tena, December 3, 1963, AGN.

107 Juan J. Nieto, Teniente Político de Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo, Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola, December 4, 1963, AGN.

553 that originated outside the region and the belief systems in place since before the arrival of large numbers of colonists and state officials. As Blanca Muratorio has argued, the practice of shamanism, which whites regarded as brujería, provided an important source of ethnic identity that gave Quichua people in the Napo area the “basis for a political discourse in defense of the ideological and material practices” and the ability to

“fight for the survival of their culture.”108 From the point of view of state officials, however, it was the source of conflict and discord among the Indians of the province.

The state officials of the region continued to take advantage of the at-times confusing and conflict-ridden system for personal gain. In 1962, the Jefe Político of

Napo had to chastise the Teniente Político of Ahuano Parish for committing the same kinds of abuses of authority that had occurred in the region for decades. Domingo Grefa had told the Jefe Político that the Teniente Político had fined him 60 sucres, and had fined Adan Machoa 30 sucres. These were “unjust charges,” and so the Jefe Político ordered his subaltern to send 90 sucres to his office right away so that Grefa and

Machoa could be paid back.109 It seems the Teniente Político dragged his feet in fixing his error, as his superior authority had to complain that he had not sent the money ten days later. The Jefe Político advised him to brush up on his knowledge of the penal code in order to avoid committing abuses in the future.110

Word of these kinds of abuses of authority by appointed officials occasionally reached high-ranking state officials in Quito. At some point in October of 1963, the

Undersecretary of Government [Subsecretario de Gobierno], Dr. Galo Recalde,

108 Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, 228.

109 Anibal Borbua, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Ahuano, April 16, 1962, AGN.

110 Anibal Borbua, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Ahuano, April 26, 1962, AGN.

554 received a long letter from a concerned citizen in Archidona Parish. Recalde transcribed this letter and sent it back to the Governor of Napo Province so he would take some action. The letter began by praising the military government that had swept into power in July of that year. But the situation occurring in Archidona Parish did note live up to the promise of the new regime. As the letter’s author declared, “as with all the Oriente territory, the aboriginal Indian IS A NATIONAL RESERVE, and it is just that this Indian be given the same treatment as is given to the other brothers of Ecuador.” The governor’s recent naming of Jaime Delgado as Teniente Político of Archidona flew in the face of this principle, however. Delgado was a known Communist sympathizer and immoral man. Only three days after taking office, he charged over three hundred sucres worth of fines without sending the money onto the treasury. He routinely charged

Indians in his parish for carrying out civil marriages, which was against the law. In one case, the Indian Pedro Chimbo asked for Delgado’s help with some paperwork;

Delgado demanded a mule as payment, thereby abusing the “ingenuity of the Indian.” In general, Delgado treated the Indians very harshly while “the infractions committed by whites remain in the most ridiculous impunity.” Delgado frequently took the name of the government and the ruling military junta to impose extra work obligations on the Indians of the parish, and used them to work on the properties of private individuals only, rather than the urban perimeter of Archidona. As the author of the letter asked, if the Indians were required to do this work, why not the whites? He elaborated, “in our country discrimination or division of classes does not exist, for this reason we give our most fiery protest for what is going on in this zone of the Oriente…behind the backs of the sectional authorities and the Central Government.”111

111 Dr. Galo Recalde, Subsecretario de Gobierno to Sr. Gobernador del Napo, Quito, November

555 This letter does not appear to have had much effect; in November, a group of

Indians headed by Pascual Chambo wrote to the Ministro de Gobierno to complain about Delgado, who was charging five sucres to inscribe their children in the Civil

Register and three chickens for a civil marriage. With chickens valued at about fifteen sucres each, these Indians complained that they could not afford to participate in the state’s civil institutions. In their view, Jaime Delgado’s actions as Teniente Político of

Archidona Parish amounted to a “dictatorship.”112 This case demonstrates that even with the new military government, the Oriente remained a place where white appointed officials could take advantage of their attributions in the Ley Especial de Oriente to enrich themselves and other private individuals. In this and other cases, the region’s

Indians were the target of these machinations, taken advantage of for their poverty and unfamiliarity with the state system.

The state of poverty in which most Indians lived prevented them from having the full protection of the law. In September of 1964, some white colonists were responsible for the burning down of the home of the Indian Francisco Alvarado. Although two

Indians, Ventura Huatatuca and Cesar Tapui, actually committed the arson, in the view of Bolívar León, which he expressed to the Governor of Napo, the “intellectual actor” of the crime was the white colonist Abraham Garcés. This crime was presented before the criminal judge in Ambato, a highland provincial capital city. The Ley Especial de Oriente did not provide for judges in the Oriente itself that could hear this kind of case.

Unfortunately, the judge ordered the release of the responsible individuals. Due to the

16, 1963, AGN.

112 Jaime C. Paz y Miño S. Coronel del EM, Jefe Civil y Militar de las Provincias Orientales to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Pastaza, November 20, 1963, AGN.

556 Indians’ “scarce economic resources,” Alvarado and his family could not travel to

Ambato to present themselves as witnesses. They also could not afford to hire a lawyer in Ambato to represent them. Bolívar León asked the Governor of Napo to intervene in what way he could to see that the decision was reversed.113 Napo remained an ancillary province that resembled the central parts of the Republic in some respects, but lacked equal resources and state institutions. The Indians of Napo Province, due to their limited economic resources, suffered especially from the hollow aspects of the state structure in the region.

Nevertheless, the Indians were not completely without their advocates, as the state officials of the region occasionally intervened on their behalf. More frequent in the

1960s than charges of abuse by appointed officials were complaints that employers neglected to pay their Indian workers. In January of 1963, the Indian Alfredo Grefa went into the Jefe Político’s office to declare that he had worked for one Hernán Coloma on the Puyo-Napo highway, but was never paid. In response to this, the Jefe Político wrote to the supervising engineer of that project and ordered him to withhold the amount owed from the subcontractor Hernán Coloma’s account on that highway.114 Another typical example came later that year, when Bautista Yumbo and Hipólito Yumbo went to the

Jefe Político to declare that Rolando Guerrero, another subcontractor on the Puyo-Napo highway, hired them each at the rate of 15 sucres per day. Neither had been paid, and were now owed 180 and 300 sucres for 12 and 20 days of work.115

113 Bolívar León to Sr. Anibal Burbua, Gobernador de Napo, Quito, September 14, 1964, AGN.

114 Aníbal Borbua, Jefe Político de Napo- Comisario de Trabajo to Sr. Ing. Carlos Nieto, Carretera Puyo-Napo, Tena, January 4, 1963, AGN.

115 Declaración, Salvador Alvarado et al to Sr. Jefe Político de Napo-Comisario de Trabajo, Tena, August 26, 1963, AGN.

557 The existence of patrones, or wealthy private individuals who held Indian workers in their sway through debt peonage or other means, was not entirely eliminated by the middle of the 1960s. In May of 1966, the Indian José Tunay came into the office of the

Jefe Político of Napo Canton, Jesús A. Ruiz, to lodge a formal complaint about the

“mistreatment” and “lack of attention” by his patrón, Aurelio Espinosa. Ruiz wrote to the

Teniente Político of Archidona, where Espinosa resided. It was not the first time he had received complaints about the patrón Espinsoa, and he asked the Teniente Político to make some “definitive” solution to the conflict. As Ruiz explained, “we are no longer in the time of García Moreno [a nineteenth-century Ecuadorian president, known for his strict conservatism] nor of the Inquisition, and in consequence all of us who believe ourselves to be rational beings must respect human rights.”116 In general, the state officials of the Oriente in the 1960s tried to impose a system governed more by law and order than the influence of private individuals or interpersonal conflicts and vendettas. In

1967, the Jefe Político Jaime Mancheno Albuja received a complaint from Alosno Andi that he was subject to various “criminal acts” by one señor Caicedo, a white colonist.

The Jefe Político ordered the corresponding Teniente Político to call Caicedo into his office and punish him as the law stipulated. “It is not just or possible,” he explained,

in the middle of the twentieth century and in the era in which we find ourselves that one is trying to…exercise justice with his own hands, leaving the authorities to the side. For this reason and in the desire to make an effort in favor of the Oriente region I ask that you proceed according to what is determined by the Codes and Laws of the Republic.117

116 Jesús A. Ruiz T., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Archidona, Tena, May 11, 1966, AGN.

117 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de la Parroquia de Santa Clara, July 4, 1967, AGN.

558 The continuing importance of the region’s Indians to the infrastructure and economy of the province meant that their protection in equal fashion by the laws of the

Republic was an important task for the state officials there. Evidence suggests that the

Indians played a much larger role than white colonists in some types of work. In May of

1966, Gilberto Ayora, the Teniente Político of Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola Parish wrote to the Governor of Napo to fill him in on the needs of his jurisdiction. In his letter, he mentioned the fact that most of the white colonists in the parish never participated in mingas, or communal work parties for infrastructure and agriculture. “In every project, the only ones who show up are the Indians,” he explained. “It is necessary that we all work in union, so that our grain of sand can be the cornerstone of our aspirations.” The

Teniente Político asked for the Governor to intervene with the Ministro de Gobierno so that he could use fines and prison sentences to punish those white colonists, “enemies of the advancement of this place,” who did not do any work.118

Though they were the essential workforce of the region, the Indians of Napo

Province were subject to punishment by the state officials when complaints about their behavior were filed, by whites or by other Indians, too. The charge of witchcraft remained one that could provoke the state’s intervention, as its effect upon the indigenous people in the province was significant. In April of 1966, the Jefe Político of

Napo Canton, Petronio Rivadeneyra, ordered the Teniente Político of Arajuno Parish to capture the Indian Vicente Tanguila, who held many of the Indians in the parish “in terror” due to his claims of being a brujo. It was the third occasion on which he had ordered Tanguila’s arrest; in the past, Tanguila evaded punishment, so Rivadeneyra

118 Gilberto Ayora, Teniente Político de Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Carlos Julio Arosemena Tola, May 30, 1966, AGN.

559 urged the Teniente Político to give him a “severe and exemplary” punishment on this occasion.119

When Indians were found to be innocent of charges of brujería, the state officials let it be known. In August of 1967, the Jefe Político Jaime Mancheno sent a circular to all civil and military authorities in the province certifying that the Indian Prudencio Jipa

Cifa

at no time exercises witchcraft nor any other maleficent thing, against anyone, for he is a person that like all Ecuadorians may freely travel throughout the territory of his homeland…and for being an oriental by birth should be aided by all the people who exercise the functions of civil and military authorities.120

It is not clear what prompted the Jefe Político’s circular, but it is worth noting that he considered it vital information that Jipa was not known to exercise witchcraft; conveying this fact seems to have been intended to raise confidence in Jipa as a good citizen among the other authorities of the region.

Some of those authorities continued their campaign to stamp out any abuses by appointed officials against the Indians of the province. In September of 1967, the Jefe

Político Jaime Mancheno sent a circular from the Visitador General de la Administración to all the Tenientes Políticos in the canton. This official from the Ministerio de Gobierno,

Dr. Rafael Márques Moreno, reminded all the Tenientes Políticos of their

legal obligation to protect the indigenous race and to watch out for them; for we have received various reports that unscrupulous and inhumane Tenientes Políticos commit a series of abuses against them, obligating them with fines of up to 200 sucres that in many cases must be replaced with prison due to the economic situation of the Indian race.

119 Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Arajuno, April 5, 1966, AGN.

120 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo to Las Autoridades Civiles y Militares Ecuatorianos, August 15, 1967, AGN.

560 Moreno stated that from then on, the Jefe Político would make periodic visitations of each parish to connect these abuses. Guilty Tenientes Políticos would be “sanctioned in exemplary form” for their abuses against those Indian citizens.121 This strongly worded letter did not put an end to such abuses, however. In December of that year, Vicente

Chimbo and Ricardo Paushí, two Indians from Santa Cecilia Parish, made a formal complaint about their Teniente Político, Vicente Erazo Varela, who had imposed a

“series of unjust charges and fines that affect the weak economy of the inhabitants” of the Oriente. A military engineer received this complaint and passed it along to the

Governor of the Province, asking for an account of the income due to fines in that parish.122

The state officials also continued their campaign to see that wage work and commercial transactions were established normally in the province. State officials could intervene even in small matters of this nature. For example, in March of 1966, the Jefe

Político Petronio Rivadeneyra ordered Pedro Shiguango to deposit one hundred sucres in his office right away. As the designated middleman in the sale of a dog from Carlos

Shiguango to Manuel Licuy, Shiguango would be punished if he did not hand over the money immediately.123 More common, however, was the intervention by the Jefes

Políticos and Tenientes Políticos between employer and employee. In May of 1966, the new Jefe Político, Jesús A. Ruiz, responded to Francisco Yumbo’s complaint that he

121 Jaime Mancheno Albuja to Sr. Teniente Político de Todo el Canton Napo, Tena, September 12, 1967, AGN.

122 Eugenio Ortega, Myr. Ing. To Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Santa Cecilia, December 12, 1967, AGN.

123 Petronio Rivadeneyra V., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Pedro Shiguango, Tena, March 16, 1966, AGN.

561 had not been paid the 800 sucres he was owed for work done for Enrique Páez. Ruiz ordered Hugo Baquero, who was Paéz’s business associate, to retain that sum from

Paéz so that Yumbo could be paid.124 A few days later, the Indians Vicente and Manuel

Tanguila complained to Ruiz that they had been hired by Julio Cardona to work at the rate of twenty sucres per day, but had not been paid. Ruiz ordered the Teniente Político of Archidona to call Cardona into his office to see to this problem.125

The way that the state officials intervened in these disputes did not always go without challenge. In 1968, Pedro Catota of Francisco de Orellana Parish complained about his Teniente Político to the Governor of Napo Province. As he stated, the

Teniente Político ordered him to pay 4,575 sucres to the Indian Alejandro Condo.

Catota objected to this order because in his view it was in violation of the verbal work agreement he held with Condo. According to Catota, Condo agreed to clear and plant ten hectares of pasture on Catota’s land at the rate of 400 sucres per hectare. Catota alleged that while Condo never finished his work, the Teniente Político sought to make him pay the rate of 600 sucres per hectare as if they were all completed. Now the

Teniente Político threatened Catota with prison if he did not pay. The issue was especially problematic because it had forced him to miss work as a motorist for

Geophysical Service Incorporated, a North American petroleum company in the region.

Catota complained to the Governor that the Teniente Político was acting like a cacique or curaca from “a savage tribe.”126

124 Jesús A. Ruiz T., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Hugo Baquero, Tena, May 16, 1966, AGN.

125 Jesús A. Ruiz T., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Archidona, Tena, May 21, 1966, AGN.

126 Pedro Catota to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Francisco de Orellana, no date, 1968, AGN.

562 As North American petroleum companies entered the region in the middle part of the decade, the state officials of the Oriente were forced to intervene with them, too, to see that wages were paid and that employers and employees fulfilled their obligations.

Many of the region’s Indians would have been familiar with wage work for foreign oil companies. As Blanca Muratorio has described, during the 1940s many Indians worked for Royal Dutch Shell during that company’s unsuccessful pursuit of oil drilling operations in the region.127 In January of 1966, Petronio Rivadeneyra, the Jefe Político of Napo Canton, sent a complaint to the General Administrator of Geophysical Service

Incorporated. Bartolo Shiguango Grefa had shown Rivadeneyra his fractured index finger, for which he was hospitalized in Ambato on GSI’s account. However, he had not been paid for the two weeks he had worked for the company in Puerto Napo and the one week in Pastaza. Rivadeneyra demanded the company square up with Bartolo

Shiguango Grefa right away.128

In August of 1966, more than thirty workers complained about Leopoldo Beltrán, a contractor for the North American company “Sedia” (or “SEDIAC”). Despite being called into the office of the Jefe Político twice, Beltrán still had not paid all these workers. Rivadeneyra wrote to his counterpart in Pastaza Canton to see that Beltrán was captured.129 Upon capture, Beltrán gave Rivadeneyra his “personal guarantee” that he would make good on the payment, so he was released on the promise he would pay

127 Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, 169-170.

128 Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Administrador General de la Compañía Geophysical Service Incorporated, Tena, January 19, 1966, AGN.

129 Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Jefe Político de Pastaza, Tena, August 1, 1966, AGN.

563 with in a matter of days.130 Rivadeneyra then informed Oscar Whit, the manager of

Sedia, that Beltrán was found to owe a total of 6,225 sucres to various workers, to be deposited in a public office for distribution to the complainants.131

Problems with getting payment from Sedia contractors persisted, however. In

October of 1966, Rivadeneyra received a large number (“un sinnúmero”) of Indians who had worked for the Sedia employee Orlin Bustos. According to the Indians, they were owed money by the whole company. Rivadeneyra wrote again to the manager of Sedia and ordered him to remove 2,610 sucres from Bustos’s account so that the Indians could be paid. Also, he informed the manager that the police officer Guillermo Proaño would soon visit him to collect the 1,185 sucres that Leopoldo Beltrán still owed to various Indians.132 Two months later, things remained unresolved. Rivadeneyra again asked the manager of Sedia to remove 2,610 sucres from the account of Orlin Bustos and 1,200 from Leopoldo Beltrán. As Rivadeneyra complained, “it is iniquitous to leave those poor people [“pobre gente”] without their dues from days worked with [those men].”133

The state officials of Napo Province, then, intervened regularly to see that work agreements and commercial transactions between Indians, whites, and foreign oil companies were enacted according to contract and to the satisfaction of the party that

130 Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Capitán Jefe Provincial de Policía de Napo, Tena, August 5, 1966, AGN.

131 Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Oscar Whit, Gerente Compañía SEDIAC, Tena, August 5, 1966, AGN.

132 Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político-Intendente de Policía del Napo to Sr. Gerente de la Compañía “Sedia,” Tena, October 20, 1966, AGN.

133 Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político del Napo to Sr. Gerente de la Compañía “Sedia,” Tena, December 6, 1966, AGN.

564 the officials deemed to be in the right. Throughout the 1960s, the state officials also intervened in matters involving the region’s Indigenous families and children. Evidence in the Archivo de la Gobernación de Napo demonstrates that the Quichua Indians of

Napo Province frequently entrusted the care of their children to wealthy white colonists and landowners. These arrangements often went sour, however, and the Jefes and

Tenientes Políticos of the region were called to secure children in the care of their parents or other family members. These officials were also called to intervene in cases involving the breakdown of marriages and the flight of wives from their husbands.

The Indians of Napo Province frequently sought help from the state officials in seeing their children returned to them from the care of white patrones or other colonists.

For example, in January of 1960, the Jefe Político of Napo Canton, Rafael M. Enríquez, wrote to the white teacher at the Josephine mission, Alberto Albuja, ordering him to bring the Indian girl Serafina Tapuy into his office; he had been holding her against her family’s will, and Enríquez threatened to arrest Albuja if he did not comply.134 Two months later, Enríquez intervened in a similar case. Carlos Shiguango and Juana Cerda came into his office to ask for help in getting their daughter, Salomé Shiguango Cerda, returned to them. She had been in the power of a police captain for seven or eight months, and this captain had taken the girl with him to the highland provincial capital of

Ambato. As Enríquez explained to the President of the Minors’ Tribunal of Tungurahua

Province, the girl’s parents owed no debt to the police captain and had made no agreement with him about the girl’s care; Enríquez asked for the Tribunal’s help in seeing that the girl be taken away from the police captain and placed in the care of a

134 Rafael M. Enríquez B., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Alberto Abuja, Tena, January 19, 1960, AGN.

565 seminary in Ambato until she could be returned to her parents in Napo Canton.135 Later that year, the Governor of Napo Province, Colonel Gregorio Zabala M., wrote to the

Jefe Político of Aguarico Canton to inform him that one Galo Rodas was in his jurisdiction after having taken a boy away from the care of his parents. Rodas had taken the boy without any authorization, and furthermore did not pay him for the work he did for Rodas. The Governor ordered the Jefe Político to find Rodas and order him to return the boy to his parents, who were “very poor” and would not be able to afford to go to

Aguarico Canton themselves.136

The state officials of the province also got involved in cases of abuse within families. In June of 1960, Alberto Albuja was once again asked to explain himself by the

Jefe Político Enríquez. On this occasion, Enríquez’s letter was prompted by a visit from

Juana Andi, who stated that her husband, Abelardo Calapucha, was mistreating her barbarously and refusing to let her enter the house. As Juana Andi explained, Albuja encouraged Calapucha to do this because he wanted Calapucha to leave his wife and marry one of Albuja’s servant women instead. Enríquez told Albuja that his behavior was especially scandalous for a teacher at the Mission school. Other Indians had confirmed Andi’s version of events to Enríquez, so he warned Albuja that if the marriage between Calapucha and Andi persisted in this tumultuous fashion, he would hold Albuja responsible.137

135 Rafael M. Enríquez B., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Presidente del Tribunal de Menores de Tungurahua, Tena, March 17, 1960, AGN.

136 Coronel Gregorio Zabala M., Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Jefe Político de Aguarico, Tena, October 31, 1960, AGN.

137 Rafael M. Enríquez B., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Alberto Albuja, Tena, June 18, 1960, AGN.

566 The violation of Indians’ homes and violence against Indian children could also provoke the state officials’ intervention. In August of 1960, Camilo Aguinda, an Indian man who had long sat on the Junta Protectora de Indígenas in Napo Canton, wrote to the Governor, Ney Estupiñán, to complain that a police officer had broken into his sister’s house and sexually assaulted her two young daughters. There were more witnesses besides the victims that could testify about what happened. He demanded justice by stating,

you know, Señor Gobernador, that we are no longer the Indians of yesteryear, we are now civilized Indians who have heard the laws, we know that private homes must be respected, and that it is even worse to commit these crimes against poor creatures that still do not know the things of the world.138

This attitude perhaps mirrors that of the Indians who sought intervention from other state officials in keeping families together or putting an end to abusive situations.

Parents often turned to the Jefes and Tenientes Políticos of the region to get their children back. Or, in some cases, they went to other advocates, such as parish priests, that could do so on their behalf. In January of 1962, for example, Serena Licua, an Indian woman, went to her parish priest, Luciano Trinchero, to state that her daughter had been taken. The girl, Rosa Andi, who was seven years old, had recently gone to listen to an evangelical sermon, where she met Venancio Grefa. Grefa told her that if she went with him to the evangelical mission at Limón Cocha, run by the North

American evangelical operation, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, she would have plenty of meat to eat and that her parents would no longer mistreat her. Licua and her

138 Camilo Aguinda to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Ongota, August 23, 1960, transcribed in Ney Estupiñán, Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Jefe Accidental del Cuerpo de Policía Napo, Tena, August 26, 1960, AGN.

567 husband first went to the Evangelical mission to demand their daughter’s return, but the missionaries demanded 250 sucres. So they turned to the Catholic priest Trinchero, who then complained to the Teniente Político of Tena.139

In other cases, aggrieved husbands turned to the state officials to repair their marriages. In April of 1962, Luis Andi Cushillo presented his difficulty to Petronio

Rivadeneyra, the Jefe Político of Napo Canton. As Andy described it, several months earlier, Fermín Flores had convinced him to marry the minor Aguasanta Bargas. Her parents agreed to the union after Andy paid them 200 sucres’ worth of liquor and food.

After eight months of marriage, Andy had to go visit some sick relatives, leaving his wife in the care of her parents. Upon his return, the parents objected to their union, and accused Andy of being a brujo, or witch doctor. The Jefe Político Rivadeneyra ordered the Teniente Político of Madre Tierra Parish, where all this occurred, to call Fermin

Flores, the parents, and the young girl into his office so they could explain why they no longer wanted her living with her husband. If the union could not be reestablished, then the Teniente Político was to see that Andy’s belongings were returned to him. He also ordered the Teniente Político to provide some security for Andy, who feared that his in- laws meant to do him harm.140

A similar case from two years later shows what the Jefe Político could do to try to keep marriages together. In December of 1964, Petronio Rivadeneyra tried to help Juan

139 Padre Luciano Trinchero, Párroco de Tálag to Sr. Anibal Borbua, Teniente Político de Tena, Tálag, January 31, 1962, AGN. The Summer Institute of Linguistics first entered Ecuador in 1952 and concentrated on evangelizing Indians in the Oriente. It signed contracts with the Ecuadorian government in 1953, 1956, and 1971, and attracted some worldwide attention after five missionaries were murdered by Huaorani Indians in 1956. See Alvin M. Goffin, The Rise of Protestant Evangelism in Ecuador, 1895- 1990 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), especially chapters 4 and 5, pp. 51-78.

140 Petronio Rivadeneyra V., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Madre Tierra, Tena, April 26, 1962, AGN.

568 Ashanga “re-make his home” with his wife Juana Cuji, who had left him and went to live elsewhere. Rivadeneyra wrote to the commanding officer of the military garrison in

Villano, where Cuji had gone. He ordered the officer to call Cuji into his office and make her explain why she had left her husband. If the officer found that there were not

“sufficient reasons,” then he was to order her to return to Ashanga.141 Later, in 1966,

Rivadeneyra received Alejo Grefa in his office, who stated that he and his brother

Alberto were both abandoned by their wives for no reason. The women left their homes and went to the Capuchin Mission in Aguarico Canton. Rivadeneyra ordered the

Teniente Político there to find the women and force the women to go back to their husbands.142 Rivadeneyra also wrote to the Bishop who was the Apostolic Prefect of the

Mission and appealed to his religion when asking for his help in seeing the women go back to their husbands, stating that Alejo and Alberto Grefa’s homes were formed by law and by God, and that it was “impossible to break the tie that the Lord has bound.”143

These and other such letters demonstrate that the appointed officials of Napo played a larger role in the 1960s than they had in previous decades in maintaining civil marriages that had been enacted among the Province’s indigenous inhabitants. This does not mean, though, that they were not subject to accusations of abuse and malfeasance in this realm, too, as they were in others. For example, in 1962, Antonia

Aguinda complained to the Jefe Político of Napo Canton that she had been the victim of

141 Petronio Rivadeneyra V., Gobernador Accidental de Napo to Sr. Jefe del Destacamento Militar del Villano, Tena, December 4, 1964, AGN.

142 Petronio Rivadeneyra V., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Teniente Político de Francisco de Orellana, Tena, June 22, 1966, AGN.

143 Petronio Rivadeneyra V., Jefe Político de Napo to Excelentísimo Monseñor Prefecto Apostólico del Aguarico, Tena, June 22, 1966, AGN.

569 domestic abuse. As she explained, on September 11th the local Teniente Político of

Archidona, Enrique Espinoza, tied her to a pillar outside her house. He then ordered the woman’s husband to beat her with his fists, and then whipped her himself three times.

Antonia Aguinda showed clear physical signs of this abuse when she went into the Jefe

Político’s office. Later, the Jefe Político called the Espinoza into his office, and Espinoza denied none of Aguinda’s account. So the Jefe Político wrote to the Governor to ask for

Espinoza’s immediate firing.144

Much more common than such reports of violent abuse were incidents in which state officials intervened on one side or another in cases involving childcare.

Throughout the 1960s, Indian citizens in Napo Province, out of economic necessity, arranged to see their children work for white colonists or landowners. The state officials were often the arbitrators of such agreements. For example, in November of 1963, the

Indian father Antonio Chimbo and Ricardo Baquero signed an “Act of Deposit” [“Acta de

Depósito”] in the office of the Jefe Político Petronio Rivadeneyra. Through an interpreter, Chimbo agreed to entrust the care of his daughter Juana, who was seventeen years old, to Baquero, who would pay her 80 sucres a month for the first five months and then 100 sucres a month thereafter. The arrangement would last until

Juana chose to leave Baquero.145

The state officials were called to intervene when these arrangements went wrong, or when individuals tried to hold onto children against their parents’ will. In

144 Aníbal Borbua B., Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Tena, September 21, 1962, AGN.

145 Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político de Napo, Acta de Depósito, Tena, November 1, 1963, AGN.

570 November of 1964, the priest in Cotundo Parish wrote to the Governor of Napo, to see that the “natural rights of a mother” were respected. As he explained, Dolores Alvarado had a two-year-old daughter that was being retained by one Lucrecia G. Loaña in

Archidona, for whom Alvarado had previously worked as a servant. Loaña never wanted her daughter to remain in Loaña’s power, so the priest asked the Governor to intervene so that the girl would go back to her mother.146

In 1966, the Jefe Político of Aguarico had to intervene in a dispute over the care of three children in the canton of his jurisdiction. According to Alberto Ajón, he was in his home on August 31st when a canoe from the military garrison at Tiputini showed up carrying one Señora América de Tangoy and her husband, a soldier in the garrison. The woman explained that she had orders from the Jefe Político and from the commander of the garrison to take the children Jana, Venancio, and Roberto Santi into her care. Ajón explained that their deceased mother had deposited them into his care, so he objected to Tangoy’s claim on them, even though she was an aunt. Ajón knew that the grandparents were still alive, and they ought to have first right to the children.147 The

Jefe Político later wrote to the Governor of the Province to explain that he had never given authorization for Tangoy to take the children. In fact, he explained, this was another example of the frequent abuses committed by the military personnel in the area.

The commanding officer of the garrison frequently trampled on the rights of the civil authorities, enacting a “dictatorship” in which he claimed to be the top official on all matters in the canton. He had treated Ajón badly and threatened him with jail for

146 Padre Francisco Tramarollo, Párroco de Cotundo to Sr. Dn. Hanibal Burbua, Gobernador de Napo, Cotundo, November 25, 1964, AGN.

147 Alberto Ajón to Sr. Jefe Político de Aguarico, Nuevo Rocafuerte, August 3, 1966, AGN.

571 opposing his effort to see the children taken by Tangoy and her husband. As for the children, the Jefe Político ordered them to be placed in care of the Catholic mission there, until their grandparents could come to take possession. The grandparents later told a priest that the military officers had “abused their innocence” by forcing them to make their fingerprints on a document that would transfer possession of the children to

Tangoy.148 This case is another example of how the Indians of the province had to confront a state system that largely operated in a language other than their own, and that was rife with rivalries between different officials that could augment the difficulties they faced.

Throughout the rest of the 1960s, Indians came to the state officials looking for help in seeing their children returned to them. In 1966, Petronio Rivadeneyra, the Jefe

Político of Napo Canton, wrote to Lucila Pazmiño because he had received a complaint from Antonio Cerda de Grefa, who told him that while she had freely decided to deposit her daughter Maria Elena into Pazmiño’s care, the agreed upon period of one year had run out, so it was time for Pazmiño to return the girl to her mother.149 Later that year, the

Governor of the Province wrote to the commanding officer of the military garrison at

Limón-Cocha after Domingo Cerda complained that one of the soldiers from that garrison had taken Cerda’s daughter, Rosa Shiguango, as a servant. Since this was done without the parents’ consent, the governor ordered the commander of the garrison

148 Roberto E. Clavijo V., Jefe Político del Cantón Aguarico to Sr. Gobernador de Napo, Nuevo Rocafuerte, August 4, 1966, AGN.

149 Petronio Rivadeneyra, Jefe Político de Napo to Sra. Lucila Pazmiño, Tena, August 30, 1966, AGN.

572 to see that the girl was handed over to the civil authorities so she could go back home.150

Later in the 1960s, Indians continued to deposit their children in the care of others out of necessity. For example, in May of 1967, Paula Cerda and Elsa Borbúa de

Vargas signed an “Act of Deposit” with the Jefe Político Jaime Mancheno Albuja in which Cerda, a widow with five children, agreed to deposit her daughter Rosa Marina with Borbúa, while the latter agreed to care for her material welfare and education.

Cerda made this decision due to the poor economic situation she had faced since her husband’s death.151 The Jefe Político Mancheno, on that occasion, arranged for childcare to be transferred. But on other occasions he worked to see that parents saw their children returned. In September of that year, he was visited by the mother of Maria

Teresa Licuy, an Indian girl who had worked for Captain Jaime Rodrigo Pareja has a domestic servant. The mother had agreed to allow her daughter to work for 80 sucres a month; but lately, Pareja had withheld 520 sucres of the girl’s pay in order to keep her in his employ indefinitely. Mancheno reminded Pareja that this was against the law, and ordered him to deposit the 520 sucres into his office so it could be given to the girl’s family.152 The following month, Mancheno threatened a man with prison if he did not return an Indian boy to his father as soon as possible.153 All of these incidents signal the

150 J. Eloy Baquero L., Gobernador de Napo to Sr. Comandante del Destacamento Militar de Limón-Cocha, October 19, 1966, AGN.

151 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo, “Acta de Depósito,” Tena, May 25, 1967, AGN.

152 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Capitán Jaime Rodrigo Pareja, Tena, September 28, 1967, AGN.

153 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo to Sr. Enrique NN, Tena, October 20, 1967, AGN.

573 growing importance of the state officials of Napo Province in maintaining the marriages and families of the indigenous people of the region. The state had grown strong enough that the Quichua Indians could seek their aid against wealthy white colonists and military officers.

As they did on matters involving land, many Indians looked to the Jefes and

Tenientes Políticos to mediate disputes arising from personal enmity or mistreatment among Indian families and neighbors. Evidence in the Archivo de la Gobernación de

Napo demonstrates that Indians in Napo Province frequently went to these public officials to enact “Acts of Transaction” or “Acts of Agreement” that were intended to put an end to quarrels or property disputes. In many cases, the cultural practices of

Quichua Indians were involved in these conflicts, forcing the state officials to weigh in on cultural phenomena that lay outside the purview of the law.

In May of 1967, Antonio Aguinda and Vicente Tanguila went before the Jefe

Político of Napo Canton, Jaime Mancheno Albuja, and signed an Acta de Convenio in which they agreed to put an end to their quarrels. As the document states, “for no reason of any nature,” Antonio Aguinda had long been persecuting his neighbors while claiming to be a witch doctor, or brujo, “something that does not exist in reality.”

Recently, he had sent curses against the wife of Vicente Tanguila, which resulted in his being called before the Jefe Político. According to the document, Aguinda promised never to say anything concerning witchcraft in the future; if he did, he would be

“sanctioned until he abandons the belief in witchcraft.”154

154 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo, “Acta de Convenio,” Tena, May 23, 1967, AGN. In a similar case, from August of 1967, Juan Pío Dahua and Pascual Dahua went before Mancheno after an ongoing quarrel in which each man accused the other of witchcraft; they both promised to live in peace and to abandon any such practice. Juan Pío Dahua was sentenced to four days of prison, in

574 Another case from October also involved threats of witchcraft. In this case, the motive for the quarrel was clearer. As the Acta de Transacción stated, a party of Indians comprised of Silverio Grefa, Bernardo Licuy, and Miguel Andi, and another party comprised of Juan Andi and Modesto Cerda, each owned a parcel of land between the

Illuculí and Jatun Yacu rivers. A dispute over property boundaries gave rise to a continuous series of threats and curses. “Beginning today,” the document reads,

[the parties] agree to live in a friendly fashion without wounding, nor injuring, nor making offense of word or act. They also will not threaten each other with brujos or curses, and if they do they will be sanctioned with maximum rigor by this authority. They must live in healthy and eternal peace, in mutual harmony and in complete comprehension.155

Many of these Actas demonstrate an effort on the part of state officials to stamp out the Indians’ belief in witchcraft. In November of 1967, Antonio Aguinda, Edmunda

Alvarado and Alejandro Alvarado went into Mancheno’s office after the Aguinda and

Alvarado families had been “continuously” engaged in a series of “rumors and stories, threats and curses.” “In light of the fact that it is no longer possible to believe in rumors and in witchcraft,” the document states, “starting today [these families] promise to respect each other and keep the harmony due to rational persons.” Furthermore, they swore to cease taking ayahuasca, the psychotropic beverage used by Quichua shamans or brujos to launch curses and to divine culpable parties after crimes were committed. The parties agreed that anyone caught drinking ayahuasca would be

addition to signing the Acta. Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo, “Acta de Transacción,” Tena, August 30, 1967, AGN.

155 Pablo Pazos Oritz, Jefe Político Accidental de Napo, “Acta de Transacción,” Tena, October 11, 1967, AGN.

575 “sanctioned with the maximum rigor” according to the Penal Code.156 The institution of the Acta de Convenio and the similar Acta de Transacción were used, then, as an administrative tool to keep the peace between Indian citizens who confronted a state system that was in some respects incompatible with their cultural practices.

Conflicts and rivalries remained the most common reason for the signing of these

Actas into 1968. In February of that year, Salvador Shiguango and Mauricio Huatatoca came into Mancheno’s office after Shiguango accused Huatatoca of being a brujo and of having threatened Shiguango with threats of death through witchcraft. Both men signed an agreement that recognized that all these threats and accusations were unfounded, and promised to live in peace and harmony with all due respect between their families.157 The next month, Guillermo Andy, Carlos Felipe Shiguango, and

Serafina Cerda went before Mancheno in response to the “divergences” that had been ongoing between them. Specifically, Andy had been using threats of witchcraft against the other two. Before the Jefe Político, Andy promised to cease all such threats and recognized that he would be sanctioned with the “maximum of the law” if he repeated these threats.158 A similar case from April further illustrates the desire on the part of the state officials to stamp out the cultural practice of witchcraft. In this case, several

Indians accused Vicente Grefa of practicing witchcraft, threatening to kill them or give them some mortal disease. As the document, which was signed by Grefa and his

156 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo, “Acta de Transacción,” Tena, November 28, 1967, AGN.

157 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo, “Acta de Transacción,” Tena, February 9, 1968, AGN.

158 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo, “Acta de Transacción,” Tena, March 7, 1968, AGN.

576 accusers, explained, “in reality witchcraft does not exist, but it is a threat because of belief.” All agreed that any future incident of witchcraft would be harshly sanctioned.

Furthermore, they agreed to live “in friendship and common accord, without launching injuries or threats, and helping each other as is custom among the persons of the

Oriente.”159

A case from November of 1968 is another instance in which the state officials cracked down on specific aspects of witchcraft. In this instance, Washington Grefa and

Ramon Andy went before the Teniente Político of Tena, Mariano Diaz. Both Grefa and

Andy had been accused of being brujos by Luis Aguinda; both men admitted that they customarily drank ayahuasca, but it was strictly for personal health reasons and not to injure other people. Nevertheless, “the rest of the Indian people” believed that they drank the substance for nefarious reasons. Before the Teniente Político, Grefa and

Andy promised never to drink it again on the threat of maximum legal punishment.

Furthermore, the rest of the “Indian people” in the parish were authorized to tell the authorities if they broke their promise.160 The preoccupation with ayahuasca and witchcraft in these Actas indicates the degree to which these practices could lead to disputes among the Indian people of the province. These documents represent efforts by the state officials to put an end to such things that lay outside the legitimate framework of the state system they sought to impose in the Oriente.

Similar Actas were drawn up and signed for cases in which witchcraft was not specifically mentioned. These documents remained a tactic for smoothing out disputes

159 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo, “Acta de Transacción,” Tena, April 15, 1968, AGN.

160 Mariano Diaz G., Teniente Político de Tena, “Acta de Convenio,” Tena, November 11, 1968, AGN.

577 among Indian citizens in order to promote better administration in Napo Province. For example, in June of 1968 Marcos Tapuy and his parents went before Jaime Mancheno, the Jefe Político of Napo Canton, after Marcos had drunkenly offended his father, which created “division and brawls” between his brothers and the whole family. Marcos agreed to “respect, consider, and love his father, like a good son, asking him for forgiveness” in front of the Jefe Político. He also agreed to pay for any medical care his father needed.

This peaceful settlement would also guarantee that Marcos and his brothers would peacefully live on the parcels of land that were created for them out of their father’s holdings.161 In another case from the following month, the brothers Silverio Andi and

Pascual Andi agreed to “carry themselves as is humane and logical among brothers, loving and respecting each other,” after putting aside “problems of a family character” that had led to a series of “verbal insults and threats.”162 Many of these Actas sought to prescribe respectful behavior; in August of that year, Clemente Licuy and Agustín Grefa

Aguinda, neighbors who had been engaged in a series of conflicts, promised before the

Jefe Político to “get along with each other, as is logical between persons who are from this place and region.”163

These Actas demonstrate that the Indians of the province frequently accepted the intervention of the state authorities in settling disputes. In many of these documents, the administrative logic of the state system in the Oriente is revealed: the Jefes and

Tenientes Políticos sought to impose a set of behaviors on the Indian citizens based on

161 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo, “Acta de Transacción,” Tena, June 11, 1968, AGN.

162 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo, “Acta de Transacción,” Tena, July 25, 1968, AGN.

163 Jaime Mancheno Albuja, Jefe Político de Napo, “Acta de Compromiso,” Tena, August 5, 1968, AGN.

578 what they deemed “logical” and “respectful.” The need to do this often arose from the fact that cultural practices that predated the development of the Oriente as an ancillary province, such as drinking ayahuasca and practicing brujería, persisted in the region, leading to conflict and even violence. As evidence from state officials demonstrates,

Indians in the region also turned to these officials to see that their work was remunerated and that their families were kept together.

The Indians of the province did not always accept the state officials’ decisions. At times, they took direct action against state officials to see their interests fulfilled. In April of 1969, a large group of Indians in Archidona Parish publicly demonstrated against their Teniente Político, Rolando Guerrero. Guerrero had tried to impose sanction on an

Indian named Francisco Andy for some infraction, but was met by massive resistance.

According to the Governor of the Province, the Indians were being stirred up against the

Teniente Político by the parish priest and by a schoolteacher named Bolívar Tapuy, who was himself a Quichua Indian. This kind of meddling was very common, and interfered with the “normal administrative unfolding of justice, causing in this way greater problems.” Somehow, news of this incident had reached a group of senators and representatives to Congress; the governor urged them to take the Teniente Político’s side in the matter, as this was just another incident in which the Indians of the province were “manipulated by third parties.”164

This letter demonstrates that the governor believed that the Indians of the province could not be acting according to their own desires, but needed encouragement

164 Alfredo Salazar Guevara, Gobernador de Napo to H. Legisladores Señores Ruben Cevallos Vega, Ernesto Sotomayor, Senadores; Simón Bustamante, Galo Vayas Salazar, Diputados, Tena, April 15, 1969, AGN.

579 from some outsider. This belief in the Indians’ non-political nature was a common one, and it had been expressed by state officials in previous decades. But the frequency with which Indians engaged state officials on a variety of matters, common enough in the

1940s and 50s and even more frequent in the 1960s, demonstrates that these Indian citizens were becoming more familiar with the state system and more willing to engage it to seek redress of grievances and to maintain access to family and property. The incident described here may have been related to the burgeoning indigenous movement in Napo Province. The year 1969 saw the founding of FEPOCAN, or the Provincial

Federation of Peasant Organizations of Napo (Federación Provincial de Organizaciones

Campesinas del Napo). This group was headed by Quichua teachers that were trained at the Josephine mission; among the organization’s early goals was a system by which to settle intra-community disputes without the need to interact with state officials who, like Rolando Guerrero was said to have done, frequently imposed extra fines upon

Indian litigants.165

In 1969, the legislature decreed that the Oriente’s provinces would be incorporated into the general political-administrative regime of the state. That is, all special dispositions for the region, including the “Special Laws” that had governed the

Oriente since the 1880s, were repealed.166 By the time of that decree, the state was an unavoidable and essential player in social and economic relations in Napo Province. It would remain so in the coming years as the Oriente’s population and economic importance both skyrocketed with the maturing of oil drilling operations. These

165 Yashar, Contesting Citizenship, 122-123.

166 La Comisión Legislativa Permanente, “Incorpórase Provincias Orientales al Régimen Político Administrativo General de la República,” Registro Oficial 1, no. 222 (July 15, 1969): 1712-1713.

580 operations brought an unprecedented amount of human and economic capital to the region, and expanded the reach of the state into previously unincorporated areas of the

Amazon. The dynamics of this process, how it led to the lessening of the Oriente’s status as a collection of “ancillary” provinces, how it provoked the growth of the

Ecuadorian indigenous movement in the Amazon, and how it affected the national understanding of the region as a whole, will have to be studied elsewhere.

Concluding Remarks

In 1948, President Galo Plaza responded to the suspension of oil exploration in the Amazonian region by Royal Dutch Shell after that company’s failure to find viable deposits by stating, “The Oriente is a myth.”167 Chapter 2 of this dissertation described the corpus of national imaginings and hopes for future prosperity that did indeed lend the Oriente a mythic quality in its popular understanding. The region was the subject of civic celebration and propaganda in the press and other publications that presented it as a fully Ecuadorian region; a stage upon which the state and patriotic citizens must act in order to ensure national security and domestic prosperity. From these constructions of the region as a national object of desire, an agenda for development, including colonization, agriculture, resource extraction, and good governance, was derived. As

Chapter 3 explained, the Indians of the region were swept up into these constructions; the Yumbos and Jívaros that populated the Oriente were understood in terms of their participation in the great project to incorporate the Oriente into the Ecuadorian state, nation, and economy. These racial groups, therefore, were a creation particular to the

Amazonian frontier of Ecuador as a dynamic in the formulation of national identities.

167 See Taylor, “El Oriente ecuatoriano,” 47.

581 But one must recognize the more cynical side of President Plaza’s claim; indeed, the Oriente was a disappointment to statesmen for much of the period covered by this dissertation. Chapter 4 described how the region was administered as a set of ancillary provinces, rather than a fully integrated section of the Republic. A failure to devote adequate resources to the region was largely responsible for this. Just as importantly, the laws designed for the region did not differ significantly from the administrative schematic of the rest of the Republic. Though the government passed a series of

“Special Laws” for the Oriente, they were not special enough, and the region’s appointed officials found themselves unable to effectively carry out the multiple attributions layered upon their offices.

Nevertheless, the Oriente was not a myth for the growing numbers of colonists who populated the region in the 1940s and later. Nor was it a mythic place for the

Quichua and Shuar indigenous people that were the majority of the population in the

Oriente’s provinces. This dissertation has taken up Norman E. Whitten, Jr.’s charge to treat the Oriente as a center of analysis. It is, in Whitten’s words, an “interface zone” between the Andean and Amazonian worlds where the Ecuadorian state bureaucracy along with political and nationalist ideologies overlapped with indigenous social systems and economic networks established by white-mestizo landowners. My research helps to

“strip away the marginal character spuriously attributed to” the Oriente and to examine in detail the “ecological, social, and ideological processes” that took place there in the decades before the discovery of oil radically transformed the region.168 Above all, I call attention to the fact that the Oriente’s construction as a “national object of desire,” which

168 Norman E. Whitten, Jr., “Amazonia Today at the Base of the Andes: An Ethnic Interface in Ecological, Social, and Ideological Perspectives,” in Norman E. Whitten, Jr., ed., Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 123.

582 largely took place in Quito and publications available to wider Ecuadorian society, had real consequences for what occurred in the region itself while it was administered as a set of “ancillary provinces.” As described in Chapters 5-8, the layering of ideological importance upon the Oriente as a great hope for the future provided its colonists and state officials with a toolkit of rhetorical ideas they could use to seek redress of grievances. The priorities for administration and state formation in the region were judged in terms of their relationship to the project of making the Oriente a vital, fully integrated section of the Republic. The region’s Quichua and Shuar people could draw upon the notions about their ethnic groups that were imparted to wider society when interacting with state officials and arguing for access to justice or land. The way the modus vivendi of the Oriente was hammered out between colonists, influential landowners, state officials, and Indians was influenced at every turn by the fact that the

Oriente’s provinces were ancillary, suffering from lack of resources and isolation. A great deal of improvisation, at best, and corruption, at worst, was required to control the limited resources of the state in the region and to manage the administration of a diverse population.

Though it was a group of ancillary provinces, rather than an equally functioning section of the Republic, the Oriente was, nevertheless, an Ecuadorian place in the period under study. The state did not function in ideal fashion, but it was a vital component of social and economic relations in the region. By the 1960s, state officials remained under-resourced, but they were heavily involved in ensuring fair relations between workers and employees, and in resolving disputes over land and other problems between white-mestizo colonists and Indians alike. The period between the

583 two most significant “booms” affecting the Ecuadorian Amazon, namely, the rubber boom of the turn of the twentieth century and the oil boom that continues to this day, was not “dead time” in the history of the Oriente. Rather, it had important consequences for the development of Ecuadorian national identity. It also saw the negotiation of a modus vivendi in the Oriente between state officials, landowners, colonists, and Indians that lay the groundwork for the region’s transformation by oil drilling operations, and the politicization of the region’s Indians that contributed to the Ecuadorian indigenous movement that is among the most significant in Latin America.169

By the late 1960s, the Ecuadorian government frequently employed the slogan,

“Ecuador has been, is, and will be an Amazonian country!” (“Ecuador ha sido, es y será, país amazónico!”)170 This was true even before Amazonian oil became essential to the national economy; the Oriente provided a vital component of Ecuador’s national identity for many decades before that. Furthermore, the settlements and towns of the Oriente were, in fact, a stage for the enactment of Ecuadorian history during those same decades. Though the players on that stage, including colonists, Indians, and state officials, were forced to improvise, what they enacted was a frontier drama that was fully national and consequential for the future.

169 See Yashar, Contesting Citizenship, Chapter 4, pp. 85-151.

170 Whitten, “Amazonia Today,” 121.

584 LIST OF REFERENCES

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Cecco, Monseñor Emilio. “Conferencia de Monseñor Emilio Cecco, Administrador Apostólico de la Misión del Napo, Sobre el Oriente Ecuatoriano, Pronunciada en Ambato el 13 de Diciembre de 1926.” Boletín Eclesiástico 23, No. 1 (January, 1926): 23-34.

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Informe del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Junio de 1921-Junio de 1922. Quito: Talleres Tipográficos Nacionales, 1922.

588 Informe que presenta a la Nación, el Sr. Dr. Pedro Pablo Egüez Baquerizo, Ministro de Previsión Social y Trabajo. 1925-1928. Quito: Imprenta Nacional, 1928.

Informe del Ministro de Agricultura, Previsión Social, etc... a la Nación, 1929-1930. Quito: Talleres Tipográficos Nacionales, 1930.

Informe del Ministro de Guerra, Marina, Aviación, Oriente y Archipiélago de Colón. Quito: Imprenta Nacional, 1931.

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Informe del Ministro de Guerra, Marina, Aviación, Archipiélago de Colón y Oriente A La Nación, Julio de 1934. Quito: Talleres Tipográficos Nacionales, 1934.

Informe del Ministro de Guerra, Marina, Aviación, Archipiélago de Colón y Oriente, A La Nación, Julio de 1935. Quito: Talleres Tipográficos Nacionales, 1935.

Informe a la Nación del Ministro de Defensa Nacional Sr. N. Galo Plaza. Quito: Talleres Gráficos del Colegio Militar, 1939.

Informe a la Nación del Ministro de Defensa Nacional Sr. Dn. Galo Plaza. Quito: Talleres Gráficos del Colegio Militar, 1940.

Informe que el Ministro de Defensa nacional, Oriente y Deportes, presenta a la Nación, 1941. Quito: Talleres Gráficos del Colegio Militar, 1941.

Informe que presenta a la Nación el Ministro de Defensa Nacional, Oriente, Archipiélago de Colón y Deportes, acerca de las labores desarrolladas en el año de 1941 a 1942. Quito: Talleres Gráficos del Colegio Militar, 1942.

Informe del Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, Oriente, Archipiélago de Colón y Deportes, al Honorable Congreso Nacional de 1943. Quito: Talleres Gráficos del Colegio Militar, 1943.

Informe a la Nación 1948. Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1948.

Informe a la Nación 1948-1949. Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1949.

Informe a la Nación, Segunda Parte, 1948-1949. Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1949.

589 Mensaje que el Excelentísimo Señor Doctor Don Camilo Ponce Enríquez, Presidente Constitucional de la República dirige al H. Congreso Nacional. Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1960.

Informe a la Nación 1960. Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1960.

Informe a la Nación 1961. Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1961.

Informe a la Nación 1961-62. Quito: Talleres Gráficos Nacionales, 1962.

Periodicals

Diario Oficial, Quito.

El Comercio, Quito.

El Oriente Dominicano, Quito.

Miscelánea, Quito.

Oriente, Tena.

Registro Oficial, Quito.

Selva, Quito