Indians and Leftists. in the Making of Ecuador's Modern Indigenous Movements. MARC BECKER: Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008

In: Estudios interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe: EIAL, Band 21, Heft 2, S. 186-188

Abstract

With this book, Marc Becker addresses a number of erroneous assumptions about Indigenous movements in Ecuador. He first takes issue with the belief that Indigenous people put an end to centuries of political passivity with what is often referred to as the first Indigenous levantamiento (uprising) in June 1990, when "indigenous peoples shocked the dominant blanco-mestizo(white) population of Ecuador with a powerful uprising that paralyzed the country for a week" (1). During this uprising they presented to Rodrigo Borja Cevallos, who was then the President from the center-left political party Izquierda Democrática, a list of sixteen demands for cultural, economic, and political rights, insisting that the government address long-standing and unresolved issues of land ownership, education, economic development, and the Indigenous relationship with state structures (1).