From Agrarian Reform to Ethnodevelopment in the Highlands of Ecuador

Through an examination of interventions in the agrarian structures and rural society of the Ecuadorian Andes over the past 40 years, this article explores the gradual imposition of a particular line of action that separates rural development from the unresolved question of the concentration of land ownership and wealth among the very few. This imposition has been the consequence, it is argued, of the new development paradigms implemented in Andean peasant communities since the end of land reform in the 1970s. The new paradigms emphasize identity and organizational aspects of indigenous populations at the expense of anything connected with the class-based campesinista agenda, which was still operational in the indigenous movement in the early 1990s. The essay concludes with some thoughts on the remarkable parallels between the 1990s neoliberal and counter-reformist models of action, and the pre-reformist indigenist policies of the period that ended in the 1960s.