Seeing like the people: a history of territory and resistance in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon

Diana Vela-Almeida

doi:10.2458/v27i1.23286

Abstract

The Cordillera del Condor in the Ecuadorian Amazon has been analyzed frequently in the literature of extractivism in Latin America, due to the current mining pressure on this territory. Mining is, however, the most recent in a long history of territorial transformations in the region. The production of territory in the Cordillera del Condor is the result of a complex historical accumulation of events, motivated by the political economy of the country that has transformed the people and its land. By studying the main events of state deterritorialization, this article examines multiple socio-spatial relations that occurred in the Cordillera del Condor. This article identifies three main events of state deterritorialization: (1) colonization and evangelization, (2) the Ecuador-Peru war and (3) large-scale mining. The analysis illustrates how territory is constantly integrated into the economic and political rationality of the nation-state and discusses these transformations in line with the institutionalization of new forms of organization, legibility, commodification of nature and subjectification of people. In contrast, the study also illustrates how people inhabiting this space counteract state deterritorialization by deploying the same strategies as the state; reinforcing reterritorialization in their own terms. The article concludes by highlighting the agency of people to reshape state mechanisms in the struggle of defining a territory.Keywords: state deterritorialization, reterritorialization, political ecology, Cordillera del Condor, Ecuador

Highlights

The Cordillera del Condor in the Ecuadorian Amazon has been discussed in the literature on extractivism in Latin America because of the current prominence of large-scale mining projects
This article contributes to the emerging political ecology discussion of the "eco-territorial turn" (Svampa 2019), suggesting that extractivism in its current form needs to be contextualized within the longer history of political economy and the territorialization practices that have resulted in struggles for control of resources
I discuss territorial transformations in line with strategies for state deterritorialization, which are here understood as practices that render space subject to abstract forms of power of the state, a process famously described by James Scott (1998) as "seeing like a state." At the same time, these practices incite resistance, understood as reterritorialization (i.e. "seeing like the people"), a vis a vis response to political and economic changes enacted in the process of reclaiming control over land and resources (Haesbaert 2013)

Summary

Introduction

The Cordillera del Condor in the Ecuadorian Amazon has been discussed in the literature on extractivism in Latin America because of the current prominence of large-scale mining projects. Reterritorialization takes shape as a consolidation of contested notions of territory that allow people to control resources and exercise decisionmaking power to define socio-spatial organization (Elden 2010; Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith 1991; Lefebvre 1991; Little 2001, 2018; Sack 1986) As such, both deterritorialization and reterritorialization processes in the Cordillera del Condor have been shaped by global and national historical moments coming together and influenced by contesting economic, political and social apparatuses

The territorial history of the Cordillera del Condor

Conclusion