BY: Miguel Delgado C.
Land and water are key factors in peasant and communal production. And for decades, they have been a fierce dispute between large agribusinesses and rural families around the world.
According to a UN report, between 15 and 20 million hectares of agricultural land in developing countries have been the subject of transactions and negotiations with foreign investors since 2006. While multinational corporations seek to privatize and monopolize them, with the support of the World Bank, peasant families seek to maintain them as common goods. In many countries, corporations have negotiated long-term economic concessions to establish agricultural plantations and produce agrofuels, rubber and oils. In coastal areas, land and marine and water resources are sold, rented, transferred or taken from their legitimate owners, in favor of tourist investors to the detriment of coastal and fishing communities.
It is not surprising that in 2008, representatives of the II Zone of the Chamber of Agriculture (Guayaquil) called on the inhabitants of Santa Elena to propose the purchase of 120 thousand hectares of land to produce agrofuels, in exchange for a minimal value and the offer of paid work. In that same year, a group of Peruvian and Chilean investors proposed the support of local authorities to implement the massive planting of the pine nut, based on a pilot crop of 2,500 hectares and the commitment of Petroecuador to process it.
The communes of Santa Elena cover 90% of the province's territory, which according to the titles granted by the MAGAP represent more than 300 thousand hectares. This is a special condition of the province, which distinguishes it from others in the country; however, the privatization process has been advancing since the beginning of the neoliberal regimes, so that currently in the Santa Elena peninsula there are more than 150 thousand hectares in conflict (some of which are more than 20 years old), and which have now worsened because the resolution of conflicts over communal lands has passed from the Minister of Agriculture to civil judges, in conditions in which the judicial system does not guarantee the transparency of judicial processes, and on the contrary reactivated trials and encouraged new invasions of communal territories, with the complicity, conscious or not, of certain authorities and entities of the current Government. One of them is the order to vacate communal lands in the Montañita commune, where the commune has built a complex of communal cabins, the Provincial Council has built an acoustic shell for open-air events, and the Ministry of Tourism a surfing service point. The provincial authorities, headed by the Governor, are responsible for protecting and safeguarding the legitimate interests of the ancestral peoples of Santa Elena.
ANCESTRAL CHARACTER OF THE EARTH
The Santa Elena community members are ancestral peoples even though they abandoned their original dress and language; however, they developed a new identity, with a mixture of their original beliefs, customs, and above all, effective ownership of the land. Thus, to cite just one example, until 1912 there existed the so-called Ancient Indigenous Community of Chanduy, which owned 6 property titles purchased from the Spanish Crown from the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th century and which covered 90 thousand hectares, which extended from Chanduy to near Guayaquil, and in that case alone, it represents 25% of the total area of the current Province of Santa Elena.
The protection of ancestral land, in the example cited, immediately passed into the hands of the Democratic Workers' Society of Chanduy, established for this purpose, under conditions in which effective possession of the land was in the hands of the community members. With the Law of Communes created in 1937, the way was paved for the creation of communes in all populations exceeding 50 people. The community members accepted this as a mechanism to defend their ancestral property, and so, in the case of Chanduy, for example, the Democratic Workers' Society of Chanduy, as an authority recognized by the community members, is the one in charge of handing over the land and defining the boundaries between the communes, before requesting their formal registration before the competent authority.
Unfortunately, the ethnographic, archaeological and historical research promoted by the State and NGOs was concentrated in the mountains and the Ecuadorian Amazon. This reduced the understanding of their cultural identity by locals and foreigners, and weakened the defense of their heritage. Added to this was the abandonment to which they were subjected, in conditions of ecosystem degradation, deforestation and drought, which forced many to flee the lands of their ancestors. This unscrupulous attitude of the State corresponded to a geopolitical and economic interest, since large business interests in Guayaquil led the dispossession of the community members of their lands in the last 28 years, starting with the Government of Oswaldo Hurtado and the development of the hydraulic infrastructure for the transfer to the Santa Elena Peninsula by CEDEGE. At the same time, these dominant groups, falsifying history, created the belief that Guayaquil was the center of power of the Huancavilca culture and invented the legend of Guayas and Quil, in order to legitimize their hegemony over the true peoples heirs of the Huancavilca culture. Even the INEC wrongly recorded, according to the 2001 Census, that in Santa Elena the population is mestizo in more than 90% of cases. Because of the pejorative nature of defining themselves as “indigenous” for the community members, they identified themselves as “mestizos” because the survey did not offer any other possibility, such as “native”, “ancestral people”, “original”, or something similar, which did correspond to their self-definition achieved until then.
It should be noted that the process of provincialization of Santa Elena has an ethnic content, which continues to deepen and deserves attention from the competent bodies of the National Government for its creative development, and does not become a source of conflicts that may become more acute, given the lack of understanding of the reality of some actors in public institutions.
OTHER RESOURCES: Current problems with communal lands in Santa Elena.
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