Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2022
In June of 1990, the mountains of the Ecuadorian Sierra provided the setting for a spectacular display of protest. For an entire week, tens of thousands of Indian peasants stopped delivering farm produce to the towns and blocked the main highways, picketed on the roadsides and marched en masse in regional capitals. In some places, demonstrators seized the offices of government agencies, and in others, localized skirmishes reportedly broke out where landowners and Indian communities had been embroiled in unresolved land disputes.
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Eighth World Congress on Rural Sociology held at the Pennsylvania State University in August 1992. Many of the ideas developed here originated in stimulating discussions with Jorge León in a scholarly exchange sponsored by the Education Abroad Program of the University of California. I would also like to thank Juan Diez, Paul Drake, Nelle Fuller, Harvey Goldman, Andrés Guerrero, Martha Lampland, Margaret Ovenden, Gershon Shafir, Carlos Waisman, and the four anonymous LARR referees for their comments. My work on Ecuador has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Senate Committee on Research of the University of California, San Diego.