Ecuador (redirected from Ecuadorean)

Ecuador (ĕk`wədôr) [Span., = equator], officially Republic of Ecuador, republic (2005 est. pop. 13,364,000), 109,483 sq mi (283,561 sq km), W South America. Ecuador is bounded on the north by Colombia, on the south and east by Peru, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. The capital is Quito; the largest city and chief port is Guayaquil.

Land and People

The Andes, dominating the country, cut across Ecuador in two ranges and reach their greatest altitude in the snowcapped volcanic peaks of Chimborazo (20,577 ft/6,272 m) and Cotopaxi (19,347 ft/5,897 m). Within the mountains are high, often fertile valleys, where grains are cultivated, and the major urban centers, such as Quito, Cuenca, and Riobamba, are located. Earthquakes are frequent and often disastrous; in 1949 the city of Ambato was leveled. East of the Andes is a region of tropical jungle, through which run the tributaries of the Amazon River. The Pacific coast region, with hot, humid valleys north of the Gulf of Guayaquil, is the source of Ecuador's chief exports including oil and coffee. Large deposits of oil are also located in the northeast.

Most of the population live in the highlands. Over half of the people are mestizo, and a quarter are indigenous. Spanish is the official language, but many natives speak Quechua or Jarvo. European-descended residents, who account for about 10% of the population, are mostly landholders and play a dominant role in Equador's unstable political life. Some 10% of the country's inhabitants are of African descent. Roman Catholicism is the main religion, although there is no established church. Ecuador has ten universities.

Economy

More than one third of the workforce engages in agriculture, which accounts for almost 20% of the gross national product. Potatoes, manioc, corn, barley, rice, and wheat are grown for subsistence; coffee, bananas, and cacao are the main cash crops. Petroleum is the country's largest industry; others include food processing, metal works, and the manufacture of textiles, wood products, chemicals, and plastics.

Oil is Ecuador's leading export, followed by coffee, bananas, cocoa, shrimp, and fish products; other exports include forest products (notably balsawood), sugar, rice, and copper. The United States plus Latin American and European Union countries are its chief trading partners; Guayaquil and Esmeraldas are the chief ports. During the 1980s and 90s, Ecuador's leaders imposed austerity budgets on the government in an attempt to stimulate economic growth.

Government

Ecuador is a multiparty republic, governed under the constitution of 1979, its 18th. The executive branch is headed by the president, who serves a four-year term and may not be immediately reelected. The legislature or congress is made up of the unicameral Chamber of Representatives. The dominant political groups are the Social Christian party (PSC), the Conservative party (PC), the Roldosista party (PRE), and the Popular Democracy party (DP). The country is divided into 21 provinces.

History

Through the Nineteenth Century

Prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, Ecuador was controlled by the Inca empire. Francisco Pizarro's subordinate, Benalcázar, entered the area in 1533. Not finding the wealth of the mythical El Dorado, he and other conquistadors, notably Gonzalo Pizarro and Orellana, moved restlessly on and the region became a colonial backwater. Given an audiencia in 1563 and established politically as the presidency of Quito, it was at various times subject to Peru and to New Granada. After an abortive independence movement in 1809, the region remained under Spanish control. It was liberated by Antonio José de Sucre in the battle of Pichincha (1822) and was joined by Simón Bolívar to Greater Colombia.

With the dissolution of that union in 1830, Ecuador, geographically isolated, became a separate state (four times its present size) under a constitution promulgated by its first president, Juan José Flores. Ecuador unsuccessfully attempted to annex Popayán prov. from Colombia by war in 1832 and occupied the Galápagos Islands that year. Boundary disputes led to frequent invasions by Peruvians in the 19th and 20th cent. The entire eastern frontier, known as Oriente, was in dispute. (In 1942, Ecuador signed a treaty ceding a large area to Peru, but in 1960 it renounced the treaty.)

Bitter internecine struggles between Conservatives and Liberals marked the political history of Ecuador in the 19th cent. The Conservatives, led by Flores and García Moreno (1821–75), supported entrenched privileges and the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church; the Liberals, led by Rocafuerte (1783–1847) and Alfaro (1867–1912) and championed by the writer Montalvo (1832–89), sought social reforms.

The Twentieth Century

There have been a bewildering number of changes in government during the 20th cent. In 1925 the army replaced the coastal banking interests, dominant since 1916, as the ultimate source of power. Military juntas supported various rival factions, and between 1931 and 1940, 12 presidents were in office. José María Velasco Ibarra became president (for the second time) by a coup in 1944. He was ousted in 1947, and the next year Galo Plaza Lasso was chosen in free elections. During Plaza's regime there was unprecedented political reform. Velasco Ibarra was elected again in 1952 and sponsored improvements in roads and schools.

The first Conservative to rule in 60 years, Camilo Ponce Enríquez, followed (1956–60), but Velasco Ibarra was elected again in 1960. He was forced to resign the following year. His legal successor, Julio Arosemena Monroy, was deposed by a junta in 1963. Agitation for a return to civilian government led the military to remove the junta in 1966. A constitutional assembly installed Otto Arosemena Gómez as provisional president and drafted the country's 17th constitution. Velasco Ibarra was elected for the fifth time in 1968. Two years later, faced with economic problems and protests by leftist students, he assumed absolute power. Velasco promised to hold elections in June, 1972. However, the military deposed him in Feb., 1972, and canceled the elections.

Relations with the United States deteriorated in the early 1970s after Ecuador claimed that its territorial waters extended 200 mi (322 km) out to sea. Several U.S. fishing boats were seized by Ecuadorians, and U.S. aid to the country was suspended. In the same period Ecuador became Latin America's second largest oil producer. After Velasco's ouster, the military governed Ecuador until 1979, when a new constitution came into force and Jaime Roldós Aguilera was elected president. Following his death in 1981, he was succeeded by Osvaldo Hurtado Larrea. Hurtado faced many economic and political problems, including inflation, a large international debt, and a troubled oil industry, but his austerity programs failed to revive the economy.

Contemporary Ecuador

León Febres Cordero Rivadeneira, who replaced Hurtado in 1984, was kidnapped in 1987 by a guerrilla group but was released in exchange for a former coup leader. Rodrigo Borja Cevallos was elected president in 1988, and in 1992 he was replaced by Sixto Durán Ballén. In 1990 the indigenous peoples organized a series of boycotts and demonstrations, known as "the Uprising," and in 1992 they were given title to a large area of rain forest in the eastern part of the country. That same year Ballén privatized many state-owned enterprises. In 1994 Ecuador reached agreement with creditor banks on a landmark foreign-debt rescheduling plan. Ecuador again clashed with Peru in a border war in 1995; in 1998 the countries signed an agreement finalizing their borders and giving Ecuador access to the Amazon River.

Despite some achievements, Ballén's government was compromised by several developments, including a severe energy crisis and criminal corruption charges against the vice president. New presidential elections, held in mid-1996, resulted in a victory for Abdalá Bucaram, an often flamboyant populist. After only six months in office, he was dismissed for mental incapacity by the congress, which chose its leader, Fábian Alarcón, as interim president, but Vice President Rosalía Arteaga declared herself Bucaram's legitimate successor. An agreement was reached granting Arteaga the position, but she abruptly resigned and Alarcón succeeded her as interim president for 18 months.

Jamil Mahuad Witt, the mayor of Quito, was elected in a presidential runoff in 1998, as the country went into an economic crisis stemming from a drop in oil prices, high inflation, and nearly $3 billion in damages from El Niño. The sucre, the national currency, plunged in 1999, bringing strikes and more economic turmoil, and Mahuad declared a series of states of emergency. In Jan., 2000, dissident military officers and thousands of Ecuadorans of indigenous descent attempted to oust Mahuad and establish a junta, Armed forces chief of staff Gen. Carlos Mendoza intervened and engineered the accession of Vice President Gustavo Noboa Bejarano to the presidency. In Mar., 2000, the congress approved legislation that made the U.S. dollar the national currency beginning in 2001, a move intended to stabilize the economy; it originally had been proposed by Mahuad.

In 2002 the presidential election campaign ended with a runoff victory by Lucio Gutiérrez Borbúa of the leftist January 21st Partriotic Society party. Gutiérrez, a former army colonel, was a leader of the dissident military forces that sparked Mahuad's removal from the presidency in 2000. The government, which had been elected on a promise of increasing social spending, adopted austerity measures to win a new loan from the International Monetary Fund. The move alienated many who had backed Gutiérrez, and made his government dependent on uncertain coalitions in the congress.

A bid to impeach the president (Nov., 2004) failed, and he subsequently won enactment of a reorganization of the supreme court, which he accused of favoring the opposition. That move, however, sparked protests and demonstrations (and counterdemonstrations) and led to a political crisis in early 2005. In April increasing street protests and the president's endorsement of the use of force to quell them led the congress to remove the president. Vice President Alfredo Palacio was sworn in as his successor, and Gutiérrez, who denounced his removal as unconstitutional, went into exile.

In Aug., 2005, protesters in NE Ecuador sparked a national crisis by disrupting the nation's oil industry. They called for more of the revenues to be invested in the Amazonian regions that produce the oil, and won concessions from the government and oil companies. Gutiérrez returned to Ecuador in Oct., 2005, in a bid to retake office, but he was arrested; he was released only in Mar., 2006, after the charges of endangering national security were dismissed.

Palacio, who lacked allies in congress and headed a government suffering from scandal and defections, also was frustrated with his inability to push political reforms through Ecuador's congress. In Oct., 2005, he proposed asking voters to approve holding a constitutional assembly instead, but abandoned the idea (Dec., 2005) after it was rejected by the nation's electoral tribunal. Meanwhile, in November, a new supreme court was finally sworn in. In Feb.–Mar., 2006, the country experienced a new series of demonstrations, by various groups calling for local investment of oil revenues, full-time jobs for oil contract workers, and an end to negotiations on a free-trade pact with the United States. The protests, which disrupted the economy and were sometimes violent, led the government to declare a state of emergency several times during the two months. In the first round of the presidential election in Oct., 2006, no candidate won a majority, forcing a runoff in November. Álvaro Noboa, the country's wealthiest person and a conservative, placed first with 27% of the vote; the runner-up, Rafael Correa, a leftist economist, secured 23%. In the runoff, however, Correa won 57% of the vote.

Correa sought a referendum to establish a national assembly for constitutional reform, which the congress approved in Feb., 2007. The question of the powers of the assembly set off a power struggle between the president (supported by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal), who favored unlimited powers, and the congress, which had approved the assembly with limited powers. A narrow congressional majority voted to remove the tribunal judges aligned with the president, and those judges then voted to remove 57 members of the congress; both moves were of uncertain constitutionality. Correa, buoyed by his popularity and supported by sometimes violent demonstrators, managed to retain the upper hand; the congress lacked a quorum until March, when sufficient substitute members were appointed. In April, the country's constitutional court upheld the congressional dismissals and voters approved electing a national assembly to rewrite the constitution.

Bibliography

See C. R. Gibson, Foreign Trade in the Economic Development of Small Nations: The Case of Ecuador (1971); L. Linke, Ecuador: Country of Contrasts (repr. 1976); N. E. Whitten, Jr., ed., Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador (1981); O. Hurtado, Political Power in Ecuador (1985); J. D. Martz, Politics and Petroleum in Ecuador (1987); F. M. Spindler, Nineteenth Century Ecuador: A Historical Introduction (1987); D. Corkill, ed., Ecuador (1989).

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Ecuador

 officially Republic of Ecuador

Country, northwestern South America. Area: 105,037 sq mi (272,045 sq km), including the Galápagos Islands. Population (2006 est.): 13,419,000. Capital: Quito. About two-fifths of the population are Indian (mostly Quechua), and two-fifths are mestizos; most of the rest are of Spanish ancestry. Language: Spanish (official). Religion: Christianity (predominantly Roman Catholic; also Protestant). Currency: U.S. dollar. Pacific coastal lowlands rise to the peaks and highlands of the Andes Mountains, which give way to the Ecuadoran portion of the tropical Amazon River basin in the east. The Andes rise dramatically in two chains that run north to south and are separated by high valleys. The highest peak is Chimborazo, which rises to an elevation of 20,702 ft (6,310 m); nearby Cotopaxi, 19,347 ft (5,897 m) high, is the world's highest active volcano. The country lies in an active earthquake zone and is prone to violent seismic activity. Almost two-fifths of the land is forested, with tropical rainforests in the east. Ecuador straddles the Equator. Its climate varies from tropical in the lowlands to temperate in the highlands. It has a developing economy based primarily on mining, manufacturing, services, and agriculture. Principal exports include crude petroleum, bananas, and shellfish. It is a republic with one legislative house; its head of state and government is the president. What is now Ecuador was conquered by the Incas in the second half of the 15th century and came under Spanish control in 1534. Under the Spaniards it was a part of the Viceroyalty of Peru until 1740, when it became a part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. It gained its independence from Spain in 1822 as part of the republic of Gran Colombia and in 1830 became a sovereign state. A succession of authoritarian governments ruled into the mid-20th century, and the military played a prominent role in politics. Border disputes led to war with Peru in 1941; conflicts with that country continued periodically until there was a final demarcation of the border in 1998. The economy thrived during the 1970s because of large profits from petroleum exports but was depressed in the 1980s because of lower oil prices. In the 1990s social unrest caused political instability and several changes in the presidency. In a controversial move to help stabilize the economy, the government replaced the sucre with the U.S. dollar as the national currency in 2000.

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Ecuador

a republic in South America, on the Pacific: under the Incas when Spanish colonization began in 1532; gained independence in 1822; declared a republic in 1830. It consists chiefly of a coastal plain in the west, separated from the densely forested upper Amazon basin (Oriente) by ranges and plateaus of the Andes. Official language: Spanish; Quechua is also widely spoken. Religion: Roman Catholic majority. Currency: US dollar. Capital: Quito. Pop.: 13 193 000 (2004 est.). Area: 283 560 sq. km (109 483 sq. miles)