El caso de la Federación de Comunidades Negras del Alto San Lorenzo

In 1994, under the Agrarian Development Law, the Ecuadorian State granted 127,279.28 ha of land for collective use to 37 Afro-Ecuadorian peasant communities in the North of Esmeraldas. Twenty years later, these lands are under heavy pressure for the penetration of capital for extractive and agroindustrial purposes. This article examines the situation of pressure on these territories and shows a substantial loss of them by the communities. This has had serious consequences Which undermine culture, food security and the balance between sustainable production practices and the conservation of nature. In a paradoxical way, the violation of the right to the territory occurs in a context in which Ecuador changes its state model, going from monocultural to multi-ethnic, with the Constitution of 2008, already plurinational and intercultural, with the Constitution of 2008. These Normative frameworks consecrate Afro-descendants as a people and as holders of twenty-one collective rights. The research was carried out in the north of the province of Esmeraldas, in the cantons of San Lorenzo and Eloy Alfaro. Specifically, in the territorial communes associated with the Federation of Black Communes of the Upper San Lorenzo (Fecona), which is part of the Afro-Ecuadorian Comarca of the North of Esmeraldas (Cane). This region is a network of ethnic-territorial organizations that defend the rights to the ancestral Afro-descendant territory in Ecuador. In the north of Esmeraldas, precisely, an important experience of defending the right to the ancestral Afro-descendant territory of Ecuador is developed. Thanks to the struggles of Afro-Ecuadorian peasant organizations, the State has implemented a series of rights for the preservation and strengthening of its identity, traditions and forms of social organization. This recognition enables the exercise of the principle of self-determination of Afro-Ecuadorian peoples. In spite of these advances, the reality of poverty, violence, state abandonment and lack of guarantees of the right to the territory generates a pessimistic scenario so that the rights of the towns and nationalities materialize, and so that progress can be made toward the construction of the model of Plurinational and intercultural state and Afro-descendant good living.