Indigenous Political Voice and the Struggle for Recognition in Ecuador and Bolivia

Over the last three decades, indigenous movements in Ecuador and Bolivia have grown increasingly powerful and made great gains in political voice. Different structures of opportunity in each country, however, made Ecuadorian indigenous movements more unified than Bolivian ones. This background paper briefly explores the common conditions that enabled indigenous people to challenge the terms of recognition in Ecuador and Bolivia as well as the contrasting contexts which have produced different patterns of indigenous political action. It suggests that indigenous organizations in Ecuador have been more central actors in the politics of development encounters while Bolivian movements remained more regionally fragmented and politically divided.