Ethnicity, Gender, and Oil: Comparative Dynamics in the Ecuadorian Amazon
by Ivette Vallejo, Cristina Cielo, and Fernando García
During the past decade, Ecuador’s Alianza PAÍS socialist government, primarily under the leadership of Rafael Correa, was committed to moving toward a post-neoliberal economy and implementing a “New Amazon” free of poverty, with expanded infrastructure and services, as part of the redistribution of oil revenues. However, in sites of state development projects, gender hierarchies and territorial dispossession in fact became more acute. Analysis of two place-based indigenous political ecologies—one in the central Amazon, where the state licensed new oil blocks in Sapara territory to a Chinese company in 2016, and the other in the Kichwa community of Playas de Cuyabeno in the northern Amazon, where the state company PetroAmazonas has operated since the 1970s—shows how women have reconfigured their ethnic and gender identities in relation to oil companies and the state in the context of rising and falling oil prices and in doing so reinforced or challenged male leaders’ positions in the internal structures of their communities and organizations.
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