Facts About Ecuador

Ecuador is a South American nation on the northwest Pacific coast of the continent. It is bordered by Colombia and Peru, and its territorial waters in the Pacific include the famous Galapagos islands. Historically the region has been defined by two major empires: the Inca and the Spanish.

The Inca empire was based in Cuzco, located the south of Ecuador in present-day Peru, and eventually by the fifteenth century the Inca would conquer much of present-day Ecuador, which was at the time inhabited by a confederation of smaller indigenous tribes, who fought annexation by the Inca. The native peoples were thus assimilated into the Inca empire, and adopted the language of the Inca, known as Quechua.

At the time of the Spanish conquest, the Inca presence in Ecuador was fairly recent, but it of course led to the introduction of the language of the colonists. As Hurtado describes it the language of the Incas, which had been adopted by the indigenous people of the Audiencia of Quito, was not prepared to compete with the Castilian language used by the conquerors, colonists, bureaucrats, and clergymen.

According to La Condamine, Quechua was lacking in words 'that would allow it to express abstract, universal ideas' such as 'time, duration, space, being, substance, matter, body, virtue, justice, liberty, gratitude, ingratitude,'…For this reason, the Indians found it difficult to master the language of their conquerors (Hurtado 4). "Audiencia" was the Spanish colonial term for a specific district, and Ecuador was governed from the city of Quito -- still today the nation's capital.

However the Spanish presence in Ecuador in the colonial period was never a majority: instead, the country retained its very large indigenous population, merely subjecting them to the Emperor of Spain instead of the Emperor of the Incas. As a result the population today in Ecuador is over seventy percent mestizo, or mixed indigenous and European heritage. Ecuador gained its independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, and adopted a republican form of government not unlike the North American model.

However Ecuador remained a model colonial society even after independence, insofar as the country essentially existed as a vast source of raw materials for industry and capitalist production elsewhere. Early on, an indigenous remedy made from the bark of the cascarilla tree was shown to be effective in the treatment of malaria -- the extract of this bark, still available today in the form of "tonic water" with quinine, would be a major agricultural export.

However, as Sawyer notes, by the twentieth century Ecuador would fall largely in to the Latin American pattern of cozying up to North American business and industrial interests: she notes that "throughout the 1990s neoliberal policies were the primary measures through which a succession of Ecuadorian regimes sought to shape the behavior and condition the movements of populations, capital, and resources." (Sawyer 14). This would, however, change in the new millennium.

As a response to this pattern of economic exploitation, and the gradual politicization of the indigenous population, in 2006 Ecuador elected a reform-minded leftist president, Rafael Correa. Consequently, Ecuador would follow a very different path after the 2008 economic crisis. Even as the country experienced "an increase in inflation, unemployement, underemployement, poverty, and inequality," the Correa administration shunned the austerity and pro-capitalist politicies of European and American governments, and "in response, the Ecuadorian government with its president Rafael Correa implemented safeguard measures, import restrictions, and fiscal and banking regulations.

The government also conducted educational reforms and prioritized human development within public spending, especially health and education through the Human Development Bond (BDH,.