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...

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…