Ecuador Peasants
A man in Esmeraldas Province
Courtesy Inter-American Foundation (Juan García)
Unavailable
A hostel for migrant workers in Guayaquil
Courtesy Inter-American Foundation (Miguel Sayago)
Until the early 1950s, peasant families formed the vast
majority of the populace. Historically, these families were
isolated from national society, a pattern reinforced by the nature
of traditional rural social life. Social arrangements aimed at
self-defense limited the intrusions of outsiders. The individual
"nested" within the protective layers of family, kin, neighborhood,
and village.
Peasant links to city, region, and nation were mediated through
powerful outsiders, such as foremen, landowners, merchants,
priests, or law enforcement officials. Such relations were
typically exploitative to the peasant, but they were also
multistranded--however uneven the exchange, the two parties were
linked by more than just the naked self-interest of the powerful.
At the center of the peasant family's life and livelihood stood
access to land. Landholding not only assured the family
subsistence, but also defined its status within the community.
Adult participation in village social life demanded land;
nonholders remained peripheral to the most significant aspects of
the community's social life, such as participation in justice.
Elite control over most land, however, left those at the bottom
of the social pyramid with limited options and created the classic
latifundio-minifundio (small landholding) complex. Large
landholders monopolized the most desirable holdings and left
marginal lands to peasants. Sierra haciendas extended from valley
floor to mountain crest. The fertile valley bottoms were assigned
to hacienda production whereas the steeper lands went to peons.
Costa plantation owners reached the same end by controlling
riverine land with ready access to markets.
Historically, the traditional Sierra hacienda engaged in mixed
livestock and crop production and relied on a "captive" labor
force. On the eve of land reform in the 1960s, about two-thirds of
all farmers owned some land, but still remained dependent to
varying degrees on haciendas. Haciendas regulated access to land
mainly through the huasipungo system. The
huasipunguero or concierto peon was a resident
laborer who received a plot of land in return for labor on the
hacienda and domestic service in the landlord's household. Although
precise terms of tenure varied from valley to valley and from time
to time, they were typically disadvantageous to the peon. The
huasipunguero usually had to provide four days of work per
week to the hacienda as well as domestic service--an especially
onerous obligation that required both husband and wife to work full
time at hacienda maintenance for a specified period. Finally, peons
had to participate in collective work parties during planting and
harvesting.
A variety of subsidiary arrangements provided an auxiliary
supply of laborers. Peasants from neighboring free communities
often negotiated for the use of hacienda firewood, water, and
pastures. These peasants, known as yanaperos, typically
worked one or two days per month and helped out at planting and
harvest times. Other peasants worked hacienda lands through some
type of sharecropping arrangement. Some casual wage laborers or
skilled specialists were employed as production dictated, but these
constituted a very minor part of the hacienda's total labor force.
The classic huasipungo system continued in use in the
1960s in relatively remote but well-populated valleys. Near towns,
where other employment was available, smaller holdings and more
diverse tenure arrangements typically prevailed. Merchants and
other townsmen frequently owned small parcels of land, which
peasants worked through sharecropping agreements. Typically, the
sharecropper had lands of his own nearby; he provided labor, draft
animals, tools, seed, and fertilizer. The landowner and
sharecropper split the harvest.
Landowners who wished to exploit the growing urban market
(especially for dairy products) found it more profitable to
consolidate their holdings and sell the less desirable plots to
their peons. This process of transferring marginal hacienda land to
peasants was most evident in Pichincha, Imbabura, and Carchi
provinces. Elsewhere (in Chimborazo and Cayambe, for example)
landlords simply evicted peons and refused to compensate them,
treatment that fueled peasant unionization drives.
Sharecropping and wage labor arrangements historically
prevailed on the export-oriented Costa plantations. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a cacao boom occurred in
the Costa. Sharecroppers on cacao plantations cultivated the crop
in exchange for advances on the harvest. Plantation owners
controlled most marketing channels; their economic clout came not
merely from landholding, but because rental agreements typically
obliged the sharecropper to sell at terms set by the landlord.
Landlords' effective control over sharecroppers declined
following the 1922 blight of the cocoa crop. Sharecroppers either
purchased their plots, simply assumed control of them, changed the
terms of their rental agreements, or they moved onto unoccupied
land. As cocoa prices rose in the 1950s, however, landowners
attempted to reinstate their control. Tenants responded with
efforts to unionize and, by the early 1960s, with land invasions
and rent strikes. Workers on banana plantations, which developed in
the 1950s employing wage labor, also tried to unionize.
Land reform legislation in the 1960s and the 1970s aimed at
eliminating minifundio plots under 4.8 hectares and
subjected absentee landholders to the threat of expropriation. The
threat prompted some landlords to sell off at least a portion of
their holdings; the main beneficiaries were peasants who could
muster sufficient resources to purchase land. Land reform also
eliminated the various demands for time that landlords had placed
on peasants. By 1979, however, when most expropriations were
completed, less than 20 percent of peasant families and 15 percent
of agricultural land had been affected by agrarian reform. The
legislation did little to change the structure of landholding,
which remained roughly as concentrated in the mid-1970s as it had
been in the mid-1950s (see
table 5, Appendix). Nearly 350,000 farms
contained less than five hectares--the minimum experts considered
necessary to support a family. Almost 150,000 plots were less than
one hectare.
The degree of land fragmentation in the Sierra added to the
problems of poorer farmers. Andeans had long preferred some
dispersion of their lands in order to take advantage of the
diversity in microclimates in the region and to limit the risks to
any given field. A family might have as many as twenty to thirty
small fields scattered around a village. In addition to the poor
farmers, there were more than 220,000 landless laborers whose
situation was even more tenuous.
For the mass of small producers, agrarian reform simply
increased the amount of time available to work on their own
holdings. Most had so little land, however, that their own farms
could hardly absorb the added labor. Some peasants, especially in
the northern Sierra around Otavalo, supplemented their farming with
profitable crafts production. Other families produced items such as
bricks and tiles for which there was a local market. In these
instances, then, additional time afforded a measure of prosperity.
A survey of Sierra families in the early 1980s found, however, that
fewer than 10 percent earned any of their income from traditional
rural crafts. Instead, families with sufficient resources might
purchase a small truck and market agricultural products.
The mass of small farmers were not so fortunate; those who did
not have any plots to work or whose plots were too small to provide
subsistence had to seek wage labor, since land reform regulations
had deprived them of the option of working on haciendas as peons or
sharecroppers. By the mid-1970s, wages, not agricultural products,
had become the largest portion of small farmers' income. As
nonagricultural employment expanded during the oil boom, peasant
laborers increasingly chose urban employment over agricultural
work. Fully one-third of all rural Sierra families surveyed in the
early 1980s had at least one member working away from the family
landholdings. Peasant laborers had enjoyed a measure of well-being
during the economic growth of the 1970s. Both the construction and
the service sectors expanded apace and cushioned land-poor
peasants. The economic downturn that occurred in the 1980s,
however, hit wage earners particularly hard and severely limited
employment opportunities.
In the late 1970s, analysts estimated that between 370,000 and
570,000 rural Ecuadorian families lived in poverty. The worst
levels of Sierra poverty were found in Chimborazo Province. Poverty
in the Sierra correlated with altitude: the higher the family's
holdings, the more limited its production options and the greater
its poverty. Access to modern transportation was a main determinant
of farm income in the Costa. The poorest coastal areas were found
in isolated settlements, fishing towns, and villages in Esmeraldas
Province.
The emergence of crafts as a major component in some peasant
families' livelihood created the potential for intergenerational
conflict. Children learned new production techniques in school that
sometimes increased their own earning power beyond that of their
parents. As some family members sought wage labor farther from
home, those remaining relied more heavily on nonfamily wage
laborers to assist with farming. Cooperative work exchanges
declined in favor of hired casual labor.
The increased pressure on land also sharpened disputes about
inheritance and divisions among siblings. Traditionally,
inheritance provided the main means of access to land. Individuals
began receiving parcels of land from their parents at marriage.
Without sufficient land, a couple could not fulfill the wider
obligations of sharing and reciprocity that were part of
communitywide fiestas. With less land available, moreover, parents
tended to favor the youngest son--the child who would stay at home
and care for them in their old age. Older siblings increasingly
fended for themselves or depended on the largess of the younger
sibling.
The need for wage labor in the Sierra reinforced traditional
patron-client ties. Former peons found themselves and their
children dependent on powerful and influential outsiders as they
had once been on landowners. Clientalistic bonds linked the
powerless with those who could help them in finding work, emergency
loans, and other forms of assistance
(see Family and Kin
, this
ch.).
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the government pinned
most of its hopes for a relief of rural poverty not on land
redistribution but on colonization of relatively underpopulated
regions, especially the Oriente. By the late 1970s, the Ecuadorian
Institute of Agrarian Reform and Settlement (Instituto Ecuatoriano
de Reforma Agraria y Colonización--IERAC) had awarded 2.5 times
more land in areas of new settlement than it had redistributed in
agricultural reform zones. Further, colonists normally received a
forty- to fifty-hectare parcel in contrast to the minifundio
typically awarded former sharecroppers or huasipungueros.
Land distribution in the Oriente was more equal than in either the
Costa or the Sierra. The average Oriente holding in the mid-1970s
was thirty hectares. Farms from 10 to 100 hectares--65 percent of
all holdings--accounted for 83 percent of the agricultural land.
Migrants to the Oriente were typically males between the ages
of twenty-five and forty with little land in their home
communities. They began homesteading with a small amount of savings
accumulated through agricultural wage labor. Migrants cleared as
much land as they could on their parcel and brought their families
to join them as soon as possible. As savings were exhausted,
migrants had frequent recourse to wage labor either for oil
companies or for more established settlers.
The Oriente's poorly developed transport and marketing
infrastructure severely constrained Sierra migrants
(see Transportation
, ch. 3). Settlements typically consisted of a series
of long, narrow parcels of land strung along both sides of a road.
Roadside land was at a premium; as it was claimed, subsequent
settlers repeated the same pattern of narrow rectangular holdings
behind those already established. In the more heavily settled
areas, homesteads stood four to six properties deep by the late
1970s. Colonists at farthest remove were six to ten kilometers from
an all-weather road--a significant impediment in marketing their
crops and increasing family income.
Data as of 1989
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