Bienvenidos al Ecuador

After sending travel missives in old-fashioned email, I finally decided to upgrade to a blog. Welcome to my first foray. I’m not sure what the larger purpose of Traveling Storywriter will be, but for now it will at least serve as a convenient way to share a few stories from my adventures in Ecuador and read your comments (yes, I’m prompting you!)

On this, my fifth trip to Ecuador in just over a year, I had a mission on behalf of Global Pediatric Alliance, the non-profit for which I work: travel to communities around the country and see what projects local people are cooking up to improve child and maternal health. In other words, I had come On Business. I had no illusions that I would simply send a few emails, leave a few voicemails, set up appointments and shazaam! everything would fall into place. After all, I’d inadvertently scheduled my arrival around Carnaval, the national holiday where people drink, dance, pelt each other with water balloons and spray each other with water guns or cans of pink foam for five days and then begin 40 days of lent. Even without Carnaval, I expected a few bumps. I did not expect a major paro.

The week after I landed in Quito I was due for a meeting in Tena, a town in Napo Province in the Amazon Basin. On Sunday, two days after I arrived, I discovered that the northern road to Tena through a small mountainous town called Baeza was closed due to a protest, or “paro”. Often, paros entail protesters with signs and chants and a smattering of burning tires. Sometimes if people are extremely frustrated, they use the backhoes that government repair crews leave along the side of the road, since roads in Napo are always in some state of construction, and dig massive holes or push boulders from previously cleared rock slides to block the way.

In my limited experience, paros usually last just a few days, enough to get the attention of the federal authorities who apparently don’t respond to other methods, especially from people from the Amazon. Most Ecuadorians from other parts of the country, public officials and private citizens alike, consider people who live in the Amazon to be inferior and primitive. I’ve seen this rampant racism almost everywhere people interact—on busses, in restaurants, on the evening news.

Since my meeting in Tena wasn’t until the following Saturday, I didn’t initially consider the paro to be a major obstacle in getting from Quito to Tena. By Tuesday I’d learned that Napo denizens were protesting the lack of federal financial support from oil drilling proceeds. According to my friend and colleague Natalia, who is from Tena but now lives in Quito, this dispute has been going on since oil drilling began in the Amazon basin in the 70s. There have been other flare ups, but in the past the protests had fallen along political party lines. Now people across all parties were united in demanding development money for oil extracted from their region.

On Wednesday, I’d gotten spotty reports from friends in Tena and bits on the news that things had gotten worse. A delegation from Tena had gone to Quito to meet with the President over the dispute, but he’d refused to see them. Next I heard that violence was breaking out in Baeza—protesters threw dynamite at police and police attacked, though I’m not sure in what order. In any case, things were deteriorating. The government declared martial law in Napo, and public officials including the mayor of Tena, who belongs to the same political party as the President, were arrested for inciting violence. Whether they did or not I’m not sure, but it seemed to me like at least a little bit of grandstanding from the feds.

People in Tena took to the streets, marching with machetes and torches. According to my friends there, in the melee the police killed 3 or 4 people and beat a 12-year-old boy in the head. People became more furious and threatened to arm themselves against the police (with more than machetes, I gathered) and to rupture the oil pipeline that runs through Napo to the coast. Some of my friends told me they’d been put on a list of people the national police would arrest for being affiliated, personally or professionally, with the mayor and other local officials.

By Thursday afternoon I nervous about my friends’ safety and worried this wouldn’t be just any old paro. I also figured there was no way I was getting to Tena for the weekend. Even my Quiteño friends, who expect these kinds of fires to die out rather than rampage, seemed concerned. This dispute looked more like what I’d seen and read about in Guatemala, where people almost never get justice through the political process and violence is the standard power tool for all sides.

But when I woke up Friday morning, the news reports said that everything had been resolved. Good morning Ecuador, you simply had a bad dream. The roads were open, the paro had been disbanded, martial law had been lifted, and the peaceful city of Tena was ready to receive thousands of revelers who usually descended on the city for Carnaval. Although I was surprised by this news, no one else seemed to be.

I hopped on a bus to Tena and passed through Baeza, where the remnants of melted tires were the only sign of what had happened the day before. When I reached Tena, everything appeared calm, though I everywhere I noticed signs people had printed with laser printers and posted in store and car windows: “Soy Primitivo” and “Somos Primitivos”—“I’m primitive” and “We are primitive.” I assumed the opposing side must have hurled that insult and people in Tena had decided to turn it back on them. Friday evening was quiet, but by Saturday the salsa music was pounding up and down the river where a good-sized crowd of partiers from other regions had put the news of the paro behind them. Though the fire had been doused, I suspect the embers are still glowing hot, and I assume I’ll learn more when I settle in Tena for a few weeks.