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Women have long been at the forefront of Indigenous struggles. Their historical protagonism, however, did not translate into political leadership. As Indigenous movements became institutionalized in the 1990s, most women were left behind. Today, ethno-politics are marked by acute gender inequality, with few women in power. Indigenous women's rights are fundamental tenets to the realization of individual and collective human rights, and as such they are inextricable from democratic practice. In Latin America, the political participation of Indigenous women is a key barometer of democracy. This case study takes an intersectional approach to explore the receding presence of women in Ecuador's Indigenous movement. Gender inequalities reveal the permanence of discriminatory practices within ethno-politics, yet they also signal the lasting influence of external forces.
Keywords: Ecuador, ethno-politics, gender, Indigenous women, inequality
Women have long been at the forefront of Indigenous struggles. In the eighteenth century, Mary Mom oho was leading the legal resistance against land dispossession of Eastern Pequots in New England while Bartolina Sisa terrified the colonial army holding Spanish officials under siege in La Paz, Bolivia. More recently, Zapatista women covered their faces with masks and took up arms to resist military forces in Chiapas, Mexico. In Ecuador, Dolores Cacuango and Tránsito Amaguaña founded the Federation of Indians and led massive historical revolts against exploitation. Such legacies should have contributed to women's solid participation in contemporary Indigenous movements. Yet their historical protagonism did not translate into political leadership. Instead, most Indigenous women were left behind as ethnic struggles became institutionalized.
Indigenous women's rights are a fundamental tenet of global human rights, and their political participation is a key barometer of the scope and quality of democracy. Since the 1970s, Indigenous peoples have articulated their rights within the international human rights regime (Morgan, 2011), and feminist movements have successfully framed "women rights as human rights" (Bunch, 1990). The 1993 Vienna Declaration of Human Rights established the indivisibility and interconnectedness of human rights: political rights are not only an end in itself but also a fundamental means to achieve economic, social, and cultural rights (Sen, 1999). Indigenous women's political rights are core to the larger realization of individual and collective human rights. They also constitute political signals. Processes of democratization that fail to secure Indigenous...