The national mobilization of october 2019 in Ecuador. An approach from the ethnographic analysis

Abstract

Ecuador lived eleven days of social protest in October 2019 after the elimination of the fuel subsidy. In this sense, this article performs a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the historical-colonial and structural roots of racism in the Ecuadorian State and the way in which this situation is going through and emerging from the national mobilization of October 2019. From there the symbolic and structural elements that interacted in the indigenous uprising that took place between October 3 and 13 can be observed. For this, an ethnographic reconstruction was carried out, day after day during the national strike, in the place of concentration of the protests. In the context, the relationship between the repression of social protest and the quality of democracy in current states is visible, which has been observed through ethnography. The review of the historical data on the conformation of the Ecuadorian State, allows to understand the origin of the exclusions and inequalities of the indigenous sectors; going through an invisibility both at the normative level and in the census statistics, as structural causes that motivated this uprising, beyond the conjuncture of a certain economic policy.