Slave ships first arrived in Ecuadorian ports in 1526, and slaves worked on plantations and in gold mines. Although slavery was abolished at 1851, the descendants of enslaved Africans continued to suffer the consequences of that socio-economic system. One of the first Afro-Ecuadorian organizations, Asociación de Negros Ecuatorianos (ASONE) was founded in 1988 to reassert Afro-Ecuadorian dignity and to reverse the ecological destruction caused by lumber companies and shrimp farms of mangrove swamps vital to the coastal region. Afro-Ecuadorian consciousness became heightened in 1992 in response to the 500th anniversary of European arrival in the Americas, in which people of African descent were excluded from the narrative.
In 1998, leveraging international support and their connections with pan-Afro-Latin American networks, Afro-Ecuadorian organizations were successful in pressuring the Ecuadorian government to recognize them as a distinct ethnic group in the new constitution. Article 85 of the former Constitution of 1998 gave Afro-Ecuadorians rights to cultural patrimony and collective territory. Furthermore, in 1998 President Fabián Alarcón created the Afro-Ecuadorian Development Corporation (Corporación de Desarrollo Afroecuatoriano, CODAE), which became an official institution in 2002, dedicated to addressing issues facing the Afro-Ecuadorian population. However, critics have expressed that CODAE has gone through periods of crisis and instability, which are manifested by the various legal norms that have regulated its operation and by some disagreements of Afro-Ecuadorian organizations regarding the management of the entity, among other issues.
Starting in the late 1990s, there have been some significant changes in the situation of Afro-Ecuadorians. In 2000, the government implemented the Measurement Survey of Child and Household Indicators (Encuesta de Medición de Indicadores de la Niñez y los Hogares EMEDINHO), which for the first time included a question about self-identification based on the individual’s socio-racial condition. In the same way, in the 2000National Agricultural Census (III Censo Nacional Agropecuario) and the VI Population and V Housing Census of 2001 (VI Censo de Población y V de Vivienda) two questions were incorporated to identify ethnic groups in Ecuador, referring to language use and ethnic self-identification.
October 2nd has been declared Afro-Ecuadorian Day. Nevertheless, many policy reforms have been largely symbolic. Although the 1998 Constitution guaranteed collective rights for indigenous peoples, article 85 related to Afro-Ecuadorians was less precise, only extending to Afro-descendants the guarantees conferred upon indigenous people. Consequently, Afro-Ecuadorian NGOs worked closely with Afro-Ecuadorian Congressman Rafael Erazo to draft a law in 2006 further elaborating collective rights for Afro-Ecuadorians, which was finally approved by the Ecuadorian Congress. The law also established the National Council for Afro-Ecuadorian Development (Consejo Nacional de Desarrollo Afroecuatoriano, CONDAE) in order to create policies and strategies that are aimed at improving the lives of Afro-descendants in Ecuador.
In September 2008, Ecuador approved a new Constitution that highlights its identity as ‘multinational’ (Article 1) and further defines Ecuador as a ‘pluricultural, and multiethnic nation’, (Article 380). The 2008 Constitution recognizes that the collective rights established in their own charter, law, treaties, agreements, declarations and other international human rights instruments are recognized for the Afro-Ecuadorian people (Article 58). The political constitution of Ecuador also establishes that Afro-Ecuadorian people are part of the single and indivisible Ecuadorian State and that they can establish territorial districts for the preservation of their culture. Despite these measures, significant changes in the situation experienced by Afro-Ecuadorian communities have not occurred.
Source link : https://minorityrights.org/communities/afro-ecuadorians/
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Publish date : 2024-01-23 14:11:08
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