A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

possible future of indigenous cultures. As Armando Muyolema, in a personal
communication, put it: “interculturalism feeds a utopian fantasy:
the possibility of lateral coexistence between all those who live in a ‘multination’
territory. This would entail devising a totally different political order,
a different system of representation, involving a more profoundly inclusive
concept of utopia than the old concept of multi-na tionalism. It is, as Galo
Ramón has said, “a new way of thinking, one that has been trapped inside
old concepts: in sum, political self-determination seen within a State order
that itself needs to be newly conceived.”
However, while this was going on within the Ecuadorian indigenous organizations
from the mid-1980s up to the first half of the1990s, the German
development cooperation organization GTZ financed and supported
the Intercultural Bilingual Education project for Latin America and spread
the concept to other countries in the region. It was quickly adopted by
various organizations and countries, with different levels of serious reflection
and in-depth studies of the implications of this intercultural proposal.
In the 1990s the word began to be used widely and this was linked,
among other things, to the commemorative events of the 500 years of
Indigenous Resistance in 1992 and to the United Nations Declaration on
the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples in 1993.
The ‘ethnic’ experts and the interculturality of the 1990s
International assistance gave large sums of money during the 1990s for
development projects for indigenous populations. In Ecuador, the World
Bank’s showcase project, which was implemented between 1998 and
2004, was PRODEPINE (Project for the Development of the Indigenous
and Afro-Ecuadorian people of Ecuador). Claiming to respond to the specific
cultural needs of the indigenous peoples, it was sold as a development
project ‘with an indigenous face’. Victor Bretón (Bretón, 2001,
1005, 2005b, 2006, 2007) made an in-depth analysis of how the most
visible results of this project did little or nothing to remedy the structural
poverty suffered by the indigenous population of the country. On the
contrary, they showed that the political approaches of the strong indige-
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