A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

nous movement had been resoundingly rebuffed. This became evident
in the first uprisings of this decade. 119
Confronted by the political strength of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement
and its great power to mobilize people, the World Bank, in partnership
with the State, had pledged to accept and support requests that
expressed their special cultural needs – always on the condition that
they do not “question the logic of the neoliberal model of capitalist accumulation
of the turn of the century” (Bretón, 2007:98). Profiting from
the impulse towards ‘development projects’, two basic objectives were
convincingly achieved: 1) to cushion the social cost of the neoliberal
model by giving capital to the indigenous organizations themselves; and
2) to divert the key discussions by the leadership and the grassroots on
themes such as the structural factors of indigenous poverty, towards
only one possible area of negotiation: the number and costs of the projects
to be implemented.
The logic of handing over money for development projects to the indigenous
peoples corrupted certain leaders, turning them away from a
process that had been offering a fruitful political alternative to capitalism
and the more traditional forms of politics. 120
Perhaps more serious in the long run was that the development projects
that claimed to have an ‘indigenous face’ hollowed out the real meaning
of the word cultura. This led to cultural expressions being reduced to
mere folklore, which easily became goods for the consumption of eco-
119 Two events, in particular, should be mentioned: in June 1990, when there was a
resolution of the land tenure problems that the Agrarian Reforms of 1963 and 1973
had left unresolved, and in 1994 in a response to the Law of Agrarian Reform
which, before the defeat of the Agrarian Reforms, claimed to promote an entrepreneurial
capitalist approach to agriculture
120 Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that when the World Bank proposed a
PRODEPINE II in 2004 to national indigenous organizations like CONAIE (Confederation
of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador), they categorically refused its implementation
and the programme came to an end
242