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- Ecuador is a representative democratic presidential republic and a developing country whose economy is highly dependent on exports of commodities, primarily petroleum and agricultural products. The country is a founding member of the United Nations, Organization of American States, Mercosur, PROSUR, and the Non-Aligned Movement.
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Ecuador, officially the Republic of Ecuador, is a country in northwestern South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and the Pacific Ocean on the west. Ecuador also includes the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific, about 1,000 kilometers (621 mi) west of the mainland.
- Overview
- Pre-Spanish era
- The colonial period in Ecuador
- Early national history of Ecuador, 1830–c. 1925
- Liberal-Conservative hostilities
- Rivalry between Flores and Rocafuerte (1830–45)
- Breakdown of national government (1845–60)
- The regime of García Moreno (1860–75)
- Shift to liberalism (1875–97)
- Problems of the early 20th century
history of Ecuador, a survey of important events and people in the history of Ecuador from the time of the Inca empire. Located in northwestern South America, Ecuador is one of the most environmentally diverse countries in the world, and it has contributed significantly to the environmental sciences. Notably, research in Ecuador by naturalists Alex...
The area presently known as Ecuador had a long history before the arrival of Europeans. Pottery figurines and containers have been discovered that date from 3000 to 2500 bce, ranking them among the earliest ceramics in the New World. Ecuadoran ceramic styles probably influenced cultures from Peru to Mexico. Early artistic traditions such as Valdivia, Machalilla, and Chorrera were of high quality, resulting in works of art that are on display in museums around the world.
By the 1400s Ecuador was divided into warring chiefdoms. Large populations were supported by sophisticated raised-field cultivation systems, and trade networks united the Costa (the Pacific coastal plain), the Sierra (the mountainous Andean area of central Ecuador), and the Oriente (the eastern region). Chiefs built large earthen mounds (tolas) that served as bases for their homes. However, Ecuador lacked cities and states until after the Inca conquest.
The conquest was begun by Topa Inca Yupanqui (ruled 1471–93) and extended by his successor, Huayna Capac (ruled 1493–1525), who lived much of his later life in Tomebamba. Although their cultural impact was otherwise spotty, the Inca spread the use of Quichua as a lingua franca and ordered large forced migrations where resistance to their conquest was especially strong. In Ecuador it is evident that Inca rule was resented by some and supported strongly by others. Huayna Capac left the Inca empire divided between his legitimate heir, Huascar, in Cuzco, and his son by an Ecuadoran Cara princess, Atahuallpa.
This led to a territorial dispute, and Atahuallpa won the ensuing civil war after a major battle near Riobamba in 1532; about the same time, a Spanish expedition led by Francisco Pizarro appeared off the coast. Atahuallpa was executed the next year as the Spanish conquest spread. In many parts of what is now Ecuador, Inca rule was less than 50 years old, and many of the pre-Inca chiefdoms still held the peoples’ allegiance. As a result, the Spanish under Pizarro’s lieutenant Sebastian de Benalcázar were welcomed as liberators by some when they invaded Ecuador from Peru in 1534, while stiff resistance was encountered from others, especially the local leader, Rumiñahui, who was captured by the Spanish and executed in Quito.
During much of the colonial period, what is now Ecuador was under the direct jurisdiction of the law court (audiencia) of Quito and ultimately under the rule of the Spanish crown. Spanish culture was spread primarily by religious orders and male Spanish colonists.
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In the Sierra, the Spaniards established a colony of large estates worked by Indigenous peons. Settlements included semiautonomous Indigenous villages and Spanish and mestizo administrative and religious centers such as Quito, Ambato, and Cuenca. The making of rough textiles in primitive sweatshops was the only industry. The development of Roman Catholic religious establishments provided for the flowering of Baroque architecture, sculpture in wood and stone, painting, music, and other arts and crafts.
In the tropical Costa, much of the population died as a result of introduced diseases, and the area remained unhealthy until the advent of modern medicine. As a result, the coast was somewhat neglected during the colonial period, although there was some shipbuilding and exporting of cacao (as cocoa beans) from the port of Guayaquil. The small coastal population of enslaved people, free Blacks, and mixed ethnicities, with plenty of vacant land and less coercion of labor, developed a culture very different from that of the Sierra.
In the Oriente, the region on the eastern slopes between the Andes and the headwaters of the Amazon, large populations of Shuar and other Indigenous people successfully repelled European invaders; however, Jesuits and other missionaries were able to spread both Christianity and the Quichua language. The Spaniards used Quichua as a language of evangelization—at one period missionaries were required to know the language—and continued to spread it orally by means of Quichua speakers who travelled with them in further conquests.
Ecuador’s early history as a country was a tormented one. For some eight years it formed, together with what are now the countries of Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela, the confederation of Gran Colombia. But on May 13, 1830, after a period of protracted regional rivalries, Ecuador seceded and became a separate independent republic.
An increasing rivalry and ideological differences between the Sierra and the Costa usually focused on the two leading cities: Quito, the capital, in the Sierra, and Guayaquil, the country’s principal port, in the Costa. Quito was the home of a landed aristocracy whose positions of power during this early period were based on large semifeudal estate...
Ambitious generals and politicians have played on this Quito-Guayaquil rivalry since the foundation of the republic in 1830. During the period 1830–45 two leaders from the wars of independence—Juan José Flores and Vicente Rocafuerte—struggled for power; Flores found much of his support in Quito, Rocafuerte in Guayaquil. Hostility was not constant, ...
The rivalry between Flores and Rocafuerte was a struggle between two strong leaders. Between 1845 and 1860, however, the country went through a period of chaos in which a series of squabbling, weak leaders (usually self-proclaimed liberals) fought for the presidency. This period reinforced the already close ties between the military and the nationa...
In the next period (1860–75) one of Latin America’s most extraordinary experiments in autocracy occurred, during the presidency of Gabriel García Moreno. As a young man, García Moreno had witnessed the chaos in Ecuador and the selfish struggles of the various cliques. He had also seen the European Revolutions of 1848 and had developed an abhorrence of liberalism and of uncontrolled violence. A careful analysis of Ecuadoran society led him to conclude that the young country lacked unifying factors: it had no great tradition, suffered from regional resentments, and was sharply divided by class and between Europeans and Indigenous people who did not even share a common language. García Moreno concluded that the only social cement was religion—the general adherence of the population to Roman Catholicism. He thought that in time nationalism could be created and more social cohesion would emerge as a result but that meanwhile Ecuador needed a period of peace and strong government. When he became president, therefore, he based his regime on two factors: strong authoritarian personal rule and the Roman Catholic Church. He established the Conservative Party (Partido Conservador; PC), which promoted a powerful central government and a strong connection between church and state. All education and welfare, along with the direction of much government policy, were turned over to clerics. Other religions were harshly discouraged. All opposition was ruthlessly suppressed, and some leading liberals spent many years in exile.
Although many aspects of García Moreno’s regime were reactive, it did mark the first period of genuine progress for Ecuador. Roads, schools, and hospitals were built. A start was made on a Quito-Guayaquil railroad, to tie together the Sierra and the Costa. García Moreno encouraged the planting of eucalyptus trees from Australia to combat erosion in the Sierra, where the original ground cover had been cut down for fuel by the impoverished Indigenous people. Other agricultural reforms slowly raised production. By the end of his regime a strong feeling of nationalism had been created among the urban classes.
García Moreno’s death, as he himself might have forecast, brought a period of near anarchy. Conservatives and liberals struggled for power. But Ecuador had become part of the world market; the importance of the coast slowly increased, and the liberals of that area increasingly dominated the economy.
A new liberal hero emerged from the lower classes as the leader of the coastal reaction to Sierra conservatism and clericalism. A man of great personal magnetism, Gen. Eloy Alfaro led a march against the Sierra in 1895 and after a year became constitutional president, serving two terms (1897–1901 and 1906–11). Much of the administrative structure of the García Moreno era was dismantled. The anticlerical liberals, proclaiming themselves the Radical Liberal Party (Partido Liberal Radical; PLR), gradually removed the church from state education: they instituted civil marriage and burial, proclaimed freedom of religion, permitted divorce, and eased controls on the press. The church’s tithe was abolished, and many of its large estates were confiscated by the state, some estates passing into the hands of liberal leaders.
In many ways, however, in spite of political manifestos to the contrary, the liberals of this era shared the basic ideas of the previous period. They advanced García Moreno’s road- and railroad-building programs; the Quito-Guayaquil railroad was completed in 1908, during Alfaro’s second term. Moreover, central government did not lose its authoritarian caste; Alfaro, the liberal caudillo (dictator), was as arbitrary and ruthless as his conservative predecessor. In the Sierra and on the coast, power remained unchanged. The problem of the great haciendas was not touched, and the change to liberalism meant little to the impoverished Indigenous people and peasants.
Alfaro’s overthrow, like that of García Moreno, was brought about by his stubborn attempts to perpetuate himself in office. A coalition of conservatives and dissident liberals forced him and his clique from the presidency in August 1911, but, when the next president died in office shortly thereafter, the aging and increasingly unpopular Alfaro returned from exile and tried to recapture his following. The leaders of the liberals rejected him, and, after some fighting, he was arrested in Guayaquil. He and his lieutenants were sent to a model prison in Quito, built years before by García Moreno. There, on January 28, 1912, a lynch mob broke in, dragged the prisoners through the streets, and burned their bodies.
The liberals remained in office, but the real power continued to rest in the hands of the wealthy merchants and bankers of Guayaquil. During World War I and the short boom that followed it, this clique further extended its influence and diversified its capital with a view to controlling the agriculture of the coastal plain. Cacao was the dominant export crop, as in the colonial period, but sugar and rice became increasingly important.
A depression followed in the early 1920s. The price of food increased, and exports in general declined. The sucre—the national unit of currency—fell rapidly in value. At the same time, the country’s cacao plantations became infected with a fungus that causes a malformation known as witches’-broom, and production sagged. These crises brought urban discontent, the formation of trade unions in Guayaquil, riots, and massacres by the army. Hundreds died during riots and shootings in November 1922.
4 days ago · Background. What is now Ecuador formed part of the northern Inca Empire until the Spanish conquest in 1533. Quito -- the traditional name for the area -- became a seat of Spanish colonial government in 1563 and part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada in 1717.
4 days ago · Geographical and historical treatment of Ecuador, country of northwestern South America. One of the world’s most environmentally diverse countries, it has contributed notably to environmental science. Much of what is now Ecuador was part of the Inca empire, pre-Columbian America’s largest political unit.
Ecuador became independent initially as part of the Republic of Gran Colombia, before finally breaking away in 1830. Ecuador would endure a period of civil war until the mid nineteenth century after which it would be dominated by caudillos , alternatively conservative and liberal.
Dec 19, 2023 · The territories of the Viceroyalty - New Granada (Colombia), Venezuela, and Quito - gained their independence between 1819 and 1822 and formed a federation known as Gran Colombia. When Quito withdrew in 1830, the traditional name was changed in favor of the "Republic of the Equator." Between 1904 and 1942, Ecuador lost territories in a series ...
Jan 15, 2024 · 15 January. Ecuador is a patchwork of ethnic identities, a complex legacy of its indigenous and colonial past. Long the heartland of a series of native Andean civilisations, it was taken over by...
