Pressure on the right to the ancestral territory of the Afro-Ecuadorian people. The case of the Federation of Black Communities of the Upper San Lorenzo

In 1994, with the Law on Agrarian Development, the Ecuadorian State authorized 127,279.28 hectares of land for collective use for 37 Afro-Ecuadorian farm communities in the north of Esmeraldas, Ecuador. Twenty years later, these lands have experienced strong pressure from the penetration of capital in the areas of resource extraction and agro-industry. This article examines the situation of pressure on these territories and shows a substantial loss of these territories on the part of the communities, leading to serious consequences that affect culture, food security, and the balance between sustainable practices of production and the conservation of nature. Paradoxically, the vulnerability of the right to territory occurs in a context in which Ecuador is changing its model of the State, moving from monocultural to multiethnic with the Constitution of 2008 and to plurinational and intercultural with the Constitution of 2008. These normative frameworks establish the Afro-descended as a people who hold 21 collective rights. The research was conducted in the northern region of the province of Esmeraldas, in the cantos of San Lorenzo and Eloy Alfaro, concretely, in the associated territorial communes in the Federation of Black Communities of the Upper San Lorenzo, which is part of the Afro-Ecuadorian Region of the North of Esmeraldas (Cane). This region is a network of ethnic-territorial-based organizations that defend the rights to the ancestral territory of the Afro-descended in Ecuador. Precisely in the North of Esmeraldas, an important experiment is occurring in defense of the right to the ancestral territory of the Afro-descended in Ecuador. Owing to the struggles of Afro-Ecuadorian farm organizations, the State has implemented a series of rights for the preservation and strengthening of their identity, traditions, and forms of social organization. This recognition makes viable the exercise of the principle of self-determination for Afro-Ecuadorian peoples. Despite these advances, the reality of poverty, violence, State abandonment, and lack of guarantees concerning the right to territory produces a pessimistic scenario for materializing the rights of the peoples and nationalities and for being able to advance toward the construction of the plurinational and intercultural model of the State and the well-being of the Afro-descended