SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AS SOURCE OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: THE CASE OF THE INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT IN PLURINATIONAL STATE OF ECUADOR

In 2008, a new Constitution of Ecuador was enacted with a novel definition of the state as “plurinational.” The plurinational state is a concept created and widely discussed inside the CONAIE (the most prominent indigenous peoples social movement); one of the most successful social movement in Latin America in conventional and contentious politics. This dissertation is a demosprudential study of the plurinational state for it underlines how the modern Ecuadorian indigenous social movements were sources of the Constitution and the law. This dissertation tries to answer why one of the most successful social movement in Latin America (regarding legal reform) has not achieved significant effectiveness in the implementation of their interpretations of the law? To achieve that goal, the first part will show how autonomy and self-determination has been the interpretation of justice if indigenous peoples in Ecuador since the clash with the Spaniards colonizers, how that interpretation took the form of the idea of the plurinational state, and the way that that concept followed from the movement to the text of the Constitution. The second part will show the contesting interpretations of the Plurinational State from the State’s branches, and how mestizo politicians and authorities’ narrative is setting back the transit of the concept to the idea of the law and the Constitution. Four relevant variables intervene in the formation of such idea: ethno-racial policy, reception of the international law, social movements activity, and legal system. The study of the decade in which Rafael Correa was President of the Republic (2007-2017) shows how the variables manifested in cases regarding prior consultation, indigenous law and the protection of the indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation (Tagaeri and Taromenane). After the analysis of the Ecuadorian case and the relevant literature on the matter, the study shows that there is an idea of what is the law (of what is the Constitution) that excludes the collective rights of the indigenous peoples and their interpretations of the law that is holding the legal changes to become social changes