Ecuador

This handbook provides an unmatched, comprehensive political history of Ecuador written in English. Ecuador is a nation of over 13 million people, its area between that of the states of Wyoming and Colorado. Like the United States, Ecuador's government features a democratically elected President serving for a four-year term. The Galápagos Islands, well known as the birthplace of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, are part of a province of Ecuador. The History of Ecuador focuses primarily on the political history of Ecuador and how these past events impact the nation today. This text examines the traditions established by Ecuador's great caudillos (strong men) such as Juan José Flores, Gabriel García Moreno, and Eloy Alfaro, and documents the attempts of liberal leaders to modernize Ecuador by following the example of the United States. This book also discusses three economic booms in Ecuador's history: the Cacao Boom 1890–1914; the Banana Boom 1948–1960; and the Oil Boom 1972–1992.

This is the first book to comprehensively discuss Ecuadorian soils. Richly illustrated, it provides information on the unique characteristics and distribution of these soils. Due to the influence of the Andes, which vastly modified the climate and parental materials, a relative small country like Ecuador has a wide variety of soil orders, rarely found in other countries. The country is divided into three distinctive regions by the Andes: The Coastal Plain, the Andean Highlands, and the Amazonia Region each with different soil development, influenced by the varying conditions in that region. It is also necessary to consider the Galapagos Islands as a separate region with a particular climate and parental material.

The definitive field guide to the rich avifauna of Ecuador. This up-to-date and comprehensive guide to the birds of mainland Ecuador is a valuable resource for anyone exploring the mountains, forests and wetlands of this incredibly bird-rich country. With thousands of beautiful and detailed paintings, accompanied by concise descriptions and accurate maps, this is an indispensable guide to bird identification in Ecuador. It covers every species and most subspecies recorded in Ecuador, including migrants and vagrants, with accurate and up-to-date distribution maps. There are also 291 colour plates included, which illustrate more than 1,630 species, with text on facing pages for quick and easy reference. Concise text provides an overview of the species' identification, voice, habits, habitats, range, distribution and status.

Providing painstakingly detailed information for safely and securely navigating some of Latin America’s most rewarding excursions, this guide is for both avid climbers attempting Chimborazo’s 20,700-foot summit and recreational trekkers looking to get off the beaten path. From the heights of the Andes and the cloud forests to the Amazon, coastal rainforests, and the low-lying beaches, time-tested travel advice and updated route descriptions are offered on how to select the best outing to suit each individual’s interests, abilities, and time constraints. Step-by-step instructions on how, when, and where to approach each trail guide climbers, hikers, bikers, and trekkers through these often unmarked paths.

Ecuador is the third-largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the western United States. As the source of this oil, the Ecuadorian Amazon has borne the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of a growing U.S. demand for petroleum and the dynamics of economic globalization it necessitates. Crude Chronicles traces the emergence during the 1990s of a highly organized indigenous movement and its struggles against a U.S. oil company and Ecuadorian neoliberal policies. Against the backdrop of mounting government attempts to privatize and liberalize the national economy, Suzana Sawyer shows how neoliberal reforms in Ecuador led to a crisis of governance, accountability, and representation that spurred one of twentieth-century Latin America’s strongest indigenous movements. Through her rich ethnography of indigenous marches, demonstrations, occupations, and negotiations, Sawyer tracks the growing sophistication of indigenous politics as Indians subverted, re-deployed, and, at times, capitulated to the dictates and desires of a transnational neoliberal logic. At the same time, she follows the multiple maneuvers and discourses that the multinational corporation and the Ecuadorian state used to circumscribe and contain indigenous opposition. Ultimately, Sawyer reveals that indigenous struggles over land and oil operations in Ecuador were as much about reconfiguring national and transnational inequality—that is, rupturing the silence around racial injustice, exacting spaces of accountability, and rewriting narratives of national belonging—as they were about the material use and extraction of rain-forest resources.

"This book draws on the author's twenty years of field research among the Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador, offering a unique perspective on the people's culture and society"--Provided by publisher.

Encompassing Amazonian rainforests, Andean peaks, coastal lowlands, and the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador’s geography is notably diverse. So too are its history, culture, and politics, all of which are examined from many perspectives in The Ecuador Reader. Spanning the years before the arrival of the Spanish in the early 1500s to the present, this rich anthology addresses colonialism, independence, the nation’s integration into the world economy, and its tumultuous twentieth century. Interspersed among forty-eight written selections are more than three dozen images. The voices and creations of Ecuadorian politicians, writers, artists, scholars, activists, and journalists fill the Reader, from José María Velasco Ibarra, the nation’s ultimate populist and five-time president, to Pancho Jaime, a political satirist; from Julio Jaramillo, a popular twentieth-century singer, to anonymous indigenous women artists who produced ceramics in the 1500s; and from the poems of Afro-Ecuadorians, to the fiction of the vanguardist Pablo Palacio, to a recipe for traditional Quiteño-style shrimp. The Reader includes an interview with Nina Pacari, the first indigenous woman elected to Ecuador’s national assembly, and a reflection on how to balance tourism with the protection of the Galápagos Islands’ magnificent ecosystem. Complementing selections by Ecuadorians, many never published in English, are samples of some of the best writing on Ecuador by outsiders, including an account of how an indigenous group with non-Inca origins came to see themselves as definitively Incan, an exploration of the fascination with the Andes from the 1700s to the present, chronicles of the less-than-exemplary behavior of U.S. corporations in Ecuador, an examination of Ecuadorians’ overseas migration, and a look at the controversy surrounding the selection of the first black Miss Ecuador.