Políticas Estatales, Territorios y Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas en Ecuador (1983-2012)

During the last three decades in Ecuador, the rights of indigenous peoples and the self-management of their ancestral territories have gone from absolute ignorance or subordination to State rationality, to gradual and conflictive processes of recognition of these sectors and population groups as peoples and nationalities or subjects of rights as collectives, in the heat of the given conflicts and the derived legal-political reforms. Undoubtedly, the so-called transition to civil-electoral regimes in Latin America, and in Ecuador in particular, occurred in the midst of the economic crisis of the 1980s and its subsequent replicas, reflected especially in the adoption of neoliberal structural adjustment policies, as described in this study.