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Personal Journey

Seeing what U.S. tax dollars do for Ecuador's poor

BY Dennis G. Arguelles

In 2001, I hiked through remote villages in the highlands and rainforests of Ecuador. That summer, the Bush administration announced the Andean Regional Initiative (ARI), an expansion of policies started under the Clinton administration and the latest effort in the “war on drugs.” The ARI would receive very little media attention. Not that it mattered. A few weeks later, 9/11 occurred and the war on drugs was forgotten.

The ARI provided the governments of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and neighboring countries hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, mostly in military equipment and training, to help destroy coca and poppy crops and improve internal policing in the region. It didn’t seem to matter that some of these regimes had horrendous human rights records. Peru had faced near-genocide conditions in years past. Colombia had suffered under a military government, paramilitary forces and a guerilla insurgency some say has gone haywire.

Growing coca and poppy was one of the few viable economic options for much of the region’s peasant and indigenous population. I fear that eliminating these crops is bound to push thousands and possibly millions of people deeper into poverty, further destabilizing the region. Although the Bush administration has paid lip service to issues of alternative economic development, its aid is overwhelmingly military in nature.

Given these conditions, we spent months training and preparing for our trip. We studied maps of the area, making sure to avoid hot spots near the Colombian border, where there had been a rash of kidnappings and military activity. After arriving in Quito, we quickly made our way to the countryside, where we were often treated more as guests than tourists. We had intimate conversations with locals, gaining insight into their lives. As we passed from village to village, it became clear to us that people desperately needed jobs. Competition for productive land was also a major issue between locals and the government, the economic elite and multinational corporations.

Still, we found signs of hope. On the slopes of Ecuador’s highest mountain, Chimborazo, an Indian village had a particularly inspiring and innovative job-creation project. Thanks to a grant from the Canadian Agency for International Development, and help from Canadian expatriates, the village was capitalizing on a growing global market for exotic, adventure travel. It launched a mountain and eco-tourism guide service and built a guesthouse for mountain climbers, horseback riders, mountain bikers and other enthusiasts, thereby creating valuable jobs. It was an example of how globalization, with the strategic intervention of governments, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and volunteers, could work in favor of the poor.

My trip opened my eyes to a part of the world that has been ignored by the American media because of their focus on the Middle East and President Bush’s war on terror. This part of the world could easily fall into turmoil if we continue shortsighted and ill-begotten polices like the ARI. I lament the fact that our own government spends millions of tax dollars spraying coca fields and militarizing the region, rather than supporting projects that provide true hope and an alternative to the drug trade for the area’s impoverished people.

Arguelles is assistant director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.