Crude Chronicles

Argues that neo-liberal economic reforms both provoked a crisis of governance and created the conditions for a disruptive indigenous movement in Ecuador. Provides an ethnographic study of indigenous opposition to processes of economic globalization 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 neo-liberal reforms in Ecuador led to a crisis of governance, accountability, and representation that spurred one of twentieth-century Latin America’s strongest indigenous movements.