TRÁNSITO AMAGUAÑA – A FIGHTER FOR INDIGENOUS RIGHTS

Tránsito Amaguaña started her political activism at a young age. On the newly-built road that connected Quito with Ibarra, socialist activists came. In clandestine meetings, they started organizing agricultural unions. She then joined the Communist Party, in her own words because of “hunger and abuse,” which, for her, was worth the exclusion from the Catholic Church with its priests that were always on the landowners’ side.

When the unions were organized, they went to the three haciendas of the area and presented their demands to the owners:

That the salaries be raised

That the working week be only until Saturday

That the working day be only of eight hours

That the obligatory work and voluntary work (faena) be not on the same day

That the owners return the part of land (huasipungo)

That the taxes to the church and land owners be abolished

That the forced domestic labor be abolished

“And we declared ourselves on strike. And see! We didn’t go to work!” tells Tránsito later. The strike started in January 1931 and lasted until March. The landowners asked the government for help, and so the military arrived looking for the leaders. One of them was Mercedes Alba, Tránsito’s mother. She received them standing in front of her house and saw them destroy it. “The soldiers arrived. Fifty at every hacienda. They destroyed houses and arrested the leaders, tying them up and beating them.”

This year, 1931, the indigenous people tried to organize the first National Indigenous Congress, but the government sent troops to close the ways and make sure the meeting didn’t happen.

Still, with the support of the Ecuadorian unions and the pressure from the peasants, certain regulations for agricultural work were established and published in the Labor Code (1936) and a Law for the Communities (1937). Nonetheless, these regulations were hardly ever applied, thus the fight for justice continued.

From the start, women played the leading role in the movement. Especially Tránsito Amaguaña and her companion Dolores Cacuango knew how to talk to people and how to inspire them to join their cause.

Tránsito lived about 15 years in hiding. During this time she went to Quito many times, as she recalls: “By foot we went, barefoot. We used to sleep in Cayambe. From there we left at 3 am, and by noon we were in Guayllabamba. We washed our feet in a stream and went on. We slept in Calderón, and in the morning we went to the hearings. We stayed in Quito for five days, eight days, up to a month.”

In 1941, the work and struggles of the previous years led to the foundation of the Ecuadorian Indio Federation (Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios, FEI) by various indigenous leaders, supported by the Communist Party. They came to pick up Tránsito one day – she thought the people in her house wanted to force her to work for them, but they came from Quito to take her to talk before Congress. She remembers:  “I yelled, first in Spanish, then in Kichwa, that the Law be just, for whites, for the rich, for the poor. That the Indios are not put on one side. That the work be the same for everybody. That we may have friendship, that we work affectionately together.”