Wait... they... moved on?!

According to the UNESCO website, Ecuador had more than twelve thousand artifacts restituted to the country in 1983 (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization n.d.) from Italy. The latest reported restitution was made by the Spanish government in 2014 (TelesurEnglish 2014) that have been collected from Colombian drug lords in Spain.

“Give back the gold!”

When thinking about this post, I had in my head a phrase that I heard every single time I went out to protest against policies or to topple presidents in the mid-2000s, “Give back the gold!” was shouted by different protestors, written on walls and chanted across the streets during marches that had nothing or little to do with the Spain-Ecuadorian relations; which, by the way, are limited to some areas of international cooperation but do not compare to the interest that the Iberic country has to other parts of the world such as the Asian Pacific and Sub Sharan Africa (Olivié 2009). On the other hand, Spain is currently the home of around 450.000 Ecuadorian citizens (Iglesias Martínez 2015, 33) that moved from 1999 after the financial crisis the Latin American country had at the end of the XX century.

I grew up with the idea that Spain had not yet given back everything that had been taken away during the colonial occupation by the crown, this notion of been cheated made me feel hurt by the past and resentful of a country that I have never been in (and that to this day I have a certain bad feeling about going to). I was “playing the same game” (Barth 1998, 15) than the older students around me and what I was hearing during my upbringing, the idea that the identity of my nation was to resent our colonial past clashed directly with the stories of my father’s exchange to Spain during the 70s. I couldn’t believe the way he was talking about the vast gardens, buildings culture, and food while ignoring all that they had “stolen” from us.

The fact is that Ecuador-Spain relations have been over the restitution and reparations that the former colonizers did or did not provide their former colonies after leaving. From my position, it would seem that the rehabilitation process has not been completed to remedy the crimes and actions committed during colonial times in Latin America. But we signed our independence 200 after a decade of conflict that did not improve our relationship with our European rulers, even if a process would be started to remedy this “notion of injustice and theft”, the people who were victims and enforcers have been dead for a long time and their descendants replicated the same horrors to the already dwindled native population that simply saw how they were enslaved by Spaniards to being enslaved by Criollos that took the former’s place.

I don’t think we can talk about a completed circle of reparation in the Ecuadorian society when there was a repetition within the country after independence and that is only coming to an apparent end with the revalorization of the indigenous ancestral knowledge due to the ecological and preservation current that has reached the higher classes of Ecuadorian society in the past decade or so.

There are restitutions in the country as long as the artifacts are found and proved to be of Ecuadorian origin, but these restitutions take place all over the European continent or wherever the objects are recovered. As for the reparations, I think that the process is starting now; as Spaniards moved on from their colonial past, I can only but wonder if we could be able to close the circle from within.

---

References:

Barth, Fredrik. 1998. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Prospect Heights.

Iglesias Martínez, Juan. 2015. “La población de origen ecuatoriano en España.”

Olivié, Iliana. 2009. “Coherence of Development Policies,” no. 280. https://doi.org/10.1787/221388758133.

TelesurEnglish. 2014. “Spain to Return Pre-Hispanic Artifacts to Ecuador.” Spain to Return Pre-Hispanic Artifacts to Ecuador. September 20, 2014. https://www.telesurenglish.net//news/Spain-to-Return-Pre-Hispanic-Artifacts-to-Ecuador-20140920-0021.html.

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. n.d. “Return or Restitution Cases |

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.” Accessed January 10, 2021. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/restitution-of-cultural-property/return-or-restitution-cases/.