In November last year the Ecuadorean congress laid down the legal framework which would fully open up the oil and gas reserves to the international companies and at the same time allowed them to increase the capacity of the Trans-Ecuadoran pipeline. Resistance April 91 saw an historic march from the Amazon to Quito. On the way indigenous people from all over the country joined the march which arrived in Quito on 23rd April. OPIP makes a distinction between land and territory. Land belongs to communities with no rights to exploit subterranean resources.
Territories belong to nationalities who have managerial rights.
The unjust land system has created serious land scarcity with almost half the land in the country being owned by 1.5 per cent of landowners. Ballen on June 13 which halts popular land distribution programmes exacerbating the land problem still further. Now the people are resorting to more direct forms of action. During the last two weeks of June protestors closed off some of the main motorways in the country, hitting commerce and isolating several cities. The Pan-American highway was blocked off by protests from some 200 indigenous communities at several junctions in Cotopaxi Province.