Cultivating Dragon Fruit’s Political Power in Ecuador

Amid ongoing colonization, the Indigenous Shuar people are taking back control of their economic and political futures.

“This is a magnificent fruit, but is difficult to care for,” says Juan Chamik as he stands on a hill on his land, looking over the rainforest. As he speaks, the smell of moist foliage rises with the wind, shaking a few peach palm trees in the distance. Chamik explains how he looks after the patch of pitahaya he planted. The spiky plant, known in English as dragon fruit, barely peeks above a green mesh of Amazonian weeds. It is incredibly hard to keep up with weeding in the jungle, but Chamik doesn’t use any pesticides. Instead, his young plants can be identified by the sticks of hardwood aligned next to the seedlings to help the plants grow straight. “Sorry you’ll photograph the field overgrown,” he apologizes. “I’ve been busy these past weeks.”

Recently, into . In Ecuador, this has created a boom that is changing the economic fortunes of many Indigenous Amazonians. Like Chamik, hundreds of Shuar individuals—the country’s second-largest Indigenous group—have increasingly turned to the exotic fruit as a means of subsistence.

Now, as Chamik and other growers prepare for their first harvest, Shuar people wonder: Can dragon fruit help trigger something grander? In the Shuar Association of Bomboiza, a land reserve of 10,000 hectares (nearly 25,000 acres) and 27 communities in Gualaquiza county, in southeast Ecuador, they certainly think so.

Germán Tzamarenda, president of the Etsa Shuar Association, posing in front of his truck in November 2022. At his back, the people of Bomboiza unload and share out Tzamarenda’s dragon fruit seeds donation. *Photo by Sebastian Vacas-Oleas*

Sovereignty Through Seeds

The idea started two years ago when an old, beat-up truck rumbled into Gualaquiza with 9,000 pitahaya seeds, worth an estimated U.S. $9,000. The seeds were a donation, intended to boost economic well being and self-reliance among Indigenous communities.

The project was not run by the state or an NGO, but by the Shuar themselves. “We want to expand local harvests to increase our export capacity,” I was told by Germán Tsamarenda, president of Etsa, a neighboring Shuar reserve, at the heart of the pitahaya boom.

Tsamarenda, a young man wearing a traditional red and yellow toucan feather crown, was personally delivering the seeds. In a political rally organized for the event, he proudly told a crowd in Bomboiza how they were already exporting the fruit to the United States, Canada, China, and Russia. “We achieved all that,” he said, “without forgetting our sovereignty, our customs, and tradition.”

He also encouraged the audience to work hard and with ethnic solidarity during the first challenging two years: Pruning and nourishing the spiky plant until the first harvest is no easy task. “Until then,” Tsamarenda added, “I urge you all to push elected officials to develop our rural infrastructure. It is their moral obligation, and we have the right to demand it.”

Tsamarenda’s words were timely and strongly resonated with the audience. Mauricio Pujupat, or Kunki, by his Shuar name, is president of the Bomboiza Shuar Association. He welcomed the donation and, nodding, outlined a political road map for the future. Kunki was the person responsible for pumping up hope in the exotic fruit. But behind all the entrepreneurial aims of the day stood more profound, ambitious objectives.

Kunki wanted the world to know what they are doing in Bomboiza, so I, as a videographer, recorded the event and much of the work that has followed. We have since been working together to set up a website for the association to showcase their ongoing efforts.

Could dragon fruit help change the future of the Shuar people of Gualaquiza? Could it help support a broader platform to help overcome colonial inequality and strengthen Shuar political autonomy and territorial sovereignty?

Downtown Gualaquiza, Ecuador, with the municipal office on the lower left and the town’s church on the right. According to some Shuar accounts, the church was built over the extended house of one of the region’s most famed warriors, after this warrior agreed to relocate and support Salesian missionary efforts. *Photo by Sebastian Vacas-Oleas*

Ongoing Colonization

Historically, Shuar people were mostly known—and feared—as fierce Amazonian warriors. The practice of taking the heads of their enemies as war trophies and shrinking them to seize their opponent’s vital power captured the imagination of European travelers and ethnographers. Their infamous love of liberty, radical egalitarianism, and staunch resistance to being governed by powerful outsiders granted them some celebrity across colonial sources. In fact, for almost 300 years past the European invasion of the Americas, Shuar were able to live independently.

Since the 1800s, however, colonial expansion and missionization has systematically encroached on Shuar lands in Gualaquiza. A Roman Catholic mission run by the Jesuits was established in 1815, but after a smallpox epidemic, Shuar attacked and burned down this mission and the Jesuits left by 1872. Salesians established themselves in the region in 1893, and this proved to be a more lasting and impactful endeavor.

Settler colonialism slowly eroded Shuar control of Gualaquiza, carving itself into the land with the help of epidemics, trade, and boarding schools. Over time, Salesian intrusion, brutal at first, moved away from repressive evangelization to support land demarcation, Indigenous self-rule, and cultural revival. Shuar people today remain bitterly divided on how to perceive the mission’s legacy and historic influence.

Earlier this year, I taught a graduate course on Amazonian anthropology and invited a group of young students from Bomboiza. This is how one of my students explained Salesian tutelage: “First, they told us we shouldn’t speak our language, and they used to hit the old people with sticks when they did. Later, they encouraged us to keep speaking our language and preserve our traditional dances.”

“And there are so many things we have kept quiet,” another student added.

Still, some Shuar are appreciative of the education they received from the Salesians, especially for what it helped achieve when mediating relations with the state. Shuar people overwhelmingly recognize the joint efforts made by some missionaries and their elders to demarcate and acquire land titles in their territory. This process led to in 1964—a powerful grassroots organization that spearheaded Indigenous rights in Latin America and delivered world recognition for Shuar identity politics. “Without the Federation,” the same students ventured, “we may have disappeared.”

In contemporary Ecuador, many ethnic tensions remain fundamentally unchanged. Shuar people know that despite the efforts advanced by the Shuar Federation, Indigenous land was stolen, allowing settler colonists to grow wealthy and benefit from a racialized political system.

This is seldom, if ever, discussed in the Ecuadorian media, education system, public policy, or public debate. Yet, unequivocally, in the everyday life experience of Shuar people, the inequity is ongoing. I’ve been told so many times doing ethnographic fieldwork in Bomboiza that “colonization is not over.”

“It is no coincidence,” Kunki tells me, “that our province has one of the higher rates of poverty in the country. The scheme of things keeps us Shuar impoverished.”

Kunki Mauricio Pujupat, president of the Bomboiza Shuar Association, oversees the delivery of dragon fruit seeds among his organization members in November 2022. He aims to grow dragon fruit in Bomboiza to improve the household economy of his people and strengthen their collective political representation. *Photo by Sebastian Vacas-Oleas*

Real Indigenous Representation

Today, Gualaquiza county is still ruled by the homonymous city left by the missions and colonization, with cobbled roads, old houses with balconies, and a viewpoint to the surrounding forest. But increasingly, Shuar people are refusing to allow the status quo to go on.

Here’s where Shuar politics meets entrepreneurialism. Kunki and other young political activists in Bomboiza are trying to build a material platform for their people that they expect will better serve their ethnic interests in the long term. What they really aim for is to govern the county themselves, from the city of Gualaquiza.

“It’s the only way forward,” Kunki says. “For years, we have experienced apaach management”—management from non-Shuar Ecuadorians—“and even with Pachakutik [Ecuador’s Indigenous party] governing, our needs and demands have not been met.”

For more than a decade, Pachakutik has been very successful among large Indigenous constituencies, and the current mayor in Gualaquiza got into office by aligning with the Indigenous party. Although he is not Shuar, he was elected by most people in Bomboiza. But support waned when a WhatsApp video circulated that showed the mayor drunk, calling a Shuar group “savages” and other racist slurs when they demanded he fulfill his campaign promises. “It was a disgrace,” the outraged people in Bomboiza protested. “They simply use us for our votes.”

Since then, the idea of a Shuar mayor in the city has taken root.

But electoral politics are expensive, and even the most humble of campaigns can amount to several thousand dollars. This is an important reason why, even in an Indigenous party, non-Indigenous politicians have historically been more successful.

By growing dragon fruit in the jungle, the people in Bomboiza aim to create an economic boost to help Shuar people better fund their own forays into national politics.

Hope for Indigenous Futures

Shuar leadership is not unprecedented; there are already several regional offices in the same province under Shuar administration. But it has never been achieved in Gualaquiza before and, crucially, it has never been achieved through Shuar self-funding.

In the past, external funding has opened the doors to political co-option, corruption, and mismanagement. Now, despite the great pride Shuar have for the historic achievements of the Shuar Federation and their electoral aims with Pachakutik, for many, the current situation is nothing short of heart-breaking. Following years of mismanagement, the Shuar Federation is but a shadow of its former glory. Pachakutik is not faring much better either.

For two decades, the in Shuar lands has . In April of 2023, the president of the Shuar Federation was violently ousted after it was discovered he had traveled to Toronto, at the invitation of Solaris Resources, a Canadian mining corporation interested in exploiting a copper deposit in Shuar territory. He was rumored to have been paid to rewrite the Federation’s statutes to allow mining activities in common land, which he did.

Despite years of against , Chinese and North American companies are now major employers in the region. And there are troubling rumors that Mexican cartels may be behind smaller gold mining operations inside Shuar territory.

“Young people have been left no choice but to work in mining or risk their lives migrating abroad,” Kunki notes. Indeed, in Gualaquiza alone, hundreds of Shuar people, along with other Ecuadorians, are increasingly choosing to trek across Central America in the hope of reaching a better life in the U.S.

People in Bomboiza hope that by growing dragon fruit and tapping into its export market, they will provide an answer to some of these local economic woes. At the same time, they are wary of their production morphing into monocultures and so are working on a project to harness women’s ecological knowledge and the incredible diversity of traditional gardens.

They also believe that, in the colonial context reigning in the region, they need to develop a larger political project. The new president of the Shuar Federation, who is also from Bomboiza, is one of the leading Indigenous activists against mining in Ecuador, so there are reasons to be hopeful.

“If mining undermines our territorial sovereignty, and we’re doing it out of necessity, or if we’re leaving abroad,” Kunki says, “then we need to provide our people with an alternative.”

“But,” he says, “we won’t be able to develop economic opportunities if we don’t maintain our political strength.”

Sebastian Vacas-Oleas is a postdoctoral affiliate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. He is also a lecturer and a visiting researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Ecuador. He writes about Indigenous Amazonia and is currently working as an editor on an Indigenous-authored book of collected life histories. He works with the Indigenous Shuar people of Ecuador and collaborates with the Shuar Research Group of Bomboiza, which broadcasts podcasts and produces cultural content for broad audiences in Ecuador. He speaks English, Spanish, and Mandarin.

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