Ecuador vs. Peru: Peacemaking Amid Rivalry

Latin American Politics and Society, Spring 2003 by Hey, Jeanne A K

Herz, Monica, and Joao Pontes Nogueira. Ecuador vs. Peru: Peacemaking Amid Rivalry. International Peace Academy Occasional Paper series. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002. Map, bibliography, index, 124 pp.; paperback $10.95.

The October 1998 signing of a series of peace accords creating (one hopes) a final resolution to the Ecuador-Peru border dispute in the Amazon marked the end of one of South America's most enduring and, recently, violent territorial conflicts. It was also the culmination of an impressive, if protracted, multilateral mediation process, the success of which shows promise for third party interventions in similar conflicts in Latin America and beyond. It is therefore with great expectations that those with an interest in Ecuador-Peru relations, border conflicts, and peace negotiations meet a book titled Ecuador vs. Peru: Peacemaking Amid Rivalry. The authors, both of Rio de Janeiro's Institute of International Relations, pledge a book that will become the standard on this conflict, as it includes not only details of the conflict's history and the arduous 1995-98 negotiations but, most promisingly, interviews with many of the principals in both Quito and Lima. The International Peace Academy, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation funded this research project, and the authors appear to have had enviable access to the participants, including those in the military.

Certainly this book is a must-have on the shelf of any scholar of the Andean region or of mediation and border conflicts in the region. Yet the volume disappoints, perhaps because the authors set it up as the much-needed definitive statement on the Ecuador-Peru conflict and its resolution. Although it includes new information and fresh observations, there are also important gaps and questionable conclusions that mar the book's potential status.

Ecuador vs. Peru begins with a brief introduction that attempts to establish a theoretical frame in which the study will be conducted. The grounding concept is rivalry, as articulated primarily by Gary Goertz and Paul Diehl (1995) and John Vasquez (1996). In contrast with other conflicts, rivalries last longer and are more resistant to mediation. These are such obvious components of the Ecuador-Peru dispute as to make the time spent on conceptualizing rivalry seem questionable, mostly because the conceptualization does not offer much beyond what is already known from the facts of the case at hand. If this were a comparative study that contrasted this rivalry with, for example, mediation in other regional conflicts, the theoretical frame might become more useful. In contrast, references to "rational actors" and "structural theories" pepper the book, but are not fully developed or utilized. In the conclusion, however, the authors do return to the rivalry literature and nicely situate the Ecuador-Peru dispute into that literature's conceptual frames. This allows other scholars of rivalries and similar disputes to use this case in future comparative analyses.

Chapter 2 presents a detailed history of the conflict, laudably spending time on its colonial and early postcolonial origins. This is an important contribution to the literature, for too many studies of this conflict do little more than mention the dispute's origins before the 1942 Rio Protocol established the postwar status quo, in which Peru gained most of the disputed territory. This section also reveals that the Ecuador-Peru conflict has been the subject of frequent third party mediation efforts, the first as early as 1827 and most of them failures. The authors argue that "territorial identity" is the crucial component of Latin Americans' sense of nationhood, most especially in Ecuador in this case. Anyone familiar with Ecuadoran maps dating into the 1990s, which included a huge portion of Peruvian territory, and with Ecuador's claim to be a paid amazonico knows that Ecuador has attempted to exploit the conflict for a boost in nationalism. Yet the idea that the claim to that territory remains a key sense of Ecuadorans' identity today is questionable. The very observation that once the conflict in the border region became too bloody, Ecuadorans were quick to sign a ceasefire and eventually a lasting settlement indicates that their attachment to their claim was tenuous at best.

There is also evidence to suggest that Ecuadoran resistance to resolution in the 1970s and 1980s was almost entirely political, a ploy used by a typically intractable congress eager to obstruct the executive and to earn easy nationalist points (Hey 1995). In the forward to Ecuador vs. Peru, David Malone of the International Peace Academy states, "It is remarkable, when visiting the two countries today, to note how widespread support for the agreement is," even among the militaries (p. 8). It is doubtful that Ecuadorans would show that support if the core of their national identity were as bound up in the territorial dispute with Peru as the book later suggests.

There are two weaknesses in the authors' otherwise sound history of the conflict. The first is the absence of accompanying maps that would illustrate the various changes in borders and territorial claims over the centuries. Indeed, the book has but one abysmal map (with an inset) before the introduction. The authors' contention that this "map is compiled from best available sources" is hard to accept, given the Ecuadoran military geographical institute's mapping skills and that the map is reprinted from an earlier published article in this very journal. The second flaw is that the historical review's attention to detail and rich observations fade away in the latter half of the twentieth century. The 1981 Paquisha border skirmish, for example, is noted as a "serious incident" (p. 39), yet receives only the barest consideration.