Ecuador Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ====Struggle for possession of the Amazon Basin==== [[File:South America 1879.png|thumb|left|South America (1879): All land claims by Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia in 1879]] When Ecuador seceded from the Gran Colombia, Peru contested Ecuador's claims with the newly discovered ''Real Cedula'' of 1802, by which Peru claims the King of Spain had transferred these lands from the Viceroyalty of New Granada to the Viceroyalty of Peru. During colonial times this was to halt the ever-expanding Portuguese settlements into Spanish domains, which were left vacant and in disorder after the expulsion of Jesuit missionaries from their bases along the Amazon Basin. Ecuador countered by labeling the Cedula of 1802 an ecclesiastical instrument, which had nothing to do with political borders. Peru began its de facto occupation of disputed Amazonian territories, after it signed a secret 1851 peace treaty in favor of Brazil. This treaty disregarded Spanish rights that were confirmed during colonial times by a Spanish-Portuguese treaty over the Amazon regarding territories held by illegal Portuguese settlers. Peru began occupying the missionary villages in the Mainas or Maynas region, which it began calling Loreto, with its capital in [[Iquitos]]. During its negotiations with Brazil, Peru claimed Amazonian Basin territories up to Caqueta River in the north and toward the Andes Mountain range. Colombia protested stating that its claims extended south toward the Napo and Amazon Rivers. Ecuador protested that it claimed the Amazon Basin between the Caqueta river and the Marañon-Amazon river. Peru ignored these protests and created the Department of Loreto in 1853 with its capital in Iquitos. Peru briefly occupied Guayaquil again in 1860, since Peru thought that Ecuador was selling some of the disputed land for development to British bond holders, but returned Guayaquil after a few months. The border dispute was then submitted to Spain for arbitration from 1880 to 1910, but to no avail.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Zook |first1=David H. |title=Zarumilla-Marañón: the Ecuador-Peru dispute |date=1964 |publisher=New York, Bookman Associates |location=New York |pages=15–36 |edition=First}}</ref> In the early part of the 20th century, Ecuador made an effort to peacefully define its eastern Amazonian borders with its neighbours through negotiation. On 6 May 1904, Ecuador signed the Tobar-Rio Branco Treaty recognizing Brazil's claims to the Amazon in recognition of Ecuador's claim to be an Amazonian country to counter Peru's earlier Treaty with Brazil back on 23 October 1851. Then after a few meetings with the Colombian government's representatives an agreement was reached and the Muñoz Vernaza-Suarez Treaty was signed 15 July 1916, in which Colombian rights to the Putumayo river were recognized as well as Ecuador's rights to the Napo river and the new border was a line that ran midpoint between those two rivers. In this way, Ecuador gave up the claims it had to the Amazonian territories between the Caquetá River and Napo River to Colombia, thus cutting itself off from Brazil. Later, a brief war erupted between Colombia and Peru, over Peru's claims to the Caquetá region, which ended with Peru reluctantly signing the Salomon-Lozano Treaty on 24 March 1922. Ecuador protested this secret treaty, since Colombia gave away Ecuadorian claimed land to Peru that Ecuador had given to Colombia in 1916. On 21 July 1924, the Ponce-Castro Oyanguren Protocol was signed between Ecuador and Peru where both agreed to hold direct negotiations and to resolve the dispute in an equitable manner and to submit the differing points of the dispute to the United States for arbitration. Negotiations between the Ecuadorian and Peruvian representatives began in Washington on 30 September 1935. The negotiations turned into arguments during the next 7 months and finally on 29 September 1937, the Peruvian representatives decided to break off the negotiations.{{citation needed|date=April 2022}} In 1941, amid fast-growing tensions within disputed territories around the Zarumilla River, war broke out with Peru. Peru claimed that Ecuador's military presence in Peruvian-claimed territory was an invasion; Ecuador, for its part, claimed that Peru had recently invaded Ecuador around the Zarumilla River and that Peru since Ecuador's independence from Spain has systematically occupied Tumbez, Jaén, and most of the disputed territories in the Amazonian Basin between the Putomayo and Marañon Rivers. In July 1941, troops were mobilized in both countries. Peru had an army of 11,681 troops who faced a poorly supplied and inadequately armed Ecuadorian force of 2,300, of which only 1,300 were deployed in the southern provinces. Hostilities erupted on 5 July 1941, when Peruvian forces crossed the Zarumilla river at several locations, testing the strength and resolve of the Ecuadorian border troops. Finally, on 23 July 1941, the Peruvians launched a major invasion, crossing the Zarumilla river in force and advancing into the Ecuadorian province of [[El Oro Province|El Oro]]. [[File:Ecuador-peru-land-claims-01.png|thumb|left|Map of Ecuadorian land claims after 1916]] During the course of the [[Ecuadorian–Peruvian War]], Peru gained control over part of the disputed territory and some parts of the province of El Oro, and some parts of the [[Loja Province|province of Loja]], demanding that the Ecuadorian government give up its territorial claims. The Peruvian Navy blocked the port of [[Guayaquil]], almost cutting all supplies to the Ecuadorian troops. After a few weeks of war and under pressure by the United States and several Latin American nations, all fighting came to a stop. Ecuador and Peru came to an accord formalized in the [[Rio Protocol]], signed on 29 January 1942, in favor of hemispheric unity against the [[Axis Powers]] in [[World War II]] favoring Peru with the territory they occupied at the time the war came to an end. The 1944 [[Glorious May Revolution]] followed a military-civilian rebellion and a subsequent civic strike which successfully removed Carlos Arroyo del Río as a dictator from Ecuador's government. However, a post-Second World War recession and popular unrest led to a return to populist politics and domestic military interventions in the 1960s, while foreign companies developed oil resources in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In 1972, construction of the Andean pipeline was completed. The pipeline brought oil from the east side of the Andes to the coast, making Ecuador South America's second largest oil exporter. In 1978, the city of [[Quito]] and the [[Galápagos Islands]] were inscribed as [[UNESCO World Heritage Sites]], making the first two properties in the world to become listed sites. [[File:Relevo-ecu.JPG|thumb|Ecuadorian troops during the [[Cenepa War]]]] [[File:Mirage F.1JA.JPG|thumb|The [[Dassault Mirage F1|Mirage F.1JA]] (FAE-806) was one aircraft involved in the claimed shooting down of two Peruvian [[Sukhoi Su-22]] on 10 February 1995.]] The [[Rio Protocol]] failed to precisely resolve the border along a little river in the remote ''Cordillera del Cóndor'' region in southern Ecuador. This caused a long-simmering dispute between Ecuador and Peru, which ultimately led to fighting between the two countries; first a border skirmish in January–February 1981 known as the [[Paquisha Incident]], and ultimately full-scale warfare in January 1995 where the Ecuadorian military shot down Peruvian aircraft and helicopters and Peruvian infantry marched into southern Ecuador. Each country blamed the other for the onset of hostilities, known as the [[Cenepa War]]. [[Sixto Durán Ballén]], the Ecuadorian president, famously declared that he would not give up a single centimeter of Ecuador. Popular sentiment in Ecuador became strongly [[nationalism|nationalistic]] against Peru: graffiti could be seen on the walls of Quito referring to Peru as the "''Cain de Latinoamérica''", a reference to the murder of [[Abel]] by his brother [[Cain]] in the [[Book of Genesis]].<ref>Roos, Wilma and van Renterghem, Omer ''Ecuador'', New York, 2000, p.5.</ref> Ecuador and Peru signed the [[Brasilia Presidential Act]] peace agreement on 26 October 1998, which ended hostilities, and effectively put an end to the Western Hemisphere's longest running territorial dispute.<ref name="ucdp.uu.se">{{cite web|title=Uppsala Conflict Data Program – Conflict Encyclopedia, General Conflict Information, Conflict name: Ecuador – Peru, In depth, Background to the 1995 fighting and Ecuador and Peru engage in armed conflict|access-date=15 July 2013|url=http://www.ucdp.uu.se/gpdatabase/gpcountry.php?id=126®ionSelect=5-Southern_Americas#|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130927150723/http://www.ucdp.uu.se/gpdatabase/gpcountry.php?id=126®ionSelect=5-Southern_Americas|archive-date=27 September 2013|url-status=dead}}</ref> The Guarantors of the [[Rio Protocol]] (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States of America) ruled that the border of the undelineated zone was to be set at the line of the ''Cordillera del Cóndor''. While Ecuador had to give up its decades-old territorial claims to the eastern slopes of the Cordillera, as well as to the entire western area of Cenepa headwaters, Peru was compelled to give to Ecuador, in perpetual lease but without sovereignty, {{convert|1|km2|abbr=on|sp=us}} of its territory, in the area where the Ecuadorian base of Tiwinza – focal point of the war – had been located within Peruvian soil and which the Ecuadorian Army held during the conflict. The final border demarcation came into effect on 13 May 1999, and the multi-national MOMEP (Military Observer Mission for Ecuador and Peru) troop deployment withdrew on 17 June 1999.<ref name="ucdp.uu.se"/> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. 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