Ecuador. A trip between San Gabriel and Quito took about five days by horseback and
other precarious means of travel. As a result, the people of Carchi had greater business and
social interactions with the nearby city of Ipiales, Colombia than with the rest of Ecuador.
Following a workers protest in 1925 that became known as the “Revolución Juliana,” the
government decided to build a road between the city of Ibarra and the Rumichaca River on
the Colombian border. It studied three routes across the highlands of Carchi and chose the
shortest western flank of the Andes, which would pass through Chota, El Angel, and the
unpopulated páramo to Las Juntas and finally to the border city of Tulcán. While this
western route represented the seemingly most economical option, the communities along
the eastern alternative – Bolivar, La Paz, Sand Gabriel, Cristóbal Colón, Dacha, and Julio
Andrade – decided to change the calculus.
While the government continued with the western highway, the people of Montúfar had
decided to build an eastern highway on their own. Led by Manuel J. Bastidas, an eccentric
farmer-researcher famous for his improvement of potato varieties and cattle, the able
people of the villages of Montúfar united and on 25 September 1927 brought their picks
and shovels with them to the main square of San Gabriel. Creating the “Pro-western
highway Committee,” they took charge of tracing the route of the road, which included
negotiations with the landowners, provision of tools, and obtaining horses for transporting
rocks and logs. Additionally, they had to organize food, housing, and other logistical
support for what would quickly become thousands. The first three-day minga took place
between 25-27 September and involved 6,250 men, plus hundreds of women and children
who prepared food, transported water, and provided other logistical support. By the
afternoon of 27 September, a stretch of highway running North across the inter-Andean
Valley and measuring some forty kilometres was opened. That same afternoon the first
automobile arrived to San Gabriel from the city of Pasto, Colombia. This early success
inspired them to look South.
The highway to Ibarra posed greater challenges due to the difficult rocky and mountainous
terrain. On 25-27 September 1930, a work party of some 15,000 volunteers, now from
both Carchi and Imbabura, arrived to the banks of the Chota River, across from the town
of Juncal, Imbabura. Over three years, the people of Northern Ecuador had opened over
100 kilometres of road. Impressed by the enormity of this effort, the government ceded
and financed the construction of the bridges as well as the repair of certain problematic
sections that would take through October 1936 to finalize. In honour of this effort, in
1934, the Ecuadorian Congress awarded the industrious people of Montúfar, for the first
and only time in the country’s history, the “National Distinction of work.” Today, in the
plaza where the decision was made to build what has become the northern stretch of the
Pan-American Highway, stands a statue of a nude man with a pick and shovel – the
anonymous worker and hero of Carchi.
Learning from Carchi: Agricultural Modernisation and the Production of Decline
With summaries in English, Spanish, and Dutch. Sherwood, Stephen G. (2009)
ISBN 978-90-8585-316-9
Box 4.2 Construction of the Pan-American Highway in Carchi (Carlos Raza-Salcedo, nd, as
summarized in M. Landázuri, 2003 and C. Landázuri, 2003) Pág 113
