Discourses of the Past, Discourses of the Present Heritage Tourism in Latin America

Resumo

Objectives Heritage tourism—engaging with sites, material culture, or intangible culture deemed repositories of the history of societies—is one of the fastest-growing segments of the worldwide tourism industry. But “heritage” is not an unproblematic term or a social construction situated exclusively in the past. It is often based on discourses of the present, constructed with categories that serve interests rooted in today’s unequal power dynamics.

 This paper explores heritage tourism embedded in past and present discourses using the example of the South American country of Ecuador. I study former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa Delgado’s (2007-2017) heritage tourism policies during his self-proclaimed Citizen’s Revolution (Revolución Ciudadana). I focus on one of Correa’s emblematic tourism projects: the reconstruction and restoration of the Ecuadorian railway system between 2008 and 2013. I study how this regime used the railway system reconstruction project to build a unified national identity around their Citizen’s Revolution and the concept of Buen Vivir, an approach to socialism that embraces the ancestral and communitarian knowledge of the Quichua indigenous peoples. I propose that, just as the original railroad system had been built to unify the country in the early 20^th century, its reconstruction 100 years later as a tourism attraction had similar political and cultural objectives under the banner of “21st-century socialism.”

Methodology This paper is based on ethnographic research between 2014 and 2023. I conducted participant observation on board the Tren Crucero between September 30 and October 4, 2014, and on four of the five main thematic routes available between 2014 and 2018. In 2023, I visited some of the unused stations once the project had been closed for tourism. I also conducted open-ended, semi-structured interviews with key officials of the railway system, tour guides, and domestic and international tourists between 2014 and 2023.

Main Results and Contributions The Ecuadorian railway is unlike any other railroad system in Latin America because of Ecuador’s rugged topography and the degree of national integration that it generated in a previously fragmented nation. Four of the five largest cities in the country were connected for the first time by the railroad. Congressional authorization for building the railway system was obtained by conservative president Gabriel García Moreno in 1861. However, by the time of Moreno’s assassination in 1875, only 45km of track had been laid. There was little additional progress until the late 1890s when José Eloy Alfaro Delgado, the leader of the Liberal Revolution, took up the project. The Liberal Revolution (1895 to 1925) gave rise to one of Ecuador's most important political, economic, and cultural transformations. In just fifteen years, the Revolution secularized and guaranteed public education, declared freedom of religion, promulgated civil marriage and divorce laws, established the civil registry of births, marriages, and deaths, secularized cemeteries, and nationalized the properties of religious orders. The railroad (inaugurated on Alfaro’s birthday on June 25, 1908) exemplifies the Liberal Revolution’s economic and social achievements.

In the latter part of the 20th century, Ecuador changed in ways that diminished the railroad’s value. The country’s economy up to the 1970s had been based primarily on exporting bananas, coffee, and cacao. But when oil production and exportation became Ecuador’s central economic engine, the state turned its attention to constructing roads—particularly to and from the Amazonian region—to facilitate oil transportation, enhance commerce, and accommodate population growth. This transformation resulted in neglecting the railway system, which was left to deteriorate under challenging climate conditions.

By the 1990s, the railway system served the transportation and commerce needs of just a few rural areas. Although it had once been an essential component of Ecuador’s commercial infrastructure, the railroad was sinking into irrelevance, and its roadbeds and equipment were succumbing to decay. President Correa gave it a new lease on life through his vision of marketing it as a heritage tourism attraction. This massive undertaking required the reconstruction of 507 km of railway. The project was carried out using a three-pronged approach: rehabilitation of ways and stations, restructuring of the public corporation, and development of community-based tourism products, requiring an investment of USD 340 million between 2008 and 2013 when the vast enterprise was concluded.

 The system’s schedule included five one-day thematic routes of 4 to 6 hours each through the Andean and coastal provinces and one multi-day excursion. At its peak in 2015, the railway system had more than 30 stations, 23 cafés, 14 handicraft markets, and 13 local museums, providing more than 5,000 direct and 15,000 indirect jobs and involving 180 micro-enterprises. Though the revenue from the railway system was small, it is estimated that 200,000 domestic and international tourists traversed the Andes aboard the renovated trains.

 Conclusions Even if it is heritage-, community- or conservation-based, tourism growth risks being co-opted by the state when it becomes its major champion. President Correa’s railroad restoration project was used to boost a particular political ideology and contribute to the construction of the nation-state.

The reconstruction of the railway system for tourism and heritage purposes was an iconic component of Ecuador’s Buen Vivir nation branding. Tourism policies aimed to link this branding with the more extensive public policies being put in place. One of President Correa’s most visible actions was to grant rights to nature under its constitution while fostering an extractivist economic approach. Paradoxically, the revenues of the oil production boom of the early 2000s allowed the railway system to be reconstructed and subsidized. However, as important as the economics of tourism were to the government, social and political considerations provided a more significant incentive for promoting its growth. Tourism became a means to cement the government’s political platform, thus establishing a memorable branding for the nation.

The Ecuadorian railway became a highly contentious political project; it remained so under successive administrations (Lenin Moreno, 2017-2021, and Guillermo Lasso, 2021-present), which let the project slowly die. While economic reasons, such as the fall of oil prices between 2014 and 2021 and the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, played a role in the demise of the railway system, the intentional neglect to which it was subjected after Correa left power in 2017 speaks to how this project was seen as representative of his administration. The system’s vulnerability was profoundly tied to its emblematic nature for this regime.