Importance of Fernando Daquilema

He was an Ecuadorian indigenous leader elevated to the rank of national hero for his fierce fight against exploitation and the limitation of rights that his community had been suffering.

A fight for survival and dignity

The new increase in the tithe, a hateful tax that only the Indians were obliged to pay to the state and that went back to the bloody times of the Spanish conquest, which had established it through the famous mita and that no later republican authority he wanted to eradicate, was the trigger for the fury of Daquilema, and many other indigenous people who accompanied his protest against the collector governmental.

But the voracious and unfair tax was the reason that filled the patience of the community that was tired of discrimination, tyranny, and poverty in which they were forced to live.

He led a rebellion in Cacha, his hometown, encouraged all the workers who were vilely exploited by their bosses to rebel and fight for fairer and more humane treatment.

His proposal quickly attracted followers and he was immediately chosen by his peers to assume as their leader and king, and lead them to the total liberation of the

Regain rights and get out of submission

The royal designation was not capricious since he considered himself a direct descendant of the former lords of Puruhas.

The mission was to free themselves and found a new government in which the indigenous had the same rights as whites and mestizos.

The army that he formed fought fiercely and hand-to-hand against the official militia sent by the president in exercise Gabriel Garcia Moreno.

At his side, he also had the invaluable collaboration of Manuela León, a young indigenous woman who upheld and defended the same ideals of equality.

A fight that was not in vain

It is speculated that he was not even 30 years old when he was executed by government directive, once his uprising was controlled and subdued.

As was customary at the time, his execution was an event made public in a city square.

It took 136 years for the Ecuadorian government to give him the great honor of designating him a national hero.

His history and her name have become an emblem of the fight for the human rights the indigenous community of their homeland and the rest of the world.

Her tragic fate and her fight of course built the legend around her figure but they are also the irrefutable proof of the systematic damage that the original peoples suffered throughout so many centuries of history.

She had to shed a lot of her blood in order for them to achieve the recognition that many finally obtained and enjoy today.

Fortunately it was not in vain because her descendants today enjoy those rights for which Daquilema fought and died.