workingclasshistory:

On this day, 10 May 2009, leading Ecuadorian Indigenous rights activist and revolutionary Tránsito Amaguaña died a few weeks away from her 100th birthday in her native village of Pesillo.
Born into a Kichwa family of hacienda workers, Amaguaña took part in a strike in 1931 demanding an eight-hour working day and Sundays off, amongst other improvements. Then, she later recounted, “the soldiers arrived. Fifty at every hacienda. They destroyed houses and arrested the leaders, tying them up and beating them.”
Amaguaña joined the Communist Party and helped found some of the first unions in the country for agricultural workers, and later helped set up rural cooperatives to provide land for other Indigenous people. She also helped establish schools for rural poor children teaching in Spanish and Kichwa, and was jailed by authorities several times.
In the 1940s, campaigning was successful in achieving the abolition of forced taxes by the Catholic Church. Amaguaña recalled: “We went to Cardinal Carlos María de la Torre and asked him, how can the priest take away from the poor? The priest didn’t work at all and he took one row from every ten rows of planted corn or potatoes, or anything. – ‘Fine, fine, it will be voluntary’ said the Cardinal.”
In 1961, after representing the native peoples of Ecuador in the Soviet Union and Cuba, she was arrested by the Ecuadorian government on the false accusation of bringing in arms and money. After her imminent release, the government tried to make her sign a commitment to abandon all activism, which she refused.
She remained active until the end of her life, and today several schools in Ecuador are named after her.
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