Some observers – anthropologists, philosophers, human rights' activists, development professionals – were horrified when indigenous peoples shed their political innocence and entered formal politics in significant numbers in the mid-1990s. Would this be the end of “pure” native cultures uncorrupted by Western politics? Would we no longer have living, morally superior models of prepolitical human relations to juxtapose to modern, complex, failing states?

For the most part indigenous citizens (and not a few political scientists) were thrilled with the prospect of empowering Latin America's most-excluded groups and with the possible implications for democracy of this promising and unexpected turn of events. As a Pachakutik militant explained to me one afternoon in Quito in July 2005,