A Botany of Violence

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rom germ theory to plantation logic, this 529-year timeline charts the legacy left behind by extractivist forces of colonial powers in the violent search for the elusive Cinchona plant. Originally known as the fever tree since time immemorial, Cinchona is a plant that grows in-between worlds—from the lower reaches of the Andean Mountains to the upper headwaters of the Amazonian River Valley—constantly resisting and fighting attempts at its substitution, simulation, or synthesization. Yet the Cinchona plant is more than a tree though: it is a map of soils, airs, climates, temperatures, territories, histories, and peoples. Stolen by the Spanish Jesuits in the 17th century, smuggled abroad by the British and Dutch during the 18th century, mapped by Humboldt in the 19th century, and patented by global pharma in the 20th century, the story of the Cinchona plant whose bark lies at the base of global drug production is not only a story of the search for the cure for malaria; it is a story captured by the quintessential capsule of quinine as we know it today.

In a wide-ranging way, this little pill is not only the product of removing bark from a tree; it is the dangerous precedent that was set in an imperial attempt to remove the plant from its peoples and its systems; systems of governance, of knowledge, of healing, of history, of life. It is a story of human violence, land dispossession, and cultural erasure, through more than five hundred years of chemical abstraction.

For thousands of years, Indigenous Peoples of Kechwa Nations through the Central Andes have cared for, cultivated, and nurtured the medicinal knowledge of quinine and the geographic intelligence of the Cinchona plant by respecting and honoring its sovereignty. Its very existence has come under threat

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of extinction by an array of foreign invasions: over-harvesting, industrial logging, deforestation, missionary expeditions, infrastructural development, road building, pipeline corridors, land seizures, mining, extraction, rampant tourism, unregulated trade, pharmaceutical dumping, proliferating chemical synthesis, intellectual property patenting, child labor exploitation, global trade deregulation. In other words, the basis of western industrial capitalism of the North—a bountiful world, free of malaria—is primarily, if not entirely premised on the wasting of the South, specifically rampaging Andean and Amazonian environments that have been inhabited for multi-millennia generations. From Amazon gift cards to Expedia eco-tourism, the benevolent eurocentric image of greenness that masks global capitalism is actually pillaging the region with foreign intervention.

As witnessed by the enduring legacy of the Cinchona plant, there is an overlooked territorial conflict belying the transnational world; frictions resulting from the invasive penetration into the Andes and rampant extraction of the Amazon: the oppression, exploitation, and elimination of Indigenous Peoples.

As a declaration of sovereignty, this timeline thus proposes the mapping of a counter-cartography that transcends the historical divide between the colonial metropolis and resource hinterlands of a capitalist cosmos: one that centers Indigenous struggles instead of fragmenting or opposing them, positioning futures in parallel with that of the Cinchona plant and the urgently needed deindustrialization of the global production of quinine.

From fact to fiction to fable, the scientific and taxonomic epistemologies of the Cinchona plant are rooted in longstanding forms of imperial conquest and

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Forensic Botany & Systems of Oppression The following chronology doesn’t just start with an industrial white pill nor with global conservation policy. Beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, it begins with the geopolitical transformation of the only known natural cure for malaria, the complex compound of quinine. Its endemic geography may trace a historical territory of tradition between the lowlands of the Andean Mountain Range and the highlands of the Amazon River Basin, but the global complex of plantations inscribe and entrench a space of technological violence and domination. These are traditional lands of Kechwa Nations that underlie the boundaries territories of Ecuador, a nation whose colonial administrative space once stretched a massive region mirroring the watershed of the Amazon River, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, geometrically paralleling the cartographic line of the Equator. This territorial history also goes beyond the geography of quinine production to delineate the political trajectory of the Cinchona plant whose potent and precious bark has been—and, still is—the object of scientific expeditions, industrial secrecy, pharmaceutical exploitation, and corporate colonialism. If the plant is a media that carries a message, then it is a political medium of the forces—past, present, and future—that shape its environment. To map the plant is thus to reveal its enduring power shaped by legacies of historical struggle and contemporary conflicts. Mapping the contours of the dominant structures of power associated with the Cinchona plant reveals how political control is exercised at different levels and how the image of authority and the narrative of the omnipresent nation-state are projected at different scales. Here, the nation-state is, according to Peruvian sociologist and scholar of the coloniality of power Aníbal Quijano, “a society where, within a space of domination, power is organized with some important degree of democratic relations... basically in the control of labor, resources, products, and public authority.” To understand the imperative for decolonizing the global and national discourse on conservation (specifically, through land cessions and repara-

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tions) that shapes these lands and waters today, it is essential to understand how these power structures are historically entrenched in a dominant system of settler-colonialism formed by European policies of spatial, racial, and economic domination—the basis of empire-building and white supremacy. How the inequalities and injustices of the Cinchona plant’s history emerge from the original civilizing mission of the Spanish Empire, sanctioned by the Catholic Church and its papal bulls (Doctrine of Discovery) over the past five centuries is paramount in understanding the significance and influence movements of resistance, patterns of resurgence, and struggles for self-determination today.

Super-Structure of Settler-Colonialism & Systems of Racial Capitalism in Ecuador’s Nation-State Objects of Control

Strategies Deployed

Myths Projected

Architectures Entrenched

land

dispossession

property / market

city / settlement

water

pollution / contamination

nature / conservation

national parks / heritage

resources

extraction / preservation

economy / development

blocks / corporations

women

gender violence / poverty

heteropatriarchy

police / prison / bureaucracy

girls

subjugation / abuse

assimilation

factories / plantations / schools

Key

history

distortion / propaganda

science / religion

university / museum / church

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information

racial erasure

paper world / map

laws / codes

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1532-85: Foreign Invasions

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At the precise moment that Francis Bacon begins writing his three Essays on “Nature,” “Science,” and “Empire,” the pillaging of the Andean region now associated with Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia are in full force. Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro traps and tricks Incan Emperor Atahualpa Capac, massacres thousands of Incan warriors— women and men—assimilating and indoctrinating remaining Indigenous survivors into Christianity. Not uncoincidentally, “dominion over nature,” as Bacon proclaims, implies supreme colonial power, control over land, and elimination of Natives deemed “savages.”

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Diego Rivera, The Arrival of Cortés, 1951

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Gaudentio Brunacio, De Cina Cina seu Pulvere ad Febres, 1661

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Sebastiani Badi, Anastasis Corticis Peruuiae, seu Chinae Chinae defensio, 1663

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François Baron Gérard, Voyages de Humboldt et Bonpland (detail), 1815

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Henry Wellcome and his guide-interpreter J. Baiz near Loja (Ecuador/Peru), 1878

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1880: Global Pharma’s Ground Zero

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Increasingly worried by dwindling, unreliable sources of Cinchona bark from South America, Anglo-American entrepreneur Henry Wellcome undertakes a reconnaissance mission to Ecuador and Peru between 1878 and 1879 to check in on Cinchona forest reserves and track down new herbal remedies and plant-based medicines throughout the rainforests. Mirrorring Humboldt’s Andean journey to the forests of Loja with a Thomas Church-lust for the Heart of the Andes, Wellcome observes from the promontory of Popular Science Monthly on the extreme risks of cascarilleros and their squads in bark harvesting: “the almost continuous revolutions and wars in those South American countries so unsettle everything as to render investments hazardous; the roads and ports are sometimes blockaded for months, preventing shipments of barks... Mules and servants are engaged for the journey to the mountains. Wheeled vehicles are useless, for want of roads, and all transportation is done on the backs of beasts or Indians...

The skeletons of hundreds of wretched peons can be seen in the far depths of the chasms below of some of the older trails, suggestive of lurking dangers." By privileging supply over territory, Wellcome’s career will explode as a pharmaceutical entrepreneur, medical innovator, and precursor to the multinational corporation bearing his name.

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Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Guayaquil, 1970

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Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Guayaquil, 2009

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Thomas Imo, Quinine Production at Pharmakina (Bukavu, DRC), 2004

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Eduardo León, Mercado San Roque a Quito, 2015

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Colectivo Arquitectura Expandida, Mercado San Roque a Quito, 2015

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Eraldo Peres, Amazon Forest Fire Near Br-163 in the City of Porto Velho, 2019

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Pablo Escudero, Blockades of Imbabura Region, 2020

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