The purpose of this research is to examine the protocol of 1941-42 between Peru and Ecuador. The plan of the research will be to set forth an analysis of the protocol, or treaty, and then to discuss evidence that shows the weight and substance of the Ecuadoran position, as well as the international rules of law that govern the case. As appropriate, evidence will be cited that demonstrates the strength of the protocol's results from Ecuador's point of view.
In the era of modern nationalism, no single feature of national character and integrity is more central to the defining of what constitutes the life, livelihood, and reach of a national people than its territorial boundary. It is in this sense that analysis of the protocol signed in Rio de Janeiro in early 1942, between Peru and Ecuador, must be approached. From an informal American perspective, it may seem that the strength of a international boundaries between two South American Andean countries is irrelevant to the stability and integrity of intrinsic foreign policy in the continent. However, as we shall shortly see, this decisive protocol has informed the tenor and substance of international boundaries in the north Andean segment of South America both before and since that time. But for Ecuador and Peru, unlike for other members of the international community, the dispute represented more than borders. It represented the very standing of the countries in the international community. Indeed, as Erickson, et al., state with regard to Ecuador, "For more than a century the cornerstone of foreign policy has been defense of territorial integrity, and present policy derives directly from the history of that contract" (1966, p. 287).
In the background of the dispute between Ecuador and Peru over the border that ended with the Rio Protocol of 1942 is a protracted history of territorial sovereignty in the Andean region that derives partly from Spanish imperial dominance of South Amer...