Salinas is a small rural community in the Ecuadorian Andes in the province of Bolívar, where a Salesian mission has been operating since 1971. Father Antonio Polo has been promoting a process of socio-economic development there that has made Salinas an example of direct participatory democracy.
Over the past thirty years the local population has established communitary cooperatives, drawing on their natural resources, which have provided jobs for the inhabitants of the 22 villages of the diocese. The people have created a cheese factory, a spinning mill with an associated machine shop, facilities for drying mushrooms, extracting essential oils, producing chocolate, nougat, sausages...
One of the innovative policies introduced by the organisation of the first coop of 15 founding members was the prohibition on distributing profits, which had to be invested instead in projects that benefited the group. The community, therefore, and not the individual, was established as the basic unit of production that would become the motor of local development, operating on the premise that organising means sharing responsibilities and problems, mobilising otherwise inaccessible human and material resources, giving visibility and a voice to a community, concretising the values that have always been fundamental in Andean culture – that is, reciprocity and mutual aid.
The success of the “Salinas model” of local development derives mainly from the ability of the local people – working alongside missionaries, volunteers, aid organisations – to rise autonomously out of a poverty that is the result of centuries of exploitation and isolation. Those who have visited and studied the Salinas project agree that it is important to try to reproduce this kind of approach in other places, even where different environmental, social and economic conditions might represent an obstacle to comparable success. The Salinas model was not planned on paper, but improvised, discussed collectively, driven by strong motivation, perseverance, creativity, flexibility, spontaneity, luck and outside help.