[7] Its aim is not just to win elections but to initiate a democratic transformation of Ecuadorian society, centring on the neglected needs of the indigenous.

[citation needed] According to American-Venezuelan lawyer Eva Golinger, during the 2010 Ecuador coup d'état attempt, Pachakutik stated that President Rafael Correa was authoritarian and issued a press release opposing him and supporting police and army rebels.

[8][better source needed] Golinger accused Pachakutik of having accepted funding from USAID and NED, and playing a role as part of a United States plan to destabilise Latin American democracies in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA).

[13]According to left-wing Ecuadorian scholar Pablo Ospina Peralta, it is "a social movement that is diverse, popular, and multicultural.

Although Ehlers failed to win the election, he placed third with nearly twenty percent of the popular vote despite having less than five months to prepare his campaign.

Pachakutik, along with a strong civil society effort by CONAIE and others, was instrumental in pushing for the new Ecuadorian Constitution in 1998 which, among other things, recognized the country as multi-cultural, paving the way for such reforms as bilingual education.

Since the 1998 elections in which Pachakutik's amount of representation declined, the party has never quite reached its prior levels of support and has been unable to topple the majority of the Congress that does not share their views.

However, with Gutierrez out, the return of Luis Macas to the presidency of CONAIE and the opposition to the signature of an agreement of free trade with United States, they have been able to reunify to the movement.