Here are the latest developments from Pope Francis' trip to South America:

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1:15 p.m. CDT

Crowds are beginning to gather along the route in Quito, Ecuador, that the pope will take from the airport to the papal nuncio's residence where he will be staying.

Francis will switch from a car to the bubble-windowed popemobile for the last five miles of the trip.

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1:05 p.m. CDT

Indigenous peoples — Quechua, Aymara, Shuar, Guarani, Chiquitano — are prevalent all in all three countries Francis is visiting this week.

Humberto Cholango is ex-president of Ecuador's dominant indigenous federation, CONAIE (Koh'-nye). He says his group sought a separate event with Pope Francis during his trip to South America but the Vatican said the pontiff's schedule was too packed.

Cholango says 30 indigenous delegates will attend a speech by the pope on Tuesday outside Quito's cathedral.

That contrasts with what's planned for Bolivia, whose President Evo Morales is Aymara.  

An Aymara honor guard will greet the pope when he arrives there Wednesday. Church officials also say a choir of lowlands Indians will perform the Baroque music that Jesuit missionaries introduced there in colonial times.

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10:50 a.m. CDT

When Ecuador's President Rafael Correa greets Pope Francis at Quito's airport this afternoon it will be the fourth time the two have met.

Correa is a practicing Roman Catholic who worked as a missionary with a highlands indigenous community as a young man. He says in an interview published Sunday in the official newspaper El Telegrafo that the two have mutual friends among Ecuador's Jesuits.

When the pope headed the religious order in Argentina he sent young seminarians to study in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

The priest in charge of those studies, Francisco Cortes Garcia, is now 91 and walks with a cane with a built-in flashlight. The pope specifically asked to see him on this visit.

Known as Padre Paquito, he is among 22 Jesuits lunching privately with the pope in Guayaquil on Monday.

It will be the first time the two have met since 1985.

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10:35 a.m. CDT

Ecuador's president appears to be trying to capitalize on Pope Francis' huge popularity.

In Quito, where the pope arrives this afternoon, billboards erected by Rafael Correa's leftist government quote the pontiff's reflections on the same inequalities the president argues against. All bear Francis' smiling visage.

One in Guayaquil says: "It's not enough to wait for the poor to pick up the crumbs that fall from the table of the rich."

But church officials say the quote is inaccurate on one billboard that reads: "The redistribution of wealth should be demanded." Catholic authorities say the pope used the word "distribution," not "redistribution."

Political opponents have cried foul, saying Correa is bent on that very redistribution.

Correa has been recently buffeted by the most serious protests of his more than eight years in power. They were sparked by legislation that would have imposed a 75 percent tax on inheritance and real estate capital gains. Correa has suspended the proposal.

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9:30 a.m. (0730 GMT)

Pope Francis is in the air, heading to his native continent of South America on a nine-day pastoral pilgrimage.

The Alitalia plane flying Francis and his entourage to Quito, Ecuador, left Rome on Sunday at 9:15 a.m. (0715 GMT). The Argentine-born pope will also visit Bolivia and Paraguay. He returns to Rome on July 13.

History's first Latin American pope is returning with a message of solidarity with the region's poor, who are expected to turn out in droves.

"The pope of the poor" chose to visit Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay because they are among the poorest and most marginal nations of a region that claims 40 percent of the world's Catholics. He's skipping his homeland of Argentina, at least partly to avoid papal entanglement in this year's presidential election.