Populist Seduction in Latin America. Carlos de la Torre

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СКАЧАТЬ percent in 1939 and 22 percent in 1944 (Cremieux 1946, 77). Electoral laws further discouraged poor people and immigrants from voting because voters had to reregister and pay a fee for each election and return to the district where they had first registered to cast their ballots (Maiguashca and North 1991, 133). The small proportion of voters, which had none theless increased from 3.1 percent in 1933 to 8.8 percent in 1948 did not mean political apathy. Starting with the 1939–40 presidential campaign, Velasco Ibarra’s followers felt they were participants in the political struggle and asserted their rights by symbolically occupying public spaces and demonstrating for their leader. This occupation of public spaces was in itself an act of self-recognition and affirmation of the political rights of people excluded by the lack of honesty at the polls and a restricted franchise from the political decision-making apparatus.

      Four years later, the country prepared to elect a new president in the elections of early June 1944. After a series of discussions, debates, and maneuvers, two candidates emerged: the Liberal Miguel Albornoz, supported by President Arroyo del Río, and José María Velasco Ibarra, whose candidacy was promoted by the broad-based Alianza Democrática Ecuatoriana (ADE). All the principal political parties except the Partido Liberal-Radical had joined forces to form ADE in July 1943 (Partido Conservador [Conservative Party], Partido Comunista [Communist Party], Partido Socialista [Socialist Party], Vanguardia Socialista Revolucionaria [Revolutionary Socialist Vanguard], Partido Liberal Independiente [Independent Liberal Party], and Frente Democrático [Democratic Front]), and sponsor Velasco Ibarra as their candidate for the upcoming elections. This coalition also included organizations of civil society, such as workers’ unions, student federations, electoral committees, artisan associations, and truck and bus drivers’ organizations. The Liberal government prevented Velasco from returning to the country to direct his own presidential campaign. This arbitrary executive order, the repression of Velasquistas, and the memories of previous electoral frauds led the opposition to conclude that the Liberals were preparing yet another fraud for June 1944.

      The second cause for the revolt was Ecuador’s military defeat by Peru in 1941, which resulted in the loss of half of the national territory located in the Amazonian tropical rain forest. For many people, especially young army officers, the cause of the defeat was the ineptitude and corruption of the Liberal regime. The anonymous anti-Arroyo del Río flyer “Death to the Traitor,” circulated in 1941, concluded: “Ecuadorian soldiers, Why don’t you take up the weapons of the homeland, to punish the Traitor and trafficker who has sold the national soil! How much longer will you tolerate the infamy of obeying the orders of such a monster?” (Biblioteca Aurelio Espinosa Pólit, Cotocollao [hereafter BAEP], Hojas volantes [flyers] 1939–45, no. 100). Nationalistic feelings were reinforced in late May 1944, when the government agreed to the establishment of a new frontier with Peru, which validated the loss of half of the national territory.

      The third cause for the revolt was the rivalry between the regular army and the carabineros. Established in 1938, this repressive elite police force was not only autonomous from the army, it was also a parallel repressive institution with superior attributes of authority. Logically, the relationship between the carabineros and the army was one of rivalry. For example, Major Luis A. Nuñez, director of the May Revolution in the central highland city of Riobamba, related the following incidents between carabineros and the army: “The mockeries and insults of the carabineros continually fed animosity to them … they used to come to the barracks of the battalion Córdova with rude and defiant attitudes to try to scare people and to look for trouble, saying things such as: ‘We don’t think of you as men, and when the fight comes we’ll punish you as lads’” (Girón 1945, 307). The carabineros were hated by young army officers, who suspected that their institution was going to be replaced by this elite police force. Velasquistas and other opponents of the regime also detested them, leading officials of the carabineros to say in a press interview that the shout “Viva Velasco Ibarra” had become an “insult to our institution and they should not be surprised that we defend the decency of our corps” (El telégrafo, 15 May 1944). In this context, Albert Franklin, an American who lived in Ecuador in the 1930s and 1940s, wrote, “The shout ‘Viva Velasco Ibarra!’ which for nine years had only been an insult to authority, started to be heard with more frequency and with a new meaning. Velasco’s absence, instead of diminishing had increased his legend. In Quito, to the V for Victory was added another V, and nobody doubted the meaning of the two Vs formed with both hands: ‘Viva Velasco!’ These words became a crime, and jails started to be filled with offenders” (1984, 350–51).

      In Guayaquil on 19 May 1944, carabineros assassinated a university student, Héctor Hugo Paute. On 21 May in Quito, they killed a fifteen-year-old girl, María del Carmen Espinosa. The funerals of these victims turned into mass demonstrations against the government. Both funerals also transformed the victims of police brutality into martyrs. As suggested by José Álvarez Junco in his study of Spanish populist leader Alejandro Lerroux in Catholic cultures, “the strength of martyrdom … does not only demand posthumous honors, but also produces guilt and commands revenge; it does not calm but stirs up passions. It is precisely what is convenient for mobilizing movements” (1990, 255).

      The fourth cause of La Gloriosa was popular discontent with the high cost of living. As a consequence of the export boom of war-related products such as balsa wood, rubber, and chinchona bark, the country experienced an inflationary spiral. The price of basic foods increased by 400 percent from 1938 to 1944, while real monthly wages decreased from an average of 164.44 sucres in 1941 to 133.31 sucres in 1943 (INIESEC 1984, 46–47). These inflationary processes were felt most strongly in the cities, in the context of important socioeconomic changes produced by the collapse of cacao exports and the emergence of new export products. The 1930s and 1940s were decades of important economic and social change that resulted in a relative crisis of paternalistic authority in the countryside, in dramatic processes of urbanization, and, most important, in the growth of popular organizations.

      The conventional view depicts the 1930s and 1940s as a time of overall stagnation and transition from cacao to banana production. Recent scholarship, however, points to the diversity of experiences in different regions of the country (Maiguashca 1991; Maiguashca and North 1991). This historical period was not only characterized by the crash of the first cycle of agro-export-led cacao development,⁴ but also by the growth of other export crops and products such as coffee, panama hats, ivory nuts (tagua), rice, oil, gold, and, during the Second World War era, rubber and balsa. This economic period, characterized by the decline of cacao and the growth and diversification of other export products, resulted in a crisis and reconstitution of paternalistic authority that was experienced differently in the three regions of Ecuador.

      The cacao crisis changed the agricultural and social landscape of the coast. Unlike the highlands, the patriarchal hacienda system had not had time to develop here. Rice production and sugar refining took the place left by cacao. Big cacao hacienda owners, who were more an exporting than an agricultural elite, shifted the emphasis of their operations, whereas medium and small cacao hacienda owners were eventually wiped out by the crisis (Marchán 1987, 276). Some cacao haciendas disappeared, others became fragmented, and a new elite of banana and sugar interests eventually replaced the cacao elite. For many agricultural workers, the first effect of the crisis was unemployment. Some of the former cacao plantation laborers became sharecroppers, others went to work in sugar plantations, still others stayed in the cacao haciendas, and others migrated to Guayaquil.

      In the northern and central highlands, at least from the beginning of the century, a process of differentiation between modernizing and traditional haciendas had taken place (Arcos 1984; Arcos and Marchán 1978; Marchán 1987). Some hacendados responded to increasing market opportunities by specializing in dairy production, modernizing production techniques, and abolishing precapitalist labor systems and introducing wage labor relations. These modernization efforts, which took place in selected areas, did not result in the transformation of most traditional haciendas or in the overall establishment of capitalist relations of production. The traditional hacienda system and the latifundia-minifundia polarity continued to characterize the highlands and the country’s agrarian scene in general until the 1970s.

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