Ecuador:
Clash Of Old And New
By Federico Fuentes
30 July, 2007
Green Left
Weekly
Caracas:
Denouncing the congress as “rubbish” and a “national
disgrace”, left-wing Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa called
on the upcoming constituent assembly, for which there will be elections
held on September 30, to dissolve the body, which is widely viewed as
corrupt. The calls came after the opposition-controlled congress amended
a number of recent laws introduced by the executive to curb unprecedented
rises in the price of food.
Correa’s call also
came in the wake of congress’s censure of finance minister Ricardo
Patino over a scandal involving the secret filming of a discussion between
the minister and figures from the banking sector. Patino is highly popular
due to his hardline opposition to international financial institutions,
recently stating that Ecuador should not pay its “illegitimate”
foreign debt.
Reuters reported on July
25 that deputy economy minister Fausto Ortiz had been made Patino’s
successor. The news wire reported that “Ortiz, who has said his
role is to make sure the government avoids a default on its foreign
debt, told Reuters Ecuador would not do anything that might jeopardize
foreign financing”.
According to the July 22
edition of Venezuelan daily 2001, Correa made reference to the concerted
campaign by big business to push prices up by 25%-50%, stating the “the
groups of power are desperate and they will try to destabilise us by
any means possible”. He threatened business owners with prison
terms if they were found to be involved in speculation.
“We will give them
until Monday [July 23] for prices to return to their normal level or
we will take measures [via] decrees and we will put in prison the business
owners, the intermediaries, who are speculating.”
He asked the population to
be “prepared” because “this is only the beginning.
Ahead of us are days which will be much more harder because the oligarchy,
the partyocracy [a reference to the loathed traditional parties of the
elite that dominate congress], certain media outlets, the banking sector,
are desperate.”
Dispute over hegemony
According to Virgilo Hernandez
— a candidate for Agreement Country, an alliance formed by Correa’s
party Alliance Country to contest the constituent assembly elections
— this clash was only the latest in an ongoing “period of
confrontation” between Correa and “the oligarchic powers,
financial powers, and large media corporations”.
“We are living through
a dispute over hegemony between the oligarchic forces, those forces
that have opposed change, and the process of transformation being pushed
by President Correa and other forces that are supporting Correa”,
he explained to Green Left Weekly during a visit to Venezuela in mid-July.
Correa contested the 2006
presidential elections with the stated aimed of bringing about a “citizen’s
revolution”, uniting Ecuadorians behind a radical project aimed
at moving Ecuador away from neoliberalism. Since day one of the Correa
government, the international and local elites have been campaigning
against the Correa government, which they see as a direct threat to
their interests.
The congress has been one
of the battle sites between the elites, represented in the form of the
traditional political parties, and Correa’s project. While Correa
won convincingly in the second round of the presidential elections,
his party did not contest the concurrently held elections for the congress.
This left control of this widely discredited body in the hands of parties
tied to the Ecuadorian elites. Instead, a central point of Correa’s
election campaign was to call a constituent assembly to do away with
congress and rewrite the constitution to lay the foundations for a new
Ecuador.
This is an idea shared by
many in Ecuador. Blanca Chancoso, leader of ECUARUNARI, the largest
indigenous organisation affiliated to the Confederation of Indigenous
Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), told GLW that congress had lost all
credibility, and that “it is the problem”.
“The people are demanding
its dissolution; it is not just a policy of the president. I believe
that after the new constitution is approved, a new congress should be
installed”, she added. This was reflected in the strong show of
support for Correa in April, when over 80% of Ecuadorians voted in favor
of convening a constituent assembly, giving a massive boost to his popularity
and his political project.
While Hernandez is not a
member of Correa’s party, his organisation, Democratic Alternative,
has decided to come behind Correa’s project, running candidates
on his slate for the constituent assembly. Hernandez believes that Correa
has a “clear conviction to create a homeland for all” and
to construct a more democratic Ecuador. Through the constituent assembly,
Ecuadorians will be able to work out “what we want our ’socialism
of the 21st century’ to look like”.
For Hernandez, such a society
requires “a democracy without end” with the extension and
deepening of democracy “in the economic sphere, in the political
sphere — [for example,] how can we democratise the right to education,
health, housing, which until now have been in the constitution only
in a rhetorical form”.
Indigenous movement
On the other hand, Chancoso
explained that CONAIE would be supporting the candidates of Pachakutik,
the political arm of the Ecuador’s powerful indigenous movement.
“In the political, electoral sphere, Pachakutik is calling on
different social sectors to converge, with a strong indigenous identity
— which does not mean a movement or party that is exclusively
indigenous, but rather that clearly identifies itself with the indigenous
people.”
Through the constituent assembly,
Chancoso argues that Ecuadorians could begin to “lay the foundations
of a new country that brings together the indigenous and non-indigenous
population”.
“We [the indigenous
people] are more than 40% of the population. We have being putting forward
our proposal of a plurinational state. Our country is not made up of
just one people, but rather is comprised of many millenary peoples with
different cultures, which existed long before the Spanish invasion.”
Chancoso explained that for
indigenous people, the demand of a “plurinational” state
was a call for “unity based on diversity”. This diversity
allow for the self-determination of the indigenous peoples “as
communities, as nations”, but seen from within a “political
process of identity, on the basis of a common political agenda, an agenda
of sovereignty of the country”.
“Our slogan is ’Never
again a country without us’. Even if we do not gain a majority
of delegates, we believe that we will be fighting inside [the assembly]
to enshrine in the constitution real changes, a real restructuring to
refound the country …”
Even though there are different
lists that will represent different sections of the left in the upcoming
elections — Agreement Country, Pachakutik and the Maoist-influenced
Movement for Popular Democracy (MPD) — Hernandez said that there
was an important need “to make the effort to have a common project.
We [Agreement Country] are making an effort to find points of agreement
to transform the country and to deepen democracy, which we characterise
as part of this new socialism of the 21st century.”
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