Levantamientos and Forajidos
by Fernando Marti
Part of my reason for traveling to Ecuador was to try to understand the political landscape there, that had just in April toppled another lousy president, in the uprising of the forajidos. I tried to find as many books and articles as I could about the rise of the indigenous movement in Ecuador over the last ten years, and got a chance to interview Alexis Ponce from the Permanent Assembly on Human Rights in Quito.
Ecuador has had eight presidents in ten years, the newspapers like to say (Sixto, Bucaram, Rosalía, our only woman president, if only for four hours, Alarcon, Mahuad, Noboa, Lucio, Palacio), a sure sign of instability, of the fragility of Latin American “democracy,” of the lack of constitutional order. We Latin Americans seem to be, almost by definition, incapable of order. Three presidents ousted by popular unarmed uprisings, levantamientos. I like to think this is a sign of true democracy. We don't like the guy, he lied to us, we rise up and kick him out. Not with weapons, not with big costly recall campaigns, but with simple power of the people. Unlike other Latin American countries, Ecuador's military doesn't have a deep-seated history of repression. When the angry crowds outside the Palacio de Carondelet, the presidential palace, get too big, they turn on their commander-in-chief. “Sorry, Mr. President, here's your helicopter.”
In 1997 we elected Abdalá Bucaram, who ran as “el loco,” the crazy one, who sang his own theme song (“Madman in Love”) on the campaign trail with scantily clad backup singers, sometimes sported a Hitler moustache, and lost his temper in fits of rage. He managed to do what no one else could do: he united the left and the rights, the unions and the indigenous movements, the workers and the middle classes, against him. He lasted six months.
His ouster managed to do something else: the indigenous movement, which burst onto the national consciousness in 1990 with a massive Inti Raymi march on the capital demanding recognition and autonomy after decades of being relegated to the world of Ecuador's “folklore,” now understood that they had the power to radically change the state. The movement, through its federation of indigenous nationalities, the CONAIE, allied with the Coordinadora de Movimientos Sociales, which brought together dozens of liberation theology groups, ecologists, afro-ecuadorians, women's groups, campesinos, street vendors, and new unions in the energy sector, began to flex its collective power.
There seems to be a new call every few years for a new Constituyente, a new constitutional assembly. How many constitutions has Ecuador had? Our last new one, in 1998, after Abdalá fled, was to be the great hope for the indigenous and the social movements. The indigenous movement sought to create reforms to redefine Ecuador as a “plurinational” country, for autonomy for indigenous justice systems, for the right to the land, and in particular, for the right to be free from exploitation of the international oil companies. The Constitutional Assembly ended up filled with the same old parties, concerned about how to pass out the power between themselves (“Ni partidos ni repartidos,” says one slogan on a wall.) So we now have one of the more progressive constitutions in Latin America, defining Ecuador as a plurinational country, ensuring rights for women, for the environment, even sexual orientation, but the same old crooks in power…
Ecuador is unique in its own form of “instability.” We had an agrarian reform in the 60's, which, however incomplete, did begin to create the conditions for self-determination for the indigenous communities. Despite incidents of repression, we have an unspoken understanding that violence will not be accepted, whether the repression of the military and police, or of terrorist acts. And, despite officer training from the “School of the Americas,” the army has maintained a relative nationalist autonomy from US control. We've been the last Latin American country to attempt privatizations, and never got very far. This may not be much to go on, but with all the corruption in the government, it gives us hope that not all is lost.
A series of massive marches throughout 1999 called for by the CONAIE culminated in a march on the capital in January 2000. The uprising had been foretold: in the previous days two volcanoes had erupted, and the night before was greeted with a new moon. The indigenous people were clear: they were unarmed, this was to be a peaceful revolution, but a revolution nonetheless, led under the rainbow flag of their movement. They arrived from small villages throughout the Sierra and Amazonía. Despite army blockades of the main highways they arrived in groups of tens and twenties, through side roads, until there were 20-60,000 people in the capital, camped out on the grounds of the Casa de la Cultura.
The indígenas on the streets performed ritual cleansings of the people of “saco y corbata,” the suit and tie bureaucrats and office workers trying to make their way through the throngs of Indians descended on the city. They would find themselves in the center of a circle of indigenous people, and the shamans would have them take off their shoes and leave walking barefoot, saying, “It's been too long since you felt the earth beneath your feet.” They would have them place their hands on the earth, saying, “Take care of the earth, your earth. Don't mistreat the Indian, don't be corrupt, don't charge bribes…” If a cop happened on a group by himself, he would be asked to point to the direction from which the sun rises. Putting dirt in their hands, the shaman would whisper in their ears, “Go in peace, don't repress the people…” In some cases, where the shamans weren't around, the acts turned more violent.
They did not just march against the President: they had seen how that resulted the previous time. They marched against the four corrupt governmental powers (the executive, the legislative, the judicial, and the electoral), the whole rotten constitutional order, the apparatus of the system. Their intent was to replace it with new more democratic and responsive institutions. A People's Parliament was convened in the days leading up to the march, presided by the former arch-bishop of Cuenca, Msgr. Luna Tobar. But there was a difference in this march from the previous ones: the march shied away from the traditional left parties and the traditional unions. And this time, they counted on the tacit support of sections of the armed forces. On the final day, January 21, accompanied by dissident colonels from the army, and leaders of the social movements, the Indians entered the congress and took it over. They declared an interim government, with the support of the colonels, but it crumbled within 24 hours. There was no Fidel or Marcos to give the moment its voice and hold it together while the indigenous people “consensed” on their next move. They scarcely expected to be so successful. The colonels handed power back to the generals, who returned things to their “constitutional order,” placing the vice president in power.
From a distance it seemed once again like another of those pieces of political theater, where voices are raised, points made, but in the end nothing really changes. If anything had changed, it's that the leaders of the indigenous movement had had a taste of power. But even as they began to grasp it in their hands, the power seemed to slip through their fingers like grains of sand. What does it mean to go from counter-power (resistance) to power? If power is a corrupting influence, do we need to always stay in the role of not-power?
In 2003, Pachakutic, the electoral arm of the indigenous movement, threw in their luck with Lucio Gutierrez, the most charismatic and ambitious of the colonels who had supported the 2000 takeover. He won the elections as a coalition between Pachakutic and his own party, the Patriotic Society of January 21. He presented himself in the line of Hugo Chavez, and he promised much. He was also the darkest president Ecuador has had, bringing hope to mestizos and Indians, that things could really change in Ecuador. But he turned out to be just another populist like the rest, trading cabinet posts for political endorsements. Or, as many suspect, perhaps he was something worse, something more insidious. In the six months that the coalition government lasted, he managed to infiltrate with his own hacks all the political “spaces” that the indigenous people had been carving for themselves over the last decade. He had managed to coopt the leftist parties that had supported him, and coopted or bought outright many indigenous leaders. By the time it left the coalition, the indigenous movement had lost much of the prestige and moral authority that it had enjoyed just two years before, many leaders tainted by their association with Lucio, seen as naïve, and caught in infighting between rival indigenous groups. Many evangelical Christian Indians remained close to Lucio, and Antonio Vargas, former head of the CONAIE, remained as Social Welfare Minister in Lucio's government.
But maybe it's all for good. Soured on reliance on electoral politics, on the pursuit of central power, CONAIE still has its work in community building, its ongoing challenge to neoliberal policies and oil drilling. Mexico has its “ejido” as a living symbol of its precapitalist roots, a different way of doing things, that permeates far beyond the indigenous communities where it is a fact of life. In Ecuador we have the “minga,” an Andean cooperative labor of building a village house, clearing a field, spanning a bridge, or cleaning the streets. The Indians have begun calling for a “Minga Genral,” a general cleansing, to rebuild the country, to refound it…
Lucio himself lasted only another year. For a while after Pachakutic's split, he allied himself with the right-wing party, the Social Christians, and later abandoned them to seek the support of the exiled populist ex-president Bucaram. Lucio had run a campaign against corruption, and had only managed to put in his own cronies, his entire extended family, and his close military comrades, in cabinet positions. Part of his campaign had called for “depoliticizing” the Supreme Court, controlled for many years by justices friendly to the right-wing, and now he moved to get Congress to fire the entire Supreme Court, which he immediately filled with his friends, and whose first act was to cancel the arrest warrants on the two ex-Presidents and an ex-Vice President, including Bucaram, all wanted on corruption charges. He thought that he had bought off all his enemies, coopted or neutralized all the opposition. He hadn't counted that the people have a memory, and that they are more and more realizing that governments exist only by their consent…
In 2004 the CONAIE called for more protests against their former ally Lucio. In early 2005, the right in its coastal stronghold and the center-left in its Sierra stronghold called for rallies against the President, and the party faithful showed up to protest. But in the end it was just regular people, fed up, pissed off, cynical about all the parties, unorganized by any one leader but connected by email, cell phone, text messaging, and local radio stations, and fueled by anarchical creativity, that forced the new levantamiento. In the media blackouts, Radio La Luna, a small popular education station in Quito, was key. As the street protests mounted, La Luna became an all call-in station, listeners throwing out ideas for that night's protests, seconded by others, police and military movements announced via cell phone and instantly transmitted ahead to the streets. After one night's protest with cacerolas (banging of pots and pans) in front of the President's house in his fancy neighborhood, he called them “forajidos,” lawless ones. The lawless ones took on the name with pride. From then on, the calls to La Luna began, “I am Forajida Marta Guzmán, cédula número 0973458…,” I am a forajida, here is my name and national ID number, if any police are listening, I am a proud citizen, perhaps lawless to you, but performing my civic duty to topple bad governments. (One afternoon in Quito, Michelle and I wander into the Pichincha provincial government building. Above a Guayasamín mural depicting the sun and the corn, heroic Indians, the conquering Spaniard, the suffering mestizo, the boot-jacked military man, is a sign: “Regicidio es el derecho del pueblo.” The killing of kings is the right of the people.)
The protests began as a middle-class movement, tired and scared of the return of the populist el Loco from the coast. The middle classes here, not so far from the bottom, are seeing the neoliberal agenda as an attack against their own interests, too. Alexis explains it like this: the middle class in Quito are not like the middle class in Caracas (those whom Chávez calls the escuálidos) or in Santiago in 73 (or in Guayaquil, I add) concerned about their second homes in Miami. This middle class reads Galeano and listens to Silvio. These protests are not necessarily of desperation, brought on only by the “objective conditions” of hunger or poverty or dispossession. Like the Zapatistas, at the core it is a struggle about dignity, about the right to claim one's own future.
On the streets popular assemblies spring up in every neighborhood, caracoles urbanos . I bet there were more assemblies in the streets of Quito than soviets in the streets of Petrograd in 1917, Alexis says with exaggeration. Middle-class and workers, talking to each other, maybe seeing each other as equals in the right to determine the future of the country, for the first time, all discussing what to do. Indigenous leaders were invited to the assemblies, but the old leftists and dirigentes could only participate as equals, and they stayed back, looking dour faced, not knowing what to do when they couldn't have the microphone, as the people talked in small groups, and planned, and laughed. What was different was the participation of all the women, all the youth, the elders, the school students. Alexis tells us that unlike so many meetings he's attended in the past, these were full of happiness and laughter, of the joy of people finally trying to decide a future for themselves. Every so often they would stop to sing the national anthem, the song every Ecuadorian child knows by heart, singing of throwing off the imperial yoke, and kicking out the tyrants.
The slogan was, “Que se vayan todos,” as in Argentina in 2001. Everybody out – the President, the Congress, the courts, the whole stinking system. But unlike Argentina, this was not a moment of economic collapse. There weren't factories and stores to be taken over by the workers and run as cooperatives, there weren't doctors bartering their medical services for food, and the popular assemblies didn't seem to keep their force as a counter-power. Nonetheless, it gives me hope. We've tasted our own power, and this may be enough to feed our hope for a better future. These are the moments when the strictures of reality seem to unhinge, when possibilities seem limitless. They seem to come along only every once in a while, for us as individuals, as well as for societies, windows of boundless opportunity that close soon enough, leaving ecstatic memories and, one hopes, some kind of shift or transformation. But it's impossible to tell in our short time there, what qualitative change this little revolution of the forajidos has had.
The protests soon spread throughout the city, to the poor barrios to the south, to the outlying villages. As Lucio attempts to bus in supporters from his hometown (paid by the Ministry of Social Welfare), the people from the south blockade the roads. On the last day, Lucio commits a fatal tactical error. He announces that the schools will be closed in early morning, after all the students have already arrived in their classrooms. They pour out of the schools, and join the multitudes in the streets. Lucio takes a military helicopter to the airport, only to find the runway filled with people, denying him escape. He takes refuge in the Brazilian embassy.
The vice-president, Alfredo Palacio, who had become a critic of the President early into the term, is named President. Back to order. I'm typing this in early August 2005. Palacio talks tough on national sovereignty, social spending, etc., but already he shows signs of buckling to US and IMF interests. The forajidos are back in the streets tonight.
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