THROUGHOUT ITS HISTORY, Ecuador has displayed a continuity in
traditional cultural and economic patterns as well as in social and
political interaction among the country's highly heterogeneous social
groupings. Modern patterns overlay the traditional, making present-day
Ecuador a veritable living museum of its varied, rich heritage.
Pre-Columbian Ecuador is reflected in the persistence of native
languages, customs, and economic activities among a considerable, though
diminishing, number of communities in the Sierra (Andean highlands) and
the Oriente (eastern region). The legacy of three centuries of Spanish
colonial rule is also pervasive and includes a social inequality that
largely coincides with race, rural land tenure patterns, and the
nation's dominant European cultural expressions.
Analysts of Ecuador's postindependence political history have pointed
to a number of persistent ingredients. Regionalism is especially
prominent, particularly as expressed in the struggle for power between
the Sierra, represented by Quito, and the Costa (coastal region),
represented by Guayaquil. Regionalism has coincided with the party
struggle between the Quito-based Conservatives and the Guayaquil-based
Liberals. Personalism, from the political prominence of military
caudillos in the early years of the republic to the civilian dictators
and the populists of more recent times, has been another persistent
theme since independence.
Perhaps the most consistent element of Ecuador's republican history
has been its political instability. In just over a century and a half,
there have been no fewer than eighty-six changes of government, making
for an average of 1.75 years in power for each regime. The 1979
Constitution is Ecuador's seventeenth national charter. Ecuador's
political instability is a product of the struggles mentioned above
combined with the important political role maintained by the nation's
armed forces. The longest periods of civilian, constitutional rule were
between 1912 and 1925 and again between 1948 and 1961. Governmental
institutions, as a result, have had little opportunity to mature into
established expressions of civilian, democratic rule.
Ecuadorian economic history has displayed marked cycles of
"boom" and "bust" based on the rise and fall of
particular export products. The longest-lasting "boom,"
between the last years of the nineteenth century and the early 1920s,
resulted from Ecuador's near monopoly on the production and exportation
of cacao. An onagain , off-again banana boom punctuated the decades of
the 1950s and 1960s, whereas the oil boom--the most pronounced as well
as the shortest of all the boom periods--lasted from 1972 until 1979.
The sudden end of the oil expansion coincided with the onset of a
foreign debt crisis bred by massive foreign borrowing by two successive
military governments (1972-79) and by Jaime Rold�s Aguilera's regime
(1979-81).
Although petroleum revenues brought about significant social change
by generating a sizable middle class, the widely anticipated political
changes were less apparent. The populist Rold�s and Conservative Le�n
Febres Cordero Ribadeneyra (1984-88) represented traditional elements,
although other prominent postboom personalities, such as Osvaldo Hurtado
Larrea (1981-84), did espouse more modern, center-leftist ideologies.
Still, prosperity from petroleum strengthened the state's traditionally
weak fiscal hand and promised to tilt the regional balance of power
significantly toward the nation's capital.
The intensity of the political struggle, commonly played out between
the president and Congress during periods of civilian rule, did not seem
to diminish after 1979. Perhaps the central unanswered question of the
1980s, however, was whether the armed forces would persist in their
historically active political role, or would be content to operate from
the sidelines without directly intervening in the political process.
Ecuador - PRE-HISPANIC ERA
Ecuador offers little archeological evidence of its preHispanic
civilizations. Nonetheless, its most ancient artifacts-- remnants of the
Valdivia culture found along the coast north of the modern city of Santa
Elena in Guayas Province--date from as early as 3500 B.C.. Other major coastal archaeological sites are found in the
provinces of Manab� and Esmeraldas; major sites in the Sierra are found
in Carchi and Imbabura provinces in the north, Tungurahua and Chimborazo
provinces in the middle of the Andean highlands, and Ca�ar, Azuay, and
Loja provinces in the south. Nearly all of these sites are dated in the
last 2,000 years. Large parts of Ecuador, including almost all of the
Oriente, however, remain unknown territory to archaeologists.
Knowledge of Ecuador before the Spanish conquest is limited also by
the absence of recorded history within either the Inca or pre-Inca
cultures as well as by the lack of interest taken in Ecuador by the
Spanish chroniclers. Before the Inca conquest of the area that comprises
modern-day Ecuador, the region was populated by a number of distinct
tribes that spoke mutually unintelligible languages and were often at
war with one another. Four culturally related Indian groups, known as
the Esmeralda, the Manta, the Huancavilca, and the Pun�, occupied the
coastal lowlands in that order from north to south. They were hunters,
fishermen, agriculturalists, and traders. Trade was especially important
among different coastal groups, who seem to have developed considerable
oceanic travel, but the lowland cultures also traded with the peoples of
the Sierra, exchanging fish for salt.
The Sierra was populated by elements, from north to south, of the
Pasto, the Cara, the Panzaleo, the Puruh�, the Ca�ari, and the Palta
cultures. These people lived mostly on mountainsides and in widely
dispersed villages located in the fertile valleys between the Cordillera
Occidental (Western Chain) and the Cordillera Oriental (Eastern Chain)
of the Andes. The Sierra natives were a sedentary, agricultural people,
cultivating maize, quinoa, beans, and many varieties of potatoes and
squashes. The use of irrigation was prevalent, especially among the Ca�ari.
A wide variety of fruits, including pineapples and avocados, was grown
in the lower, warmer valleys. Historians believe that political
organization centered around local chieftains who collaborated with one
another in confederations or were subjected to "kings." Such
local chiefs had considerable authority; they could raise armies, for
example, and administer communal lands.
The Inca expansion northward from modern-day Peru during the late
fifteenth century met with fierce resistance by several Ecuadorian
tribes, particularly the Ca�ari, in the region around modern-day
Cuenca; the Cara in the Sierra north of Quito; and the Quitu, occupants
of the site of the modern capital, after whom it was to be named. The
conquest of Ecuador began in 1463 under the leadership of the ninth
Inca, the great warrior Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui. In that year, his son
Topa took over command of the army and began his march northward through
the Sierra. After defeating the Quitu, he moved southward along the
coast, and from there he launched an extensive ocean journey that took
him, depending on the account, to the Gal�pagos Islands or to the
Marquesas Islands in Polynesia. Upon his return, he tried unsuccessfully
to subdue the populations around the Gulf of Guayaquil and the island of
Pun�. By 1500 Topa's son, Huayna Capac, overcame the resistance of
these populations and that of the Cara, and thus incorporated all of
modern-day Ecuador into Tawantinsuyu, as the Inca empire was known.
The influence of these conquerors based in Cuzco (modern-day Peru)
was limited to about a half century, or less in some parts of Ecuador.
During that period, some aspects of life remained unchanged. Traditional
religious beliefs, for example, persisted throughout the period of Inca
rule. In other areas, however, such as agriculture, land tenure, and
social organization, Inca rule had a profound effect despite its
relatively short duration. Farming remained the major form of
subsistence, but the Inca introduced a variety of new crops, including
yucca, sweet potatoes, coca, and peanuts. The use of llamas and
irrigation was expanded considerably. Largely in private hands
previously, land became, in theory at least, the property of the Inca
emperor. In practice, most land was held collectively by the ayllu,
an agrarian community group headed by a curaca, that was the
basic social grouping under the Inca. Within the ayllu, each
domestic family unit was allotted a small plot of arable land to grow
food for its own consumption. The state and the clergy also held a
substantial amount of land, which was worked by the emperor's subjects
as part of their obligatory public service.
Emperor Huayna Capac became very fond of Quito, making it a secondary
capital of Tawantinsuyu and living out his elder years there before his
death in about 1527. He preferred to rule through local curacas
as long as they were willing to accept the divine authority of the Inca
and to pay tribute. When he met opposition, the emperor dispersed large
parts of local populations to other areas of the empire and replaced
them with colonists who were brought from as far away as Chile. This
wholesale movement of populations helped spread Quechua, the language of
Cuzco, into Ecuador. A standing army, a large bureaucracy, and a
temporally important clergy further enforced the rule of the emperor.
Huayna Capac's sudden death from a strange disease, described by one
Spanish chronicler as "probably smallpox or measles,"
precipitated a bitter power struggle between Huascar, a son borne by
Huayna Capac's sister and thus the legitimate heir, and Atahualpa, a son
who, although borne by a lesser wife, was reputedly his father's
"favorite." This struggle raged during the half-decade before
the arrival of Francisco Pizarro's conquering expedition in 1532. The
key battle of this civil war was fought on Ecuadorian soil, near
Riobamba, where Huascar's northbound troops were met and defeated by
Atahualpa's southbound troops. Atahualpa's final victory over Huascar in
the days just before the Spanish conquerors arrived resulted in large
part from the loyalty of two of Huayna Capac's best generals, who were
based in Quito along with Atahualpa. The victory remains a source of
national pride to Ecuadorians as a rare case when "Ecuador"
forcefully bettered a "neighboring country."
Ecuador - DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST
The discovery and conquest of Ecuador by Spanish forces in the early
sixteenth century are adjuncts to the history of the conquest of Peru,
the richest of the New World prizes won for the Spanish crown. The
central figure of that history is Pizarro, an illiterate adventurer from
Trujillo in the Spanish region of Extremadura, who had accompanied Vasco
N��ez de Balboa in his crossing of the Isthmus of Panama to discover
the Pacific in 1513. Eleven years later, Panamanian governor Pedro Arias
de Avila ("Pedrarias") authorized Pizarro, in partnership with
an equally questionable character, a Castilian named Diego de Almargo,
and a priest named Fernando de Luque, financing to explore southward
down the west coast of South America. Their first two voyages, in 1524
and 1526, ended in failure; not until the third voyage, launched in
1531, would the Peruvian prize be won and the Inca be conquered.
The first European to set foot on the territory of modern-day Ecuador
was probably Bartolom� Ruiz de Estrada, the pilot for Pizarro on his
second voyage, who pushed southward while Pizarro explored the Colombian
coast and Almargo returned to Panama for supplies. Pizarro himself
landed on the Ecuadorian coast later during his exploratory voyage and
traveled as far as Tumbes in the extreme north of present-day Peru, in
defiance of official orders to return to Panama.
Having thus lost the favor of the king's representatives in Panama,
Pizarro was forced to return to the royal court in Spain to petition
King Charles I personally for authorization of a third voyage. Flush
with the success of Hern�n Cort�s in Mexico and tantalized by the gold
pieces brought by Pizarro from Tumbes and growing fables of great wealth
in the South American interior, Charles granted Pizarro authorization
and much more: the titles of governor and captain-general of Peru, a
generous salary, and extensive territorial concessions. Almargo was
granted important, although less generous, titles and privileges; his
resentment of this slight would affect relationships for the rest of the
conquest. At the time that Charles granted various titles to Pizarro and
Almargo, he named de Luque Bishop of Tumbes. Before returning to Panama
in 1530, Pizarro recruited for the conquest several immediate family
members, including two full brothers named Gonzalo and Juan as well as
two half-brothers. The participation of so many of Pizarro's relatives
further strained relations between the two partners in conquest.
Pizarro then embarked from Panama with some 180 men while Almargo
remained there to gather additional recruits. After thirteen days at
sea, Pizarro landed once again on the coast of Ecuador, where he
procured some gold, silver, and emeralds, which were dispatched to
Panama and put to good use in Almargo's efforts. Although the capture of
the Inca stronghold of Tumbes was Pizarro's first objective, he was
forced to spend several months in Ecuador, first nursing a rash of
ulcers and then fighting the fierce warriors of the island of Pun�. By
the time the conquerors arrived in Tumbes, it had been destroyed by the
Pun� warriors and its population dispersed. Just to the south, they
founded the first Spanish settlement in Peru, San Miguel de Tangarar�.
Upon their fateful departure to Cajamarca on September 24, 1532, Pizarro
left a lieutenant, Sebasti�n de Benalc�zar, in charge of protecting
and developing San Miguel as a Spanish base of operations. Two years
later, Benalc�zar would lead the conquering forces that moved northward
into Ecuador.
Meanwhile, Atahualpa was resting near Cajamarca, in the Sierra of
northern Peru, following the defeat and capture of his brother. He had
known of the arrival of foreign invaders for several months; it is not
clear why he did not order their obliteration before they could
penetrate into the heart of the empire. After a march of almost two
months, Pizarro arrived in Cajamarca and summoned Atahualpa from the
nearby thermal baths known today as the Ba�os del Inca. Reluctantly,
accompanied by several thousands of his best troops, Atahualpa went to
Cajamarca's central plaza, where he was met, not by the conquistadors,
but by their chaplain, Fray Vicente de Valverde, who called upon the
Inca emperor to submit to the representatives of the Spanish crown and
the Christian god. Atahualpa replied disparagingly and, upon his
throwing a Christian prayer book to the ground in contempt, concealed
Spanish soldiers opened fire, killing thousands of Atahualpa's defenders
and taking the Inca emperor captive. This slaughter, called "the
decisive battle" of the conquest of Peru by historian Hubert
Herring, took place on November 16, 1532.
A panic-stricken Atahualpa, fearing that Pizarro might be planning to
depose him in favor of his rival brother, summoned Huascar, at this time
imprisoned in Cuzco, to Cajamarca, then ordered him to be executed along
with hundreds of Huascar's nearest of kin. It served the Spaniards'
purposes to allow Atahualpa the freedom, from his cell, to command his
forces. Thus continued the rapid annihilation, through a vicious civil
war that now overlapped with the Spanish conquest, of the army and
leadership of one of the great polities of modern history. Pizarro was
not planning to depose Atahualpa, of course, but to execute him. First,
however, he had Atahualpa fill his cell, once with gold, then twice with
silver (estimated at 4,850 kilograms of gold and 9,700 kilograms of
silver) supposedly as ransom for his release. Instead the Spaniards
garrotted Atahualpa on August 29, 1533, following a mock trial at which
he was convicted of every charge that Pizarro could invent for the
occasion. Having deprived the Inca empire of leadership, Pizarro and
another conquistador, Hernando de Soto, moved south to Cuzco, the heart
of Tawantinsuyu, which they captured in November 1533; they then led
their men in an orgy of looting, pillaging, and torture in search of
more precious metals.
Benalc�zar, Pizarro's lieutenant and fellow Extremaduran, had
already departed from San Miguel with 140 foot soldiers and a few horses
on his conquering mission to Ecuador. At the foot of Mount Chimborazo,
near the modern city of Riobamba, he met and defeated the forces of the
great Inca warrior Rumi�ahui with the aid of Ca�ari tribesmen who,
happy to throw off the yoke of their Inca rulers, served as guides and
allies to the conquering Spaniards. Rumi�ahui fell back to Quito, and,
while in pursuit of the Inca army, Benalc�zar encountered another,
quite sizable, conquering party led by Guatemalan Governor Pedro de
Alvarado. Bored with administering Central America, Alvarado had set
sail for the south without the crown's authorization, landed on the
Ecuadorian coast, and marched inland to the Sierra. Pizarro had heard of
this competing expedition some time earlier and had sent Almargo north
to reinforce Benalc�zar. Together, Pizarro's two representatives
managed to convince Alvarado, with the help of a handsome amount of
gold, to call off his expedition and allow the "legal"
conquest to proceed as planned. Most of Alvarado's men joined Benalc�zar
for the siege of Quito.
Rumi�ahui left Quito in flames for the approaching conquistadors. It
was mid-1534 and, after the customary orgy of violence, in December the
Spanish established the city of San Francisco de Quito on top of the
ruins of the secondary Inca capital. Benalc�zar was soon off on more
conquests in Colombia to the north; it was not until December 1540 that
Quito received its first captain-general in the person of Gonzalo
Pizarro, the brother of Francisco.
Benalc�zar had also founded the city of Guayaquil in 1533, but it
had subsequently been retaken by the local Huancavilca tribesmen.
Francisco de Orellana, yet another lieutenant of Francisco Pizarro from
the Spanish city of Trujillo, put down the native rebellion and in 1537
reestablished this city, which a century later would become one of
Spain's principal ports in South America.
Orellana is chiefly remembered, however, for being the first European
to travel the length of the Amazon River. This journey, one of the great
adventure tales of Spain's conquest of America, began in February 1541,
when the lure of spices, particularly cinnamon, led Pizarro's brother
Gonzalo to set off from Quito to the eastern jungle with a party that
included 210 Spaniards and some 4,000 Indians. Orellana was second in
command. After several months of hardship and deprivation during a
crossing of the Cordillera Oriental of the Andes that cost the lives of
nearly half the party, Gonzalo Pizarro placed Orellana in charge of
building a brigantine in the Coca River in present-day Ecuador. Together
with fifty-seven Spaniards and several hundred Indians, Orellana sailed
downstream in search of food and friendly natives. The explorers never
rejoined Pizarro, however, but set out on their own in search of neither
food nor spices, but gold. "Having eaten our shoes and saddles
boiled with a few herbs," wrote Orellana in a caricature of the
ruggedness for which the Extremaduran conquerors were noted, "we
set out to reach the Kingdom of Gold." The group reached the mouth
of the Amazon, a name given by Orellana because he believed that they
had been attacked by the legendary giant female warriors at a point
below the Negro River, and sailed northward along the Atlantic coast as
far as Venezuela, then back to Spain. The journey completed by the
expedition headed by Orellana was not to be repeated for 100 years.
In the same August 1542, as Orellana reached the Atlantic, Gonzalo
Pizarro was stumbling back to Quito with the few surviving members of
his party. He found Peru in political chaos. Several years earlier,
Almargo had entered into open rebellion against Francisco Pizarro and
been defeated in battle, tried, and executed in his newly founded
capital city of Lima. The resentment among Almargo's followers did not
end, however, and in June 1541, Francisco Pizarro had been assassinated
by the remnants of Almargo's army. In an attempt to try to control the
unruly conquistadors and to end the enslavement of the native population
of America, the Spanish crown had promulgated the New Laws in 1542,
which in theory though not in practice abolished encomiendas,
and two years later it sent its first viceroy to head a newly created
colonial administrative system.
Gonzalo, who had little interest in being controlled by anyone,
defeated and killed the first viceroy on a battlefield near Quito. After
a brief period of glory, however, the younger Pizarro was himself
defeated by the forces of a subsequent royal emissary, and in 1548 he
was tried and hung for treason. It was the end of the tumultuous era of
the conquistadors and the beginning of two and a half centuries of
relatively pacific colonial rule.
Ecuador - SPANISH COLONIAL ERA
Spain's colonies in the New World were, legally, the personal
patrimony of the king, and he held absolute control over all matters in
Ecuador. Colonial administration at all levels was carried out in the
name of the monarch. The king's chief agency in Madrid was the Council
of the Indies, which devoted most of its energies to formulating
legislation designed to regulate virtually every aspect of colonial
life. The House of Trade, seated in Seville, was placed in charge of
governing commerce between Spain and the colonies. In America, the
king's major administrative agents were the viceroyalty, the audiencia
(court), and the municipal council (cabildo).
Between 1544 and 1563, Ecuador was an integral part of the
Viceroyalty of Peru, having no administrative status independent of
Lima. It remained a part of the Viceroyalty of Peru until 1720, when it
joined the newly created Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada; within the
viceroyalty, however, Ecuador was awarded its own audiencia in
1563, allowing it to deal directly with Madrid on certain matters. The
Quito Audiencia, which was both a court of justice and an
advisory body to the viceroy, consisted of a president and several
judges (oidores). The territory under the jurisdiction of Quito
considerably exceeded that of present-day Ecuador, extending southward
to the port of Paita in the north of present-day Peru, northward to the
port of Buenaventura and the city of Cali in the south of present-day
Colombia, and well out into the Amazon River Basin in the east. Quito
was also the site of the first (founded in 1547) and most important
municipal council within the area comprising modern-day Ecuador. It
consisted of several councilmen (regidores) whose extensive
responsibilities included the maintenance of public order and the
distribution of land in the vicinity of the local community.
The borders of the Audiencia (or kingdom as it was also
known) of Quito were poorly defined, and a great deal of its territory
remained either unexplored or untamed throughout much of the colonial
era. Only in the Sierra, and there only after a series of battles that
raged throughout the mid-sixteenth century, was the native population
fully subjugated by the Spanish. The jungle lowlands in both the Oriente
and the coastal region of Esmeraldas were, in contrast, refuges for an
estimated one-quarter of the total native population that remained
recalcitrant and unconquered throughout most or all of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Despite Orellana's harrowing journey of
discovery, the Oriente remained terra incognita to the Spanish until its
settlement by Jesuit missionaries beginning in the mid-seventeenth
century, and it continued to be largely inaccessible throughout the
remainder of the colonial period.
The coastal lowlands north of Manta were conquered, not by the
Spanish, but by blacks from the Guinean coast who, as slaves, were
shipwrecked en route from Panama to Peru in 1570. The blacks killed or
enslaved the native males and married the females, and within a
generation they constituted a population of zambos (mixed black
and Indian) that resisted Spanish authority until the end of the century
and afterwards managed to retain a great deal of political and cultural
independence.
The relative autonomy of this coastal region nearest to Quito
enhanced the effect of the Andes in isolating the Ecuadorian Sierra from
the rest of the world during most of the nearly three centuries of
colonial rule. Behind these barriers a social system was established
that was essentially a replica of the Spanish feudal system at the time
of the conquest, with the peninsulares (Spanish-born persons
residing in the New World) being the ruling, landed elite and the
Indians being the subject people who worked the land. Although a few
towns, particularly Quito, Riobamba, and Cuenca, grew along with the
administrative and Roman Catholic bureaucracies and the local textile
industries, colonial Ecuador was essentially a rural society.
The most common form in which the Spanish occupied the land was the encomienda.
Settlers were granted land, along with its inhabitants and resources, in
return for taking charge of defending the territory, spiritually
indoctrinating the native population, and extracting the crown's annual
tribute (payable half in gold, half in local products) from the encomienda's
Indian population. By the early seventeenth century, there were some 500
encomiendas in Ecuador. Although many consisted of quite
sizable haciendas, they were generally much smaller than the estates
commonly found elsewhere in South America. A multitude of reforms and
regulations did not prevent the encomienda from becoming a
system of virtual slavery of the Indians, estimated at about one-half
the total Ecuadorian population, who lived on them. In 1589 the
president of the audiencia recognized that many Spaniards were
accepting grants only to sell them and undertake urban occupations, and
he stopped distributing new lands to Spaniards; however, the institution
of the encomienda persisted until nearly the end of the
colonial period.
Land that was less desirable was never distributed, but rather was
left to traditional Indian communities or simply remained open public
land. In the late sixteenth century, the estimated one- quarter of the
total native population on such public lands was resettled into Indian
towns called reducciones in order to facilitate the collection
of the Indians' tribute, their conversion to Christianity, and the
exploitation of their labor.
Outside the encomienda, Indian labor was most commonly
exploited through the mita, modeled after the Inca institution
of the same name. All able-bodied "free" Indians were required
to devote one year of their labor to some public or private Spanish
concern, be it constructing a church, road, or public building, or
working in a textile mill. Although mitayos were paid for their
labor, the amount was extremely meager, often less than debts
accumulated through purchases from their employer, thus requiring the
them to continue working, sometimes indefinitely, after their assigned
period of service. In this way, the mita system disintegrated
into debt peonage. Debts were commonly passed on to ensuing generations,
in which cases the mita was, in effect, slavery. Black slaves,
in comparison, were extremely expensive and were thus used almost
exclusively in the lowland plantation culture along the hot, humid
coast, where the Sierra Indians proved unable to adapt. Black slaves
numbered some 60,000 by the end of the colonial period.
The best estimates of the size of Ecuador's native population at the
time of the conquest range between 750,000 and 1 million. Diseases
imported by the Spanish, particularly smallpox and measles, virtually
wiped out the indigenous coastal population during the sixteenth century
and also decimated the Sierra population, although not as thoroughly as
in the Costa or many other areas of Latin America. Despite a succession
of deadly earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, the native population
increased steadily during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
except in the 1690s, when an epidemic of smallpox and diphtheria was
reported to have killed one-third of Ecuador's population.
Ecuador's Indians probably owe their relative prosperity during the
colonial period to the audiencia's lack of mineral resources.
The hardships of working in the silver and mercury mines of Peru cost
the lives of millions of Indian mitayos; Ecuador, in contrast,
had only small deposits of gold and silver in its southern provinces of
Cuenca and Loja, and these deposits were depleted by the end of the
sixteenth century. Its serrano economy was based, instead, on
agriculture and textiles. Cotton, grown on the eastern slope of the
Andes in Quijos Province, and wool, from imported merino sheep that
thrived in the high Andean valleys, provided the raw materials for
high-quality textiles that were manufactured in hundreds of sweatshops,
called obrajes, and exported throughout Latin America. Indian mitayos,
who commonly worked from dawn to dusk chained to their looms, provided
the labor. As appalling as were the preindustrial working conditions in
the obrajes, most historians agree that they were more bearable
than those found in the Peruvian mines at the time.
The coastal economy revolved around shipping and trade. Guayaquil,
despite being destroyed on several occasions by fire and incessantly
plagued by either yellow fever or malaria, was a center of vigorous
trade among the colonies, a trade that was technically illegal under the
mercantilist philosophy of the contemporary Spanish rulers. The guiding
principle of mercantilism in the New World was that the colonies existed
to serve the commercial needs of Spain. Since trade among the colonies
would not enrich Spain, it was banned. In addition to textiles and other
light manufactures from the Sierra, hardwoods and cacao from coastal
plantations were exported from the port of Guayaquil to points all over
Spanish America, while a wide variety of items were imported, including
foods and wines from Peru. Guayaquil also became the largest
shipbuilding center on the west coast of South America before the end of
the colonial period.
The Ecuadorian economy, like that in the mother country, suffered a
severe depression throughout most of the eighteenth century. Textile
production dropped an estimated 50 to 75 percent between 1700 and 1800.
Ecuador's cities gradually fell into ruins, and by 1790 the elite was
reduced to poverty, selling haciendas and jewelry in order to subsist.
The Indian population, in contrast, probably experienced an overall
improvement in its situation, as the closing of the obrajes
commonly led Indians to work under less arduous conditions on either
haciendas or traditional communal lands. Ecuador's economic woes were,
no doubt, compounded by the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 by King
Charles III. Missions in the Oriente were abandoned, and many of the
best schools and the most efficient haciendas and obrajes lost
the key personnel that made them outstanding institutions in colonial
Ecuador.
The Bourbon kings were best known for their economic and
administrative reforms, which, like the expulsion of the Jesuits, were
designed to enhance the flagging power of the crown in Spanish America.
As a result of those reforms, the Quito Audiencia was
transferred in 1720 from the authority of the Peruvian viceroyalty to
the newly created Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada, whose capital was in
Bogot�. In the process, the Quite�o authorities gained jurisdiction
over their own political and military affairs, while the audiencia's
southern and eastern boundaries were delineated more specifically and
retracted. A royal decree (c�dula) in 1802 further shrank the
area of the audiencia by transferring the provinces of Quijos
and Mainas in the Oriente to Peru. Another decree by Charles IV in 1803
transferred the port of Guayaquil to Peru, but resistance by port
citizens led to its being returned to the jurisdiction of Quito in 1819.
Between 1736 and 1745, a French scientific mission with some of the
best minds in Europe resided in Quito and contributed to the development
of ideas in Ecuador. While carrying out their scientific
mission--measuring the earth's circumference at the equator--the members
of the mission disseminated the message of the Enlightenment, which
stressed nationalism, individualism, and a questioning of authority and
tradition. Works of Voltaire, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Paine,
introducing such revolutionary concepts as equality and freedom, managed
to elude the censors of both the Inquisition and a languishing political
authority, and penetrated Ecuador's historical cultural isolation. The
most famous Ecuadorian intellectual of the age, Eugenio de Santa Cruz y
Espejo, was a physician and a writer who advocated emancipation from
Spain and a republican, democratic system of government. Honored today
as the precursor of Ecuadorian independence, Espejo was imprisoned for
his ideas and died in jail in 1795.
The coming of independence was also foreshadowed by the numerous
civil disturbances that rocked the Ecuadorian Sierra from the 1760s
until the end of the colonial era. In 1765 the Quite�o white and
mestizo or cholo (a person of mixed white and Indian ancestry)
population revolted against reforms in the colonial tax system.
Potentially more serious was a subsequent series of Indian rebellions in
Latacunga and Riobamba. Although clearly of a political nature, calling
for the overthrow of the Spanish regime and the expulsion of all the
whites from the land in addition to putting an end to the odious mita
system, these uprisings never led to such large-scale insurrections as
occurred in Peru at the same time. Ironically, the passing of the
colonial era, according to most historians, occasioned a worsening of
conditions for the indigenous population.
Ecuador - THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE
The struggle for independence in the Quito Audiencia was
part of a movement throughout Spanish America led by criollos (persons
of pure Spanish descent born in the New World). The criollos resentment
of the privileges enjoyed by the peninsulares was the fuel of
revolution against colonial rule. The spark was Napoleon's invasion of
Spain, after which he deposed King Ferdinand VII and, in July 1808,
placed his brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne.
Shortly afterward, Spanish citizens, unhappy at the usurpation of the
throne by the French, began organizing local juntas loyal to Ferdinand.
A group of Quito's leading citizens followed suit, and on August 10,
1809, they seized power from the local representatives of Joseph
Bonaparte in the name of Ferdinand. Thus, this early revolt against
colonial rule (one of the first in Spanish America) was, paradoxically,
an expression of loyalty to the Spanish king.
It quickly became apparent that Quito's criollo rebels lacked the
anticipated popular support for their cause. As loyalist troops
approached Quito, therefore, they peacefully turned power back to the
crown authorities. Despite assurances against reprisals, the returning
Spanish authorities (Bonaparte's men) proved to be merciless with the
rebels and, in the process of ferreting out participants in the Quito
revolt, jailed and abused many innocent citizens. They actions, in turn,
bred popular resentment among Quite�os, who, after several days of
street fighting in August 1810, won an agreement to be governed by a
junta to be dominated by criollos, although with the president of the
Audiencia of Quito acting as its figurehead leader.
In spite of widespread opposition within the rest of the Quito Audiencia,
the junta called for a congress in December 1811 in which it declared
the entire area of the audiencia to be independent. Two months
later, the junta approved a constitution for the state of Quito that
provided for democratic governing institutions but also granted
recognition to the authority of Ferdinand should he return to the
Spanish throne. Shortly thereafter, the junta elected to launch a
military offensive against the Spanish, but the poorly trained and badly
equipped troops were no match for those of the viceroy of Peru, which
finally crushed the Quite�o rebellion in December 1812.
The second chapter in Ecuador's struggle for emancipation from
Spanish colonial rule began in Guayaquil, where independence was
proclaimed in October 1820 by a local patriotic junta under the
leadership of the poet Jos� Joaqu�n Olmedo. By this time, the forces
of independence had grown continental in scope and were organized into
two principal armies, one under the Venezuelan Sim�n Bol�var Palacios
in the north and the other under the Argentine Jos� de San Mart�n in
the south. Unlike the hapless Quito junta, the Guayaquil patriots were
able to appeal to foreign allies, Argentina and Venezuela, each of whom
soon responded by sending sizable contingents to Ecuador. Antonio Jos�
de Sucre Alcal�, the brilliant young lieutenant of Bol�var who arrived
in Guayaquil in May 1821, was to become the key figure in the ensuing
military struggle against the royalist forces.
After a number of initial successes, Sucre's army was defeated at
Ambato in the central Sierra and he appealed for assistance from San
Mart�n, whose army was by now in Peru. With the arrival from the south
of 1,400 fresh soldiers under the command of Andr�s de Santa Cruz
Calahumana, the fortunes of the patriotic army were again reversed. A
string of victories culminated in the decisive Battle of Pichincha, on
the slopes of the volcano of that name on the western outskirts of
Quito, on May 24, 1822. A few hours after the victory by the patriots,
the last president of the Audiencia of Quito signed a formal
capitulation of his forces before Marshal Sucre. Ecuador was at last
free of Spanish rule.
Two months later Bol�var, the liberator of northern South America,
entered Quito to a hero's welcome. Later that July, he met San Mart�n
in Guayaquil and convinced the Argentine general, who wanted the port to
return to Peruvian jurisdiction, and the local criollo elite in both
major cities of the advantage of having the former Quito Audiencia
join with the liberated lands to the north. As a result, Ecuador became
the District of the South within the Confederation of Gran Colombia,
which also included present-day Venezuela and Colombia and had Bogot�
as its capital. This status was maintained for eight tumultuous years.
They were years in which warfare dominated the affairs of Ecuador.
First, the country found itself on the front lines of Bol�var's war to
liberate Peru from Spanish rule between 1822 and 1825; afterward, in
1828 and 1829, Ecuador was in the middle of an armed struggle between
Peru and Gran Colombia over the location of their common border. After a
campaign that included the near destruction of Guayaquil, the forces of
Gran Colombia, under the leadership of Sucre and Venezuelan General Juan
Jos� Flores, proved victorious. The Treaty of 1829 fixed the border on
the line that had divided the Quito audiencia and the
Viceroyalty of Peru before independence.
The population of Ecuador was divided during these years among three
segments: those favoring the status quo, those supporting union with
Peru, and those advocating autonomous independence for the former audiencia.
The latter group was to prevail following Venezuela's withdrawal from
the confederation during an 1830 constitutional congress that had been
called in Bogot� in a futile effort to combat growing separatist
tendencies throughout Gran Colombia. In May of that year, a group of
Quito notables met to dissolve the union with Gran Colombia, and in
August, a constituent assembly drew up a constitution for the State of
Ecuador, so named for its geographic proximity to the equator, and
placed General Flores in charge of political and military affairs. He
remained the dominant political figure during Ecuador's first fifteen
years of independence.
Ecuador - THE FIRST CENTURY OF THE REPUBLIC
Before the year 1830 drew to a close, both Marshal Sucre and Sim�n
Bol�var would be dead; the former, murdered (on orders from a jealous
General Flores, according to some historians), and the latter, from
tuberculosis. Heartbroken at the dissolution of Gran Colombia, Bol�var
is quoted as saying shortly before his death, "America is
ungovernable. Those who have served the revolution have plowed the
sea." These words would seem prophetic during the chaotic first
thirty years in the life of the Republic of Ecuador.
Initial Confusion, 1830-60
Independence did not occasion a revolutionary liberation of the
masses of Ecuadorian peasants. On the contrary, as bad as the peasants'
situation was, it probably worsened with the loss of the Spanish royal
officials who had protected the indigenous population against the abuses
of the local criollos. This criollo elite, which had spearheaded the
struggle for independence, was to be its principal beneficiary. The
early battle to define the political parameters of the new state was
fought, to a great extent, among the various sectors--Ecuadorians and
foreigners, military personnel and civilians--of this elite.
Flores was of the foreign military variety. Born in Venezuela, he had
fought in the wars for independence with Bol�var, who had appointed him
governor of Ecuador during its association with Gran Colombia. Although
of humble origins with little formal education, Flores married into the
Quite�o elite, gaining acceptance, initially at least, within the local
criollo upper class. As a leader, however, he appeared primarily
interested in maintaining his power. Military expenditures, from the
independence wars and from an unsuccessful campaign to wrest Cauca
Province from Colombia in 1832, kept the state treasury empty while
other matters were left unattended.
In 1833 four intellectuals who had begun publishing El Quite�o
Libre to denounce the "pillaging of the national treasury by
foreigners" were killed by the authorities at a time when Flores
was absent from Quito. Although not directly responsible for the
killings, Flores inevitably became associated with them, and criticism
of his regime grew. In 1834 opponents staged a rebellion in an effort to
place Jos� Vicente Rocafuerte y Rodr�guez de Bejarano, a member of the
Guayaquil aristocracy who had recently returned from fourteen years
abroad, into the presidency. The rebels effort failed; Flores then
coopted his opponent and sponsored Rocafuerte as a presidential
candidate. For four years following this Machiavellian political
move--in effect the nation's first coup d'�tat--Flores continued to
wield considerable power from behind the scenes as commander of the
military.
President Rocafuerte's most lasting contribution was to begin
development of a public school system. Although he had previously
condemned Flores's violations of civil liberties, Rocafuerte argued that
"the backwardness of Ecuador makes enlightened despotism
necessary." At the end of his term in 1839, Rocafuerte returned to
his native Guayaquil as provincial governor, while in Quito Flores was
again inaugurated into the presidency. After four years in office,
Flores summoned a constitutional convention that wrote a new
constitution, dubbed "the Charter of Slavery" by his
opponents, and elected him to a new eight-year term of office.
After 1843 the opposition to Flores often manifested itself in
unpleasant ways: in reference to the dark skin of Flores and his fellow
Venezuelan and Colombian soldiers, Rocafuerte (by now exiled in Lima)
wrote that "the white oppressors of the peninsula were less
oppressive than the Negro vandals who have replaced them." A young
student named Gabriel Garc�a Moreno--later to become the most infamous
of all of Ecuador's nineteenth century dictators--tried unsuccessfully
to assassinate Flores. Discontent had become nationwide by 1845, when an
insurrection in Guayaquil forced Flores from the country. Because their
movement triumphed in March (marzo), the anti-Flores coalition
members became known as marcistas. They were an extremely
heterogeneous lot that included liberal intellectuals, conservative
clergymen, and representatives from Guayaquil's successful business
community.
The next fifteen years constituted one of the most turbulent periods
in Ecuador's century and a half as a nation. The marcistas
fought among themselves almost ceaselessly and also had to struggle
against Flores's repeated attempts from exile to overthrow the
government. The first marcista president was a businessman,
Vicente Ram�n Roca, who served a full four-year term of office. The
most significant figure of the era, however, was General Jos� Mar�a
Urbina, who first came to power in 1851 through a coup d'�tat, remained
in the presidency until 1856, and then continued to dominate the
political scene until 1860. During this decade and the one that
followed, Urbina and his archrival, Garc�a Moreno, would define the
dichotomy--between Liberals from Guayaquil and Conservatives from
Quito--that remained the major sphere of political struggle in Ecuador
in the 1980s.
Liberalism under Urbina took on anticlerical, ethnic, and regional
dimensions. In 1852 he accused a group of Jesuit priests-- admitted by
his predecessor, Diego Noboa, only a year earlier--of political meddling
and expelled them. Urbina freed the nation's slaves exactly one week
after his coup of 1851, and six years later, his successor and life-long
friend, General Francisco Robles, finally put an end to three centuries
of required annual payments of tribute by the Indian population.
Henceforth, liberalism associated itself with bettering the position of
Ecuador's non-white population. Urbina's and Robles's favoring of the
Guayaquil business classes over the Quito landowners reinforced the
regional aspect of the political dichotomy.
Opposition against Robles intensified after his signing, in 1857, of
an unpopular contract aimed at alleviating the burdensome foreign debt.
By 1859--known by Ecuadorian historians as the Terrible Year--the nation
was on the brink of anarchy. Local caudillos had declared several
regions autonomous of the central government. One of these caudillos,
Guayaquil's Guillermo Franco, signed the Treaty of Mapasingue ceding the
southern provinces of Ecuador to an occupying Peruvian army led by
General Ram�n Castilla. This action was outrageous enough to unite some
previously disparate elements. Garc�a Moreno, putting aside both his
project to place Ecuador under a French protectorate and his differences
with General Flores, got together with the former dictator to put down
the various local rebellions and force out the Peruvians. This effort
opened the last chapter of Flores's long career and marked the entrance
to power of Garc�a Moreno.
Ecuador - The Era of Conservatism, 1860-95
Garc�a Moreno is the father of Ecuadorian conservatism and no doubt
the most controversial figure in the nation's history, condemned by
Liberal historians as Ecuador's worst tyrant but exalted by
Conservatives as the nation's greatest nation-builder. In the end, both
appraisals may be accurate; the man who possibly saved Ecuador from
disintegration in 1859 and then ruled the nation with an iron fist for
the subsequent decade and a half was, in fact, an extremely complicated
personality. Born and raised under modest circumstances in Guayaquil, he
studied in Quito, where he married into the local aristocracy, then
traveled to Europe in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutionary uprisings
and studied under the eminent Catholic theologians of the day.
Garc�a Moreno's religious education had a profound impact on the
future president. In the words of historian Frederick B. Pike:
His personal experiences seem to have influenced his attitudes toward
governing his country. In his own case, liberalism and religious
indifference had gone hand-in- hand with personal debauchery and lack
of self-control, while religious fervor had been intertwined with a
life of rigorous self-control and spartan discipline. After coming to
the presidency, Garc�a Moreno set out to rekindle religious fervor
among Ecuadorians in the expectation that the entire country could be
made to undergo a transformation paralleling his own.
President Garc�a Moreno saw Roman Catholicism as the ingredient of
Ecuadorian culture that, through its emphasis on order, hierarchy, and
discipline, could unite the nation and save it from the multiple crises
and disorder of the 1850s. Catholicism thus held a prominent position in
each of the two new constitutions that he introduced: the charter of
1861 named Catholicism as the exclusive religion, and its replacement in
1869, in addition to providing for a six-year presidential term and
unlimited reelection, made citizenship dependent on one's adherence to
the Roman Catholic religion. In 1863 Garc�a Moreno promulgated
Ecuador's first concordat with the Vatican, bestowing vast powers on the
Ecuadorian Roman Catholic Church, especially with respect to education.
A decade later, the dictator's puppet congress dedicated the republic to
the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Despite such proclerical measures that have led many historians to
dub his regime a theocracy, the local clergy believed Garc�a Moreno to
be fanatical and criticized him for it. The president, in turn, replaced
many local clergymen with foreign priests in an effort to revitalize the
Roman Catholic Church in Ecuador, which he considered degenerate and
dissolute.
The highly anticlerical Liberals were, of course, livid. Urbina
organized an invasion in 1864, which was defeated with the help, once
again, of General Flores. Garc�a Moreno was ruthless in his repression
of the captured rebels, as he was commonly with less formidable
opponents as well. Nor did he hesitate to manipulate the presidential
succession. Finding his hand-picked successor deficient after two years
in office, in 1867 Garc�a Moreno presided over the installation of a
second puppet, whom he also overthrew in 1869, when it appeared that the
Liberals might win scheduled elections. In 1869 Garc�a Moreno also
formally established the Conservative Party (Partido Conservador--PC).
Shortly after the onset of his third presidential term in 1875, Garc�a
Moreno was hacked to death with a machete on the steps of the
presidential palace. The exact motives of the assassin, a Colombian,
remain unknown, but the dictator's most outstanding critic, the liberal
journalist Juan Montalvo, exclaimed, "My pen killed him!"
Although maligned for his highly proclerical and dictatorial ways,
Garc�a Moreno made a number of vital contributions to the development
of the nation. Perhaps the most important advances were in education.
The generation of many new schools at all levels, from primary to the
polytechnical training school in Quito, elicited universal praise,
despite the fact that the Jesuits were largely responsible for these
accomplishments. Transportation links with Quito were also vastly
improved with the building of roads to Esmeraldas and to Babahoyo, near
Guayaquil, as well as the first portion of the railroad linking Quito
with Riobamba and Guayaquil. These public works not only promoted
national unity but also helped Quito begin a long-delayed effort to
overcome the geographic barriers that had historically caused its
isolation, an isolation that had hindered the nation's integration into
the world economy.
Between 1852 and 1890, Ecuador's exports grew in value from slightly
more than US$1 million to nearly US$10 million. Production of cacao, the
most important export product in the late nineteenth century, grew from
6.5 million kilograms to 18 million kilograms during the same period.
The agricultural export interests, centered in the coastal region near
Guayaquil, became closely associated with the Liberals, whose political
power also grew steadily during the interval. After the death of Garc�a
Moreno, it took the Liberals twenty years to consolidate their strength
sufficiently to assume control of the government in Quito.
Five different presidents governed during the two decades of
transition between Conservative and Liberal rule. The first, Antonio
Borrero, tried valiantly to return the nation to the rule of law, but,
after only ten months in office, he was overthrown by the only military
dictator of the period, Ignacio de Veintemilla. Although he came to
power with the help of the old Liberal General Urbina, Veintemilla later
evolved into a populist military dictator rather than a politician with
any party or ideological affiliation. He was extremely popular with his
troops and able to woo the masses with employment on public works
programs and large-scale public festivals and dances during holiday
periods. In office until 1883, Veintemilla enjoyed a period of relative
prosperity resulting primarily from increased maritime activity while
Peru, Bolivia, and Chile were mired in the War of the Pacific.
Jos� Mar�a Pl�cido Caama�o, a Conservative, then served as
president until 1888, and he remained a powerful figure during the
administrations of the duly elected Progressive Party (Partido
Progresista) presidents who followed him, Antonio Flores Jij�n and Luis
Cordero Crespo. Flores, who was the son of President Juan Jos� Flores,
intended progressivism to represent a compromise position between
liberalism and conservatism. The Progressive program called for support
for the Roman Catholic Church, rule by law, and an end to dictatorship
and military rule. Although neither Caama�o, Flores, nor Cordero was
able to curtail the growing animosity between Conservatives and
Liberals, their periods in office were, for the most part, characterized
by relative political stability and prosperity. The latter resulted more
from favorable international circumstances for cacao exports than from
astute government policy making.
In 1895, midway through his term in office, Cordero fell victim to
scandal and charges of "selling the flag" over an agreement
made with Chile. Cordero allowed the warship Esmeralda, which
Chile was selling to Japan, to fly the Ecuadorian flag briefly in order
to protect Chile's neutrality in the conflict between Japan and China.
Bribes were apparently involved and, tremendously weakened by the
scandal and also challenged by the outbreak of several military
rebellions, the president resigned in April. In June the Liberals seized
power in Guayaquil in the name of their most popular caudillo, General
Jos� Eloy Alfaro Delgado. Three months later, "the old
battler" (a name Alfaro had earned during his armed struggle
against Garc�a Moreno) returned after a decade of exile in Central
America and marched triumphantly into Quito. It was the end of Ecuador's
brief experiment with progressivism and the beginning of three stormy
decades of rule by the Radical Liberal Party (Partido Liberal
Radical--PLR), commonly referred to as the Liberal Party (Partido
Liberal).
Ecuador - The Rule of the Liberals, 1895-1925
Eloy Alfaro is the outstanding standard-bearer for Ecuador's
Liberals, much as Garc�a Moreno is for the Conservatives. Some Marxist
groups have also looked to Alfaro; although his political program was in
no way socialist, it did prove to be revolutionary in the extent to
which it stripped the Roman Catholic Church of the power and privileges
previously granted to it by Garc�a Moreno. Catholic officials and their
Conservative allies did not give up without a fight, however. During the
first year of Alfaro's presidency, Ecuador was ravaged by a bloody civil
war in which clergymen commonly incited the faithful masses to rise in
rebellion against the "atheistic alfaristas" and
were, just as commonly, themselves victims of alfarista
repression. The foreign-born Bishops Pedro Schumacher of Portoviejo and
Arsenio Andrade of Riobamba led the early resistance to Alfaro. A
fullfledged bloodbath may well have been averted only through the
magnanimous efforts of the outstanding historian and Archbishop Federico
Gonz�lez Su�rez, who urged the clergy to abandon the pursuit of
politics.
This final ecclesiastical struggle for control of Ecuador was in
vain, however. By the end of the Liberals' rule in 1925, Roman
Catholicism was no longer the constitutionally mandated state religion,
official clerical censorship of reading material had been suppressed,
many powerful foreign clergy had been expelled, education had been
secularized, civil marriage as well as divorce had been instituted, the
concordat with the Vatican had been broken, most of the church's rural
properties had been seized by the state, and the republic was no longer
dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Roman Catholic Church in
Ecuador would never again hold prerogatives as extensive as those it
enjoyed during the late nineteenth century.
The other accomplishment for which the three decades of PLR rule are
remembered is the completion, in 1908, of the GuayaquilQuito railroad.
At the time, however, Alfaro was condemned by his critics for
"delivering the republic to the Yankees" through a contract
signed with North American entrepreneurs to complete the project begun
by Garc�a Moreno. Although the criticism did not halt Alfaro on this
project, a similar nationalistic outcry did force him to end
negotiations with the United States, which wanted to protect the
soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal, over military base rights in
Ecuador's Gal�pagos Islands. Alfaro's affinity for the United States
was also evident in 1910, when war between Peru and Ecuador over their
perennial boundary dispute was narrowly averted through the mediation of
the United States, together with Brazil and Argentina.
The Liberals can be credited with few further accomplishments of
major proportions. The system of debt peonage that lingered in the
Sierra came under government regulations, albeit weak ones, and
imprisonment for debts was finally outlawed in 1918. These and other
limited social benefits gained by the Indians and the mixedblood montuvio
(coastal mestizo) working class were overshadowed by the ruinous
economic decline world wide and the severe repression of the nascent
labor movement at the hands of the Liberals during the early 1920s.
Furthermore, Liberal rule did little to foster the development of stable
democracy. On the contrary, the first half of the period saw even more
illegal seizures of power and military-led governments than in previous
decades.
A major cause of the instability of the period was the lack of unity
within the PLR itself. Alfaro and a second military strongman, General
Le�nidas Plaza Guti�rrez, maintained a bitter rivalry over party
leadership for almost two decades. Following Alfaro's first period in
the presidency, Plaza was elected to a constitutional term of office
that lasted from 1901 until 1905. In 1906, shortly after a close
associate of Plaza had been elected to succeed him, however, Alfaro
launched a coup d'�tat and returned to the presidency. Alfaro, in turn,
was overthrown in 1911 after refusing to hand power over to his own
hand-picked successor, Emilio Estrada. Four months later, Estrada's
death from a heart attack precipitated a brief civil war that climaxed
the rivalry between Alfaro and Plaza. Alfaro returned from his exile in
Panama to lead the Guayaquil garrison in its challenge to the
Quito-based interim government, which was under the military authority
of General Plaza. The rebellion was quickly defeated, however; Alfaro
was captured and transported to Quito via the same railroad that he had
done so much to complete. Once in the capital, Alfaro was publicly and
unceremoniously murdered, along with several of his comrades, by a
government-instigated mob.
Shortly thereafter, Plaza was inaugurated into his second
presidential term in office. It was the first of four consecutive
constitutional changes of government: following Plaza (1912-16) came
Alfredo Baquerizo Moreno (1916-20), then Jos� Luis Tamayo (1920-24),
and Gonzalo S. C�rdova (1924-25). Real power during this second half of
the period of Liberal rule was held, not by the government, but by a
plutocracy of coastal agricultural and banking interests, popularly
known as la argolla (the ring), whose linchpin was the
Commercial and Agricultural Bank of Guayaquil led by Francisco Urbina
Jado. This bank gained influence by loaning vast quantities of money to
the free-spending government as well as to private individuals.
According to Ecuadorian historian Oscar Efr�n Reyes, the bank was
influential "to the point that candidates for president and his
ministers, senators, and deputies had to have the prior approval of the
bank." Many of the private loans were to members of the Association
of Agriculturists of Ecuador, an organization that also received
government funds intended to promote an international cartel of cacao
growers, but which instead were used to line members' pockets.
All parties involved in la argolla, from the government
officials to the bankers and the growers, were professed militants of
the Liberal cause. It was not only the political fortunes of the party
that fell victim to their financial activities, however, but also the
national economy, which experienced runaway inflation as a result of the
printing of money by the private banks. The severe economic problems
during the final years of Liberal rule were also partially caused by
factors beyond the control of the politicians. A fungal disease that
ravaged Ecuador's cacao trees and the growth of competition from British
colonies in Africa abruptly ended conditions that had favored Ecuador's
exportation of cacao for over a century. What was left of the nation's
cacao industry fell victim to the sharp decline in world demand during
the Great Depression.
Ecuador's economic crisis of the early 1920s was especially
devastating to the working class and the poor. With real wages, for
those lucky enough to have jobs, eaten away by inflation, workers
responded with a general strike in Guayaquil in 1922 and a peasant
rebellion in the central Sierra the following year. Both actions were
aimed at improving wages and working conditions; both were put down only
after massacres of major proportions.
President C�rdova, closely tied to la argolla, had come to
office in a fraudulent election. Popular unrest, together with the
ongoing economic crisis and a sickly president, laid the background for
a bloodless coup d'�tat in July 1925. Unlike all previous forays by the
military into Ecuadorian politics, the coup of 1925 was made in the name
of a collective grouping rather than a particular caudillo. The members
of the League of Young Officers who overthrew C�rdoba came to power
with an agenda, which included a wide variety of social reforms, the
replacement of the increasingly sterile Liberal-Conservative debate, and
the end of the rule of the Liberals, who had become decadent after three
decades in power.
Ecuador - Reform, Chaos, and Debacle, 1925-44
The reformist officers initially named a governing junta consisting
of prominent opponents of the Liberal plutocracy, but neither it nor a
succeeding junta was able to consolidate the power necessary to govern
effectively. In 1926 they named as provisional president Isidro Ayora, a
dedicated reformer who, although married into one of the wealthiest
coastal families, possessed a social conscience and the vision to see
that reform would help preserve the status of the upper classes. Ayora
quickly assumed dictatorial powers, with which he set out to institute
reforms that were partly of his own making and partly the making of the
League of Young Officers.
An advisory mission from Princeton University, headed by Edwin W.
Kemmerer, was invited to propose measures to reorganize Ecuador's fiscal
and monetary structures. Its major accomplishment was the creation of
the Central Bank of Ecuador (Banco Central), which replaced the private
banks' authority in the issuing of currency; in addition, the Kemmerer
mission also reorganized the state budgeting and customs agencies. The
appropriation of these functions, which were previously under the
control of la argolla, brought a revenue windfall to the
government during the next half-decade. In addition to building state
fiscal and social agencies, the funds were used to initiate a number of
programs, including pensions for state workers, that enhanced the
security of the middle and lower economic sectors of the population. A
range of social legislation--quite progressive for its day--intended to
protect the working class from unscrupulous employers and to improve
working conditions emerged from the enactment of the 1929 constitution.
The same constitution, Ecuador's thirteenth in just under a century
as a republic, also provided for a powerful legislative body with
authority to censure presidential ministers. This diminution of
executive power, the appearance of a wide variety (socialist, communist,
and populist) of new groupings in political competition with the
traditional parties and with the military, and the devastating effects
of the Great Depression combined to make Ecuador's political record
especially unstable during subsequent years. Ayora was the first of
fourteen chief executives during the 1930s.
World demand for cacao and other Ecuadorian export crops dropped
precipitously in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash: export crop
value fell from US$15 million in 1928 to US$7 million in 1931 and US$5
million in 1932, causing widespread unemployment and misery. Few
objections were voiced in 1931 when Ayora was the victim of a military
coup. Neptal� Bonifaz Asc�zubi was then elected with the help of a
quasi-fascist grouping of the serrano lower classes called the
Consolidation of National Workers (Compactaci�n Obrera Nacional). In
August 1932, after various Liberal and leftist elements in Congress
blocked Bonifaz's assumption of power, the Compactaci�n fought a bloody
four-day civil war against other paramilitary forces amassed by
opponents of the president-elect. The latter were victorious, largely
because the great majority of the government military forces remained in
their barracks rather than defend Bonifaz.
Another election two months later brought victory for the Liberal
candidate, Juan de Dios Mart�nez Mera, but soon accusations arose that
the election had been fraudulent. The congressional opposition censured
virtually every minister as soon as he was named and also encouraged the
Compactaci�n to lead demonstrations against the president in the
streets of Quito. The campaign against Mart�nez was led by the
charismatic president of the Chamber of Deputies, Jos� Mar�a Velasco
Ibarra, who at the time professed a "total lack of presidential
ambitions." In September 1934, less than a year after Mart�nez was
forced to resign, Velasco assumed the presidency after having won
popular elections by an overwhelming margin.
The first of Velasco's five periods as president lasted only eleven
months. He was overthrown by the military after attempting to assume
dictatorial powers by dissolving Congress and jailing his congressional
opponents. Shortly thereafter, the military placed Federico P�ez in the
presidential palace. An engineer and former senator, P�ez ruled
precariously for two years, first with the political support of the
socialist left and then with that of the right, and he tried to advance
the reforms undertaken by Ayora a decade earlier. Ongoing fiscal
difficulties severely limited P�ez's efforts, however, and in September
1937 he was overthrown by his minister of national defense, General
Alberto Enr�quez Gallo. Although he ruled for less than a year, Enr�quez
achieved note as a social reformer by his promulgation of the Labor Code
of 1938.
Enr�quez is also remembered for having initiated a protracted
confrontation with the United States-based South American Development
Company over the terms of its Ecuadorian concession and the wages it
paid its Ecuadorian employees. The company refused to comply with Enr�quez's
entreaty that more of the profits from its mining operations stay in
Ecuador, and it won the support of the United States Department of
State. The Ecuadorian government continued its demands despite United
States pressure. In 1940 the United States, hoping to obtain Ecuadorian
cooperation in its anticipated war effort, ended its support for the
mining firm. Ecuadorian President Carlos Alberto Arroyo del R�o, in
turn, proved generous in his cooperation with the Allies, allowing the
United States to build a naval base on the Gal�pagos Islands and an air
base at Salinas on the Ecuadorian mainland.
In addition to being a genuine friend and admirer of the United
States, Arroyo del R�o was the leader of the PLR and a representative
of the Guayaquil-based "plutocracy." He came to power
constitutionally in November 1939 upon the death of his predecessor, but
he continued in office in January 1940 through fraudulent elections that
were universally believed to have been won by Velasco, and continued in
power later, through repression. Despite such antipopular methods of
ruling, he managed to remain in office for almost four years, thanks to
economic support by the United States and the recuperation of Ecuador's
export markets as worldwide economic depression gave way to recovery
during World War II.
Arroyo del R�o's undoing was the disastrous 1941 war with Peru.
Although the prior sequence of events--the breakdown of talks aimed at
resolving the boundary issues in 1938, followed by repeated border
skirmishes--had given ample warning of a possible outbreak of
large-scale hostilities, Ecuador was unprepared to meet the July 5
Peruvian invasion. Furthermore, the president's fear of being left
unprotected from his opponents led him to keep the nation's best
fighting forces in Quito while Peruvian troops continuously attacked the
nation's southern and eastern provinces until a ceasefire went into
effect on July 31.
Peru's occupation ended only after January 1942, when the two nations
signed the Protocol of Peace, Friendship, and Boundaries while attending
the Third Conference of Foreign Ministers of the American Republics in
Rio de Janeiro. Under the terms of the Rio Protocol, the informal name
of the agreement, Ecuador renounced its claim to some 200,000 square
kilometers of territory. Shortly afterward, the Rio Protocol was
ratified by a bare plurality of the Ecuadorian legislature.
The Ecuadorian government quickly regretted having become a party to
the Rio Protocol. The protocol became the focus of a surge of Ecuadorian
national pride and concomitant opposition to Arroyo in a new
coalition--the Democratic Alliance. The coalition brought together a
wide array of Ecuadorian politicians dedicated to replacing the
"president who had been unable to defend the national honor."
Arroyo's rejoinder that he would remain in office the full four years,
"neither one day more nor one day less," and his being
prominently hailed in Washington as "the Apostle of PanAmericanism
" only increased his political isolation. A persistent inflation
that whittled away at the purchasing power of salaried workers was a
further cause of popular resentment against Arroyo.
In May 1944, following an uprising in Guayaquil that pitted the
military and civilian supporters of Velasco against Arroyo's police, the
president finally resigned. The military handed power to the Democratic
Alliance, which in turn named Velasco, whose electoral candidacy had
recently been vetoed by Arroyo, as the popularly acclaimed president of
the republic. The populist master returned triumphantly from exile in
Colombia, greeted by throngs of enthusiasts during a three-day journey
to Quito, to assume the presidency for the second time.
Ecuador - THE POSTWAR ERA, 1944-84
Galo Plaza differed from previous Ecuadorian presidents. The son of
former President Plaza Guti�rrez, he had been born in the United
States, where he also attended several universities. His ties to the
United States grew even closer as a result of serving there as
ambassador under President Arroyo del R�o. These links, as Pike points
out, "rendered him vulnerable to charges by Velasco Ibarra and
other demagogic opponents of being the lackey of U.S. imperialism."
Galo Plaza was not a professional politician, but a gentleman farmer
with a sizable cattle ranch near Quito, where he customarily spent
weekends throughout his four years as president.
Galo Plaza brought a developmentalist and technocratic emphasis to
Ecuadorian government. He invited a wide variety of foreign experts in
economic development and in governmental administration to recommend and
catalog reforms in both areas. In large part because of a lack of
political will within either the executive or the legislature, however,
virtually none of the recommended reforms was enacted. Nevertheless, the
economy experienced a marked improvement, with inflation finally slowing
down and both government budget and foreign currency accounts balancing
for the first time in many years. This achievement was even more
remarkable in light of the series of major earthquakes, landslides, and
floods suffered by Ecuador in 1949 and 1950.
No doubt Galo Plaza's most important contribution to Ecuadorian
political culture was his commitment to the principles and practices of
democracy. Galo Plaza endorsed such democratic guarantees as freedom of
the press and the freedom of opponents to voice their opinions, to
assemble for political purposes without fear of being jailed or worse,
and to be elected to the legislature without fear of being defrauded or
arbitrarily dismissed. Galo Plaza was able to create a mystique around
the idea of his completing his term in office, something no president
had accomplished since 1924, and this mystique no doubt helped him
achieve his goal.
As Galo Plaza readily admitted, however, his greatest asset, both
politically and economically, was the onset of the nation's banana boom,
as diseases plaguing plantations in Central America turned Ecuador into
an alternative supplier to the huge United States market. Ecuador's
banana exports grew from US$2 million to US$20 million between 1948 and
1952. During these years, Ecuador also benefited from sizable price
increases--generated by the Korean War--for its commodity exports.
A proof of the politically stabilizing effect of the banana boom of
the 1950s is that even Velasco, who in 1952 was elected president for
the third time, managed to serve out a full four-year term. He continued
to spend as before--building bridges, roads, and schools at will and
rewarding his political supporters (including, this time, the military)
with jobs, salary increases, and weapons-- but, in contrast to his
previous times in office, there were now sufficient funds to pay for
everything.
Always the master populist, Velasco (who by now liked to be known as
"the National Personification") again came to power with the
support of the common man, this time through the vehicle of the
Guayaquil-based Concentration of Popular Forces (Concentraci�n de
Fuerzas Populares--CFP). Once in office, however, he arrested and
deported the CFP boss, Carlos Guevara Moreno, together with several
other party leaders. Guevara Moreno reassumed control of the CFP in 1955
following a three-year exile. Velasco's subsequent party support during
the 1950s came from the Conservatives, the conservative Social Christian
Movement (Movimiento Social Cristiano--MSC), and the highly
nationalistic, anticommunist, quasi-fascist Ecuadorian Nationalist
Revolutionary Action (Acci�n Revolucionaria Nacionalista
Ecuatoriana--ARNE).
On repeated occasions, members of ARNE acted as thugs and shock
troops, attacking students, labor unions, and the press. In 1955 Velasco
also chose to pick a fight with the United States. In the opening round
of what would later become known as the "tuna war," Ecuadorian
officials seized two fishing boats carrying the United States flag,
charging them with fishing inside the 200-nauticalmile limit claimed by
Ecuador as territorial seas under its sovereignty.
In 1956 Camilo Ponce Enr�quez, the MSC founder who had served in
Velasco's cabinet, assumed the presidency after a close election replete
with allegations of fraud. Although late support from Velasco proved
crucial to Ponce's victory, shortly afterward "the National
Personification" became the principal opponent of the new chief
executive. In a display of statesmanship and political acumen, Ponce
co-opted the Liberal opposition by including it, along with
Conservatives and the MSC, in his cabinet.
Although Ponce did not enact the Social Christian reforms of which he
spoke vaguely during the campaign, the relative political calm that
prevailed during his four years in office was, in itself, an
accomplishment given the worsening economic situation. Ponce's term saw
the end of the banana boom that had sustained more than a decade of
constitutional rule. Falling export prices led to rising unemployment
and a social malaise that briefly erupted into riots in 1959. By the
following year, the effects of the discontent were ready to be exploited
by the populist appeal of the irrepressible Velasco, who was elected
with his widest margin of victory ever. Velasco's fourth turn in the
presidency initiated a renewal of crisis, instability, and military
domination and ended conjecture that the political system had matured or
developed a democratic mold.
Ecuador - Instability and Military Dominance, 1960-72
The instability began immediately. Ponce was so angry over Velasco's
vicious campaign attacks on his government that he resigned on his last
day in office rather than preside over the inauguration of his
successor. During his campaign, "the National Personification"
had promised government support to the masses of urban poor, many of
whom had recently migrated to Guayaquil and other major cities in search
of a decent job and a place to live. Velasco's populism continued into
his inaugural address, when he renounced the hated 1942 Rio Protocol. He
thus came to power with the adoration of the masses, but he saddled
himself with expensive commitments to the poor at a time when deficits
in the state coffers were approaching a critical level. Additionally,
Velasco threatened Ecuador's shaky economy with what amounted to a
declaration of hostilities against Peru and the guarantors of the Rio
Protocol, namely Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States.
Sensing the direction of the political wind in the wake of the Cuban
Revolution, Velasco magnified his anti-United States rhetoric and
included leftists in his government. Meanwhile, the United States
encouraged Latin American governments to break diplomatic relations with
Cuba. Before long, Ecuador's widening political polarization became
manifest in outbreaks of violence between leftist students and the
anticommunist right.
The rapidly deteriorating economic situation soon brought about a
split in the velasquista coalition, however, with the left, led
by Vice President Carlos Julio Arosemena Monroy (who was also president
of the Chamber of Deputies) openly opposing the government in July 1961.
By October relations between Velasco's government and Congress had
deteriorated to the point where legislators and progovernment spectators
engaged in a gun battle. Although dozens of bullet holes were later
found in the Chamber, no one was injured.
A series of new sales taxes imposed during the same month in order to
raise desperately needed revenues then sparked a general strike and a
series of demonstrations and riots in several major cities. Amid growing
chaos, Velasco ordered the arrest of his vice president, a move that
opened him to charges of violating the constitution. On November 8,
after only fourteen months in office, Velasco was ousted by the military
and replaced by Arosemena, who was his constitutional successor as well
as his leading opponent.
Arosemena came from a well-known Guayaquil family; his father had
briefly served as president following a previous anti-Velasco coup in
1947. In an attempt to allay concerns about his being a dangerous
leftist (as Velasco's vice president he had expressed warm sympathy for
Cuban leader Fidel Castro Ruz and made a much- criticized trip to the
Soviet Union), Arosemena named a cabinet that included Liberals and even
Conservatives and quickly sent former President Galo Plaza on a goodwill
trip to Washington.
Arosemena's insistence on maintaining relations with Cuba, however,
became a major domestic political issue in Ecuador. Political opponents
labeled Arosemena a dangerous communist, and part of the military went
into open rebellion in March 1962. The following month, Ecuador broke
diplomatic relations with Cuba, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The crisis
over Cuba proved to be very costly for Arosemena, who lost not only much
of his local political support, but also the self-confidence to pursue
his own, independent course. Afterward, the government drifted with
little leadership from the president, who allegedly indulged in frequent
drinking bouts.
The brief appearance of a guerrilla movement in the coastal jungle
and a rash of small-scale terrorist incidents (many of which later were
found to have been staged by right-wing provocateurs) also left
Arosemena open to accusations of being either unable or unwilling to
stop communist subversion. By early 1963, military conspiracy was again
afoot. On July 11 the high command of the armed forces decided, without
dissent, to depose Arosemena.
The four-man military junta that seized power announced its intention
not to return the nation to constitutional rule until the institution of
basic socioeconomic reforms, which both Velasco and Arosemena had
promised but never implemented. This failure by their two civilian
predecessors, the junta believed, had become a source of growing
frustration within the lower classes, thus making them more receptive to
the lure of communism. The junta combined its reformist anticommunism
with the more traditional hard-line variety. After jailing or exiling
the entire leadership of the communist left, the new government
reorganized the nation's two leading universities in an effort to
eliminate them as sources of left-wing political activity.
In July 1964, the junta decreed the Agrarian Reform Law to
commemorate the first anniversary of its assumption of power. The law
abolished the huasipungo system, the feudalistic land tenure
arrangement widely used in the Sierra. However, the law resulted in little real improvement in the
lives of the long-suffering Sierra peasants and died from lack of
funding under subsequent civilian governments.
Meaningful reform was precluded, in part at least, by the
increasingly cumbersome process of decision making within the
politically heterogeneous, plural executive. Insubordination by the air
force representative on the junta led to his dismissal and arrest in
November 1965; thereafter, the junta had only three members.
In 1965 Ecuador also saw a dramatic drop in its revenue from banana
exports and, despite generous development assistance from the United
States government and the Inter-American Development Bank, the junta
suddenly faced an economic crisis of major proportions. The announcement
of increased taxes on imports sparked the opposition of the powerful
Guayaquil Chamber of Commerce, which in March called for a general
strike. Long- disgruntled student groups and labor unions were only too
happy to join in the protest, which rapidly spread to other cities. On
March 29, 1966, following a bloody and demoralizing attack on the
Central University in Quito, the disillusioned military reformers
stepped down.
The following day, a small group of civilian leaders named Clemente
Yerovi Indaburu, a non-partisan banana grower who had served as minister
of economy under Galo Plaza, to be provisional president. In October a
popularly elected constituent assembly drafted a new constitution and
elected Otto Arosemena G�mez, a cousin of Carlos Julio and a political
centrist, to act as a second provisional president. During his twenty
months in office, the new constitution went into effect in May 1967, and
popular elections for president were held in June 1968. Incredibly,
Velasco--now seventy-five years old--was voted into the presidency for
the fifth time, an incredible thirty-four years after his initial
victory.
The weakness of Velasco's mandate--he managed only a plurality of
barely one-third of the popular vote in a crowded field of five
candidates--foreshadowed political difficulties that plagued him during
his final term. His newly formed National Velasquista Federation
(Federaci�n Nacional Velasquista--FNV) was far short of a majority in
either house of Congress, and a failure to build any working coalition
made for a stalemate in the legislative process. Even Velasco's own vice
president, a Guayaquile�o Liberal named Jorge Zavala Baquerizo, turned
into a strident and vocal critic. Cabinet ministers came and went with
astonishing frequency. This political impasse soon combined with the
fiscal and balance-of- payments crises, which by now had become
customary under the spendthrift habits and administrative mismanagement
associated with each of Velasco's terms in office, to spawn a major
political crisis. The turning point came on June 22, 1970, when Velasco,
in an action known as an autogolpe (self-seizure of power),
dismissed Congress and the Supreme Court and assumed dictatorial powers.
Velasco subsequently decreed a number of necessary, though extremely
unpopular, economic measures. After devaluing the sucre for the first time since 1961, he placed tight controls on
foreign exchange transactions and then decreed a number of new tax
measures, the most controversial of which raised import tariffs
considerably. Velasco attempted to compensate for his lost prestige by
baiting the United States, seizing and fining United States fishing
boats found within 200 nautical miles of the Ecuadorian coast. The
intensification of the "tuna war" inflamed tempers in both
countries; Ecuador dismissed United States military advisers, and the
United States withdrew almost all economic and military aid to Ecuador.
Such nationalistic adventures were of only momentary value to Velasco,
however. In 1971, amid mounting civic unrest that verified the extent of
the opposition, he was forced to cancel a scheduled national plebiscite
in which he hoped to replace the 1967 constitution, with the charter
written under his own auspices in 1946 the Constitution, Velasco argued,
made the president too weak to be effective.
The president's autogolpe and his continuance in power were
possible because of support from the armed forces. Velasco's key ally
was his nephew and minister of defense, General Jorge Acosta Velasco,
who continually reshuffled the high command in order to retain velasquistas
in key posts. In the wake of a failed attempt to oust the powerful
commandant of the Quito military academy in April 1971, however, Acosta
himself was forced to resign his ministerial portfolio and was summarily
dispatched to Madrid as ambassador. Having lost the man who was his
linchpin in the armed forces and the only apparent heir to the velasquista
throne, Velasco was left to the mercy of the high command.
Two circumstances proved critical in persuading the military to
overthrow Velasco before the scheduled completion of his term in 1972.
On the one hand, the state was due very shortly to begin reaping vast
revenues under a 1964 petroleum concession. On the other hand, the
overwhelming favorite to win the presidency in 1972 was Asaad Bucaram
Elmhalim, a former street peddler who in 1960 had seized the leadership
of the CFP from Guevara Moreno and later had twice been an extremely
popular mayor of Guayaquil. Both the military and the business community
regarded Bucaram as dangerous and unpredictable and unfit to be
president, especially at a time when unprecedented income was expected
to flow into the state coffers. On February 15, 1972, four months before
the scheduled elections, the military once again overthrew Velasco, who
was sent into his final period of exile. He was replaced by a three-man
military junta headed by the Army chief of staff, General Guillermo Rodr�guez
Lara.
Ecuador - Direct Military Rule, 1972-79
The military regime called itself "nationalist and
revolutionary," but the well-known connections of Rodr�guez Lara
to the Guayaquil business community signaled disappointment for those
who anticipated that he would head a progressive military regime such as
was ruling in Peru at the time. It shortly became apparent that,
ideologically, the Rodr�guez Lara regime was a hybrid, reflecting a
tenuous equilibrium among the widely divergent political tendencies
within the Ecuadorian armed forces. Nevertheless, like the contemporary
Peruvian and Brazilian regimes, the regime of Rodr�guez Lara, he
promised, would not be an interim government, but rather a long-term
venture dedicated to introducing structural changes thought necessary to
unfreeze the development process.
Rodr�guez Lara's regime gave early emphasis to a campaign designed
in part to exert firm control over the nation's petroleum resources and
in part to consolidate the government's political authority. Several
former political leaders, including ex-President Otto Arosemena, were
tried for corruption in connection with oil concessions granted during
the 1960s. In addition, a large number of functionaries of the Velasco
government, supporters of Bucaram, as well as drug traffickers,
legitimate importers, and customs officials were charged with corruption
and "illegal enrichment." Although it thus assailed its major
opponents from the start the military regime, however, failed to build
its own civilian base of political support.
Promises of a "meaningful agrarian reform" under the
auspices of Minister of Agriculture Guillermo Maldonado, a dedicated
reformer, were frustrated by intense opposition from traditional elites.
Maldonado was eventually forced out, and by the end of Rodr�guez Lara's
four years in office less than 1 percent of Ecuador's cultivable land
had changed hands under the reform. More notable achievements came in
the areas of building infrastructure projects, such as the major oil
refinery and petrochemical complex in Esmeraldas; various highway and
electrification projects; and state capitalist enterprises, particularly
the Ecuadorian State Petroleum Corporation (Corporaci�n Estatal
Petrolera Ecuatoriana-- CEPE). The lateter corporation was founded in
1972 and grew to become the major actor in Ecuador's exploitation of its
oil reserves.
Oil policy was the regime's vehicle for its most forceful expression
of nationalism. Minister of Natural Resources Gustavo Jarr�n Ampudia
presided over Ecuador's 1973 entry into the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC), with all its attendant prestige and economic
benefits. He was also responsible for Ecuador's renegotiation of a
number of oil concessions, including the key Texaco-Gulf concession in
the Oriente, on terms much more favorable to the state, such as
substantial increases in both the royalties paid by foreign firms and
the tax rate they paid on petroleum exports. These efforts were
initially successful in allowing the government to retain a larger share
of Ecuador's petroleum earnings.
The oil companies became increasingly disconcerted, however, when
Jarr�n proposed in late 1974 that the share of stock in the Texaco-Gulf
subsidiary held by CEPE be increased from 25 to 51 percent. Claiming
that the terms of their concessions negotiated with Jarr�n had priced
Ecuadorian oil beyond the world market price, the oil companies cut back
drastically on their exports, at a cost to the government of hundreds of
millions of dollars over the following nine months. This intense
financial pressure finally led to a July 1975 announcement that taxes on
the oil companies' exports were being reduced. It was thus clear that
the military regime had overplayed its nationalistic oil policy, having
failed to keep in mind that Ecuador was, after all, a relatively small
oil producer and thus not a powerful player within OPEC.
The moderation of the regime's oil policy, however, did not result in
the anticipated resolution of mounting economic problems. Oil exports
rose only slightly, while imports, particularly of luxury items,
continued to soar, aided by a low-tariff policy that had been designed
to soak up petroleum earnings, and thus control inflation. In excess of
22 percent during 1974, inflation was rapidly eroding the real value of
wages within the middle class.
In August, in an effort to resolve its balance-of-payments
difficulties, the regime decreed a 60 percent duty on imported luxury
items. The measure was condemned by the Chambers of Commerce in Quito
and Guayaquil, whose constituents had grown dependent on the sale of
imports, and caused, a week later, a bloody attempt led by the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Ra�l Gonz�lez Alvear, to
overthrow Rodr�guez Lara. Although this coup attempt failed, at a cost
of twenty-two lives, on January 11, 1976, a second, bloodless coup was
successful in removing Rodr�guez Lara. He was replaced by a Supreme
Council of Government consisting of the commanders of the three armed
services.
Virtually the only item on the agenda of the new military triumvirate
was to preside over a return of the government to constitutional,
civilian rule. The bloody September 1975 coup attempt had revealed the
depth of the breach in the institutional unity of the armed forces.
Handing the government back to civilians, it was hoped, might remove the
causes of divisions within the military, or at least make it easier to
hide them from public view.
The original timetable, announced in June 1976, called for a
transition that was to culminate in presidential elections in February
1978. First, new government charters and electoral laws were to be
drafted by appointed commissions, and then a public referendum would
choose between two proposed constitutions. The transition was repeatedly
slowed down, however, and in the end, instead of the less than two years
originally scheduled, three years and eight months elapsed between the
1976 coup and the inauguration of a civilian president.
Two reasons are commonly cited for the delay: the slowness of
decision making within the Supreme Council of Government because of
ongoing disagreement within the military high command and repeated
maneuverings by the military government to manipulate the electoral
process, thereby controlling its outcome. Like the Rodr�guez Lara
government, the Council was particularly interested in seeing a poor
electoral performance by the CFP and, especially, preventing Bucaram
from winning the presidency.
The national referendum to choose the constitution was finally held
on January 15, 1978. The results saw 23 percent of the voting population
nullify their ballots, an action that had been advocated by the
traditional right; 31 percent of the population voted in favor of a
revised version of the 1945 constitution, and a plurality of 44 percent
voted in favor of the newly drafted national charter. The charter was
the more progressive of the two constitutions, its major reforms being
the acknowledgement of a role for the state in socioeconomic
development, the legalization of a worker self-managed (autogestional)
sector in the economy, a unicameral legislature, no presidential
reelection, and, for the first time in Ecuador, electoral suffrage for
illiterates.
Five candidates then campaigned for the presidency. The consistent
favorite in polls was Rodrigo Borja of the social democratic Democratic
Left (Izquierda Democr�tica--ID). Because the Supreme Council of
Government made sure that Bucaram was barred from running, the CFP
strongman named his second in command, Jaime Rold�s, to be the party's
candidate. In order to broaden the appeal of the ticket, Osvaldo
Hurtado, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party (Partido Dem�crata
Cristiano--PDC), was tapped to be Rold�s's vice presidential running
mate. The traditional rightist vote was split between two candidates,
and the various parties of the Marxist left coalesced to name one
candidate. After a lengthy recount, the final results of the July 16
election confirmed the initial tally of a surprise victory by Rold�s,
with 27 percent of the national vote. Sixto Dur�n Ball�n, candidate of
a coalition of rightist parties, finished second with 24 percent. The
electoral law mandated that when no candidate achieved a majority vote,
a run-off election between the two top finishers be held.
It was more than nine months before the second-round election took
place, however. They were months of considerable political tension and
doubt as to whether the transition would proceed as planned. First,
widespread problems in organizing the election and in the vote count
during the first round left serious doubts as to the competence and
honesty of the electoral authorities. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal
(Tribunal Superior Electoral--TSE) was, as a result, completely
reorganized. Second, the government-- remembering a campaign slogan
calling "Rold�s to the government, Bucaram to power"--was
understandably dismayed with results of the first-round election. By
delaying the second round, the government sought to give rightists the
time to build an anti-Rold�s coalition under which Dur�n could emerge
as the second-round victor. To complicate matters further, Abd�n Calder�n
M��oz, a populist candidate who had won 9 percent of the vote in the
first round, was murdered under circumstances implicating the
government. Finally, as a further distraction during this difficult
period, Velasco returned from exile to bury his wife and died in March
1979 at age eighty-six.
The second round was finally held on April 29, 1979, with the Rold�s-Hurtado
ticket sweeping to an overwhelming 68.5 percent victory against a weak
performance by Dur�n. Doubts persisted, however, up to the moment that
the winners took office three months later, that the military would
allow them to assume their duly elected offices. The size of their
popular mandate and, according to political scientist John D. Martz,
pressure from the administration of President Jimmy Carter in Washington
made it difficult for the military to stop the
"democratization" process at this late date. The military did
extract as a price, in any case, unprecedented powers to name
representatives to the boards of directors of major state corporations
and to participate directly in the naming of the minister of defense.
The outgoing government also made it clear to Rold�s (who had an early
campaign slogan of "we will not forgive, we will not forget")
that it would not tolerate any investigation into the behavior of the
military with respect to human rights. With his autonomy thus
diminished, Rold�s finally assumed the presidency on August 10, and
thus Ecuador returned to constitutional, civilian rule after almost a
decade of dictatorship.
Ecuador - Return to Democratic Rule, 1979-84
Rold�s presided over a nation that had undergone profound changes
during the seven years of military rule. During the ceremony to pass the
mantle of power to Rold�s, Admiral Alfredo Poveda Burbano pointed
proudly to impressive indicators of economic growth between 1972 and
1979: the government budget expanded some 540 percent, whereas exports
as well as per capita income increased a full 500 percent. Industrial
development had also progressed, stimulated by the new oil wealth as
well as Ecuador's preferential treatment under the provisions of the
Andean Common Market (Ancom, also known as the Andean Pact).
Past export "booms" in cacao and bananas were managed by
and for private coastal interests, but the state controlled the
petroleum bonanza and thereby transformed the social landscape.
Quito--the seat of the bureaucracy and the closest major city to the oil
fields--reaped the benefits of the economic growth. The capital city
lost much of its sleepy Sierra character and in the 1980s competed with
Guayaquil as a center of modern economic endeavor. Employment in the
public sector grew in excess of 10 percent annually throughout the late
1970s, creating a new consumption-oriented middle class in Quito. But
such change highlighted the persistence of the traditional rural
campesino and the unskilled urban subproletariat; petroleum revenues
thus widened Ecuador's habitual inequality in income distribution.
Expectations that the economic and social changes would transform the
traditional political culture were unfulfilled. Customary aspects of
civilian politics, such as regionalism and personalism, reflected in the
proliferation of political parties; and rivalry between the executive
and legislature persisted during the five years that Rold�s and his
vice president, Osvaldo Hurtado, were in power.
The most destructive of these traditions was evident in the intense
rivalry that developed between Rold�s and Bucaram, the strongman of the
president's own CFP who, having twice been prevented from running for
the presidency, was now determined to run the country from his power
base in the unicameral legislature, the National Congress (Congress
Nacional--hereafter, Congress). Bucaram's coalition building secured him
the presidency of the legislature during the first year of the new
government. The president, for his part, was determined to retain his
independence from the autocratic and increasingly conservative party
boss. Bucaram had no apparent agenda other than blocking the reformist
agenda of the president, who was thus forced to spend most of his first
year in office scratching together his own political base, independent
of the CFP, in order to achieve a legislative majority.
Rold�s proved successful in this effort; in August 1980, his
candidate for the congressional presidency narrowly defeated the bucaramista
candidate, and the CFP also suffered major losses in the municipal and
provincial elections in December. The president was not able to enjoy
the fruits of his success, however; on May 24, 1981, he was killed,
along with his wife and the minister of defense, in an airplane crash in
the southern province of Loja.
The death of Rold�s generated intense popular speculation. Some
Ecuadorian nationalists attributed it to the Peruvian government because
the crash took place near the border where, four months previously, the
two nations had participated in a bloody flare-up in their perpetual
border dispute. Many of the nation's leftists, pointing to a similar
crash that had killed Panamanian President Omar Torrijos Herrera less
than three months later, blamed the United States government.
Rold�s's constitutional successor, Hurtado, immediately faced an
economic crisis brought on by the sudden end of the petroleum boom.
Massive foreign borrowing, initiated during the years of the second
military regime and continued under Rold�s, resulted in a foreign debt
that by 1983 was nearly US$7 billion. The nation's petroleum reserves
declined sharply during the early 1980s because of exploration failures
and rapidly increasing domestic consumption.
The economic crisis was aggravated in 1982 and 1983 by drastic
climatic changes, bringing severe drought as well as flooding,
precipitated by the appearance of the unusually warm ocean current known
as "El Ni�o". Analysts estimated damage to the nation's
infrastructure at US$640 million, with balance-of- payments losses of
some US$300 million. The real gross domestic product (GDP) fell to 2
percent in 1982 and to -3.3 percent in 1983. The rate of inflation in
1983, 52.5 percent, was the highest ever recorded in the nation's
history.
Although widely considered a center-leftist, Hurtado confronted the
economic crisis by instituting highly unpopular austerity measures aimed
at gaining the approval of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
international financial community at large. Hurtado eliminated
government subsidies for basic foodstuffs--thus contributing to both
inflation and the impoverishment of the masses--and substantially
devalued the sucre. With unemployment increasing to as high as 13.5
percent, the United Workers Front (Frente Unitario de Trabajadores--FUT)
launched four general strikes during Hurtado's period in office. The
most militant of these nationwide strikes, in October 1982, was called
off after forty-eight hours because of union leaders' fears of provoking
a coup d'�tat.
Outside observers noted that, however unpopular, Hurtado deserved
credit for keeping Ecuador in good standing with the international
financial community and for consolidating Ecuador's democratic political
system under extremely difficult conditions. The political right,
nevertheless, believing that the economic crisis was caused by
presidential policies that were inimical to free-enterprise capitalism,
bitterly criticized Hurtado. The right united for the 1984 elections in
order to back Le�n Febres Cordero Ribadeneyra, a businessman from
Guayaquil, with Borja running a close second. As Febres Cordero entered
office on August 10, there was no end in sight to the economic crisis
nor to the intense struggle that characterized the political process in
Ecuador.
