An Unvanquished Movement May 31, 2016

In February, a federal judge in Mexico admitted that he had no choice but to accept that the state’s case against the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (ELZN) could not move forward. The charges of terrorism, sedition, riot, rebellion, and conspiracy filed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1994 against Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos and the indigenous leaders of the resistance were null and void: the statute of limitations had expired.

That the two-decade-long battle the Zapatistas waged against the Mexican government’s policy of privatization and neoliberalization would end with a legal whimper seems, at first blush, anticlimatic. But it is part of the famous black-balaclava-clad fighters’ long-term strategy: silence in the face of oppression and opposition.

The San Andrés Accords

The Zapatistas appeared for the first time on the morning of January 1, 1994 to protest the adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Armed members of the Tsotsil, Tseltal, Ch’ol, and Tojolabal indigenous peoples — the poorest of the poor, some barefoot, some carrying guns dating from the 1910 Mexican Revolution, others carrying cardboard cutouts of rifles — seemed like characters from the novels of Carlos Fuentes or Laura Esquivel. Upon their arrival, they took over cities throughout Chiapas, freed prisoners in San Cristobal de las Casas, burned military outposts, and claimed the ranches of wealthy landowners as their own.

Although the world learned of their existence when their battalions came down from the mountains that freezing morning, they had been secretly organizing for the moment in their communities for ten years prior to the 1994 uprising.

“Our date of birth is November 17, 1983,” Subcomandate Insurgent Marcos — who has now changed his name to Galeano to honor a comrade assassinated by paramilitaries in 2014 — recalled. “We prepared in silence for a decade to shout ‘Enough!’,” he said. “By keeping our pain inside, we prepared to cry out in pain, because we could no longer wait and hope to be understood by those who didn’t even understand that they didn’t understand.”

Marcos, an eloquent, pipe-smoking mestizo (the government claimed he was a Mexico City philosophy professor influenced by radical liberation theology), became the public face of the Zapatistas’ struggle. In January of this year, he outlined the reasons for the indigenous uprising:

The resistance of those from below is to wake those who sleep, to enrage those who are content, to force history to say what has been kept silent and to expose the exploitation, killings, displacement, contempt and forgetfulness that is hidden behind the museums, statues, books and monuments to the lies of those above.

In their silence, Carlos Fuentes wrote, the Zapatistas “won the hearts of a nation,” declaring a “war against being forgotten.”

The Mexican government charged Marcos and the indigenous leaders of the Zapatista movement with terrorism, sedition, riot, rebellion, and conspiracy. They met the Zapatistas’ cardboard guns with tanks, soldiers, and helicopter gunships. But when the army failed, the government was forced to negotiate with the indigenous peoples, promising official recognition of ancestral lands, their culture, and their languages.

The San Andrés Accords — signed by the Zapatistas and the state in January of 1995 — marked the first time since the Spanish Empire’s invasion five hundred years previously that indigenous peoples’ collective rights to territory, autonomy, and self-determination had been recognized by the dominant elite.

But, as was apparent almost immediately, the agreement was not worth the paper it was written on. Eight months later, the PRI intensified anti-revolutionary activity in the Chiapas region: daily harassment at military checkpoints, constant overflights by helicopter gunships, and soldiers on patrol in villages with hunting dogs. Even more frightening was how the state outsourced terror to paramilitaries who threatened, intimidated, and forcibly evicted rebel sympathizers and their families from their land at gunpoint — and killed those who opposed them.

The Fray Bartolomé Human Rights Center in Chiapas reports that the military’s “paramilitary strategy has been effective because it relies not only on direct attacks perpetrated with impunity, but also on the psychological effect of the presence of paramilitaries recruited from among supporters of the government within indigenous communities, to create fear and tear apart those communities.”

Why would the government so quickly turn its back on the agreement? Francisco López Bárcenas, a preeminent campaigner for indigenous rights, explained that the accords “would make it more difficult for foreign capitalists to appropriate the resources on collectively owned land.” Mexican intellectual newspaper La Jornadaexplained, “Instead of establishing a new and inclusive social pact, respectful to the original peoples’ right to autonomy, the state decided to maintain the old status quo”: forcing autonomous indigenous peoples submit to government control and work as cheap labor for capitalism. As the Fray Center put it, the government wanted to make sure that wealth “accumulates in as few hands as possible.”

Once the conservative and neoliberal National Action Party (PAN) succeeded in ousting the corporate PRI in 2000, “all México was put up for sale, and the state opted for a low intensity war in an attempt to end the Zapatistas’ resistance,” Bárcenas added.

Little Islands

The silence that followed the accords and the military’s oppression in Chiapas following them is, in large part, due to the media. After portraying Marcos as a postmodern Ché Guevara and the Zapatistas as quixotic revolutionaries, it quickly lost interest. But the silence around their activities has allowed them to create an autonomous society deep in the Lacandon jungle, working quietly against the increasing neoliberalization of Mexico.

There and throughout Chiapas, hand-painted signs at the entrances to hamlets and pueblos mark the frontiers of Zapatista territory: “Here, the people command and the government obeys.” Painted spirals representing caracols, or snails, emphasize the rebels’ intention to “slowly, but surely” continue moving forward to organize their own society, whether the state recognizes it or not.

Sergio Rodríguez Lascano, editor of the Zapatista magazine Rebeldía, describes the Zapatista economy as “based on small agro-ecological parcels of land, tended by families for their own sustenance, together with ranches where the collective production of cattle, corn, coffee, bread, and honey provides an income for the community and contributes to the building of schools and medical clinics.” Zapatista communities train their own teachers, medics, and midwives, run their own pharmacies using traditional herbal medicines, and even organize their own autonomous banks.

Not everyone on the Left agrees with Marcos’s “silence as a strategy” approach or with the Zapatista’s emphasis on local self-reliance.

Mike Gonzalez, a Marxist and Latin American studies professor, thinks “the Zapatistas’ rhetoric of rights is posited on the assumption that a capitalist state is governed by principles and laws rather than class interests,” and while the EZLN’s “heroic resistance” is inspiring, a retreat into local autonomous communities is “a renunciation of any claim to lead society in a different direction. There is not a choice between power and its absence.”

Former Mexican Revolutionary Workers’ Party activist and academic Arturo Anguiano recognizes that the Zapatistas’ attempt to escape capitalism has left the indigenous resistance open to the criticism that it is presenting an alternative that is “too exceptional, too specific, and probably unrepeatable.”

“Marcos explains the Zapatista communities as ‘little islands’ or ‘spaces of resistance’ where social relations can be transformed without waiting for the revolution,” Anguiano relates.

But Lascano doesn’t see it that way. He says the Zapatistas are using the territory seized from the wealthy landowners to “construct an equalitarian alternative” that “is located outside the thinking and practice of the traditional left.”

Part of the ELZN’s distance from recognizable left practice, Lascano argues, is that Zapatista supporters “are not working class and the EZLN is not a workers’ party because the traditional Marxist concept of class consciousness doesn’t exist in these communities. But we have a number of things that have something to do with Marxism. For instance, everyone is involved in the communities’ democratic political organization,” he adds, which range from local assemblies to high-level juntas (councils) that are responsible for running the Zapatista territory’s political, economic, and judicial affairs.

Lascano has declined invitations to join the current national campaign, led by radical Catholic priests, to rewrite Mexico’s Constitution, and was uninterested in the presidential campaign of the left-wing former Mexico City mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Quoting Marcos, he declared, “The Zapatistas are going to build something else.”

Historian Severo Martínez Peláez, known for his work on indigenous resistance during Spain’s occupation of Mexico, says

It is a mistake to believe that the oppressed social classes live their “normal” lives when they are resigned to their fate by the inability to change it, and that their lives become “abnormal” when they rebel. This can only seem that way to those who are concerned that that supposed normality is not altered. The Zapatistas take pride that their indigenous communities — belonging to original peoples whose Tsotsil, Tseltal, Ch’ol and Tojolabal names are still unknown even to most Mexicans — are living “abnormal” lives.

Isolated from the country’s left — or, as Anguiano describes it, with the Left isolated from the Zapatistas — the indigenous resistance continues unheralded and out of sight for most Mexicans.

Work from Below

Yet with the return of the PRI to power in 2012, the Zapatistas showed that, even while silent, they have the power to resonate from the mountains of Chiapas to the presidential palace.

That year, the Zapatistas, together with hundreds of thousands of supporters, took to the streets in massive demonstrations throughout Mexico to demand that the original San Andrés agreement to recognize indigenous rights be respected by the political party that signed it.

The demonstrations were silent, but the message was clear: “Can you hear us?”

The Zapatistas have since applied their strategy not just to their old enemies in the PRI, but to the entirety of Mexico’s notoriously corrupt political process, declaring that elections “don’t interest us, nor do they concern us.”

“Mexicans should organize for a world in which the people command and the government obeys. While others wait for those above to solve problems, we Zapatistas have already started building our own liberty, from below,” the EZLN stated.

“We are building a new system and another way of life,” Galeano/Marcos explained on January 1 of this year to the assembled EZLN fighters, Zapatista campesinos, and a few foreigners attending in solidarity, a celebration in the heart of the Lacandon jungle to commemorate three decades of resistance.

Before, to know if someone was a Zapatista, they had to be seen wearing a red bandana or a black balaclava. But now you know if someone is a Zapatista because they know how to work the land; because they care for their indigenous culture; because they know how to work collectively, and because if, when someone claims that the Zapatistas no longer exist, they respond: “Don’t worry, there will be more of us – it may take a while, but there’s going to more of us.”

Despite the continued virtual military occupation of the jungles and mountains of Mexico’s southern frontier, and despite the helicopter gunship patrols, the hunting dogs, and the threats, intimidation, and violence of paramilitaries in the pay of government-supporting political parties, the Zapatista resistance remains proudly undefeated.

Paul Salgado is a former labor union organizer working in communications for indigenous community organizations in Mexico.

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September 4, 2015

Left and indigenous forces in Ecuador are attempting to create an alternative to both Rafael Correa and the Right.

 

A woman at the indigenous march and People’s Strike in Quito, Ecuador earlier this month. Amazon Watch

Jacobin

30th August 2015

On August 13, an indigenous march and people’s strike converged on the Andean city of Quito, Ecuador’s political center. The march was coordinated principally by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), and began on August 2 in Zamora Chinchipe, passing through Loja, Azuay, Cañar, Chimborazo, Tungurahua, Cotopaxi, and Salcedo before arriving in the capital. Demands emanating from the different sectors of urban and rural groups supporting the initiative were diverse, and sometimes contradictory.

But Alberto Acosta, at least, sees a certain clarity in the tangle of ideas and demands. Acosta was the presidential candidate for the Plurinational Unity of Lefts in the 2013 general elections. An economist by profession, he was the minister of mines and energy and president of the Constituent Assembly in the opening years of the Correa government. After the assembly ended, he and Correa parted ways, but Acosta remains an important shaper of opinion in the country. In the lead-up to August 13, he maintained that, contrary to popular assessments, there was a discernible political core to the protesters’ demands.

According to Acosta, the people in the streets are opposed to any constitutional changes that will allow indefinite reelection of the president and demand an end to the ongoing criminalization of social protest. They are outraged by a new agrarian reform initiative that will displace peasants and advance the interests of agro-business, and they are lined up against the expansion of mega-mines and their nightmarish socio-ecological implications.

The demonstrators are defending workers’ rights to organize and strike, elemental freedoms limited in the Labor Code introduced in April this year. They are aligned against oil exploitation in Yasuní, one of the most biodiverse areas in the world, and a zone that Correa promised to protect and then abandoned. Finally, the popular organizations are opposed to the neoliberal free trade agreement Ecuador signed with the European Union that erodes the country’s sovereignty. These overlapping concerns, according to Acosta, overshadow other divisions on the Left.

A Day in the Streets of Quito

Despite this shared mission, walking through the different sections of the August 13 march, it was difficult to miss the contest for hegemony unfolding within the opposition. Left-wing unions called for dignified wages and the right to strike, while socialist feminists chanted slogans against Correa’s Opus Dei-inflected “family plan” and anticapitalist environmental groups marched against extractivism — particularly the expansion of the mining, oil, and agro-industrial frontiers.

Alongside these groups were social-democratic and revolutionary socialist and anarchist collectives, some with significant strength and long organizational histories, others little more than affinity groups. These eclectic expressions of a Left — broadly conceived — dominated the streets in numbers and political sophistication, but they have yet to cohere into a unified left bloc, independent of Correa.

CONAIE issued a public manifesto after a three-day conference in February, outlining demands that are clearly distinguishable from the politics of the Right — contrary to the suggestions of state officials — and reiterate longstanding aims of the indigenous movement.

It’s patently clear that Correa’s Manichean worldview, in which the population is with the government or with the Right, obscures more than it reveals. Still, the social bases, potential or realized, of the myriad faces of the right-wing opposition — Guillermo Lasso, the largest shareholder in the Bank of Guayaquil and 2013 presidential candidate for the Right; Jaime Nebot, the conservative mayor of Guayaquil; and Mauricio Rodas, the mayor of Quito — were also visible in the avenues and byways of Quito.

This politics found material expression in middle-class banners defending families and freedom, and audible resonance in the chanted echoes of “Down with the dictator!” President Correa points to the large demonstrations of last June against taxes on inheritance and capital gains as evidence that this Right is a real and imminent threat to stability.

The immediate battle lines of the demonstration — on the Left and Right alike — were delineated by the various participants’ desires to demonstrate social power in the extra-parliamentary domain, but anxious anticipation of the 2017 general elections weighed on every element of the day’s events. No one knows if Correa will amend the constitution and run a third time as the candidate for PAIS Alliance (AP), the party in power since 2007, and under Correa’s leadership since its inception.

Golpe Blando?

During the commodities boom, life for Ecuador’s poor improved. According to official figures — which use $2.63 per day as the baseline — poverty in Ecuador declined from 37.6 percent in 2006 to 22.5 percent in 2014, while inequality income (measured by the Gini index) also improved.

In that economic context, Correa could maintain his popularity through a fluctuating amalgam of co-optive measures and targeted retaliation vis-à-vis the principal social movements, especially the indigenous movement, which is fighting a two-pronged battle centered on socio-ecological conflicts around mining and the integrity of indigenous territories. Under charges of “terrorism and sabotage,” several nonviolent indigenous leaders have been jailed and are serving punitive sentences for activities like blocking roads or preventing mining companies from gaining access to their (ever-expanding) concessions throughout the country.

But recently, amid an extended rut in oil prices and looming austerity measures, the Correa administration has suffered significant declines in popularity. According to the indispensable conjunctural reports regularly published by sociologist Pablo Ospina Peralta, polling data show the president has lost between ten and twenty points in popularity over the last few months.

In the face of growing discontent, the Correa administration has responded defensively by framing the demonstrations as either intentionally, or naively, playing into the hands of the domestic right and imperialism, reinforcing the destabilization of the country, and laying the groundwork for the Right to enact a golpe blando, or soft coup.

One AP congressperson, María Augusta, casually told the media that the CIA financed the indigenous march, although she offered no evidence for this claim. Correa himself blames indigenous and labor “elites” for the demonstration, arguing they have no sense of the interests and sentiments of their rank-and-file bases.

Activism has become sedition, and left-wing dissent betrayal of the country. Two prominent indigenous leaders were arrested at the end of the day on August 13 and roughed up by police: Carlos Pérez Guartambel, of the Andean indigenous organization ECUARUNARI, and Salvador Quishpe, the prefect of Zamora Chinchipe. Manuela Picq, a French and Brazilian academic and journalist who has lived in Ecuador for eight years on a cultural-exchange visa and is Pérez Guartambel’s partner, was also arrested and threatened with deportation.

Vying for Hegemony

Just as the right-wing anti-tax protests in June were a sign of the political fragility ofCorreísmo in the medium term, the weighty presence of the Left in the recent protests suggests that the popular sectors sense a change in the balance of forces as well. “What is at the center of the national debate is the exit from Correísmo,” Acosta explains. “How, with whom, towards what, and on what terms.”

Yet, as Alejandra Santillana Ortíz recently suggested, it can be misleading to map the trajectory of dissent leading to the present moment using proximate catalysts, like the falling price of oil. Ruptures between social movements and the state began to surface in earnest as far back as 2009 and have intensified measurably over the last three years. Their culmination in the strike on Quito is at least as much a question of this medium durée as it is the response to political-economic developments of the last couple of months.

Sociologist Mario Unda’s recent snapshot comparison of the country’s principal socio-political lines of demarcation in 2007 and 2013 (the first year of the first and second administrations of Correa, respectively) echoes this perspective. For Unda, the outset of the first Correa administration conflict was overdetermined in many ways, by the Right’s fear of Correa’s potential radicalism and the Left’s hope for the same.

Conflict gravitated around the political-institutional terrain of the state, with the Right still retaining control of the National Assembly and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. Alongside this institutional competition with the Right, big private media corporations lined up against Correa, increasingly playing the role of conservative opposition, as the traditional parties of the Right imploded into irrelevance. The principal business confederations in the country also adopted an extremely confrontational stance in the face of the new government.

At the same time, even in 2007 it was possible to identify certain lines of conflict between the AP government and popular movements and sectors. Some of these were marginal and localized — disputes over rural and urban service provision, labor disputes, pension disputes, and so on. However, in the countryside the indigenous movement was already being drawn into battles with the state and multinational capital on the extractive fronts of mining, oil, water, hydroelectricity, and agro-industry.

Far from marginalia, these issues proved central to Correa’s development model in the years to come. In 2009, for example, a pair of laws on mining and water sparked the largest protests witnessed in the first three years of the Correa administration.

The mining law facilitated the rapid extension of favorable concessions to multinational mining companies throughout the length and breadth of the country, while the water law privatized access to communal water sources (crucial legislation for large-scale private mining initiatives), limited community and indigenous self-management of water resources, and relaxed regulations on water contamination. With mineral prices soaring on the international market and oil reserves diminishing in the national territory, Correa staked the country’s future on the gold under the soil.

By comparison to 2007, the divisions were much clearer in 2013. The scene was determined not by the axis of right-wing contestation with the government, but rather by the government’s growing disputes with popular movements and their historic allies. There were conflicts with the bourgeoisie to be sure, but these disagreements were only with certain sectors of the elite, and face-offs with capital no longer accurately captured the determining dynamics of the terrain.

Instead, the Correa government’s principal enemy had become the indigenous movement and “infantile” environmentalists, and consequently, the government threw all its coercive and co-optive powers in that direction. At the same time, Correa sharpened his relations with public-sector workers, most notoriously laying off thousands through obligatory redundancies.

High schools — students and teachers — were another live field of contention, as the government tried to ram through “meritocratic” reforms in the educational sector. All the while, criminalization and control of social protest and independent organizing was a primary concern of the government.

Ideologically as well, the Right had taken on novel forms by 2013, relative to their collective demeanor in 2007. Sections of the traditional right continued to battle for a purist retention of neoliberal axioms, but there were also new experiments — like Creando Oportunidades and the Sociedad Unida Más Acción — that sought to present a public image of moderation and modernity, appropriating much of the language of the Correa administration for itself.

The economic organizations of the bourgeoisie were also developing in interesting directions. The confrontational disposition of business confederations was largely eclipsed by 2013, and most federations had elected new leaderships whose mandates were to negotiate and reach agreement with a government seen to be far more flexible than originally anticipated. The negotiation hypothesis of the Right paid dividends in the creation of a new ministry of foreign trade, and the signing of the Ecuador-EU free trade agreement, which had the enthusiastic backing of all the big capitals.

Unda argues that the dispute between the government and the bourgeoisie had metamorphosed into an internal dispute, and while control of the state apparatus was still a domain of contestation, the field of consensus on capitalist modernization — a fundamentally shared vision of society and development — defined the broader politico-economic backdrop.

Of course, this did not mean the obsolescence of sectional and conjunctural conflict, but it did mean the bourgeois-state axis of conflict had been eclipsed by that of the state–popular movement. The disputes with business and the Right were disputes over control of the same societal project, whereas battle lines between popular movements and the state were drawn over distinct visions of society, development, and the future.

Latin America’s Passive Revolution

Massimo Modonesi’s reading of Antonio Gramsci’s “passive revolution” is useful for making sense of the trajectories of progressive governments in South America over the last ten to fifteen years. In Modonessi’s interpretation of Gramsci, passive revolution encompasses an unequal and dialectical combination of two tendencies simultaneously present in a single epoch — one of restoration of the old order and the other of revolution, one of preservation and the other of transformation.

The two tendencies coexist in tandem, but it is possible to decipher one tendency that ultimately determines or characterizes the process or cycle of a given epoch. The transformative features of a passive revolution mark a distinct set of changes from the preceding period, but those changes ultimately guarantee the stability of the fundamental relations of domination, even while these assume novel political forms.

At the same time, the specific class content of passive revolutions can vary within certain limits — that is to say, the different degrees to which particular components of popular demands are incorporated (the transformative tendency) within a matrix that ultimately sustains the fundamental relations of domination (the restorative tendency).

Passive revolutions involve neither total restoration of the old order, the full reenactment of the status quo, nor radical revolution. Instead, they involve a dialectic of revolution/restoration, transformation/preservation.

Capacities for social mobilization from below in early stages are contained or coopted — or selectively repressed — while the political initiative of sections of the dominant classes is restored. In the process, a new mode of domination is established that is capable of enacting conservative reforms masked in the language of earlier impulses emerging from below, and thus achieving a passive consensus of the dominated classes.

Rather than an instantaneous restoration, under passive revolution there is a molecular change in the balance of forces that gradually drains the capacities for self-organization and self-activity from below through cooptation, encouraging demobilization and guaranteeing passive acceptance of the new order.

In the context of Ecuador, Agustín Cueva’s Marxist theorization of impasse in the 1970s parallels Modonessi’s passive revolution most closely. There have been recurring moments in Ecuadorian history where the intensity of the horizontal, intra-capital conflicts, in combination with vertical contests between the ruling and popular classes, was simply too much for the existing form of domination to bear. As politicians sought new and more stable forms of domination, instability reigned in the interregnum, until an impasse was reached.

Overcoming such impasses, as sociologist Francisco Muñoz Jaramillo points out, has been the work of populists, in Ecuadorian history, of Caesars and Bonapartes. Think of the left-military government of Guillermo Rodríguez Lara (1972–75) or that of left-populist Jaime Roldós (1979–1982), which took up the ideological mantle of newly emergent bourgeois layers against some of the interests of traditional oligarchs and incorporated the popular sectors through corporatist techniques of sectional negotiation and bargaining.

Between 1982 and 2006, the dominant classes of the country attempted to introduce neoliberal restructuring through a variety of channels. It was a deeply unstable period, reaching an apex in the 1999 financial crisis, followed by a series of mobilizations that threw out various heads of state in succession before their mandate was completed.

The orthodox neoliberal governments of León Febres Cordero (1984–88), Sixto Durán Ballén (1992–96), and Jamil Mahuad (1998–2000) tried and failed, in many ways, to carry out far-reaching structural adjustment programs, giving birth to right-wing populist experiments, such as Abadalá Bucaram (1996–97) and Lucio Gutiérrez (2003–5).

Accused of embezzlement and corruption, mass protests succeeded in forcing Bucaram’s impeachment. A military man, Gutiérrez, after participating in a short-lived coup against Mahuad in 2000, ran on a left ticket in the 2002 presidential elections, but governed from the right, and thus was overthrown as well.

Correa and the Left

These were two decades, then, of a neoliberal variant of Cueva’s recurring impasse. Correa calmed the storm and restored profits in sectors like banking, mining, oil, and agro-industry, and has simultaneously coopted or crushed most independent social movement activity.

Rhetorically, the government has employed vague ideologies, from buen vivir (an indigenous conception of “living well”) in the beginning of the administration, to the techno-fetishism that has dominated the last several years (best exemplified in theYachay Tech university debacle, and some dystopic model cities in the Amazon, as the excellent research team at the local think tank CENEDET has pointed out).

At the end of the day, Correa has been functional to capital. However, this isn’t the same as saying he is capital’s first choice — like all his populist predecessors, Correa is expendable. With the price of oil falling, capital is scrambling to collect what’s available and regain more direct control of the state. It’s an uncertain period ahead, and the sentiment on the Right is that Correa should go. A recent piece in the Economistcaptures this nicely, essentially thanking him for his service while showing him the door:

Mr. Correa faces a choice . . . He could persist in his bid for permanent power and risk being kicked out by the street, like his predecessors. Or he could swallow his pride, stabilize the economy and drop his re-election bid. He would then go down in history as one of Ecuador’s most successful presidents.

The various forces of the Left, broadly defined, are meanwhile trying to rebuild and regain initiative and forge the bases of a societal project that is a genuine alternative to both Correa and the Right. But the Left is starting from a point of weakness and disarticulation, and the present ideological and political landscape could scarcely be more complicated.

Original article: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/correa-pink-tide-gramsci-peoples-march/

CITOYEN CORREA AND THE REALITY OF A MULTICULTURAL WORLD September 3, 2015

August 27 2015

One of the things the 2013 presidential candidate Alberto Acosta remarked on after the left’s comprehensive defeat, was that the political stability Rafael Correa brought to the country after a decade of chaos had been a major factors in his victory at the polls. People had appreciated it more than was evident at the time. The thought comes to mind now, in the wake of August’s major anti-government demonstrations that in all probability are only precursor of an even greater test of strength in the next few months. The Pax Correana may be finally be coming to an end.

The president rather unsurprisingly dismissed the protests as the work of a few, adding insults for good measure, as is his wont. Few they were not however, although diverse they certainly were. And after days and nights of tear gas and anti Correa chants, of arrests, violence and the de facto deportation of an indigenous leader’s partner[i], a respectable number were still protesting a week later. Tenacity was certainly not lacking. Although the marches and demonstrations may have come to an end, this is not the end, the protestors will be back in mid-September. Round two promises more of the same.

The government’s customary confrontational attitude exacerbated everything, but then no one expected Rafael Correa to lie down and be rolled over; the South American Margaret Thatcher, though clearly with another agenda, is not for turning. But Margaret Thatcher was finally turned, by her own people. Decisiveness and strength may be useful in a politician, cutting through Gordian knots is a talent, but limits there are, and in the end strength can too easily become weakness, as Thatcher found out. The hope is that the comparison between the two leaders will not be lost on any government official or legislator that cares to think about it. Unfortunately, few likely will.

A major difficulty is the country’s political structure. The indigenous populations, there are a number in the country, have been denigrated and ‘repressed’ since the time Columbus stumbled into the Caribbean, and the long fight for recognition and equality is not yet in sight. Nor has racism disappeared and can be counted on to erupt when the ‘indios’ claim their rights, in particular hen the government denigrates them in the name of governing for the great majority. At the same time, trying as Rafael Correa has to impose the evidently unsuccessful French model of the supposed equality of all – we are all Citoyens in Correa’s Ecuador – was never likely to succeed in the multicultural world of the Andes. One of the indigenous groups’ deepest fears is disappearance, a slow melting away into an amorphous population that might acknowledged their (its) past but not their present or future.

Anything that may consequently hasten that evaporation – loss of control over territory due to large extractive projects such as mining and oil, loss of influence over water supply as a result of recently passed legislation, added to lack of support for the small scale farming on which many, and the internal market, still depend – will as a result be fiercely resisted. Understanding that man does not live by bread alone is crucial. In addition, we have the President’s tendency to insult anyone getting in his way, and as the group with the most to organize against him, the ‘indios’, have consequently received special attention. Given their history it is hardly surprising that derision is not appreciated.

So the indigenous people have legitimate claims, but no way to make them heard, or rather have them resolved. As a minority, representative democracy does not work in their favour, but as a special case, and few would care to deny that this they are, they deserve better. They know it and so do we; so when they say that building roads, schools and hospitals is not enough, we should be listening. If we do not, if the government does not, because as the President likes to repeat ad nauseum, he has an electoral mandate, then the obvious answer for indigenous groups is to use whatever tools they may have at their disposal: blocking roads being one of them.

Blocking roads is of course prohibited, and to emphasise the point President Correa stated the obvious: that roads would be cleared, more or less ‘at any cost’. Fortunately ‘at any cost’ did not come to pass, but costs in the form of violence and arrests came quickly enough. The use of the police and military to control the population in times of trouble may be necessary, the government can hardly be expected to hand over control to whoever cares to challenge it, but the cost will be high, both in terms of people injured and credibility lost. And all sides know it[ii].

The pattern is familiar: the police attempt to dislodge the protestors who in turn resist, at times violently, the police, hardly known for being gentle in these kinds of situations, react with even greater violence, and so on, and so on… the protestors finally lose and the road is cleared. No one accepts any responsibility, not police, who have their own injured to show for their efforts, or the government, which claims that it is just trying to maintain order and that the police are heroes, or even the indigenous groups, whose protest may be legitimate, but whose tactics may be questionable unless the idea is to use the victims of police violence as evidence of the state’s lack of legitimacy.

Whatever the case may be, the outcome of the latest battles will not bring peace. This war is not over. Neither the violence, nor the arrests, nor the confrontational rhetoric, nor the clumsily belligerent threat of legal action against the head of the country’s most important indigenous organization will be enough to stop the next march, or the one after that. In all likelihood they will have the opposite effect. And there is also the small matter of the debate in the National Assembly over whether to allow Rafael Correa to be indefinitely re-elected[iii]. Planned for December, insistence on passing the measure without a national plebiscite (according to the polls eighty percent or more are in favour of being consulted) will bring a lot more people onto the street: the indigenous groups, the right, the left, the center, the good, the bad and the ugly…

The indigenous agenda is not the only one of course; there are many grievances – the use of the justice system to hound political enemies; the setting up of government sponsored social organisations to divide the opposition; the decision to drill for oil in Yasuní National Park; the imposition of Catholic values on a constitutionally lay state; the president’s bellicose style, etc. etc. – but it is the central theme around which the others will likely gel. Even the right will support it to some degree, until it regains power.

That all things pass is not at issue, the real question is the timing. Rafael Correa’s time as President has not yet been defined: he might survive to run again, he might even win, but the end of his tenure and of the region’s ‘progressive’ governments seems to be drawing closer; only the faithful or those with vested interests would argue the contrary. On the other hand, his reign has not been a failure; many good things have happened over the last eight years. But added to the erosion of his personal credibility, the political and economic atmosphere is not what it was in 2005 when he first ran for President, witness the situations in Brasil and Venezuela. Ecuador is not Venezuela, not yet at any rate, and no major corruption scandal has stained the government as in Brasil, not yet at any rate, but as in that country the rapidly deteriorating economic situation will almost inevitably increase disillusion with ‘progressive’ leaders, and consequently add to the President’s woes.

The only bright spot for Rafael Correa and his supporters is that until now no credible opponent has appeared, certainly not on the left, which has no real electoral structure and appears to be betting everything on the protests. The tactic would appear to be somewhat shortsighted as despite the dire economic situation[iv] people want to believe in something, in the possibility of a brighter future, however defined. Optimism is the opiate of the people as Milan Kundera once concluded and Rafael Correa is if nothing else the master of optimism, a sort of Ecuadorian pied piper if you will, whose approval rating is still at a healthy fifty percent. Correa seems far from finished, but then again the same appeared to be true in Brasil before Dilma Rousseff ran for reelection; now she hangs on for dear life and makes deals with the neoliberal right. Despite the wisdom of the old adage, previously disdained opposition candidates have a habit of becoming credible in the face of already known and increasingly unpopular devils.

[i] Manuela Picq a Franco-Brasilian academic who has also written for the Al Jazeera English Network, is the partner of Carlos Pérez Guartambel, the President of Ecuarunari, the country’s principal Kichwa organization. She was arrested during the protests, was about to have her visa rescinded when she decided to leave voluntarily. She is unlikely to be allowed back in.

[ii] It has been suggested that infiltrators were used by the government to provoke attacks on the police and discredit a pacific protest.

[iii] According to the country’s reigning Constitution, approved in 2009, the President can only be re-elected once. Amending the Constitution can be done in two ways: by popular vote if it the changes are deemed to alter the fundamental nature of the state, or if not, by a two thirds parliamentary majority, which Correa’s party has.

[iv] Since 2000 Ecuador’s currency is the US dollar, which presently stands at an almost historic high against other currencies. Without the capacity to devalue the country’s exports are suffering, at the same time that the price of oil, the country’s major export has dropped below $40 a barrel. The president recently suggested that Ecuador’s income from oil would amount to no more than US$40 million this year.