Constructing a State in the Face of Regional Power

Abstract

The city of Guayaquil is a territory in which economic actors play a central role in the configuration of subnational power. This has generated a kind of pseudo- or half-finished democracy in which, although elections are held, there is only one actor, the Madera de Guerrero Social Christian Party, representing the local economic elite that has held power since 1992. Following the theory of Edward Gibson, this situation can be viewed as sort of subnational authoritarianism: the parochialization of power, the nationalization of influence, and control of institutional and noninstitutional links have allowed this subnational power to achieve local control and influence in the national arena during various periods.

La ciudad de Guayaquil representa un territorio donde los actores económicos juegan un papel central en la configuración del poder subnacional, haciendo de los espacios de representación política su mecanismo legitimador y su fuente de negociación local y nacional. Para algunos investigadores del caso, esto ha generado una suerte de seudodemocracia o democracia a medias en la que, si bien se celebran elecciones, a la vez encontramos un solo actor en escena, el Partido Social Cristiano Madera de Guerrero, representante de la élite económica local en el poder desde 1992. Siguiendo la teoría de Edward Gibson bien se podría hablar de una suerte de autoritarismo subnacional: la parroquialización del poder, la nacionalización de sus influencias y el control de los vínculos institucionales y no institucionales han hecho de este poder subnacional una fuerza que ha logrado un control local y una influencia en la arena nacional durante varios períodos.

Keywords

Subnational authoritarianism Economic elite Guayaquil Democracy

Every developing state confronts a tension between broadening the power base of its bureaucratic apparatus and undermining the power of regional and local elites. Ecuador, in contrast, has always depended on the economic powers located primarily in the city of Guayaquil, its most important economic center. The right of the state to penetrate all significant sectors of the population (Migdal, 2008) did not exist. Historically, most attempts to establish a central power have failed, resulting in a country that is fractured by powerful sectors with the capacity for destabilization. A fragmented state undermined by the interests of its regional powers (Quito, Guayaquil, and Cuenca) may have been envisioned from the beginning. Any effort to establish national institutions that might generate an Ecuadorean nation-state was postponed until the conservative administration of Gabriel García Moreno in 1861 and then the liberal administration of Eloy Alfaro in 1895. The next attempt was that of the military headed by General Guillermo Rodríguez Lara in 1972. None of these attempts achieved its mission.

Until the arrival of the military in the 1960s, the Ecuadorean state depended on the commercial, financial, and export elite of Guayaquil, a kind of “city-state” (Bustamante, 1999: 26) that managed to articulate its interests as the interests of the nation. The functioning of these “local oligarchies” (León, 2004) is fundamental for understanding the nature of power in Guayaquil. This city-state¹ constituted the core of the territorial structure of power in Ecuador in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth and established a model of co-optation of the state by the elite. Instead of a center that coordinated and governed, there was a region with the capacity to manipulate this legitimate and necessary action of the state—a subnational authoritarianism (Gibson, 2006). Beginning in 2006, when Rafael Correa and his Citizens’ Revolution came to power, there was an attempt to “refound the fatherland,” and a key part of it was co-opting the local elite. According to Charles Tilly (1985), the choice was either to replace the elite’s power with a new one organically connected to the state or to continue the course of Ecuadorean history and yield to it. This article will examine the way in which the power generated in Guayaquil has hindered the construction of a nation-state.

Guayaquil and its National Imprint

Guayaquil is a city of contrasts. It was the cradle of the independence activists and secessionists who attempted to annex Peru after the separation of Great Colombia. It was the inspiration of the nineteenth-century liberals, staunch critics of conservative and clerical policy. It was also the champion of the liberalism of Alfaro in 1896 and the bulwark against the latifundista regime of the Sierra. It housed the most important and buoyant agrarian, export, and financial oligarchy of the late nineteenth century and, with products such as cacao, tobacco, coffee, and later cotton, sugar, and bananas, was one of the most important cities of Pacific South America. The city managed to accumulate so much power in its economic elite that it created a powerful financial system with the Ecuadorean state as its main debtor. Nothing happened in the country without the consent of the Guayaquil banks, principally the Agricultural Commercial Bank.²

Despite the intervention that this exporting and banking elite suffered at the hands of the military, it managed to keep the state under its control until the 1970s. It was only after the military coup under Rodríguez Lara and in part as a consequence of the oil boom of 1973 that the state, which for the first time had its own income (oil), managed to impose serious restrictions on the coast’s plutocratic power. Thereafter the Guayaquil elite never again had complete control of the country, but the loss of its leading role did not prevent it from exercising solid veto power (Tsebelis, 2004) over important decisions. The return to democracy did not position it as a group that could win the presidency, but it did manage to manipulate the new government process for its convenience. With the representation of the Social Christian Party, it became the principal obstacle to the Roldós-Hurtado slate that triumphed in the presidential elections of 1979. The political and economic destabilization that the country suffered in this period was such that the Social Christians managed to achieve legitimacy as a force capable of redirecting democracy toward neoliberalism (Montúfar, 2011) and thus rise to national power in 1984.

The co-optation of institutional links not only allowed Guayaquil to become the new center of operations of the local elite but also made its representatives spokespersons for the national right and economic-banking-commercial power. The election as mayor of León Febres Cordero, who had been president from 1984 to 1988, says much about the elite’s bid for the recovery of its territory. At this point it undertook what the mayor called a moral, judicial, administrative, and financial restoration of a city marked by corruption and the populism of the Roldocistas, led by the Bucaram family. Beginning in 1992, the city initiated a new phase on three important fronts: urban reconstruction (later called “urban regeneration”), the repositioning of the Guayaquil elite through institutions such as the Charity Board,³ the Chamber of Commerce,⁴ the Civic Council,⁵ and the Municipal Council,⁶ and the positioning of the Madero de Guerrero Social Christian Party as the elite’s political arm.

Subnational Authoritarianism

Taking as a guideline Edward Gibson’s concept of subnational authoritarianism, I intend to show in what follows that authoritarianism is a function of the co-optation of democratic laws and institutions to advance particular interests. Local authoritarianisms manage to capture the national state according to group interests. Subnational authoritarianism appears in democratic systems that meet the main requisites (more or less clean elections, freedom of the press) and are called “democratic” because of their having elections. However, the concept refers to a clientelist postelection structure in which nonelectoral groups hold power over electoral groups and there is no real participation in administration by other sectors of the population.

The inequality with which democracy is expressed in many democratic states calls into question the traditional measures of democracy. Gibson (2010), Giraudy (2011), and Gervasoni (2010), among others, question the characterization of certain subnational governments as “democratic” because, despite having elections, they have authoritarian forms of government. In terms of these criteria, Guayaquil, despite presenting itself as a liberal city, is clearly an instance of authoritarian subnational power. It is true that local elections occur in all periods, in addition to historical struggles for autonomy and decentralization, but in 1992 representatives of the commercial and banking elite that has historically co-governed the country returned to power. Under a single party and two mayors to date, the Guayaquil elite maintains control of the city to this day (it won the 2014 elections, allowing it to stay in power until 2018). There is practically no participation from other political movements, and opportunities for generating participation are ambiguous and limited; in addition, the administration is hierarchical and closed. At the same time, the local legislature does not confront the mayor’s decisions and plays a legitimating rather than a supervisory role.⁷ Perhaps more important, the city’s powerful economic groups are linked to the administration through contracts and bids that are made directly to a system of foundations; public services in the city are outsourced, paving the way for a private system of public administration.

These pro-capital subnational structures undoubtedly have an ambiguous relation with the idea of democracy. On the one hand, they respect formal institutions—holding elections, promoting accountability, and generating a model of representation for marginal groups. At the same time, these formal institutions function through informal practices, clientelism, negotiated bids, or violent co-optation of opportunities for representation. Thus, their spheres are both public and private, and they may be formal or informal; their objective is to manage to maintain their power, and for that they articulate a strategy of co-optation of links between the local and the national. The literature has called these types of structures subnational authoritarian regimes (Gibson, 2007), nondemocratic regimes (Giraudy, 2011), or hybrid regimes (Gervasoni, 2010).

Territorial Politics

Edward Gibson (2006; 2007; 2008; 2010) has suggested a novel focus for territorial politics, “boundary control,” with which it is possible to examine the site and scale of subnational political action and find evidence of authoritarian enclaves. He points out that boundary control is composed of three strategies—parochialization of power, nationalization of influence, and monopolization of institutional links. I will apply this scheme to the reality of local-regional power in Guayaquil and analyze the subnational controls within a democratic national logic.

Parochialization of Power

Through boundary control, certain actors in the subnational arena seek to strengthen and protect local interests based on the appropriation of territory. Local elites respond to pressures from the center such as local democratization or an increase in political competence. However, the local force may have a major impact in accepting or rejecting these changes or fitting them together according to their interests. Thus what I analyze is local strategies of political control that have maximized the mayor’s hegemony as a representative of the city’s elite and its permanence in the shadow of a single political party. Among these strategies are the recovery of the city, the control and elimination of the opposition, the use of the media and public resources, and the appropriation of the local agenda.

Recovery

In 1992 the Guayaquil elite set its sights on recovering control of the city. The characters associated with the local government were members of the business elite,⁸ but this was not very problematic because the degree of disruption of the city was sufficient to draw support for change from various sectors. In the opinion of Nila Velázquez, director of the Universe Foundation and a prominent local intellectual, the recovery of the city was an urgent necessity (interview, Guayaquil, April 14, 2010):

With Febres Cordero a physical recovery was achieved after a fateful period for Guayaquil marked by corruption, poverty, and the deterioration that was the legacy of the Roldocistas—a corrupt, voracious party that had no vision for the city and governed with a short-term logic. It was urgent, regardless of where it came from, and undoubtedly both a business and a citizens’ project.

The urgency of providing order and public services for the Guayaquil population was converted into the legitimizing mechanism for the recovery of the territory for the local business elite, which has been the visible face of this project. The predisposition of the citizens allowed the parochialization of power to produce undisputed hegemony for the Guayaquil elite.

The proposal for recovery was part of a neoliberal project characterized by the private administration of the public, and this meant that the economic groups administered the territory and symbolic control of the public was linked to the efficiency of business. The physical restoration of many deteriorated areas, such as the Malecón 2000, the municipal building, the international airport, the bus terminal, the port, and the civil registry, and investment in programs for public safety, health, and education were linked to a private administration in which the citizen had no participation of any kind.⁹

Elimination of the opposition

The Guayaquil elite, perhaps understanding the need to maintain political control of local power without intermediaries, managed to eliminate their closest political competition, the Ecuadorean Roldocista Party,¹⁰ which had been responsible for the physical deterioration of the city in the 1980s. This caused the tremendous recovery of the city to be accomplished between the barbarism of Roldocista populism and the modernity of the Social Christian economic elite, with which the presence of the latter was legitimized. That legitimacy allowed it to enjoy an overwhelming majority on the municipal council, whose members were direct allies of the mayor rather than supervisors of public works. Under these circumstances, the opposition’s council members had no real possibility of influencing the council’s decisions. According to César Cárdenas, director of the Citizen Observatory of Public Services (interview, Guayaquil, July 13, 2007),

They do not tolerate any type of opposition. We are not even members of the social organizations that they recognize, and when we press them they send us their thugs. . . . Citizen participation in Guayaquil is not something that concerns the mayor. He has the votes because he silences other forms of participation; it is a mafia system of electoral control. It is very difficult to have any other politics when you have a monopoly of all the opportunities for participation in this way. . . . In Guayaquil the opposition has no voice.

Jorge Estrella, a social and neighborhood leader in Guayaquil (interview, Guayaquil, April 27, 2015), said that one had to understand the political moment:

The lack of capacity to change the citizens’ view of administration is because this model, private administration, manages to satisfy the basic needs of the vulnerable sectors; with this they manage to maintain Social Christian votes. They have been in local power for 24 years. They know how to control their clientelist networks in the neighborhoods, making use of people’s needs. People see themselves obligated to pay for the mayor’s help with votes; if they don’t, they won’t receive the help. The politics of show has succeeded in Guayaquil, and it makes it very difficult to place other things on the citizens’ agenda.

At the same time, Willington Paredes, political analyst, university professor, and editor of the newspaper Expreso (interview, Guayaquil, April 10, 2015), argued that

the impossibility of generating new political positions is due to the fact that there is a regionalist discourse legitimated by Social Christianity, a discourse that allows it to create a common enemy for the guayaquileño, the central government, and as long as this is the banner of the Social Christians it will be very difficult to do away with the leadership of the city today. That is why it is necessary to end this country’s regionalized system, a solution that transcends political parties.

The parochialization of power through the elimination of local adversaries has been successful in Guayaquil, but there is a central element that explains it: the control of the regional issue. Having the central power, represented by the country’s capital, Quito, as an enemy of Guayaquil, has allowed the local elite to legitimize itself as the actor that defends the rights of the city, although that implies an authoritarian practice in the exercise of local government.

Use of the media and public resources

Enjoying the support of the local private press, El Periódico, El Universo (one of the country’s main newspapers), the daily Expreso, and the Revista Vistazo, as well as radio stations and television channels based in Guayaquil, the local business elite managed to establish an editorial policy in favor of the Social Christian Party without the national government’s intervention. In the same way, it made use of charitable agencies to achieve legitimacy on the local level. The Charity Board served as a local planning committee and promoted solidarity and health and hospital care for low-income persons and, beyond this, administered maternity and other hospitals, orphanages, schools, the hospice, and the cemetery. In addition, it controlled and administered the national lottery, one of the main sources of funding for its work. Through these institutions the Guayaquil elite became an essential part of Social Christian administrations as one of the main administrators of public services in the city. It invested in the management of welfare in Guayaquil without any intervention from the central government. The Charity Board never went bankrupt and maintained strict discretion, secrecy, and silence about the details of its administration (Torre, 2004).Thus, public resources masked as private allowed parochialization to persist much longer here than elsewhere in the country, and almost all the foundations that administer public services today are similarly organized.

Appropriation of the local agenda

The parochialization of power also involves controlling the local agenda. The direct support of the most important power groups of the city has imposed some interests over others. Thus, when the Febres Cordero administration began in 1992, the Chamber of Commerce, the banks, and the city’s economic sector generally knew that León was their representative. According to former president Gustavo Novoa (interview, Guayaquil, April 10, 2015),

We all knew that there was a symbiosis between economic power and political power, but it was not a negative relationship. On the contrary, it was necessary to join forces to save this city. . . . For that reason, I assume that León’s team had the support of the chambers and of the city’s important companies, which lent their employees to the administration and paid their salaries.

This logic of power without distinction between economic interests and public interests has put on the municipality’s agenda projects that are linked to private interests but in some way connected with public ones. For the former president of the Guayaquil Chamber of Commerce (2010–2014), Eduardo Peña (interview, Guayaquil, April 6, 2015), “that public-private relationship in the city’s administration is understandable, it being a commercial city. It is understood that the main objective of the city is to position its commerce. The local administration has to provide the necessary inputs to make this happen. That is why the support of businessmen for Mayor Nebot is unconditional.” The attorney Xavier Flores (interview, Guayaquil, April 6, 2015) points to the co-optation of the local agenda by the interests of the elite: “This private administration of the public converts Guayaquil residents into tourists in their own city. There is no construction of citizens, no appropriation of the public, because we don’t feel it is ours. It is a project in which we, the majority of this city’s inhabitants, have not been taken into account, an anticitizen agenda.”

Thus the Social Christian agenda is imposed and approved without any opposition and without citizen participation, and this explains why Guayaquil is one of the most unequal cities in the country.¹¹ According to Flores,

The system of foundations that administers the city’s public services is the cause of its great inequities. It is not possible for business owners to administer public services; that is corruption. There is a clear conflict of interest in the administration of the city and in the end they are the ones who impose their agenda. They tell us where we have to walk.¹²

For Jorge Estrella, the co-optation of the local agenda by the Social Christians is clear: “A logic of perverse development has been present since the administration of León Febres Cordero and now with Nebot. Instead of prioritizing the basic problems of the city as an extension of public services, potable water and sewerage, they made major construction the priority for Guayaquil” (interview, Guayaquil, April 27, 2015). This resulted in policy making’s being focused on certain sectors of the population. Some 65 percent of municipal investment in the 1990s (in viaducts, overpasses, roads, and sewerage) was concentrated in the wealthier North of the city, and the reality of current public spending in Guayaquil is not very different. A study conducted by Arduino Tomasi (2013) shows that one of the major destinations of funding under the 2012 and 2013 budgets was the Twenty-first-Century Foundation–Urban Regeneration. For every dollar invested in marginal areas and neighborhoods, two were invested in middle- and upper-class areas. The so-called urban regeneration privileges mainly sectors in which high-income families reside. One of the most moving complaints of Guayaquil residents is that “‘urban regeneration’ is for the rich; for the poor the most they do is fix the facades, and we may go for days without water” (interview, Guayaquil, April 3, 2012). It is the intense public investment going to those sectors that provides income to private capital in the construction sector. In the opinion of the University of Guayaquil sociology professor Gaitán Villavicencio, under Jaime Nebot’s administration “there is no real policy for redistribution. To the contrary, the Guayaquil effect is characterized by the polarization of its social sectors” (interview, Guayaquil, April 3, 2012).

Guayaquil’s agenda has focused on the “recovery of the city,” which implies a coalition between the public and private, a successful formula that has managed to parochialize local power. The municipality acts as an administrator of the business that is done in the city; it achieves legitimacy and the support of the large companies, which fund the party and its electoral campaigns. This type of relationship makes urban regeneration, the hallmark of the current administration, an example of the inequality with which the public budget of the city is managed.

Nationalization of Influence

This strategy presents itself when the arena of political action and the actors’ strategies that come into play are national (deputies, ministers, or the president) but the scope and the goal of the action are subnational. This model is based on the capacity of local political elites to become players in national politics. Successful authoritarian subnational leaders occupy national positions only to ensure their territorial control—to maintain their influence over federal political decisions that affect the provinces (Gibson, 2007: 171).

As we have seen, the Guayaquil elite has always been influential in decision making. Both the cacao boom of the beginning of the twentieth century and the banana boom between 1948 and 1960 placed it in a position with many advantages vis-à-vis the center; it became the principal producer of bananas on the global level, bringing significant income to the country and even influencing a political peace never before seen as the banana bonanza satisfied certain local interests that had destabilized the country. As Frank (2007: 128) puts it, “Once there was a stable flow of resources, distributional coalitions had the opportunity to rearrange and form again. This contributed to political stability since it implied that the demands from different provinces were satisfied.” Although it allowed the government some room to maneuver, the boom required accommodation to coastal capital, costing the central state its independence in decision making and establishing economic capital as an interlocutor in the majority of decisions.

The Guayaquil elite of the mid-twentieth century arranged for taxes on exports to be paid in Guayaquil, excluding the other municipalities and provincial councils, principally from the Sierra and the East, from this income. Thus, while for the governments on the coast taxes on exports were some 39 percent of their budgets, in the Sierra they amounted to 1 percent (Frank, 2007: 130). Two thousand private organizations performing public functions appeared in this period (Frank, 2007: 132):

Such “juntas autónomas” were mainly financed with earmarked export and import taxes and operated in a number of different sectors. They included local power companies, quasi-charitable juntas de asistencia social (welfare boards), customs agencies, port authorities and others that were formed to execute particular public works, such as the construction of a bridge, the improvement of certain stretches of roads, and so forth.

This private system of administration of “public” services persists today, and Mayor Nebot argues that “the state is inadequate to provide these services and the intervention of the private sector is necessary” (interview, Guayaquil, April 25, 2009).

Thus the Guayaquil elite managed to inscribe itself within a hegemonic project that has proved functional for its economic interests and that has achieved legitimacy under private schemes of organization (Andrade, 2005). For Allan (2011), this is a perverse form of appropriation of national spaces, since by alluding to regionalism and centralism the elite has managed to maintain sectarian positions benefiting Guayaquil without the centralist practice’s reflecting a prejudice in favor of Guayaquil. The great majority of Guayaquil’s income comes from the center (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Income of the municipality of Guayaquil, 1993–2014, based on municipal budgets.

Despite the Guayaquil elite’s regionalist discourse, it has constituted an important part of the national power elite since before the formation of the Ecuadorean Republic (Cueva, 1988; Quintero, 1991). There have always been representatives of the coast in the spheres of power (presidents, ministers, vice ministers, presidents of the Congress, and deputies). Perhaps the only point at which it was displaced from central power was on the arrival of the military in the 1960s and 1970s, but even then the military saw itself doomed to negotiation with the commercial sectors of Guayaquil. Then the president of the Chamber of Commerce, Febres Cordero was part of the pact that led to the presumed “return to democracy.”¹³ Gaitán Villavicencio points to a paradigmatic case of the elite’s influence at the national level under President Sixto Durán Ballén (1992–1996), when “a call from León was enough to approve budgets and even get special items for Guayaquil included” (interview, Guayaquil, April 3, 2012).

The nationalization of local elite influence has achieved control of the structures of power, with influence not only on the presidency but also on Congress and even the judiciary. The distribution of seats in the Ecuadorean Congress is a clear example (Table 1). Every capacity to impact the national level has benefited particular economic sectors. The banking sector of Guayaquil, for example, until the 1999 crisis held more than 50 percent of the shares in the National Bank and therefore had almost total control of the country’s finances. Perhaps because of this, the government’s control of the National Bank was always limited, giving it veto power over national policy.

Table 1

Representation of the Social Christian Party in the Congress, 1984–2009

Year	1984	1986	1988	1990	1992	1994	1996	1998	2003	2006	2007	2009
Number of deputies/total	9/71	14/71	8/71	16/72	21/77	26/77	27/82	28/121	24/100	13/100	5/130	4/130

Note: The numbers of delegates in 2006 and thereafter reflect Rafael Correa’s presidential win and the subsequent formation of the Constituent Assembly and new elections.

The now historic 1999 crisis, in which the Ecuadorean economy was dollarized, was a consequence of that power without control, but it was also an example of the influence of economic over political power. The mayor of Guayaquil, in an unprecedented defense of local capital, gave his full support to a bank with a severe liquidity problem and direct connections with the corruption that had produced the breakdown of the financial system, the freezing of all deposits for more than a year, and the eventual dollarization of the economy, the Progress Bank. Here a mayor who was supposedly at the service of the citizenry assumed the representation of the banks and the chambers of production (industry, commerce, small business, agriculture, exporting, and fishing) of Guayaquil. The mayor, municipal council members, and Social Christian deputies headed a historic “march of the black ribbons” in defense of the city’s capital, employing an anticentrist discourse and one in favor of the region responsible for the crisis.

These groups have managed to nationalize their influence in part because of the regionalism¹⁴ that has characterized relations between Guayaquil and Quito. This element has become the major catalyst of regional forces at the national level, and it is sufficient to put pressure on and even destabilize the center. Its calls for autonomy have managed to mobilize the population against the central government and make specific demands. The “march of the black ribbons,” for example, although it mobilized regional sentiment (Burbano, 2014), was in the end a march in defense of Guayaquil capital.

Thus, despite the fact that the Progress Bank had already been liquidated for its demonstrated corruption, it was reestablished, and, in the name of “respect for Guayaquil,” the president, Jamil Mahuad (1998–2000)—who was later deposed for being responsible for the worst economic, social, and political crisis ever recorded in Ecuador—granted it extra time to capitalize and reopen its doors to the public. (While it was capitalized, it never opened its doors to savers.) At the same time, Febres Cordero demanded a restructuring of the board of the Central Bank, suggesting a number of names, to produce a regional balance in the institution. This perverse use of regionalism as a mechanism for positioning local interests in the national arena has not been eliminated by any government. Even Rafael Correa, with his commitment to undermining the power of regional elites, is still using the same practice.

Despite the fact that the Guayaquil elite is more limited today than under previous governments, the level of opposition to the Correa government that the municipality of Guayaquil has generated is notorious. On January 24, 2008, a march against the Constituent Assembly, called by the mayor and involving company executives, wholesalers and retailers, and representatives of Guayaquil institutions such as the Chamber of Commerce and the industrial associations, as well as small businesses and the Civic Board, defended a “no” vote on the referendum, meaning “no” to strengthening the central state, which is now one that limits the power of the local elite.

Currently, the capacity of the Guayaquil elite to wield influence at the national level is operating not through institutions but through social pressure from economic groups, the use of private media, and calls for destabilization such as the June 25, 2015, march against the government of Rafael Correa.

Control of Institutional Links

Institutional links may be material or immaterial. A government institution may represent both a material link and a network of relations, a flow of communication. Thus the provision of services to which such an institution is dedicated may be the motor that drives a local party, and immaterial links like this can be used to strengthen the control of some actors, reduce the power of their local opponents, and close or open political opportunities to outside actors.

Formal links

A persistent characteristic of the policy in authoritarian provinces is the struggle of local forces to undermine the opposition and to control the reach of local conflict. The local government prevails when conflict is kept local, opposition is eliminated, and alliances and resources are available in the national arena (Gibson, 2007: 164). Some of these strategies are detailed by Henry Allan (2011). One is promoting judicial reforms that support the municipal project in Guayaquil with the objective of channeling direct resources to it and achieving legitimacy as actors in the process. Thus, through the Council for the Modernization of the State, the Congress—in which the Social Christian Party had a majority—passed laws that benefited the neoliberal project in Guayaquil, transferring resources and skills from the central state exclusively to the municipality (Allan, 2011: 165):

Mayor Nebot pressured the presidents (first Jamil Mahuad 1998–2000, Gustavo Noboa 2000–2003, Lucio Gutierrez 2003–2005 and later Alfredo Palacio 2005–2006) to contribute to “Guayaquil’s development.” This pressure developed on two levels: the permanent threat of calling for a popular referendum where supposedly the principles of autonomy would be reflected and the use of symbolic dates such as July 25 (the founding of the city) or October 9 (independence) to present—in reality demand—that the presidents of the republic approve “proposals” for the “progress” of the city.

This control of the links between local and national power allowed the local government to receive transfers or resources, goods, and skills. It achieved the transfer of control of basic services, most of all drinking water, sewerage, and garbage collection, that were then privatized, the control of ports, airports, and highways, the creation of the system of foundations, and a major transfer of resources through special laws, the “donation” of the tax on rent, discretionary transfers, and the construction of a deep-water port, an airport, a technological park, an oil refinery, and telephone, electricity, highways, transport, security, and sanitary services.¹⁵

Informal links

The links between the arenas of a territorial system are crucial to the organization of power. They are produced through a network of neighborhood committees that are “the clients of the Social Christians” (Jorge Estrella, interview, Guayaquil, April 27, 2015), in Guayaquil’s 14 parishes that channel the municipality’s attention into works for sewerage, health brigades, drinking water, or housing construction (Burbano, 2014). The identification of much of the population with the governments of Febres Cordero and Nebot reflects “a symbolic alchemy of the civic and the prestige of the municipality” (Burbano, 2014: 404). The control of this link has allowed the Social Christians to maintain power for 24 consecutive years.

For Willington Paredes this has provoked “a social precariousness, a subcitizenry that accepts authoritarian styles of government. . . . It is necessary to separate local government from being Guayaquil citizens. In this moment there is a kind of symbiosis, and that is dangerous for citizenship” (interview, Guayaquil, April 10, 2015). This means, in fact, that there is no political actor except the Madera de Guerrero Social Christian Party. One could speak of a unionization of the citizenry, since it is the union members who have assumed not only the legitimate representation of regional interests but a kind of representation of Guayaquil citizens. Undoubtedly, having control of that articulation of interests makes control of local links much easier. To this union representation must of course be added the Charity Board, the Fire Department, the (former) Transit Commission, the Civic Board, the Customs Corporation, the Union Club, and the municipal foundations, all identified as forms of private organization of the public.

The Positioning of the State and the Control of the Local Elite

Since 2006 Ecuador has experienced a process charged with nationalism and a commitment to the construction of a state under the current president, Rafael Correa. This has involved a reorganization of the sources of power. The most urgent has focused on recovery of the state by co-opting and eliminating local powers. This process has clashed with the traditional evolution of regional elites, who were accustomed to administration without control. The central state’s commitment is to reducing the Guayaquil economic elite’s influence on national politics, and for this it has initiated a restructuring of the state that involves the penetration of the state at the local level across the nation and the provision of greater guarantees of political participation. This has generated the emergence of new political leaders at the local level who are undoubtedly limiting the traditional powers that operate from subnational areas.

With the current national government, the Social Christians have lost much of their traditional influence: they have no representation in the Congress, in which the majority is from the governing party, Alianza PAIS; they also lack any representation in the judiciary and the National Electoral Council, where they once had a strong presence. Correa’s leadership has practically eliminated the Social Christians as a national political force, and its representation in Guayaquil by the Madera de Guerrero Movement has been reduced. With the current government, the traditional local strategies of political control in national politics have been eliminated. Without these articulations, local elites appear dispossessed of the power to influence the national arena.

This displacement of the traditional regional powers has generated important changes in the country, and perhaps because of this Correa is called the best president that Ecuador has had in recent decades and considered to have brought political stability after many years of chaos (Santos, 2014). Perhaps for the first time, control of the economic elites that have governed Ecuador has been achieved. This has generated historic changes such as the redistribution of income; taxes on those who have the most have allowed a considerable reduction of poverty and the strengthening of the middle classes.

The rejection of the new model by the regional elites is understandable, but, returning to Tilly, what is left for them is either to adapt to and negotiate with the central power or to develop a strategy for destabilizing it. The history of a country without a state such as Ecuador has granted local elites a privileged position; perhaps we are at the point when a state is seeking to dispute their power and in the attempt must either negotiate with them or undermine their power. The Guayaquil elite still controls important institutions that position it in the local and national arena: the municipality, the chambers of production, and the private media. Reducing the strength of the local elite is a challenge for the current government and should be made a priority if these authoritarian niches are to be eliminated.

Conclusions

This analysis confirms the existence in Guayaquil of an authoritarian structure of power supported by an electoral democracy but following the same patterns that govern the market: the voter is seen as a captive consumer who has to choose between being loyal to the party and not being part of the system. Here power rests in the elite; the voter is just another consumer who, if he wishes to receive benefits from the system, has to enter the market. The absence of national policies with an impact on Guayaquil has allowed the creation of a kind of market-city-state that responds to particular interests, with private investment intervening directly in the absence of a city project.

This territorial focus of power has managed to construct not only a scheme for the city but also a sense of being guayaquileño, a sort of identity that is closely related to the elitist project of the city and that has served to legitimize its economic project. But, at the same time, this project has reduced the concept of the citizen to the idea of “consumer-user-contributor” (Nuñez, 2000). The consequences of this are apparent in the unequal distribution involved in the project because there is no organization to audit its work and no organized citizenry outside the Social Christian Party (Tomasi, 2013). The municipality has become a sole power and its own interlocutor, pseudo-governing a society with serious social and material shortcomings. The prioritization of the market has left the middle class orphaned, and this is one of the main reasons that critical opportunities to compete with the elite’s power have not emerged. The attempt of Guayaquil forces to nationalize local interests and control links between the national and local has been successful to date. Despite the current government’s efforts to seize power from the Guayaquil political and commercial elite, the results are not very significant.

Edward Gibson’s analytical scheme theoretically explains Guayaquil’s authoritarian structure. Its leaders manage to position the interests of local economic elites and not the interests of the majority. This is how their political strategies and the conditions that empower them and the possible mechanisms through which such regimes can be weakened or dismantled are understood. At the same time, through this theoretical focus we realize why the consolidation of the state has been impossible.

Footnotes

Notes

Verónica Silva received her Ph.D. in political science from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where she currently teaches. Her research is on subnational elites, decentralization, and political economy in the Andean countries. Margot Olavarria is a political scientist and translator living in New York City.

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