Left Populism,State Building,Class Compromise,and Social Conflict in Ecuador’s Citizens’ Revolution

Populism, State Building, and the Ecuadorian Left in the Citizens’ Revolution

Populism is the rule in Ecuadorian politics, and the Correa government was a leftist populist government with a developmental raison d’être. As the Ecuadorian historian Juan Paz y Miño (2010) argues, populism ⁶ has been used by every political party since the return to democracy in 1979 and was nearly all-pervasive across the political spectrum (Larrea and North, 1997: 923). The perennial presidential candidate and several-time president José María Velasco Ibarra perfected Ecuadorian populism between the 1940s and the 1970s (Martz, 1983). Populists like him displaced the left politically but did not implement policies favoring the lower classes when they came to power (Cueva, 1973; de la Torre, 1997). In contrast to the Ecuadorian experience with populism, Jennifer Collins (2014: 70) argues that many of the populist movements and governments in twentieth-century Latin America not only “talked the talk” but also “walked the walk,” enacting reforms favoring the extension of social citizenship ⁷ to the lower classes. Populism in Latin America has proven agile enough to adjust to changing global and historical trends. For example, in the 1990s it was used at the service of the neo-populists’ campaign for neoliberal reforms (Weyland, 1996).

As Lucy Taylor (2004: 219) argues, since the beginning of the republican era in most Latin American countries there has been a significant “disjuncture between rhetoric and lived experience” with regard to liberal democratic citizenship and rights. Along the same lines as Francisco Panizza’s (2005b) metaphor of “democracy in the mirror,” populism is a reflection of a fledgling democratic state and society that are not fully liberal or democratic in practice. The consequence of this is that “actually existing citizenship” in Latin America more closely resembles what Taylor terms “client-ship.” ⁸ She argues that until citizenship can provide meaningful participation it will continue to be overshadowed by clientship because “the fact that inequality is built into the patron/client relationship matters little in a social world where equality of citizenship is a laughable myth” (2004: 224). In short, populism is a symptom of the inadequacies of liberal democracy, which lacks a solid basis on which to flourish in Ecuadorian society because of the country’s history of racism, inequality, and social exclusion (see Becker, 2007). In this vein, J. D. Bowen (2015), while recognizing that the outcome of these processes is uncertain and contingent, raises the possibility that a more democratic ⁹ society could emerge out of the state building and party building of the Correa era.

While scholars criticizing the Correa government from a liberal perspective have raised legitimate criticisms of the ways in which it concentrated power and perpetuated a “plebiscitary” politics (Conaghan, 2011; de la Torre, 2013a), they do not allow for the possibility that its state building may ultimately democratize the society. Many Correistas claimed political affinity with Eloy Alfaro and Ecuador’s 1895 liberal revolution. Liberal citizenship is a radical idea that has served as a discursive tool for indigenous peoples, peasants, and the lower classes opposing the predatory state structures that characterized Ecuador throughout much of its republican history (Coronel, 2011; Guerrero, 1997; Williams, 2003). Liberals and later the Socialist and Communist parties that came out of the radical liberal tradition (see Coronel, 2011) opened up space for subaltern groups to claim their rights against the “gamonal power” of the haciendas by “engaging modernity” (Schaefer, 2009). At its best moments, the Citizens’ Revolution represented an extension of this tradition of “inviting the state in” (Nugent, 1994) to redress the inequalities of Ecuadorian society by extending social citizenship.

State building has received attention in the recent scholarship on the Correa period, and different writers have argued that the Correa government attempted to construct a developmental state (Andrade, 2015; Bowen, 2015; Nicholls, 2014; Ramírez, 2016). Attempts to construct the kind of state apparatus associated with a developmental state are inherently disruptive, coercive, and contradictory and have a wide range of intended and unintended consequences. Adrian Leftwich (2005: 579) argues that developmental states, whether democratic or authoritarian, are defined by “the legitimate authority and consolidated power of the state, its political will, developmental determination and bureaucratic capacity.” Elsewhere (1993) he argues that the handful of developmental states in the post–World War II period conformed well to the Marxian and Weberian typologies of the state, including relative autonomy from particular capitalist interests in the Marxist sense and the development of rational bureaucracies in the Weberian sense. Since this kind of autonomy has historically been so elusive in Ecuador, Correa government attempts to establish it generated conflict with many actors in what has historically been a polycentric and corporatist political system. Therefore many scholars have argued that the centralization of the Correa period strengthened the state at the expense of civil society (Martínez Novo, 2014; Nicholls, 2014; Ortiz Lemos, 2015; Ospina, 2011). Others have questioned this interpretation, emphasizing the deficiencies of the neoliberal, neo-corporatist democracy that preceded the Correa government (Bustamante, 2006; Quintero and Silva, 2010; Ramírez, 2016). The Correa government’s efforts to “decorporatize” the state’s “neo-corporatist” institutions ¹⁰ brought it into conflict with veto players such as the police, the Unión Nacional de Educadores (National Teachers’ Union—UNE), and the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (Ecuadorian Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities—CONAIE) (Chartock, 2013; Ramírez, 2016). These issues underscore some of the most difficult and controversial aspects of the Correa years and lead to broader questions about the boundaries between civil and political society (Ellner, 2016: 114) in contemporary Latin America and the need to overcome a reductionist people-versus-the-state view of politics (Coronel and Cadahia, 2018) that has come to dominate much of the debate about the Correa decade in an unhelpful way.

The political ideas that inspired the Citizens’ Revolution, those of buen vivir and twenty-first-century socialism (Andrade, 2012; Guardiola and García-Quero, 2014; Lalander, 2016) have been the subject of debate on the left for the past decade. This debate can be summed up as a conflict between postmaterialist leftism (buen vivir) and Correismo’s twenty-first-century socialism or neodevelopmentalist leftist reformism, in less poetic terms, in which the latter won out. The conflict between these two visions goes back to the founding of AP and the drafting of the 2008 constitution and Alberto Acosta, the president of the constituent assembly (Andrade, 2012: 39). Acosta was an early supporter of Correa’s 2006 presidential bid and one of the founders of AP, joining the movement from Pachakutik. He was the main intellectual force behind the concept of buen vivir in the movement’s early years. During the constituent assembly he gave a significant amount of space to environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (see Tanasescu, 2013) that influenced the new constitution’s content. He and Correa had fallen out by the end of the constituent assembly, however, and he left AP and the government. Despite this, his mark on AP, the constitution, and the discourse of buen vivir was indelible. Though this concept generated interest and enthusiasm beyond Ecuador, its translation into laws and policies proved largely elusive.

Pablo Andrade (2012) argues that the 2008 constitution was based on an “imaginary” view of Ecuadorian society and concepts such as buen vivir could not easily shape laws and policies. While the popularization of the debate on buen vivir raises important issues such as environmental degradation and indigenous rights, the intellectual genesis of buen vivir in postdevelopment ideology (Acosta, 2010)—criticized as the “last refuge of the noble savage discourse” (Kiely, 1999)—has led some scholars to reject it as problematic (Morozov and Pavlova, 2016; Villalba, 2013). The late Ecuadorian anthropologist José Sánchez Parga (2011: 31–32) dismissed the concept as “retro-projection” of a future based on the ahistorical myth of a communitarian Andean world that was destroyed long ago by colonialism and capitalism. The influence of the social movement actors and intellectuals who pushed for buen vivir during the constituent assembly was completely disproportionate to the representation of buen vivir in actual social relations in Ecuadorian society. Ecuadorians had a chance to vote for this vision when Acosta ran against Correa in the 2013 elections, but Acosta garnered only 3.2 percent of the vote. As in the other electoral rejections of neoliberalism in Latin America, the voters who elected the Correa government had “little in common but their opposition to neoliberalism” (Panizza, 2005a: 725). Ecuadorians, including many indigenous people, voted for Correa and AP not because they were opposed to capitalism or modernity (as the proponents of buen vivir would have it) but because neoliberalism was not working for them. The Correa government was successful because it reversed neoliberalism and increased investment in public health care, education, and infrastructure and because it improved the economic situation ¹¹ —things that the indigenous people who voted for Correa also wanted. The question for the proponents of buen vivir was what kind of political coalition could realistically advance the “civilizational change” that buen vivir entailed if the Citizens’ Revolution failed to do so.

Alianza Pais

AP was founded in 2006 not as a political party but as an electoral movement for the presidential campaign, and it became consolidated as a “party of government” (Benavides, 2012). Building on Catherine Conaghan’s (1995: 450) concept of “floating voters, floating politicians,” we argue that the historical phenomenon of cambiando camisetas (changing T-shirts)—politicians switching from one political party to another—was a key factor in the consolidation and nationalization of AP as a party. In contrast to previous upstart populist parties formed by outsiders in order to run for office, AP was a leftist project from its inception (Ramírez, 2012). The core leadership of the party came from “old left” sectors of the Ecuadorian political landscape, with many leaders and activists coming from what had historically been small left-wing parties in Ecuador such as the Partido Socialista Ecuatoriana (Ecuadorian Socialist Party—PSE), ¹² the MPD, ¹³ and Pachakutik (PK) ¹⁴ and those considered to be to the left of the government (Benavides, 2012: 54). The Partido Comunista Ecuatoriana (Ecuadorian Communist Party—PCE), along with many leaders from the center-left Izquierda Democratica (Democratic Left—ID), either joined AP or supported the government. AP succeeded in uniting nearly the entire political left in Ecuador, including former members of PK, social democrats, socialists, and communists, within a big-tent party that was able to oversee the brokerage process with regional and local caciques.

One of the key mechanisms of the AP’s nationalization as a party was establishing alliances with traditional local political bosses or caciques at the provincial and municipal levels. On the coast, most prefectos (provincial government leaders) who allied themselves with AP came from right-wing or populist political parties. This was the case in the coastal provinces of Manabí, ¹⁵ Los Ríos, ¹⁶ El Oro, ¹⁷ and Guayas, ¹⁸ where left-wing parties were historically weak. In contrast, in the highlands, those who joined AP from other parties, largely PK, ID, and the PSE, tended to have a more natural ideological affinity with the party. This was the case in the province of Pichincha, ¹⁹ where the prefecto Gustavo Baroja left ID to join AP in 2008, and in Tungurahua with Fernando Naranjo and Azuay with Paul Carrasco (who later broke with AP and joined the opposition).

The rift between AP and the indigenous leaders of PK and CONAIE began when Correa attempted to ally himself with PK in the 2006 presidential elections. PK, disappointed by the alliance it had previously made with Lucio Gutiérrez, turned down the offer and ran its own candidate, though individual members did join Correa’s campaign and AP. While the national leadership of PK opposed the Correa government during much of its term, at the local level the situation was much more heterogeneous. In the central highland province of Chimborazo, which had one of the largest indigenous populations in the country, Mariano Curicama ²⁰ was elected prefecto in alliance with AP in 2009. In Imbabura, the province where PK first won power at the local level in the 1990s, many indigenous activists changed from PK to AP in 2009, when AP was elected at the provincial level and in several of its municipalities. Santiago Ortiz suggests that the success of AP in Imbabura was due to its ability to incorporate “indigenous ways of doing politics” (Van Cott, 2003: 27, cited in Ortiz, 2013: 92), essentially assembling established political leaders and electoral networks under the AP banner. Both of these examples suggest a disjuncture between the discourses of CONAIE and PK at the national level. The opposition of national-level indigenous leaders was not reflected in the way indigenous people voted in most areas of the country. Electoral results ²¹ from the 28 most indigenous cantons showed that the percentage of the vote for Correa and AP was not significantly lower than the national average. In 2016 PK attempted to broker alliances with various right-wing opposition parties in the run-up to the 2017 elections, and this led to further divisions within the party, with the leadership of the CONAIE publicly denouncing these alliances (El Comercio, August 23, 2016).

In interviews conducted with AP leaders, two arguments emerged regarding how best to consolidate the party as an electoral force on the center-left. The former director of AP in Manabí, Vicente Velez, a lifelong activist who joined AP from the PSE, stated (interview, Portoviejo, Manabí, October 19, 2013) that he was in favor of alliances with local caciques who had been members of other movements, justifying them as a means of consolidating the post-neoliberal process of state building. He emphasized that leftist parties had historically had such a limited presence on the coast that many honest politicians had no choice but to affiliate with right-wing parties. He also said that it had been easy to find common ground in the case of Manabí, where local leaders were happy to cooperate with a national government that was investing in highways, hospitals, and schools in their province. Velez’s analysis seems to confirm our assertion about the relationship between state building and the nationalization of AP. At the same time, Paola Pabón (interview, Quito, December 8, 2013), former congresswoman for Pichincha and a minister under Correa, who had joined AP from ID, argued that party building should be prioritized. She had focused time and energy on building the capacity of AP at the local level through its comités de Revolución Ciudadana (Citizens’ Revolution committees) in the province. She argued that it was easier to consolidate the party in the highlands, where there was a longer tradition of left-leaning parties such as ID and PK. In contrast to Velez, she advocated the consolidation of AP as a programmatic center-left party to ensure the survival of the policies of the Citizens’ Revolution.

The Political Economy of Class Compromise in Post-Neoliberal Ecuador

What distinguished the Correa government’s economic strategy from that of, for example, the Venezuelan government was that it focused on the taxation of economic growth rather than on the nationalization of private industry. In this sense, it was broadly reformist (Sandbrook, 2007). ²² The increase in government revenue as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) has been significant, from 14.7 percent in 2006 to 20.3 percent in 2015 (CEPAL, 2016). Tax collection was improved through the modernization of the reporting system and new taxes on the financial sector. In its early years, the government implemented a tax on international capital flows, set at 0.5 percent in 2008 and rising to 5 percent in 2011 (Weisbrot, Johnston, and Lefebvre, 2013: 14). Revenues from this tax alone made up 10 percent of government revenue in 2012. In addition, the government implemented a windfall tax on mining and oil companies, which raised US$500 million in revenues for 2010, and a tax on assets held abroad, which raised an average of US$33 million annually between 2008 and 2012 (Weisbrot, Johnston, and Lefebvre, 2013: 14). Though these policies represent a departure from neoliberalism, Ecuadorian capitalism did much better in the post-neoliberal period than it had during the previous neoliberal period. Annual GDP doubled from US$46 billion in 2006 to more than US$100 billion in 2015 (World Bank, 2016). Economic growth averaged 4.3 percent annually in the same period, a higher growth rate than many other countries achieved in the same period. The Gini index of economic inequality was reduced from 0.54 to 0.47 between 2006 and 2014 as per capita income doubled (World Bank, 2016).

While some critics emphasize that the “bad” left governments have been able to maintain such significant spending only because of high commodity prices, in the case of Ecuador the political will of the government to increase taxes is an important part of the story despite the central importance of higher than average oil prices and increased royalties. A report by the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (Weisbrot, Johnston, and Lefebvre, 2013: 5) emphasized this high level of growth and, in particular, the expansion and significant profitability of the financial sector in spite of the implementation of heterodox economic policies that included “taking executive control over the Central Bank, defaulting on one-third of the foreign debt, increasing regulation and taxation of the financial sector, increasing restrictions on international capital flows, and greatly expanding the size and role of government.” The new revenues from higher taxes on the banking sector allowed the government to make greater investments in health, education, infrastructure, and social welfare policies like the bono de desarrollo humano, a social welfare payment targeted at Ecuadorians in the lowest income bracket. The Citizens’ Revolution brought with it a reversal of the privatization of social welfare programs through increased downloading to local governments and NGOs. The extension of social welfare programs has led some observers to identify a nascent move toward universal social programs or universal social citizenship (see Minteguiaga and Ubasart-González, 2014). The other important way in which the government departed from neoliberal policies was in its neodevelopmental and protectionist policies for some domestically produced goods and products. ²³ With these policies it attempted to transform the economic structures of the country and move away from dependence on natural resources, though it fell far short of these goals (see Andrade, 2015).

While there were some significant departures from neoliberalism in economic policy, as detailed above, there were also continuities reflecting the fundamental class compromise of the Correa government’s strategy. Critics point out that there has been no real change in the structure of the Ecuadorian economy and that the traditional family businesses that concentrate economic power have only grown richer during the past decade. Pablo Ospina (2015) argues that favored economic groups include the domestic food processing industry, the construction industry, and others that have benefited from the government’s high levels of public spending and investment, for example, in infrastructure and construction. In 2015 the government approved a law promoting private-public partnerships with the intent of attracting more than US$3 billion in new investment over the next three years to build public infrastructure. In late 2016 the government ratified a free-trade agreement with the EU that eliminates some protections for the domestic market.

The most unusual feature of the Ecuadorian case in comparison with other pink-tide governments is that its currency is the U.S. dollar. Though Correa has been critical of dollarization, he never advocated for or contemplated the reversal of the policy. Dollarization can be a political straitjacket, since the government has no effective sovereignty over monetary policy. However, dollarization also makes a country more attractive to foreign investment by effectively eliminating exchange rate risk. This made Ecuador quite different from Venezuela and Argentina, where left governments imposed currency controls that caused consternation among those who traveled abroad. Dollarization provided Ecuadorian banks and businesses with a kind of “insurance” against instability in exchange rates; the government critic Pablo Dávalos (2012: 42) makes this point. Dollarization led to low inflation and promoted a perception of economic stability that allowed the pursuit of more heterodox economic policies in other areas.

Episodes of Social and Class Conflict: The 30-S and Inheritance Tax Protests

Two episodes during the Correa government show how state-building measures generated opposition and the strategy of class compromise broke down. The first episode was the poorly coordinated coup attempt that took place on September 30, 2010, known in the aftermath as the 30-S. The details of the attempted coup remain disputed (Becker, 2011; Ortiz, 2010), but it began with police officers’ opposing a new law governing public service that would have applied the same rules to all public servants, reducing the power of corporatist decision-making bodies within the national police force (Ortiz, 2010: 27). Other groups conspired with the police, including some sectors of the national air force, which blockaded highways and shut down the Quito and Latacunga airports as well as several bus terminals and the National Assembly. Others who are alleged to have supported the coup attempt include bankers angry about the new financial regulations and taxes, former officials of the secret service, and exiled political figures on the far right (Ortiz, 2010: 28).

This episode is instructive because groups ideologically on the left also supported the leaders of the UNE, who were angry about the government’s reform of public education. Some UNE leaders were opposed to a 2009 measure that would have forced public school teachers to undergo testing and to complete university degrees in order to keep their jobs. In addition, two PK legislators, Clever Jimenez and Lourdes Tiban, as well as the small left-wing parties the Partido Comunista-Marxista Leninista Ecuatoriana (PCMLE) and the MPD, also supported the attempted coup (Becker, 2011). As Santiago Ortiz (2010: 33) argues, the 30-S demonstrated the weakness of AP as a political movement able to mobilize the population in defense of its political project and speak with a coherent voice. During this crisis AP organized a rally in the Quito city center, but it took time for party activists and sympathizers to react. The lack of a popular mobilization like the one that occurred during the attempted coup against the Chávez government in 2002 in Venezuela demonstrates that the social base of the Citizens’ Revolution was passive compared with the Chavista base, although initially the Correa government enjoyed more cross-class support.

During the first two elections in which the Correa government was involved, the vote for AP and Correa was multiclass, in contrast to the cases of Bolivia and Venezuela, where support for left governments was correlated with lower-class socioeconomic status (García, 2012). However, since Correa used rhetoric that emphasized class cleavages, raised taxes, and imposed increased regulations on some economic sectors, many wealthy Ecuadorians still opposed the government. By 2015 the private media and opposition parties were able to galvanize action against the government’s proposed inheritance tax, which would have affected only the wealthiest 2 percent of the population (Presidencia del Ecuador, 2015). In the first half of 2015 there was an upsurge of mobilization against the government, with large demonstrations occurring on March 19, May 1, and several days in June. Opposition politicians such as the Guayaquil mayor Jaime Nebot and the private media were instrumental in this mobilization. Sectors of the CONAIE, the MPD, and others joined the protests, much as the events of 30-S had become catchall antigovernment demonstrations. The size of the protests seemed to catch the government off-guard, and in response it set aside the law and implemented a series of dialogues with different sectors of society. These two episodes demonstrated the fragility of the Citizens’ Revolution in disputes with different interest groups that opposed reforms associated with state building and in moments of class conflict over policy decisions.

Conclusions

The political success of the Correa government and the historic nationalization of votes in its favor was both a cause and an effect of its post-neoliberal state-building project. Political incumbency gave AP a great advantage in terms of building a big-tent party that incorporated many local caciques and thus served to reinforce its project. The Correa government’s leftism largely fits the radical liberal tradition in Ecuador and the radical populist or national-popular phenomenon in twentieth-century Latin American politics. The Correa government largely stayed true to its initial leftist program, which was neodevelopmental despite the interlude of postmaterialist leftism during the 2008 constituent assembly. Its following through with its electoral promises gave it legitimacy and increased the population’s faith in democracy. ²⁴ The changes it brought about were important to the lower classes and have undoubtedly changed the state and society in significant ways.

The experience of the Correa government has divided social scientists, political analysts, and leftist activists over whether it was truly leftist. The answer depends as much on one’s theoretical and ideological orientation as on the facts and arguments. While its program was one of reformism and class compromise, the changes were radical in the context of Ecuadorian history, and this explains why the lower-class majority of the population continued to support the government in the 2017 elections. We have argued here that in a country with a history of weak and predatory state structures, it was both ideologically coherent and strategically sound for a left-wing government to focus on rebuilding public institutions, services, and infrastructure and on strengthening the foundations for true citizenship. We hope that future scholarly work will move beyond the infatuation with buen vivir and the simplistic estado-versus-pueblo binary that postmaterialist/postmodern concepts like these have fostered (Coronel and Cadahia, 2018). Ecuador is a very different country today from the one it was before Correa came to power, and future research about Ecuadorian politics needs to wrestle with these contradictions rather than reproduce these tired narratives.

The transition toward citizenship and away from clientship is a long process, and the efforts of the Correa government to build public institutions have only laid the groundwork for it. As Bowen (2015) has argued, the success of the Correa government should be measured by its ability to develop a better-functioning democratic system and an autonomous state capable of guaranteeing civil, political, and social citizenship. The next few years will test whether or to what degree the Citizens’ Revolution has amounted to a shift toward real citizenship and democracy. The past decade demonstrates the limits of political centralization and a populist strategy of political division. After a decade of Correa’s leadership, Lenín Moreno’s conciliatory style was initially welcomed by Ecuadorians. The corruption allegations that were brought forward against some members of Correa’s former government have surely contributed to disenchantment with the previous government and Correa’s leadership. However, the results of the February 2018 referendum demonstrated that, despite Moreno’s popularity, Correa maintains a strong core of support for his more left-wing project, with 35 percent of voters opposed to the move to block reelection that would have allowed Correa to run again in the future. The result has effectively barred Correa from seeking office again, but it is also a good approximation of the support for Correismo’s leftist vision. The next test will be whether the political and social forces behind Correismo can build the kind of national popular political coalition that won it power without the state-building apparatus that served to consolidate that power in government.