Translator’s introduction
Earlier this month, the national election in Ecuador delivered a somewhat surprising result. After almost being eliminated from contention in the first round, the right-wing candidate Guillermo Lasso, a neoliberal capitalist, defeated AndrésArauz, the candidate of the Citizen Revolution Movement, the bloc associated with the former Pink Tide government of Rafael Correa (2007–2017).
Much of the left had expected that Arauz would win the election and reverse the neoliberal shift that Correa’s successor, Lenin Moreno, implemented. The social democratic left, like Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara, who interviewed Arauz with the expectation that he was interviewing the next president of Ecuador, assumed that the Ecuadorian electorate would support a return to the Pink Tide era. But this North American “socialism from above” view ignored the degree to which Correa’s extractivist policies had alienated both the main Indigenous organization, the Confederation of Ecuador’s Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE), and other social movements.
Running as the electoral expression of the mass uprising that shook Ecuador in 2019, CONAIE-endorsed candidate of the Pachakutik movement, Yaku Pérez, ran a strong first round campaign. Pérez just barely missed making it to the runoff against Arauz. As the article points out, shady practices in the elections may have hurt Pérez. As a result, many of Pérez’s supporters—located mostly in the areas of the country with the highest concentration of Indigenous voters—spoiled their ballots in protest. This “blank vote” and abstention—and not a major shift to the right among the Ecuadorian electorate—were likely the main reasons for Arauz’s loss.
Apparently, Ecuador’s voters weren’t as enthusiastic about a return to the Pink Tide as were Arauz’s supporters in the U.S. social democratic left. But at least the social democrats didn’t go so far as “anti-imperialists” at Gray Zone, who characterized Pérez as a pseudo-left candidate in the pocket of U.S. imperialism. At the time of writing, Jacobin hasn’t published an analysis of the election in its English language flagship.
But its Latin American edition didn’t hold back its criticisms of Arauz and Correa’s party: “The electoral result is an enormous blow to Correismo and a strengthening of right-wing “common sense” in the population in general. The economic and social crisis in which Ecuador finds itself, the discontent and lack of confidence in the state and its institutions that the blank vote and electoral abstention represented—neither of these will be overcome easily. Social tensions and internal contradictions will sap Lasso’s government over time.
“Correismo’s incapacity for self-criticism—it had convinced itself that it was the best government in the republican era—its dependence on a single leader, its hostility to social organizations, especially CONAIE and the those of the anti-capitalist left—the lack of dialog with distinct social sectors, both while in government and during the campaign—all took their toll.”
This article by Juan Cuvi, a development specialist, and former leader of the Alfaro ViveCarajo movement (a one-time guerrilla organization that transitioned to above-ground legal political activity in the 1990s) and member of the National Anticorruption Commission. The article appeared first in Nueva Sociedad. Translated for the ISP by Lance Selfa.
The 2021 national election will be remembered for an anomaly: in the second round three candidates ended up participating, instead of the two officially proclaimed by the national election authority. In effect, the charges of fraud raised by the candidate of the Pachakutik Movement, YakuPérez, made him, in effect, the third contender in the runoff. And not because his decision could have tipped the balance in favor of one of the two finalists this April 11, but because his call to spoil ballots challenged both candidates. With almost 97% of the votes counted, Guillermo Lasso, of the Creating Opportunities (CREO) movement, won with 52.52 percent of the vote against 47.48 percentfor Andrés Arauz, the candidate backed by former “Pink Tide” President Rafael Correa.Spoiled ballots reached 17 percent. Even in the first round, the level of ballot spoilage had already been high.
Although formally it was impossible to prove fraud in the first round, there were plenty of indications to suggest it. It’s enough to cite one instance to understand its magnitude. On the night of first round election on February 7, the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced on national television that Pérez had advanced to the second round withthe young Arauz, former official in Rafael Correa’s government. On the following day, the vote count confirmed an irreversible trend in favor of the Pachakutik candidate. However, a last-minute addition of thousands of ballot boxes in the city of Guayaquil, a bastion of the right wing with a very bad record regarding electoral transparency, reversed the trend. Despite an agreement reached on February 12 with the electoral council and international delegations, Lasso refused to open the ballot boxes in which irregularities had been detected. Moreover, after the evidence of the 612 additional votes in favor of Pérezwere found in only 28 ballot boxes reviewed, the NEC did not open the 20,000 contested tally sheets. Didn’t this de facto tie vote between Pérez and Lasso demand a more thorough confirmation of the results?
In the three weeks following the first electoral round, Pachakutik’s legal challenges forced the main players in the political system—the business elite, the traditional parties, the major media and the electoral authority—to show their hand. The Indigenous movement’selectoral success upended all forecasts and calculations. Not only that: it threatened the dynamics of power. Although Yaku Pérez, strictly speaking, cannot be described as an outsider, he does represent an alternative to the reigning orthodoxy: for limiting the extractivist model of economic development and for promoting territorial autonomy for Indignenous people in a plurinational state. Both of these seriously challenge the logic of capitalist domination.
The most striking thing was the convergence between Arauz and the Correa hierarchy with Lasso. Former President Correa, from Belgium, openly discounted the allegations of fraud and ratified the CNE’s final decision. At first glance, the explanation for this position is simple. All polls showed Pérez defeating Arauz by a wide margin, with Arauz faring better against the conservative banker Lasso. However, there are deeper, and more complicated reasons for this tacit agreement between the right and Correa’s current.
Pachakutik’s electoral success in the first round (it will have the second largest bloc in the National Assembly) and the hints of irregularities drew a clear line of demarcation with conventional politics. If Lasso appeared as the expression of the old political oligarchy, Arauz represented a politics in clear decomposition. He could never manage to put distance between himself and the image of corruption that stuck to Correa. Moreover, during the campaign, several instances of shady dealings implicating Arauz emerged. For example, in the city of Loja he approved expensive contracts for an art festival that ran over budget and he signed oil contracts with China that some judged detrimental to Ecuador.
Under these conditions, it was inevitable that Pérez would become the outsider, anti-system candidate, channeling the discontent and disappointment of a good part of the electorate, while bringing together several social agendas. In effect, Pérez’s campaign attracted forces far beyond the existing organizations of the left or of the Indigenous population. Its penetration into areas historically off-limits to an Indigenous candidate, like several provinces along the Ecuadorian coast, reflects a sharp change in the political behavior of several social sectors. Of the 27 National Assembly seats Pachakutik took, two of them hailed from the provinces of Guayas and El Oro, a result considered to be unthinkable only recently.
In the end, the protests against fraud progressed from being a campaign for civil rights and electoral transparency to a strategic position that questioned an exclusionary and anti-democratic political system. A call for a blank vote taken by the majority of the main Indigenous organization, the Confederation of Ecuador’s Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE), was the obvious and clear conclusion to this agitation because it highlighted the illegitimacy of both major candidates. In other words, it called the legitimacy of the entire political system into question. It was no accident that all Establishment voices, as if using the same talking points, condemned CONAIE’s decision.What’s more, Lasso’s and Arauz’s campaigns both agreed to oppose the spoiled-ballot campaign because each thought the other would benefit from it. As a result, the campaign for the “blank vote” turned Pérez into the de facto third candidate, while being excluded from the runoff.
Lasso flipped the script
In this context, and in view of the April 11 results, the first conclusion to draw is that the right, and not the Correa populists, made the right calls. Lasso’s determination to get to the second round—even going back on his pledges—made sense. He knew that, despite his big deficit in the first round (32.7 percent to 19.7 percent), Arauz was beatable. Not only because Arauz was a bad candidate, but also because Lasso’s strategists, with Jaime Durán Barba at their head, had some tricks up their sleeves. Let’s see.
The turning point in the presidential race came with the debate between the two candidates. Lassoknew of Arauz’s insurmountable limitations in this venue. His weak performance in the first debate, before the first round, foreshadowed his weakness. Then, Arauz refused to take part in a media-sponsored debate, demonstrating his poor media skills. Despite being a substandard candidate, Lasso was able to tilt the results in his favor. His constant repetition of “Andrés, don’t lie again,” took only a few hours to exact a devastating toll in social media and in the political world.
Lasso skillfully portrayed Arauz as a candidate who couldn’t tell the truth. The revelation that Arauz worked with Lenin Moreno’s government when he was an official of the Central Bank—a fact Arauz tried to conceal—spearheaded Lasso’s dirty campaign. Alongside that was Arauz’s well-compensated retirement from the bank, right in the middle of the pandemic, and after he had been on leave for years. Arauz fit the image of a pipón, a slang term for a bureaucratic parasite. A final misstep took place after Arauz touted support from CONAIE because its leader endorsed him, only to have the confederation vote to oppose endorsing Arauz.
Lasso proved more effective than Arauz at waging a smear campaign. His campaign made a simple calculation: all of the charges that could have been thrown at him have been in the public sphere for years. That he is a banker, that he is a millionaire, that he owns real estate, that he is a neoliberal, that he is a far-right conservative, that he collaborated with different governments, that he supported pro-business policies. All of this was well-known. In fact, Arauz’s campaign pulled back some attacks against Lasso when it determined that they were backfiring.
On the other hand, the young Arauz was vulnerable to those attacks. His main dilemma was how to distance himself from the unpopular aspects of Rafael Correa’s government without breaking from Correa. Lasso exploited this dilemma well, to the point where he took awaythe patina of youth and renewal that Arauz tried to project. The presence of Pérez, who appeared not only as a real alternative, but as someone who changed the political discourse and practice, compounded Arauz’s problems. Pachakutik strongly occupied the political space on the left, relegating Arauzto the traditional spaces. The candidate of Correismothus ended up identified with the past.On April 11, Arauz won mainly on the Coast, but lost in the Highlands and in the Amazon. [Ed.: Arauz won areas traditionally associated with the pro-business right, and lost areas with the highest concentrations of Indigenous voters.]
This last point is closely connected to another factor that was impossible for Arauz’s campaign strategists to shake: the intervention of former president Correa in the campaign from Belgium. This factor had already been noted and analyzed in previous campaigns. For example, after the 2014 electoral defeat, when the Proud and Sovereign Homeland Alliance [Alianza País, Correa’s party/bloc] lost the main mayoralties of the country, especially that of Quito. In the 2021 elections, the image of a candidate whose strings are pulled by another leader, added to the significant resistance that built up against Correa over the years, corroded Arauz’s support further. The contradiction turned out to be insurmountable: the base that provided Arauz with the hard vote of Correismo became at the same time the ceiling that prevented him from getting above 50 percent.
For several weeks, attempts to push Correa into the background were obvious and unsuccessful. And Lasso’s advisers were clearly aware that this posed an opportunity for them. A good part of their strategy was to attack the former president, forcing him to intervene in the campaign, and thus turning voters away from Arauz. The lukewarm criticisms that Arauz raised against the outbursts of his mentor short-circuited his campaign. Perhaps the best-known episode came when Arauzsaid that “hatred is out of style” and clearly tried to distance himself from his Correista past. This ended up being what’s called in courtrooms an “admission of guilt.”It proved absolutely detrimental to his attempt to position himself as a new and fresh alternative.
The left after April 11
After 35 years of formal democracy, an organic representative of the business sector came to government directly. Unlike Leon Febres Cordero, whose triumph in 1984 reopened the old Ecuadorian oligarchic regime in its neoliberal heyday, Lasso faces multiple crises that won’t be easy to resolve. The continuation of the Covid-19 pandemic alone implies a permanent political deadlock.
The answers that the next government will eventually give have already been foretold: opening to foreign investment, agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), empowering of the private sector, prioritizing mining, weakening protections for workers, deepening of the productive model based on the extraction of natural resources… that is to say, the whole compendium of neoliberal strategies and policies. However, the country’s conditions are not favorable for the implementation of this model in a dollarized country. The popular uprising of October 2019 showed the persistence of deep structural problems impossible to resolve within the scope of the free-market economy. The demands of the Indigenous movement (plurinational state) and other social movements (diverse rights) are at the forefront.
In these circumstances, the symbolic weight of the blank vote will define the terms of future political conflict. The shadow of electoral fraud and the shaky legitimacy of the next government will turn the Indigenous movement into a key political actor. Together with the old Social Christian Party, Pachakutik is the only force that has not only managed to survive the collapse of different parties and blocs, but has increased its support. Moreover, it can combine parliamentary pressure with social mobilization. For now, it has seized the banner of the left from Correa’s party.
This situation allows Patchakutikto play a stronger role in the unfolding political scene. Faced with the fragile hegemony of the right—which will not have a majority in Parliament—and the progressive deterioration of Correismo, Pachakutik and the social movements can try to make a third way between the two blocs a reality. There is a government program (“la Minka por la vida”) and an agenda with strategic lines (plurinationality, the defense of nature, women’s rights) that place this sector outside of the stagnant political system.
Three main rallying points—a demand for territorial autonomy for Indigenous peoples and nationalities, protection of natural resources against depredation, and a demand for the decriminalization of abortion—put this bloc at odds with both the Right and with Correa’s populism. The election results will make this confrontation even more acute.
This is still a complicated situation, however. Correa’s populism will seek to rehabilitate itself in opposition to Lasso’s government. That is the only chance it has to reconsolidate itself over the next four years. From having declared itself the winner in the first round, to losing the election, there is an unfathomable abyss.
