Populist Seduction in Latin America. Carlos de la Torre
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1988b) analyzes the popular mobilizations from 17 October 1945 through Perón’s victory in February 1946 to understand the contradictory meanings of Peronism. On 9 October 1945, General Perón resigned from his positions as vice president and secretary of labor. He was arrested on the 13th. On 17 and 18 October, the workers in the capital and provincial cities staged enormous demonstrations demanding his release. The festive and carnivalesque4 spirit of these events contrasted sharply with the behavior typical of the 1 May demonstrations organized by the Socialists and Communists. Instead of a solemn, ordered march, on 17 and 18 October the workers sang popular songs, played huge drums, danced in the streets, costumed themselves in traditional gaucho gear, and wrote Perón’s name in chalk on city walls. The surprise of the leftist press was such that they did not recognize the demonstrators as workers, but perceived them as marginal and lumpen. For example, the Communist press characterized them as “‘clanes con aspecto de murgas’ [clans with the appearance of carnival] led by elements of the ‘hampa’ [underworld] and typified by the figure of the compadrito” (James 1988a, 451).
The workers attacked institutions that symbolized and transmitted their social subordination. Their principal targets were the cafes, bars, and clubs of the elites. They also threw stones at anti-Peronist newspaper offices and burned copies of such papers. Students were a favorite target. With the cry “alpargatas si, libros no” (shoes, not books) many students, especially the sons of the well-heeled (jóvenes engominados), were the object of the jokes and at times the violence of the workers. Shouting “menos cultura y más trabajo” (less high culture and more work), they threw stones at the universities. “The central column of demonstrators in Rosario was headed by an ass on which had been placed a placard with the slogan ‘offensive to university professors and a certain evening paper.’ … In La Plata during the disturbances of the 18th a group of demonstrators entered a funeral parlor and demanded a coffin which they then paraded through the fashionable area in the center of the city shouting slogans ‘hostile to the students and newspapers’” (1988a, 452). Young men made obscene gestures and dropped their pants in front of upper-class ladies. Monuments to national heroes, considered sacred by the elite, were covered with Peronist slogans.
James shows that these actions, which appeared to both elites and the left as acts of barbarism committed by the lumpen and recent migrants to the cities, had a rationality. The workers attacked the symbols marking their exclusion from the public sphere: universities and students, social clubs, and the press. Moreover, their actions constituted a kind of countertheater through which they mocked and abused the symbols of elite pretensions and authority, as well as affirming their own pride in being workers.
The workers marched from the outlying areas to the central plazas. Their presence was seen by elites and middle classes as the eruption of barbarism, of the cabecitas negras (the dark-skinned) in places reserved for the high society (gente bien). By invading the public plazas—spaces where citizens gather and political power resides—the workers from outlying areas challenged the spatial hierarchy, affirming their right to belong to the public sphere.
The Paradoxes of Populism and Liberal Democracy
I have stressed the importance of studying the complex and ambiguous meanings of populism. Particular emphasis has been placed on the social historical analysis of collective action, as well as on discursive political events. This approach to the study of populism takes into account both the actions and discourses of the leaders and the autonomous actions of the followers. It requires examining the concrete mechanisms of electoral articulation in the context of particular political cultures.
Perhaps the principal effect of populism has been the entrance of the masses into politics. That is why Carlos Vilas interprets populism as a “fundamental democratizing force” (1995b, 98). Populist movements not only expanded the number of voters, they also gave large social groups within exclusionary and racist societies access to a symbolic dignity. Alberto Adrianzén (1998) has argued that the fundamental quality of Peruvian populism has been its antiaristocratic and proplebeian traits. Similarly, the chusma of Gaitán and Velasco Ibarra and the descamisados of the Peróns were transformed into the bearers of the “true” nation in their struggle against the “aristocratic” oligarchical antination. This search for support and legitimation from the people, placing at political center stage sectors previously regarded as undeserving, is to a certain extent irreversible. As shown by the most recent experiences of dictatorship and democratization in the Southern Cone, once the people become activated they cannot be permanently ignored.
The political emergence of previously excluded groups through populism has ambiguous if not contradictory effects for Latin American democracies. On the one hand, in the incorporation of people through the expansion of the vote and their presence in the public plazas, populism is democratizing. On the other hand, this popular activation occurs through movements that acritically identify with charismatic leaders, who in many cases are authoritarian. Moreover, the Manichaean populist discourse that divides society into two antagonistic fields does not permit the recognition of the opposition. This latter point suggests one of the great difficulties of consolidating democracy in the region. Instead of recognizing the adversary, accepting diversity, and proposing dialogue—implying conflict but not the destruction of rivals—populists through their discourse seek the destruction of opponents and impose their authoritarian vision of the ‘true’ national community.5
Chapter 2
Velasquista Seduction
By combining an analysis of the social creation of the populist leader José María Velasco Ibarra in La Revolución Gloriosa (the May Revolution) with a study of his discourse, this chapter explains why Velasco Ibarra became the central political figure in Ecuador in the mid-1940s. La Gloriosa, an insurrection in the name of the exiled former President José María Velasco Ibarra in May 1944, is a critical site for analyzing the complexities of the social creation of a populist leader.1 La Gloriosa was a revolt against an elected civilian Liberal regime. It occurred in the name of de mocracy and an exiled politician who had acquired the aura of the Great Absentee, and indeed did not himself participate in the insurrection. The uprisings that together make up La Gloriosa took place in Guayaquil and other Ecuadorian cities on 28 and 29 May 1944. In these uprisings, common citizens fought together with conscripts and junior officers of the armed forces in the name of Velasco Ibarra against the Liberal regime and its elite police corps, the carabineros. Popular collective violence targeted the institutions and supporters of the Liberal regime, especially the carabineros, while respecting the property of wealthy non-Liberals. As a result of this insurrection, former president Velasco Ibarra came to power for his second administration, which lasted from June 1944 to August 1947.
In July 1943, in preparation for the elections planned for June 1944, most political parties and associations of civil society had joined forces to form the Alianza Democrática Ecuatoriana (ADE; Ecuadorian Democratic Alliance). They promoted the candidacy of José María Velasco Ibarra for the upcoming presidential elections, which, however, did not take place because of the insur rection in support of Velasco on 28 and 29 May. How could Conservatives, Catholics, Socialists, and Communists unite in a common program of democratization and under the name of a politician, who came to represent the salvation of the nation? How was Velasco transformed in 1944 into the embodiment of the solution to all of Ecuador’s problems? What were Velasco’s actions and words that made him the country’s redeemer and the personification of the democratic ideal?
By the time of the Gloriosa, José María Velasco Ibarra was far from an unknown public personality. A son of a mathematician of Colombian origin and a lady from “high society,” Velasco was born in 1893. He studied with the Jesuits and became a lawyer. In 1930, in recognition of his journalistic and academic work, he was appointed a member of the most important elite literary institution, the Real Academia Ecuatoriana de la Lengua [The Ecuadorian Royal Academy of Language]. He was elected to Congress in 1931 while he was living in Paris and with no affiliation with any political party. Velasco’s political career from this point on was meteoric. In 1932 and 1933 he became president of Congress and later in that year he was elected president of the republic itself. Of a total of 64,682 votes, Velasco obtained