Populist Seduction in Latin America. Carlos de la Torre
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assumed the presidency of Ecuador. He was overthrown by a coup d’état a year later, on 20 August 1935. Velasco’s first presidency was short and full of strife. He had an autocratic style: he dismissed public employees, closed newspapers and Quito’s university, exiled or jailed some of his opponents, and relied on the support of thugs in his conflicts with a Congress that did not behave as a loyal oppositional force. After being overthrown, Velasco lived in exile in Colombia, Chile, and Argentina until he returned to the country for the 1940 elections. After losing the elections and staging a failed insurrection, he went again into exile until 1944 when he returned as the Great Absentee.
The political movement named after José María Velasco Ibarra, Velasquismo, was the most important political phenomenon in Ecua dor from the 1930s to the early 1970s. With very few exceptions, most politicians who were Velasco’s contemporaries, regardless of their ideology or party affiliation, were Velasquistas at some point in their careers. Velasco’s populist movement attracted more than political elites. More important, this was the political movement that introduced mass politics in Ecuador, partially incorporating previously excluded people into the political community.
Velasquismo did not only appeal to some of Velasco’s contemporaries, it has also captured the attention of social scientists, who have passionately debated its meanings and origins. Indeed, the analysis of Velasquismo has been one of the main avenues through which Ecua dorian political sociology has been constructed.2 This chapter analyzes the dual process that produced Velasquismo. It examines how Velasco Ibarra was socially created and how he constructed himself into such a leader. Here I study a particular phase of Velasquismo: La Gloriosa. Given Velasquismo’s forty-year span, it would be an error to draw general conclusions about it from the study of the 1940s. That era was particularly important, however, because it marked the beginning of mass politics in Ecuador and because, as in other Latin American nations, it was a period of failed democratization (Bethell and Roxborough 1988; Rock 1994).
Existing Approaches to the Study of Velasquismo
Velasquismo has been researched by historians and social scientists since at least 1951, with the publication of George Blanksten’s Ecuador: Constitutions and Caudillos. Three approaches to its study, which reflect more general trends in the analysis of Latin American populism, can be differentiated: mass-society theories, Marxism, and discourse analysis. Osvaldo Hurtado (1988), following the insights of mass-society theory, used two key sociological categories—anomie and charisma—to analyze Velasquismo. The principal consequence of modernization is the destruction of previously existing communities and the formation of anonymous, isolated, and alienated “masses.” The individuals within these groups, whose normative framework has been shattered, and who have not yet been integrated into a new normative framework, become “available masses.” Hence, they are easy prey for “demagogic” leaders who can use them for their personalistic interests. The charismatic leader, like the great man in traditional historiography, becomes the key to analyze populist movements.
The main flaws of the mass-society theory lie in the vision of history as the history of great personalities and the consequent conservative interpretation of followers as deceived “masses.” By over emphasizing the role of the political leader, authors who follow this theory cannot account for the actions of followers. As a reaction to the study of politics through great personalities, Marxists have de-emphasized the role of the leader, studying instead the social conditions that produce populist movements.3 They focus on the analysis of socioeconomic processes and class formation, in particular the history of the formation of the working class, the revolutionary subject.
Ecuadorian orthodox Marxist analyses, which originated as a legitimate reaction against the vision of history as made by “great men” and as an attempt to study the autonomous actions of subaltern groups, have not, however, fulfilled their promise. Ironically, they share mass-society theorists’ view of common folk as “masses.” Due to their objectivist and dogmatic Marxism, the history of subaltern groups, particularly of the proletariat, is theoretically predetermined. Only when the proletariat acts on behalf of its “true interests,” which of course are known by the theorist, do they act as a class; otherwise they are misled or irrational “masses.” Although Ecuadorian Marxists tend to minimize the role of political leaders, at some point they have to face the inevitable and account for the importance of Velasco’s authority. To do so, they use the category of Bonapartism, which refers to exceptional moments in which the executive, under the rule of an individual, achieves dictatorial powers over all parts of the state and civil society. These moments occur at conjunctures when the ruling classes are divided and the proletariat is strong enough to challenge bourgeois domination but too weak to replace it. The problem with the Bonapartist hypothesis is that most of Ecuadorian history could be characterized by these extraordinary moments, turning what is supposed to be the exception into the rule.
Marxists have fervently debated the origins and meanings of Velasquismo, especially whether it was populism. For Agustín Cueva (1988), Velasquismo represented a new mechanism of political domination or manipulation that he interchangeably describes as caudillismo or populism. Cueva understands the socioeconomic crisis of the 1930s as the end of three previous forms of political domination: liberalism, representing the interests of the agro-exporting bourgeoisie of the coast; conservatism, representing the interests of the highland hacendados; and the military, petit bourgeois reformism of the Revolución Juliana (9 July 1925). This crisis also marks the entrance of new political actors: the subproletariat. Cueva interprets this group, whose political behavior could have been a challenge to elite rule, as, in fact, deceived and manipulated by the rhetoric of the caudillo, converting them into the electoral and social base of Velasco’s populism. For this reason, Velasquismo is explained as a sociopolitical movement serving the interests of the ruling classes, and Velasco as a mediator of the interests of the coastal agro-exporting bourgeoisie and the highland landowners. But, for Cueva, Velas quismo was also a new sociopolitical phenomenon that articulated subproletarian demands for incorporation into the political community.
Revealing the empirical inconsistencies and lack of theoretical rigor in Cueva’s work, Rafael Quintero (1980) challenges his interpretation and accuses him of introducing a series of myths about Ecuadorian populism. From an orthodox Marxist perspective and through an analysis of the 1931 and 1933 presidential elections, Quintero shows that due to the small size of Ecuadorian cities (Guayaquil had 126, 717 inhabitants in 1933; Quito had 107, 192) and of the electorate (3.1 percent of the population), it is absurd to emphasize the role of the subproletariat in explaining the origins of Velasquismo. For Quintero, the so-called Velasquismo was not a new political phenomenon. On the contrary, the first election of Velasco marked the triumph of the Partido Conservador, and the consolidation of the Junker path of authoritarian capitalist development from above. Moreover, Quintero denies any explanatory value to the concept of populism, proposing instead the analysis of class relations and alliances in each of Velasco’s elections and administrations.
Cueva is right in analyzing Velasquismo as a new sociopolitical phenomenon. Quintero arbitrarily projects the results of Velasco’s first electoral victory over the entire forty-year period of Velasquismo. Given that he does not analyze voting patterns at the local level, he cannot argue convincingly that any particular group (such as the subproletariat) did or did not vote for Velasco (Menéndez-Carrión 1986). Moreover, Quintero does not differentiate Velasquismo as an electoral movement from Velasquismo as a broader sociopolitical phenomenon.
Going beyond Cueva and Quintero and applying E. P. Thompson’s concept of the moral economy of the crowd, Juan Maiguashca and Liisa North (1991), in contrast, interpret Velasco’s populism as a political and ideological phenomenon that challenges the country’s capitalist modernization from a moral perspective. Unfortunately, their suggestive argument is incomplete because they do not carry through with the Thompsonian analysis they promise. Nevertheless, it is important to point out the limitations of this popular category in anthropological and historical writings. The category of moral economy refers to the way in which subaltern groups interpret and challenge the dislocations of capitalist modernization via their perceptions of the past. But, as William Roseberry (1989) points out, many authors who use this category tend to present the precapitalist past as homogeneous and undifferentiated. They fail to consider power relations within