Blood of Extraction by Todd Gordon

Author:Todd Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2016-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

TAPPING THE VEINS OF ECUADOR

Luis Macas has long been a proponent of the simultaneous struggle against colonial racism endured by indigenous peoples and the exploitation of popular classes under capitalism. When, in mid-July 2010, we sat in Quito with this ex-president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), and former presidential candidate for the Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement – New Country, we began our exchange with his reflections on the government of Rafael Correa. “From my point of view,” Macas began,

this is neither a socialist nor even a left-wing government. This is a populist government, whose objective is to challenge the model on a few points, through a series of modest reforms, so that the model as a whole can continue advancing. Fundamental changes, radical changes in this country, are not going to come about with this government.870

Correa first scraped his way into the presidency in the second round of elections in 2006. This was a political contest scheduled in a time when the prestige of the indigenous movement—by far the most important popular force in Ecuador for several decades871—had still to recover from the acute setback it suffered as a consequence of the movement’s participation in the ill-fated government of Lucio Gutiérrez.872

The wildly popular process of a Constituent Assembly in 2007 and 2008 offered up an extended honeymoon for Correa and large cross-sections of society. A new, progressive Constitution received the approval of 64 percent of voters in a referendum in September 2008, and Correa was re-elected—this time in the first round—with 52 percent of the popular vote in April 2009. Things began to sour soon after, however, when Correa’s failure to break with many of the quotidian banalities of the neoliberal economics he had inherited was difficult to reconcile with the President’s romantic and ostentatious slogans of “twenty-first century socialism” and a “Citizen’s Revolution.” Indeed, the President would strain to align his practical commitment to aggressively reorienting the Ecuadorian economy toward the extraction of minerals by multinational corporations with his preferred rhetorical schemas for the next several years.

“But one of the recurrent paradoxes of the bourgeoisie’s political history,” Catherine Conaghan rightly points out in reference to twentieth-century Latin America, “lies in its capacity to oppose even the most tepid reformism. Polices that do not directly damage dominant-class material interests are sometimes opposed with an intensity seemingly out of proportion to the issues at stake.”873 This incongruity between the actual threat of reform and the hostility of bourgeois response can be partially explained by the “unpredictability of policy outcomes,” Conaghan suggests:

Policy shift may replace the devil you know for one you don’t know. With this principle in mind, the business community can be expected to oppose any sort of policy change that would upset the environment that they have already mastered.874

With very little need for alteration, Conaghan’s formula can be generalized in many respects from the dynamics of the domestic bourgeoisie to the reaction of imperialist powers operating in Latin America when faced with reformist challenges to their immediate and longer term interests in the region.

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