Ecuador’s Great Betrayal

AN INTERVIEW WITH

GUILLAUME LONG

Ecuador’s president Lenin Moreno was elected to continue Correa’s

Citizens' Revolution — but has set about dismantling it instead.

INTERVIEW BY

Pablo Vivanco

In a little over a year, the political landscape in Ecuador has changed

dramatically.

For more than a decade, the Citizen’s Revolution that began under Rafael
Correa made tremendous strides in reduction of poverty and inequality,
including taking hundreds of thousands of children off the streets and into
schools, while also significantly increasing Ecuador’s middle class.

The country also achieved political and social stability after years of turmoil
that followed the 1998 banking crisis.

The Citizen’s Revolution was not without its detractors and contradictions
however, including rows and protests over reproductive rights, extractive
industries, and more recently, corruption scandals involving key government
figures.

Nonetheless, in the 2017 elections Ecuador was seen as having bucked the
trend of right-wing victories across Latin America. The candidate from
Correa’s Alianza PAIS, Lenin Moreno, was elected on a platform of
continuity — but signs of a looming divergence began to emerge.

Moreno and Correa are now bitter enemies, with Moreno’s government
seeking to jail his former ally as they did with Correa’s last vice president,
Jorge Glas. Alianza PAIS has split, and Correa’s allies have not yet been
allowed to register a new party.

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 The Moreno government has also allied with political forces on the right to
pass significant austerity and liberalization measures, while shifting the
country’s foreign policy to a more US-friendly disposition.

The spectacular shift — which Correa has characterized as a “treason” or a

“coup” — has baffled many.

Guillaume Long served as Correa’s last foreign minister. He was also the
head of international affairs for Alianza PAIS, and led efforts to create a
broad space for Latin American left parties called the Latin American
Progressives Summit (ELAP). Long spoke to Jacobin about what is
happening in Ecuador and the state of the Left in the region.

The political-economic reforms that were surprisingly ushered in PV

by Lenin Moreno as well as the split that occurred in the ruling
Alianza PAIS are examples of the tectonic shifts in the country’s
politics. What explains the departure from the election platform and
allegiances by Lenin and his supporters, many of whom had supported
Correa and the Citizen’s Revolution?

GL There are a number of internal factors, the first one of course

being the choice of Correa’s successor, one might argue by Correa
himself, so that’s a significant mistake. I mean it was born out of
good intentions, with Correa deciding not to run again.

This was supposed to be a very democratic move. It was likely that Correa
would win, whereas Lenin struggled to win, but he won with Correa’s votes.
If you do a rigorous analysis of the Moreno vote in 2017, it’s basically the
bastions of popular support for Correismo.

But the idea was to have someone who would be more to the center because
we’ve had a lot polarizing policies, particularly in 2015 with a new windfall
tax on land and inheritance that didn’t exist before. The right wing was
highly mobilized and it was thought that someone like Lenin Moreno, a
benign character that was all about dialogue, would institutionalize things.
Maybe even Correa could come back four years later with a more radical

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 agenda and continue the transformation.

But also I think a number of mistakes were committed by the Correa

administrations, particularly in the last years. These empowered Lenin,
because there was a notion that Correa was too conflictive. The mistakes
were more aesthetic than structural, and they made Lenin not just an heir of
Correa, but a viable alternative for other sectors who were unsympathetic to
Correa.

When Moreno departed from Correa in the first few months, he was able to
capitalize on people who were fed up with Correa’s polarizing style of rule.
Particularly in the middle classes, there was a feeling that it was time for a
much more ecumenical kind of government, one that would listen, that
would be less conflictive. Of course, this was used as a platform for the
recuperation of power and to put an end to all sorts of policies including
redistributive policies that the elites disagreed with.

Of course there are also exogenous factors. Correa’s last two years of rule
were the most difficult. In 2014, the commodities crash affected the economy
in a very serious way. This meant that instead of finishing on a high, Correa
finished on a low. Now paradoxically, I would argue that his best governance
was between 2014 and 2017, where he surfed the commodities decline in a
very intelligent way. Ecuador is the only country of its kind that didn’t face a
major crisis because of the commodity decline.

There was also an earthquake which participated in a negative growth, so

there were all sorts of factors. Ecuador did a lot right: it managed to get out of
the recession through anti-austerity investment, beating neoliberalism,
demonstrating that austerity doesn’t work when times are good, and it works
even less when times are bad.

But people saw that there was a slowing down on the back of the economy,
things got tougher, things got difficult. This enabled Lenin to come in with an
agenda of change, but change that turned away from reform, away from
transformation, away from redistribution, and returned to a sort of
conservative style of rule which implies much less polarization with the
elites.

In this process, Lenin got the backing of the media. Suddenly there was this
massive hegemony rebuilt around his figure which enabled him to
consolidate himself politically.

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 So why did people from Correa’s political project accompany Lenin?
Correa’s government was always very heterogeneous, I would say from the
Communist Party to the center right, it was broad. There were business
sectors, but there were also social movements, trade unions, the Communist
Party, the Socialist Party, and Alianza PAIS which is like the mass party, and
within PAIS there are a lot of factions.

That meant the Left in its entirety was represented. Correa had certain
aspects that were radical, and others that were less radical, including his
deeply embedded Catholicism which was problematic for certain sectors in
his government. Some of those sectors saw Moreno as somebody who was
more secular.

At the time there was a possibility that Moreno would open up on a few of
those fronts, certain gender reforms, sexual and reproductive rights. Now we
know that hasn’t happened. We could go back into some of these accusations
against Correa, because I would say with the great exception of abortion, on
the other fronts, Ecuador made huge leaps forward on gender and LGBT
issues.

But it was a perception of certain sectors of the left that Moreno would be
more progressive on those issues. That maybe we would lose some radicalism
on the economic front, but you would gain some on identity politics.

It hasn’t happened, but this is the reason why they joined.

It seems paradoxical that on the one hand, the current situation PV

is a result of the weaknesses of Correa and his government; but
on the other, he would have likely won the election. Given that,
how would you describe the state of the Left and the Citizen’s Revolution
in Ecuador today?

GL I wish politics was less contradictory because both hold true. I

think Correa would have won, but I also think that it was very easy
to set up an anti-Correa platform. You got two broad sections of
society — one that would have voted for Correa and one that wouldn’t have
voted for Correa. I think Moreno managed to get elected with one half, but
rule with the other.

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 I would say that the Left within the government is now almost nonexistent.
Those sectors that we were describing that joined Moreno’s government,
little by little soon realized that Moreno had a fundamentally neoliberal
agenda. We’re seeing now all these laws coming into force that are basically
bringing a new kind of structural adjustment with moves away from the
model of development that Correa and his government implemented.

All the key ministries are now in the hands of not just the Right, but
hardliners including the key advisers of Moreno’s opponent in the 2017
election. The new minister of finance was the financial adviser to Moreno’s
opponent.

So the Left that’s in government in Ecuador is in marginal places. We just

had another resignation last week. It’s got its hands tied. There were some
doubts during the first few months, including internationally as to whether
Moreno could still be considered left. But I think consensus everywhere now,
including outside of Ecuador, is that Moreno has not got a left-wing
government in place and that in every possible way, economically,
geopolitically, it terms of his foreign policy, it’s a conservative turn.

So where is the Left at? In opposition. There are few small parties that are
accompanying Moreno, but all the others are now in opposition.

What is amazing is Alianza PAIS itself. It was founded by Correa then

expropriated by Moreno and all of the key founding people were thrown out.
Now, it’s an empty shell. PAIS was for years the biggest party in Ecuador,
and yet it basically has crumbled because the party is divided both in its
parliamentary expression, between those who remain loyal to Correa and
those who sold out to Moreno, but also in its grassroots expression. In the
grassroots, where there are less interests, less salaries involved, less power
and less money to be thrown around, obviously a huge majority of PAIS
supporters have remained loyal to Correa.

This means that they are now partyless because Moreno’s government and all
the institutions that he controls have prevented Correa from creating a new
party.

Moreno got control over the PAIS but the party is now insignificant. It’s lost
its majority in Congress, not through votes, but through all these lawmakers
leaving the party. And so Moreno has lost his majority and by losing his
majority has also had to cuddle up to the Right because the only way he’s
been able to govern is with this hotchpotch alliance that’s pressuring him to

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 do neoliberal structural adjustment.

So the Left is in opposition, obviously divided in a myriad of different

expressions, but it is increasingly united against the neoliberal turn.

There are diehard Correistas, there are Correistas that are critical. Some
people that were very favorable to his socio-economic policies and his foreign
policy, the kind of birth a sovereign nation state, were critical of other things,
for example the issue of abortion. There’s all sorts of different types of
Correismo, and there is also the Left that’s not Correista. It’s more marginal,
it’s smaller, but it exists and we are now seeing people who are on the left-
wing opposition to Correa, including people who were aggressively anti-
Correa who are now aggressively anti-Moreno. So we are seeing the Left
reconfiguring itself.

You mention an anti-Correa left that is shifting against Moreno. PV

Who are you referring to?

GL The anti-Correa left was always small and elite. The only non-elite
aspect was the fast-declining indigenous movement CONAIE
which, since unfortunately co-governing with Lucio Gutierrez
between 2003-5, has been going downhill. There is still some indigenous
remnants there, but it’s never really been important electorally.

Then there is another kind of hard-left that calls itself Maoist, although I
don’t think it’s got any Maoist element to it. They are linked with trade
unions and the clientelistic relationship with the state. They were called the
Democratic Popular Movement and are now Popular Unity. They were
always very opposed to Correa because he obviously cleaned up the state’s
relationship unions.

They are not against Moreno because he has given them a lot of space in the
states so as to not have problems.

Other sectors of the Left, particularly the liberal left, certain elites, are
starting to become more critical. You’re seeing left-wing academics,
economists for example who thought that Correa wasn’t radical enough,
always carrying a left-wing critique of Correa, being even more critical of
Moreno.

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 Do you see Lenin’s “betrayal” as something that developed, a PV
product of a process of divergence, or do you think there was
something more nefarious involved?

GL Nobody was expecting Moreno to be identical to Correa, nor

should we have expected him to obey Correa or be Correa’s
puppet. Anybody who was going to be legitimately elected should
have their own program of government and we all expected that. In many
ways, we wanted that.

But it’s one thing to say “I’m going to be my own man, I’m not going to be a
puppet,” it’s different to implement policies that are exactly contrary to what
he offered people in his political campaign. Moreno is implementing the
program and promises of his opponent in that political campaign. He actually
said on camera half-jokingly that he “was sort of hating” the people who
voted for him.

Real democratic leaders should be aware that they are a representative of the
nation, the whole of the electorate and not just the voters who voted for
them, but that’s very different from actually saying “I’m starting to prefer the
people who voted against me.”

That is contrary to the idea behind representative democracy which is that

you have a program, you make promises and then if you’re elected, you enact
this program. And if you don’t what you are actually saying is that you’re
lying, you lied throughout the campaign, your program was a lie, your
promises were a lie.

You can’t say, as Moreno has, “I’m in favor of the Citizen’s Revolution, what
we’ve done is really important terms of our sovereignty, in terms of our social
justice and redistribution” and then warm to the United States, want to expel
Julian Assange from the embassy, join the Pacific Alliance, put an end to the
peace process between the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the
Colombian government in Ecuador, and implement an aggressive neoliberal
structural adjustment program.

This is not about just personal rivalry between two leaders. This is something
integral, which has geopolitical consequences. It’s something which has been
encouraged and celebrated by Ecuador’s elites, Latin America’s elites, and
US elites. I think the United States is happy with it, you see that from the US

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 ambassador in every photograph, in every ministerial event that’s organized
in Ecuador. He appears with a booming smile. It’s very clear, I think, what’s
happening geopolitically.

The extent to which it was premeditated or whether it unfolded is something

we have to analyze beyond political rhetoric. Historians will have to examine
with a lot of rigor whether there was a plan from the start, including
international involvement, or whether the United States jumped on the
bandwagon and gave further incentives.

But I’m absolutely certain that this is not an innocent occurrence — it’s part
of a broader project that seeks not just to put an end to Latin American’s left
governments, but actually to throw dirt on their legacy. In that sense, the
Moreno government inserts itself into TINA — “there is no alternative” —
into the kind of neoliberal fatalism that you cannot have anti-austerity
success, or successful left-wing governments in Latin America. This is what is
really at stake.

The dirt that’s being thrown at Correa is about trying to change the judgment
of history, but I don’t think they are going to succeed. I think there are too
many of us that are going to be fighting back. The people have more memory.

Regionally things have also changed a lot in the last few years. PV
Not just in terms of election results, but also lingering questions
around addressing the contradictions that arose from the Left
coming into power. Aside from your role as foreign minister, you led
various regional political initiatives for PAIS. What lessons should the Left
on the continent draw from these experiences in government?

GL We should learn from our mistakes, clearly.

Correa’s project was to create a modern nation state, in a very pre-

modern context. Ecuador is in many regards one of the most premodern
states in South America.

Correa created a much more stable, modern nation state with redistribution.
Ecuador has a lot to teach Latin America and the Left, it was successful, it was
economically viable — which is always the critique that’s thrown at the Left.

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 The economic model was interesting in terms of its redistribution, the
reduction of inequality in the most unequal part of the world. It was
successful also in terms of its international projects: sovereignty, integration,
inserting yourself strategically in a multipolar world. So these are the
successes, but there are things that it was less successful at.

I think it’s difficult to have a left project today if you don’t have a more radical
stance on feminism, particularly in the Latin American context. This is also
the case because the global north tries to make an ethical pedestal out of the
fact that the global south is still premodern in a number of aspects.

Now of course we know that these issues have tended to advance with
modernity, urbanization, and literacy, these aren’t separate. And in Ecuador,
there were some aspects where we had success, for example women’s
representation in politics. We had a parliament that had way more women as
legislative representatives than most European democracies. But I think the
revolution should be not just social, not just economic, it should also be
feminist and it’s something that we need to do.

Environmental simplification is also tool of imperialism. A lot of the

environmental problems that Latin American countries such as Ecuador face
are because of the lack of modernity in the first place. So if you don’t have
organized cities in the Amazon with good sewer system and if all the waste
goes into rivers, which is a consequence of weak states, a consequence of
neoliberalism, a consequence of premodernity, then you’re going to damage
the environment more than if you have what are often condemned as
developmentalist policies.

There is a myth that we have been a victim of, but it’s also true that we could
have done more to make sure that our development was environmentally
friendly. We could have done more also to mobilize politically around the
issue of the environment and to create the right kind of political alliances in
order to create hegemonic consensus around the rights of nature, which we
actually enshrined in our constitution.

So on gender, reproductive rights, LGBT rights and the environment, which

is the big issue in twenty-first century, we should have done more.

Generally in Correa’s government there was a lot of concern for the global
commons, public goods, all these things that had to be dealt with at an
international level and not just superficially by NGO-style “nature is
beautiful” discourse without really thinking in structural and systemic terms.

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 There are two types of redistribution. The first is the kind of national
redistribution where you redistribute to the poorest people, and that’s the
big problem in Latin America because of our inequalities. But there is the
other the type of redistribution, between rich and poor countries and that
you cannot do by decree or public policy. You have to do it through changing
the unproductive matrix and your role in the international division of labor.
That’s the only way because there’s no global government that’s going to
redistribute.

That is where Correa was strong, and where Ecuador was strong. Ten years is
not enough to change your productive matrix, but the vision was always in
education, in higher education, in science and technology, in energy, in
developing new sectors. Not just to use the money we had from oil or from
other sectors to redistribute, but to invest a significant amount in
transforming the economy for global redistribution.

That’s something I think Ecuador can bring to the Latin American left
because it talks a lot about domestic redistribution but very little about
international redistribution.

We need to unite the Left and iron out differences. It’s always easier to iron
out the differences from opposition than it is to do it from government,
because when you are ruling, you do things that divide people. But when
you’re in opposition, it’s much easier to find what Laclau used to call the
empty signifiers that make for a broad, anti-oligarchic platform. And I think
the next time we’re are in government, we should try and strive for less
divisions than we had this time, and to try maintain that platform.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Guillaume Long was president of the International Relations Commission of Ecuador’s governing
Alianza PAIS party. He was Ecuador’s minister for foreign relations and holds a PhD from the University
of London’s Institute for the Study of the Americas.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Pablo Vivanco is the former director of TeleSUR English.

FILED UNDER

ECUADOR

PARTY POLITICS / POLICY

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 ALIANZA PAIS / RAFAEL CORREA / LENÍN MORENO

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