Re: Re: [Marxism] Interesting view on Ecuador events

["Carlos Eduardo Rebello" <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 11:21:22 -0700
> From: "Paul H. Dillon" <illonph@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Joaquin,
>
> You ask a very interesting question:  why did the leadership emerge in
> Venezuela and not in Bolivia, Ecuador, and you also mention tangentially
> Argentina . . .
>
> To my mind the race/culture factor has a very large part to play.    Being
an "indio" or "indigena" is not a
> socio-economic category in Venezuela as it is in Ecuador and Bolivia. This
factor facilitates the existence of a coherent mass
> movement bridging the city and country in Venezuela but makes it virtually
> unthinkable in the two Andean countries where large numbers of people (in
> Bolivia, the majority) speak native Andean languages and have traditions
> that commemorate and keep alive the memory that they were conquered by
> Europeans 500 years ago.

You could say the same, Paul, of pre-1910 Mexico, where the existence of a
clear ethnic "divide" didn't prevent the emergence of the mass movement that
triggered the Mexican Revolution.

Actually, what is called Latin American "populism" is an ongoing phenomenon
envolving primarily the emergence of a Bonapartist leadership that ensures
the making of a process of (bourgeois) nation-building envolving the
building of some ideological bridge between the "lower" and "higher" folk,
the economic demands of national capital accumulation and concessions to
imperialism - a very complex process in which many a Bonapartist leader has
found himself stranded at least at some point of his career - viz. the
jagged patterns of say, Vargas' and Chaves' careers. What Gutierrez has
tried to do seems to me as trying to grant the "lower" folk some
concessions, as well as appeasing the demands of the "higher" folk, keeping
pace with the demands of international finance capital as well as of US
imperalism - a set of complex give-and-take moves in which he seems to have
failed, given, by the way, the narrowness of the Equatorian economic base on
which he had to operate. But then the asylum willingly granted him by Lula
tells a lot about his appertainance to the Left-populist field.

Regards_Carlos Rebello


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