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Chapter 6. How to Lose by Winning: From the 2002 Elections to the 2006 Elections
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Chapter 6 How to Lose by Winning From the 2002 Elections to the 2006 Elections CONAIE doesn’t own the movement, but is just one of its members. —Miguel Lluco, Pachakutik national coordinator, in response to discussions among CONAIE leaders that Pachakutik should adhere to the CONAIE line, 2003 The indigenous sector have been united in supporting me as a candidate. I accepted because they asked me to. —Luis Macas, Pachakutik’s presidential candidate, in response to a reporter’s asking why he is running for president after the bad experiences Pachakutik had with the previous presidential election, 2006 since pachakutik’s stunning 2002 presidential election victory in alliance with Lucio Gutiérrez’s Partido Sociedad Patriótica (PSP), the electoral movement and its indigenous parent organization, CONAIE, have fallen on hard times. Even before Gutiérrez took office, in January 2003, there were strains between leaders of Pachakutik and the new president that only deepened in the early months of his presidency, culminating in a very contentious dissolution of the alliance in August 2003. The collapse of that alliance arguably resulted in the most profound crisis faced by the CONAIEled indigenous movement since the birth of Pachakutik. chapter 6 In the aftermath of that breakdown serious internal conflicts and fractionalization have torn apart the once cohesive and powerful indigenous movement, leading to the embarrassing outcome of the 2006 elections. Our analysis and conclusions of these developments will center on the problematic relationship between social movements’ strategies of civil mobilization and direct political involvement. We will revisit and discuss our central thesis, introduced in the first chapter, that the creation and continuance of a political movement or party such as Pachakutik has damaged the organizational strength of the social movement (CONAIE), primarily by weakening its ties to the base of the movement, the indigenous people in rural areas. Furthermore , we assert that this damage, despite apparent electoral successes, was almost guaranteed by intimate contact with well-established institutional forces in the Ecuadorian political system. Basically, political processes and actions of political actors in Ecuador are oriented to insure not so much that one will succeed but rather that others will fail. Pachakutik leaders and militants have been drawn into this vicious and unpredictable game,often acting in the same way as those traditional politicians they so publicly disdain. The apparent solidarity and energetic cooperation among indigenous militants in November and December 2002 can easily be understood in the context of the victory of Gutiérrez: real power was at hand.But the problems between Pachakutik leaders and the incoming president were evident even before Gutiérrez took office (El Comercio, November 16,2002).For example, right after Gutiérrez won the runoff and was putting together a cabinet that did not entirely consist of leftists, the president of CONAIE, Iza, warned the president-elect that if he did not take into account the demands and goals of indigenous peoples, he would not be able to govern. As the inauguration of Gutiérrez neared it became clear that there were three areas in which disagreements were emerging between Gutiérrez and the leaders of CONAIE/ Pachakutik: (1) the apparent willingness of Gutiérrez to continue to adhere to the demands and policies of the IMF and other international creditors,(2) the public assertions of Pachakutik leaders that there would be a cogobierno (a situation in which the leadership of Pachakutik would be involved in reaching a consensus with Gutiérrez about almost all matters of governance), and (3) the distribution of government jobs from minister on down. In regard to the first factor mentioned above, it is correct that even before he was inaugurated, Gutiérrez moved away from the critical, anti-neoliberal positions he maintained during the campaign. A telling signal, and one that [44.200.169.91] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:08 GMT) how to lose by winning Pachakutik and other leftist supporters did not miss, was selecting Mauricio Pozo as minister of economy. Pozo was well known as an orthodox, conservative economist with ties to the banking industry. Pozo quickly engineered a deal, some would say a cave-in, to the IMF in February 2003. The assumption that an electoral alliance signifies a true partnership of shared power and responsibilities would be questionable at any time in Ecuador and this assumption was certainly questionable in terms of the PSP-Pachakutik alliance. Miguel Lluco, Pachakutik’s national coordinator, and other leaders and activists in this movement were...