Will Ecuador go down along with Correa?

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa is heading downhill. According to the latest Cedatos-Gallup survey, only 41 percent of Ecuadoreans would support the extravagant new constitution that his supporters are drafting in the town of Montecristi. Approval requires 50 percent.

Correa has said that, if he fails, he will quit politics. He has not said whether he will go back to teaching at the university (where he left no memorable impression) or if he will devote himself to playing the guitar and singing, activities he performs with greater talent than Abdalá Bucaram, another musician who drifted through Carondelet Palace. Ecuadoreans overthrew Bucaram on the grounds of madness, shortly after he perpetrated a rock 'n' roll CD in cahoots with a Uruguayan group that called itself The Irascible Ones. The CD was irrefutable proof of the charges brought against him.

It seems that the constitution being drafted by the Ecuadorean patricians is a socialist contrivance burdened by the noble intention of imparting social justice and granting spiritual and bodily felicity to everyone. One of the contributions from the indigenous groups to the constitutional text is that the economy should be guided by the principle of sumak kawsay, an ancient philosophy of development that says that ''good living'' means a harmonious coexistence with nature, which of necessity excludes progress and consumerism, two predatory attitudes that destroy the world's habitat.

How do the illustrious Ecuadorean legislators uphold that sweet pre-Columbian vision today? Very easy: by citing the thoughts of Europe's radical philosophers Iván Illich and Serge Latouche.

What's really revolutionary is not to grow but to ungrow. To undevelop. To flee from Western dementia.

Nonsense, of course. That was a theory formulated many decades ago by Gandhi when he defended a return to the spinning wheel and a rejection of the search for progress as the objectives for the nation he intended to found.

Poor Ecuadoreans. Ecuador is a beautiful nation, potentially very wealthy, controlled by a ruling class that is tenaciously engaged in worsening the problems of society. If the new ''social and supportive'' constitution is approved, it will most likely be promulgated in the National Congress, under a huge mural by Oswaldo Guayasamín, a successful expressionist painter with communist links who tried to exterminate Yankee imperialism by hoarding all the dollars that came his way. The mural happens to be titled ''The History of Ecuador's Constitution,'' and it assails -- among other horrors -- the wicked CIA, which is of course guilty of all the ills that afflict the country.

When Correa was elected president, two of the arguments made in his favor were his fine university education and his status as a practicing Catholic. Correa had done post-graduate work at the University of Louvain (Belgium), an ancient and prestigious Catholic university, and later obtained a doctorate at a U.S. institution in Illinois. He knew all about economy.

What nobody bothered to find out was what he thought about human nature, liberty, tolerance, pluralism, democracy, history, justice or his neighbor's dignity, without realizing that knowledge -- when distortedly integrated into a harebrained structure of values and dispensed with a huge dosage of arrogance and insensitivity -- can deteriorate into the most harmful behavior.

How is this new Latin American comic opera going to end? Obviously, in another frustration with no apparent solution.

 If Correa succeeds and the constitution is approved, its text will be the baptismal certificate of a contradiction that will substantially impoverish the Ecuadorean people for as long as they try to put it into practice.

 If he fails and the people reject the constitution, he will leave the presidency in a couple of years (earlier, maybe), unsung and unmourned, to the bewilderment of his compatriots.

That's what happens to people when they lose their compasses. That's what has happened to Ecuador for so many years now.

June 10, 2008

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