Ecuadorian Elections, 2002, by Ben Thomas

From MemoryArchive

Who: Ben Thomas
What: National Elections in Ecuador
When: September 2002
Where: Quito, Ecuador

I first learned of the upcoming Ecuadorian elections when I ordered a drink in a Quito bar. Politics and drinking have many similarities but the presence of the former rarely affects the latter. That is why I was very surprised that day when the waitress told me that I could not have a beer, there was an election.

I understood the literal meaning of what she said but I could not understand the logic. In my mind the two events of me consuming beer and the Ecuadorian electoral process were entirely unrelated. What did their democracy have to do with my ability to drink? The answer, I would soon learn, is quite a lot. The entire country, including me, was prohibited from buying alcohol until the next president of Ecuador was elected. In the unstable inimitable world of Latin American politics I was about to witness an election that would be deeply revealing of the beauty, tragedy and idiosyncrasies of this small diverse nation and the perception, values and processes that define it.

The signs, t-shirts, and TV commercials should have tipped me off a lot sooner then they did. The trouble was I had a hard time telling the difference between advertisements selling everyday goods and those selling political candidates. Both types of commercials were filled with jingles, scantily clad women and cartoon marquees promising a great future.

The clippie calypso music of Rodrigo Borja, candidate Lista 6, was particularly memorable. Relying on the higher ranges of the trumpet, Borja’s bouncy theme could scarcely be hummed without gentle ass-shaking and a slight side to side dance, the type of gentle rhythmic movement you think other people wouldn’t notice but they always do. Another commercial took the viewer through a small but reasonable sized computer animated home and panned out to show whole subdivisions of the same house in miniature Levittowns that candidate promised would spring up in all the poor areas once they were elected. The only thing more striking than modesty of the homes and their simple promise of a stable future, was the general understanding among the people that the commercial was a complete and utter lie.

The poorest citizens also wore false promises on their chests. A fresh batch of white t-shirts with some shimmering candidate looking boldly to the future was distributed to the poor in time for the elections. Screen printed smiles or bold unwavering faces showed the myriad of candidates as strong, optimistic and yet approachable figures. The graphics were generally just faces but an occasional candidate stood behind a podium or in front of a crowd in a grandiloquent gesture meant to inspire confidence. No matter how the candidate was standing, their eyes were almost universally looking upward.

I am not sure where my eyes were looking but they were definitely looking past the propaganda, jingles and hype. Having only been in Ecuador for a few days I wasn’t quite sure what was electoral exception and what was Ecuadorian reality. Back in the bar I starred blankly at the waitress after my request was rebuffed and tried again for my beer. I repeated my request slowly and clearly, and I accompanied it with a slight hand tilting motion imitating a bottle in my hand. She responded in her own slow clear Spanish, “no beer, elections” and accompanied it with her own finger wave that she may or may not have learned from my forth grade teacher. I still didn’t understand the logic but I understood the finger wave, and resigned myself to sobriety, settling for a Coke instead. I would learn latter that prohibitions on alcohol had been put in place nation wide because of the incredible social convergence that was scheduled for the next day.

School was canceled on the day of elections. I got to sleep in my hard working host mom Rocio had to rise early to work at the polls. She had been drafted to help in the neighbor polls in a service obligation similar to American jury duty and similarly despised. Around midday, the rest of my host family and went to greet her, deliver a sandwich and see how she was faring in her civic obligation.

The streets around the polling both, a local university, were blocked off and filled with street vendors selling ice cream and typical Ecuadorian snacks, drinks and toys. Elections weren’t just entrepreneurial opportunities for the candidates, the common man could profit as well. Inside the courtyard of the university was filled with an incredible range of people. A multi-story building and large blacktop area had been given over as a polling place bristling with the people from the entire Ecuadorian socio-economic spread all wearing similar resigned expressions. No one wanted to be there but they were all legally obligated to show up. Voting is not a choice in the Ecuadorian political model it is a legal requirement. When I asked Ecuadorians if they thought it was odd that they were required to vote I usually received the same two answers; either they had not considered it and so just thought mandatory voting was normal or they conceded that it was the only way people would show up to vote. The mix of classes, race and people was also made more distinct by the gender separations in the lines. Men and women waited in separate lines to vote to counter the influence of machismo and marianismo. Maybe the election organizers feared the potential for Lysistrata inspired tactics of political control. The lines were gendered restricted but certainly not class or race separated. Indigenous women with their traditional skirts and different cultural conceptions of cleanliness stood in the same lines as high heeled urban sophisticates in gold necklaces and modern fashions. Business suited men stood behind tradesmen, farmers and Indians everyone impatient annoyed and but prepared to accept their civic duties.

Other than the gender separated lines, the voting was pretty familiar. Three or so poll workers sat at each table, handing out ballots and checking name s off list. After someone turned in their ballets there were two key differences from what I was used to in the US; people were given little cards they had to carry around and had to stick a finger in indelible purple ink. The cards had to be carried around with the state identification card. Not having a proof of voting card meant fines and hassles in future encounters with Ecuadorian bureaucracy. The ink was a basic step to prevent one person from voting multiple times and was a particular annoyance for the urbane women with well done manicures. Some of the more prepared among them carried cloths soaked in rubbing alcohol to immediately clean their fingers rather than bear the mark of democracy for a few days. Vanity, rather then intention to commit electoral fraud motivated these women but that did not stop young semi-automatic wielding soldiers who were overseeing the process from chastising the vain women.

That night we watched the polls come in and my family was heart-stricken at the candidates that were to require a run-off. A former army colonel who had allied himself with powerful indigenous parties, Lucio Gutierrez was to square off against a rich swarming costal businessmen, Alvaro Noboa. Both candidates represented identities and ideas that were anathema to the middle-class urban QuiteÑos that I spent most my time with.

Gutierrez ended up winning the second round. The Indian values and rhetoric was interpreted as embarrassing and shameful by most my friends. A lot of people were especially insulted when Lucio appointed Nina Pacari, an Indian as foreign minister and made a lot of jokes about her as a women and Indian.

I learned a lot about the nature of Ecuadorian society that day. From the government that keeps people from ordering alcohol to respect their electoral process, to the glances between the rich women sharing lines with people who owned nothing, it was a chance to see the forced convergence of a deeply divided society.