Ecuador: THE PUBLIC CONSULTATION, A DENIAL OF NOVEMBER 15, 1922

Hereby we share an unofficial translation of a statement by the Defense Front of the People’s Struggles in Ecuador.

November 15, 1922 is not a date of joy for opportunists electioneers; it is an open wound in the memory of the working class and people of Ecuador. That day, in Guayaquil, the proletariat in ports, trains, printing presses, workshops and factories rose up against hunger, the exploitation and the dictatorship of the wealthy bourgeoisie and big landlords. The response from the old state was swift: bullets, massacre, bodies of workers thrown into the Guayas River as a sign of the rejection that the people of the dominant class feel for the masses.

The proletarian uprising of 1922 was one of the most significant to the working class. Crosses On The Water, by Joaquín Gallegos Lara captures, in a literary but profoundly realistic way, that massacre that official history has tried to silence. The crosses floating in the river are a symbol of murdered and invisible workers, but also the evidence that class memory does not fade into oblivion: it comes back again and again as an ideological guide in the struggle against the executioners of the present.

From the Defense Front of the People’s Struggles in Ecuador, we affirm that November 15, 1922 is, above all, a political lesson about the path to follow: the path of struggle, never the bureaucratic one, sheltered by the system of government and the State system. It teaches that the working class, when it it rises up in an organized manner, is capable of shaking and give a joint blow to the dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie and big landlords. It also teaches that the big bourgeoisie and its governments, when they see their power threatened, unleash all the violence, even the most malicious, to neutralize the popular rebellion; and, at the same time, they create an entire “democratic” narrative, sustained by new opportunists, to delegitimize the people’s struggle. Didn’t we just experience that reality during the latest indigenous-popular uprising?

On November 15th we commemorate this historic date for the working class strengthening FDLP-EC and assuming a critical and combative position against the leaders of revisionism and opportunism who diverted the indigenous-popular uprising for participation in the elections, disfiguring completely the correct political line that should lead the masses to strength all forms of action against the old State, its institutions, its forms of organization and its mechanisms of alienation, factors that block the revolutionary transformation of the old society.

In this context, the popular consultation proposed by the Fascist Noboa took place. The country has twenty constitutions and countless amendments. We start with the 1830 Constitution, which didn’t even address essential issues like the emancipation of slaves. What do we mean by this? That the Constitution is the fundamental legal and political form of the State and that it belongs to a particular class: the big bourgeoisie. It is a text which condenses and formalizes the correlation of forces between the classes at a specific historical moment, establishing in rules the dominion of those who hold economic and political power, and guaranteeing, above all, the reproduction of the existing production relations. Therefore, it does not serve the interests of the oppressed and exploited.

We can understand that the masses continue to attend electoral processes and that they, to some extent, express the mood of the great majorities “with absenteeism, at 20%, being the most noteworthy aspect”; However, elections, consultations, etc., are far from resolving the fundamental problems of the people. Popular consultation, under the current conditions, becomes a political weapon used to frame the people as “co-responsible” for everything that happens in the country, without affecting in the slightest the real power of the ruling classes.

The FDLP-EC called not to vote and not to participate in the popular consultation because ideologically and politically, it’s the right thing to do. Regardless of the result, the big bourgeoisie and the big landlords will continue doing what they deem appropriate, whether or not it is written in the Constitution. It must be addressed: behind the government, behind the so-called bourgeois-big landlord democracy and elections, a class dictatorship is sustained that will do even the unimaginable to maintain the power in their hands.

With the Constitution they have “defended” at the ballot box, haven’t they starved, repressed, persecuted, territorially mutilated, and handed over our lands to the transnational corporations of mining, oil and all kind of looting? Perhaps with the 2008 Constitution, supposedly “progressive”, they did not murder comrades in the uprisings of 2019, 2022, and in the recent indigenous-popular uprising? And let’s not be naive: if the “yes” of the repressive, subservient, and fascist regime of Noboa won, was anything going to be different? Absolutely not!

One day after the results of the consultation and the supposed “victory” from the “No” we woke up with the same social conditions we had when we arrived to the ballot boxes. The streets and prisons still smell of blood; death and insecurity is a daily occurrence. High unemployment rates persist. Only 3 out of 10 Ecuadorians have jobs. Corruption is rampant; some regions of the country are being bombed by their own “Air Force”; Yankees and Zionists continue to control the repressive apparatus of the old State; Noboa continues to do whatever he pleases, and revisionism and opportunism dance and toast because they “won” in the consultation.

In remembering the proletarian uprising of November 15, 1922, from the Defense Front of the People’s Struggles affirms that the organization and struggle is the only path to the true emancipation, to sweep away the old productive and political system that governs the country. Through the decision and sacrifice of hundreds of workers in November 1922 this was proven, only through struggle are rights and freedoms won. That struggle has and must have as its horizon serving the people’s war and the revolutionary transformation of the old society: destroying semi-feudalism, to crush imperialism and destroy bureaucratic capitalism.

NO TO THE CONSTITUTIONALIST ILLUSION!

NO TO ELECTORALISM!

PREPARE AND DEVELOP THE SEIZURE OF POWER!

ORGANIZE- COMBAT- RESIST!