Emergence of Ecuadorean Maoism
By 1963 there was clearly a struggle for power in the Ecuadorean Communist Party (PCE), which had been established in the late 1920s, between pro-Moscow elements and those favoring the Chinese. The former were dominant in the port city of Guayaquil, the base of the party’s Secretary-General, Pedro Saad, who had held that post for several decades. The pro-Chinese dominated the party organization in the national capital, Quito.
In 1963, the pro-Chinese sent José Maria Roma, a member of the Central Committee, to China to solicit help, including funds. There are various accounts of what the funds were to be used for. Cecil Johnson suggested that they were to be used to finance a wide distribution of Maoist literature in Ecuador.[366] An American who was in Quito at the time claimed that the money was to be used to organize a guerrilla effort in the country.[367]
Upon his return, Roma’s baggage was searched, and $25,000 was discovered in it.[368] This scandal caused great embarrassment to the Ecuadorean Communist leaders, and Pedro Saad hurried to Quito to lecture the local Communist leadership on the error of their ways.[369]
Not long after this incident, the government of President Carlos Arosemena was overthrown in July 1963 by a military coup. The pro-Chinese elements had been predicting this for some time, and as a result, they had gone into hiding before it occurred. Pedro Saad and the pro-Moscow element in the leadership ignored the warnings of the pro-Chinese party members, and as a consequence were quickly rounded up once the coup had taken place.[370]
These events may have postponed the showdown within the Ecuadorean Communist Party between the pro-Moscow and pro-Chinese elements. However, that showdown did take place on March 31, 1964, when leading figures of the Maoist group, including José Rafael Echeverría Flores, José María Moura Cevallos, and César Muññz Mantilla (all members of the Central Committee), as well as Carlos Rodríguez and Jorge Arellano, were expelled from the Communist Party of Ecuador. Soon afterward, they took the leadership in organizing the Communist Party of Ecuador (Marxist-Leninist) (PCEML).
The new party, like that from which it originated, had its followers both in the organized labor movement and among the university students. For some time in the mid-1960s, the PCEML had control of the Confederación de Trabajadores del Ecuador (CTE), the central labor body that had traditionally been under Communist control, although the pro-Moscow party soon captured control of the CTE.[371]
Maoist control of the university students’ organization was longer-lasting. The Federación de Estudiantes Universitarios del Ecuador (FEUE), which had long been under Communist leadership, became the scene in the late 1960s of struggles for power among the pro-Moscow and pro-Chinese Communists and followers of Fidel Castro. Lynn Ratliff noted, “At its congress in November 1968 the FEUE elected a predominantly pro-Chinese national board and a pro-Chinese president. … Although Maoists hold many key positions, there remains considerable resistance to their leadership among FEUE leaders. The organization of secondary school students, the FESE, remained under control of the pro-Moscow PCE.”[372]
In the late 1960s the PCEML played a not inconsequential role in national politics. One U.S. State Department source reported that its “hard-line” leaders “played a prominent role” in the ouster of the military government that had ruled the country from July 1962 and until mid-1966.[373]
In 1969, the PCEML conducted an extensive campaign against a petroleum agreement with a foreign group dominated by Texaco and Gulf oil companies. This accord had been reached during the 1963—1966 period of military rule but, with some modifications, was ratified by the succeeding regime of President José María Velasco Ibarra. The PCEML accused the Velasco Ibarra regime of “surrendering our sovereignty to Texaco-Gulf.”[374] However, the Maoists’ campaign did not prevent the Velasco Ibarra regime from going ahead with the agreement with the foreign syndicate.
Ecuadorean Maoists and the Chinese Party
Cecil Johnson noted that the Chinese were slow in giving their benediction to the PCEML.[375] This may well have been because the leaders of the party quickly began to feud among themselves. By 1968 the party had split into three separate organizations, led respectively by José Rafael Echeverría, Jorge Arellano, and Pedro Sorroza. That headed by Echeverría continued to use the name Partido Comunista del Ecuador (Marxista-Leninista), and in 1969 was given recognition as the “true” Maoist party in Ecuador, and its pronouncements were being carried in the Peking Review and other Chinese media.
By 1969, the pronouncements of the PCEML had an orthodox Maoist ring to them. For example, one article appearing in its periodical En Marcha proclaimed, “The revolution in Ecuador… will be a new-democratic revolution led by the proletariat and this revolution is in essence a peasant war. Therefore, the party should strike deep roots in the rural areas if it wants to mobilize the peasant masses and to make revolution. The party will be consolidated and will develop in the course of armed struggle. Without armed struggle there will be no place for the proletariat and its party. Without a people’s army the people have nothing.”
In order for the party to be able to carry out its objectives, it had to “apply Marxism-Leninism to the concrete reality of Ecuador and integrate Mao Tse-tung Thought, Marxism-Leninism of our time, with the concrete conditions of the country.” There is no indication that the Maoists established any substantial base among (predominantly Indian) peasantry.
In May 1969, the PCEML sent greetings to the 9th Congress of the Chinese party. Three months later, one of its pronouncements castigated the Soviet party at the time of military incidents on the Sino-Soviet border. It denounced the “Soviet revisionist renegade clique’s armed provocations against China” and added, “The degeneration of the Soviet revisionists is becoming more barefaced every day. The October Revolution led by Lenin has been despicably betrayed. The new tsars have pursued a fascist policy, merely paying lip service to socialism while in fact engaging in clearly imperialist undertakings.”[376]
Typical of the adherence of the Ecuadorean Maoists to the Chinese line was an article in the April 1974 issue of En Marcha, the party’s monthly paper, entitled “The Peoples of the World Struggle.” It said, “The contemporary world—as Lenin pointed out—is divided and convulsed by 4 great contradictions: between the imperialisms and the nations exploited and oppressed by them; among the same imperialisms, in their permanent dispute to divide up zones of influence; between the countries which form the capitalist system and the socialist countries; and finally, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the developed capitalist countries.”
The article went on, “In this set of contradictions there is formed a general anti-imperialist united front—at the present time especially against the two superpowers (USA and USSR)-which crystallizes in the struggle for national and social liberation of the proletariat and the rest of the people in the capitalist and imperialist countries, and in unlimited support which these struggles give to the socialist countries, China and Albania.”[377]
366
Cecil Johnson,
367
Manuel Castillo, in
369
Interview with anonymous political officer, U.S. Embassy, Quito, Ecuador, July 5, 1966.
370
Interview with Ashley Hewitt, Columbia University graduate student just back from Ecuador, in New York, October 24, 1963.
371
Lynn Ratliff, in
373
374
377