by O. Hugo Benavides
The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
—James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Introduction
The Indigenous Kichwa language of the northern Andes has a special term, pachakutik, that is not easily translatable into English. It is a compound word (as many are in Kichwa) made up of two independent ones, pacha (meaning earth) and kutik (meaning shift). Literally the term means “a shift of the earth.” Pachakutik is used to mean several things, including earthquake and revolution. (Both imply a fundamental shift in the structure of the world.) It is also the word the Indigenous movement (the CONAIE) in Ecuador use to name their political arm, Pachakutik Nuevo Pais (Seismic/Revolution New Country).
This year’s presidential and legislative elections in Ecuador made Pachakutik the second most important political force in the country. This was registered by the number of representatives from the party elected to the National Assembly and by the fact that the electoral success of its presidential candidate, Yaku Pérez Guartambel (Yaku means water in Kichwa), threw him into the national spotlight. The fact that Yaku Pérez, an Indigenous candidate, received almost 20% of the vote seems to foreshadow a seismic shift, a pachakutic, long in the making but coming into view in the widespread protests of October 2020 (see the Identifications issue of OC, Benavides, September 2020). In this essay I call for a new interpretation of the elections in Ecuador and new frames of historical analysis that do justice to the contestations in play both in Ecuador and throughout contemporary global society.
Ecuador’s 2021 presidential election illustrates the diversity of forms contestation is now taking as multiple crises play out around the world. Such diversity shows that contestation is far from monolithic and that it cannot be analyzed as one unified, coordinated action. One can be a contestant in an election, as all presidential candidates are (and were in Ecuador). One can simultaneously contest an election, as presidential candidates do (and candidates in Ecuador did as well). Before describing Ecuador’s particular recent electoral scenario, however, let me say that I will be suggesting that events and new power alignments in Ecuador point to a larger global shift, possibly hegemonic in scope. I believe we are witnessing configurations with global significance such that political contestation can best be interpreted not as regular, periodic, temporary ruptures within a normalized order of relative harmonious continuity but rather as a permanent conflictual state of social and political crisis within an era and global context of unsustainable maximized economic extraction.
Ecuador’s recent presidential elections reveal how a state of contestation is not the exception but rather the norm of the social characterizing everyday life throughout the country at large (fig.1). Is this not now perhaps the norm in all contemporary nation states? Perhaps the larger, and more interesting questions to ask are: 1) why is this general contestation not easily registered? and, 2) why are its effects being continually erased from the cognitive and political frameworks we use to map reality? The 2021 Ecuadorian presidential election provides some insights and possible answers to these questions.
Ecuador’s Presidential Elections
The results of Ecuador’s presidential elections were surprising and disturbing for the majority of Ecuadorians. Out of an electoral contest which presented 16 presidential candidates (15 of whom were male) only four (all men) came out with electorally significant tallies. Only three of them had any real chance of making it to the second round or the final run-off that took place on Sunday, April 11. Andrés Arauz (fig. 2) came in first with an impressive 32% of the vote but was still unable to claim an outright victory in the first round (over 50% of the vote was needed for that), or in the second round. Meanwhile, Guillermo Lasso (fig. 3) and Yaku Pérez (fig. 4) came in virtually tied with each other with 19% each, and finally Xavier Hervas (fig. 5) came in a distant but still solid fourth with 15% of the vote.
Figure 2 (Photo: José Jácome, EFE)
Figure 3 (Photo: Angel Dejesus, Associated Press)
Twelve candidates each came in with less than 2% of the votes? With numbers like these, what was the rationale for their contending in the election in the first place? Three of the four successful candidates represented socialist and left leaning ideologies, with only Guillermo Lasso being representative of the country’s right-wing tendencies. Lasso went on to win the elections on April 11th, but he secured just barely over a third of the vote (4, 665,964 votes). Arauz won 4,235,996 votes while abstentions, invalid, and blank votes, totaled 3,951,445 and accounted almost evenly for the rest of the count.
Figure 4 (Photo from Pérez campaign)
Figure 5
The election represented a seismic shift in Ecuador’s left. The perceived political subject oppressed by capitalist rule was no longer embodied in the figure of the proletarian worker or the peasant farmer but in the figure of the Indigenous person. And that is exactly who the third leftist candidate was: Yaku Pérez. He was the official candidate of the CONAIE, particularly of its political party, Pachakutic Nuevo País. Yaku came to represent not only the Indigenous subject but also those non-traditional subjects differentiated along gender, sexual, and racial lines (fig. 6). It is important to note that these otherized identities had not been allowed to play a significant role in Ecuadorian national politics ever since their inception in 1830. Yaku was the only candidate who supported abortion rights (and only under rape conditions) or who supported environmental rights and the protection of natural resources from foreign extraction (in direct opposition to Lasso’s explicit political platform).
Figure 6 (Photo: Santiago Arcos, Reuters)
Yaku Pérez and Ecuador’s Foundational Racism
As if to mark the advent of permanent contestation as a continuous way of life, the mere presence of Yaku Pérez as an Indigenous candidate for the presidency was a first for the country. Ecuador’s racism is not unique or special, but it plays a foundational role in the political structure of the country, as it does throughout the Americas. In Ecuador the nation state form itself is inseparable from an original foundational genocide and ethnocide, that of the land’s ancestral Indigenous populations but also of the plundering of enslaved African communities and more recently of the exploitation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Asian and Arab-descent communities. (Shakira, the Colombian global megastar, very much embodies the conundrum of love-hate that most Andean people feel toward their Arab brethren (fig 7).)
Figure 7 (Photo: Greg Allen, Invision/Associated Press)
Stuart Hall has shown that racism is less about hating the other than denying one’s closeness to that other—that is, the hatred of that part of oneself that is so intimately linked to what one would like, for reasons of internalized oppression and domination, to consider the other. This is the reason why racism is such a powerful modern element of cultural production. It functions to create cultural artifices which distance us from the unwanted other but which, through associations of actual historical experience and the realities of social intersubjectivity, only reconfirm our foundational connection to that otherness which is already always part of ourselves. James Baldwin highlighted this when he argued, over half a century ago, that the problem in the United States was not integration. That, according to him, had occurred centuries earlier. Rather, he argued, the problem was how did one now live with that integration that has been denied for so long, and that his white brethren were still so intent on denying so ferociously. His own last name, Baldwin pointed out, was not an African one, but came from the white ancestors who had owned his family.
This kind of identity and disavowal is also clearly expressed in Carla Moore’s analysis of Jamaican Dancehall with its explicit homophobic lyrics (fig. 8). The truth is that without gay, queer, and transgender people there would be no Dancehall. It needs gay people more than it is willing to admit. Dancehall’s homophobia is less about hatred of gays than it is the hatred of knowing that its very musical livelihood is based on the existence of this ostracized community. Dancehall, like all cultural productions, is born from the conflicts and denials of contestation, and, above all, an unwillingness to admit the deepest contestations’ most fundamental sources. A foundational racism is present throughout the Americas. It is present in American (United States) football (see Benavides, OC, Issue 1, 2013). In it we can see the anxiety to disavow the presence of a queer other as an attempt to displace the reality that the large majority of the football players are racially otherized themselves. The racial make-up of the majority of the players helps explain how both the NFL and NBA have become central in the Black Lives Matter movement in recent years (fig. 9).
Figure 8 (Source)
Figure 9 (Photo: Getty Images)
We are seeing something analogous in Yaku Pérez’ candidacy. At first it was quite a shock to the system to see two leftist candidates explicitly and successfully challenging the right-wing option. But, on top of that, it was profoundly destabilizing for one of them to be Indigenous and attempting to bring together an ostracized rainbow coalition of those who, until this moment, have had no voice in mainstream political circles (including in the other three candidates’ political agendas). The Indigenous figure as the racial other, he/she who has worked in the national imagination of Ecuador as the denied, disavowed, subjugated, and contested subject of the nation, was suddenly successfully running for president.
Until now this denied ostracized other has provided an unacknowledged embodied sign cordoning off what the Ecuadorian nation is not, thereby hiding from the nation its own historical hermeneutics. Ecuadorans have thereby deprived themselves of knowing who they are. Awakening to this dynamic has created a new nervous and anxious continuous contestation that, at the same time, is becoming normative. It is, among other things, an internal contestation made from the conflict over not wanting to accept that we are exactly who we are told we are not and who we continue to be told we should never want to be.
This racist and homophobic contestation of the supposed other can also be seen in the manner that the Ecuadorian nation has historically responded to Afro-Ecuadorian subjects. In fact, Afro-Ecuadorian subjects have represented the nation quite successfully, if problematically, in the international realm of soccer (fútbol in Ecuadorian parlance) and in international beauty pageants (fig. 10 and 11). In both arenas, the successful rupture of the anxious façade made it more difficult, albeit not impossible, to deny the contested central place of the other in the nation’s hegemonic makeup.
Figure 10 (Source)
Figure 11 (Source)
At an immediate level, it makes sense that Yaku Pérez’ candidacy formed close alliances with the Afro-Ecuadorian movement as well as with the other ostracized gender and sexualized subjects, including the LGBTQ+ movement. At another level we need to understand that his candidacy provoked a deeply anxious reaction across the nation. His successful candidacy meant having to face a profound and fundamental political reckoning. Not only did it entail recognizing the centrality of the Indigenous subject within the actual framework of the nation, but it entailed experiencing the loss of the comforting denial afforded by Indigeneity’s ubiquitous racist rhetorical projection in outdated history textbooks and folkloric simplifications.
The difficulty in this instance was not limited to racism, that is, the refusal to see in the mirror the other one is seeing. The difficulty was compounded by having to confront the denial, extremely violent at times, entailed in not seeing the process that led to the original refusal to acknowledge the nation’s foundational crimes. Breakthrough recognition of the denial of the process by which contestation was originally constituted and solidified itself into the face of the nation implies a permanent earth shifting in the nature of politics itself. Here we should remind ourselves of another of James Baldwin’s transforming insights: of how one spends so much time playing a role and putting on a mask to survive, that when one grows up, one finds one’s mask has become one’s face. It then takes the rest of one’s life, Baldwin said, to come to terms with what one’s original face has become or actually looks like.
Conclusion: Fear of a Black Planet
The conundrum faced by the Ecuadorian nation in the wake of the recent elections suggests that one cannot hide the repressed fundamental sources of social and political contestation forever. This is not to overlook the simultaneous truth that the Ecuadorian nation-state, as are all nation-states, is exemplary in some regards. Ecuador, for example, was the first state in Latin America to provide women national suffrage and is one of the few countries that recognizes the federal state not only as multi-cultural but also as multi-national in its representational and legislative responsibilities.
However, Ecuador is still unwilling, and perhaps unable, to deal with the foundational guilt provoked by the genocide and enslavement of tens of millions of Indigenous subjects who eerily still look very Ecuadorian. The victims of the constitutive crimes of nationhood are still too close to home for the nation to reckon with. It was therefore not surprising that the contested candidate, Yaku Pérez, found himself contesting the presidential election for weeks after the official results tallied by the Consejo Nacional de Ecuador (CNE) were made public. Despite the fact that he was named as the runner up the night of the election, after hundreds of voting tables were challenged and contested, Yaku found himself and his candidacy officially relegated to third place behind Lasso by O.35%, or just a third of one percent of the vote.
After exhausting all legal challenges, and always refusing to resort to violent protests or uprisings, Yaku accepted the official results, despite there being substantial reason to believe in an orchestrated fraud allowing Lasso to defeat him by such a small margin (19.74% to 19.39%, a difference of 30,000 votes). Lasso’s victory resulted in a gigantic sigh of relief on the part of the entire nation, coming from both the left and the right. Contestations as they had been defined and organized over the last two centuries could nominally remain in place. Yaku’s dangerous recent electoral blip notwithstanding, the nation could go on assuming that those historically repressed Indigenous subjects would never regain control of the nation. Everything signaled that the traditional Mashis, like Rafael Correa, would remain in place. Perpetrated and justified by both white European subjects and their Ecuadorian mestizo counterparts, domination, extraction, and oppression would continue in their usual patterns and according to their familiar routines.
The nation was assured by the elections’ final results that political control and power would not be returned to the descendants of those communities obliterated five centuries ago. The state’s administrative and ideological institutions would continue to threaten, destroy, and kill those Indigenous communities and their way of life. Their waterways and everyday means of livelihood would continually be compromised and infected without letup or relief.
Nevertheless, caught in this fragile, constantly negotiated contestation there persists the fear of an authentic subject, or, as part of the same dynamic, the lack thereof. Just as in the film Fear of a Black Hat, we in the audience are led to understand that we are constantly terrified that we might be much more fragile and human than we believe or want to be. We are led to almost experience a fragility that makes us act in the most violent of ways to avoid both exposure and self-recognition. For now, this is the role that native others are forced to play as contested figures in the social and political landscape of Ecuador and as exploited Indigenous subjects. But, as Baldwin urged almost 70 years ago:
The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. . . . It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
The same can be said for Ecuador today. This last presidential election has not left the nation untouched or unscathed (no matter what some recent political rhetoric may seem to project or wish to express). The tremor from a potential fundamental shift in the nature of conventional political contestation itself has been felt around the world. After last year’s Indigenous October uprising and this year’s presidential election the Ecuadorian nation can no longer claim to be white or white/mestizo again.