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Chapter 2

Velasquista Seduction

By combining an analysis of the social creation of the populist leader José María Velasco Ibarra in La Revolución Gloriosa (the May Revolution) with a study of his discourse, this chapter explains why Velasco Ibarra became the central political figure in Ecuador in the mid-1940s. La Gloriosa, an insurrection in the name of the exiled former President José María Velasco Ibarra in May 1944, is a critical site for analyzing the complexities of the social creation of a populist leader.¹ La Gloriosa was a revolt against an elected civilian Liberal regime. It occurred in the name of de mocracy and an exiled politician who had acquired the aura of the Great Absentee, and indeed did not himself participate in the insurrection. The uprisings that together make up La Gloriosa took place in Guayaquil and other Ecuadorian cities on 28 and 29 May 1944. In these uprisings, common citizens fought together with conscripts and junior officers of the armed forces in the name of Velasco Ibarra against the Liberal regime and its elite police corps, the carabineros. Popular collective violence targeted the institutions and supporters of the Liberal regime, especially the carabineros, while respecting the property of wealthy non-Liberals. As a result of this insurrection, former president Velasco Ibarra came to power for his second administration, which lasted from June 1944 to August 1947.

In July 1943, in preparation for the elections planned for June 1944, most political parties and associations of civil society had joined forces to form the Alianza Democrática Ecuatoriana (ADE; Ecuadorian Democratic Alliance). They promoted the candidacy of José María Velasco Ibarra for the upcoming presidential elections, which, however, did not take place because of the insur rection in support of Velasco on 28 and 29 May. How could Conservatives, Catholics, Socialists, and Communists unite in a common program of democratization and under the name of a politician, who came to represent the salvation of the nation? How was Velasco transformed in 1944 into the embodiment of the solution to all of Ecuador’s problems? What were Velasco’s actions and words that made him the country’s redeemer and the personification of the democratic ideal?

By the time of the Gloriosa, José María Velasco Ibarra was far from an unknown public personality. A son of a mathematician of Colombian origin and a lady from “high society,” Velasco was born in 1893. He studied with the Jesuits and became a lawyer. In 1930, in recognition of his journalistic and academic work, he was appointed a member of the most important elite literary institution, the Real Academia Ecuatoriana de la Lengua [The Ecuadorian Royal Academy of Language]. He was elected to Congress in 1931 while he was living in Paris and with no affiliation with any political party. Velasco’s political career from this point on was meteoric. In 1932 and 1933 he became president of Congress and later in that year he was elected president of the republic itself. Of a total of 64,682 votes, Velasco obtained 51,848 or 80.2 percent (Quintero 1980, 282). On 1 September 1934, Velasco assumed the presidency of Ecuador. He was overthrown by a coup d’état a year later, on 20 August 1935. Velasco’s first presidency was short and full of strife. He had an autocratic style: he dismissed public employees, closed newspapers and Quito’s university, exiled or jailed some of his opponents, and relied on the support of thugs in his conflicts with a Congress that did not behave as a loyal oppositional force. After being overthrown, Velasco lived in exile in Colombia, Chile, and Argentina until he returned to the country for the 1940 elections. After losing the elections and staging a failed insurrection, he went again into exile until 1944 when he returned as the Great Absentee.

The political movement named after José María Velasco Ibarra, Velasquismo, was the most important political phenomenon in Ecua dor from the 1930s to the early 1970s. With very few exceptions, most politicians who were Velasco’s contemporaries, regardless of their ideology or party affiliation, were Velasquistas at some point in their careers. Velasco’s populist movement attracted more than political elites. More important, this was the political movement that introduced mass politics in Ecuador, partially incorporating previously excluded people into the political community.

Velasquismo did not only appeal to some of Velasco’s contemporaries, it has also captured the attention of social scientists, who have passionately debated its meanings and origins. Indeed, the analysis of Velasquismo has been one of the main avenues through which Ecua dorian political sociology has been constructed.² This chapter analyzes the dual process that produced Velasquismo. It examines how Velasco Ibarra was socially created and how he constructed himself into such a leader. Here I study a particular phase of Velasquismo: La Gloriosa. Given Velasquismo’s forty-year span, it would be an error to draw general conclusions about it from the study of the 1940s. That era was particularly important, however, because it marked the beginning of mass politics in Ecuador and because, as in other Latin American nations, it was a period of failed democratization (Bethell and Roxborough 1988; Rock 1994).

Existing Approaches to the Study of Velasquismo

Velasquismo has been researched by historians and social scientists since at least 1951, with the publication of George Blanksten’s Ecuador: Constitutions and Caudillos. Three approaches to its study, which reflect more general trends in the analysis of Latin American populism, can be differentiated: mass-society theories, Marxism, and discourse analysis. Osvaldo Hurtado (1988), following the insights of mass-society theory, used two key sociological categories—anomie and charisma—to analyze Velasquismo. The principal consequence of modernization is the destruction of previously existing communities and the formation of anonymous, isolated, and alienated “masses.” The individuals within these groups, whose normative framework has been shattered, and who have not yet been integrated into a new normative framework, become “available masses.” Hence, they are easy prey for “demagogic” leaders who can use them for their personalistic interests. The charismatic leader, like the great man in traditional historiography, becomes the key to analyze populist movements.

The main flaws of the mass-society theory lie in the vision of history as the history of great personalities and the consequent conservative interpretation of followers as deceived “masses.” By over emphasizing the role of the political leader, authors who follow this theory cannot account for the actions of followers. As a reaction to the study of politics through great personalities, Marxists have de-emphasized the role of the leader, studying instead the social conditions that produce populist movements.³ They focus on the analysis of socioeconomic processes and class formation, in particular the history of the formation of the working class, the revolutionary subject.

Ecuadorian orthodox Marxist analyses, which originated as a legitimate reaction against the vision of history as made by “great men” and as an attempt to study the autonomous actions of subaltern groups, have not, however, fulfilled their promise. Ironically, they share mass-society theorists’ view of common folk as “masses.” Due to their objectivist and dogmatic Marxism, the history of subaltern groups, particularly of the proletariat, is theoretically predetermined. Only when the proletariat acts on behalf of its “true interests,” which of course are known by the theorist, do they act as a class; otherwise they are misled or irrational “masses.” Although Ecuadorian Marxists tend to minimize the role of political leaders, at some point they have to face the inevitable and account for the importance of Velasco’s authority. To do so, they use the category of Bonapartism, which refers to exceptional moments in which the executive, under the rule of an individual, achieves dictatorial powers over all parts of the state and civil society. These moments occur at conjunctures when the ruling classes are divided and the proletariat is strong enough to challenge bourgeois domination but too weak to replace it. The problem with the Bonapartist hypothesis is that most of Ecuadorian history could be characterized by these extraordinary moments, turning what is supposed to be the exception into the rule.

Marxists have fervently debated the origins and meanings of Velasquismo, especially whether it was populism. For Agustín Cueva (1988), Velasquismo represented a new mechanism of political domination or manipulation that he interchangeably describes as caudillismo or populism. Cueva understands the socioeconomic crisis of the 1930s as the end of three previous forms of political domination: liberalism, representing the interests of the agro-exporting bourgeoisie of the coast; conservatism, representing the interests of the highland hacendados; and the military, petit bourgeois reformism of the Revolución Juliana (9 July 1925). This crisis also marks the entrance of new political actors: the subproletariat. Cueva interprets this group, whose political behavior could have been a challenge to elite rule, as, in fact, deceived and manipulated by the rhetoric of the caudillo, converting them into the electoral and social base of Velasco’s populism. For this reason, Velasquismo is explained as a sociopolitical movement serving the interests of the ruling classes, and Velasco as a mediator of the interests of the coastal agro-exporting bourgeoisie and the highland landowners. But, for Cueva, Velas quismo was also a new sociopolitical phenomenon that articulated subproletarian demands for incorporation into the political community.

Revealing the empirical inconsistencies and lack of theoretical rigor in Cueva’s work, Rafael Quintero (1980) challenges his interpretation and accuses him of introducing a series of myths about Ecuadorian populism. From an orthodox Marxist perspective and through an analysis of the 1931 and 1933 presidential elections, Quintero shows that due to the small size of Ecuadorian cities (Guayaquil had 126, 717 inhabitants in 1933; Quito had 107, 192) and of the electorate (3.1 percent of the population), it is absurd to emphasize the role of the subproletariat in explaining the origins of Velasquismo. For Quintero, the so-called Velasquismo was not a new political phenomenon. On the contrary, the first election of Velasco marked the triumph of the Partido Conservador, and the consolidation of the Junker path of authoritarian capitalist development from above. Moreover, Quintero denies any explanatory value to the concept of populism, proposing instead the analysis of class relations and alliances in each of Velasco’s elections and administrations.

Cueva is right in analyzing Velasquismo as a new sociopolitical phenomenon. Quintero arbitrarily projects the results of Velasco’s first electoral victory over the entire forty-year period of Velasquismo. Given that he does not analyze voting patterns at the local level, he cannot argue convincingly that any particular group (such as the subproletariat) did or did not vote for Velasco (Menéndez-Carrión 1986). Moreover, Quintero does not differentiate Velasquismo as an electoral movement from Velasquismo as a broader sociopolitical phenomenon.

Going beyond Cueva and Quintero and applying E. P. Thompson’s concept of the moral economy of the crowd, Juan Maiguashca and Liisa North (1991), in contrast, interpret Velasco’s populism as a political and ideological phenomenon that challenges the country’s capitalist modernization from a moral perspective. Unfortunately, their suggestive argument is incomplete because they do not carry through with the Thompsonian analysis they promise. Nevertheless, it is important to point out the limitations of this popular category in anthropological and historical writings. The category of moral economy refers to the way in which subaltern groups interpret and challenge the dislocations of capitalist modernization via their perceptions of the past. But, as William Roseberry (1989) points out, many authors who use this category tend to present the precapitalist past as homogeneous and undifferentiated. They fail to consider power relations within “traditional” communities, such that they cannot capture the multiple and contradictory images and values that different actors have of the past. Thus, the historical movement from heterogeneous precapitalist pasts to heterogeneous capitalist presents is often oversimplified through the use of this category.

Existing works on Velasco’s discourse, such as Cárdenas Reyes (1991) and Ojeda (1971), do not study the broader discursive field from which it emerged, hence they cannot show why it was successful over rival discourses. Moreover, these studies do not differentiate the analysis of discourse in general from political discourse, whose specificity is the struggle over and about state power.

Given the theoretical and methodological problems inherent in existing studies of Velasquismo and Latin American populism in general, a new account is needed to explain the success of political leaders. This chapter applies a multidisciplinary approach to study Velasco Ibarra’s leadership as a dual process. To understand how Velasco Ibarra was produced socially, I employ the tools of social historians to study the meanings of politics through an analysis of collective violence in the May Revolution. Discourse analysis is used to map how the shared (if contested) frame of discourse in Ecuador in the 1940s transformed Velasco Ibarra into the savior of the country. To see how Velasco Ibarra produced himself as the key leader in this conjuncture, I thoroughly analyze his speech in Guayaquil on 4 June after returning to the country as the Great Absentee. Finally, I study his oratory strategies to explain the success of his discourse over rival alternatives.

La Gloriosa: The Social Production of Velasco Ibarra

Contemporary newspaper reports and memoirs of participants in La Gloriosa propose the following causes for the May Revolution: a rejection of Liberal electoral fraud; Ecuador’s military defeat by Peru in 1941; the animosity between the government’s elite police force (the carabineros) and the regular army and broad sectors of the population; and the Liberal government’s economic policies, which resulted in an almost unbearable increase in the cost of living (Arízaga Vega 1990; Girón 1945; Muñoz Vicuña 1984; Naranjo 1945; Pérez Castro 1990).

Broad sectors of the population perceived that the Liberals had remained in power by electoral fraud. Eloy Alfaro, leader of the 1895 Liberal Revolution, was rumored to have said, “What we won with bullets we will not lose by ballots,” and this became an ongoing Liberal strategy. More recently, the 1940 presidential election, won by the Liberal Carlos Arroyo del Río against José María Velasco Ibarra and the Conservative Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, was seen as no exception. The perception that the 1940 election was dishonest—despite the fact that it was approved by Congress—had motivated defeated candidate Velasco Ibarra to lead a failed insurrection in Guayaquil in January 1940, which resulted in his political exile.

The significance of the 1940 election was to show the Liberal elites that their strategy of electoral fraud could not longer work because of the beginning of a new electoral style. Velasco Ibarra, unlike the other presidential candidates, campaigned by touring most of the country and delivered his message of honest election to voters and nonvoters. In Quito he proclaimed, “the streets and plazas are for citizens to express their aspirations and yearnings, and not for slaves to rattle their chains” (de la Torre 1993, 160). Velasco democratized public spaces by bringing politics from the salons of the elites to the streets. His followers, who were for the first time addressed in the public plazas, asserted their right to occupy public sites. They cheered Velasco Ibarra, booed his opponents, and, when they felt that the elections were dishonest, revolted in the name of their leader. The 1940 elections, thus, showed that the costs of electoral fraud were too high. That election also marked the beginning of a new electoral strategy—from then on, to win an election, a presidential candidate had to visit most of the country.

The political incorporation in the 1940s, however, was more symbolic than real. The franchise excluded most of the population because it was restricted to literate voters, excluding de facto most poor mestizos and Indians—literacy rates were 20 percent in 1939 and 22 percent in 1944 (Cremieux 1946, 77). Electoral laws further discouraged poor people and immigrants from voting because voters had to reregister and pay a fee for each election and return to the district where they had first registered to cast their ballots (Maiguashca and North 1991, 133). The small proportion of voters, which had none theless increased from 3.1 percent in 1933 to 8.8 percent in 1948 did not mean political apathy. Starting with the 1939–40 presidential campaign, Velasco Ibarra’s followers felt they were participants in the political struggle and asserted their rights by symbolically occupying public spaces and demonstrating for their leader. This occupation of public spaces was in itself an act of self-recognition and affirmation of the political rights of people excluded by the lack of honesty at the polls and a restricted franchise from the political decision-making apparatus.

Four years later, the country prepared to elect a new president in the elections of early June 1944. After a series of discussions, debates, and maneuvers, two candidates emerged: the Liberal Miguel Albornoz, supported by President Arroyo del Río, and José María Velasco Ibarra, whose candidacy was promoted by the broad-based Alianza Democrática Ecuatoriana (ADE). All the principal political parties except the Partido Liberal-Radical had joined forces to form ADE in July 1943 (Partido Conservador [Conservative Party], Partido Comunista [Communist Party], Partido Socialista [Socialist Party], Vanguardia Socialista Revolucionaria [Revolutionary Socialist Vanguard], Partido Liberal Independiente [Independent Liberal Party], and Frente Democrático [Democratic Front]), and sponsor Velasco Ibarra as their candidate for the upcoming elections. This coalition also included organizations of civil society, such as workers’ unions, student federations, electoral committees, artisan associations, and truck and bus drivers’ organizations. The Liberal government prevented Velasco from returning to the country to direct his own presidential campaign. This arbitrary executive order, the repression of Velasquistas, and the memories of previous electoral frauds led the opposition to conclude that the Liberals were preparing yet another fraud for June 1944.

The second cause for the revolt was Ecuador’s military defeat by Peru in 1941, which resulted in the loss of half of the national territory located in the Amazonian tropical rain forest. For many people, especially young army officers, the cause of the defeat was the ineptitude and corruption of the Liberal regime. The anonymous anti-Arroyo del Río flyer “Death to the Traitor,” circulated in 1941, concluded: “Ecuadorian soldiers, Why don’t you take up the weapons of the homeland, to punish the Traitor and trafficker who has sold the national soil! How much longer will you tolerate the infamy of obeying the orders of such a monster?” (Biblioteca Aurelio Espinosa Pólit, Cotocollao [hereafter BAEP], Hojas volantes [flyers] 1939–45, no. 100). Nationalistic feelings were reinforced in late May 1944, when the government agreed to the establishment of a new frontier with Peru, which validated the loss of half of the national territory.

The third cause for the revolt was the rivalry between the regular army and the carabineros. Established in 1938, this repressive elite police force was not only autonomous from the army, it was also a parallel repressive institution with superior attributes of authority. Logically, the relationship between the carabineros and the army was one of rivalry. For example, Major Luis A. Nuñez, director of the May Revolution in the central highland city of Riobamba, related the following incidents between carabineros and the army: “The mockeries and insults of the carabineros continually fed animosity to them … they used to come to the barracks of the battalion Córdova with rude and defiant attitudes to try to scare people and to look for trouble, saying things such as: ‘We don’t think of you as men, and when the fight comes we’ll punish you as lads’” (Girón 1945, 307). The carabineros were hated by young army officers, who suspected that their institution was going to be replaced by this elite police force. Velasquistas and other opponents of the regime also detested them, leading officials of the carabineros to say in a press interview that the shout “Viva Velasco Ibarra” had become an “insult to our institution and they should not be surprised that we defend the decency of our corps” (El telégrafo, 15 May 1944). In this context, Albert Franklin, an American who lived in Ecuador in the 1930s and 1940s, wrote, “The shout ‘Viva Velasco Ibarra!’ which for nine years had only been an insult to authority, started to be heard with more frequency and with a new meaning. Velasco’s absence, instead of diminishing had increased his legend. In Quito, to the V for Victory was added another V, and nobody doubted the meaning of the two Vs formed with both hands: ‘Viva Velasco!’ These words became a crime, and jails started to be filled with offenders” (1984, 350–51).

In Guayaquil on 19 May 1944, carabineros assassinated a university student, Héctor Hugo Paute. On 21 May in Quito, they killed a fifteen-year-old girl, María del Carmen Espinosa. The funerals of these victims turned into mass demonstrations against the government. Both funerals also transformed the victims of police brutality into martyrs. As suggested by José Álvarez Junco in his study of Spanish populist leader Alejandro Lerroux in Catholic cultures, “the strength of martyrdom … does not only demand posthumous honors, but also produces guilt and commands revenge; it does not calm but stirs up passions. It is precisely what is convenient for mobilizing movements” (1990, 255).

The fourth cause of La Gloriosa was popular discontent with the high cost of living. As a consequence of the export boom of war-related products such as balsa wood, rubber, and chinchona bark, the country experienced an inflationary spiral. The price of basic foods increased by 400 percent from 1938 to 1944, while real monthly wages decreased from an average of 164.44 sucres in 1941 to 133.31 sucres in 1943 (INIESEC 1984, 46–47). These inflationary processes were felt most strongly in the cities, in the context of important socioeconomic changes produced by the collapse of cacao exports and the emergence of new export products. The 1930s and 1940s were decades of important economic and social change that resulted in a relative crisis of paternalistic authority in the countryside, in dramatic processes of urbanization, and, most important, in the growth of popular organizations.

The conventional view depicts the 1930s and 1940s as a time of overall stagnation and transition from cacao to banana production. Recent scholarship, however, points to the diversity of experiences in different regions of the country (Maiguashca 1991; Maiguashca and North 1991). This historical period was not only characterized by the crash of the first cycle of agro-export-led cacao development,⁴ but also by the growth of other export crops and products such as coffee, panama hats, ivory nuts (tagua), rice, oil, gold, and, during the Second World War era, rubber and balsa. This economic period, characterized by the decline of cacao and the growth and diversification of other export products, resulted in a crisis and reconstitution of paternalistic authority that was experienced differently in the three regions of Ecuador.

The cacao crisis changed the agricultural and social landscape of the coast. Unlike the highlands, the patriarchal hacienda system had not had time to develop here. Rice production and sugar refining took the place left by cacao. Big cacao hacienda owners, who were more an exporting than an agricultural elite, shifted the emphasis of their operations, whereas medium and small cacao hacienda owners were eventually wiped out by the crisis (Marchán 1987, 276). Some cacao haciendas disappeared, others became fragmented, and a new elite of banana and sugar interests eventually replaced the cacao elite. For many agricultural workers, the first effect of the crisis was unemployment. Some of the former cacao plantation laborers became sharecroppers, others went to work in sugar plantations, still others stayed in the cacao haciendas, and others migrated to Guayaquil.

In the northern and central highlands, at least from the beginning of the century, a process of differentiation between modernizing and traditional haciendas had taken place (Arcos 1984; Arcos and Marchán 1978; Marchán 1987). Some hacendados responded to increasing market opportunities by specializing in dairy production, modernizing production techniques, and abolishing precapitalist labor systems and introducing wage labor relations. These modernization efforts, which took place in selected areas, did not result in the transformation of most traditional haciendas or in the overall establishment of capitalist relations of production. The traditional hacienda system and the latifundia-minifundia polarity continued to characterize the highlands and the country’s agrarian scene in general until the 1970s.

Information about the southern highlands is somewhat scattered. What we know, however, is that the misnamed panama hat industry, previously centered in the coastal province of Manabí, developed in this region in the 1930s and 1940s to become a major export product. Most panama hat production was located in the rural areas. The development of this cottage industry presented an alternative to work on the haciendas and created a middle class that challenged traditional agrarian elites (Maiguashca 1991, 84–85).

During the 1930s and 1940s, Ecuador had seen dramatic urbanization processes. Guayaquil’s population grew from 58,000 in 1896 to 100,000 in 1920 and doubled again by 1944, when the city had 200,000 residents (Rojas and Villavicencio 1988). Although less impressively than in Guayaquil, Quito’s population also grew in this period. It went from 51,858 in 1906 to 120,000 in 1933 and to 138,906 in 1942 (Dirección Nacional de Estadísticas 1944). The increase in urban population, however, did not mean proletarianization. In spite of very modest processes of import substitution industrialization, in both cities there were fewer blue-collar workers than artisans, and most people were marginally employed as servants, day laborers, and street vendors. These modernization processes and the growth of the state meant that white-collar workers represented 14 to 25 percent of the employed population.⁵

The changes in the social relations of production that resulted in a crisis of paternalistic authority in some parts of the countryside (Maiguashca 1991), and the increasing urbanization of the country coincided with the growth of popular organizations in civil society. Although only 42 organizations were established between 1925 and 1930,191 were founded between 1931 and 1940, and 682 in the 1940s (Maiguashca and North 1991,106). By the 1940s, the labor movement had been transformed by the establishment of two national federations: the Catholic Confederación Ecuatoriana de Obreros Católicos (CEDOC) in 1938 and, in 1944, the Communist and Socialist Confederación de Trabajadores del Ecuador (CTE). The middle classes also became organized. Whereas before 1930 only two office em ployees’ associations existed, twenty-one were formed between 1931 and 1940, and sixty-eight between 1941 and 1950 (Maiguashca and North 1991,106).

All the above issues—the belief that the government was going to commit electoral fraud, the defeat by Peru, the carabineros’ arrogance and brutality, and the government’s failure to stop inflation—were expressed in messianic terms of the immediate need to save the nation.

“Ecuador is experiencing the most serious moments of its history, in these days of civil hurricanes, only cowards will stay in their beds.” (José V. Ordeñana, Secretary of Unión Democrática Universitaria of Guayaquil)

“We are living at the crucial moment of our history.” (Partido Comunista del Ecuador, 24 July 1943)

“Our nationality has been threatened with death.” (Comité Nacional de los Trabajadores del Ecuador)

“This is the definitive time for our homeland.” (Comité Femenino de Chimborazo pro Velasco Ibarra, Riobamba, 12 May 1944)

“If we do not save ourselves at this crucial moment of our history, we will disappear.” (Alianza Democrática Ecuatoriana, Guayas, 26 December 1943)

“These are dreadful times of misery, uncertainty, and agony.” (La voz del pueblo, 20 February 1944)

“We are in the moment of to be or not to be.” (estamos en el instante de ser o no ser) (Velasco Ibarra, 7 March 1944)

La Gloriosa in Guayaquil

According to participants, in the context of all of the above, young army officers and civilians had agreed to stage an uprising in Guaya quil. The contacts between ADE politicians and young officers had begun in Guayaquil in April 1944. By 17 May they had agreed that they would revolt in response to any of the following events: “(1) massacre against the people; (2) imprisonment of an involved officer; or (3) electoral fraud” (Naranjo 1945,13). The military high commanders suspected that a revolt was being planned and arrested junior military officers. The government also jailed some of ADE’s civilians involved with the plot. Thus, the conspirators had to move up the insurrection to the night of Sunday, 28 May—Mother’s Day.

On the night of 28 May civilians and draftees under the command of the “known Communist leader Lara Cruz” attacked the telegraph office, interrupting communications with Quito. At 11:15 p.m. conscripts and civilians assaulted the security office and proceeded to destroy furniture and liberate prisoners. Meanwhile, civilians marched through the city shouting, “Viva Velasco Ibarra.” Liberal meeting places, such as the dance salons El Pigal and El Dixie belonging to the Echeverría brothers, were destroyed, as well as the bar-restaurant Miraflores of Enrique Zamora and the food and liquor store of Tar -quiño Alaña. The transit police headquarters and the provincial al cohol tax office were also ravaged. Crowds burned the car of the governor of Guayas province and the house of the police chief, Manuel Carbo Paredes.

Meanwhile, young military officers, with the support of organized civilian militia, were preparing for the main military objective: the attack on the carabineros’ barracks. In front of the military garrison, there were “lots of people … offering their services and asking for weapons; the cries of ‘Viva la Revolución,’ ‘Viva Velasco Ibarra,’ ‘Viva el Ejército,’ ‘Abajo Arroyo,’ could be heard” (Naranjo 1945, 23). The bloody attack on the carabineros’ barracks lasted through the night.

On the morning of the 29 th, around 7:30 A.M., civilian and military combatants, along with other bystanders, entered the defeated carabineros’ barracks. They proceeded to “throw to the crowds all the weaponry they found …, and a few moments later the doors … were opened so all the people could come inside” (Girón 1945, 211). Finally the crowds burned the barracks. “After inquiring why the building was burned, the conclusion was that a group of angry people with intense hatred did not want the quarters of the Carabinero Battalion of Guayaquil to exist any more” (Naranjo 1945, 32).