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Preface to the First Edition

Books tend to reflect, to a large extent, the obsessions and life histories of their authors. This volume is a result of my ambiguous feelings toward, and intellectual fascination with, Latin American populism. I remember as a child how my family life was affected by the passions stirred by populist leader José María Velasco Ibarra. Some of my uncles and aunts were passionate Velasquistas. They had supported the caudillo in his five presidencies (1934–35, 1944–47, 1952–56, 1960–61, and 1968–72), and longed for him during his exiles. My father, the late Carlos de la Torre Reyes, who was the editor of El tiempo, a Quito newspaper, was an opponent of Velasco. As a liberal, my father was committed to a struggle for fundamental democratic freedoms that were not always respected by the populist caudillo, and faced many attacks by Velasco’s supporters. For instance, El tiempo was at the forefront of the opposition against Velasco’s autogolpe (self-inflicted coup d’état) in 1970. I remember watching how Velasco’s nephew and minister of defense, Jorge Acosta Velasco, insulted and falsely accused my father on television and how my father’s office in El tiempo was vandalized by Velasquista crowds. In this climate of political instability and lack of rights for the opposition, we were always ready to face my father’s imprisonment. Fortunately that never occurred.

Reflections on the late 1960s and early 1970s also brings back memories of large crowds and collective action. I was impressed by the large crowds that Velasco attracted when giving public speeches. I also remember the traffic jams and the smell of tear gas left by police repression of student demonstrations against Velasco’s regime.

Several years later, in 1988, as a student at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, I returned to Ecuador to define my dissertation topic. I was surprised by the passion aroused by Abdalá Bucaram, a new populist caudillo. In this election he faced Rodrigo Borja, a moderate Social Democrat. Most scholars and journalists saw in Borja the promise of a social democratic modernity. After all, his party, Izquierda Democrática, was a modern political organization with a clear ideological platform. Borja was committed to the respect of human and civil rights and the reconciliation of the nation after the authoritarian excesses of León Febres Cordero’s regime (1984–88). With the excuse of stopping “subversion,” Febres Cordero had abused the human rights of his opponents. Several guerrilla members, including some of my friends, had been tortured and killed by the government. Conflicts between the executive and congress and the judiciary had plagued Febres Cordero’s administration. He had also faced a military insurrection led by General Frank Vargas. After these years of political instability, most journalists and intellectuals saw the 1988 elections as a contest between a modern party with a concrete ideology and program of modernization and democratization and the populist politics of the past, represented by Abdalá Bucaram.

Journalists and social scientists constructed Bucaram as the embodiment of the rabble and a charlatan who charmed ignorant masses. They argued that poverty and lack of education explained poor people’s support for Bucaram (Fernández and Ortiz 1988). He was seen as a corrupt demagogue and a danger to democracy. In spite of what the press and some academics were expressing, Bucaram’s populist movement was obviously more than manipulation. Only middle-class prejudices could reduce his followers to ignorant masses misled by a charlatan. When, out of curiosity, I attended some of Bucaram’s mass meetings, I was impressed. Bucaram drew on popular culture and humor to attack the well-established “white” elites and champion the dignity and self-worth of his supporters. During these mass meetings, Bucaram established a dialogue with the audience. He focused on everyday life to politicize the humiliations of common mestizo Ecuadorians. He transformed the servants, the poor, and the excluded into the essence of the real Ecuadorian nation, and their bosses into effeminate antinational oligarchies. I was also terrified to see how this self-appointed messiah saw himself as the embodiment of the people’s will that stood above and beyond any democratic institution or procedure.

The tensions and ambiguities between the authoritarian appropriation of the people’s will and the inclusion of previously excluded people into the political community that was so clearly revealed in Bucaram’s populism are what attracted me to the study of these phenomena. I wanted to understand how populist leaders appealed to those they led without assuming manipulation by leaders, irrationality of followers, or the reduction of populism to models of instrumental rationality that explained politics by the exchange of votes for goods and services. I became determined to understand the complexities of populist seductions and explore the tensions between liberal democracies and populism.

The study of populism is certainly puzzling. In Latin America, populism is generally viewed in negative terms. For most it implies an abnormality, an anomaly, and a passing phenomenon that will eventually, and hopefully, go away. That is why most studies of populism begin by focusing on its negative characteristics, on what populism is not when it is compared with other political ideologies, parties, movements, or regimes. For instance, unlike liberalism or socialism, populism lacks an ideology. Populist movements are not the political expression of the economic interest of a particular social class. Nor can populism be specified as a type of political regime. Because of populism’s negative characteristics, modernization theory, for example, considered it a temporary event, an aberration produced by abrupt processes of social change.

Populism is also associated with leaders who manipulate, followers who are betrayed, and overall backwardness. Modernization theorists, influenced by mass-society models, interpreted populist caudillos as charlatans who duped backward masses left in a state of anomie after sudden processes of social change. From the opposite ideological angle, orthodox Marxists have tried to explain the historical abnormalities that have not allowed the proletariat to discover its own class interests when it has been misled by populist leaders. José Álvarez Junco (1994, 16) illustrates how this orthodox Marxist thesis of the proletariat as a revolutionary class whose historical mission is the struggle against capitalism and bourgeois domination is based on erroneous assumptions that have substituted dogma for historical research. Álvarez Junco claims the thesis is based on a view that assigns a priori an essence to historical subjects even before their historical appearance. The proletariat has been constructed as a revolutionary subject whose historical mission has been predetermined by a teleological evolutionary theory of society.

Populism is not only viewed as a negative and ephemeral phenomenon, it is also a profoundly ambiguous category. In 1967 a leading group of scholars met at the London School of Economics to try to define the new specter haunting the world: populism. The result of this endeavor was not fully satisfactory because many and contradictory definitions of this term emerged. The editors of the volume based on this conference, Ghit¸a Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, wrote, “There can, at present, be no doubt about the importance of populism. But no one is quite clear just what it is. As a doctrine or as movement, it is elusive and protean. It bobs up everywhere, but in many contradictory shapes. Does it have an underlying unity, or does one name cover a multitude of unconnected tendencies?” (1969, 1; emphasis in original).

Despite the increasing number of case studies of populist experiences and the efforts to develop a theory of populism, at present we are as perplexed as these scholars were almost thirty years ago. There is no underlying definition of the term or a convincing theory of populism. Moreover, there are so many objections to the use of the category populism that perhaps we should forget about it and abandon its study for good. What can another book on populism offer to the debate on a phenomenon that we cannot even define?

Margaret Canovan urges us to retain the term populism, arguing that at least “it provides a pointer, however shaky, to an interesting and largely unexplored area of political and social experience” (1981, 6). The term populism, as Felipe Burbano (1998) argues, continues to allow us to compare historical experiences by reflecting on key issues of political sociology such as the generation of political identities, the study of political discourses, the analysis of political cultures and clientelism, and the research of the particularities of citizenship and democracy in Latin America. Because the categories offered by the detractors of populism tend to be reductionist in that they squeeze these phenomena into the utilitarian exchange of political loyalty for material goods or the study of the economic policies of these regimes, the term populism at least allows for the study of the multidimensional aspects of these experiences.

I see populism as a modern political phenomenon that cannot be shortened to a historical phase in the history of Latin America or to specific economic policies. Contrary to the hypothesis of modernization theory, populism is not the anomalous result of rapid processes of political mobilization. Nor is it a phase in the history of the region closely linked to import substitution industrialization, as dependency theorists have argued. Populism has adapted itself to a new neoliberal conjuncture characterized by the privatization of state enterprises and the opening of the economy. Populism, old and new, is the product of a particular form of political incorporation of the popular sectors into politics—one based on strong rhetorical appeals to the people and to crowd action on behalf of a leader. As many authors have shown, citizenship is not strong in Latin America, and political and social rights have been given priority over civil rights. The poor whose rights are specified in constitutions and laws, do not have the power to exercise these rights. They have to rely on protectors who can help them to take advantage of their rights and who can defend them from the arbitrariness of the police and of the powerful. Politicians who have become such guardians have organized clientelist networks that have allowed their followers limited access to goods and services, not as rights but as concessions to interest groups. Personalized relations of domination based on unequal exchanges between leaders and led allow some politicians to present themselves as saviors of the underdog. Populist politicians have been successful in incarnating the demands of those at the bottom of society for symbolic and material dignity. Their authoritarian appropriation of the people’s will has posed fundamental challenges to the institutionalization of democracy, and their movements, which have included previously excluded groups, have not always respected the norms of liberal democracies.

The essays and case studies in this book represent my attempt to understand Ecuadorian populism in a comparative perspective. My aim is to develop a research strategy to understand the social creation of political leaders. I want to examine how followers’ actions produce certain leaders at particular conjunctures. With the study of political symbolism and discourse, I have incorporated the analysis of material exchanges emphasized by studies grounded in notions of instrumental rationality. Velasco’s leadership in the 1940s, for instance, was based on political alliances between political parties and associations of civil society. They shared a discourse that personalized politics as the struggle between the Liberal oligarchy and the people, understood as citizens whose will has been mocked at the polls by Liberal electoral fraud. Velasco was not only successful in building his leadership on this shared populist discourse. He also became the embodiment of the democratic ideal. He presented the incarnation of a religiously based ascetic figure whose aim was to bring moral and social redemption to common people. Bucaram in the 1980s and 1990s politicized the experiences of humiliation of common mestizo Ecuadorians. He represented the world turned upside down. The well-established elites became the incarnation of foreign and effeminate lifestyles, and common people were portrayed as the incarnation of the real and authentic Ecuadorian nation to come, under the leadership of Bucaram, “the leader of the poor.”

My engagement with populism is not just motivated by an almost masochistic intellectual interest in an object of study that defies precise categories and in a slippery and undertheorized concept that is regularly banned from the vocabulary of the social sciences. I am also politically committed to understand the appeal that so many populist leaders have had in Latin American politics since the 1940s and to explore their ambiguous impact on the construction and strengthening of democracy.

The study of populism is a privileged site to analyze the particularities of Latin American democracies. If Latin American populism was a fundamental democratizing force that marked the entrance of common people into the political community (Vilas 1995b), the specificity of this process of inclusion needs to be explained. Most social scientists have accepted Marshall’s description (1963) of democratization in the West as the movement from civic to political to social rights. Charles Tilly argues that citizenship, defined as the “sense of rights and mutual obligations binding state agents and a category of persons defined by their legal attachment to the state,” only became “a widespread phenomenon during the nineteenth century” in Europe (1995, 375). Unlike the Western pattern, common people in Latin America are not necessarily tied to the state by citizenship. Even though there is a legislation that guarantees and specifies citizenship rights, paternalistic relationships between powerful people—“patricians,” who are above the power of laws—and their clients guarantee the access of the latter to state resources and legally recognized citizenship rights. Moreover, the civil rights of common people are not respected, and they live at the mercy of the arbitrariness of law enforcement agents (Chevigny 1995; Pinheiro 1994, 1997).

The differentiation between common people, whose rights are not recognized in their interactions in everyday life, and powerful people, who can use laws and citizenship rights to their convenience (Matta 1991), results from the incredible economic, social, ethnic, and status inequalities in Latin America. If citizenship is not the mechanism that binds common people and the state, it is not a surprise that liberal democratic institutions and the rule of law are not always respected. As Guillermo O’Donnell (1994) has argued, Latin American delegative democracies are different from representative democracies. Delegative democracies are based on the idea that those who win an election have the popular mandate to govern according to their interpretation of the people’s will and interests. The president claims to embody the nation. He sees himself as the redeemer of the homeland. His policies, therefore, do not need to be linked to his promises during the campaign or with the agreements made with organizations and associations that supported his election. All the responsibility to rule the country falls to the president. He is perceived as the source of the country’s ills or its successes. Because he feels that his duty is to “save the nation,” he does not always have to respect democratic procedures or the rights of his political rivals.

Hence, democracy in Latin America has been constructed differently than in the West. Populist leaders have invoked forms of direct democracy against liberal models. Modernizing elites have also used discourses of democracy as tools to exclude common people from the political decision-making process. They have used paternalistic arguments to claim that ordinary people are not prepared for democracy. However, as in the West, common people have used the rhetoric of democracy to struggle for their rights. The fact that elites have to pay at least lip service to a discourse of rights, citizenship, and democracy attests that the struggle for a more equitable and participatory political system continues. It also implies that in the future democratic struggles might cease implementing a system based on the binding consultation of citizens, the equality of citizenship, the breadth of citizenship from civic to political to social rights, and the protection of common people from the arbitrary power of the state and law enforcement agents (Tilly 1995).

For the last ten years, I have been writing about the uneasy relationship between populism and democracy and the problem of populist leadership. Chapter 1 is a modified version of an essay first published in Social Research in 1992. This chapter reviews some works about what some scholars nowadays call classical populism. It develops a multidimensional approach to the study of populist leadership that goes beyond the binary options between rational choice and crowd psychology. I argue that to understand the social creation of populist leaders, economic and social structural processes must be analyzed together with cultural and political variables. Economic and social structural changes allowed for the emergence of populist politics. The transformations of oligarchic systems by capitalist development, urbanization, and the expansion of the state apparatus created social classes and groups that demanded their political inclusion. However, social and economic transformations do not explain why populism became the rhetoric and style of political mobilization that included previously marginalized sectors. To analyze the specificity of the populist relationship between leaders and led, all these variables must be studied. The personalistic charismatic relationship between leaders and followers must be examined together with the material and symbolic exchanges of clientelist networks and patronage relationships. The social history of populism and the autonomous expectations of the crowds need to be analyzed in conjunction with the Manichaean discourses of leaders.

Chapter 2 builds on my dissertation, and my book, La seducción velasquista (1993). In this chapter I study the emergence of mass politics in Ecuador in the late 1930s and 1940s and the transformation of Velasco Ibarra into the redeemer of the homeland. I analyze the patterns of collective violence in a populist civilian-military insurrection against the Liberal regime and in the name of a populist politician. The shared, if contested, frame of discourse that transformed the Liberals into the embodiment of sin and the lack of democracy and the simultaneous transformation of Velasco into the incarnation of the democratic ideal allow an understanding of the success of Velasco’s leadership and the patterns of collective violence in the Gloriosa (May 1944), which destroyed the symbols of Liberal rule while respecting the property of the non-Liberal elites. Velasco’s oratory and his ambiguous commitment to democracy are also explored.

While writing my dissertation, I began to study Abdalá Bucaram’s political style. I attended several of Bucaram’s mass meetings and those of his rival politicians in the 1992 presidential campaign and gathered their televised propaganda, flyers, and journalistic accounts. I returned to Ecuador in 1996 with Carmen Martínez to carry out ethnographic participant observation of Bucaram’s presidential campaign. Chapter 3 is based on this data and builds on my book ¡ Un sólo toque! Populismo y cultura política en Ecuador (1996). This chapter analyzes the interrelationship between daily life, populism, and political culture in present-day Ecuador. This chapter examines how the figure of populist politician Abdalá Bucaram has allowed modernizing political and intellectual elites to constitute themselves as the incarnation of the democratic ideal, while representing the populist leader as the embodiment of the rabble and a threat not only to democracy but to civility. I explore two moments of collective effervescence to illustrate how everyday forms of domination and resistance have produced particular political cultures: the electoral rituals that transformed Bucaram into “the leader of the poor” and the demonstrations demanding his resignation that made him the “repugnant other” who had to leave the presidency and the country.

Chapter 4 reviews the recent literature on neopopulism, showing how previously unresolved research questions have reappeared in the literature. It suggests new lines for future research, and the chapter concludes with a reflection on the specificity of Latin American democracies and the paradoxes of populist politics for strengthening those regimes.

I have benefited from the support of many people and institutions. My research on Velasquismo was financed by an Alvin Johnson dissertation fellowship from the New School for Social Research (1990–91), and by a doctoral fellowship of FLACSO-Ecuador (1990–92). My thanks to Amparo Menéndez-Carrión, former director of FLACSO-Ecuador, for her support. I did archival research at the Biblioteca de Autores Ecuatorianos Aurelio Espinosa Pólit. My gratitude to its director, Father Julián Bravo, and his staff—Wilson Vega, Martha Llumiquinga, and Elizabeth Villareal. I also thank Ramiro Ávila, curator of the Archivo Histórico del Banco Central. My research on Bucaram’s populism was generously funded by the Centro Andino de Acción Popular and by a faculty research grant from Drew University. My gratitude to Francisco Rhon, director of the Centro Andino de Acción Popular, and to Paolo Cucchi, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Drew University for their continued support. I also acknowledge Santiago Nieto Montoya, director of Informe Confidencial, for the public opinion surveys on Bucaram’s image and popularity.

My dissertation committee—William Roseberry, Andrew Arato, José Casanova, and Charles Tilly—has encouraged me and helped me for several years. Preliminary versions of my analysis of how Bucaram got to power were presented at FLACSO-Ecuador in September and November 1996. I delivered a paper on the relationship between Bucaram and the mass media at the conference Media and the Politics of Democracy at the New School for Social Research, 6 March 1998. A version of chapter 3 was presented at the Workshop of Contentious Politics, Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, Columbia University, 16 November 1998. I am grateful to the participants in these seminars and workshops, in particular Andrew Arato, Javier Auyero, Jeff Goldfarb, Margot Olavarría, and Charles Tilly. I also thank Robert Dash and Kristen Anderson for comments on earlier versions of chapter 3. Some of the arguments of chapter 4 were presented in papers at Ohio University in April 1998 and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, in June 1998. I thank Felipe Burbano, Carmen Martínez, César Montúfar, Ricardo Muratorio, and the anonymous reader of Ohio University Press for comments to earlier drafts of this book.

Finally, I express my gratitude to several people whose support continues to inspire me: my mother, Noemí Espinosa; my sister María Soledad; and my brother Felipe; Alberto Acosta, Francisco Rhon, and Felipe Burbano, with whom I published my first book on populism; José Álvarez Junco and Tom Walker, who encouraged me to organize this book. This book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of Carmen Martínez. She postponed her dissertation research in 1996 to come to Ecuador to do the research of Bucaram with me and has been the most enthusiastic and critical reader. This book is for her and in memory of my father, whose passion for politics and intellectual work has always inspired me.