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