Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Ecuador's political left is a broad front of progressive organizations that has experienced brief moments of success, most notably the “Glorious May Revolution” of 1944 unifying workers, students, peasants, indigenous peoples, women, and junior military personnel into a broad movement. However, with internal divisions, government repression, and a failure to offset the strong military, Ecuador's left historically failed to consolidate opposition to the conservative state. The left has also succumbed to the appeal of populist movements using progressive rhetoric, but once in power defending the country's oligarchic upper class. Ecuador's political left represents multiple historic movements of Utopian socialism, radical liberalism, anarchism , revolutionary Marxism , and an indigenous tradition of millenarian struggles. In May 1925 these currents converged in the founding of the Ecuadorian Socialist Party (PSE). With the establishment of the Third or Communist International (Comintern) the party became the Ecuadorian Communist Party (PCE), and the left alliance fractured. Another group of socialist soldiers formed the Ecuadorian Revolutionary Socialist Vanguard (VSRE), which gained strength in the 1940s. These three parties sometimes collaborated in popular fronts, and at different historic periods clashed. The PSE was the most successful of the three groups in elections, becoming ... log in or subscribe to read full text