Ecuador Traditional Parties
Modern Quito
Courtesy Embassy of Ecuador, Washington
Middle- and upper-middle class professionals and businessmen
have led Ecuador's two traditional parties, the Conservative Party
(Partido Conservador--PC) and the Radical Liberal Party (Partido
Liberal Radical--PLR), also commonly referred to as the Liberal
Party (Partido Liberal)
(see The First Century of the Republic
, ch.
1). García Moreno established the PC in 1869 as a loosely
structured party and gave it a rightist ideological base. The
Conservative Party promoted close cooperation between church and
state, a strong, centralized government, and private property. Its
regional stronghold was the Sierra, particularly Quito and Cuenca
(capital of Azuay Province). The PC monopolized political power
from 1860 until 1895, when the PLR seized power as the outcome of
a civil war. The PC steadily lost ground thereafter. Although
neither party held the presidency between 1944 and 1989, the PC
supported the successful presidential candidacy of Camilo Ponce
Enríquez in 1956. The PC also consistently made a strong showing in
municipal and congressional elections in the 1960s.
Like the Conservatives, the Liberals were slow to develop a
formal party structure. According to Osvaldo Hurtado, although the
Liberal political movement had strengthened organizationally and
ideologically by the 1880s, especially in Guayaquil, it still
lacked a formal political party and remained factionalized into two
main groups. The original "civilist" faction consisted of
doctrinaire intellectuals who opposed the Conservative governments
through the press and legislature. In 1884 the six-year-old radical
faction of the Liberals led by Eloy Alfaro and his revolutionary
montoneras (guerrillas) proclaimed itself the true Liberal
Party and took up arms on the Costa against the Conservative
government. After the temporary defeat of the radicals in 1887, the
civilist faction again assumed the leadership of the Liberals. The
Liberal Party was formally organized as a political entity with the
holding of its first assembly in Quito in July 1890. Nevertheless,
party factionalism continued. In 1892 a "fusionist" faction broke
away and joined the Conservatives. Liberal opposition to
Conservative rule became so bitter, however, that Alfaro was able
to consolidate the various factions into the Radical Liberal Party
(PLR) by 1895, when it took power.
The PLR was the principal ruling party between 1895 and 1944,
although the coup of July 9, 1925, marked the beginning of a
gradual decline in the two-party structure and in Liberal hegemony.
Since its founding, the PLR had been strongest in the Costa, but in
the 1960s it also won a significant following in Quito. Since the
1920s, the PLR's platform has included anticlericalism and agrarian
reform. The Radical Liberals traditionally aligned themselves with
the armed forces and commercial interests. The armed forces,
discredited by their association with the party, distanced
themselves after 1942, but trade and banking interests continued to
finance the PLR. Like the PC, the PLR garnered nearly a third of
the vote in congressional elections in the decades prior to 1972.
The traditional parties depended to a considerable extent on
the largess of wealthy individuals or economic interest groups. It
was customary, moreover, for most donors to expect large returns on
their investment, and most of them assumed the role of
patrón (patron) toward the dependent party leaders, who were
expected to assume a properly subservient attitude. Corruption was
widely assumed to be an institutionalized attribute of partisan
activities, and party platforms enjoyed little credibility.
Data as of 1989
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