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Ecuador Other Nations and International Organizations
Ecuador and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations
in 1969, but it was not until 1972, when Ecuador joined OPEC, that
the Soviets showed much interest in Ecuador. By the mid-1970s, the
Soviet Union maintained an embassy in Quito rivaling in importance
that of the United States.
Ecuador traditionally favored multilateral approaches to
international problems. It belonged to the UN, the Nonaligned
Movement (NAM), the OAS, and other regional integration groupings,
such as the Latin American Economic System (Sistema Económica
Latinoamericano--SELA), the Latin American Energy Organization, the
Latin American Integration Association, and the Andean Pact.
Ecuador--along with Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, and Peru--signed the
Andean Pact and the Cartagena Agreement in 1969, creating an Andean
Common Market. In 1978 Ecuador and seven other South American
countries signed the Amazon Pact treaty for the joint development
of the Amazon River Basin.
Febres Cordero, however, took exception to Ecuador's
traditional multilateralism. Impatient with regional and
multilateral arrangements, he opposed the clause in the Andean Pact
that restricted foreign investment, and sought to have it
liberalized. To that end, Ecuador threatened several times to
withdraw from the Andean Pact. It did not send a representative to
the 1986 meeting of the group's foreign ministers in Uruguay. The
Febres Cordero government also kept a low profile in the OAS, the
SELA, and the Cartagena Group.
Praised as "realistic and pragmatic" by some, Febres Cordero's
foreign policy was criticized as "erratic and incongruous" by
others. Evidence supporting both these views could be found in his
government's relations with Cuba and Nicaragua and his positions on
Latin American issues. On April 16, 1985, Febres Cordero became the
first conservative Latin American president to visit Cuba since
Fidel Castro Ruz took power twenty-six years earlier. The
Ecuadorian president reportedly talked at length with Castro about
ways to ease the region's foreign debt burden and bring peace to
Central America.
The Febres Cordero government kept its distance, however, from
most of the region's initiatives to promote Latin American
solidarity. In October 1985, Ecuador joined the so-called Lima
Group of four South American nations--Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and
Uruguay--supporting the search for peace in Central America
initiated by the Contadora Group (consisting of Mexico, Venezuela,
Colombia, and Panama, whose ministers first met in 1983 on
Contadora Island in the Gulf of Panama). Nonetheless, Ecuador not
only withdrew from the Lima Group later that month, but also became
the first Latin American nation to break diplomatic relations with
Nicaragua. The break in relations, which came suddenly after Febres
Cordero and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega Saavedra traded
public insults, had the unintended effect of isolating Ecuador from
other Latin American countries. Some observers also viewed it as
Febres Cordero's response to the United States' request for a
blockade of international aid to Nicaragua.
In his inaugural address, Borja vowed to pursue an independent,
nonaligned foreign policy based on the principles of selfdetermination and nonintervention. He believed that Latin American
unity should take priority over ideological differences.
Accordingly, he invited both Ortega and Castro to his inauguration
ceremony on August 10. Castro attended the event, but Febres
Cordero refused to allow Ortega into the country, except as a
tourist. Consequently, Ortega delayed his arrival in Quito until
August 11, by which time Borja, in one of his first official acts
as head of state, had restored diplomatic relations with Nicaragua.
Borja also expanded the relationship that Febres Cordero had
initiated with Cuba, allowing some Cuban and Nicaraguan advisers to
assist in Ecuador's National Literacy Program. In addition, he
criticized the policy of isolating Cuba from international forums,
such as the UN and OAS.
Borja also endorsed the establishment of an OPEC common front
to defend oil prices, to fulfill the obligations that Ecuador
assumed in the modifying protocol of the Cartagena Agreement, and
to reincorporate Ecuador into the group of Latin American countries
supporting the Central American peace process. The Borja government
anticipated good relations with Venezuela, another OPEC member
whose president, Carlos Andrés Pérez, was Borja's closest associate
in the region. In early 1989, however, the Group of Eight (the
eight democratic Latin American countries which belonged to the
former Contadora or Lima Groups) rejected Ecuador's bid for
membership. Nevertheless, in June 1989 Colombian president Virgilio
Barco Vargas invited Ecuador to replace Panama in the Group of
Eight. In September 1989, Borja stated publicly his belief that
General Manuel Antonio Noriega, Panama's de facto leader as
commander of the Panama Defense Forces, should step down, but added
that he opposed United States military intervention to depose him.
A protracted border dispute continued to strain relations
between Ecuador and Peru. The approximately 200,000-squarekilometer area of the Amazon (the Marañón district), which Ecuador
had claimed since the nineteenth century, contained the city of
Iquitos on the west bank of the Amazon River and also Peru's main
jungle petroleum-producing region. Since 1960, when Ecuador's
president Velasco declared invalid the Rio Protocol, under which
the area was recognized as Peru's, Ecuador had continued to assert
its right to the disputed region and to emphasize its need for an
outlet to the Atlantic via the Amazon River
(see
Reform, Chaos, and Debacle, 1925-44.
A small border war with Peru broke out on
January 28, 1981, in the Condor mountain range, which runs along
the border between the Amazon Basin and Ecuador. After Peruvian
forces drove Ecuadorian troops back from the border posts, a ceasefire came into effect on February 1. A commission composed of the
military attachés of the United States, Argentina, Brazil, and
Chile, who helped negotiate the cease-fire, was charged with
supervising the border area. Most Ecuadorians, however, supported
their government's efforts to obtain a revision of the 1942
protocol.
As a vice president of the Socialist International, Borja
enjoyed good relations with several West European countries. He was
particularly close to Portuguese President Mario Lopes Soares, who
attended his inauguration. The French-speaking Ecuadorian president
was also a long-time admirer of France's president François
Mitterrand, whose wife Danielle attended the installation ceremony
on behalf of France. The deputy prime minister of Spain also
attended, as did representatives from the Federal Republic of
Germany (West Germany), the German Democratic Republic (East
Germany), and Sweden. The Soviet Union and China were also
represented at the inauguration. The Borja government reaffirmed
Ecuador's support for the rights of the Palestinian people and for
a peaceful, just, and lasting solution to the Middle East conflict
within the framework of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338
and an international conference under UN auspices. Borja attended
the NAM summit in Yugoslavia in September 1989.
* * *
The scholarly literature in English on Ecuador's political
system is limited. A pioneering study of Ecuador's political system
is George I. Blanksten's Ecuador: Constitutions and
Caudillos. John D. Martz's Ecuador: Conflicting Political
Culture and the Quest for Progress is a somewhat dated but
still useful historical study of the political system. Former
president Osvaldo Hurtado's Political Power in Ecuador is a
very informative and insightful academic study of Ecuadorian
politics. Although some of the data in the revised version remains
outdated or inconsistent, Hurtado's book is nevertheless widely
considered to be one of the best and most original studies of the
country's political, economic, and intellectual history. An
authoritative study of Ecuador's constitutional history and
political system in the 1980s by one of the country's leading
judicial scholars is Hernán Salgado Pesants's Instituciones
Políticas y Constitución del Ecuador. Other up-to-date,
scholarly books include David W. Schodt's Ecuador: An Andean
Enigma, Ecuador: Fragile Democracy by David Corkill and
David Cubitt, and Catherine M. Conaghan's Restructuring
Domination: Industrialists and the State in Ecuador.
Insightful political analyses in academic journals include
Martz's "Instability in Ecuador" and Conaghan's "Ecuador Swings
Toward Social Democracy" in Current History. A detailed and
well-informed analysis (in French) of voting patterns in Ecuador's
1984 and 1988 presidential elections is "Équateur de León Febres
Cordero à Rodrigo Borja (1984-1988)," by Yves Saint-Geours. (For
further information and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of 1989
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