The Land Problem in Ecuador

Communist Party of Ecuador (Reconstruction Committee)

October 2011

Translated by Comrade Lucas

luchaliberation@protonmail.com

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 Two recent events have "revitalized" the debate
around land tenure in our country in the media. The first is
the presentation of the preliminary draft of the Land Law,
drawn up by FENOCIN, FEI, FEINE, and Alianza País.
The other revolves around the repression and expropriation
by the Central Government of land belonging to the middle
peasants in the province of Manabí, in the Río Grande
sector.
The land problem in Ecuador is much more complex
than the fascist government, revisionism, and the
mainstream media suggest.

Semifeudalism in Ecuador

Bureaucrat-capitalism is developing in our country.

That is, a type of capitalism submissive to imperialism and
anchored to semi-feudalism—typical of the oppressed
countries where the bourgeois-democratic revolution did not
triumph.
Semi-feudalism is expressed through many economic,
social, cultural, and political properties, the main one being
the system of land and water ownership.
The following is the current distribution of land and
water in Ecuador:
There are 636,375 minifundios, each generally owned
by an entire family, covering 1,463,212 hectares. The vast
majority of the peasantry owns properties ranging in size
from less than one hectare to less than ten hectares. In
contrast, there are 19,557 latifundios that cover 5,260,375

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hectares. Generally, each landowners possesses more than
one latifundio.1
The distribution of water—a fundamental element of
agricultural production—is completely unequal. 1% of the
landowners and agro-exporters control 70% of water flow.
Often, they do not even pay for this service. 80% of the
poor peasantry can access only 12% of the water flow, which
they must continuously pay to receive.
As we can see, there exists a great concentration of
land and major water sources in the hands of only a few
thousand landowners, compared to millions of poor
peasants, day-laborers, and medium rural land proprietors,
who produce the agrarian wealth of our country. We will
provide a few concrete examples of land concentration in
the hands of a few:

Owning Size (ha) Location

family/proprietor
Valgaz 6000 San Lorenzo-
Esmeraldas
Province
Villa 460 Puyango-Loja
Garces 500 Tambillo-Pichincha
Isabela 570 Guayas
Yépez 500 Carchi
Zuleta 2000 Pichincha
La Sofía 250 Manabí
Yanahurco 26000 Cotopaxi
Wong 1020 Santo Domingo
Paredes 2000 Chimborazo
1 Data obtained from the third, and most recent, National
Agricultural Census.

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El Porvenir 4500 Cotopaxi
Gonzales 500 Quinindé-
Esmeraldas
Wong 1000 Los Ríos
Cusín 4000 Imbabura
Santa Rita 500 Cotopaxi
Guachalá 2000 Pichincha
Pucate 1000 Chimborazo

For many decades, these conditions of inequality in

the countryside have generated extreme poverty, migration,
relations of servitude, and gamonalismo (especially at the
rural level), along with, of course, peasant struggles and
uprisings. So far, these uprisings have been unable to
achieve their strategic objectives—land to those who work it
and water for small and medium peasant producers—mainly
because these struggles have lacked proletarian leadership.

The Agrarian Policy of the Correa Administration

Correa and the Alianza País leadership have

spearheaded a fascist, corporatist government that
represents the big bourgeoisie and the landowners allied to
imperialism, mainly Yankee and Chinese. Since the
beginning of its administration, the agrarian policy of the
current government has been to defend and promote the
system of landownership in the countryside, which, in our
country, can be summed up in six axes:
1) Do not interfere with—in fact, protect—the
latifundio.

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 2) In some areas, and under certain circumstances,
expropriate a small percentage of the big haciendas and sell
it to the poor peasantry via credit from the State banks.
3) Sell certain tracts of State land to the peasantry
via credit from the State banks.
4) Confront and corporatize the small and medium
peasants, especially based on land and water issues.
5) Give [land] bonds to the peasantry in order to
mitigate poverty in the countryside and the ensuing class
struggle.
6) Promote laws, regulations, and other legal statutes
that endorse the protection of the latifundio and the sale of
land to the peasantry via the State banks; criminalize any
mass protest, such as the occupation of estates, that exceed
that which is permitted by the landowner.
The current government has been in office almost five
years. During this time, the application of these six axes
have been evident. The recent events in the Rio Grande
sector serves as confirmation of this. The government,
through SENAGUA, and with the "help" of the Chinese
company Tiesiju, is building the Chone Multipurpose
Project, using the "argument" that this work will help
prevent permanent flooding that occurs in this canton of
Manabi province. However, this was just a pretext. The
floods in Chone are actually a consequence of a series of
floodgates built by shrimping entrepreneurs downstream
from the Chone River, which obstruct the river's natural
flow during the winter season.
The underlying "reason" is to create a large dam to
"improve the productivity" of the landowners in this sector,
as well as the productivity of the monopolistic companies.
For this purpose, the government has expropriated the

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middle peasants who possessed an average of 30 to 40
hectares, and whose properties lie in the area where the
dam is currently being constructed. This expropriation did
not affect the big hacendados in that canton, nor did it take
into account the great damage caused to the hundreds of
people who worked as day laborers on these properties, nor
the eviction of about 1500 families affected directly by the
construction of the dam.
This eviction was carried out forcefully with the
intervention of large police and army contingents,
foreshadowing the great repression prepared by this fascist
and corporatist regime in order to deepen bureaucrat-
capitalism in Ecuador.

The Preliminary Draft of the Land Law

This bill was presented by several revisionist and

opportunist organizations allied to the government like
FENOCIN, FEINE, and FEI, with the support and advice
of the National Assembly's Food Sovereignty Commission.
This project basically proposes the following:
a) The expropriation of agrarian properties larger
than 500 hectares. The landowner will be paid the "fair
price" for each expropriated hectare (Art. 18, 53, 54). For
example, if a landowner owns 700 hectares, then 200
hectares will be expropriated, and he will continue to own
the other 500. As we can see, this point essentially seeks to
sustain the basis of the latifundia, and tries to force a sector
of the landowners to gradually "evolve" into capitalists.
b) Expropriation of properties larger than 300
hectares that are owned by that same foreign, natural, or
juridical person, or, by foreign capital. In the same way as

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above, the "fair price" shall be paid for each hectare of
expropriated land (Art. 53, 54).
c) Expropriation of properties larger than 25 hectares
that do not comply with the "social and environmental"
function established by the Law (Art. 53, 54). This is
simply the expropriation of the middle peasant producers
under a liberal interpretation of the Law. This point is
simply laying the groundwork for the legalization of what
has happened, for example, with the violent expropriations
of peasants in Rio Grande who owned an average of 30
hectares.
d) The sale of these expropriated lands to the poor
peasantry through credit granted by the National
Development Bank upon a favorable report from the
National Land Institute, and with the mortgage of the sold
land "guaranteeing" the payment of the loan capital, plus
interest (Art. 57, 58).
e) Regarding the peasantry who bought a piece of
land that cannot pay for it, the National Land Institute will
adjudicate the land and will only compensate the owner for
the value of the improvements made to the land (Art. 59).
In other words, if the harvest fails to yield due to bad
weather, pests, falling prices, etc., and the farmer cannot
pay back the loan installments plus interest to the National
Development Bank, then they will simply take away the
land and only pay back the equivalent of the
"improvements" made to the land (such as having laid
electric power lines), but not all the capital that has been
paid to the State bank up to that point.
f) Land invasions [occupations -TRANS.] are
absolutely prohibited. The ringleaders will be sanctioned by
the Public Prosecutor's office and those who are

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"arbitrarily" occupying land that does not belong to them
will be evicted, "ensuring that, throughout the eviction
process, international human rights standards for forced
evictions are guaranteed.)(Art. 65). At this point, we can
see how this Law serves to protect the properties of the big
hacendados, since poor peasants generally do not occupy a
property of 20, 30, or 70 hectares, but rather, haciendas
larger than 100 hectares. This happened, for example, with
the seizure of the 270-hectare Cantapez hacienda in the
province of Cotopaxi three months ago.
As can be conclusively understood, this preliminary
draft of the Land Law, presented by the revisionist faction
that is directly co-governing with the Correa regime, serves
in one way or another to fundamentally continue the
application of landlordism [el camino terrateniente] in the
Ecuadorian countryside.
Such is the servility of Correa and the Alianza País
to the big bourgeoisie and the landowners. Even this
preliminary draft of the Land Law, which is lukewarm and
conciliatory, is viewed with concern by the government.
Correa himself has said the following on this issue:
"Some wish to define the latifundia according to size:
larger than 100 hectares, and the latinfundia are prohibited,
the Constitution prohibits the latifundia...! [But] the
important thing is the property, and the important thing is
that it is productive... So that we are all owners, let us
divide these 2,000 hectares among 1,000 families at two
hectares per family. Well, [if we do that] we are going to
have 2,000 families poorer than before. The second key idea
is productivity. Our agricultural productivity is too low. In
the peasant economy, that productivity is disastrous. And
part of that low productivity is small plots of land. Even

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with the capitalist system, if we have a production of 2,000
hectares and a corporation with 200 shareholders, that is
good news—the ownership of that land is being
democratized, to some extent. This is something that many
of our colleagues don't understand. I see land [development]
projects, even from the Food Sovereignty Council itself, that
only have this vision of justice. Be careful—by seeking
'justice,' in quotation marks, we destroy efficiency, and what
we end up doing is making everyone equal—equally
miserable, equally poor." (La Línea de Fuego, 17/10/2011.)
As we can see, Correa sometimes openly defends the
big landowners, and sometimes he does so in an
underhanded manner. He attempts at any cost to cover up
the unfair distribution of land in Ecuador, which has
resulted in 50% of productive land being concentrated in
the hands of less than 5% of owners. This is exactly the
main source of poverty in the countryside and even the
economic backwardness in the cities.
Correa's discourse around efficiency acts as if it is
preferable to have large agricultural properties with high
productivity than to have many small properties with low
productivity—even disastrous according to his own words.
In other words, he is closing ranks [cerrando filas junto]
with the large landowners, the plantations, monocultures,
and agro-exportation.
Correa also intends to further corporatize and deceive
the people with the old, tired tale of a "society of
entrepreneurs," according to which, "property is
democratized" when a group of workers or people from the
popular sectors attain a certain amount of shares in a
company, of any nature. In this specific case, an agricultural
company. What the miserable, fascist Correa doesn't

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mention is that, in any business partnership of any nature,
whomsoever has the largest number of shares—that is,
whomsoever has the most capital and the most land—will
impose himself upon his "partners."
Specifically, Correa is saying that his assessment of
the preliminary draft of the Land Law, presented by his
own revisionist allies in the old Communist Party and the
PS-FA, through the FEI and FENOCIN respectively, is
negative in terms of [the amount of] expropriations, and
that he is going to fundamentally continue to apply
landlordism in the countryside.
This preliminary draft of the Land Law is already
condemned to historical failure. Even if it is approved by
Alianza País (logically, including the amendments resulting
from the "tug of war" in the midst of the collusion and
struggle of the ruling classes), it serves principally to deepen
bureaucrat-capitalism in Ecuador by applying landlordism
in the countryside in accordance with its six basic axes.

The Position of the Other Revisionist Faction on

the Problem of Land

We have already seen the position of the revisionist

faction of the old Communist Party and the PS-FA. Now it
is appropriate to analyze the ideological-political position of
the other revisionist faction—the MPD2 and Pachakutik.
Since it abandoned Mao Tse-tung Thought and
surrendered to parliamentary cretinism, leading to the
creation of the opportunist MPD group, the PCMLE 3 has

2 Democratic People's Movement (Movimiento Popular Democrático)

3 Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador (Partido Comunista
Marxista Leninista del Ecuador)

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simultaneously assumed Trotskyite and Hoxhaist revisionist
positions. This has led them to disengage from the strategic
struggle of the peasantry for land, to see it as no longer
necessary to organize the peasantry under the principle of
the worker-peasant alliance, to use the agrarian masses as
simple voters during election season, and even to assume a
direct-to-socialism program in a semi-colonial and semi-
feudal country like Ecuador. Thus, it has generated great
confusion amongst the popular sectors.
This revisionist party basically uses the FEUNASSC
(Federación Única de Afiliados al Seguro Social Campesino)
for peasant "work". They use it as an administrative and
electoral fief, with old opportunist leaders hunting for votes
during every bourgeois election. The PCMLE's approach to
the land problem is reduced to promoting "Agrarian
Reform," i.e., a simple transaction of land in an
evolutionary manner within the capitalist system. Even this
approach is accompanied by the call to vote. In other words,
they "link" agrarian reform with bourgeois elections.
Whether they are conscious or not of what they are doing,
this revisionist party is promoting landlordism in the
Ecuadorian countryside. It is as simple and concrete as that.
Pachakutic assumes two basic positions with regards
to the land problem. On the one hand, it attempts to
"solve" this problem in a pacifist, conciliatory, and legalistic
way, that is, through land and water laws. And on the other
hand, Pachakutik promotes bourgeois nationalism based on
ethnocentrism at the margins of class struggle in the
countryside. They claim the struggle for a plurinational
state more than the struggle for land itself.

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 To understand the distortion of Pachakutik's
approach, the teachings of José Carlos Mariátegui, one of
the greatest Marxist-Leninists of Latin America, are needed:
"We are not satisfied to assert the Indian’s right to
education, culture, progress, love, and heaven. We begin by
categorically asserting his right to land... Any treatment of
the problem of the Indian—written or verbal—that fails or
refuses to recognize it as a socio-economic problem is but a
sterile, theoretical exercise destined to be completely
discredited. Good faith is no justification. Almost all such
treatments have served merely to mask or distort the reality
of the problem. The socialist critic exposes and defines the
problem because he looks for its causes in the country’s
economy and not in its administrative, legal, or ecclesiastic
machinery, its racial dualism or pluralism, or its cultural or
moral conditions. The problem of the Indian is rooted in the
land tenure system of our economy. Any attempt to solve it
with administrative or police measures, through education
or by a road building program, is superficial and secondary
as long as the feudalism of the gamonales continues to
exist... The new approach consists of looking for the
indigenous problem in the land problem."4
This strong critique by Mariátegui of ethnocentrism
and other stances that vindicate the indigenous struggle
outside of the revolutionary struggle for land is very clear,
forceful, and irrefutable.
Pachakutik caps its revisionist deviation with a
golden seal when it holds the peasant masses, and, in some
cases, the cities, captive as bourgeois-democratic voters in
this country. In all of this, Pachakutik, of course,
contributes to this affirmation of landlordism in the
4 Mariátegui. The Problem of Land and The Problem of the Indian.

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countryside. Even some of its leaders are landowners, like
Mariano Curicama, who owns about 115 hectares in the
prefect of Chimborazo.
The MPD and Pachakutik serve as the other faction
of Ecuadorian revisionism who, together with the old
Communist Party and the PS-FA, contribute, either directly
or indirectly, in one way or another, tacitly or explicitly, to
landlordism in the Ecuadorian countryside, applied by the
fascist, corporatist regime of Correa.
Simultaneously, the revisionist MPD-Pachakutik bloc
struggles to tie the masses down to the 2012-2013 reformist
electoral project of Alberto Acosta, who represents a sub-
faction of the bureaucrat-bourgeoisie, along with CIA agent
Gustavo Larrea, co-author of the imperialist "Ecuador
Without Arms" plan. They seek to channel the discontent
of the peasant masses, the struggle of the students, teachers,
and small traders, into bourgeois parliamentarism. It is the
duty of Communists and revolutionaries to disrupt this
revisionist discourse in the midst of our agitation and
propaganda amongst the masses.

The Revolutionary Agrarian Program of the

Ecuadorian Communists

The PCE in reconstruction, in accordance with the

scientific, class, and historical analysis of our society, states
that Ecuador first needs to pass through the democratic
stage of the revolution in order to pass uninterrupted into
socialism.
We must sweep away imperialist domination,
bureaucrat-capitalism, and semifeudalism. In other words,
organize the New Democratic Revolution.

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 This democratic program of a new type has several
themes. Concretely, with respect to the problem of land,
these are our fundamental approaches:
1) The destruction of the latifundia. All estates larger
than 100 hectares shall be confiscated without
compensation, and these lands shall be distributed for free
amongst the poor peasantry, who have little or no land,
under the principle of "land to those who work it."
2) The main sources of water shall be provided
primarily to the small and medium peasant producers.
3) The establishment of a revolutionary-democratic
government led by the workers, peasants, and the
progressive intelligentsia.
4) This program will not be carried out through
peaceful means, or through bourgeois elections, but through
People's War, from the countryside to the city, through the
establishment of Revolutionary Support Bases as New
Power that will emerge as the old bourgeois-landowner
State is destroyed, until the conquest of power throughout
our country, and the establishment of a People's New
Democratic Republic.
5) The worker-peasant alliance, expressed through
the leadership and unity of the Communist Party of a new
type, with the revolutionary agrarian movement.
Combat the fascist, imperialist lackey, Correa!
Down with revisionism as a servant of landlordism!
Fight for land and water, preparing the People's
War!
Generate a movement of poor peasants with
proletarian leadership!

Communist Party of Ecuador (Reconstruction Committee)

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