Concluding the two day conference organized by the Latin American Network of Women Transforming the Economy (REMTE) which took place in Quito on August 2nd and 3rd, Maria Paula Romo evoked a proud past, “In 1924, Ecuador became the first Latin American country in which a woman voted, Ecuador also had the first constitution on the continent to recognize the right of women to vote in 1929, and in 1978, it inaugurated the return to democracy and the third wave of democratization on the continent. Hopefully,” she continued, “we can also play a role in the current recreation of democracy.”

Quoting a 2004 United Nations report concerning the state of democracy in Latin America, Romo said, “The question guiding Latin American democracies today is: how much poverty will democracy sustain?” A lawyer, and the only woman participating in the legal commission struck by current Ecuadorian President, Rafael Correa, to draft a working constitution that will give the upcoming National Constituent Assembly a head start, Romo wants Ecuador to help change this trend.

Romo together with feminist economist Magdalena León wrapped up the REMTE conference last week by examining the potential to advance equality in Ecuador based upon processes occurring under the Correa administration.

Romo is Vice President of the legal commission of the National Council of Higher Education (CONESUP) and specifically addressed questions that the National Constituent Assembly will have to consider once it’s been elected on September 30th. The committee has received about 700 proposals from diverse sectors, said Romo, and will wrap up their work at the end of August. “[This assembly has] a special opportunity,” she said. “It’s a possibility for transformation and for a democratic path away from a period of serious political blockade that has been primarily institutional.”

While Ecuador has seen many such assemblies, she noted that this is the first that has been motivated by progressive interests. Romo added that “There are other ways to make reforms, but here, they have all been blocked.” As a result, she added, not only does this assembly need to address constitutional change, but it will also need to establish new political actors in order to confront issues of representation within the current political system.

Pertaining to human rights, she said that Ecuador’s 1998 constitution is in fact “the most progressive on the continent.” However, it hasn’t been implemented. It’s the first in Ecuador’s history to describe the country as pluricultural and multiethnic and the first to incorporate the collective rights of indigenous peoples and Afrodescendents. It’s also the second worldwide to acknowledge the right to freedom of sexual orientation and is notable for its acknowledgement of women’s right to sexual freedom and for recognizing domestic labour as productive work.

However, Ecuador’s institutional crisis, she said, “amounts to a virtual kidnapping of the Republic; of the design and appointments for institutions based upon a corporatist way of thinking that negates even the most basic meaning of democracy.” She added that not one president in Ecuador has completed the full term for which they were elected in the last ten years and within this same timeframe, five have also been spent without the Auditor General, three without the National Ombudsman and one without the Supreme Court of Justice. More than 50 laws that congress should have created in order to implement the 1998 constitution, have not been passed.

Despite having resisted privatization in various sectors, she said the country has undergone “the privatization of the state.” She says the upcoming constituent assembly will need to address this, while ensuring that human rights already guaranteed within the constitution are not eroded. She added that while it’s also widely assumed that Ecuador is a secular state, this is not part of the constitution. She notes its importance among others to ensure women’s right to contraception. Territorial organization and distribution of state resources are also critical issues.

Solidarity economy

Economist Magdalena Leon is coordinator of REMTE in Ecuador and reminded the audience that the feminist proposal “isn’t by women for women, but rather by women for humanity, for the region, for the country; proposing changes and redefinitions toward greater equality according to which we need to consider what we have to do today in this country and in the region.” Examining in particular Ecuador’s economic system and related constitutional elements, she said that the potential exists for Ecuador to adopt a solidarity economy at the systemic level.

There is near consensus in Ecuador, she said, for the creation of a solidarity economy, “One way or another people are living by practices of a solidarity economy.” Such practices, she said, include associative means of production and collective consumption, practices of reciprocity within indigenous communities, as well as other home-based practices in which women in particular play a principal role. However, she added, “We need to see the solidarity economy not just as a sector, but as an objective to be obtained for the economic system.”

Emphasizing how people’s day to day experience could be used to redesign the system, she continued, “It needs to be seen as a current reality in the experiences, practices and initiatives past and present and not just as a possible or future idea. Based upon this work, the economy can be reoriented toward production, services and consumption for the needs of human life.”

Leon noted positive steps already taken by the current government toward largely severing relationships with the World Bank and the IMF, but added that constitutional changes are also required “in order to remove the chains of neoliberalism.” Outlining some basic questions that the national assembly will need to address in order to redefine economic elements described in Ecuador’s Carta Magna, she also pointed out how the current section on rights enshrines a neoliberal framework.

“There are several rights upheld in this so-called progressive chapter such as the freedom of enterprise as a personal and human right. The freedom to make contract labour and the freedom to own property are also there. These are three freedoms placed amongst the freedoms of human beings that in reality are the heart of the neoliberal model and that need to be redefined.” She gave examples of how each of these three freedoms might be redefined. In the case of freedom to own property, she said, “it should be redefined recognizing the diversity of means of ownership as well as access and control of resources.”

Echoing Romo, she noted Ecuador’s success in resisting privatization in certain sectors, also qualifying it with regard to mining. “Quietly,” she said, “mining concessions have been given out throughout the entire national territory.” Quoting the past Minister of Energy and Mines who resigned in order to become a candidate for upcoming national assembly elections, she illustrated what she termed a perverse situation enabled by a series of constitutional and legal changes, “There are mining concessions even within the central park of one town.”

Aware of the challenges, Leon says that this is “a moment to leap ahead … toward redefinitions that follow a feminist vision and that re-found the economy as a whole and the state as well.” These definitions however, “are not just words, but paths that are opening up, that we can utilize.” Beyond Ecuador, she pointed out complementary processes taking place particularly in Bolivia noting the benefits of exchanges and adding this that is also “a time of collective construction of regional alternatives.”