BORROWED KEYS; THE SPREADER SAGA; OUR LIFE IN BAHIA: GENERAL ELECTION IN ECUADOR
Bahía de Caraquéz, Ecuador, Monday, 16 October 2006
Borrowed Keys
It has been weeks since I have been able to blog. Of course, I could have blogged while sitting in the darkened and even air-conditioned Genesis Internet Café in town. The machines are fairly fast, the screens easy on the eyes. But, by the time I finally get in there of a morning, by the time I have rowed in from the boat, by the time I check my emails and read the latest dispatch from the war-crimes and mismanagement front, my motivation has drained. My best time for writing is late at night, if I cannot sleep, or early in the morning while I am still fresh. This means I am aboard Vilisar at this very moment and things are quiet at 0500 in the morning: nobody talking; no loud background music.
Working aboard the boat, however, means having a laptop. But, the monitor on the Compaq failed months ago. Jan, from S/V Claire de Lune, took the laptop with her when she went to California on “home leave” and dropped it off at CompUSA, where we still have a valid maintenance agreement. Even with a full two weeks, they were not able to get a new monitor installed in time for Jan to bring it back with her. It lies in limbo somewhere, no doubt waiting to be picked up at the shop even though Jan told them to ship it to Catonsville, MD, so that Kathy’s parents could bring it with them when they come to visit in December.
I shall beg the whole question about relative standards of service in the USA and the so-called primitive Third World except to say that dealing with most large-scale American retailers can be at least as frustrating as trying to negotiate service with the local smithy or carpenter here in Bahia. Without the laptop, Kathy and I have been tied to the expensive internet café for proofreading and translating work, and I have more or less foresworn blogging.
Yesterday, just before they left for a trip to the USA, our friends, Katie and Jim aboard S/V Asylum, offered to lend us their spare laptop. Bless them! Here is the first instalment on the borrowed keys.
The Spreader Saga (boat stuff; skip it if you like)
We have had no functioning shrouds on our mast. At high tide waves are set up when the river flowing through its estuary at 4 or 5 knots to the sea about a mile away meets the incoming tide. If there is a wind coming over the hills from the beach your boat turns sideways to these waves and you start to roll. During this hour or so, our unstayed mast arcs through the sky above the boat with the masthead whipping back and forth and low groans emanating from below the deck where the mast passes through the 5-inch thick mast collar and wedges.
Both avid readers of “The Vilisar Times” will recall that during our voyage from The Galapagos some months ago, the constant sailing to windward caused of one of the lower shrouds affixed to a tang at spreader level to fail. In fact, neither the shroud nor the tang themselves failed: it was the metal which was used for the base-plate – a homemade affair fabricated from metal waterpipe to which chain links had been welded for tangs – and the whole corner was torn, tang and all, the shroud collapsing onto the cabin roof in the night while we were at sea. We stopped the boat and got the sail off her as we were afraid we would be dismasted. We had to motor the remaining two days to Bahia.
Also, while two months ago, when we had Vilisar up on a makeshift grid here in Bahia to coat her bottom with anti-fouling paint and to give her topsides a new coat of white paint, the starboard wooden spreader split when the boat leaned over against a fence. By that time, my confidence in the whole spreader set-up, baseplates and wooden spreaders, had evaporated, and I resolved to replace everything that was remotely suspect up there.
My plan was quickly formulated: remove the galvanised shackles holding the lower shrouds to the tangs and drop the shrouds to the deck; unbolt the two wooden spreaders from the base-plates and send them down to the deck; get the base-plates off either side of the mast for lowering. No problem!
“The best-laid plans of men and mice aftimes gang awray!” (pace Robbie Burns). First, just getting the bosun’s chair rigged with its double-purchase tackle takes me a few hours: it insists upon twisting so badly while being hoisted with the main halyard that it is impossible to haul up even its own weight. I finally figure out that everything has to be stretched out on deck to the same length as the mast is high and only then hauled up. And this is step one.
Once up there, - many thanks to another cruiser, Andrew of S/V Nueva Vida (Nanaimo, B.C.), for doing the pulling – it is very heavy work to loosen the weathered single bolt holding each spreader. I eventually get one spreader unbolted and lowered away. The port spreader bolt, however, cannot be loosened in situ so is eventually lowered with the base-plate still attached. The long through-bolts holding the plates to the mast have to be hammered out a centimetre at a time. I am quickly exhausted to the point where I am shaking. Working from the bosun’s chair is also very painful after a while; your hips and legs first become very painful and after a while turn numb as the blood is cut off.
In the end, getting everything off her takes two trips up the mast on consecutive days. The upper shrouds (running to the masthead) are left in place for the moment even though they were totally useless without spreaders. Finally back at deck level, I spend hours removing the cotter pins and loosening all the heavy bronze turnbuckles which connect the galvanised, parcelled and served shrouds to the bronze chainplates bolted to the hull. Since the turnbuckles have not been turned (or buckled, for that matter) for quite a few years, they are very stiff and I cannot work them all. But I eventually have all the shrouds disconnected and lying in parallel arcs on the deck from one side of the cabin around to the other. I work out the copper cotter pins on the turnbuckles as best I can, wasting some in the process and set the heavy bronze turnbuckles aside to be taken to the smithy for him to heat and free them up. Some of them are so stiff that I cannot budge them a millimetre. A day or two later, I get a panga to carry me and the shrouds down river to the Club de Yates where Victor, the bosun, is going to slush them.
Carrying one of the spreaders as a model, I also pay a visit the next day to Maestro Luiz, the carpentero across the street from the anchorage. I describe my intentions and settle on ordering new spreaders made of a very strong tropical hardwood called, I think, Quaycam. Each spreader costs $15. He has them done in a few days but they lie in his yard for weeks while I attempt to get the base-plates made.
To get this step started, off I go with the old base-plates in my mittens to Maestro Cuanqui across the estuary by ferry in San Vincent. (I also take along all the bronze turnbuckles as well as a tab for a Cap Horn windvane steering that I have borrowed from Bruce on S/V Chance Encounter, Toronto, Canada. Our tab has been “missing in action” since the voyage from The Galapagos. The actual tab is of wood and Carpentero Luiz makes me a new one out of tropical cedar [Morel?] for $10. However, it needs a U-shaped stainless steel bracket for mounting.) Maestro Cuanqui quotes $100 to make spreader plates out of “acero negro” (“black steel”), to fabricate a windvane-tab bracket out of stainless and to free up of all the bronze turnbuckles. Since after discussions with other cruisers I was expecting to pay about $90, I agree at once. The work, which is finished punctually a week later, is first class, the mast plates now seriously heavy-duty. The only joker in the pile is that the base-plates have to be galvanised and that means they have to be sent now to Guayaquil. Eventually, however, they arrive back. The galvanising costs $30. Up to now the spreaders and plates have cost about $100 including painting.
The new windvane steering tab (plus a reserve one that we also had made) is also back aboard. They cost $40 each. After now nearly four weeks with an unstayed mast – we have grown accustomed to the noises and the rather frightening perspective of our mast tip waving in the air above us - we are nearly ready to reinstall everything. Meanwhile, so many boats have been leaving for The Galapagos and/or destinations in Central America or the USA that I may have trouble finding somebody to pull me up the mast.
There are still a few other hurdles to get over. I want to replace all the shackles in the rigging with new galvanised ones. But while I can get stainless steel shackles here, getting good-quality galvanised ones is proving very difficult. Galvanised steel is stronger and will not work-harden like stainless. I want to keep the whole standing rig from the base-plates at the masthead above to the bronze turnbuckles at the chainplates below in the same metal, i.e. galvanised steel. I have a couple of irons (so to speak) in the fire but if they fail I am not sure what I shall do. I could have the smithy make shackles in steel but they would have to be sent away to be galvanised and we are coming up to a travel deadline in early November. I would have to install them when I return from Venezuela in the Spring when I shall likely have very little time to clear out of Ecuador before my visa expires. The alternative is to have Maestro Cuanqui make them now out of stainless.
Nevertheless, after nearly a month of painfully slow steps, we are getting close to having a standing rig again. When the plates and lower shrouds have been re-installed, I shall take off the upper shrouds and perhaps even the fore and aft stays and have Victor slush them too. They could certainly do with it even though I plan eventually to replace the bare and now rusty forestays with stainless steel wire to prevent staining the sails with rust. The problem of course is getting the stainless steel wire in Ecuador. I sure do not want to order new sails and have them filthy within a few days or weeks of sailing in the South Pacific!
I should mention, if I have not done so elsewhere, that we now also have a freshly painted dinghy with two new 7 ½ foot oars (from carpentero Maestro Luiz) and even new stainless steel oarlocks with high shanks that I had made at another smithy in town. Looks cool!
Our life in Bahia
Our lives on Vilisar are quiet. Without an outboard motor, we usually row into shore sometime in the morning when the tide is running in our favour and try to return when the tide has turned. There are ways of sneaking up the side of the channel and then cutting across the main current to Vilisar when the tide is running against us; there is no way I can row fast enough out in main channel when both the river current and the tide are adverse. Occasionally friendly cruisers with motorised inflatables will give us a tow if we really have to get out to the Vilisar at an inconvenient time in the tide cycle.
Kathleen has been getting a lot of proofreading work, which of course means that she has to spend her days in the internet café. (This may change now that we are using this borrowed laptop; she can work whenever she likes on board, put everything on a flash memory stick and send it off from the internet café.) Once ashore, I usually putz around trying to move the Spreader Saga another episode. Occasionally I also get some translating work and then hunker down to get it done.
General election in Ecuador
Bahia is generally a pretty sleepy little town. But there was a Federal general election yesterday (Sunday). We don’t have access to TV ourselves, and no doubt most of the campaigning is done there. But, since voters here in Ecuador are not generally isolated out in suburbs or barricaded behind their air conditioning, there is an old-fashioned, direct-contact feel about the campaign. Every party has an open-air shop cum campaign headquarters in town with lots of flags and posters. Each HQ has a huge public address system from which competing campaign songs are beamed out into the streets and across the waters. These songs – especially composed for each party and repeated ad nauseum - are also broadcast by pickup trucks or cars that cruise the streets until late at night with speakers on top. We joke that the election campaign has degenerated into the “Battle of the Songs”; the new president will be picked like a Euro Song Competitor.
Things here in Ecuador are by no means as noisy and raucus as Mexico. But Ecuadorians still seem to live in wrap-around sound. Restaurants either play loud music or the TV is running. In one restaurant where we frequently eat almuerzos (a cheap set lunch found everywhere and usually costing only between $1.25 and $1.50), there are two televisions and the radio is also usually playing. The TVs seem always to be showing old episodes of ‘Bewitched’ and ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ with dubbed Spanish. But Ecuadorians, maybe because the population is generally much younger than in Canada, the USA or Europe, do not seem to mind the racket. But many are also just too timid to ask for the noise to be turned down; if I ask, the restauranteur will usually turn the music down and people at neighbouring tables nod at us in appreciation. My point is that Ecuadorians let all this – including the election songs- fade into the background.
Every few days, however, one of the party hopefuls arrives in town. There is an after-dark motor cavalcade of hooping and blinking cars and large stake trucks full of cheering people, often campesinos, waving flags and singing the appropriate (I assume) campaign song. The candidate rides in an open car or jeep or standing up in the back of a pickup. All very open. Nothing like the main candidates in the USA moving around the country by chartered airplane for the next staged photo op or the next canned speech before a carefully vetted audience to be broadcast in short clips later on that evening’s news. As the cavalcade approaches, people come out of their houses to watch. Free goodies are sometimes thrown out into the hands of bystanders. One candidate, Nuncio, and his cohorts were even throwing buns in clear plastic bags. The children scurry to pick them up.
Since our Spanish is not yet up to political debate, we are not very well plugged into the campaign. But it appears that left-of-centre candidate Dale Correa, a US educated (Ph.D. from Univ. of Illinois) economist is in the lead though with only about a quarter of the popular vote. He was economics minister in a previous government but was kicked out or resigned over some economic issue. He is a ruggedly handsome mid-40’s.
Along with furthering small and medium-sized business and cleaning up corruption, his policies, interestingly, also include moving toward a ‘Bolivarian’ political union of Columbia, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, i.e. all those countries that were part of the revolt against Spain led in the early 1800’s by Simon Bolívar and Mariscal Sucre. Correa promises to clean up corruption, create jobs in agriculture and tourism, keep ‘dollarisation’ (although he says he is sceptical of it), make petroleum benefit all Ecuadorians (and not just the corrupt elites), reject free trade with the USA, preferring instead to emphasise MERCOSUR (a free trade arrangement in South America) as well as other regional arrangements and insist that Ecuador as a sovereign nation not be dictated to about whom it can have relations with (read Chavez/Venezuela). With the recent collapse of WTO free-trade talks, these regional free-trade arrangements have perhaps taken on new urgency. Some of the potential members (Venezuela and Ecuador) have petroleum. Chavez in Venezuela is pushing hard for leadership of such a grouping. (The USA has anyway stopped talking to Ecuador about free trade because Ecuador nationalised Occidental’s oil leases in the Amazon basin. The deep reason behind this is that the royalties agreement with ‘Occi’ is decidedly one-sided in Occi’s favour. Occi has also been playing fast and loose with the agreement and has seriously polluted the environment down in jungle as well.)
Correa’s main rivals seem to be León Roldós, a centrist, and the beautiful and vivacious, young-forties and fashionably blond, Cynthia Viteri-Kelly (she calls herself only Cynthia in her campaign posters). Roldós and Cynthia seem to me to be talking only generalities and tiptoeing around key issues. Like Democrats in the USA, they seem to be trying to get elected by not being too controversial and/or resorting to doubletalk. For example, Cynthia might be willing to talk about Gran Columbia but would put more Ecuadorian troops on the border with Columbia. Go figure! The conservative candidate is Alvaro Noboa. He’s all for free trade but, curiously, not in agriculture.
The first voting was yesterday (Sunday), and there will be runoffs until a clear call is made for a new president by the citizens. We have not heard the results yet because we have not yet been ashore today. The elections are also for federal vice president, for deputies to the national congress in Quito, for all the provincial governors and parliaments and right down to the Alcaldos (mayors) and councillors in the municipalities. Aside from the widespread democratic aspects of all this, it seems amazing that at any one time the whole country can be swept by some fervour and the same party could be brought in nationwide at all levels of government. That would certainly make things easier for the party in power since they would not have to deal with recalcitrant locals. One would also not have to endure the never-ending electioneering that we see in other federal states (like Germany) where there is always an election campaign going on somewhere in the country and where state elections determine representation in the federal upper house.
From what I can glean from the newspapers, all voting is done with paper ballots and by lists of candidates. Perhaps because it is considered uncorrupted and the guardian of Ecuadorian political purity, the Army is being used to transport and guard the ballot boxes. International observers have been invited to witness the elections. Polls opened at 0700 and closed at 1700: El Comercio newspaper in Guayaquil predicts that final results will be available within thirty minutes of closing.
More seriously for us yachties , no alcohol is allowed to be served from mid-afternoon Saturday till after the polls close. But this being Ecuador, it was decided to treat Puerto Amistad as a free zone. As long as there were no beer bottles on the table, you could have your drink. I guess that satisfied everyone because, at one point, about six or eight police officers came in for a meal and, although we wondered if they might object, there was no fuss whatsoever. I did not check to see if they were following the same procedures that we were.
Bahía de Caraquéz, Ecuador, Monday, 16 October 2006
Borrowed Keys
It has been weeks since I have been able to blog. Of course, I could have blogged while sitting in the darkened and even air-conditioned Genesis Internet Café in town. The machines are fairly fast, the screens easy on the eyes. But, by the time I finally get in there of a morning, by the time I have rowed in from the boat, by the time I check my emails and read the latest dispatch from the war-crimes and mismanagement front, my motivation has drained. My best time for writing is late at night, if I cannot sleep, or early in the morning while I am still fresh. This means I am aboard Vilisar at this very moment and things are quiet at 0500 in the morning: nobody talking; no loud background music.
Working aboard the boat, however, means having a laptop. But, the monitor on the Compaq failed months ago. Jan, from S/V Claire de Lune, took the laptop with her when she went to California on “home leave” and dropped it off at CompUSA, where we still have a valid maintenance agreement. Even with a full two weeks, they were not able to get a new monitor installed in time for Jan to bring it back with her. It lies in limbo somewhere, no doubt waiting to be picked up at the shop even though Jan told them to ship it to Catonsville, MD, so that Kathy’s parents could bring it with them when they come to visit in December.
I shall beg the whole question about relative standards of service in the USA and the so-called primitive Third World except to say that dealing with most large-scale American retailers can be at least as frustrating as trying to negotiate service with the local smithy or carpenter here in Bahia. Without the laptop, Kathy and I have been tied to the expensive internet café for proofreading and translating work, and I have more or less foresworn blogging.
Yesterday, just before they left for a trip to the USA, our friends, Katie and Jim aboard S/V Asylum, offered to lend us their spare laptop. Bless them! Here is the first instalment on the borrowed keys.
The Spreader Saga (boat stuff; skip it if you like)
We have had no functioning shrouds on our mast. At high tide waves are set up when the river flowing through its estuary at 4 or 5 knots to the sea about a mile away meets the incoming tide. If there is a wind coming over the hills from the beach your boat turns sideways to these waves and you start to roll. During this hour or so, our unstayed mast arcs through the sky above the boat with the masthead whipping back and forth and low groans emanating from below the deck where the mast passes through the 5-inch thick mast collar and wedges.
Both avid readers of “The Vilisar Times” will recall that during our voyage from The Galapagos some months ago, the constant sailing to windward caused of one of the lower shrouds affixed to a tang at spreader level to fail. In fact, neither the shroud nor the tang themselves failed: it was the metal which was used for the base-plate – a homemade affair fabricated from metal waterpipe to which chain links had been welded for tangs – and the whole corner was torn, tang and all, the shroud collapsing onto the cabin roof in the night while we were at sea. We stopped the boat and got the sail off her as we were afraid we would be dismasted. We had to motor the remaining two days to Bahia.
Also, while two months ago, when we had Vilisar up on a makeshift grid here in Bahia to coat her bottom with anti-fouling paint and to give her topsides a new coat of white paint, the starboard wooden spreader split when the boat leaned over against a fence. By that time, my confidence in the whole spreader set-up, baseplates and wooden spreaders, had evaporated, and I resolved to replace everything that was remotely suspect up there.
My plan was quickly formulated: remove the galvanised shackles holding the lower shrouds to the tangs and drop the shrouds to the deck; unbolt the two wooden spreaders from the base-plates and send them down to the deck; get the base-plates off either side of the mast for lowering. No problem!
“The best-laid plans of men and mice aftimes gang awray!” (pace Robbie Burns). First, just getting the bosun’s chair rigged with its double-purchase tackle takes me a few hours: it insists upon twisting so badly while being hoisted with the main halyard that it is impossible to haul up even its own weight. I finally figure out that everything has to be stretched out on deck to the same length as the mast is high and only then hauled up. And this is step one.
Once up there, - many thanks to another cruiser, Andrew of S/V Nueva Vida (Nanaimo, B.C.), for doing the pulling – it is very heavy work to loosen the weathered single bolt holding each spreader. I eventually get one spreader unbolted and lowered away. The port spreader bolt, however, cannot be loosened in situ so is eventually lowered with the base-plate still attached. The long through-bolts holding the plates to the mast have to be hammered out a centimetre at a time. I am quickly exhausted to the point where I am shaking. Working from the bosun’s chair is also very painful after a while; your hips and legs first become very painful and after a while turn numb as the blood is cut off.
In the end, getting everything off her takes two trips up the mast on consecutive days. The upper shrouds (running to the masthead) are left in place for the moment even though they were totally useless without spreaders. Finally back at deck level, I spend hours removing the cotter pins and loosening all the heavy bronze turnbuckles which connect the galvanised, parcelled and served shrouds to the bronze chainplates bolted to the hull. Since the turnbuckles have not been turned (or buckled, for that matter) for quite a few years, they are very stiff and I cannot work them all. But I eventually have all the shrouds disconnected and lying in parallel arcs on the deck from one side of the cabin around to the other. I work out the copper cotter pins on the turnbuckles as best I can, wasting some in the process and set the heavy bronze turnbuckles aside to be taken to the smithy for him to heat and free them up. Some of them are so stiff that I cannot budge them a millimetre. A day or two later, I get a panga to carry me and the shrouds down river to the Club de Yates where Victor, the bosun, is going to slush them.
Carrying one of the spreaders as a model, I also pay a visit the next day to Maestro Luiz, the carpentero across the street from the anchorage. I describe my intentions and settle on ordering new spreaders made of a very strong tropical hardwood called, I think, Quaycam. Each spreader costs $15. He has them done in a few days but they lie in his yard for weeks while I attempt to get the base-plates made.
To get this step started, off I go with the old base-plates in my mittens to Maestro Cuanqui across the estuary by ferry in San Vincent. (I also take along all the bronze turnbuckles as well as a tab for a Cap Horn windvane steering that I have borrowed from Bruce on S/V Chance Encounter, Toronto, Canada. Our tab has been “missing in action” since the voyage from The Galapagos. The actual tab is of wood and Carpentero Luiz makes me a new one out of tropical cedar [Morel?] for $10. However, it needs a U-shaped stainless steel bracket for mounting.) Maestro Cuanqui quotes $100 to make spreader plates out of “acero negro” (“black steel”), to fabricate a windvane-tab bracket out of stainless and to free up of all the bronze turnbuckles. Since after discussions with other cruisers I was expecting to pay about $90, I agree at once. The work, which is finished punctually a week later, is first class, the mast plates now seriously heavy-duty. The only joker in the pile is that the base-plates have to be galvanised and that means they have to be sent now to Guayaquil. Eventually, however, they arrive back. The galvanising costs $30. Up to now the spreaders and plates have cost about $100 including painting.
The new windvane steering tab (plus a reserve one that we also had made) is also back aboard. They cost $40 each. After now nearly four weeks with an unstayed mast – we have grown accustomed to the noises and the rather frightening perspective of our mast tip waving in the air above us - we are nearly ready to reinstall everything. Meanwhile, so many boats have been leaving for The Galapagos and/or destinations in Central America or the USA that I may have trouble finding somebody to pull me up the mast.
There are still a few other hurdles to get over. I want to replace all the shackles in the rigging with new galvanised ones. But while I can get stainless steel shackles here, getting good-quality galvanised ones is proving very difficult. Galvanised steel is stronger and will not work-harden like stainless. I want to keep the whole standing rig from the base-plates at the masthead above to the bronze turnbuckles at the chainplates below in the same metal, i.e. galvanised steel. I have a couple of irons (so to speak) in the fire but if they fail I am not sure what I shall do. I could have the smithy make shackles in steel but they would have to be sent away to be galvanised and we are coming up to a travel deadline in early November. I would have to install them when I return from Venezuela in the Spring when I shall likely have very little time to clear out of Ecuador before my visa expires. The alternative is to have Maestro Cuanqui make them now out of stainless.
Nevertheless, after nearly a month of painfully slow steps, we are getting close to having a standing rig again. When the plates and lower shrouds have been re-installed, I shall take off the upper shrouds and perhaps even the fore and aft stays and have Victor slush them too. They could certainly do with it even though I plan eventually to replace the bare and now rusty forestays with stainless steel wire to prevent staining the sails with rust. The problem of course is getting the stainless steel wire in Ecuador. I sure do not want to order new sails and have them filthy within a few days or weeks of sailing in the South Pacific!
I should mention, if I have not done so elsewhere, that we now also have a freshly painted dinghy with two new 7 ½ foot oars (from carpentero Maestro Luiz) and even new stainless steel oarlocks with high shanks that I had made at another smithy in town. Looks cool!
Our life in Bahia
Our lives on Vilisar are quiet. Without an outboard motor, we usually row into shore sometime in the morning when the tide is running in our favour and try to return when the tide has turned. There are ways of sneaking up the side of the channel and then cutting across the main current to Vilisar when the tide is running against us; there is no way I can row fast enough out in main channel when both the river current and the tide are adverse. Occasionally friendly cruisers with motorised inflatables will give us a tow if we really have to get out to the Vilisar at an inconvenient time in the tide cycle.
Kathleen has been getting a lot of proofreading work, which of course means that she has to spend her days in the internet café. (This may change now that we are using this borrowed laptop; she can work whenever she likes on board, put everything on a flash memory stick and send it off from the internet café.) Once ashore, I usually putz around trying to move the Spreader Saga another episode. Occasionally I also get some translating work and then hunker down to get it done.
General election in Ecuador
Bahia is generally a pretty sleepy little town. But there was a Federal general election yesterday (Sunday). We don’t have access to TV ourselves, and no doubt most of the campaigning is done there. But, since voters here in Ecuador are not generally isolated out in suburbs or barricaded behind their air conditioning, there is an old-fashioned, direct-contact feel about the campaign. Every party has an open-air shop cum campaign headquarters in town with lots of flags and posters. Each HQ has a huge public address system from which competing campaign songs are beamed out into the streets and across the waters. These songs – especially composed for each party and repeated ad nauseum - are also broadcast by pickup trucks or cars that cruise the streets until late at night with speakers on top. We joke that the election campaign has degenerated into the “Battle of the Songs”; the new president will be picked like a Euro Song Competitor.
Things here in Ecuador are by no means as noisy and raucus as Mexico. But Ecuadorians still seem to live in wrap-around sound. Restaurants either play loud music or the TV is running. In one restaurant where we frequently eat almuerzos (a cheap set lunch found everywhere and usually costing only between $1.25 and $1.50), there are two televisions and the radio is also usually playing. The TVs seem always to be showing old episodes of ‘Bewitched’ and ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ with dubbed Spanish. But Ecuadorians, maybe because the population is generally much younger than in Canada, the USA or Europe, do not seem to mind the racket. But many are also just too timid to ask for the noise to be turned down; if I ask, the restauranteur will usually turn the music down and people at neighbouring tables nod at us in appreciation. My point is that Ecuadorians let all this – including the election songs- fade into the background.
Every few days, however, one of the party hopefuls arrives in town. There is an after-dark motor cavalcade of hooping and blinking cars and large stake trucks full of cheering people, often campesinos, waving flags and singing the appropriate (I assume) campaign song. The candidate rides in an open car or jeep or standing up in the back of a pickup. All very open. Nothing like the main candidates in the USA moving around the country by chartered airplane for the next staged photo op or the next canned speech before a carefully vetted audience to be broadcast in short clips later on that evening’s news. As the cavalcade approaches, people come out of their houses to watch. Free goodies are sometimes thrown out into the hands of bystanders. One candidate, Nuncio, and his cohorts were even throwing buns in clear plastic bags. The children scurry to pick them up.
Since our Spanish is not yet up to political debate, we are not very well plugged into the campaign. But it appears that left-of-centre candidate Dale Correa, a US educated (Ph.D. from Univ. of Illinois) economist is in the lead though with only about a quarter of the popular vote. He was economics minister in a previous government but was kicked out or resigned over some economic issue. He is a ruggedly handsome mid-40’s.
Along with furthering small and medium-sized business and cleaning up corruption, his policies, interestingly, also include moving toward a ‘Bolivarian’ political union of Columbia, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, i.e. all those countries that were part of the revolt against Spain led in the early 1800’s by Simon Bolívar and Mariscal Sucre. Correa promises to clean up corruption, create jobs in agriculture and tourism, keep ‘dollarisation’ (although he says he is sceptical of it), make petroleum benefit all Ecuadorians (and not just the corrupt elites), reject free trade with the USA, preferring instead to emphasise MERCOSUR (a free trade arrangement in South America) as well as other regional arrangements and insist that Ecuador as a sovereign nation not be dictated to about whom it can have relations with (read Chavez/Venezuela). With the recent collapse of WTO free-trade talks, these regional free-trade arrangements have perhaps taken on new urgency. Some of the potential members (Venezuela and Ecuador) have petroleum. Chavez in Venezuela is pushing hard for leadership of such a grouping. (The USA has anyway stopped talking to Ecuador about free trade because Ecuador nationalised Occidental’s oil leases in the Amazon basin. The deep reason behind this is that the royalties agreement with ‘Occi’ is decidedly one-sided in Occi’s favour. Occi has also been playing fast and loose with the agreement and has seriously polluted the environment down in jungle as well.)
Correa’s main rivals seem to be León Roldós, a centrist, and the beautiful and vivacious, young-forties and fashionably blond, Cynthia Viteri-Kelly (she calls herself only Cynthia in her campaign posters). Roldós and Cynthia seem to me to be talking only generalities and tiptoeing around key issues. Like Democrats in the USA, they seem to be trying to get elected by not being too controversial and/or resorting to doubletalk. For example, Cynthia might be willing to talk about Gran Columbia but would put more Ecuadorian troops on the border with Columbia. Go figure! The conservative candidate is Alvaro Noboa. He’s all for free trade but, curiously, not in agriculture.
The first voting was yesterday (Sunday), and there will be runoffs until a clear call is made for a new president by the citizens. We have not heard the results yet because we have not yet been ashore today. The elections are also for federal vice president, for deputies to the national congress in Quito, for all the provincial governors and parliaments and right down to the Alcaldos (mayors) and councillors in the municipalities. Aside from the widespread democratic aspects of all this, it seems amazing that at any one time the whole country can be swept by some fervour and the same party could be brought in nationwide at all levels of government. That would certainly make things easier for the party in power since they would not have to deal with recalcitrant locals. One would also not have to endure the never-ending electioneering that we see in other federal states (like Germany) where there is always an election campaign going on somewhere in the country and where state elections determine representation in the federal upper house.
From what I can glean from the newspapers, all voting is done with paper ballots and by lists of candidates. Perhaps because it is considered uncorrupted and the guardian of Ecuadorian political purity, the Army is being used to transport and guard the ballot boxes. International observers have been invited to witness the elections. Polls opened at 0700 and closed at 1700: El Comercio newspaper in Guayaquil predicts that final results will be available within thirty minutes of closing.
More seriously for us yachties , no alcohol is allowed to be served from mid-afternoon Saturday till after the polls close. But this being Ecuador, it was decided to treat Puerto Amistad as a free zone. As long as there were no beer bottles on the table, you could have your drink. I guess that satisfied everyone because, at one point, about six or eight police officers came in for a meal and, although we wondered if they might object, there was no fuss whatsoever. I did not check to see if they were following the same procedures that we were.
posted by rjb @ Monday, October 16, 2006
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