soc.culture.ecuador

Long-form reference · 3,719 words · about a 16-minute read

The group and its era

soc.culture.ecuador sat in the long national run of soc.culture.*, unmoderated as almost all of that hierarchy was, and one of its smaller national groups. What it offered was continuity rather than volume: a readership that held together through a decade in which the country changed president rather more often than the group changed its habits.

The sequence is worth setting out plainly. Abdalá Bucaram took office on 10 August 1996 and was removed by Congress on 6 February 1997 on a declaration of mental incapacity; the succession was disputed for several days before Fabián Alarcón was settled in to serve the interim term. Jamil Mahuad was inaugurated on 10 August 1998 and left office on 21 January 2000, succeeded by his vice-president, Gustavo Noboa. Lucio Gutiérrez, an army officer among those involved in the events of that January, was inaugurated on 15 January 2003 and removed by Congress on 20 April 2005.

Underneath the politics ran the money. The sucre lost 67 per cent of its foreign-exchange value during 1999, and a further seventeen per cent in a single week, ending at 25,000 to the dollar on 7 January 2000; Mahuad announced dollarisation on 9 January. The United States dollar became legal tender on 13 March 2000 and sucre notes ceased to be legal tender on 11 September — which places the whole of the news2mail gateway’s run, from 2000 to 2004, inside the dollarised years.

Some scale for the country being argued over: World Bank series put Ecuador’s population at 10.5 million in 1990 and 12.7 million in 2000, spread across four conventional regions — the Pacific coast, the Andean sierra, the Amazonian oriente and the island province of the Galápagos.

Getting online from Ecuador

The country-code domain gives the first checkable date. IANA’s root database records .ec with a registration date of 1 February 1991 — ahead of the Bolivian, Venezuelan, Peruvian and Colombian entries, all of them registered later in the same year, and a little under two years behind Brazil. A delegation is an administrative act in the root zone, however, and says nothing about how many people inside the country could reach a news server.

For that the World Bank series for individuals using the internet, compiled from ITU returns, is the better guide. It gives Ecuador 0.03 per cent of the population in 1994 and 0.13 per cent in 1998, then 0.82 per cent in 1999, 1.46 per cent in 2000, 2.67 per cent in 2001, 4.26 per cent in 2002 and 4.83 per cent in 2004. The whole of the news2mail gateway’s run therefore falls inside the years when between one and five Ecuadorians in a hundred used the internet at all, and the group’s first decade lies almost entirely below one in a hundred.

The line behind those users matters as much. Fixed telephone subscriptions per hundred people, on the same source, ran at 4.68 in 1990, 6.02 in 1995, 8.09 in 1998, 9.65 in 2000 and 11.69 in 2004. Dial-up at home needed a telephone line at home, and through the 1990s there were fewer than ten fixed lines in the country for every hundred people.

Those two series describe the group’s composition better than any subscriber count could. A reader at a North American or European university had a permanent connection paid for by someone else and often a news spool on the same campus; a reader in Quito or Guayaquil was one of a very small minority, paying by the minute over a line that was itself scarce. The outward tilt of the voices is what those numbers predict — an inference from national statistics, not a count of posters.

What was discussed

Instability was argued from both ends of the emigration, by people following the same events from very different distances, and the two ends did not always agree about what they were watching.

The currency question divided the group as it divided the country: taken by some as the only available floor under a collapsing sucre, by others as the surrender of a national instrument. Emigrants had a direct stake, since the remittances they sent were now denominated in the currency they earned.

The indigenous movement was a standing subject. CONAIE, founded at a convention in November 1986, organised the uprising of May and June 1990 that blocked roads and shut down the transport system for a week, mobilised again in 1994 and 1997, and played a large part in forming the electoral movement Pachakutik at its assembly of December 1995; it is often cited as the best-organised and most influential indigenous movement in Latin America. On 21 January 2000 indigenous crowds converged on Quito and occupied Congress, and CONAIE’s president, Antonio Vargas, joined junior officers in the government of national salvation declared that day, which the senior command dissolved within hours in favour of the vice-president.

The organisation behind that record is well documented. CONAIE was constituted at a convention of some five hundred indigenous representatives held from 13 to 16 November 1986, drawing together two existing regional federations — ECUARUNARI in the highlands and CONFENIAE in the Amazon — and it speaks for fourteen peoples. The demands raised in May and June 1990 were bilingual education, agrarian reform and recognition of Ecuador as a plurinational state; in 1992 some two thousand Kichwa, Shuar and Achuar marchers walked the 385 kilometres from the Amazon to Quito over the legalisation of land. Pachakutik, formed after the assembly of December 1995, took about a tenth of the seats in Congress in 1996.

Oil in the Amazon supplied the other long argument. The action brought in New York in 1993 on behalf of residents of the Lago Agrio field against Texaco — dismissed for improper venue in 2001, and refiled in Ecuador in 2003, by then against Chevron, which had acquired Texaco in 2001 — became internationally known.

Quito and Guayaquil were set against each other with relish, sierra against coast, capital against port, in an exchange nobody expected to win. The border settlement with Peru — the fighting in the Cenepa valley between 26 January and 28 February 1995, and the Brasilia Presidential Act signed by Mahuad and Alberto Fujimori on 26 October 1998 — is treated from the other side at soc.culture.peru. And the Galápagos, a World Heritage site since 1978, drew questions from outsiders who had come for the islands rather than the country.

The era as a dated record

The same years carry a set of events that can be given exact dates. They are set down as a record, with no argument attached about cause or responsibility.

• April 1998 — the failure of a small bank opens the banking crisis; further failures follow through the year.
• December 1998 — the Deposit Guarantee Agency, the AGD, is established.
• January 1999 — a one per cent tax on financial transactions is introduced.
• 8 to 12 March 1999 — a national bank holiday of a full week; a partial deposit freeze follows, dollar-denominated deposits being frozen for between six months and a year.
• 19 August 1999 — volcanic activity resumes at Tungurahua.
• September 1999 — the government defaults on its external debt.
• October 1999 — Guagua Pichincha erupts and covers Quito in ash; renewed activity at Tungurahua leads to the temporary evacuation of more than 25,000 people from Baños and around it.
• 1999 — a ten-year agreement allows the United States to station up to 475 personnel at the air base at Manta, rent-free.
• 7 November 2001 — a 1–1 draw with Uruguay secures Ecuador’s first qualification for a FIFA World Cup.
• 2001 and 2003 — the World Heritage boundaries of the Galápagos are extended.
• 2003 — Spain introduces a visa requirement for Ecuadorian citizens.

Two dates in the same sequence sit outside the gateway’s run, which ended in 2004: the Galápagos were carried on the List of World Heritage in Danger from 2007 to 2010, and the last United States surveillance flight from Manta was made on 17 July 2009. In the other direction, the El Niño event of 1997 and 1998, estimated to have cost about 13 per cent of GDP, predates the crisis years and is usually given as part of their background.

Coast and sierra

The regional argument has a documentary history of its own, and a cartographic one. The Carta Geográfica del Ecuador of the German geologist Teodoro Wolf was published by order of the government in 1892, at a scale of 1:445,000 and printed by H. Wagner and E. Debes of Leipzig; it put the coast, the two Andean ranges and the eastern lowlands on a single sheet. Wolf also published a Geografía y geología del Ecuador.

The two cities at the ends of the argument are unlike in almost everything that can be measured. Guayaquil is the largest city, the main port and the commercial centre: census counts give it 1,508,444 people in 1990, 1,985,379 in 2001 and 2,291,158 in 2010. Quito stands at 2,850 metres, was refounded on its present site on 6 December 1534, and in 1978 became, with Kraków, one of the first two entire cities on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

The divide is audible. Ecuadorian Spanish is normally described in three regional varieties: an Equatorial Pacific or coastal variety, whose most remarked feature is the aspiration of s at the end of a word or before a consonant; an Andean or highland variety, which uses voseo; and an Amazonic variety. The morlaco accent of the Cuenca region realises /r/ as a fricative trill. Highland Spanish carries Kichwa vocabulary used by speakers of every background — ñaño for brother, choclo for corn on the cob.

It is legible as well. The Grupo de Guayaquil — Gallegos Lara, Gil Gilbert, Aguilera Malta, de la Cuadra and Pareja Diezcanseco — opened with Los que se van in 1930, a collection of stories by three of them, which took the montubios and cholos of the coast as its subject. Four years later Jorge Icaza of Quito published Huasipungo, set in the highlands; it has been translated into more than forty languages, with a complete English version in 1962.

Context

The emigration that followed the crisis was very large for a country of Ecuador’s size, and it happened inside the group’s own lifetime. Spain took the greatest share: Spanish statistics record the Ecuador-born population there as 3,972 in 1998, 20,481 in 2000 and 139,022 in 2001, reaching some 477,000 by 2008. Italy and the United States absorbed further waves.

For a small newsgroup a shift on that scale is not invisible, although its extent here can only be inferred rather than counted. A readership that in the mid-1990s would have been weighted towards students and professionals abroad had, within a few years, a much larger and much newer emigration behind it — one preoccupied with papers, work contracts and the price of a flight home.

The money moved with the people and, unlike the people, was counted every year. World Bank figures for personal remittances received by Ecuador rise from 386 million dollars in 1995 to 1.09 billion in 1999, 1.63 billion in 2003 and 1.84 billion in 2004; by 2007 they had passed three billion. In a dollarised economy that made them a national account item rather than a private matter between families, which is one reason the currency argument and the emigration argument were never separable.

As across the smaller soc.culture groups, those best placed to post were often the people furthest from the events under discussion, and the balance of voices stayed tilted outward for most of the group’s active life. Where the archive survives, what it preserves is a decade of argument conducted while the outcome was still open, by people who were part of what was being argued over.

Where the readers actually were

Spain’s share can be described more closely than a stock figure allows. Almost half a million Ecuadorians migrated there between 1998 and 2008, about 170,000 of them settling in the Community of Madrid between 1998 and 2005; women went predominantly into domestic service, men into agriculture, construction and the service trades. The visa requirement of 2003 brought the wave to an effective halt, though the resident population went on rising and peaked at 500,512 in late 2009.

Italy was the other main European destination, and a distinctly northern one. Its census of 2001 recorded 12,752 people born in Ecuador, the heaviest concentrations being at Genoa and Milan, with Lombardy alone holding close to half of the Ecuadorian residents in the country.

In the United States the settlement is older and geographically tight. As of 1990, sixty per cent of Ecuadorians in the country lived in the New York metropolitan area; Queens County alone counted about 101,000 in 2010. A separate and older circulation belongs to the Otavalo of Imbabura, estimated in 1990 at 45,000 to 50,000 around Otavalo with a further 5,000 to 8,000 elsewhere in Ecuador or abroad, whose woven textiles have long been exported to North America.

The clock is the part of this that shows in an archive. Mainland Ecuador keeps UTC-05:00 the year round, having observed daylight saving only once, briefly, between late 1992 and early 1993; the Galápagos moved to UTC-06:00 in 1986. New York therefore shares Quito’s clock for part of the year and runs an hour ahead for the rest, while Madrid and Milan are six or seven hours ahead. Nothing in that is peculiar to this group, but it is why a dispersed national newsgroup has no single busy hour and why a reply can look a day late when it was written within the hour.

Writing Spanish and Kichwa on a seven-bit network

The article format the group lived under was RFC 1036, Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages, by Mark Horton and Rick Adams, published in December 1987 and not formally superseded until RFC 5536 appeared in November 2009, five years after the gateway closed. It assumed plain ASCII, and ASCII has neither ñ nor an accented vowel.

The eight-bit answer existed early enough. ISO/IEC 8859-1, published in 1987, covers every letter Spanish needs, the inverted marks among them. Its complication was Windows-1252, which replaces the rarely used C1 control range from 0x80 to 0x9F with typographic characters; the two were confused so routinely that the HTML5 standard now reads a document declared as ISO-8859-1 as Windows-1252 instead. MIME supplied a way to say which was meant — RFC 1341 in June 1992, then the RFC 2045 to 2049 set of November 1996 — but saying it correctly depended on the posting software and on every relay in the path.

Unicode had nothing to invent for Spanish. Its first version, of October 1991, took its first 256 code points straight from ISO 8859-1, so the accented vowels and ñ have sat in the Latin-1 Supplement block from the beginning. The difficulty was never the repertoire but the habit: where an accent might or might not survive the journey, the safe course was to leave accents off altogether.

Kichwa, the Ecuadorian branch of the Quechuan family, is cheaper to type than Spanish. The unified orthography, Kichwa Unificado, was settled by the language academy ALKI on twenty-one characters: three vowels a i u, two semivowels w y, and sixteen consonants written ch h k l ll m n ñ p r s sh t ts z zh. All but ñ exist in plain ASCII. Kichwa also does not distinguish Proto-Quechuan /k/ from /q/, both being realised as [k]: kiru in Kichwa carries both the kiru and the qiru of Southern Quechua.

The other indigenous languages are more various than the Kichwa figures suggest: Shuar, of the Chicham family, had about 35,000 speakers on a 2007 estimate, and Cha’palaachi, Cofán, Waorani, Záparo and Secoya are recognised alongside it. The constitution of 2008, which postdates the group, makes Spanish official and Spanish, Kichwa and Shuar the languages of intercultural relations.

The consequence for searching what survives of the archive is worth stating plainly. Ecuadorian names and place names occur there in at least three forms — correctly accented, deliberately stripped of accents, and corrupted by a character-set mismatch somewhere along the path — so a search on the accented spelling alone will miss part of the record.

The islands, the mountain and the arc

The Galápagos reached the group mostly as enquiry from outside, but as a subject the islands sit inside a scientific history that begins on the mainland. The French Geodesic Mission left France in May 1735 and reached Quito in June 1736; Bouguer, Godin and La Condamine, with the Spanish officers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa and the Quito geographer Pedro Vicente Maldonado, measured a three-degree arc of meridian between the plains near Quito and Cuenca, completing the survey by 1739 and producing the first accurate determination of the shape of the earth.

Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland were on Chimborazo in 1802. The fold-out plate they published in 1807, the Naturgemälde, about 54 by 84 centimetres, drew the mountain in cross-section with its vegetation belts ranged by altitude, and is generally taken as the founding image of plant geography.

The Beagle reached the Galápagos in 1835. John Gould examined the bird specimens in January 1837 and identified the finches as a group of closely related species; an engraving of four of them appeared in the second edition of Darwin’s Journal of Researches in 1845.

The modern institutions are all datable, which makes the islands an unusually tractable subject. The Galápagos National Park was established in 1959 and began operation in 1968, with its first superintendent in 1971 and its first management plan in 1974. The Charles Darwin Foundation was founded in 1959 under the auspices of UNESCO and the World Conservation Union; its research station was established in the same year, dedicated in 1964, and awarded the International Cosmos Prize in 2002, inside the gateway’s run. A marine reserve and a biosphere reserve designation both date from 1986, and the reserve now covers some 133,000 square kilometres.

On the World Heritage list the islands hold reference number 1, inscribed at the committee’s second session in 1978 and extended in 2001 and 2003. Ecuador is unusual in holding two entries from that first round, the historic centre of Quito having been inscribed in the same year.

Between the crises

Most of what a culture group carries is not crisis. Food divides along the same seam as everything else: ceviche and encebollado on the coast, hornado, cuy and llapingachos in the highlands, yuca as the staple of the Amazon. One dish is fixed to the calendar — fanesca, eaten in Lent and at Easter — which supplies an annual and entirely predictable occasion for the recipe argument every national newsgroup runs.

The music has both a national genre and a fixed date. The pasillo, a nineteenth-century form carried across the northern Andes with the independence wars, is treated in Ecuador as the national style. Julio Jaramillo, born in Guayaquil on 1 October 1935 and dead on 9 February 1978 at forty-two, recorded more than 2,200 songs across bolero, vals, pasillo, corrido and tango; his Nuestro Juramento of 1957 remains the best known. Since 1993 his birthday has been observed as the Día del Pasillo Ecuatoriano, an annual peg that fell inside the group’s life every year it ran.

Sport supplied the two datable triumphs of the period. Jefferson Pérez won the 20 kilometres walk at Atlanta on 26 July 1996 in 1:20:07, the youngest Olympic race-walk champion; he later took three consecutive world titles, at Paris in 2003, Helsinki in 2005 and Osaka in 2007. The men’s football team qualified for a World Cup for the first time with a 1–1 draw against Uruguay on 7 November 2001; at the 2002 finals it scored its first World Cup goal through Agustín Delgado and beat Croatia. The run to the second round in 2006 came after the gateway had closed.

Painting had its own dated moment inside the group’s life: Oswaldo Guayasamín, born in Quito on 6 July 1919, died on 10 March 1999, and the Capilla del Hombre he co-designed above the city opened to the public in 2002. The festival calendar gave the year its other fixtures — 6 December for Quito’s refoundation of 1534, 9 October for Guayaquil’s declaration of independence in 1820, Inti Raymi on 22 June in Ecuador, and the Mama Negra at Latacunga, held for the Virgen de la Merced at the end of September, a devotion traced to the belief that in 1742 she halted an eruption of Cotopaxi.

And there is the standing correction. The Panama hat is woven in Ecuador, the finest of them at Montecristi; the name records the isthmus through which nineteenth-century shipments passed, not a place of manufacture. They were shown at the Paris exposition of 1855, and Theodore Roosevelt was photographed wearing one on a visit to the canal works in 1906, which spread both the hat and the misnomer further.