Ecuador is in the news these days for its embassy in London giving sanctuary to Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, who is in danger of extradition from Britain and prosecution in the United States. Ecuador, in fact, has a long history of defying the U.S. Empire.<\/p>\n
Few people remember that the country once defied the U.S. by joining a wave of nonviolent campaigns in 1944, as the Second World War was coming to a close. U.S. embassies at the time were trumpeting President Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s Four Freedoms, his ideological justification for the war. The irony was that, among the series of U.S.-backed dictatorships in Latin America, even one freedom was subversive, much less four.<\/p>\n
El Salvador initiated a five-country wave of resistance in April, when army officers launched a military coup against U.S.-backed dictator Maximiliano Hern\u00e1ndez Mart\u00ednez, who had held power for over a decade. He\u2019d done the usual things: censored the press, outlawed dissident parties, targeted labor activists and peasant organizers and set up a secret police force.<\/p>\n
In 1944, it was reasonable to think that only a violent rebellion could destroy the regime, and a conspiracy emerged to do exactly that.\u00a0Mart\u00ednez put down the military revolt. He then hunted down anyone he thought might have been involved in the plot, and a bloodbath began.<\/p>\n
The university students reacted by planning a general strike for the first week of May. As they organized, they emphasized the strike\u2019s nonviolent character by calling it \u201chuelga de brazos caidos,\u201d<\/em> or \u201cstrike with arms at your side.\u201d<\/p>\n Workers, market women, teachers, doctors and many others joined the rapidly growing strike. The regime floundered. They knew how to squash a violent revolt, but didn\u2019t know what to do with the student-led nonviolent campaign. Mart\u00ednez\u2019 order to arrest the student leaders was followed inefficiently by the police.\u00a0Mart\u00ednez denounced the campaign as a movement of the rich, but everyone could see that it drew from all classes.<\/p>\n After police opened fire on students and killed one of them, more Salvadoreans joined the campaign\u2019s demonstrations. Several cabinet ministers resigned, and\u00a0Mart\u00ednez saw the end coming. On May 7, he resigned, and soon left the country.<\/p>\n Although the students knew how to bring down a dictator<\/a>, they did not prepare a nonviolent defense against the pushback from Salvador\u2019s 1 percent. After a summer\u2019s maneuvering, in October the oligarchy backed a military coup against Mart\u00ednez\u2019 successor, and a new dictator was installed.<\/p>\n In neighboring Guatemala, university students caught the wave of resistance<\/a>. Their president, Jorge Ubico, was known as \u201cthe Iron Dictator of the Caribbean.\u201d His secret police were especially vicious, but Guatemalan students were not willing to be outdone by their Salvadoran sisters and brothers.<\/p>\n When the students backed up their June strike with a demonstration, they underscored their nonviolent strategy with the tactic of marching with their arms behind their backs. That night, police beat, shot and arrested hundreds. Women reinforced the nonviolent discipline by holding a silent, peaceful march. Troops fired at the march and killed a woman, the movement\u2019s first martyr.<\/p>\n As with the aftermath of repression in El Salvador, the death of\u00a0Mar\u00eda Chinchilla Recino brought out the masses in Guatemala City. The economy shut down. The \u201cIron Dictator\u201d found his base fleeing from him; at the end, only the army and the U.S. ambassador remained loyal. He had no choice but to resign, and he did so on July 1, 1944.<\/p>\n A few days later, the struggle going on simultaneously in Honduras entered a critical phase<\/a>. The campaign had been growing since May, after the failure of a military coup against dictator Tiburcio\u00a0Car\u00edas the previous November. (Violent coups don\u2019t seem to be everything they\u2019re cracked up to be.)<\/p>\n On July 4, Hondurans were ready for bolder action, and, as in Guatemala, it was led by students and women. The movement then escalated its nonviolent tactics two days later. The movement\u2019s leadership, aware of the minimal casualties in El Salvador and Guatemala, was not prepared for the massacre that the Honduran troops then unleashed. Despite estimates of deaths ranging from 20 to 144, Hondurans\u2019 indignation didn\u2019t translate into mass action. Fewer turned out for the next series of protests, and\u00a0Car\u00edas was able to ride out the storm without resigning.<\/p>\n Then, in late June, Nicaraguan university students<\/a> held a demonstration in solidarity with the Guatemalan students, who were at that moment trying to defend their victory against the oligarchy\u2019s pushback.<\/p>\n Opponents to Nicaragua\u2019s own dictator \u2014 the notorious Anastasio Somoza \u2014 were already testing the ground for a strong nonviolent campaign. Unfortunately for them, Somoza correctly recognized the power of labor unions and had been courting them ever since he took office in 1936.<\/p>\n Although some workers joined the June campaign, Somoza was largely successful in limiting the movement to the middle class. That limitation ruled out the tactic of the general strike that proved so successful in El Salvador and Guatemala.<\/p>\n The campaigners also confined themselves largely to rallies and marches rather than reaching for a broader range of nonviolent tactics that middle-class people could do. The campaign made headway when some government ministers resigned and two newspapers attacked by the regime went on strike. Still, Somoza\u2019s pillars of support remained largely intact.<\/p>\n A much bigger portion of the 99 percent participated in Ecuador, and that made all the difference. Ecuador\u2019s President Arroyo del\u00a0R\u00edo had not co-opted organized labor in his power base. When the pro-democracy movement erupted there in 1944, it included workers and middle class people campaigning together.<\/p>\n The nonviolent campaign began the day after an armed, conspiratorial attempt to launch a coup against del R\u00edo.<\/p>\n In the evening of May 28, a group of military officers revolted, capturing members of the police and burning their barracks. At the same time, civilians attacked businesses owned by del R\u00edo\u2019s allies. The civilians then found themselves under attack by loyal elements of the army; the civilians fought back violently, and there were casualties.<\/p>\n The next morning, after this violent curtain-raiser, the nonviolent campaigners surged into the streets: women, students, Indians, peasants, intellectuals, lower ranking military personnel, Catholics, Communists. The campaigners encircled both government buildings and the presidential palace in the capital city of Quito, demanding del R\u00edo\u2019s resignation. The students took over the duty of traffic police. The growth of a general strike even included a peasant strike.<\/p>\n By the end of May, the dictator was finished<\/a>.<\/p>\n This 1944 wave of Latin American pro-democracy struggles<\/a> had ripples in other countries as well. The people were up against dictatorships sponsored by the 1 percent and backed by the U.S. empire; it\u2019s remarkable that of the five major nonviolent campaigns, three won their immediate objective.<\/p>\n In two of the three overthrows, the nonviolent campaign won after a previous violent revolt had failed. In one of them, the first move by some of the rebels was a night of violence, but the majority of the people realized it would take what we now call \u201cpeople power\u201d to win, and they were willing to fill the political space with nonviolent tactics.<\/p>\n All this happened in 1944, well before the analysis of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan showed that nonviolent struggle for regime change is twice as likely to succeed as violent struggle<\/a>. The Latin American campaigners intuitively knew back then that it made sense to use nonviolent tools when they risked their lives for freedom.<\/p>\n I first discovered the El Salvador and Guatamalan cases deep in the heart of the Harvard Library in 1968, and persuaded historian Patricia Parkman to research them properly using her Spanish skills. I had already been warned by two professional Latin Americanists that I wouldn\u2019t find any cases of Latin Americans doing nonviolent action, because \u201cthey don\u2019t do that kind of thing \u2014 machismo,<\/em> you know.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s very satisfying to see scholarship \u2014 and radical politics \u2014 finally catching up with the tradition of popular wisdom in nonviolent resistance that is many, many centuries old.<\/p>\n At the same time as today\u2019s activists are discovering we have more of a legacy than we knew, however, we can\u2019t overlook our own responsibility to innovate. The civilian insurrections that have overthrown dictators sometimes lack staying power because the movements don\u2019t know how to defend their gains. And the focus on the top of the political structure \u2014 the regime \u2014 can ignore the deeper changes a society needs for liberation and community. As encouraged as we are to learn that nonviolent struggle can often beat violence, we still have much to learn to achieve a living revolution.<\/p>\n ___________________________<\/p>\n George Lakey is Visiting Professor at Swarthmore College and a Quaker. He has led 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national, and international levels. Among many other books and articles, he is author of \u201cStrategizing for a Living Revolution<\/a>\u201d in David Solnit\u2019s book Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2004). His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in and most recent was with Earth Quaker Action Team while protesting mountain top removal coal mining.<\/em><\/p>\n