I got to see the President!

If there's one thing I love about the Galapagos Islands, it's the politics. It's election season in Ecuador again, and tomorrow, everyone of age (literally; voting is mandatory here) will take to the polls to decide whether or not to reelect the current president, Rafael Correa. My host family in Quito is convinced that he's a dictator who will win even if it requires some vote-fixing, and in Ecuador, where most authority figures apparently come with a price tag, I wouldn't necessarily be surprised. But Correa's motives and policies are also not really my concern. There's no voters' guide here, so I have only hearsay and sketchily-translated TV blurbs to base my opinion of candidates' platforms on and no way of telling how likely they are to follow through on their platforms anyway. In any case, I also don't know Ecuador well enough to know what plan is right for it as a country and what changes will be beneficial or harmful. So for now, I've been primarily just enjoying the spectacle of it all.

My house is on the main street of our little town, so I get to witness almost all of the fun. There are posters and flags everywhere, everyone has a t-shirt on, and at night, people rent out taxis or take their own cars around blaring campaign ads and jingles. The Creo party, which I don't think I ever saw in Quito, has been throwing some giant speakers in the trunk of a car and driving back and forth in circles around town playing over and over and over "eeeee-o eee-o Otro Ecuador es possible!" Creo also has a gigantic poster on one of my friend's houses that covers half the building. Alianza PAIS (Correa's party) and at least one or two others have discovered that if they rent out the pickup truck taxis here, they can have not only speakers, but flags and giant posters of their candidate displayed in the back as well, and they've been grouping their resources into little motorcades that go around trying to whip people on their front porches into small frenzies over their candidates. 

Rallies are more like parties, and despite being audible across town, they routinely last until seven in the morning. Some, like the Socialist rally, have taken the approach of wrapping the political dialogue around a salsa performance by a live singer. Or, in the case of the Avanza rally, they just rented out the same place used for the celebrations of the anniversary of the Galapagos becoming a province and used the already-present beer and fireworks to attract more crowds. I've also seen/heard several groups of campaigners going around on foot. Even right now, at 11:30, there are kids running around chanting "Go treinta y cinco! Go treinta y cinco!" (35/treinta y cinco is the number of Correa's political party. All the parties have numbers here and I believe his is named for Article 35 of Ecuador's new constitution, which his administration wrote.)

My house is about a block away from the headquarters of the Avanza crew, which had some kind of cookout last week to try and snag the votes of the numerous passersby. (They don't have a presidential candidate, but they're campaigning quite hard for their assembly-people--They've even funded a free wifi zone for part of the town!) I didn't make it down because the activity on our front porch (a big fish sale!) was too exciting to miss, but I did keep an eye on it. They've created a cover of Gangnam Style as one of their campaign songs and even have a small dance floor on the ground level of their headquarters building. One day when I came back from an afternoon field trip, their sound system was broken and playing the same line over and over again, but they got it fixed before the party, when they just played whole song over and over again. I guess people here have a high tolerance for repetition...

I should say more about the campaign songs, because I love them. Latin music and dance are such important aspects of the culture here that every campaign features them very prominently, in their rallies, in their motorcades, in their TV commercials... They vary in quality with how large and well-funded their party is, but all are very interesting to listen to. Obviously, patriotism and the "patria" (fatherland) is a big theme, but other candidates' songs discuss the merits of their party and the presumed nastiness of Correa and/or the other parties to various degrees. In Creo's case, their song is that one line repeated over and over again. But for Lucio Gutierrez, the song is long, involved, and noticeably different from all the other candidates' because it involves a dramatic, movie-soundtrack-esque opening that describes the horrors of the current administration and the lackluster other options, before transitioning into an excited melody describing how awesome it was when Lucio was president. I heard that and was a little thrown... But you guessed it: he was part of a coup that overthrew Jamil Mahuad (the guy who dollarized the economy and one of the few past presidents my Quito family will speak highly of) in 2000 and was later jailed, elected, charged with embezzlement, and exiled, which apparently only made him hungry to do it all over again, and he's running with a party named for the date of his coup.

The clincher is this: last Sunday, we got an in-person visit from none other than Rafael Correa himself. GAIAS told us not to go in light of the recent stabbings in Esmeraldas, but I was really interested in what he has to say. One of my host parents' sons is a big Correa fan (he's one of the ones that goes nuts every time the motorcade comes by) and he was so excited about me going that he gifted me with not one but fully FOUR 35 Pais shirts. I ended up taking one but not wearing it, since I wanted to be unaffiliated. That turned out to be a bad idea, since I'd worn a tank top that I could easily wear under the t-shirt if need be, and despite the downpour that lasted for most of Correa's talk, I got a viciously bad sunburn that is *still blistering* a week later.  Hello, Equator.

Anyway, I watched the entirety of Correa's speech (I tried to film the whole thing, but as usual, I'd forgotten to charge my camera batteries, so I only got about the first quarter of it) and it was very exciting. He talked about how he wasn't a dictator, and about how he was upholding the laws, particularly in relation to Article 35 (which he had on a clipboard to read) and he talked about his "una sola vuelta" (only one change--I still don't know what exactly it refers to [see comments]) and about how his campaign was the revolution Ecuador needs. And he talked about building hospitals in the Galapagos and got all the kids onstage to take photos at the end, and naturally, there was another 99% of the content that I missed because of lack of Spanish ability.

Here's Correa wielding some of his political charm at the mobs in front of the stage (which was literally a porta-tent with two or three policemen in front of it to keep people from running up and hugging him to death). For reference, I was towards the back of the stage-mob crowd, and I was maybe ten feet from the corner of stage nearest me.

You can't really see the rain in this shot, but it was freakin' pouring as soon as he stepped on stage, which none of the supporters seemed to notice at all. Also note that their primary campaign color is lime green. They've probably just about exhausted the world's supply of lime green dye by now... But anyway, by far the best thing about the Correa rally was the music. Being the biggest and the best funded campaign, PAIS has put together some genuinely awesome music. Like, I would actually listen to this, catchy chorus, relatively well-done lyrics (generally taken from the campaign slogans), varying styles, and very nicely recorded (unlike, say, Avanza's Gangnam Style take off, which sounded like it had been recorded on somebody's laptop microphone). The rally was supposed to start at 10, but they announced Correa's plane landing at 10:20ish and his motorcade rolled up at around 11, so we got a whole hour of listening to campaign music, which I didn't mind at all, until the guy running the rally apparently freaked out that people were losing interest because of the delay and started trying to rev up the crowd with a call-and-response deal that involved muting lyrics from one of the songs so that people could yell them back, which lasted for far too long and wasn't necessarily the most skillfully executed affair. But aside from that, the music was great and everybody onstage (Correa and the assembly candidates) danced to it when they played it in between segments of Correa's talk.

By far the most exciting part of the rally came about halfway through (naturally, after my camera had died). Correa had been talking about some corruption somewhere when suddenly, a guy walks onstage and passes him a clothing iron. I was like, Did he get a wrinkle or something? But then he turned the iron (yes, lime green and white) to face the audience, and we could see that the bottom had been covered by a "Vota todo 35 PAIS" sticker. And to make it all better, they played the music again, and Correa *danced* with his iron! I mean, he really got into it. He was making air-ironing motions and salsa-ing and waving the thing around. And then it got passed to the asambleistas, who had been doing their own little salsa number every time the music came on, and they all danced with it as well! At the time, I was completely baffled, but later it was explained to me that the term for voting for the same party for every position here is "vota en plancha," and since plancha means iron, it was just a visual gimmick to try and get people to vote 35 for the whole ticket.

The end of the rally saw the asambleistas each making a brief ploy at the crowd (although they didn't seem to be saying much of substance, just that the Galapagos is the "capital of paradise" and that the oranges here are great) and the departure of Correa in his motorcade. I thought they'd at least keep people from swarming the motorcade, but once Correa was safely inside his truck, they moved the sawhorses that had been blocking the way aside and let people chase after the vehicles. (Stabbing, what stabbing?) I lost them at the top of the small hill they had to go up to get away from the waterfront, where the rally was, but as I was walking back to my house, I turned a corner to see Correa just leaving some people and getting back in his vehicle. Damn! If only I had kept running, I could have caught him and gotten his signature or something! Oh well. The day was exciting enough...

My host family in Quito openly despise Correa and are voting for Lasso (candidate of the Creo party and the one often connected to Mahuad) as the least worst option. My host family here has PAIS flags outside their house and seem like perfect Correistas, but I caught them speculating about Lasso's chances at winning while we were watching election news on TV and asked my host father about it, who confessed that they were secretly voting for him but trying to keep up appearances with the Correa flags (apparently only their son who got me the shirts is actually a Correa fan). There's a lot of stigma around political affiliations here and I wish I spoke enough Spanish to get a better understanding of it. I did meet one gal who said she was voting for Lasso because Correa had implemented a policy whereby university students don't get to pick what to study; rather, they take a test and the results determine what they study instead. Supposedly Lasso would be getting rid of that rule and she didn't mind being open in her support of that decision.

The last poll I saw gave Correa 45% of the vote, with Lasso coming in second at 10%. I don't think that's close enough for a run-off election, so in order to maintain the fun through April, Lasso's going to have to do really well tomorrow. And why do two candidates account for only 55% of the vote? Well, naturally, it's because Ecuador has fully six more contenders for Carondelet (the presidential palace). Other runners include Gutierrez, whose last experience in power ended with him getting mobbed at the Quito airport, Alvaro Noboa, who owns the largest banana export business in the country and is running for the fifth time, Nelson Zavala, a preacher who believes his presidency is God's will, Nelson Wray, who seems like a bit of a hippie (but I don't really know anything about him), and Mauricio Rodas and Alberto Acosta, one of whom is running on a platform of engaging the youth and one of whom is running on a platform of attacking the current government, although I forget which is which. The national elections committee also authorized three other political parties to participate in the elections, even if they're not running candidates for presidency. These include Avanza, the socialists, and Pachakutik, the party which attempts to represent indigenous people's interests and helped Gutierrez in his coup before helping to remove him from power.

Personally, I'm hoping for a run-off between Correa and Lasso, but we'll see tomorrow!