March 2006

The Silencing of Jaime Hurtado

by Tonyaa J. Weathersbee

GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador – Lenin Hurtado has a bustling law practice here. But he isn’t interested in building wealth for himself as much as he is interested in building foundations for justice for the poorest Ecuadorians.

It’s a passion he comes by honestly. His father was Jaime Hurtado – a lawyer and the first Afro-Ecuadorian to be elected to that country’s Congress in 1979. In 1984, Hurtado did a Jesse Jackson turn and ran for president.

“He came in fourth,” Lenin Hurtado said. “But he was the first [Afro-Ecuadorian] to run for president. He was one of the leaders of leftist thought in Latin America…he always defended the workers and the laborers. Never the big guy.”

But Hurtado didn’t get a chance to see his dream of an Ecuador controlled by its marginalized working classes. On Feb.17, 1999, he and two other leaders of his national organization, the Democratic Popular Movement, were gunned down in Quito, Ecuador’s capital.

Government officials have blamed the killings on right-wing Colombian death squads. They said the death squads did Hurtado in because he was using the Colombian guerilla group, the FARC, to teach his political group how to start an insurgency movement in Ecuador. But others, including Amnesty International, suspect that Hurtado was targeted for assassination by the Ecuador government for his role in leading strikes and protests against the policies of its then-president, Jamil Mahuad.

In either case, Hurtado’s assassins have not been caught.

“I became a public guy on the day he was assassinated, because I was going to have to push the fight to look into it,” said Lenin Hurtado, who was 32 when his father was killed. “That day, I became a leader…I have enemies now.”

************

It was the big guy – the Ecuadorian government and the multinational corporations that influence it – that Jaime Hurtado spent his life battling.

He was reared in Esmeraldas as the child of farmers, and migrated to Guayaquil to go to school. He played basketball and ran track. He excelled in his studies, but Hurtado didn’t bask in his success, his son said.

What he did was work to raze the centuries-old barriers of class and race that were keeping so many other Ecuadorians from having prosperity and dignity in their lives.
“He [Hurtado] experienced discrimination when he tried to study,” Lenin Hurtado said. “But he worked to make it easier for everyone to go to the University [of Guayaquil].
“My father knew that if they [poor and black Ecuadorians] studied, they could fight against the discrimination.”

Hurtado started working with labor unions and farmers. Their plight, as well as his own experiences, transformed him into a devout Marxist – and a leader of the Democratic Popular Movement, or DPM.

“He was called the ‘Chino Negro,” (a Chinese black) said Jean Muteba Rahier, an expert on Afro-Ecuadorian culture and an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Florida International University. “It was a way to disparage him as a follower of Maoist teachings.”

Hurtado and members of his movement were persistent critics of Mahuad, under whose regime the sucre (Bolivia’s currency) lost value against the dollar by 15 percent and inflation increased by 61 percent. The DPM blamed privatization and other Mahuad policies for intensifying poverty in Ecuador, and led a number of general strikes and protests against his regime.

Mahaud was forced out of office in 2000. He now lectures at universities in the United States. Hurtado, however, never got the chance to see what Ecuador might become without Mahaud.

“The assassination came as he was doing a lot of research around the [corrupt] activities of the government,” Lenin Hurtado said. “People from the government thought it out, and did that assassination.”

*********
As Lenin Hurtado recalls his father’s struggle, the one thing that doesn’t come up a lot is Jaime Hurtado’s role in fighting for the rights of Afro-Ecuadorians.

That’s probably because Hurtado believed that he could do more to bring about change for Afro-Ecuadorians through a broader focus on the rights of workers and rural laborers – groups that not only include Afro-Ecuadorians, but indigenous peasants and other groups.

“He [Jaime Hurtado] was preoccupied with class, not race,” Rahier said. “He was not holding a political discourse based on race. He was working for the working class.”
That was a more strategic path for reform, since Afro-Ecuadorians only make up about 7 to 10 percent of the population, Rahier said. They are also involved in many of the indigenous movements, he said.

But that hasn’t hindered Hurtado’s sway over Afro-Ecuadorians.
In Esmeraldas, festivals are held to commemorate him. Huge posters of Hurtado, gleaming and groomed in a suit and tie and demanding that his assassins be captured, are posted in some offices. Those things ensure that Hurtado’s life and his death aren’t forgotten. His son certainly won’t forget.

“I’m going to keep fighting to find the killers,” Lenin Hurtado said.