In her anthropological recollection of the crisis, María Vera explains that one of the main reasons for the deposit freeze declared by the government in 1999 was to avoid the bankruptcy of the Banco del Progreso, an institution that – with more than 720,000 account holders – was arguably too big to fail.
1 Vera, p. 76. Headquartered in Guayaquil, Banco del Progreso was not only one of the largest financial institutions operating in Ecuador (with branches in the Cayman Islands as well) but it was also the centrepiece of a vast economic group that included several media outlets, from television to press and radio.
2 The relation between banks and media played a significant role in the crisis. Outlets related to the owners of Banco del Progreso were used to support the image of an inexistent stability that would stop deposit runs. Among those outlets was El Telégrafo, Ecuador’s oldest newspaper, which was ‘intensively’ employed to support the claims of regionalism and to argue that the bank’s problems were motivated by the national government’s intention to diminish the importance and influence of Guayaquil in the national scenario. See Antonio Checa-Godoy, ‘La banca y la propiedad de los medios: el caso de Ecuador’, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 67 (2012), pp. 125–147 (p. 313). Its closure, which came in spite of the deposit freeze, stirred a nationwide controversy that complicated even more the already troubled Ecuadorian society of 1999. The representatives of the bank – led by its owner and CEO, Fernando Aspiazu – sided with conservative politicians from the Coast, notably including Guayaquil’s mayor and former president León Febres-Cordero, to rally a large demonstration against the ‘regionalismo’ of the national government, arguing that Mahuad’s administration favoured the interests of the interior of the country (Quito notably) to the detriment of those of Guayaquil. Aspiazu attributed the debacle of his bank ‘al favoritismo del gobierno hacia la banca serrana’, tapping into a long history of rivalry between
costa and
sierra.
3 Vera, p. 77. The demonstrations forced the government to dispatch a millionaire bailout that was ultimately unsuccessful in its attempt to save the bank. In July 1999, Banco del Progreso was forced into governmental control in order to be liquidated and Fernando Aspiazu became the first major banker to be imprisoned in relation to the events of the
Feriado Bancario.
The story of Banco del Progreso, a bank that was once considered the most solvent financial institution in Ecuador, became an analogy for the Ecuadorian economy: a boom-and-bust tale that brought severe consequences for thousands of people across different classes, ethnic origins, genders and races. Regardless of its actual uneven consequences, the crisis is understood as a horizontal experience that affected the whole nation, from the top 1% banker who ended up in jail, to the pensioners who lost their lives’ savings with the closure of the banks.
4 It has often been argued that minority groups who were not part of the baking system, that is, who did not have money in the banks, were not affected by their collapse. However, that is a misconception of the crisis. While it might be true that people who did not have access to banking services in the first place were not part of the thousands who lost their savings when the banks collapsed, their personal economies were affected nevertheless by the devaluation of the national currency at first, and its replacement with the US dollar later. To portray the extensive reach of the crisis, the Ecuadorian writer Eliécer Cárdenas turns it into a based-on-truth fiction in
El oscuro final del Porvenir (2000), a novel that allegorises the story of Banco del Progreso through the story of the fictional bank El Porvenir. In Spanish, both words
porvenir and
progreso possess similar connotations: they equally evoke a future to come, one that is hoped to be better than the present.
5 To deliver the promise of a brighter future, Banco del Progreso offered some of the highest interest rates for deposits in the Ecuadorian context. In that sense, the two banks – fictional and real
– tap into the history of a continuous Latin American quest: the achievement of ‘progress’, especially in economic terms.
6 Historically, institutions such as the World Bank have levelled economic development with the idea of progress in Latin American countries. In this light, the achievement of ‘progress’ is largely the reflection of economic reforms. See Norman Loayza and Luisa Palacios, ‘Economic Reform and Progress in Latin America and the Caribbean’, Policy Research Working Paper, 1829 (1997), pp. 1–96 (p. 1). This quest proves to be an inescapable labyrinthine loop – or boom/bust cycle – in which hope for ‘progress’ is followed by catastrophe, as suggested by the ‘oscuro final’ of the fictional bank, its real counterpart, and the Ecuadorian economy itself.
El oscuro final del Porvenir has been overlooked both in terms of readership and critical attention. It was published by the Ecuadorian branch of Seix Barral and was commercially unsuccessful, as it went rapidly out-of-print. Today it remains a hard-to-find book even within the oeuvre of Eliécer Cárdenas, who has authored some novels – most notably
Polvo y ceniza (1979) – that are considered classics of Ecuadorian narrative and are regularly reprinted. Ecuadorian critics have made only cursory mentions of it, often agreeing with Miguel Donoso Pareja’s view that it is a novel that suffers from the same ‘descuido y urgencia coyuntural’ that could be found in another novel associated with the Ecuadorian crisis, that is, Guido Jalil’s
Usureros, diantres y endriagos (2000).
7 I disagree with Donoso Pareja when he says that Guido Jalil’s Usureros, diantres y endriagos is a novel about the Feriado Bancario. I see Jalil’s novel as a fictional portrayal of economic, social and political corruption in Ecuadorian society that mentions some of the events of the Ecuadorian crisis but does not delve deep into its causes, developments or consequences as El oscuro final del Porvenir does. That is the main reason why I do not consider Jalil’s novel as a pivotal text to reflect on the Feriado Bancario and its legacies for Ecuadorian society. Donoso Pareja’s critique is that, as a fiction,
El oscuro final del Porvenir is only concerned with documenting the visible problems of Ecuador’s present, and it does so in an over-simplistic manner. Although in some sense
El oscuro final del Porvenir could indeed be classified as a didactic novel, its value lies precisely in its documentary approach: it is the first and so far most comprehensive literary approximation to the Ecuadorian crisis per se. Ecuadorian narrative has produced many novels that engage with the migration phenomenon triggered by the
Feriado Bancario, but Cárdenas’ remains to this day the only one that explicitly and directly tries to make sense of the event that drove many Ecuadorians away from their homeland in the first place. In doing so, I argue, it articulates the transcendent significance of the banking collapse for the Ecuadorian nation.
To explore the real-life implications of the economic bust of 1998, Cárdenas opens his novel when the bubble that was the supposedly safe-and-sound Ecuadorian banking system is beginning to burst. The plot starts with an opening line, an auditory image, that predicts the breaking of a previously calm state: ‘el ruido de un cristal quebrándose suspendió, en un instantáneo congelamiento, las manos de Corita, su secretaria, que le servía en ese momento una taza de café’.
8 Eliécer Cárdenas, El oscuro final del Porvenir (Quito: Seix Barral, 2000), p. 11. The broken glass is one of the windows of the headquarters of El Porvenir,
which has been closed due to illiquidity problems
. A group of angry customers is breaking into the bank to violently reclaim their savings. The frightened secretary is serving coffee to Carlos Alemán, CEO of the bank and main protagonist of the novel, who is disturbed by the noise in his top-floor office. Intrigued by the noise, Carlos looks out the window to see that, down below, outside the bank, there is a continually growing mob of protesters screaming ‘ladrones, ladrones’ and fighting their way past the riot police that guards the entrance:
‘Han roto los cristales de las puertas de acceso. No hubo manera de contenerlos. Son bastantes’. ¿Y los efectivos de la Policía Antidisturbios que de la antevíspera ocupaban posiciones tanto en el interior como en las áreas externas del local? Quiso saber Carlos Alemán. ‘Tampoco pudieron contenerlos y uno de esos estúpidos acaba de tirar una granada lacrimógena y aquí abajo en el vestíbulo, los ánimos de esas gentes están que arden’.
9 Cárdenas, p. 13.The ground floor of El Porvenir has deteriorated into mayhem. In contrast, the top floor remains seemingly untouched by the chaos. However, the calmness experienced by those above is fictitious. The novel hints at the fragility of Carlos’ secluded world with the description of a painting hanging in his office, left there by a previous CEO. The picture depicts ‘un tren que surcaba un firmamento anochecido, sobre casitas de colores pasteles y techados naranja, árboles de redondos follajes y cristalinas esferas que se suspendían en el aire, entre mariposas y colibríes inmensos, huevos descomunales’.
10 Although unspecified, the painting is most likely one of the ‘Flying Trains’ painted by the Ecuadorian artist Gonzalo Endara Crow. His work has often been related to surrealism and magical realism. See Cárdenas, p. 13. Carlos dislikes the painting as he considers it too surreal. Nonetheless, just as the flying train, his own world is suspended in thin air, and he must descend to face the angry mob gathered on the ground floor. The fictionality of money in the banking system is questioned as the bank’s CEO walks down the stairs and, levels below, he finds the debt collection team staring at their computers, working on operations that – after the bankruptcy – now exist only on their screens: ‘“Toda operación en la pantalla es real, debe serlo”, le había respondido a un escéptico, pero de inmediato se preguntó acerca del grado de realidad de un banco.’
11 Cárdenas, p. 15.Carlos’ descent to the ground floor is also his descent into the reality of the crisis, as he is not going to remain untouched by its consequences. As he journeys down the stairs, the level where the protesters exist becomes more and more palpable for him: the tear gas starts to disturb his breathing and the noise to get on his nerves. When he finally reaches the lobby, overran by the angry customers, he is met by a faceless crowd that screams together: ‘ladrones, ladrones, devuélvanos nuestro dinero’.
12 Cárdenas, p. 18. In front of the protesters, Carlos learns that the fictionality of the bank’s operations – even when he questions the degree of reality any bank has – is very much connected to real-life circumstances. The novel makes it clear that the closing of his bank has life-threatening implications for some of its clients, a major threat for the people who had their lifetime savings in the banks:
Un viejecito calvo, de apergaminada piel, traje raído y corbata sebosa, se movió entre los presentes con unos inseguros pasos y se dirigió con un tímido ademán al que oficiaba como líder: quería hablar […] Dijo que hacía menos de un año recibió una cesantía, una miseria, fruto de cuarenta y tres años de servicio en una dependencia pública, y aquel dinero lo depositó en el banco para ganar los respectivos intereses y pasar sus últimos días. Además, su mujer estaba postrada por una parálisis y con ellos vivía una hija suya, abandonada por el marido, con un hijo pequeño.
– Y ahora qué voy a hacer, señores, qué … – la opaca voz del viejecito se quebró en un llanto espasmódico.
13 Cárdenas, p. 25. The novel features other similar testimonies in this opening section, placing its emphasis on describing the impacts of the banking collapse on some of the most vulnerable members of Ecuadorian society, most notably the elderly:
– Tiene la palabra usted, compañera – el del sombrero se dirigía a una vieja que se sostenía con el antebrazo sobre el asa de un bastón metálico […] La anciana emitió una tanda de sincopados graznidos de ave enferma, procurando hacerse escuchar. Su seguro de viudez y montepío lo había invertido en el banco. Era una enferma crónica y precisaba de medicinas costosas para su tratamiento. ¿Ahora, cómo iba a sobrevivir? Esos miserables del banco le quitaban lo suyo.
14 Cárdenas, p. 27. The tragic stories featured in
El oscuro final del Porvenir are fictional, but they might as well be real. Authentic testimonies of those affected by the
Feriado Bancario are very similar to those narrated by Cárdenas, as María Vera reminds us through a collection of real-life testimonies of people who lost their savings when the banks closed.
15 Vera’s methodology includes the analysis of press archives and in-depth interviews with people directly affected by the Ecuadorian crisis. It is partly because of these recollections that she sees the crisis as a social catastrophe that caused the decline of the material conditions of existence, sense of security and welfare of those affected. The sudden disappearance of their savings created deep anxieties in the victims. However, in my view, those anxieties developed not only because of the money they lost, but also because a system in which they believed was revealed as untrustworthy. Money, and in general the economy, Isabel Gil argues, works as a ‘system of representation’ that shapes ‘both the material way we live as well as the ways in which we make sense of the world’.
16 Isabel Capeloa Gil, ‘On the Cultural Life of Money’, in The Cultural Life of Money, ed. by Isabel Capeloa Gil and Helena Gonçalves da Silva (Berlín: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 1–23 (p. 8). In this sense, accounts and deposits in the banking system represent value and, in turn, possibilities to make use of that value in the future. Believing in that equation allows us to make sense of the exchange-based society we live in. On the other hand, losing trust in it may disrupt the whole system. The events of the
Feriado Bancario undermined people’s trust in institutions, enabling an environment where the crisis was not limited to politics or the economy, but also expanded to the field of representation.
El oscuro final de Porvenir builds on the loss of trust in the system, when deposits in the banks cease to stand for money and paper money itself loses its representational value as the deterioration of the banking system increases the devaluation of the sucre. Aware of the necessity for trust for the system to continue working, Carlos Alemán selects his words carefully when he addresses the crowd gathered in El Porvenir’s lobby. His goal is to transmit the trust he himself no longer possesses: ‘la confianza, repitió su mente, la máxima angular del sistema’.
17 Cárdenas, p. 15. Trust is what El Porvenir is built upon as ‘confianza total’ is, ironically, the slogan of the bank. Yet for the customers, trust is broken. When Carlos finishes his speech, reassuring the clients that their investments are ‘safe’, and they need to be patient, his remarks are met with sarcasm: ‘¿Y eso con qué se come, maestro?’.
18 Cárdenas, p. 24. People do not believe in him, as he is part of an institution that has fallen into disarray and is unable to fulfil its representational role. That is, it has become a bank that does not have money, as one of the clients eloquently puts it: ‘¿o sea que este banco no tiene plata? ¿Carajo, y dónde están nuestros depósitos, los ahorros que hemos dejado aquí?’.
19 Cárdenas, p. 25. As a bank without money, it is a chink in the system’s armour: if the largest bank of the country can fail, what keeps other less powerful financial institutions from experiencing the same fate? And if the banks fail, what would be of their clients?
Cárdenas’ novel answers these questions by mirroring Ecuadorian reality. What followed the closure of El Porvenir were failed attempts to save it, further deterioration of the whole banking system, demonstrations by angry depositors that quickly developed into social chaos and a full-blown political crisis that ended up with the Ecuadorian president forcibly removed from office. All the major events portrayed in the book correspond to Ecuadorian reality. As such, the narration tells us that the disruption of the economy’s system of representation embodied by money and the banks entails the breakdown of expectations in the social order. That is, a rupture in what Janet Roitman and Achille Mbembe call a ‘regime of subjectivity’, that is, ‘a shared ensemble of imaginary configurations of everyday life’.
20 Janet Roitman and Achille Mbembe, ‘Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis’, Public Culture, 7 (1995), pp. 323–352 (p. 324). In their joint study of crises in Africa, Roitman and Mbembe argue that crises produce a type of violence determined by ‘the lack of coincidence between the everyday practice of life and the corpus of significations or meanings available to explain and interpret what happens’.
21 Roitman and Mbembe, p. 324. In other words, crises fracture the systems of intelligibility to which people refer in order to determine the domain of what is possible and feasible in their contexts. The
Feriado Bancario disrupted the ways in which Ecuadorians understood how their society worked and what they considered as possible or feasible for the individuals living in it.
With the crisis, Ecuador stopped being ‘normal, conocido, controlable y predecible’ as it was once for its people.
22 Vera, p. 17. Namely, Ecuadorians’ imagining of their nation was challenged, prompting a need for new meanings. In this light, the
Feriado Bancario is to be seen as an experience with significant value for the creation of a new discourse about the Ecuadorian nation. The crisis creates a scenario where the knowledge people have about their nation does not correspond to the reality they experience any longer. In that confusion, new frameworks to grasp what the nation is are needed. That is to say, the nation as the collective construction it is – an imagined community, in Benedict Anderson’s terms – goes through an experience with re-foundational value, for after the crisis it cannot continue to be the same it was before. As a nation, Ecuador must be rethought and reimagined. This experience is both explained and engaged by Cárdenas’ novel, as it portrays the re-emergence of a national consciousness – a renewed awareness of a shared national community – in the midst of the crisis.
The re-emergence of a national consciousness is explained in
El oscuro final del Porvenir’s plot in two ways. Firstly, in the exploration of the horizontal nature of the national community. Anderson argues that nations are imagined as communities because, regardless of the inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, they are considered a horizontal comradeship.
23 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 2006), p. 7. Something similar could be said about the Ecuadorian crisis: despite its actual uneven consequences, it is seen as a horizontal experience. The
Feriado Bancario cannot be adequately understood if its collective nature is ignored. It was a nation-wide experience. It did not happen to a single person or group. Although some were more affected than others, it happened to all Ecuadorians regardless of class, ethnic origin, gender or race. Secondly, in the images of the people affected by the crisis. Widely circulated in the media, these pictures helped to represent the imagined community that is the nation. The imagery of the crisis, that is, the imagery of the fellow-victims of the financial collapse, helped to lay the basis for a renewed national consciousness.
Cárdenas represents the horizontal character of the crisis by showing its effects on different characters who gather together to pose a united challenge against El Porvenir. The story puts together characters from different social backgrounds in a legal fight against the owners of the bank. Carlos Alemán leads the assault, as he is betrayed by the board of directors: they accuse him of being responsible for the critical situation of the bank. Although he argues that he was only doing what they told him to do, he is sacked from his position as the CEO of El Porvenir and presented to the media by the bank as the main culprit for its problems. Determined to restore his reputation, Carlos teams up with the group of account holders who broke into the bank at the beginning of the novel. His story is representative of the effects of the crisis in some sectors of upper-class Ecuadorian society. As the plot develops, Carlos is shown transitioning from the most exclusive financial circles in the country to the lowest levels in the social life of the community. His plot line concludes with him being sent to jail for financial fraud, mirroring again Ecuadorian reality: Fernando Aspiazu, the real-life CEO of Banco del Progreso, also ended up in jail after the crisis.
24 Fernando Aspiazu remained in jail for seven years. After the seizure of all most of his assets, he is nowadays referred to as the ‘expoderoso que usa la Metrovía’, that is, as a former millionaire who now uses Guayaquil’s public transportation system. See La Historia, ‘El expoderoso que usa la Metrovía’, La Historia, 13 October 2014 <https://lahistoria.ec/2014/10/13/aspiazu-expoderoso-usa-metrovia> [accessed 26 February 2022]. The novel makes clear that, for some victims, the crisis meant their complete ruin.
One of the key elements to understand Carlos’ storyline is the relationship he establishes with the group of victims of El Porvenir. This collective is formed by an unspecified number of account holders of the bank, who claim that the money they invested in the institution is their means of subsistence. They are in a different position to Carlos, since his concerns are not driven by the material significance of money, but by other aspects of its symbolic relevance. Economy, in Isabel Gil’s view, shapes the ways individuals are perceived, see themselves, and deal with others.
25 Capeloa, p. 9. Despite the distinct origins of their claims, the alliance between Carlos and the group of victims outlines the horizontal nature of a crisis that affected the whole nation. In this light, the crisis functions in one of the ways traditionally attributed to money: by being a general equivalent that makes unlike things commensurable. Characters as far apart as a banker and a smuggler or a hairdresser are flattened out and put as equivalents, both as victims and allies. In this manner, throughout most of the novel, Carlos and his unexpected allies demand justice side by side, confronting the representatives of El Porvenir in a togetherness expressed through massive demonstrations in the streets and through common appearances in the media. The fight that they maintain resembles the fraternity that – in the case of nations, says Anderson – makes it possible ‘for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings’.
26 Anderson, p. 7. This comradeship signals the emergence of a renewed awareness of the existence of a people that, in this case, is unified by a common tragedy: the
Feriado Bancario brings people together, making them part of a community; for common suffering unifies.
Classic thought on nation-building, as in the works of the French philosopher Ernest Renan, argues that grief is of more value than triumph for the formation of a national memory, for it imposes duties, and requires a common effort to overcome.
27 Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi Bhabha (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990), pp. 8–23 (p. 19). The crisis, in this perspective, is a collective disaster that becomes part of a legacy of memories that helps to shape the contemporary Ecuadorian nation. The memory of the
Feriado Bancario is hard to escape even today in Ecuador. Not only because of the enduring consequences of the migration it started, or the everyday use of a foreign currency as the national legal tender. Also, because the bankrupted banks did not really disappear when they stopped their operations. They assumed a ghostly presence that lingers on to this day. The liquidation process of all the ruined institutions spanned more than a decade. However, even when the ‘definitive closure’ of most was completed by 2010, the legal proceedings initiated by the victims to reclaim their lost savings continued.
28 Redacción Negocios, ‘Cierre definitivo de Filanbanco, Progreso, Los Andes y Tecfinsa terminó, según Gloria Sabando’, El Comercio, 31 March 2010 <https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/cierre-definitivo-filanbanco-progreso-andes.html> [accessed 8 October 2018]. As of July 2018, lawsuits against some of the former shareholders of the banks were still being processed and fiercely disputed in national and international courts.
29 Redacción Política, ‘Supenden el remate de bienes incautados a los exaccionistas de Filanbanco’, El Universo, 28 July 2018 <https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/nota/6875603/juez-otorgo-medidas-cautelares-favor-exaccionistas-filanbanco> [accessed 8 October 2018]. Similarly, the landscape of cities like Guayaquil bear constant reminders of the once prosperous banks: the tallest building of Guayaquil, La Previsora, was named after the bank it used to house. Dominating the skyline of the city centre, it still stands with the same name, as a persistent token of a crisis that left long-standing consequences for the nation.
During the height of the crisis, buildings such as La Previsora were gathering points for the hundreds of demonstrators who united to demand their savings from the closed banks. The many photos that were taken during those protests form an imagery that reinforced the emerging national consciousness. In the novel – as also happened in reality – the national community represented in those affected by the collapse of the financial system is widely featured in the media through images that show them as one group with a common suffering and a common cause. Anderson remarks that the modern idea of a nation has one of its bases in the imagery created by the dissemination of print-languages through novels and newspapers. By comprehending one another via print and paper, Anderson argues, the members of a community gradually became aware not only of the other members of the community to which they belonged, but also that only those who could read the same language were part of their community. The images of these fellow-readers formed the ‘embryo of the nationally imagined community’.
30 Anderson, p. 44. In the Ecuadorian scenario of the late 1990s, the dissemination of the victims’ images gave the members of the community an awareness of other thousands of victims of the crisis, even when they could not see them all face to face but only through the media: newspapers and TV reports were flooded with pictures of people who, after losing their savings, had to face a challenging economic future. In that sense, the portrayal of the fellow-victims of the
Feriado Bancario reassured the victims that they were not alone. That they were, in fact, part of a community that, after being affected by injustice, was fighting back together.
In Cárdenas’ novel, the imagery of the crisis is explored through the role of another character, Carola Véliz, a television reporter who follows the developments surrounding El Porvenir. In her coverage of the demonstrations that take place after the bank’s closure, Carola depicts the people affected by the economic meltdown as a united front fighting for a common purpose. With her role in the story being an illustration of the role of the media during the crisis, Carola’s depiction of the victims of the Feriado Bancario outlines the way these people are portrayed in the media, and therefore the way they are represented before the nation. One of Carola’s first descriptions of the protests in national television sets up the general tone for their representation:
Desalojada con descargas abundantes de granadas lacrimógenas, por parte de los policías que acordonaban las vías de acceso, la multitud de ahorristas contrarios a capitalizar refluyó hacia las calles contiguas. Allí sus dirigentes, electos a la víspera por una asamblea de perjudicados, como han dado en denominarse, acordaron ir hacia el centro de la ciudad.
31 Cárdenas, p. 77.In her reports, Carola remarks that those affected are one united crowd, as is shown in the use of words such as ‘multitud’ or ‘asamblea’ to refer to them and to describe their actions. But she also projects the previously discussed horizontality of the community during the crisis, since she introduces the alliance between Carlos and the protesters. Carola covers a press conference given by Carlos, which is hosted by the group of victims in the meeting room of the organisation they created to conduct their claims against the bank. In this appearance, Carlos declares himself innocent, publicly saying that the owners of El Porvenir framed him and tacitly declaring his alliance with his new hosts for the first time. This report also reminds the reader that no one is exempt from the consequences of the crisis: in the broadcast, Carlos tells the audience that not only is El Porvenir in trouble, but the whole banking system of the country is at risk of falling apart. The consequences of the crisis reach Carola after her report on the press conference, when she is fired from her job because the owners of the TV station where she works do not want to continue spreading information that could harm their economic interests.
Other journalistic reports on the crisis described in the novel follow the same pattern set by Carola. In every scenario, the image of the Feriado Bancario is that of a collective: it is the image of thousands of people affected by the collapse of the economy all over the country, people fighting against the police and violently breaking into closed banks. The novel depicts nationwide chaos once certain frameworks of understanding are broken, and banks stop fulfilling their representational roles as keepers of value:
Flashes informativos interrumpían los programas habituales para señalar que el país vivía bajo un terrible suspenso. Nadie sabía lo que iba a suceder con la banca cerrada. La pantalla ofrecía imágenes, captadas en diversas ciudades, que eran las mismas, detalles más detalles menos: coléricos y angustiados clientes se enfrentaban a los cordones policiales y los carros cisterna, a fin de ganar las puertas de los locales de los bancos.
32 Cárdenas, p. 196.The narration also explains that, despite the reigning chaos, there is also unity in the demonstrations that began as protests against the banking system, but later evolved into protests against the national government which – they perceived – had allowed this situation to happen and, furthermore, was itself siding with the bankers:
Aquella misma mañana, los gremios de transporte anunciaron un paro indefinido de actividades, a fin de exigir al gobierno que dejara sin efecto el alza en los precios de los combustibles. Varios sectores productivos del país secundaban la medida y decidían plegarse con un paro comercial e industrial. Los indígenas de la meseta del país decretaban igualmente una sublevación general y ofrecían marchar hacia las ciudades y bloquear las vías. Por su parte, los agricultores de la región del bajío habían comenzado a cerrar las carreteras y guardarrayas con montones de racimos de banano, troncos derribados, neumáticos quemados y cascos de ladrillos.
33 Cárdenas, p. 211.With these developments,
El oscuro final del Porvenir shows its readers that the national imagery created during the crisis was formed by the images of fellow-victims and fellow-protesters throughout the country. Ecuadorians therefore became aware of a common suffering and a common insurgency, feelings that built on the awareness of a shared community. The members of this community were those affected by the crisis and those who were ready to rebel against those who allowed it to happen, namely the banking system in the first place and the government thereafter. In this scenario, economic and political elites – who engage with the external world through the global ties of capitalism – antagonise the ‘ordinary people’ who form the vast majority of the national community.
34 In the late 1990s, banking in Ecuador was already a multinational business, as Banco del Progreso had branches in the Cayman Islands. Likewise, the Ecuadorian political elite was related to neoliberal economic thought produced in the US: one of the most frequently mentioned aspects of the former president Jamil Mahuad’s biography is his Harvard University education. By opposing the elites, the victims of the
Feriado Bancario reinforce the type of national consciousness that constructs a nationally imagined community, for they are building on feelings of comradeship and national exclusivity by protesting together against a common enemy that is not only making them poorer, but has also interests which are external to the community. In this light, the crisis and its developments hold a critical importance for the articulation of a new discourse about the Ecuadorian nation. Nonetheless, this discourse is necessarily different to any other that could have emerged before the financial meltdown since Ecuador drastically changed after the crisis.