El oscuro final del Porvenir assumes an explanatory role in its description of the
Feriado Bancario. This is especially true when it comes to the illustration of what triggered the banks’ illiquidity: the so-called
créditos vinculados. As an investigative journalist, Carola reveals that, before the crash, bankers were giving out sketchy credits to shareholders of their own institutions without the proper payback guarantees. That is to say, they were lending money to themselves, assuming problematic roles as both judge and jury in financial operations that involved the money of the account holders who ended up as victims of their speculation. In a key passage in the novel, Carola finds out that most of these loans were conceded to fictitious companies or non-existent development projects: ‘La búsqueda y los hallazgos desconcertantes continuaron sin tregua, hasta completar una docena de clamorosos casos: presuntos créditos destinados a firmas todas fantasmas, cuyos ficticios locales simulaban funcionar en sitios donde había cuartos de inquilinato, puestos de venta de legumbres y hasta en un orfelinato de caridad.’
1 Cárdenas, p. 163. As it was destined to fund fictitious investment opportunities, the money behind this type of loan offered no return possibilities and created severe deficits in the banks’ balance books. Hence, the lack of cash that was exposed and deeply aggravated by the deposit runs. However shocking that might be (or not), this also happened in Ecuadorian reality. María Vera argues that the infamous
créditos vinculados were the result of lax financial regulations and that they were a common practice in all financial institutions in the build-up to the banking crisis, ‘siendo, por supuesto, la razón mayor de la quiebra de 17 entidades bancarias’.
2 Vera, p. 79. In this regard, the case of Banco del Progreso – the real counterpart of El Porvernir – is especially notorious: ‘otorgó créditos al menos a 86 empresas relacionadas con la institución por 1,7 billones de Sucres […] de estas, solo tres tenían hipotecas a favor del banco, 62 habían presentado pagarés y 24 ni siquiera habían presentado garantías’.
3 Vera, p. 79. With Carola’s role in uncovering these practices in El Porvenir, Cárdenas attempts to explain that – in the real Ecuador – the bankers’ own actions were one of the reasons behind their problems and, in fact, one of the causes of the crisis.
4 The resemblances with the global crisis of 2008 are self-evident at this point, as its causes have also been related to the absence or inadequacy of regulation of global private financial institutions and processes. Interestingly, the 2008 crisis has also been associated with a surge of nationalism and populism in Europe and the US. See Ian Goldin, ‘After the crash: Authority and Trust’, The Compass, 26 September 2018 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3csxhjk> [accessed 12 December 2018]. Elucidating financiers’ responsibilities in the Feriado Bancario is not the only process at work in El oscuro final del Porvenir. In its attempt to make sense of what happened, the novel goes further than saying whose fault it was. As I have argued so far, the novel signals a re-foundational moment that opens the way for new understandings of the Ecuadorian nation. Cárdenas’ work poses vital questions about what kind of nation that might be, what kind of nation is possible, as given the effects of the crisis in everyday life, it is necessarily different from before. I see El oscuro final del Porvenir as a novel that locates a turning point for Ecuador: it foretells that the nation that emerges from the aftermath of the economic crash challenges previous discourses regarding its own borders. This new nation, I argue, cannot be limited by territorial boundaries. As such, it exceeds the frameworks under which Anderson understood nations as limited imagined communities, and it must be thought of in transnational terms, simultaneously existing – and being imagined from – within its borders as well as beyond them.
El oscuro final del Porvenir introduces the need to think beyond pre-crisis conceptions of Ecuador first by highlighting that something dies with the events of the
Feriado Bancario. In the plot, it is Carlos’ father who passes away in the final pages of the novel. This death allegorises the demise of a traditional and romantic conception of Ecuador, as Carlos’ father himself is an evocation to the past: refusing to engage in digital communications, he handwrites letters to his son and lives a secluded life away from the modern city Carlos inhabits. At the end of the story, before Carlos is sent to jail, his father becomes a casualty of the chaos unleashed by the banking disaster: he is kidnapped, presumably as a way to dissuade Carlos from his crusade against his former employers. Although the real reason behind the abduction is never fully revealed, a few days after Carlos learns about it, his father’s body is found abandoned in a remote corner of the city. The forensic report reveals that he was unharmed by the kidnappers but suffered a heart attack. Carola remarks the connection between the condition of the country and Carlos’ father’s death when she notes that ‘al fin y al cabo, aquel difunto era la conclusión y el resultado del estado de cosas, tenso y violento, que imperaba en el país’.
5 Cárdenas, p. 244. During his father’s funeral, Carlos is apprehended by the police and arrested for ‘estafa a la fe pública’.
6 Cárdenas, p. 247. However, it remains unclear if the charges for fraud against the ‘public trust’ are based on his participation as CEO before El Porvenir’s closure, or for his rallies against his former employers after the bankruptcy became evident. It is this ambiguity of not knowing what has happened, or much less so what is going to happen, that builds up to the question of what comes after, once the social fabric of the country has been ripped apart by the crisis. What remains clear is that, despite the many uncertainties, national life must continue, as the final lines of the novel suggest by introducing journalism as a never-ending narration of the country’s daily life. ‘Lo de Alemán ya no es noticia’, says one reporter to another, implying that something new will fill the headlines the next day.
7 Cárdenas, p. 247. In other words, that even after a crisis that disrupts life as it is known to Ecuadorians, national life carries on, no matter what may lie ahead.
The question that lingers on when El oscuro final del Porvenir ends is what kind of future is possible for the Ecuadorian nation after the Feriado Bancario. While it is true that national life continues, it is also true that new frameworks to understand what constitutes the nation are needed, as any reflection about what the nation is and how it works must take into consideration the transformations brought about by the financial crisis. Hence, I posit that, in order to begin to think about post-crisis Ecuador, it is necessary to keep in mind that, when it comes to Ecuadorians’ everyday experience, the two most significant consequences of the economic meltdown are the dollarisation and the migration phenomenon, both of which introduced substantial elements to expand the notions under which we understand what the Ecuadorian nation is and what its limits are.
The dollarisation – a measure that was implemented in a desperate attempt to control inflation – not only precipitated a political crisis that ended up in a
coup d’état against president Jamil Mahuad. It also had a symbolic relevance for the Ecuadorian nation, for national currencies are ‘badges of national identity’, as Eric Helleiner argues in his study of the ways in which money fosters national sentiments: ‘Perhaps the most obvious way in which national currencies can be linked to national identities is through the imagery emblazoned on them. Anyone who has travelled widely, or simply collected the money of different countries, cannot help but notice the nationalist imagery that covers each country’s coins and notes.’
8 Eric Helleiner, ‘National Currencies and National Identities’, American Behavioral Scientist, 41.10 (1998), pp. 1409–1436 (p. 1410). With the disappearance of the sucre, Ecuadorians lost the imagery emblazoned on their coins and notes and saw it replaced with images that were alien for them. Suddenly, the faces of national and Latin American
próceres such as Antonio José de Sucre, Simón Bolívar and Eloy Alfaro were replaced with the unfamiliar features of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and other North Americans almost unknown in Ecuador. If ‘national currencies may foster national identities at the propagandistic level through cultivating a collective memory and nationalist culture’, as Helleiner claims, the loss of the sucre posed a challenge for the Ecuadorian nation.
9 Helleiner, p. 1414. Through that challenge, the imagining of the nation was expanded beyond the limits that, before the crisis, were acknowledged as the limits of the national experience. That is to say, beyond the limits of a traditional discourse that connected nation, territory, and a
mestizo-biased recollection of indigenous ancestry. Paper money is illuminating at this point, as the sucre banknotes illustrate the history of the Ecuadorian nation in terms of iconic places and national figures. In their designs, monuments in Guayaquil and Quito are featured alongside historical figures. One indigenous man is included in the banknotes’ imagery: Rumiñahui
(see Figure 1), an Inca noble who is mainly recognised as a brave warrior.
10 In Ecuadorian society, the name Rumiñahui is connected to a sense of ancient power and combative spirit attributed to the Incas. Although it is problematically emptied out of any further meaning, and its relation to the marginalised position of indigenous people in republican history is ignored, the word is often used as an adjective to describe – and to praise – someone for being brave and combative. ~
Figure 1. 1000 sucres banknote, issued by Banco Central del Ecuador. Scanned by Uploader, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:01000+Sucres+Bill+Ecuador+1984.jpg> [accessed 4 February 2022].
Through the sucre and its nationalistic imagery, the Ecuadorian nation is being made present and its limits are established in connection with national history and national territory. Consequently, when the sucre disappears to be replaced by the US dollar, a currency that is issued abroad, the need to rethink the limits of the nation arises. The presence of the US dollar as the legal tender allows us to see that, after the crisis, the traditional boundaries of the Ecuadorian nation become porous. Not only because the new notes circulating in the economy are emblazoned with foreign signifiers, but also because the role of guaranteeing their value is assigned to an institution located beyond the limits of the country. The French theorist Jean-Joseph Goux – who alongside Marc Shell is one of the promoters of the ‘New Economic Criticism’ – argues that US dollar banknotes are potent political symbols marked by the institutionalism behind them:
The State (and its Treasury), God (and our faith in Him), the Father (founder), the dead and sacralised Language (Latin): all these powerful, central signifiers converge, combine, and intensify each other so as to provide the bank note with its force. It is the State in all of its foundational stability that guarantees the value of the bill […] The value of the bill still refers to a certain depth, a certain verticality. Somewhere, a treasure is present, a reserve, a fund, upon which this bill is staked.
11 Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘Cash, Check, or Charge?’, in The New Economic Criticism. Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 114–129 (p. 177).When the sucre disappears, the Ecuadorian nation – as embodied by the state – loses its capacity to represent a central authority that is able to guarantee the value of paper money, that is to legitimise that the banknotes it issues stand for something else, something valuable, instead of being just worthless paper. That capacity is reassigned to another body beyond Ecuadorian borders. The US’s institutionalism, assumed to be more reliable than the Ecuadorian, takes place as the guarantor of the value of money. In that process, the system of representation on which the economy relies is presented with an external element that pushes the Ecuadorian nation beyond its own boundaries. In this sense, while the national limits of Ecuador remain in place, they are softened, for the imagining of the nation expands by including the everyday use of the US dollar, a political symbol that is issued and backed up abroad, but nonetheless exerts its signifying power at home. That is to say, it is a symbol that exists simultaneously home and abroad.
In a similar fashion, the Ecuadorian population became geographically polyvalent. The Ecuadorian ‘exodus’ redrew the demographic map of the nation and, on a scale never seen before, migration became part of Ecuador’s daily life. Scattered around Europe and the US, migrants became a driving force in Ecuadorian affairs. This is especially true considering that the turn of the millennium – with all its advances in telecommunications – contributed to amplifying the transformative impacts of the migration phenomena in the ‘local’ sphere. Ecuadorian society was deeply changed by the activities of Ecuadorians abroad: the connections between those who stayed and those who left became sustained and real-time fed networks through which events, decisions, and activities in distant regions of the globe started to have significance for individuals and communities within the Ecuadorian borders. Social sciences have emphasised the effects of migration on several aspects of everyday life, including shifts in gender, ethnic and class dynamics, as well as the reconfigurations of family, citizenship and identities. In a broad sense, the general understanding is that the transformations sparked by migration happened at the micro-level of individuals and the macro-level of collectivities.
Studies on diasporas highlight migrants’ awareness of a fractured sense of placement, of being at the same time ‘home away from home, here and there’.
12 Steven Vertovec, ‘Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22.2 (1999), pp. 447–462 (p. 450). But with a migration process as disruptive as the Ecuadorian one, it is not only people, at the individual level, who become aware of a geographical polyvalence. Alongside them, the nation can also be found ‘here and there’ as it is simultaneously imagined both from within and beyond Ecuadorian borders. Those who left the country are as much part of it as those who stayed, not only because communication technologies allow them to be in constant interaction with their homes, but also because they too participate in decision-making processes that give shape to Ecuador’s social reality. For instance, in the 2017 presidential elections, Madrid had the single largest polling station for Ecuadorians to vote anywhere in the world. A total of 168,435 Ecuadorians registered to vote in Spain, prompting a Spanish newspaper to point out that ‘España también decide el futuro de Ecuador’.
13 Nuria López, ‘España también decide el futuro de Ecuador’, El Mundo, 19 February 2017 <https://www.elmundo.es/internacional/2017/02/19/58a83b1a268e3e66228b45e4.html> [accessed 13 December 2018]. Furthermore, in the same way as provinces such as Guayas or Pichincha, migrants have their own elected representatives in the Asamblea Nacional, the legislative branch of the Ecuadorian government. In Ecuadorian law, Europe, as well as Canada and the US, are considered ‘regiones especiales’ to be represented in the national assembly.
14 Asamblea Nacional República del Ecuador, Ley Orgánica Electoral Código de la Democracia (Quito: Registro Oficial, 2009), p. 32. The elected representatives, who usually share knowledge about the ‘life experiences’ of migrants often having been migrants themselves, are required to liaise between home and abroad. This way – in theory at least – migrants are capable of making their voices heard in national politics. Meanwhile, the Ecuadorian state constructs itself on a transnational domain by recognising that Ecuador’s territory is not the single container of Ecuadorian citizens with participatory rights, and by extending its presence to the boundaries of other nations to attend the needs of those Ecuadorians.
With Ecuadorians abroad taking part in different levels of personal, political and social interactions with their home country, it is not possible to say that Ecuador is a nation whose imaginings are restricted to its territorial frontiers. Hence, Anderson’s theory becomes too narrow to capture the essence of the post-crisis Ecuadorian nation, as he says that nations are imagined as ‘limited because even the largest of them […] has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations’.
15 Anderson, p. 7. After the
Feriado Bancario, on the contrary, the imagining of Ecuador expands beyond its boundaries, so the Ecuadorian nation comes to be present also in the countries where Ecuadorian migrant communities settled. Likewise, a sense of what exists beyond the national borders comes to inhabit the national realm, as the US dollar becomes part of everyday life.
Literature mirrors these relationships, as Cárdenas’ novel introduces the need to expand the imagining of the nation, both by considering how it projects itself beyond its borders and by taking into account the presence of others within itself. The plot presents multiple relationships between Ecuador and other nations intensified by the first signs of the crisis, and it goes on to outline how these connections have – and will continue having – a significant impact on the life of all Ecuadorians, whether or not they are aware of their existence. One of the most important instances where these linkages are shown is when Carlos, Carola, and the leaders of the group of victims of El Porvenir travel together to the Bahamas. Their journey to these Caribbean islands, classified as a tax haven, is the result of Carlos’ plan to show his allies and the media that the money taken from the account holders by the owners of El Porvenir is hidden in the bank’s Nassau branch. The fact that Carlos is always aware that bank secrecy would make it impossible for any information to be disclosed does not stop him from promoting and making the trip. Of course, the attempt to reveal the transfers made from Ecuador to the Bahamas is unsuccessful. However, by taking its characters to the Caribbean, following the money, the novel renders visible that the flows of capital make it impossible for a nation to remain enclosed within its territorial limits, for money finds its ways in and out the borders of Ecuador, and in its travels establishes connections that impact how a national society functions and how it must be understood and imagined by its members.
The impacts of global financial relations on Ecuadorian society are further explored in the novel when the protagonists return home to realise that El Porvenir’s fall has created a domino effect that jeopardises national finances. The government’s response is to call for an international commission to audit the national banking system, and is later revealed to be in desperately need of cash: ‘El gobierno ha decidido elevar los precios de los combustibles en un porcentaje bárbaro, y el gas doméstico igual. Es la hecatombe, doctor. Se dice que el estado tiene que juntar la plata de donde sea para pagar a los clientes de los bancos en apuros.’
16 Cárdenas, p. 205. The novel’s reference to a foreign auditing commission and the government’s actions that followed allude to the real-life funding agreements struck by the Ecuadorian government with diverse international organisations, most notably the IMF. The arrangements made between the IMF and Ecuador included conditions to be fulfilled by the latter to secure the repayment of any loans taken, including substantial price rises for fuel, domestic gas, and electricity.
17 Paul Beckerman and Hernán Cortés Douglas, ‘Ecuador bajo dolarización: oportunidades y riesgos’, in Crisis y dolarización en el Ecuador, ed. by Paul Beckerman and Andrés Solimano (Washington: The World Bank, 2003), pp. 101–150 (p. 127). These are all measures that had a notorious effect on Ecuadorian society, for people not only found themselves poorer after the crisis and the dollarisation of the economy, but also found that the costs of daily living were significantly higher. The novel stresses that the overlapping of these situations would increase migration, a topic that is underlyingly present throughout the whole story, as Criollo, the leader of the assembly of El Porvenir’s victims and the person who starts the demonstrations against the bank, is a
coyotero, that is, somebody who smuggles people into other countries, especially into the US.
Criollo, who describes himself as a ‘travel agent’, is part of the story throughout. His real work as a smuggler is cursorily mentioned several times but, regarding plot development, it proves to be especially relevant near the end, when – like Carlos – he too suffers the retaliation of the system they dared to defy. Shortly after Carlos’ father is kidnapped, Criollo is sent to jail accused of facilitating illegal migration. From prison, he complains: ‘me acusan de mafioso, de explotar a la gente que quiere irse del país, hasta de asesino, por la gente que muere en accidentes durante los viajes’.
18 Cárdenas, p. 229. Despite the truth behind these charges – Criollo has indeed sent people to die trying to make it to the US – the plot suggests that his imprisonment is more related to his role as the leader of demonstrators than to his responsibility in smuggling. Furthermore, the novel hints that his work is to be importantly needed in the near future, as the chaotic conditions of the country would increase the likelihood of migration, be it legal or illegal.
Criollo himself observes to Carola that his role is to help people to find means of subsistence abroad: ‘Soy un hombre de bien. No hago nada malo facilitándoles a tantos compatriotas la posibilidad de conseguir trabajo en otras partes. Dime, Carolita, ¿aquí sobran los empleos?’.
19 Cárdenas, p. 229. For that reason precisely, the ending of
El oscuro final del Porvenir stresses that Criollo’s work will continue after his time in jail: even as a
coyotero, his prospects of freedom are far more promising than those of Carlos. When the pair find each other in prison, Criollo soon acknowledges that he is due to be released soon, unlike Carlos, whose future is at best ‘una celda más confortable’.
20 Cárdenas, p. 248. An intensified migration phenomenon is, after all, the most likely outcome of the crisis, for more than ever before Ecuadorians start to look abroad to find better economic opportunities.
By rendering visible external influences that impact national life, the ways in which national life also takes place abroad, and how these connections are intensified by the crisis, Cárdenas’ novel foresees the major consequences of the
Feriado Bancario for the Ecuadorian nation. After the crisis – the novel allows us to see – Ecuador must come to terms with being imagined both from ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ its borders, a phenomenon that is part of a series of transformations that have taken place within the context of Latin American modernity. Néstor García Canclini argues that these types of dislocations and displacements are some of the complexities through which globalisation manifests itself, softening national borders and redefining the concepts of nation and national identity.
21 Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (México: Grijalbo, 1990), p. 25. It is not the case that before the Feriado Bancario Ecuador was an exclusively territorially contained nation with no influence whatsoever from foreign experiences, as I have already shown with the example of Huasipungo. However, especially before 1999, the dominant discourse to represent the nation before itself and others – politically biased as any nationalistic enterprise is – is centred on essentialist attributes that connected Ecuador with an indigenous past and a uniqueness to be found in the national territory. After the crisis, such discourse cannot continue untroubled. Following the events of the Feriado Bancario, the Ecuadorian nation needs a renewed national discourse that factors in the transformative effects of migration and dollarisation as they meant a new panorama for the articulation of a national imaginary, one that expands beyond national borders. More than ever before, the idea of a nation anchored within its geographical boundaries becomes unsustainable. The crisis marks a reference point after which any discourse regarding the Ecuadorian nation needs to include migrations, flows and movements. That is to say, it needs to include the multiple facets of transnationalism.
As a concept, transnationalism is key to understanding post-crisis Ecuador. It is so because – as defined in this book – transnationalism entails that the idea of fixed territories of culture is turned into fiction and that territorial borders, although they continue to exist, are not exclusive containers of national experiences. National borders are to be understood as porous entities whose apertures allow the constant development of back-and-forth relationships among nations, peoples, and institutions beyond frontiers. These interactions, reciprocal dependencies and cultural networks are necessary to articulate a comprehensive narrative about contemporary Ecuador. Although the crisis did not open up the nation to exchanges with others – as these have happened since the beginning of the continent’s history – it greatly intensified them and made them constitutive elements of everyday experience. More than ever before, Ecuador is revealed – and must be thought of – as a transnational space.