Immersed in a hectic situation every day, we have built ourselves as a country that thinks little or not at all about its past. The history of law in Ecuador is, in this sense, a generally unknown area, minimally studied, almost always analyzed without too much rigor. Incredibly, despite the predominance that this branch has today, the history of constitutional law is one of the least researched. That is why the publication of the Center for the Study and Dissemination of Constitutional Law (CEDEC) of the Constitutional Court is entitled: Court of Constitutional Guarantees from 1945. Origins of constitutional justice in Ecuadorwritten by researchers Rubén Calle Idrovo, Byron Villagómez Moncayo and Dayana Ramírez Iza.

Let’s go on a purely Benjaminian trip: it’s March 1945. The Constituent Assembly, the result famous the revolution that was not, completed its functions and brought the country a fundamental charter, the product, without precedent, of deliberations between a huge block of socialist and communist representatives, with traditional liberals and conservatives. There is a national agreement, a real pact to create the future. In 1920, Austria published its constitutional text and, following the thought of the teacher Hans Kelsen, set about solving the question: who should be the guardian of the constitution? This model, which was later implemented by the Spanish Republic in 1931, entailed giving the high court the responsibility, outside the judiciary, to guarantee respect for the constitution. Ecuadorian voters in 1945, scholars of the great public law debates of their time, incorporated this notion and created, for the first time in our history, the Court of Constitutional Guarantees.

For decades, it has been said that this Court was not established or that it did not make any contribution, due to the ephemeral duration of that constitutional regime: in April 1946, José María Velasco Ibarra staged a coup d’état and declared himself a civilian dictator. Today we know it: he thought, in his own style, that the Court charged with ensuring constitutional supremacy had taken away governance from the executive branch. Isn’t that the complaint of every authoritarian who is bothered by constitutional restrictions? According to the information provided by this publication, it seems that the work of the Tribunal, as well as the high sense of responsibility of its members, was one of the causes that led to Velasco’s coup. That’s why he chased them.

It is true that on May 29, 1945, the Court of Constitutional Guarantees decided to suspend the validity of Article 1002 of the then Civil Procedure Code because it contradicted Article 160, Paragraph 4 of the Constitution, which prohibited imprisonment for debt. It would be the first reliable trace of a decision of constitutional supervision over a legal norm, which was made by a body tasked with being, in Kelsen’s words, the guardian of the Constitution. Before that, in 1887, the Supreme Military Court sentenced the liberal colonel Federico Irigoyen to death – an execution that, fortunately, was not carried out, despite the fact that the then-current constitution prohibited the death penalty for political and communal crimes. The Court of Constitutional Guarantees of 1945 is, therefore, the first major attempt, provable and correct, to turn Ecuador into a constitutional state.

The tribunal was presided over by lucid conservative politician Manuel Elicio Flor, who is even the reporter of the May 29 decision. I think that neither he nor the other members had the intention of going down in history with their actions, but simply wanted to do their duty. So much so that only 78 years later, his work was recognized by a team of researchers, through a small format book, easy to read and free to download, which sheds some light on a topic that, without a doubt, needs to be explored more deeply by the terrestrial academy. The Spanish writer and thinker Irene Vallejo has thought a lot about this infinity in a reed about the final role of the book in saving and preserving memories. With this book, which can be so interesting to us who love constitutional law and history, the deep meaning of his approach becomes clear: “Without books, the best things in our world would disappear into oblivion.” (OR)