I have clear memories from 1963. The school day was divided into a couple of hours for lunch at home, we barely got back to school when we were told that classes were being interrupted because “there was a commotion”. I found my parents listening to the radio, they told me that the president of the Republic was overthrown by a military junta. The concept was new to me, both because of my age and because we lived through the longest period of validity of the constitution in the history of Ecuador, 17 years! In November 1961, a coup d’état took place but failed, although President Velasco Ibarra was forced out of power, legally succeeded by his vice president, Carlos Julio Arosemena. At school we commented on the excesses of this president, we were children, but they reached us and we understood the gloomy news that was totally “public domain”. So the blow was received, I dare say, with relief.

Years later, looking at the facts, which for me came down to the overthrow of a president who scandalized with his excesses, I knew that the reality was not so simple. “The embassy overthrew me,” Arosemena said when he was ousted, implying that American maneuvers caused his downfall. In 1975, Philip Agee, a debauched CIA agent, published a malicious book whose misleading title was translated in various ways in Spanish editions. In that work, many Ecuadorians are unscrupulously described as “agents” of the Central American Intelligence Service. Most were casual collaborators, people seeking support to stem the tide of communism that swept the continent after Castro’s revolution. Others of these “agents,” as Agee mischievously calls them, were hired without even knowing the purpose of their work.

But, by the way, there were Ecuadorians who were authentic agents. Its main purpose was to align, through popular agitation, the Ecuadorian government with the anti-Castro policy of the United States. They made ineffective political contacts, it was not shown that the CIA had the power to remove or replace officials. Despite its leftist whims, the Arosemen government relented and broke off relations with Cuba in April 1962. Then Agee learned of the hilarious case of the “Toachi Guerrillas,” whose mild repression involved no American personnel. It seems that the colonel’s coup in July 1963 surprised even the informant himself, who does not claim to have established contacts or machinations to facilitate its realization. And even in the subsequent publication of the declassified material, there is no evidence of the direct involvement of North Americans in the movement.

The junta that took power was composed of the commanders of the three branches of the armed forces, as had happened on other occasions throughout Latin America, but strangely, its fourth member was the functional senator for the armed forces, then Colonel Marcos Gandara Enriquez. This officer, a recognized intellectual, was undoubtedly the ideologue of the uprising, but also of the agrarian, tax and administrative reforms that the military government later tried to implement. (OR)