All opinions point to the same thing: we need to find a consensus in the country that will allow us to create a common road map. Between whom? No doubt what we call elites: politicians, union leaders, social leaders, workers or students, academics, communicators; In short, people who have influence in certain social strata.

There is this obvious need, but it is important to understand how such a consensus can be achieved. What should we talk about? This is not only important but essential, because the alternative is authoritarian messianism: for the leader to decide the path and lead us like sheep… there is this temptation, but it is extremely dangerous.

Are there examples of consensus in the past? Dollarization in which a group of people put that issue on the agenda and in their thoughts, and when the Government found itself in front of the barracks, it decided to reach for it. Consensus? Not. The results that led the whole country to support and believe in dollarization? That. Peace with Peru was a much longer and more complex process in which there were defeats (Paquisha) and successes (1995), completely opposite visions (“open wound”) and other more conciliatory ones, dialogues (Cusín) or confrontations, and finally the signing of peace as a result of all these processes. Consensus? I don’t know if I should call it that, but it’s pretty similar. Interest in education for about 5 years around the “Social Contract for Education”? Most likely… And then there are more implicit consensuses. For example, why didn’t Ecuador have such violent dictatorships as those in the southern cone or Cuba? Why didn’t we have guerrillas like in Peru or Central America? Why were we one of the few countries on the continent without hyperinflation? and then the only one that solved a very serious crisis by taking over the foreign currency? Consensus, methods of action? In any case, positive collective actions.

And now we have insecurity as the most urgent thing. By all means, let’s get carried away with the story of “broken windows”, let the first window in the neighborhood be broken, then the second and so on; As a country we allow the poison of drugs and all its violence to seep into us. And now we have to come together, this is how the cities or countries that faced the drama did it: together. In the same way, we must dialogue together and reach solutions on issues such as social security, justice, the labor market, future education, natural resources and others. One by one. How together? Starting from a key principle: no one can be excluded from the dialogue, “not because he is a Correista or not because he is right-wing” or for any reason, our tendency to put ourselves in a corner and “ignore” others. What should be excluded in the dialogue are the specific interests that are intended to be incorporated and used as a “means of exchange” (“I accept this, but in exchange you give me amnesty”… as just happened in Spain, that It is not a dialogue, it is blackmail and power).

And there is another problem in a society without the experience of dialogue like ours: who calls for that dialogue and where are the institutional spaces? The beginning is a very difficult step… Suggestions, ideas? (OR)