The city of Quito specialized in lawyers, liars, with skin-deep double standards, and defenders of the law, while Guayaquil specialized in exporters, bankers, and economists with open guts, with an obsession with being rich from the bottom up. night to day Quito since colonial times, 500 years ago, was the guardian of Catholic morality, Guayaquil, a port plagued by pirates. smugglers, usurers turned bankers. merchants, dealers, and manufacturers of everything from sugar and alcohol to quinine, cocoa, or bananas.
The obsession with the rapid enrichment of the costeños was due to the fact that Ecuador, since the beginning of the 20th century, experienced periods of bonanza in its export products, followed by abrupt falls. Given the great fertility of the plains of the tributaries of the Guayas River, one of the largest rivers on the Pacific Coast of South America, which originates in the province of Esmeraldas, in the mountains called Mache Chindul, where the Daule River is born, which covers more than 1,000 km, and Chimborazo, the highest snow-capped mountain in the world, from the center of the planet, which is wider at the Equatorial Line than at the poles, which makes it higher than Everest, a great producer of the so-called water of life, which is water that retains microparticles of ice all year round, like spring water in the northern hemisphere.
These two rivers, the Daule, which rises in the jungle mountains of Esmeraldas, in northern Ecuador, and the Babahoyo, which collects frozen water from the northern Andes mountains, created one of the most fertile valleys on the planet. This enormous fertility served to make Ecuador the largest exporter of cocoa until before the First World War, when a plague called the witch's broom reached the plantations, and yellow fever, to the workers of the cocoa plantations. which ruined the business.
Bananas have been planted here since 1948, and until now Ecuador is the world's leading exporter of this fruit, which experienced its greatest madness until 1968 when the UNITED FRUIT COMPANY left, but in the 1970s, a former employee of the North American company, Luis Noboa Naranjo, became the largest producer and exporter of bananas in the world, with his product BONITA BANANA, which concentrated its production in the provinces of Los Ríos and El Oro, while in others such as Esmeraldas, which was the largest producer at the time of UNITED FRUIT, disappeared.
But this enormous fertile plain of the Ecuadorian Coast is very sensitive to floods, which erase fences, roads and crops when El Niño arrives, or to droughts that ruin peasants, destroying their crops and livestock, when La Niño arrives. Girl.
The Niño phenomenon of 1982 hit the banana growers but favored the politicians of Quito, which was the place where all the oil money came from, which was taken from the Amazon and exported through Esmeraldas.
In Quito, the Christian Democracy of Germany was fighting for power, through the parties DEMOCRACIA POPULAR, which had come to power with Osvaldo Hurtado, and the IZQUIERDA DEMOCRATICA, a party founded by my father in the house where the FOUNDATION now works ECOTRACKERS, which was supported and financed by the GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY and had Rodrigo Borja as its candidate for the next 1984 elections.
The candidate from the coast and from Guayaquil was LEÓN FEBRES CORDERO, an alcoholic politician, smoker, gambler, member of the Jockey Club of Guayaquil, former manager of Luis Noboa Naranjo, the largest banana exporter in the world and owner of the salt mines. in Santa Elena, then part of the Guayas Province.
This irate commercial engineer, who studied in the United States, identified with the neoliberalism that was applied in Chile, by Pinochet and the CHICAGO BOYS, after the coup d'état with the death of Salvador Allende and thousands of leftists.
It was a new economic doctrine that was born at the University of Chicago, which believed that everything that exists in a country should be privatized, from water to social security. In Chile, he had reverted the country from an economic catastrophe that it plunged into with the Allende government and the US economic blockade. Chile applied this doctrine until 2022, when the communist party returned to power by the same route as Allende, by electoral means, in the times of the covid-19 pandemic.
I returned to Quito, where Verónica gave birth, in the Social Security hospital, a delivery that I had to attend to because the brutality with which the doctor treated her became torture.
He had practiced with Vitalia, the midwife from Cabo San Francisco, the traditional delivery, in which the child and the woman were treated differently, the woman was allowed to give birth at home, in a room with dim light, the way that does not harm the newborn, while here it was with a brutal light, which helped the doctor to suture when there was a tear in the vaginal canal, the child in home births was submerged in warm water as soon as he was born, so that it does not suffer the impact of temperature change. The patient's relatives, husband, and midwife encouraged her to make more effort at the time of delivery, not to give up, but here the assistant, the nurse, and the doctor insulted the mother, calling her lazy, a coward, a crybaby, screamer, they yelled at her like a muleteer at an animal, and when the child was finally born, they brutally scraped it with a cloth, to get the vermix out of it, then they gave it vitamin K injections, and tetanus to prevent tetanus. In the villages, the treatment was less cruel, but the child was put tobacco and ashes in the umbilical cord, which favored tetanus, the main cause of neonatal tetanus. Finally, in the fields, the mother during childbirth and after the baby was born was given drinks that combined alcohol, quinine, pasta, apples, and bee honey, which acted as an energizer and uterine contractor, which favored the expulsion of the placenta, while in the hospital, the mother had it fast. with a channeled vein, and oxygen, as a preventive measure, for cases of immediate surgical surgery due to any complication, during childbirth.
I took care of the delivery with my doctor friend Carlos Lascano, and Antonellita was born in a less traumatic way.
In the elections, León Febres Cordero was victorious and a government began where the authoritarianism of the right became the persecution of the left-wing students and peasants, who were the engine of the Sandinista revolution and Allende's victory in Chile.
