El Comercio - Quito - Ecuador | 2 de junio del 2008

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Property Rights

Discussions of the ANC on property are marked by speeches themselves from the sixties.

By Fabian Corral B.

Did people vote for a change in the economic regime? Did the citizenship vote in order to build socialism? Did they vote for the Assembly to transform private property into a precarious and gracious concession of the state? No, people did not vote for that. Yes, they voted to reform the political structure, so that the bureaucracy serves the people, for parties and social movements that are representative, so that power does not interfere with the administration of justice, to be certain that those who exercise public power are accountable to them.

For that, Ecuador voted. Full powers are meant to meet these goals. They cannot be the pretext for restricting freedoms, subject the individual to the eternal permission of the bureaucrat, or to convert the society into a huge community dependent on public employment, or the permission of the hierarchy of the moment. They cannot be an instrument to impose ideologies that cause uproarious failures.

We must allude to the real powers of the ANC - the morals that limit their actions and that establish their responsibilities - when the topic of property is concerned. Private property is a social value deeply rooted in the country. Therefore, if there is consistency with that value and respect for the community, neither the ANC nor anyone else, has the power to abolish or condition it with texts that leave loose ends and possible loopholes that are then filled with secondary laws or simple political acts.

If there are inaccurate texts, full of ambiguities and generalities when it is approved by the ANC, those relating to property rights, in order to survive, would be subject to seven concurrent conditions, including 'redistributive justice', promotion of intercultural coexistence (?), respect for the good life, which is 'to not violate the collective rights' (?) ... etc etc.

Such theories, in addition to the laws they'll inspire, will be tools of any functionary of the all-powerful entity thus created to 'determine' if the property remains or not, or, as a factor of state actions degenerating into the lamentable old practices by certain junior bureaucrats, of "negotiating" with the owners an "exemption" from expropriation, because neither the President nor the assembly will, presumably, be concerned with such procedural minutiae.

Discussions of the ANC centered on property are marked by speeches themselves from the sixties. They are the two previous debates on agrarian reform that transformed the structure of ownership. These are discussions without any objective data. These are discussions that focus on the estates, in a country where the problem is the smallholding, the abandonment of land by migrants, the deterioration of nature caused by destructive practices, and by the legal standards and absurd criteria of desktop beureaucrats, led to raze massive mountains and moors, which were then qualified as good as vacant land. There are many examples.

And then they tell us that the concept of expropriation is not linked with the subjectivism of the notion of social function. They then tell us there is no intention to link expropriation with the idea of social property, which, according to the ANC, is when "the means of production are socialized", or with state ownership, which, according to the draft "expands with nationalization and expropriation." We speak the truth.

[translation - ebear]