Ecuador's Irrelevant New Constitution

One hundred and thirty Ecuadorians are gathered these days to write a new constitution. This will be number twenty they say and will be the second constitution written since I've lived here these 18 years.

The point as I understand it is that a new constitution will bring law and order to a land that is reckless and corrupt. ("Eight Presidents in ten years" is the phrase the US press uses in the first paragraph of every article about Ecuador.) Ecuadorians want order, they say, and they seem to believe that a new edition of the Ten Commandments might make the world more orderly.

The idea is absurd, of course. There's no obvious way to improve upon "Thou shalt not steal," and the Ecuadorian constitution like the Ten Commandments is not the problem. The country would save a great deal of money running a Google search for "constitution" and downloading the document with the most hits. Without further study, I would suggest photocopying the constitution of Norway. (Although one might argue that the Soviet Union had little success using its copy of the US constitution--a document that is also increasingly irrelevant in the United States of George Bush.)

Look at recent Ecuadorian history. When the Ecuadorian Congress decided to expel President Bucuram, they simply and unconstitutionally declared him insane. The Ecuadorian people, fed up with the flamboyantly corrupt Bucuram, issued no protest. Getting rid of the president mattered far more than the law. Only a few years later, when the ambitious and manipulated army colonel Lucio Gutierrez led an unconstitutional uprising to overthrew his commander-in-chief, President Jamil Mahuad, the people cheered his bravado. They were tired of Mahuad. And shortly after, the Ecuadorians chose Lucio Gutierrez as their heroic president. No one seemed to notice the irony when Gutierrez was sworn into office, vowing to uphold the law of the land. He didn't even smirk at the oath. The popular ends justified the unconstitutional means.

A constitution cannot make a people respect the law. And in this land where the injustice of poverty batters so many lives, where education fails so miserably, where children continue to die for lack of potable water, where the rich continue to grab more than they could ever morally deserve, the government could save a great deal of time, money and frustration by adopting the Sermon on the Mount or the Hippocratic Oath as its guiding light and spend the saved resources on educating children. We cannot legislate a new, better society. Legislation is a product of culture not its source. We need to create a more just world by teaching children to do no harm. If we start there, we can move toward the social justice that President Correa and his minions claim to desire.