You’d never know this from reading most of the mainstream media, but today in Ecuador, and I don’t mean in just coastal rightwing Guayaquil, but in the heart of the country, in central Quito, the capitol, tens of thousands of Ecuadoreans marched IN FAVOR OF free trade with the U.S.

Source: Associated Press

That’s right, while much of the mainstream media covered extensively the anti-free trade protests of a few indigenous special interest groups earlier in the week, which are now fizzling due to lack of public support, the real rally was building, the one the vast majority of Ecuador’s people supported, the great Free Trade of the Americas Agreement.

Surrounded by free trade countries, including neighboring Colombia and Peru, as well as direct economic competitors like the CAFTA states, Ecuador is facing a stark choice of free trade like those neighbors, or no free trade all by its lonesome. In the Andean Pact, it’s the only nation that hasn’t signed on to free trade, mostly because of the efforts of these anti-free trade factions. But is isolation the answer? Or is free trade and global competion? Is this something Ecuador’s venal government would understand? Don’t count on that crew.

But there were people to be counted on. Heroic people in fact.

Source: Associated Press

Ecuador’s people, in the truest revolutionary sense of the word, held aloft massive banners extolling free trade as the great creator of jobs and development that their country needs to develop and grow. They didn’t want to be illegal alien exporters any more, they wanted to live in their own country and export goods to other countries. Into the streets they marched, dark skinned Indians, hardly a white-elite’s march, waving thousands of roses, one of Ecuador’s finest exports.

Ecuador’s a tiny state, lacking many of the inherent advantages of Peru and Colombia. It knows that they have signed their own free trade agreements with the U.S. and are ready to compete on the field of trade with the Mighty Colossus of the North. It knows that Mexico’s economy has quadrupled fourfold since it signed onto NAFTA in 1993 and enacted it on Jan. 1, 1994.

Ecuador too wants to join them and take on the vast U.S. market. Thousands and thousands of jobs for Ecuadoreans (and heck, Americans, too!) will be created as a result. Tons of great new stuff and great new prices will appear on U.S. store shelves. Ecuador as a nation will finally fulfill its potential and watch democracy blossom. And yes, there is a such thing as all sides winning big through the nearly magical effect of real free trade.