Ecuador is not Cuba or Nicaragua,or even Chile. The left never carried out a socialist revolution. But leftists have played an important role in mobilizing popular sectors, challenging elite power, and otherwise shaping Ecuador's political scene. The following, by one of Ecuador's foremost scholars, provides a brief, coherent, description of a very complicated story. As this contribution makes clear, what stands out about the history of the Left in Ecuador -and here it shares a lot with much of Latin America-is how vibrant and fragmented "it"has been.Even in a country the size of Ecuador, leftist unity has often been elusive.