Ecuador

If he's gonna push for things like that, could he at least do the decent thing and change his first name to "Kissinger" or "Thatcher"?

"US media has a total blackout on Ecuador's popular uprising against neoliberal president Lenin Moreno. Follow for updates on the ground..."

https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1181558330847895553

"I made a thread about the traitor Lenin Moreno who sold out Julian Assange  for a $4.2b IMF loan, fleeing the capital of Ecuador as Indigenous protesters rose up..."

https://twitter.com/jaraparilla/status/1181471539994120192

Inside Ecuador's Citizens' Revolution (and vid)

https://twitter.com/TheGrayzoneNews/status/1358076084722556929

"Benjamin Norton traveled to Ecuador to report on the historic February 7 election, which pits a rich US-backed right-wing banker against a leftist economist who wants to advance the socialist citizens' revolution started by Rafael Correa."

It seems to be official the Neo-liberals have gone down in flaming defeat in Ecuador. The only question is whether the leftist party wings or the leftist indigenous party wins. It seems either way this election has been a win for the people. Moreno took a popular left of center coalition and handed to US capital and the people at the next election rejected this approach and want to return to the bosom of the Bolivarian revolution taking place in South America. Like in Bolivia and Venezuela when given the vote the people vote for themselves not the oligarchy.

Results of the presidential election of Ecuador until 4:40 AM ET this Monday, according to data from the National Electoral Council (CNE):

• With a total of 38.968 minutes scrutinized (97.46%)

• Article link https://www.en24news.com/e/2021/02/general-election-results-in-ecuador.html

   

  The leading candidates are:

  • Andrés Arauz: 32.21%
  • Yaku Pérez: 19.78%
  • Guillermo Lasso: 19.61%
  • Xavier Hervas: 16.02%
  •  
  • https://www.en24news.com/e/2021/02/general-election-results-in-ecuador.html

"If you want to know why the US is intervening in the Ecuadorian elections, it's to stop this from happening..."

https://twitter.com/OVargas52/status/1362196844290453510

The right wing in Ecuador has a history of using exit polls to seed doubt about the legitimacy of election results.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ecuador-Update-Arauz-Asks-Citizens-T...

At least the people will not have to die in the streets. If the vote was reversed the right wing would be screaming electoral fraud and reengaging the military to protect democracy.

"Arauz was unable to beat the combined forces of the state, the oligarchy and the media. Bad news for the Ecuadorean economy that has collapsed since adopting Moreno/Laso free-market reforms."

https://twitter.com/OVargas52/status/1381469248313303041

Neoliberalism unleashed. Alas poor Ecuador.

The people will fight back. The demands being made will directly affect Canadian business interests in the country so you know that our embassy will do what ever it can to back the government.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iwCkwZtZyE&t=442s

Trudeau silent on police crackdown in Ecuador

Since mid-June, protests have been sweeping across Ecuador in opposition to President Guillermo Lasso’s neoliberal economic policies, and specifically his government’s inaction concerning shortages of food and fuel in the country. The protest movement, spearheaded by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), has demanded that the Lasso government intervene in the markets to guarantee affordable gas prices at 45 cents per gallon and institute price controls in the agricultural sector. CONAIE is also demanding “a moratorium on the repayment of private bank loans held by rural people…more spending on healthcare, education, security and job creation, and an end to mining concessions in Indigenous territories.”

The protestors have organized over 900 road closures across 23 provinces. As the protest movement intensified over the past week, ultimately moving into nation’s capital, police repression increased. Lasso’s government attempted to stem the resistance by declaring a state of exception in six provinces and arbitrarily arresting protest leaders like Leonidas Iza, president of CONAIE, which ultimately backfired when thousands of supporters marched to the prison where Iza was being held, drawing international attention to the arrest and helping to ensure his safe release. After stepping free, Iza vowed to maintain the resistance and “consolidate the strength of the various other organizations and sectors of the country which have joined the strike.”

So far, four protestors have been killed by security forces, one of them a Kichwa man who died from a teargas canister fired directly into his head. Police denied that they were responsible for the death, saying the protestor died “as a result of handling an explosive device,” but CT scans clearly show that his skull was shattered by a canister fired at close range.

The most recent killing of a protestor was on June 23. This person died from “penetrating trauma to the thorax and abdomen caused by pellets” while protesting in El Arbolito park in Quito. CONAIE has also accused police of “indiscriminately causing hundreds” of injuries, many of them serious in nature.

For over ten days, Lasso shunned dialogue with the Indigenous-led protest movement while his interior minister Patricio Carrillo demeaned them as “drunks” and “terrorists” and accused them of being influenced by “radical groups” like former president Rafael Correa’s left-wing Citizen’s Revolution. On June 23, the CONAIE members successfully resisted state pressure and were able to convene a massive assembly in the House of Culture in Quito, where they will decide the future of the strike.

Like other countries in the Global South, the current crisis of inflation and high commodity prices sweeping the world—inflamed by the blowback of Western sanctions against Russia—has crashed full-force into the Ecuadorian economy. The economic policies of Lasso, a conservative and millionaire ex-banker, has only made living conditions worse. “We have two main sources of income in exports,” explained Ecuadorian economist Juan Fernando Terán in an April 2022 interview with Kawsachun News. “The first is oil, [and] logically, the war in Ukraine should have been beneficial because the price of oil has risen…However, the conservative President Guillermo Lasso had already promised the IMF the payment from future oil sales. Even if the price of oil goes to $300 it won’t benefit ordinary citizens.”.....

President Lasso had called the election to avoid impeachment. 

Lasso, who became president in 2021, has been criticized for doing little to curb the South American nation's rise in violent crime after taking office. He appeared to blame Villavicencio's shooting on organized crime in his post on X, which was translated from Spanish to English using Google Translate.

For the past several years, the South American nation has been plagued by a spike in violent crime, especially gang-related, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan organization and think tank focusing on foreign policy. The uptick in violence coupled with the country's political instability had already caused tensions leading up to the election.

Lasso called the snap election after dissolving the country's National Assembly in May, averting his impeachment. Lasso is not running in the coming election.

https://www.newsweek.com/who-was-fernando-villavicencio-ecuador-presiden...

Ecuador Descends Deeper into Chaos Following the Assassination of Presidential Candidate Fernando Villavicencio

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08/ecuador-descends-deeper-into-cha...

"On the campaign trail Villavicencio portrayed himself as an anti-corruption-crusader and campaigned under the slogan, 'it's time for the brave.'

But as notes former British diplomat Craig Murray on his blog, Villavicencio's anti-corruption campaign was 'selective and aimed only at making accusations against left-wing figures.'

He also helped Luke Harding and Dan Collins fabricate The Guardian's infamous front-page story that Paul Manafort and Julian Assange held pro-Trump meetings in the Ecuadorian Embassy..."

Here's a good examination of how Ecuador became a centre of the modern drug wars after decades of relative calm. 

Ecuador, according to its president Daniel Noboa, is now “in a state of war.” Earlier this week he had announced a state of emergency after the leader of one of the country’s top two gangs escaped from prison. The following day, armed gang members stormed the TC Television news program, broadcasting their hostage-taking and violence live to make an announcement of their own. ...

But this turn to violence in an upper-middle-income country of 18 million didn’t happen overnight.  While there are factors that accelerated a spike in crime over the last couple of years, experts say this is a story nearly a decade in the making. Ecuador’s security crisis is the product of years of growing impunity enjoyed by gangs, the influence of transnational crime groups, shifts in global cocaine consumption, and, above all, increasing institutional corruption. That means even with President Noboa’s promised military crackdown, this chaos won’t be solved overnight....

For decades, Ecuador’s stability and security distinguished it from its neighbors, Peru and Colombia, the largest cocaine producers in the world. Sandwiched between the two, Ecuador often acted as a drug transit country, but it did not suffer from the violence and armed conflict that plagued its neighbors.

n the 1990s, Ecuador’s drug trade “was controlled top-down by the FARC” — the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, the Marxist guerrilla group that waged a 50-year struggle against the Colombian government — and “there wasn’t a ton of competition and there weren’t really any clashes with the Ecuadorean state” says Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It was a stable situation.”  Then in 2016, the FARC largely demobilized — a historic peace process for Colombia, but also one that created a power vacuum in northern Ecuador. Simultaneously, cocaine demand started shifting drastically, declining in the US and surging in Europe, where since 2016 cocaine seizures have quadrupled, according to Freeman. “That’s made control of ports much more important,” he says, as cocaine headed for Europe is loaded into shipping containers. “Obviously, you’re not flying little planes from Colombia to France.” And, well, Ecuador has some great ports for cocaine smugglers — specifically Guayaquil on the Pacific coast, the country’s largest port city and now the epicenter of the violent crisis. ...

This joint power vacuum and massive trafficking opportunity invited foreign groups like Mexican cartels and Venezuelan gangs to play a larger role in Ecuador’s drug trade. Even the Albanian mafia, Freeman says, capitalized on the FARC’s demobilization and flooded into Guayaquil to set up shop in the 2010s. 

Ecuador’s two largest gangs, Los Lobos and Los Choneros, had long maintained an uneasy peace, but assassinations of gang leaders in 2020 sparked a power struggle. Since then, the groups have rapidly splintered into factions vying for control of territory, particularly Guayaquil, says Glaeldys González Calanche, a fellow at the International Crisis Group.  Experts said those foreign criminal groups took sides among Ecuador’s gangs, further fueling the turf war. “Los Lobos are believed to be tethered to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, while Los Choneros are purportedly in alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel,” both out of Mexico, she adds. “Splinter groups are now locked in a fierce competition for control of domestic consumer markets and trafficking routes, further fueling the cycle of violence.” This has all had terrifying effects for the country. 

For years, Ecuador had one of the lowest murder rates in the region, but homicides have more than quadrupled since 2018. Bombings, assassinations, and shootouts have proliferated. In 2022, when headless corpses were found suspended from a bridge in the city of Esmeraldas, some analysts concluded that the kind of cartel violence that terrorized Mexican cities like Juarez in the 2000s had found a new home in Ecuador. Last year, a presidential candidate, who had reportedly received threats from the local affiliates of the Sinaloa cartel, was assassinated. 

While former President Guillermo Lasso attempted to crack down on gangs, increasing police presence and even deploying the military failed to contain the violence. From 2022 to 2023, Ecuador’s murder rate nearly doubled.  Experts and former local officials say that not only has the government failed to curtail the violence, it may be abetting it as well.  “State actors are facilitating the operation of organized crime,” Botero says, pointing to the attorney general’s raids on the homes of judges, prosecutors, and police last month, which led to the arrest of dozens of officials linked to organized crime, including even a former drug czar and a president of the judicial council. “The state and law enforcement entities cannot control the situation of criminality and violence” he says, because “they are involved with organized crime in the country.” 

This week’s crisis only underscores that point: Experts told Vox it seemed apparent that the prison escape Sunday that prompted Noboa’s emergency declaration was carried out with ease; Choneros kingpin Adolfo “Fito” Macías fled on the very day he was supposed to be transferred to a new maximum security prison. Then on Monday, a leader of the Los Lobos gang, Fabricio Colón, also disappeared from his cell. “The [cartels] actually command the prisons,” says Daniela Chacón, who served as vice mayor of Quito from 2014 to 2016 and as a city councilor from 2014 to 2019, pointing to Fito’s escape. Chacón says recent events are “a show of control and power from organizations that have been already accustomed to running the show the past few years.”

Noboa on Tuesday said Ecuador is in an “internal armed conflict,” issuing a decree that designated over 20 gangs as terrorist groups and authorized Ecuador’s military to “neutralize” them. While Noboa has declared war, Chacón says the military can’t fix institutional corruption, warning: “The armed response will only go so far when you are fighting organizations that have more money, more power, that move more quickly, than the state does.”

“The Ecuadorian people are rightly clamoring for effective, firm government and a state role in quelling this violence and returning what, for most Ecuadoreans, was a sense of peace and security,” says John Walsh, director for drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, but he warns that the militarization of Ecuador’s law enforcement might also spawn new threats to security. Fighting organized crime in ways that skirt the rule of law, Walsh argues, “may achieve a short-term semblance of victory, but ultimately it’s serving the aims of those who would destroy and co-opt the state to begin with, and it will leave everybody less secure.” 

Noboa has been vocal about his admiration of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, pledging last week to build massive prisons modeled after Bukele’s. Bukele was elected in 2019 promising to end the gang violence epidemic that contributed to El Salvador once having the highest murder rate in the world; he has largely done so via a campaign of mass arrests that has made him domestically popular even as it has been criticized for widespread human rights abuse. Noboa’s state of emergency, which curtails civil liberties, would also seem to take a page out of Bukele’s security policy: The Salvadoran president has extended a similar state of exception since March 2022.

Walsh also points to the failure of militarized approaches in Colombia and Mexico, and warns that “militarized operations put civilian populations at elevated risk of being caught in the crossfire as both sides — the state and organized crime — seek to escalate the conflict.”  Walsh sees Ecuador’s crisis as a regional and international problem, inextricably tied to the global cocaine market. Ecuador has already been transformed. The widespread, coordinated violence and brazen show of force by the country’s gangs this week reveal that Ecuador has already become a new epicenter for drug cartel violence and conflict.  The violence is “starting to be normalized,” says Chacón, the former vice mayor of Quito. “There is this feeling of hopelessness, that the situation will not change.”

Noboa’s declaration of an “internal armed conflict” signals the same militarized approach that failed to stem cartel violence in Mexico and Colombia. Experts say Ecuador needs to first address the systemic corruption and infiltration of state institutions that have allowed gangs to amass their power. And really, Walsh says, a new regional approach that addresses the international nature of narcotrafficking is needed to ensure Ecuador does not continue down the path of spiraling violence that has destabilized its neighbors — including rethinking drug prohibition altogether. “We need to see this as a tragedy that’s not likely to limit itself to Ecuador but may also already be spreading,” Walsh says. “There’s no reason to think Ecuador is where this ends.That should be an extremely sobering thought,” he adds. “And rather than trying to counteract these developments with the tools and strategies that have failed disastrously in the past, we need new ways of thinking and in particular to challenge drug prohibition as an enabler of the organized crime and corruption that we are supposedly trying to tackle.”

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2024/1/11/24034891/ecuador-drugs-coca...