South America

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Re: South America

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 26, 2021 2:14 pm

Chile: Little Red Riding Hood and the Fierce Right
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 24, 2021
Manuel Cabieses Donoso

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The old opposition parties -Radical: 133 years; Communist: 99; Socialist: 88; Christian Democrat: 64; etc.-, hardened in a thousand entanglements, should be more astute -and resolute in the convictions they claim to have-. However, the center-left behaves like the candid Little Red Riding Hood in Perrault’s fairy tale, confusing the wolf with her grandmother, asking silly questions, settling for cynical answers and ending up in the belly of the beast.

This is what is happening with the Constitutional Convention. The “opposition” (except the Communist and Humanist parties) mistook the wolf for the granny. On November 15, 2019, it signed the Agreement for Social Peace and the New Constitution, which is an act of its own demise. The skilled “opposition” politicians cannot claim that they did not see the fangs, the bleary eyes and the huge ears of the ferocious wolf that morning. The experienced leaders of the PS, PR, PPD and DC, skilled in a thousand electoral tricks, however, were not duped. They consented to drop their pants in order to preserve the essence of an economic-social system that assures them a long life. The same must be said of the Frente Amplio, that pale youthful promise that died of early systemic tuberculosis. Its parties Liberal, Democratic Revolution, Comunes and the deputy Gabriel Boric, in his personal capacity because Convergencia Social refused at the last moment, were conscious accomplices of the Act of Betrayal. In the same wanderings, weaving the maneuver to circumvent the demands of the people, were the deputies of the RD, Giorgio Jackson and Miguel Crispi, who that night made good friends with Senator Ena von Baer and Deputy Juan Antonio Coloma, of the UDI. Even the name Constituent Assembly was vetoed by RN, which effortlessly imposed the more neutral “Constitutional Convention”. By that time the “opposition” leaders had already accepted even the most dishonest impositions of the right wing. The worst one was the two-thirds quorum that leaves the popular sovereignty of the Constitutional Convention in interdiction.

That early morning a betrayal was consummated against the people who demanded a Constituent Assembly with all the powers to draft and plebiscite a new Constitution.

The “madrugonazo” of November 15 will be -and in fact, already is- a source of serious conflicts. The most dangerous ones are already looming on the political and social horizon. The blow to the democratic expectations of the people is even more evident if one considers that only three days before, 14 “opposition” parties -led by the RD- had signed a harsh declaration demanding a Constituent Assembly with all the provisions of the law. They stated that this demand was the “most democratic mechanism to guarantee a broad popular participation” (sic). Seventy-two hours later, however, they did the usual ram’s turn of parties without ideology or links with the forces of change. The “opposition” majority capitulated dishonorably to the right wing which intimidated them with the threat of the collapse of the rule of law and an eventual military coup.

For the benefit of Little Red Riding Hood, it should be noted that most of the “opposition” parties have no organic or ideological consistency. They are organizations on the verge of extinction. They subsist thanks to State subsidies that exceed 20 billion pesos per year. This without taking into account the handouts from large companies such as SQM, Corpesca, Penta, etc. To this we have to add the pitsutos that derive from the parliamentary benches, which allows to hire “advisors” to finance hundreds of officials, institutes for the formation of cadres, opinion polls, etc.

The structural weakness of the parties -which goes hand in hand with their loss of prestige- was accentuated in 2017 with the re-registration of their militancy. Until then, the recruitment process was a selective process in which the candidate had to pass several stages, starting as a sympathizer, then as an aspirant and finally, if he/she passed all the tests, he/she could become a militant. But the 2017 re-registration adopted the modalities of neoliberalism: the parties took to the streets to seek express militant signatures. Almost all of them were inflated reaching figures close to 50 thousand affiliates. But it was only a mirage, a swelling fruit of recruitment through marketing methods.

The rebellion of October 18, 2019 produced the resignation of many of those fleeting militants. In January 2020 the Electoral Service reported thousands of resignations in the “opposition” parties. Among the most affected: RD and PS. There is every reason to suppose that this hemorrhage continues to bleed the political system which is based -for power sharing purposes- on the existence of this type of organizations of insatiable bureaucratic appetite and bureaucratic ideology. The parties of the system, controlled by self-reproducing oligarchies, administer the electoral processes and their “disputes” seek to maintain the fiction of democracy.

The demagogic and treacherous behavior of the “opposition” parties must receive the punishment they deserve on April 11. Votes are the umbilical cord that allows them to receive nourishment from the system. It is the solar plexus of the neoliberal parties. It is there, therefore, where they must be hit hard, without hesitation.

The fate of democracy will be at stake on April 11. This time it is up to the people to decide its destiny by writing with their hand the first democratic Constitution in the history of Chile.


Chaos in Santiago as police fire water cannon at anti-government protesters

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/01/ ... rce-right/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: South America

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 06, 2021 2:47 pm

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With Anti-IMF Candidate Surging in Polls, Ecuador’s Moreno Flies to DC Amid Talk of Suspending Election
February 4, 2021 Alan MacLeod Andres Arauz, Ecuador, elections, IMF, Lenin Moreno, US Imperialism
By Alan Macleod – Feb 1, 2021

Adding to worries that a Bolivia-style coup might be imminent in Ecuador, Lenín Moreno will spend his final days in office in Washington, DC, where he’s been meeting with members of the Biden administration.

Polls show socialist, anti-imperialist candidate Andrés Arauz to be the clear frontrunner in Ecuador’s presidential elections slated to take place this Sunday, February, 7. Some even suggest the 35-year-old might receive double the votes of his nearest competitor in the first round of voting. Yet it now appears that the greatest danger to Arauz is not his rival candidates, but the threat of authorities canceling the election to prevent his victory.

International groups are flying in to monitor the contest, scheduled for February 7, with some calling for increased involvement of regional bodies like the Organization of American States (OAS). However, given its role in the far-right military coup in Bolivia in 2019, it is far from clear whether they would improve or hinder the process. Formed in 1948 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., the body has consistently allied itself with U.S. foreign policy directives, permanently suspending Cuba from its members in 1962. Since then, it has often been used to legitimate American intervention in the region.

Only adding to the worries that a Bolivia-style coup might be imminent in Ecuador is current president Lenín Moreno’s decision to spend his final few days in office not in his homeland, but in Washington, D.C., where he has been meeting with senior members of the new Biden administration, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and OAS chief Luis Almagro, who is currently under investigation for his part in Bolivia’s coup.

Rafael Correa, president of the country between 2007 and 2017, raised the alarm on social media, warning that the National Electoral Council of Ecuador is meeting to discuss suspending the elections because of Arauz’s imminent victory, while Moreno’s trip to Washington is an attempt to get official approval for the plan.

“The OAS and Ecuador’s neoliberal president are looking to suspend elections so as to cling on to power and stop the coming victory of the Correa left. In Bolivia, a similar plan failed after the August general strike proved that the coup regime could not withstand an uprising,” wrote MintPress’ Ollie Vargas from Bolivia.

Arauz: anti-poverty, anti-imperialism, anti-IMF

The youthful Arauz is a disciple of Correa. Indeed, he chose Correa as his running mate before the move was blocked by the National Electoral Council. If Correa returns to Ecuador under the current administration, he will be immediately imprisoned on corruption charges. Unlike Moreno, who received billions of dollars from the organization, Arauz has promised to rid Ecuador of the IMF, an organization he sees as predatory and a tool of the United States. He is also proposing to greatly increase public spending, raise taxes on the wealthy and increase capital controls on money leaving the country. He aims to continue Correa’s anti-poverty and anti-imperialism drives, suggesting he will reconnect with other leftist governments like Bolivia and Venezuela and seek a more amicable relationship with China. Thus, it is clear why both the IMF and U.S. government would wish to see his victory stalled or prevented.

Ecuador IMF Protest Photo of the day
A man holds an anti-IMF sign depicting Lenin Moreno as a vulture at a protest in Quito, July 16, 2020. Dolores Ochoa | AP
“Arauz will win unless they steal it from him,” said Professor Steve Ellner, managing editor of the journal Latin American Perspectives. “After all, Correa had a 60% favorable rating when he left office. Moreno is completely discredited, and [conservative candidate Guillermo] Lasso has been around too long to be considered a new face for business in politics — and in addition is associated with global capital.”

Ecuador’s tug of war

Serving for ten years, Correa was the first president in modern history to be re-elected in Ecuador and presided over a period of remarkable tranquility for the often politically chaotic nation. In his time in office, he managed to reduce poverty by 38% and extreme poverty by 47% while also doubling social spending. Economic and political independence were key themes of his rule, too. He renegotiated the government’s share of the nation’s substantial oil revenues from 13% to 87%, hitting foreign energy corporations’ bottom lines hard. He also ejected all American troops from the country and forged regional ties with other like-minded neighboring nations. Ecuador also offered asylum to a number of Western dissidents, among them Wikileaks cofounder Julian Assange.

Correa’s vice-president, Moreno was elected on the express promise to carry on his legacy. However, almost immediately, he reversed most of his predecessor’s economic and political stances, inviting the IMF back in the country and moving closer to the U.S. Poverty and unemployment grew again. He also presided over one of the most inept COVID responses seen worldwide. On orders from the IMF, he had previously slashed public health budgets by 36% and expelled hundreds of Cuban doctors in an effort to please the Trump administration. As a result, the country was overwhelmed by COVID-19, with images of bodies being left in the streets for days going viral worldwide.

“The situation in Ecuador is very fucked up. I don’t even have the means to [explain in] English all of what’s happening. The new Minister of Health is an incredible idiot. Coronavirus or not this country is in big trouble with this wildly incompetent government,” said MintPress contributor and Quito resident Camila Escalante.

Economic issues are the primary concern for voters in this election, with 32% identifying poverty and 25% unemployment as their key worries. The country’s poverty rate jumped from 25.7% in December 2019 to 58.2% in June 2020, with extreme poverty quadrupling over the same period. A second issue is the ongoing COVID crisis, the latest chapter of which revolves around vaccines meant for public hospitals being diverted to private clinics in affluent areas, a scandal that has already been dubbed “vaccines for the elites, cardboard coffins for the rest.”
Arauz’s two closest rivals for the presidency are Guillermo Lasso, a 65-year-old banker and former Coca-Cola executive who has a strong following among the country’s upper-middle class and 51-year-old indigenous leader Yaku Pérez. Pérez came to national attention after leading protests against Moreno’s austerity measures in 2019. However, he has distanced himself from the left. When asked to comment on Arauz’s plan to give $1,000 to one million Ecuadorian mothers who are heads of their households, he replied that he opposed the idea because they would “probably spend it all on beer that same day.” Both trail Arauz in the polls, meaning that he could achieve outright victory in one round of voting, a rare achievement in a multi-party democracy. However, given the plots brewing, Arauz may have more to fear from the U.S. and his own election authorities than from his political rivals.


Featured Image: Andres Arauz, candidate for the Union por la Esperanza party, UNES, greets supporters during a rally in Salcedo, Ecuador, Jan. 31, 2021. Dolores Ochoa | AP

https://orinocotribune.com/with-anti-im ... -election/

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Why Arauz Leads in the Polls in Ecuador
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on FEBRUARY 5, 2021

Marco Teruggi

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Andres Arauz closed his campaign in Quito. There, the popular support which is expressed in the polls was seen again, the majority of which affirm that he is the favorite for Sunday 7th. Why is Arauz, unknown by the majority months ago, now leading the polls? There are several reasons.

Thursday afternoon in downtown Quito. Demonstrators gather for the electoral closing ceremony of Andres Arauz, the candidate of Unidos por la Esperanza (UNES), who will dispute the presidency at the polls next Sunday. People have come from different parts of the country, it is the culmination of a campaign that has overcome several obstacles, many of them imposed by the National Electoral Council (CNE).

Different candidates for the National Assembly (NA), an election to be held simultaneously with the presidential elections, are speaking. It is the last act after 40 days of campaigning in which he toured the country in order to make known the proposals of the government he seeks to lead, and, above all, to make himself known. Arauz, before being chosen to head the presidential ticket, was a young politician, academic, with government experience, but unknown to many people.

The UNES candidate leads most of the polls. The high probability of him coming out on top on February 7, is due to several interrelated reasons. In the first place, he is the candidate of the formula of the Citizen Revolution, the political force that governed Ecuador between 2007 and 2017 under Rafael Correa. The former president, now in Belgium, maintains a high level of popular support that went to the figure of Arauz.

Secondly, the memory of Correa’s governments, his leadership, contrast with the years of Lenin Moreno, a man who was elected to continue the project of the citizen revolution, and ultimately carried out a political persecution against those who brought him to the presidency, conducted a neoliberal aperture, and opted for alignment with the United States.

“The Ecuadorian people are fed up with traitors and will not put up with one more betrayal, I can swear total loyalty to the project of the citizen revolution”, Arauz affirms from the stage. Many people gathered with orange and white colors on flags, caps and t-shirts.

The reasons

Julia Almeida, 65 years old, is among those who came to listen to Arauz and the different legislative candidates. “I am here of my own free will, for my children, my grandchildren and for the thousands of Ecuadorians who have hope,” she says.

“Before the citizen revolution Ecuador was a disaster, we had four presidents in one year, one of them was president for one day, we were in a mess, we elected for the sake of electing, it was a country that had unimaginable poverty rates, we had no infrastructure in health, education or mobility”.

For Almeida, as for millions of Ecuadorians, there is a before and an after the arrival of Correa to the presidency of the country: “when Rafael arrived he changed things, he gave this country a different face, infrastructure, we could study in first class schools, hospitals were built, free medicines”.

After what she calls “four years of misgovernment”, Moreno’s mandate, she states that she will vote for Arauz and Rabascall, “the first because he is a prepared young man, a human being committed to the causes of all Ecuadorians, and for Rabascall, a first class professional and human being, so that they can provide a proper governance for the majority”.


Almeida, in turn, expresses why she would not vote for Guillermo Laso, currently second in many polls: “we do not want to have a banker who keeps the money in his own pocket and who made us pay with tears of blood during banking holidays, because this man will only work for himself and his friends”.

She, like millions of Ecuadorians, remembers not only the fact that Lasso was president of the bank of Guayaquil and is one of its main shareholders, but also his role in the financial crisis of 1999 that left millions of people in ruins and enriched a few, among them Lasso.

The betrayal

The same site in Quito, called the arbolito park, where Arauz conducts the closing of his campaign, was the epicenter of the indigenous and popular uprising in October 2019. And it was here, instead of flags, campaign music, joy, there were barricades, tear gas bombs, wounded, dead, police, military.

The uprising lasted about a week. Delegations of the indigenous movement came from various regions of the country, and many people from the country’s capital joined in. Among them was Jahaira Urresta, then 27 years old.

“On Saturday 12, the worst day of the demonstrations, a policeman fired a tear gas bomb at my left eye from two meters away, I lost my eye,” he says after getting off the stage. She had just given a speech for those who came to the event: she is the head of the list to accede to the NA in Quito.

Urresta not only lost an eye, but was subjected to extortion by the then Minister of Government, María Paulo Romo, and, finally, threatened: “she tried to buy my silence and in view of my refusal and before the request for due legal process, then came the intimidation, persecution, threats and even the attempted murder of my family”.


The October 2019 uprising was a turning point in Ecuador. Moreno, who had low popularity, fell even further in view of the attempt to implement a neoliberal adjustment agreed with the International Monetary Fund, and the militarized and judicialized response with which he responded to those who demonstrated.

“We were asking the national government to listen to us, to set up work tables, unfortunately we received as an answer the fumigation of the citizens, they mutilated, dragged, murdered, imprisoned and exiled many comrades”.

After the uprising came the political persecutions of leaders of the Citizen Revolution, such as Paola Pabón and Virgilio Hernández. They were neither the first nor the last.

First round

In the closing act there is the expectation of a victory of Arauz in the first round on Sunday. It is one of the most repeated slogans. The polls, besides giving Arauz as the candidate who would come first, indicate that he could reach 40% and the 10 points of difference needed over the second to win on Sunday itself.

The two other candidates following Arauz, namely Lasso and Yaku Perez, aspire to reach the second round rather than to come out on top. It means, both that they grow in number of votes, something that has not been reflected in most polls, and that Arauz does not reach the figure of 40%.

Within this framework of favorable tendency to Arauz, the attacks in social networks and through different international media have intensified, in what constitutes a campaign to try to delegitimize him, to hit him, and to affect his possibilities of victory in the first round.

The calculation of those who carry out the attacks to prevent a victory on Sunday is that, in case of a runoff election, an anti-correista alliance could be formed in order to defeat him at the polls.

The attacks take place in the framework of a campaign that has been marked by irregularities, mainly on the part of the CNE. “Since the beginning of the pre-campaign we have threats where they are looking for ways to damage the elections, even lengthen the time, or in one way or another cancel the vote, our call is to international organizations, to be guarantors and overseers to the suffrage of the Ecuadorian people”, explains Urresta from the event.

One of the irregularities denounced is, for example, the difficulty to exercise the vote in several countries abroad. On the same Thursday that the event takes place in Quito, there is a protest outside the Ecuadorian consulate in New York City, where they denounce the lack of the necessary observers for the electoral precincts, and the decision of the CNE that the vote count will be carried out in Ecuador and not in the voting table abroad.

That is why one of the calls heard at the event is to be vigilant on Sunday, in view of the possibility that there could be last minute maneuvers to prevent what could be a first round victory for Arauz. “On Sunday we must go out to celebrate and defend our vote,” says, for example, Ricardo Ulcuango, candidate for the legislative branch.

Much is at stake in the election, not only for Ecuador, but for Latin America and the United States, and the CNE has demonstrated throughout these months irregular practices to the disadvantage of the Arauz ticket.

Translation by Internationalist 360°

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: South America

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 08, 2021 2:00 pm

OVERVIEW OF THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS IN ECUADOR
5 Feb 2021 , 8:53 am .

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Correísmo aims to win the presidential election on February 7, 2021 (Photo: File)

Next Sunday, February 7, the presidential elections will be held in Ecuador, elections that are marked by the ravages of the pandemic, changes in the electoral system and the political crisis of the last presidential term.

STORY IN MEDIAS RES TO UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT

This last element represents the background of the political crisis because it signified a break in the economic and social stability achieved with the Citizen Revolution (CR) promoted by Rafael Correa. Although Lenín Moreno was not an outsider as long as he came to the presidency through his predecessor, he became one when he had just started his mandate, he had a radical turn in which he began a persecution against those who brought him to power.

This impact had repercussions on both domestic and foreign politics. On the one hand, its betrayal fractured the unity of the national spirit achieved by the CR and, on the other, on the geopolitical plane it joined as another satellite country of the United States by breaking with the regional integration and autonomous cooperation of the designs of imperialism.

That Moreno has created a political image for himself as Correa's vice president and the fact that he became president with the Alianza País party gave the impression that there would be some continuity in the process that improved the quality of life of Ecuadorians. However, the story was different. His flirtation with the right wing does not remove the stigma of his political past and being a traitor does not make him a trustworthy subject.

A series of actions taken by Moreno aimed at the dismantling of the Ecuadorian State. From the beginning of his government, he began a kind of national dialogue in which former presidents participated, including his contender in the last elections, the right-wing Guillermo Lasso. In this dialogue, former President Correa and Correísmo did not participate.

In 2017, it launched a national consultation to make changes to the Constitution. One of these reforms included the elimination of indefinite reelection, coincidentally promoted by a political actor with no possibility of being reelected because he did not have a party or popular base structure. With this, the consensus vision of liberal democracy triumphed, which feared any continuity of a historical process through reelection, even when it is carried out through elections.

But the most obvious sign of government decline that was projected in all social areas was that experienced in Ecuador in October 2019, when the Executive adopted a series of austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The agreement between the government and the IMF to obtain credits for more than 4.2 billion dollars.

The most affected by the measures was the public sector: lower wages of up to 20%, reduction of holidays by half and contributing one day's salary per month to the State. But the measure that caused the social outbreak that left several dead and cities in ruins was the elimination of fuel subsidies, in force in that country for 40 years at that time. This 120% increase in diesel affected the most disadvantaged sectors, who took to the streets with violence. Students, farmers and public employees led the protests.

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The social tension that no longer demanded the cancellation of the measures, but rather the resignation of the president, was not contained despite the strong military and police repression that left people dead and hundreds injured. As the objective was to remove the president, Lenín Moreno moved the government to the city of Guayaquil due to the mobilizations of various sectors of society and other peoples towards the capital.

To contain and repress citizen pressure, the government applied a state of exception for 60 days, a call for dialogue and the rethinking of the measures as a way to redesign the counterinsurgency model typical of governments supervised by the US establishment.

As expected by the Moreno government, they alleged that the cause of the social outbreak was not the package of neoliberal measures that strangled the population, but external agents such as the Bolivarian Revolution and the Correísmo, against whom criminalization and persecution began. to get them out of the political game.

Once again, the international community, the OAS and UN human rights organizations sidestepped the situation or did not express the same forcefulness as when something similar occurs, even with less intensity, in Venezuela.

LENÍN MORENO IN THE FACE OF THE PANDEMIC: DEATH RUNS THROUGH THE STREETS

At the end of 2019, a year marked by a global pandemic began, the ravages of which depended on the action of governments to contain it or let it run. Folded for some reason to the American logic, of underestimating the contagiousness of the coronavirus, some South American countries did not chastise the situation in Europe and took measures too late. Ecuador was one of those cases.

This South American nation was one of the first to make headlines due to the ravages of the pandemic. And it is that despite the fact that the government of Lenín Moreno for May of last year did not reveal the number of deaths and infected, they were not hidden.

In May of last year, Ecuador was the second country in South America with the highest number of infections and deaths from covid-19. The images of overflowing morgues and corpses in public places and streets were a reflection and extension of the decline of the Moreno government that had begun with the social outbreak a year earlier.

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(Photo: Ecuador's health crisis left corpses in streets and public places (Photo: AFP))

"The statistical capabilities, epidemiological surveillance, the information system of the Ministry of Health were exceeded and they did not have the capacity to count the number of patients, to count the number of deaths," Ecuadorian José Ruales, former delegate of the Ministry of Health, told AFP. the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in El Salvador, cited by France24 .

In the absence of a health system that would be in charge of removing the corpses from the houses, to avoid another public health problem, the relatives chose to abandon them on the streets, some were even cremated on the public highway. There were also cases in which families received other dead for their relatives.

The crisis in the Ecuadorian health sector was the consequence of the government's adjustments following the IMF recipe. "Beyond the macabre anecdote, Guayaquil is shown at this time as the heart of the unforeseen political and health authorities," says El Periódico .

ELECTIONS MARKED BY TURBULENCE AND THE SPECTER OF NEOLIBERALISM

After two years of turbulence due to causal and unforeseen events, it is time to hold the elections according to the Ecuadorian electoral schedule. For these elections, which are carried out in a pandemic context and for which there are new rules, more than 13 million Ecuadorians are summoned.

In addition to being president and vice president, in the first round, Ecuadorians will elect the members of their National Assembly and the Andean Parliament, for which 137 members and 5 representatives are required respectively.

NEW RULES
The reforms promoted by Lenín Moreno enter into force for the first time for these elections . "The difference is that now the citizen will have to choose between 'closed and blocked' lists, that is, they will mark their support for a list, with all the candidates that it has included," says Sputnik .

The changes to the voting code were approved by the National Assembly on December 4, 2019 and are as follows:

Voting between lists is prohibited. The mandatory grid voting repealed the result of question 6 of the 1997 Ecuador Referendum.
The change from the D 'Hondt method to the Webster method for the allocation of seats for assembly members, Andean parliamentarians, provincial councilors, cantonal councilors and members of parish councils and the change to voting by closed lists or voting by iron, not by candidate.
Political subjects who reach less than 4% in two consecutive elections must return 50% of the electoral promotion fund received.
Dignitaries running for re-election must take leave without pay. If they apply for another position, they must resign before signing up.
The presidential pairings must be compulsorily formed between a man and a woman as of the presidential elections of 2025.
Gender parity and alternation in the heads of lists for multi-person elections, with a woman leading 50% of the lists and 25% young people.
Greater regulations on the financing and control of electoral funds, banking on the resources of political parties, creation of accounting systems that must be maintained by political organizations and interconnection between the Prosecutor's Office, Comptroller's Office, Financial and Economic Analysis Unit (UAFE) to monitor resources.
Are these cosmetic changes in the voting system relevant at the structural level in the State?

THE CANDIDATES

The context described above serves to visualize where the balance is pointing, who is favored and a projection of the possible winner in the elections.

Another peculiarity of these elections is the number of candidates participating in the race for the presidency. In total there are 16 who ran for the first office of the Republic. However, only three candidates appear in the polls: Andrés Arauz (35 years old), candidate for the Centro Democrático coalition; Guillermo Lasso (65) , for the CREO Alliance; and Yaku Pérez (51) for the Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement.

A week before the elections, the candidate who is best profiled in the polls to reach the presidency is the young Andrés Arauz, candidate of Correísmo and the youngest to participate in a presidential election; He is followed by Guillermo Lasso, a businessman and banker linked to the extreme right who has been a candidate for the presidency on several occasions; and Yaku Pérez, linked to indigenous movements, president of the Confederation of Peoples of the Kichw Nationality, who became known for participating in the demonstrations during the government of Rafael Correa.

According to France24 , " Andrés Arauz registers in the polls between 28.64% and 15%; the conservative Guillermo Lasso is between 26% and 20.85%, while the indigenous candidate Yaku Pérez is around 13%".

According to Sputnik , "Andrés Arauz 37.4%, Guillermo Lasso 24.3%, Yaku Pérez 15.1%".

Partialized or not, all the polls project Arauz as a possible occupant of the Carondelet Palace.

Everything seems to indicate that the liberal media have reached a consensus to ignore this fact and prefer to focus on the fact that the majority of voters are still undecided, that there is an oversupply of candidates or that everything will be decided in a second round.

BRIEF PROFILES
Who is Andrés Arauz?

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Michigan.
Master's in Development Economics from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), with command of English, French and Russian.
PhD in Financial Economics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
At the age of 26 he was director of the Central Bank of Ecuador and at the age of 30 he became Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent, a position he held between 2015 and 2017.
In 2017 for a few months he was also Minister of Culture and Heritage.
It is assumed as a Latin Americanist and is committed to integration in the region.
Guillermo Lasso:

From a very young age, he was linked to the Guayaquil stock market.
His first company was Constructora Alfa y Omega, founded with his older brother Enrique Lasso in 1978, when he was 23 years old.
This businessman from birth in 1994 was appointed executive president of Banco Guayaquil. That same year he passed through the national subsidiary of Coca-Cola.
In 2017 a report revealed that Guillermo Lasso was associated with 49 offshore companies in tax havens and accumulated between 1999 and 2000 a wealth of 30 million dollars.
In 1998 he began his political career when he was appointed as governor of the Guayas Province.
During the presidency of Lucio Gutiérrez he was appointed itinerant ambassador.
He has participated in three presidential elections and since 2014 he has assumed himself as the opposition leader to Correismo and has expressed his rejection of the Bolivarian Revolution and any type of regional integration that is not akin to the neoliberal corporate model.
Yaku Sacha Pérez

He has a doctorate in Jurisprudence from the Universidad Católica de Cuenca, with specializations in indigenous justice, environmental law, criminal law and criminology, and with a diploma in Hydrographic Basin and Population management.
He was president of the Confederation of Peoples of the Kichwa Nationality (ECUARUNARI) from 2013 to 2019.
President of the Andean Coordination of Indigenous Organizations.
In 2019 he was elected as Prefect of Azuay and that same year he participated in the demonstrations against the government of Lenín Moreno.
He is projected as an alternative option by showing lightness of bureaucracies, presenting himself as a musician who rides a bicycle and supports the indigenous cause.
DIRTY WAR AND CONTINUATION OF THE PERSECUTION AGAINST CORREÍSMO

Faced with the possible triumph of the young Andrés Arauz, they have started a discrediting campaign through social networks and large media corporations that operate inside and outside of Ecuador.

The network expert, the Spanish Macías Tovar, told Sputnik that the fake news campaign is carried out "by countless media and journalists, as well as members and foundations financed from the United States (USA) through the National Foundation. for Democracy (NED) or Atlas Network ".

The expert said that these discrediting campaigns are carried out through an army of false accounts that have a specific purpose of positioning the negative image of Arauz.

Likewise, it shows how from these accounts the candidate Lasso, president of an Atlas Network foundation, is supported. Tovar shows a map in which he analyzes the interactions of the candidates on Twitter.


Macías discovered that 258,000 Twitter accounts with less than 5 followers follow and interact with Lasso. Something similar happened in Bolivia when they gave the coup to Evo Morales. They created thousands of accounts whose objective was to project what was already planned.

One of the most repeated lies attributed to the young candidate is an alleged VAT hike or that he is in favor of the de-dollarization of the country, just at a delicate economic moment in a pandemic context.

To this war some means are added. The magazine Semana, from Colombia, tried to position an alleged link between the ELN and the alliance that supports Arauz's candidacy. In addition to this complaint Lenín Moreno, who describes as " extremely delicate " the alleged content of the computer of a killed guerrilla who would have found the information, clearly a psychological operation that tries to mobilize undecided voters to the detriment of the correista candidate The ELN being an irregular group classified as a terrorist and narco both by Colombia and by the US government.

Finally, it is the Ecuadorians who are going to decide who will be the next president of the country, who must face, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC), 6.6% unemployment and 23.4% of underemployment. Moreno's legacy will be a major challenge for the winner of the elections.

On the other hand, the fall in GDP by 9.5% in 2020 leaves Ecuador in the third place of the most affected economies in South America and with low growth expectations. A decline in the quality of life that not only depended on the pandemic, but also on the neoliberal turn of the presidential period that is ending.

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Re: South America

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 09, 2021 2:05 pm

Andrés Arauz wins first round of Ecuadorian presidential election, heads to run-off on April 11
According to the quick count, Andrés Arauz of the progressive Union for Hope alliance (UNES) won 31.74% of the votes. However, its still unclear who his opponent will be as two candidates are technically tied for second place

February 08, 2021 by Peoples Dispatch

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(From left) Andrés Arauz, Guillermo Lasso and Yaku Pérez,. Photo: Pichincha Comunicaciones

Andrés Arauz of the progressive Union for Hope alliance (UNES) won the first round in the Ecuadorian presidential elections that were held on Sunday, February 7. He obtained 31.74% of the votes, as per the results of the quick count by the national electoral council. It is not fully clear who is in the second place as the results showed a technical tie between Guillermo Lasso of the right-wing Creating Opportunities  (CREO) party and Social Christian Party (PSC), and Yaku Pérez of the Indigenous Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement party. Lasso obtained 20.05% of the votes, while Pérez secured 19.85% of the votes. The margin of votes between Lasso and Pérez is so narrow (0.2%) that Arauz’s opponent for the run-off cannot be declared until all votes are counted. The run-off election will be held on April 11.

According to the Ecuadorian Constitution, in order to win the presidential election in the first round, a candidate has to obtain more than 50% of the votes or more than 40% of the votes with a 10% lead over the runner-up. The announcement that there would be a run-off was made by the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE) of Ecuador, Diana Atamaint, late on Sunday.

After the announcement of the preliminary results, at a press conference, Arauz, who is supported by former President Rafael Correa, celebrated the victory of the left-wing alliance and thanked the citizens for their support. Nevertheless, he pointed out that the results of the quick count were only “a sample” estimating the trends, and that the final results could be better and the votes in his favor could be “higher.”

“Today, the victory of the Union for Hope is clear, we are in the first place. We received an overwhelming vote from different parts of our country and this is a representative triumph of the national territory,” he said.

In addition, he criticized the CNE for releasing the results that “generate anxiety, controversy, and uncertainty among the candidates.”

“The data announced by the CNE show an apparent technical tie between second and third place [candidates]. It is technically not advisable to publish results of this type because these generate anxiety and controversy among the candidates, when the role of the electoral authority is to give certainty to all parties,” said Arauz.

Meanwhile, former president Correa described the result of the CNE’s quick count as a “lie” and called on the people “to take care of each vote.”

“The CNE’s “quick count” gives us 31%. Everyone knows that this is a lie. In the same actual data already entered, we are at around 38%. Take care of each vote! The deception is obvious,” tweeted Correa.

Ecuadorians also voted for 137 legislators of the National Assembly and five parliamentarians for the Andean Parliament, the deliberative body and of control of the Andean Community, of which Ecuador is a part.

The election day was marked by a high turnout of voters, determined to generate change in the country, which is mired in an economic, health and institutional crisis under the neoliberal regime of president Lenín Moreno.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/02/08/ ... -april-11/

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Yaku Pérez is strongly backed by Washington (Photo: The Grayzone)

SUPPORTS COUPS AND HELPS THE RIGHT
YAKU PÉREZ, THE US-BACKED "ECOSOCIALIST" CANDIDATE FROM ECUADOR
Ben norton

9 Feb 2021 , 8:10 am .

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The presidential election of the Ecuador of February 7 ended with a surprise: the count quickly released by the National Electoral Council of the country seemed to teach a candidate little known, called Yaku Pérez Guartambel, second, securing a narrow victory over the candidate of right Guillermo Lasso, a banker with significant influence in the country.

Most of the polls had predicted a presidential race that would be reduced to two candidates, who could hardly be more different: on the one hand the conservative banker Lasso, who had the support of the Ecuadorian elites and the United States, who had already launched , without success, to the presidency twice prior to this; while in the other was a young left-wing economist, Andrés Arauz, who follows in the footsteps of former socialist president Rafael Correa and wants to bring back his Citizen Revolution.

But while the polls consistently had him coming in third, Yaku Perez stayed in the race until the end. And, unlike Lasso, Pérez never showed loyalty to the right; he was running as a candidate with what had been marketed as a progressive and environmental campaign.

Pérez, an indigenous leader of the Pachakutik party, pretending to be the true option of the left in the elections, criticizes Arrauz and the correista movement he represents for not being pure enough. But Pérez's political trajectory suggests that he is a Trojan Horse for the left's most implacable enemies.

Pérez virulently attacked other movements in Latin America, supporting the US-sponsored coups against Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela and Nicaragua, while accusing those governments of being "racist."

His political vision fuses ultra-left, anarchist, criticisms of actually existing left governments with an objectively right-wing political agenda. And his opposition to state power is deeply opportunistic. While Perez harshly criticizes China, he has simultaneously said that "I will not think twice" about signing a trade agreement with the United States .

Pérez's seemingly progressive ideology is full of contradictions. While Arauz, the correista candidate, has proposed giving checks for a thousand dollars to a million working-class families, Pérez has attacked this plan claiming that poor citizens would spend all the money on beer on the same day .

Pachaktik, Pérez's party, identifies itself as “ecosocialist” and claims to represent the indigenous communities of Ecuador. But like the candidate who leads him, he employs leftist rhetoric covered in regressive goals.

Pachakutik is closely linked to NGOs funded by Washington and member states of the European Union (EU). The party's leaders have been trained by the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a subsidiary of the CIA operating under the auspices of the NED.

Pachakutik is the political arm of the indigenous group CONAIE, which collaborated at the forefront of protests against former President Correa, forming an undeclared alliance with the country's oligarchic right in an attempt to destabilize and overthrow the socialist president.

In fact, Pachakutik and CONAIE played an important role in the 2010 coup attempt (with US support), which came close to removing Correa from power in a violent and undemocratic way.

The leading right-wing candidate in the 2021 election, the wealthy banker Lasso, did not feel threatened by the “ecosocialist” rhetoric of Peŕez and Pachakutik. You seem to be very aware that the label is just a marketing strategy. Lasso publicly stated that if Pérez somehow made it to the second round, he would gladly support him in defeating the correistas.

The banker's support came as no surprise when you consider that, in 2017, before changing his name from Carlos to Yaku, Pérez himself supported Lasso's candidacy .

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Re: South America

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 11, 2021 2:23 pm

Ecuador: Indigenous Party Call for Mobilization To Defend Votes

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Presidential candidate Yaku Perez (C) at a rally, Quito, Ecuador, Feb. 8, 2021. | Photo: EFE

Published 10 February 2021

This call comes amid a slow vote count in which official figures still cannot determine who will compete with Andres Arauz for the presidency.


The Pachakutik Movement called for a national mobilization to defend the "popular will" in case its presidential candidate Yaku Perez does not make it to the second round of elections to be held on April 11.

This call comes amid a slow vote count in which official figures still cannot determine who is in second place and, therefore, who will compete with the Union for Hope (UNES) candidate Andres Arauz for the presidency.

As of Wednesday morning, the National Electoral Council (CNE) had counted 99.54 percent of the tally sheets of the February 7 elections.

According to the partial results, Perez had 19.72 percent of the votes and banker Guillermo Lasso got 19.59 percent of the votes.

Over the last 2 days, however, the absolute difference in votes between both candidates was decreasing in favor of Lasso, who previously emphasized that second place will not be defined until all votes are counted.


So far, the CNE has processed 99.54 percent of the electoral records, of which 95.85 percent have already been computed. However, there is still 3.69 percent of them that must be reviewed again because they had a registration problem.

Pachakutik holds that the delay in the declaration of results is a political maneuver orchestrated by the extreme right to prevent Perez from winning.

"We are not going to allow them to steal our victory and our right to participate in the second round of elections," it said.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Ecu ... -0013.html

As noted in previous posts in this thread Yaku Perez is a trojan horse of the US State Dept. It seems that realizing that their favored right wing candidate could not possibly win that State is promoting this gambit in order to divide progressive forces and set the stage for a reactionary revival.

That Telesur.eng has chosen not to make mention of Perez's links to the northern hegemon is another example of Telesur's English language service's 'iffy' drift on well chosen occasions. They should be purged. This problem has not been noticed in their base Spanish language service.
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Re: South America

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 03, 2021 4:03 pm

ALBA-TCP Denounces the War Policies of Western Countries: Declaration of the Political Council
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 2, 2021

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The 21st meeting of the Political Council of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of the Americas-Trade Treaty of the Peoples (ALBA-TCP) got off to a strong start in the region on March 1, with the participation of foreign ministers representing the member countries, accompanied by the Executive Secretary of that multilateral body, Sacha Llorenti, and the president of the ALBA Bank, Raúl Licausi, among other authorities present.

The meeting was opened by the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Jorge Arreaza, who explained the current situation in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic, one year after the disease was introduced in these territories of Latin America and the Caribbean. He spoke of the importance of ALBA’s reactivation, especially in the health sector, with the creation of the Vaccine Bank, which will soon bring a shipment of anti-Covid doses to the Commonwealth of Dominica from China, as well as the Henry Reeve Cuban Medical Brigade, which has become a solidary and human aid not only for our continent but for the whole world, and which has particularly provided assistance and support in the deployment of health and security protocols to the countries of the Alliance, saving lives.

Arreaza also assessed the economic effects that the closing of borders due to the coronavirus has had on imports for production and consumption, on food, tourism, transportation, supplies, on the challenge for education, which has adapted and created formulas to protect life, with different modalities and sometimes limited technologies. Therefore, since December, different sectors have been reactivated in ALBA: health, education, agriculture, economic complementation council to continue with the work promoted from this instance, different meetings of these committees have been held to review and address the difficulties, share ideas and coordinate actions, as well as create future work plans that can strengthen this system of complementarity.

Countries such as Cuba and Venezuela have not been the only ones affected by the blockade that has generated a strong economic crisis, the attack is a direct assault since they constitute a fundamental pillar for the advancement of inclusive policies for the sister Caribbean islands, historically battered and mistreated by the dependence generated by colonialist countries and which, with organizations such as ALBA and Petrocaribe, relieve their economies and allow them to carry out a more equitable distribution in terms of social plans in their territories.

Declaration:

The Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), on the occasion of the XXI Meeting of the Political Council, held in virtual format on March 01, 2021:

1. We ratify our commitment to a genuine Latin American and Caribbean integration, which will allow us to face together the imperialist domination and the growing threats to regional peace and stability, to multilateralism and to the principles of International Law; including respect for the self-determination of peoples, sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-interference in the internal affairs of States; as well as the prohibition of the use and threat of use of force and the peaceful settlement of disputes, as endorsed in the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace.

2. We denounce the policies of war and domination of Western countries, in particular the United States of America, which even in times of profound world crisis caused by the pandemic of COVID 19, do not cease in their attempts to subdue sovereign States, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Syrian Arab Republic. We recall, in this regard, the call of the Secretary General of the United Nations for an “immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world”.

3. We demand the immediate lifting of the unilateral coercive measures applied by the U.S., which impose obstacles to the countries affected in the confrontation with COVID-19, especially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and Nicaragua.

4. We reiterate the call made by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Ms. Alena Douhan, for the United States, the European Union and other States to lift the unilateral coercive measures imposed on the people of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

5. We urge the immediate and unconditional cessation of the U.S. economic, commercial and financial blockade against Cuba and demand an end to the possibility of filing lawsuits in U.S. courts under Title III of the Helms-Burton Act.

6. We reiterate ALBA-TCP’s strong condemnation of all terrorist acts, methods and practices in all their forms and manifestations, including those cases in which States are directly or indirectly involved; which is unjustifiable whatever the motivations, considerations or factors invoked.

7. We condemn in firm and absolute terms the classification of Cuba as a country sponsoring terrorism by the government of the United States and the inclusion in the spurious list of the Department of State of that country.

8. We express our deep sorrow for the mortal victims that the pandemic has caused in the world and in particular in our region. In the face of the devastating impacts of the multiple crises generated by COVID-19, a coordinated and joint response is needed to ensure the inclusive and resilient recovery of our economies, which will allow us to strengthen the sustainable development of our peoples, as well as the eradication of poverty.

9. We recognize that all peoples, particularly those of the Caribbean and the Central American isthmus, are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and natural disasters. Several countries of the Alliance have recently been affected by severe meteorological events. For this reason, the ALBA-TCP countries commit ourselves to continue defending the importance of the recognition of “Damages and Losses” in the multilateral processes of financing for Climate Change.

10. We reaffirm that the unfair international financial system and the inclusion in lists of non-cooperative jurisdictions endanger the small economies of Caribbean countries. This situation is aggravated by the pandemic, with reports of a significant decrease in tourism, a fundamental sector for their income, and limited access to sources of international financing. We demand fair, special and differentiated treatment for them.

11. We must work together on the basis of extensive immunization against HIV/AIDS as a global public health good. An equitable and supportive distribution is needed to protect the poor and most vulnerable. Our peoples have the right to access all essential, safe, effective and affordable quality health technologies and products necessary for the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that barriers to such access and distribution be urgently removed, consistent with the provisions of international treaties.

12. We denounce the hoarding of vaccines against COVID-19, which the most powerful countries in the world have been carrying out.

13. We insist on the urgency of attending to the special needs of our sister Caribbean countries, which would allow them to benefit from cooperation to prevent and confront the pandemic.

14. We recognize the gigantic effort of health professionals, scientists and humanitarian personnel to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic in different regions of the world, to defend the right to health and life, even at their own risk. We highlight the leadership of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the process of coordinating and combating the pandemic.

15. We recognize, in particular, the contribution of the Republic of Cuba to the response to the pandemic, despite the complex circumstances imposed by the tightening of the economic, commercial and financial blockade of the United States and the campaign of the government of that country to discredit and sabotage the international medical cooperation that Cuba offers in dozens of countries and territories, which has benefited millions of people.

16. We congratulate and recognize the humanistic and altruistic work of the Henry Reeve Cuban Medical Contingent and its contribution to the confrontation of the coronavirus in ALBA-TCP countries and other nations of the world. We welcome the numerous initiatives to formally register the candidacy of this Contingent for the Nobel Peace Prize 2021.

17. We congratulate the Bolivian people for the recovery of democracy, thanks to the unity and work of social organizations and the native indigenous peoples and peasants. This has resulted in important advances, mainly in the area of health, in the first 100 days of the government led by President Luis Arce Catacora and Vice President David Choquehuanca.

18. We reiterate the commitment of the ALBA-TCP member countries to address the most pressing needs and guarantee food and nutritional security for populations in vulnerable situations, stressing that food production and distribution systems are essential for sustainability and for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

19. We celebrate the agreements reached at the recent meetings of ALBA High Authorities in the areas of Health, Agriculture and Education, which revitalize our Alliance and demonstrate that only with unity is it possible to face the serious threats that affect us.

Source

Translation by Internationalist 360°

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/03/ ... l-council/
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Re: South America

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 06, 2021 2:40 pm

Police repress demonstrations against the Paraguayan president

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The protesters announced that they would continue to mobilize until the president resigns or faces a political trial. | Photo: EFE

Published March 6, 2021 (9 hours 35 minutes ago)

According to Paraguayan media, so far the repression has left at least one dead and eight people injured, who are in the Trauma Hospital in the city of Asunción.

Thousands of protesters were repressed this Friday in the Paraguayan capital by police forces with rubber bullets and tear gas.

The protesters demanded the resignation of President Mario Abdo Benítez due to the mismanagement of the Government of Mario Abdo Benítez to address the health and economic crisis derived from the coronavirus pandemic.

Citizens responded to the call of the call # I'mParaElMarzo2021, through which they expressed their annoyance at the handling of the pandemic and the possible collapse of the health system.


According to Paraguayan media, so far the repression has left at least one dead and eight people injured, who are in the Trauma Hospital in the city of Asunción.


The director of the Hospital, Agustín Saldívar said that the injured were treated and that all are out of danger and under observation.

According to the TeleSUR correspondent, Osvaldo Zayas, indicated that the protests were called by citizen organizations after relatives of patients hospitalized for coronavirus denounced that the country is short of essential medicines to treat the disease.

Zayas pointed out that relatives have been forced to spend large sums of money so that their relatives remain alive, unleashing great outrage among citizens. since the Government requested millionaire loans to attend the pandemic.

The journalist indicated that health services are collapsed and patients do not receive the necessary care "the claims grew during the week, leading to the resignation of the Minister of Health, Julio Mazzoleni."

The departure of the holder of the portfolio, a day after the Senate requested his resignation, was an incentive this Friday for the protesters who gathered in the vicinity of the National Congress.


The correspondent stated that the protesters announced that they would continue to mobilize in the streets of the Paraguayan capital until the president resigns or faces a political trial.

After the reports of the police repression, the Liberal Party, called for this Saturday a meeting before the "shameful, brutal and arbitrary repression" of the police against the concentration in front of the Congress headquarters.


Despite reports of police repression in the framework of the protests, the Interior Minister, Arnaldo Giuzzio, justified the actions of the uniformed men.

"The police reacts to incidents, they tried to enter the headquarters, they ran over the fence, but somehow it is already under control. Let's hope that the young people control themselves," Giuzzio said in an interview with the GEN channel.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/represio ... -0001.html

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Deputies will promote impeachment against Paraguayan president

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To advance in the impeachment process, the votes of at least 53 deputies are necessary. | Photo: www.lanacion.com.py

Published March 6, 2021 (3 hours 41 minutes ago)

The liberal deputy Celeste Amarilla assured that the president has been accumulating causes to file a political trial against him.

Deputies of the Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA) announced that next week they will present the request for impeachment against the president of Paraguay, Mario Abdo Benítez for Friday's repression against protesters who demanded his dismissal.

The opposition deputies argue that there are elements of mismanagement to face the pandemic and address the social and economic crisis that the country is going through.


Deputy Celeste Amarilla assured Paraguayan media that the president has been accumulating causes to file a political trial since practically the beginning of his government.

Amarilla commented that 53 votes are needed to advance in the process, which is why it is extremely necessary to have the support of the Colorados, who are the majority in both houses of Congress.


He also added that for the moment the request for prosecution would point only against the president, but that they do not rule out that in the course of the hours they may include in the accusation the second of the Executive Power, Hugo Velázquez.

For his part, the deputy for the Hagamos Party, Carlos Rejala, mentioned that the glass is already completely full due to the lack of responses from the Executive, due to the serious health situation to face the pandemic.


"It is our duty as congressmen to support this citizen clamor with a consistent vote," said Rejala.

In the Senate, the liberal senator Zulma Gómez said that legislators have already echoed the measure against the head of state.

Thousands of protesters were repressed this Friday in the Paraguayan capital by police forces with rubber bullets and tear gas during a protest against President Mario Abdo Benítez for his management in the face of the pandemic.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/paraguay ... -0008.html

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Paraguayan Minister of Health resigns amid crisis

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The Senate had urged Julio Mazzoleni on Thursday to resign from his post as Minister of Health. | Photo: RT

Published March 5, 2021 (20 hours 22 minutes ago)

Vice Minister Julio Borba took over as interim minister until the President of the nation appoints another incumbent.

The Paraguayan Minister of Health, Julio Mazzoleni, resigned this Friday from his position, amid the health crisis that the country is going through due to Covid-19 and the criticism of various sectors regarding the management of the pandemic.

Speaking to a local television station, Mazzoleni reported that he met with the Paraguayan president, Mario Abdo Benítez, and together they decided to resign.

He said that, above any personal criteria, the most important thing is the national interest and the union between all sectors to face the crisis of the pandemic.


The event takes place after the approval on Thursday in the Senate, by a majority, of a statement urging him to resign. The legislators also called for the departure of Vice Minister Julio Rolón and the Director General of Surveillance, Guillermo Sequera.

After deliberation in the Senate, the Minister of Health had stated that he would not resign out of respect for workers in the sector.

On Wednesday, a part of them requested, during an act of public protest in Asunción (capital), the improvement of conditions to face Covid-19.


These claims are linked to the shortage of drugs, particularly in intensive care. This caused tension, as the families of the patients had to invest considerable sums in procuring the drugs in other ways.

The eventual collapse of the health system has also generated discontent due to the exponential rise in infections and the lack of beds, as well as the delay in the arrival of vaccines against the coronavirus.

So far, Paraguay has only received 4,000 doses of the Sputnik V vaccine, used to immunize 2,000 health workers, although it negotiated the acquisition of one million doses of this Russian vaccine.


The arrival of 4.3 million doses of other immunizers is also expected, through the Covax mechanism sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Regarding the latter, Mazzoleni told the media days ago that they expected the arrival of a number of them by mid-March, although he did not give more specific details.

According to the most recent balance of the Ministry of Health on the pandemic, offered on Thursday, Paraguay has already confirmed 164,310 cases of coronavirus and 3,256 deaths.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/ministro ... -0026.html

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Re: South America

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 11, 2021 2:47 pm

Ecuador: The CIA in Disarray
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 9, 2021
Revista Crisis

Image
After dismantling the State, after generating the most brutal crisis in the history of the country, after taking so many lives and futures, the CIA rats are on the move.

On Friday afternoon, March 5, 2021, Patricio Pazmiño, General of the National Police on passive duty, resigned from the Ministry of Government. Pazmiño replaced deputy minister María Paula Romo, who was removed from the position last November 24. Pazmiño had been in office for only three months. As vice minister, Pazmiño was in charge of the logistical coordination of the unbridled repression of October 2019, events that for their brutality represent State crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ten days after the prison crisis, which led to the murder of 79 PPL prisoners, the highest authority in charge of the internal security of the bourgeois state, presented his resignation to President Lenin Moreno. The worst government in the history of Ecuador, apart from the relentless and aggressive application of anti-popular and neoliberal measures, has stood out for having unscrupulous authorities.

The resignations of high-ranking State officials are happening as apparently independent events, but they are not. It is evident that the Moreno government’s hours are numbered, and a massive flight of its authorities will not wait. The bourgeoisie destroys, deinstitutionalizes and takes advantage of the State. The multiple outrages to the life and dignity of the people, fall into possible criminal responsibilities, and those responsible vanish. After the raffle of privatizations of the public sector, the structural defunding of the State’s portfolios and the speculation with life in the midst of the pandemic, there will be no one left to hold responsible for so much pain.

Nor is it a coincidence that the preferred destination for the Moreno government authorities is the U.S. From the beginning, the National Government has proven to be faithful and servile to the interests of the U.S. State Department. Among the achievements of the government in favor of U.S. national interests are the signing of an FTA between the two countries, the unconditional support for its imperial policy, with the recognition of the self-claimed Juan Guaidó in Venezuela and the dictator Jeanine Áñez in Bolivia, in addition to the reinstatement of military cooperation in geopolitical terms, with the “natural base” of Galapagos. The United States knows how to take care of its “friends”, as former President Trump affectionately expressed to Álvaro Uribe last October.

The neoliberal government par excellence continues to sink, without characters like Pazmiño and Zevallos losing the opportunity to wash their hands and consciences, fleeing at the most opportune moment. The people will not forget those who have been their executioners in these four years of implementation of the machinery of death called neoliberalism. Hopefully someday, these nefarious figures will be brought to justice before they return to take refuge in their favorite homeland, the United States. The rats continue to abandon ship, one after another. The question remains as to whether the captain of the shipwreck, Lenin Moreno, will end up sinking with the ship, or whether he will also receive a life preserver from the U.S. State Department.

Chronicle of the escape

The CIA is in retreat. The agents who have imposed neoliberalism from shock to shock in the country, are on their way out. The first to leave office was the former Minister of Economic and Social Inclusion, Ivan Granda, who resigned on September 4. The next to leave the country for the United States was former Minister of Finance Richard Martinez, who was promoted to the position of Vice-President for countries at the IDB on November 13, 2020.

They were followed by the Minister of Terror, María Paula Romo. After being removed from office on November 24, 2020, in the impeachment trial carried out by the National Assembly, she vanished from the public sphere. No one knows the whereabouts of the former minister, one of the most relevant figures in the dismantling of the State, and best friend of the U.S. Embassy, along with her was her recent husband, Iván Granda.

Subsequently, the former Secretary General of the Cabinet of the Presidency of the Republic, the senior lackey, Juan Sebastián Roldán, caught up with them on the run, last February 19, 2021. His main function in the ill-fated government of Moreno, was highlighted by the rapprochement with the US State Department, the FTA agreement, the defense of the repression of October 2019, the budget cuts and the servility to the IMF and WB. With the impudence of a “dios le pague”, Roldan declared his mission accomplished, the embezzlement of the country, and left not to return.

Only a week later, in the midst of the world’s biggest corruption scandal in the handling of the vaccines against covid-19, the former Minister of Health, Juan Carlos Zevallos, resigned. That same night, he fled the country for Miami. Leaving the country with the worst SARS-COV2 death figures, a collapsed health system, and the people in total abandonment. He, his mother, relatives and friends of the worst government in history were vaccinated.

Now the brand new Minister of Government and right hand of María Paula Romo, Patricio Pazmiño, joins the escape. Who will follow him in the escape caravan? Perhaps Mr. President, who has already alleged heart problems. Or it will be Jarrín and Michelena. Maybe it will be Pablo Celi, now that the prosecutor’s office is investigating him. It is not certain, what we do know is that after dismantling the State, after generating the most brutal crisis in the history of the country, after taking so many lives and futures, the CIA rats are on the move.

Translation by Internationalist 360°

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/03/ ... -disarray/

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Ecuadorian Indigenous Leader: “We Must Get Out of the Correaism-Anticorreism Polarization”
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 10, 2021
Marco Teruggi

Image
Leonidas Iza, leader of the Indigenous Peasant Movement of Cotopaxi © Sputnik / Marco Teruggi

Ecuador’s main indigenous movement is in the midst of debates and tensions over the presidential candidacy of Yaku Perez, the logic of decision-making, and alliances for the second round of elections. Leonidas Iza, one of its main leaders, talked to Sputnik about the current situation.


Leonidas Iza Salazar is one of the main leaders of the indigenous movement in Ecuador. His name gained national prominence in the October 2019 uprising against the attempted economic adjustment sought by the government of Lenin Moreno. Iza was at the head of the Indigenous and Peasant Movement of Cotopaxi (MICC) that mobilized nearly 60,000 people to Quito during those days in October.

Since then he is the subject of eight judicial proceedings. He is not the only one: Jaime Vargas, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), of which the MICC is part, has seven processes, and “many comrades in the provinces have precautionary measures, they cannot leave the country, they have to sign-in every week,” explained Iza from San Ignacio, the community where he was born, in the province of Cotopaxi, two hours from the capital.

Iza is once again at the center of the current debates in Conaie, one of the four indigenous organizations in the country, “the most structured”, he says, which comprises 18 peoples, 15 nationalities, with a presence in the three regions of the country: the highlands, the Amazon and the coast. The debate that the movement is going through has repercussions on national politics because it has at its center the question of the presidential elections, in which Yaku Perez was a candidate for the Pachakutik party, the electoral instrument of the Conaie.

Discussions about Perez’s denunciation of fraud in the February 7 elections, as well as what position Conaie will take before the second round, hide deeper tensions, “a very difficult moment”, explains Iza. The internal differences include Pérez’s candidacy, the relationship between Conaie and Pachakutik, decision-making, alliances, and the existence of a sector of the movement with links to the right.

Conaie-Pachakutik

The Pachakutik political party was created in 1995 “by collective decision”, says Iza. Five years earlier there had been the first indigenous uprising led by Conaie. The original agreement was that “those who decide on the life of Pachakutik are the organizational structures of peoples and nationalities at the Conaie level”.

However, this relationship and form of internal decision making began to enter into “dispute”, says the MICC leader, with what he calls an attempt to “autonomize itself on the part of the Pachakutik movement, not wanting to depend on the decisions of the organizational structures”.

The debate is currently divided into two positions. One sector, which includes Iza, maintains that Pachakutik should “sustain itself with the organizational structures”. This is a vision that is raised not only in view of a specific decision, but also towards the exercise of government at any level, national or local, to which a candidate of the party may accede: there, too, one must govern and administer “with the structures of the movement and the structures of self-organization of the citizens, because this is not only about the indigenous movement”.

On the other hand, “the regulations of the code of democracy and the organic structure of Pachakutik say that those who decide are the individual adherents”, explains Iza. According to the MICC leader, this not only implies the danger that “Pachakutik as an instrument will be superimposed over the process of struggle that Conaie has had”, but also that it will lead to individualization in participation, when what is historically defended is “a collective form of participation”.

The nomination of Yaku Pérez

“It has been a very complex year”, says Iza, and the candidacy of Perez as head of Pachakutik for the presidency is an expression of that situation. Originally there were four possible candidates for the presidential election: Jaime Vargas, Perez, Salvador Quishpe, who was elected to the National Assembly (NA), and Iza himself.

The election of the candidate was to be, in the first place, by consensus, “as has been the strategy of the indigenous movement all its life”. In order to reach this consensus, three elements were to be undertaken: “a general evaluation of the polls, to determine the strength of each comrade, an evaluation of the decision of the organizational structures of peoples and nationalities, and a survey of their own”.

In the event that this procedure did not take place, then “the other regulations on the processes of internal democracy should be respected, go to primaries, let the peoples and nationalities vote, let the adherents vote, and whoever is elected, then we all align ourselves with the winner”.

Neither of the two procedures happened for the election of Perez. His designation “was a decision solely and exclusively of the coordinators of the provinces and at the national level of the national executive committee of Pachakutik without taking into account the decision of the organizations,” he explains. And that “provoked a fissure”.

There were attempts to unify again, “because we could not face polarized elections”. However, a synthesis was not achieved, Perez remained as candidate and “generated the distancing of comrade Jaime Vargas, from the organizations”.

Neither left nor right

When on February 12, seven days after the elections, Perez and Guillermo Lasso met at the National Electoral Council (CNE) to address the complaint of fraud filed by Perez, Iza wrote on his Twitter account:

We are vigilant that the meeting between @yakuperezg and @LassoGuillermo is not an agreement with the right.
This would be illegitimate and unconsulted with the grassroots of @CONAIE_Ecuador and Pachakutik. Our fight is against the neoliberal right wing that plundered the country, wherever it comes from.

– Leonidas Iza Salazar Official (@LeonidasIzaSal1) February 12, 2021



Iza’s public warning in the meeting between Perez and the neoliberal candidate Lasso, who will be in the second round against Andres Arauz, candidate of the Citizen Revolution, was due to the fact that there is “a sector within the indigenous movement that says we are neither left nor right, but at the time of the elections they prefer to go with candidates of the right”.

This happened, for example, in 2017, when faced with the ballot between Moreno and Lasso, Perez called to support the second. Iza points out that even “there is a sector that is around Perez that has stood twice for Lasso’s party, so logically now they are very close and are not going to carry the agenda of the peoples and nationalities”.

This rapprochement of the movement to a sector of the right is part of the current debates. Iza defends Conaie’s leftist position: “We take that position based on reality, most of our families live in poverty and extreme poverty, and that logically leads to a political project, and the intention is to transform that reality”.

However, politics in Ecuador is marked by a political watershed, which is Correaism and anti-Correaism. This cleavage works as a device to gather heterogeneous alliances against Correaism, namely the Citizen Revolution, under which the Conaie sectors that seek alliances to the right are sheltered. However, this is not the only problem:

“Ecuador is saturated with this idea of correísmo and anticorreísmo, an unnecessary polarization of politics. There is a sector of the right wing that confronts Correaism with all its strength, but our colleagues also confront it because we have been beaten by Correaism”.

Iza refers to several issues they “dealt with” with the governments of Rafael Correa (2007-2017). One of them was “water administration”, where “there we broke relations, we proposed that the community boards be recognized as subjects of production, that the community territories not be divided”.

Another issue was that of indigenous justice: “We had said that it is a right that must be guaranteed between ordinary justice and indigenous justice, a level of coordination, and the criminalization on the part of the justice authorities cannot be allowed”.

Another central issue was the question of territory and mining: “At this moment Ecuador has 15% of the national territory under concession for mining, and 70% of that percentage is in indigenous territories. The nerve center point with all the governments in office is the extractive issue”.

The MICC leader names several other elements, such as the “disrespect to the structures” of the movement, having been accused of being part of the enemy, or criticism of the policies of Correa’s government, in the economic field. “For example, the marketing system, if there is a policy that favors the large chains, why not generate marketing conditions for the same productive units of the peasants, so that they can enter into a redistribution of the economy from the market?”.

Iza acknowledges positive aspects, such as the social assistance policy or the improvement of roads, although in each case with a critical view. To this can be added central issues of agreement, such as the plurinational and intercultural character approved in the 2008 Constitution, or international policies such as the withdrawal of the U.S. military base in Manta, in 2009.

“With all that is there we say we have to continue fighting, but we have to get out of the polarization of correism-anti-correism. In that scenario the only ones who benefit are the right-wing groups”.

The second round

“I as a leader do not answer only for my ideas, which have been questioned or debated even with our own comrades who say we are neither left nor right wing and the elections come and they go with the right, and that will never be with me and we are not going to do it”, Iza begins by answering to a question about the second round.

His response comes before Conaie’s Enlarged Council meeting Wednesday, March 10, where this issue will be discussed. “Surely a resolution of an ideological null vote will emerge, without leaving aside the perspectives of the left that must be rebuilt in Ecuador, because we cannot continue polarized and that from that polarization has managed to influence our organizational structures with more right-wing ideas, which is very harmful for the indigenous movement”.

Already the MICC, in its Provincial Assembly of March 5, resolved to promote the “ideological null vote for the second round”, and to take this proposal to the Enlarged Council of the Conaie.

Iza looks critically at the moment: “Many actors of the indigenous movement are not observing with a perspective of international politics, neoliberalism, privatization processes, the conditions of the signing of the Free Trade Agreement, the agreements imposed by the International Monetary Fund. At this moment there is a loophole to review Correa’s policy and this process has not been able to emerge yet, and, consequently, we are going for a null vote”.

The decision that comes out will be abided by, Iza affirms. “If I myself am challenging that the left cannot be divided, no matter how important a spokesperson we have, we cannot break this organizational logic, and this must be understood by every political actor in Ecuador so that in the coming years the political and organizational capacity of the indigenous movement is not underestimated”.

Translation by Internationalist 360°

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/03/ ... arization/
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Re: South America

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 27, 2021 11:46 am

Chevron, ExxonMobil and BlackRock Want To Teach The Left About “Extractivism” In Latin America
COUNCIL OF THE AMERICAS EDITORIAL ENVIRONMENT UNITED STATES

A week after charges against former president Lula were annulled, invigorating the Brazilian left to unite and challenge neofascist Jair Bolsonaro, US magazine Americas Quarterly responded with the kind of cynical propaganda we should always expect from it.

Having enthusiastically supported the lawfare campaign against him, the AQ piece was an attack on Lula and the Latin American left’s record on the environment, built around Oliver Stuenkel’s facile comparison between Lula and a new generation of young centre-left politicians in the northern hemisphere.

It is the same story repeated across the continent: Latin America must not have sovereign development.

Americas Quarterly and AS/COA

Before we go any further we need to establish one basic premise: Americas Quarterly is a joke.

Its writers are not journalists, nor should they be considered as such. They are for the most part corporate propagandists, academics for hire, dubious or unwitting leftists, sycophant prospective employees, and “future political leaders”, groomed by the likes of YPA, LEAD, or in Brazil’s specific case, RenovaBR. Even the Guardian’s notorious Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips is listed as a speaker of its parent organisation. Americas Quarterly is not a normal magazine.

Most importantly, that parent organisation is AS/COA, Americas Society / Council of the Americas, a right wing think tank and lobby which was created specifically to interfere in Latin American politics, beginning with Brazil’s congressional elections in 1962.

Then called simply Business Group for Latin America, it was convened by Chase Bank’s David Rockefeller at the behest of John F. Kennedy. It funded candidates and organisations opposed to president Jango Goulart, and penetrated civil society to help precipitate the 1964 coup. Council of the Americas then went on to play an active role in the 1973 coup in Chile, as documented by Seymour Hersh in ‘Price of Power’.

Hersh wrote about COA’s role in Chile and its seamless integration with the CIA’s activities:
“The principal contact in Chile for the CIA as well as for the American corporations was the organization of Agustín Edwards…who was the owner of the conservative El Mercurio newspaper chain in Chile and a focal point for the opposition to Allende and the left. The CIA and the Business Group, which by 1970 had been reorganized into the Council of the Americas, relied heavily on Edwards to use his organization and his contacts to channel their moneys into the 1964 political campaign. Many of the ties between the Business Group and the CIA in 1964 remained in place long after the election. For example, Enno Hobbing, a CIA official who had initially been assigned as liaison to the Business Group, eventually left the CIA and became the principal operations officer for the Council.”
AS/COA was ITT. AS/COA was Anaconda Copper. The US companies at the heart of the plot to remove Allende by any means necessary, and install the bloody rule of Augusto Pinochet.

The Pinochet regime that followed left over 40,000 killed, tortured or imprisoned, with a further 200,000 driven into exile. And its supposed economic “miracle”, which is regularly used to justify such horrors, has been comprehensively debunked.

Many people have died in Latin America as a direct result of decisions made at 680 Park Avenue, New York, the AS/COA headquarters. For a Latin America focussed organisation, AS/COA employees are today conspicuous in their lack of social media commemoration or remorse for the September 11 1973 coup. Unsurprising given their role in it.

Editor in chief of Americas Quarterly is Brian Winter, who is also vice president of policy at AS/COA itself, as well as a former Reuters Brazil correspondent and ghostwriter of books for a range of right wing and neoliberal Latin American politicians. Winter once called Augusto Pinochet “a revolutionary”, and told Davos attendees to “prepare to be dazzled” by Bolsonaro’s Pinochet-inspired Economy minister, Paulo Guedes.

Bolsonaro long threatened to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, something that did not appear to concern AS/COA when they were holding behind closed doors meetings with him in 2017. As recently as February 2020, Americas Quarterly ran an article titled, “Bolsonaro’s Amazon Plan Has Actual Reasons for Hope” by Natalie Unterstell, who stood in 2018 as candidate for misleadingly named centre-right ‘Podemos’ party. Podemos was the party most loyal to Bolsonaro in congress, voting with his government on 90% of occasions in the first year of his military dominated administration.

AQ editorial board members include Brazil’s former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, ex-IMF economist Monica de Bolle, and Thomas Shannon, who served as Ambassador to Brazil from 2009-2013. Following two stints at the office of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Shannon was under-secretary of state for political affairs in the U.S. Department of State from 2016 to 2018.

Shannon admitted after his retirement that the Lula and Dilma governments were an obstacle to US plans for South America.

Council of the Americas holds its annual event at the State Department, from where many of its key personnel past and present have come, such as notorious cold warrior Otto Reich, and AS/COA’s current chairman emiritus, John Negroponte, a former US Deputy Secretary of State, Director of National Intelligence, and Ambassador to Iraq, Mexico, Phillipines, and Honduras.

COA’s board of directors also includes Brian Malnak of Shell, Clay Neff of Chevron, Erik Oswald of ExxonMobil, former Clinton and Bush era Government official Thomas McLarty III of McLarty Associates, John M. Moncure of the Financial Times, Martin Marron of J.P. Morgan, Armando Senra of BlackRock, Alexandre Bettamio of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Terrence J. Checki formerly of the Federal Reserve, and Richard Herold of Newmont Goldcorp, and Donna Hrinak, former Ambassador to Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela.

Also on the board is Daniel Calhman de Miranda, from Mattos Filho, Veiga Filho, Marrey Jr. E Quiroga Advogados, a Brazilian legal firm specialised in mergers and acquisitions, which boasted that the now disgraced operation Lava Jato had brought it a deluge of new business.

Cargill, Bunge, ADM and Goldman Sachs are just four corporate members of Council of the Americas that are active in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado, and linked to the fires raging across the region, which were started intentionally to enable expansion of available land, principally for Soy cultivation and Cattle.

Other current or recent members of the Council actively or historically invested in the Transmazonian region include, from agribusiness: Continental Grain Company. From finance: BlackRock, BNP Paribas, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Scotiabank, Citigroup, Inc, Santander. From Seeds and Pesticides: Bayer-Monsanto, Dow Chemical. From Oil and Gas: Chevron, ConocoPhillips. From the mining sector: Barrick Gold Corporation, Rio Tinto, Hothschild Mining, and so on.

Facing more scrutiny than ever, AS/COA’s increasingly desperate-looking employees are often found in denial of their own organisation’s documented history, and even its direct open links to the US government.

Council of the Americas’ predecessors were of whom Pablo Neruda wrote in his 1940 poem ‘Standard Oil Co’:
“Their obese emperors from New York are suave smiling assassins who buy silk, nylon, cigars, petty tyrants and dictators. They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils, distant regions where the poor hoard their corn like misers their gold: Standard Oil awakens them, clothes them in uniforms, designates which brother is the enemy. The Paraguayan fights its war, and the Bolivian wastes away in the jungle with its machine gun.”
Extractivism

AS/COA is Chevron. AS/COA is ExxonMobil. AS/COA is BlackRock. AS/COA IS “extractivism”.

It is fascinating then to see this organisation try to mobilise its media arm in criticism of its own institutional and financial basis, let alone for it to then depict extractivism as a characteristic of the left. But these gymnastics are Americas Quarterly’s function.

A week before Lula’s release, Brazil’s far right minister of Foreign Affairs, Ernesto Araújo was interviewed by AS/COA CEO and President Susan Segal. In the interview, Bolsonaro’s ruinous Amazon policy was called a “win win”. In 2019 Araújo called the an US-Brazil bilateral agreement to open up the Amazon “…the Holy Grail of Brazil’s foreign policy, at least for the private sector”.

Published less than two weeks after the Araújo’s interview, Stuenkel’s Americas Quarterly piece was headlined “Much of Latin America’s Left Has a Blind Spot: The Environment. As center-left leaders in Europe and the U.S. prioritize the fight against climate change, the same cannot be said of their Latin American peers.”

Stuenkel attacked the region’s left leaders whilst lauding the environment record of Colombia’s AS/COA backed right wing President Iván Duque.

In Lula’s first public speech since charges against him were anulled, Stuenkel complained that: “…while Lula seemed to criticize every single one of Bolsonaro’s policies, one topic was conspicuously absent: During his nearly 90-minute speech, the left-wing leader did not once mention climate change, deforestation or fires in the Amazon forest and the Pantanal wetlands, all of which have made regular global headlines over the past several years.”

Besides the fact that Lula has spoken about all of these things since his release from jail in November 2019, this was especially disingenuous given his record in government. Besides beginning the transition of Brazil’s electrical grid, already based largely upon hydroelectric, towards wind and solar power, Amazon deforestation fell dramatically under Lula between 2003 and 2010.

In June 2013 it was announced that Lula’s government reduced greenhouse emissions by 39% between 2005 and 2010, reducing them to below 1990 levels, primarily due to reduction of deforestation in the Amazon.

And even before 2015’s Paris accord, in 2009 Lula had already promised that Brazil would reduce its greenhouse emissions by 36 percent or more by 2020.

These targets were reached early, just as a corporate free for all was enabled by the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and election of Bolsonaro – both of which with came with the de-facto support of AS/COA and to the delight of its members.

When the forests are gone, the minerals remain. The riches of Brazil’s Amazon have long been coveted.In 1998, Brazilian mining giant Vale was sold off for a fraction of its value, by Americas Quarterly board member, then president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, yet extractivism became a buzzword in Brazil only following its discovery of massive offshore oil deposits in 2007, with a myriad of research papers on the subject since, many of them used to attack the ‘pink tide’. It seems that extractivism in the private sector is not an issue. Somehow, only when the companies involved are state controlled does this come under serious scrutiny by anglo media and academia, whose often well intentioned work is laundered through think tanks like AS/COA as a means to attack dreaded resource nationalist governments in Latin America “from the left”.

The candidates

AS/COA-backed candidate at the 2010 and 2014 elections, Marina Silva, rallied against the “extractivism” of Dilma Rousseff’s Workers Party government, and was heralded internationally for it.

Off the back of her credentials as an environmental campaigner, former PT minister Silva was promoted as the real “progressive” candidate at the 2014 election, despite sharing much of her policy platform with the neoliberal PSDB (who she went on to endorse in the second round), and being socially conservative herself. She was against “state intervention” which she equated to developmentalism, meaning she was open to the privatisation of Petrobras. This made Silva the best of both worlds for AS/COA.

As her campaign moved on she backtracked on her “anti-extractivist” rhetoric re-committing to the pré-sal oil exploitation, production of climate polluting biofuels, and reversed her opposition to hydroelectric dam projects, which had been used to attack the Rousseff government.

Silva’s story is similar to that of presidential candidate Yaku Pérez in Ecuador, also rallying against “extractivism” of the Correa government, yet being promoted by AS/COA as “the new face of Ecuador’s left” for doing so.

This is despite its patron Chevron being behind the country’s worst “extractivist” abuses. Chevron’s activity in Ecuador is notorious, from recruiting young journalists to work as spies, to the case of lawyer Steven Donziger, who has been persecuted in a lawfare campaign waged by Chevron for years. His nightmare began when he won a multibillion-dollar judgement on behalf of Indigenous people and farmers over massive contamination in the Lago Agrio region, and is still under house arrest. Meanwhile Pérez recently endorsed a call for a military coup in Ecuador, after having supported both the coup against Dilma Rousseff and Lava Jato’s jailing of Lula da Silva, which effectively elected Bolsonaro. Stuenkel’s article accused Correa of authoritarian crackdowns on environmentalists.

There is crossover to be observed elsewhere between critics of “extractivism” and backers of operation Lava Jato, such as in Bolivia, where the 2019 coup against Evo Morales was greenwashed with “anti-extractivist” language, and recently arrested post-coup president, Jeanine Añez was jubilant at Lula’s 2018 jailing. Dubious pro-coup “anthropologists” living in Bolivia were predictably interviewed by Americas Quarterly, while Stuenkel’s new piece also attacked Morales for “extractivist” policy.

The beneficiaries

Back in Brazil, remaining calls to keep it in the ground went strangely silent following the coup of 2016, which Marina Silva also supported. The cut price sell off of Brazil’s oil riches was enabled by the breaking of the pré-sal law, which was promised 6 years earlier to Chevron by future post-coup foreign minister José Serra. Serra had lost to Dilma at the 2010 election, having earlier warned the US Ambassador of her “extremism”. The pré-sal law had guaranteed state controlled oil company Petrobras involvement in and proceeds from any exploitation of the new discoveries. This wealth was deemed Brazil’s ‘passport to the future’, and worth trillions of reais, money which was earmarked by Rousseff for investment in public education and health. This measure was to be enshrined in the constitution, as she announced on Workers Day, 2013. This coincided with the beginning of her downfall.

Within months of Rousseff’s ouster three years later, Council of Americas extractive corporations were amongst the first to benefit from the immediate policy shift; Chevron themselves, ExxonMobil and Shell.

Americas Quarterly and AS/COA’s media arm ran a de-facto PR campaign for discredited Operation Lava Jato, which helped impeach Dilma Rousseff, jail Lula, and bring a neofascist (who it called an “arch-conservative”) Jair Bolsonaro to power. Post-coup president Michel Temer and Bolsonaro quickly trampled on Brazil’s existing environmental protections and Brazil’s commitments to carbon emissions, many of which were established under Workers Party administrations.

Temer immediately tried by decree to abolish and open up the 46.450 km2 RENCA reserve (National Reservation of Copper and Associates), home to the Wajãpi people, and where private investment had been prohibited since 1984. It had been discovered over the previous decade that the area of Pedra Branca within RENCA has possibly the biggest unexplored gold reserves in the world.

Temer’s bid to abolish RENCA was blocked, but in the closing days of his Coup-tainted mandate, he abolished the regulatory agency, the National Department of Mineral Production (DNPM), replacing it with the new National Mining Agency (ANM). This was not cosmetic. Mining.com reported that “Changes to Brazil’s 50-year-old mining regulations… are expected to spur investment in sector, while allowing miners to continue exploring for minerals even if production license applications are pending.”

A 2018 report estimated that impact on the Amazonian rainforest caused by mining operations was ten times previously thought, and there has been a continuity between the post-coup Government of Michel Temer and that of Jair Bolsonaro in their willingness to open up protected and environmentally sensitive areas to exploitation from foreign mining interests. Following Jair Bolsonaro’s inauguration, Barrick Gold, until then a Council of the Americas Elite Member, announced a massive cross-border expansion in its Amazonian Mining operations.

There were no such complaints about “extractivism” in Americas Quarterly then…

We have written extensively on AS/COA and its members’ environmental record in Brazil:

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four. All articles on AS/COA and Americas Quarterly.
https://www.brasilwire.com/convivial-wa ... -part-one/
https://www.brasilwire.com/smiling-assa ... -part-two/
https://www.brasilwire.com/gold-against ... art-three/
https://www.brasilwire.com/part-four-ho ... ed-brazil/

https://www.brasilwire.com/extractivism/
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Re: South America

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 01, 2021 3:01 pm

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Piñera’s Elections-Postponement Maneuver Passes in Lower House of Parliament ‘Due to Coronavirus’
April 1, 2021

This Wednesday, March 31, the Chamber of Deputies of the Chilean Congress approved the constitutional reform presented by President Sebastián Piñera to postpone until May 15 and 16 the elections scheduled for April 10 and 11 in the South American country,” due to the Covid-19 pandemic.”

In those elections the new governors, mayors and councilors of the country will be elected, as well as the members of the Constitutional Assembly, who will be in responsible for drafting the new Constitution of the country, reported RT.

In case a second round is necessary in the elections of governors, the approved initiative indicates that they will be held on June 13, instead of May 9.

The bill to postpone the elections was approved in the lower house of Parliament with 126 votes in favor, 3 against and 11 abstentions. Now, it will go to the Senate for discussion and, in the case of receiving the approval of that body, would only require enactment by President Piñera.

In addition to the postponement of the elections, the suspension of the electoral campaign was also approved, to resume on April 29.

The regulations also make changes in the presidential primaries—prior to the November elections—which run from July 4 to 18.

Rise in coronavirus cases
The decision was allegedly made due to the rise in coronavirus cases in Chile. According to the report of the Ministry of Health this Wednesday, in the last 24 hours 6,053 new positive diagnoses were reported, raising the total number of COVID-19 infections to 995,538.

In the last week, this country of around 19 million inhabitants, has registered 47,755 new cases of coronavirus. According to the data of the Health ministry, on March 24 they had reported 947,783 infected.

Regarding the number of deaths from COVID-19, the country has 23,135 fatalities, 733 of them occurring in the last week.

Last Saturday, March 27, a complete quarantine came into effect for the entire Santiago Metropolitan Region, which holds more than 8.1 million people.

This, added to measures in other Chilean regions, led to the confinement of more than 14 million inhabitants in the South American country.

Record vaccination… but there are more infected
Curiously, the rise in cases of coronavirus infections in Chile occurs despite being the region’s “leader” in COVID-19 vaccination.

According to figures from the Ministry of Health, as of Tuesday, March 30, 6,668,300 people have been vaccinated, and of these 3,513,361 have received both doses of the drug.



Featured image: Chilean president Sebastian Piñera announcing the proposal that may be understood not as a humanitarian decision, but as a political tactic that should be rejected. Photo courtesy of America Noticias.

(VTV)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

https://orinocotribune.com/pineras-elec ... ronavirus/

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Ecuador: Lenin Moreno and the CIA against Andres Arauz
March 31, 2021
By Katu Arkonada – Mar 29, 2021

The second round of the Ecuadorian election between the candidate of the pro-Correa citizen revolution Arauz and the banker Lasso is approaching, and things are accelerating in the axis formed by Lenin Moreno and the United States, with its intelligence services at the forefront.

Recently, a secret meeting took place in the Galapagos Islands between the Ecuadorian and US governments. On the Ecuadorian side, President Lenin Moreno, Vice President María Alejandra Muñoz, and the Secretary-General of the Cabinet of the Presidency Jorge Wated took part; on the US side, its Ambassador Michael Fitzpatrick and senior US military commanders.

In this meeting, Moreno thanked the United States for the support given by the US Embassy in Quito, to submit to polygraph all his government officials and Ecuadorian diplomats in Washington who may have leaked the information we made public on February 4 about the destabilizing plans to prevent the victory of Andrés Arauz and Correa’s supporters.

Likewise, Cabinet Secretary Jorge Wated was instructed to monitor the email and social media accounts of all officials in the Carondelet, the Ecuadorian government palace.

For his part, Ambassador Fitzpatrick gave Lenin Moreno a secret report that gives Andrés Arauz a 20-point lead over banker Lasso, based on analysis by US intelligence agencies.

It was also agreed to remove Foreign Minister Luis Gallegos from the Cabinet, as he opposed Moreno-Fitzpatrick’s orders to escalate the diplomatic conflict with Buenos Aires. Gallegos was supposed to draft a note of protest to his Argentine counterpart over Alberto Fernández’s statements about Lenin Moreno. But the real objective was to strain relations between Ecuador and Argentina, due to the sympathies that both Rafael Correa and Andrés Arauz have for Alberto and Cristina Fernández.

Also, at the urging of several US senators, Lenin Moreno was asked to get rid of former Secretary of the Presidency Juan Sebastián Roldan for allowing Arauz’s victory in the first round and not implementing all the measures agreed with the Colombian government to link Correa with the ELN guerrillas.

For her part, former Minister of Government María Paula Romo insists on preparing Moreno’s departure, using an alleged heart condition as a justification, in order to later announce from the US, Moreno’s resignation.

For weeks now, in the early hours of the morning, the evacuation of classified information and money belonging to Moreno and his family has been taking place in the Carondelet, as well as the destruction of sensitive information by trusted officials of the current government.

It is in the Carondelet itself where US Ambassador Fitzpatrick has a permanent office, very close to the presidential office. And it is in these corridors where, given the imminent deterioration of the national situation, a Crisis Committee is being considered to lead the country, made up of María Paula Romo herself, Vice President María Alejandra Vicuña, the OAS, and Ambassador Fitzpatrick.

Meetings also continue to be held via Zoom led by Romo to analyze the situation in the country. Lenin Moreno, US Senators Marco Rubio, and Robert “Bob” Menendez, and State Department official Martha Constanza Youth are taking part.

Also in March, meetings were held with public and private media executives and members of the Communications Secretariat (SECOM). The objective was to draw up a media strategy for the second round of elections, with instructions to create a national media campaign that would reduce the chances of Correa’s supporters. The main accusations are that Arauz will turn Ecuador into a new Venezuela, the financing of the Correa campaign by Colombian guerrillas, and the alleged corruption of the Correa campaign. To this end, they hired 250,000 fake Twitter accounts.

In a complementary manner, Lenin Moreno analyzed with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the National Police how to link aerial and maritime drug trafficking activities, recently detected on Ecuador’s borders with Colombia, with Arauz’s campaign. This with the aim of challenging the elections and preventing the April 11 election to take place.

Another avenue explored these days by Lenin Moreno, in conjunction with the national coordinator of the Pachakutik movement, Cecilia Velázquez, is to use the demonstrations and the request presented to the Electoral Disputes Tribunal to prevent the victory of Correism.

A call was also made for this movement to vote null and void in the second round on April 11, although within Pachakutik there are members who do not share Yaku Pérez’s mercenary positions, reject the Yaku Pérez-Lasso-Moreno alliance, especially the alliance between Yaku and the US Embassy, and prefer to support Andrés Arauz. In recent hours the Shuar nationality (Sucumbíos province) has decided to support list 1 headed by Arauz.

On April 11, the future of Ecuador is at stake: on one side, the banker Lasso, supported by Lenin Moreno, the US Embassy, and the right-wing indigenous bureaucracy; on the other, Andrés Arauz and a project of social justice based on the citizens’ revolution promoted by Rafael Correa.

Once the coup d’état in Bolivia has been defeated, it is time for Ecuador to rejoin this new phase of epochal change, and the new progressive cycle led by the Argentina of Alberto and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and the Mexico of López Obrador.

Featured image: Caption: Ecuador in the sites of the US

https://orinocotribune.com/ecuador-leni ... res-arauz/

There ain't much 'progressive' about López Obrador at all, just another liberal.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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