Ecuadorian Politics and Elections | end of the indigenous protests (for now)

[Sir John Johns]

Lasso renewed attacks on Iza

President Lasso has started the year with renewed attacks against Leonidas Iza, declaring in an interview that what the president of the CONAIE wants is ‘to overthrow the government’ and ‘to overthrow Ecuadorian democracy’ and calling Iza’s attitude as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘an attitude where he doesn’t believe in the State’ claiming that what he believes in ‘is in throwing stones, burning down buildings, attacking journalists from behind’. He added that ‘what Mr. Iza knows is to promote violence’ and renewed his comparison between the indigenous leader and The Joker, the supervillain in the Batman franchise.

Iza replied with a tweet explaining that ‘the violent ones are tax evaders’; that refusing to stick up the Pandora Papers and to kneel to the IMF doesn’t make somebody an enemy of democracy and that ‘violence is slashing the health and education budgets, it is making labor precarious’. The tweet is ending with the observation that ‘the fear of our unity and strength is noticeable, Mr. Lasso’, a way to underline the support gathered by Iza among unions and civil society few days before a new round of social mobilization.

Paradoxically, it is Lasso who is looking like the radical and extremist one with his repetitive and violent attacks against the indigenous leader when Iza has so far abstained from making uselessly offensive statements against the president, in stark contrast with his predecessor at the head of the CONAIE, Jaime Vargas, who had been criticized for his often abrasive comments like when he publicly called Lenín Moreno a patojo de mierda (‘a dirty bowlegged one’).

Iza’s candidate defeated in MICC presidency election

Nevertheless, Iza scored on 7 and 8 January a setback in the CONAIE internal politics as the election to chose his successor at the head of the Indigenous and Peasant Movement of Cotopaxi (MICC) he chaired between 2016 and 2021 took place. The candidate reputed the closest to Iza, Apawki Castro (who served as the CONAIE spokesman during the October 2019 protests) was indeed defeated in the election for the new president of the MICC as the indigenous bases elected instead Andrés Ayala, said to be more moderate and open to dialogue with Lasso. Ayala received 263 votes against 161 for Castro. Ayala has however denied claims about dissensions in the ranks of the MICC and underlined the necessity of the unity of the indigenous movement against a government he said is turning a deaf ear to the demands of the indigenous communities.

Protests planned for 19 January postponed

The Popular Front has announced today the postponement of the protests staged for 19 January and supported by the CONAIE, arguing of the deteriorating sanitary situation in Ecuador where Covid-19 contaminations are skyrocketting.

The protest was called to demand a decrease in fuel prices (a request already rejected by the government) and to protest against the upcoming labor reform, the increase in public transport prices and a series of planned privatizations.

2022 is a symbolic year for the Ecuadorian labor movement as it is the centenary of a founding event of trade unionism and leftist politics: the November 1922 Guayaquil general strike which ended on 15 November 1922 in a bloodbath with the massacre of between 90 and 900 workers by the army but paved the way for the overthrow of the plutocratic government at the hands of Guayaquil bankers three years later. 2022 is also the 150th anniversary of the execution of Fernando Daquilema, the leader of a major indigenous unrest in Chimborazo (central Sierra) during the presidency of the arch-conservative Gabriel García Moreno.

Towards a privatization of Banco del Pacífico

The most emblematic and disputed privatization envisioned by the Ecuadorian government is the one of the Banco del Pacífico. The sale to private investors of the second largest Ecuadorian bank, owned by the state since the 1999 feriado bancario, has been pushed since last month by the government with the pretext that the revenue of the sale would help financing a state plan to eradicate chronic child undernutrition.

The privatization process of the Banco del Pacífico was actually initiated in May 2016 when then-president Rafael Correa announced plans to sell the bank as well as the state-owned TAME airline, TC and GamaTV television channels, Cementera del Ecuador cement producer and Fabrec shoe and textile manufacturer companies to generate revenue for the state and finance the reconstruction process the April 2016 earthquake in Manabí. Back in November 2014, the international subsidiary of the Banco del Pacífico, the Pacific National Bank de Miami, was already sold to US private investors.

Of course, Correa is now very much against the privatization of Banco del Pacífico

https://twitter.com/MashiRafael/status/1468715034159325186

The corrupt press has already began its campaign to raffle our resources.

The PSC is apparently also opposed to the sale of the bank as Cristina Reyes, a former national assemblywoman now an Andean parliamentarian (also a blonde former TV journalist, the stereotypical profile of PSC female politicians), has accused in a video the current president of Banco del Pacífico of deliberately mismanaging the bank to enable its privatization...

The narco-generals ongoing controversy

For now, Lasso’s main source of problems isn’t the CONAIE, the unions, Correa or the PSC but Michael Fitzpatrick, the US ambassador to Ecuador, who one month ago has publicly expressed the concerns of Washington over the penetration of Ecuadorian police and judicial system by organized crime.

In addition to high-profile corruption cases investigated in the United States (bribes and possible money laundering involving the Isspol, the National Police Social Security Institute; the Las Torres case, possibly related to the Isspol case, involving a corruption network in Petroecuador and for which both the comptroller-general under Lenín Moreno, Pablo Celi, and Moreno’s general secretary – who had since committed suicide – have been arrested; the activities in Ecuador of shady Colombian-Venezuelan businessman Álex Saab who had been recently extradited from Cape Verde to the United States), the US ambassador has mentioned the existence of ‘narco-generals’ inside the Ecuadorian police and army enjoying links with drug cartels whose visas have been revoked by the US government.

An embarrassed Ecuadorian government initially dismissed the assertions of the ambassador over generals having their visas revoked before Alexandra Vela, the Interior Minister, formally requested on 15 December the Comptroller-General’s office to investigate the declaration of assets of 19 generals and their relatives the same day it was confirmed the US embassy had revoked the visa of Gen. Víctor Araus, a financial director in the police who had been dismissed for irregularities in his advancement but restored in his job by a controversial judicial decision.

Araus has previously led the Dinased (Police’s Direction for offenses against life, violent deaths, disappearances, extortion and kidnapping) in which role he was strongly criticized by a wide array of associations (Association of Relatives and Friends of Disappeared Persons; Luna Roja, involved in the fight against feminicides; Fundación David Romo providing assistance to relatives of disappeared persons) for his alleged negligence in the investigations conducted by the Dinased.

Reportedly (but without official confirmation), the visas of three other generals were canceled: a former director of the Isspol, dismissed by President Moreno for presumed financial irregularities in his management; a former director for police; another former director of the Isspol who had been fired from the police in 2019 for the illegal use of a helicopter that ended crashing in a park of Quito; a former member of the anti-narcotic national unit whose name was undisclosed who had accompanied the nephew of Pablo Celi during a trip in the United States.

On 10 January, the US embassy announced that the visas of various Ecuadorian judges and persons employed in Ecuador’s judicial and legal system have also been canceled, without providing the names nor the actual number of persons concerned by such measure.

This was three days after Jorge Acosta Cisneros, a former president of the defunct Supreme Electoral Tribunal in 2007-08, revealed in a tweet his US visa has been canceled. Acosta was an electoral observer in Venezuela’s latest elections and has served as the lawyer of various politicians including Lucio Gutiérrez, Lenín Moreno (in the INA Papers case), Dalo Bucaram, former comptroller-general Carlos Pólit and former mayor of Quito Jorge Yunda.

Ecuadorian judges have officially been ordered to inform the judicature over the current status of their US visas.

Yesterday, Guillermo Lasso officially relieved of his duties Gen. Marcos Villegas Ubillús, a former director of the anti-narcotic national unit and former financial director in the police, as requested by Villegas himself in a request sent to the police command on last 17 December.

[Sir John Johns]

The ID internal struggles

And now, it’s the turn of the Democratic Left (ID) to suffer internal disputes, publicly exposed by the hotly debated abortion issue. In last April, the Constitutional Court has ruled the criminalizing of abortion in case of rape as unconstitutional and gave the National Assembly the task of elaborating legislation governing the conditions for women to have access to abortion.

The report by majority prepared by the Justice Commission and approved last month by its president, Alejandro Jaramillo (ID), as well as six of its members (1 ID, 2 PK, 3 UNES), is providing that pregnant teenagers victims of rape could undergo abortion up to 22 weeks while adult women victims of rape could undergo it up to 20 weeks. The first draft proposed a seven-month limit for adult women and no limit at all for teenagers.

A report by minority has been presented by the three remaining members of the Justice Commission, Ricardo Vanegas (mestizo PK assemblyman and twin brother of flamboyant fedora lawyer Héctor Vanegas), Sofía Espín (UNES) and Dalton Bacigalupo (ID), an old-timer who had already been a lawmaker in the late 1990s. Said report is providing that abortion would be available up to only 6 weeks for adult women and up to 12 weeks for teenagers, women living in the countryside and disabled. The report is also recommending the introduction for a right to conscientious objection on an institutional basis (enabling a whole health establishment to refuse performing abortion) while the report by majority only recommends it on an individual basis.

On January 15, the executive secretary of the ID, Diego Almeida, whose leadership had been questioned by Xavier Hervas, the ID presidential candidate in 2021, announced his immediate resignation and published a letter denouncing a ‘coup attempt’ inside the ID purportedly pushed by Hervas and Wilma Andrade, the former president of the party and currently an assemblywoman. Almeida accused the ‘patriarchs, owners and leaders’ of the ID of wanting to install an executive secretary who would ‘not says anything when they are doing crap, who would be subservient and operational to their eventual businesses’. Three days later, the aforementioned Alejandro Jaramillo gave his resignation from the leadership of the ID caucus and emphasized in his resignation letter that the ID is an inclusive, feminist, pro-rights and environmentalist party in a veiled attack against Hervas who, shortly before, has made public his personal opposition to abortion while also mentioning he is believing that victims of rape who had aborted should not be prosecuted.

Marlon Cadena, an assemblyman from Pichincha, has been elected the new leader of the ID caucus with eleven votes out of fifteen (two legislators abstained and two other hadn’t registered their votes).

As explained by this article of María Sol Borja in GK, the ID caucus has failed to find an agreement on the vote of the report on abortion, with an unnamed legislator justifying his opposition to the legalization of abortion in case of rape by saying that ‘before, women had children at 14, at 15 they were already heads of the household’ and Dalton Bacigalupo having confirmed he would vote for the report by minority. According to Borja, the split in the ID follows generational lines with a struggle between, on one side the old guard of the party and, on the other one, the new members of the ID who are under 40. ‘Topics like feminism, ecology, animal’s rights aren’t relevant for the old membership, for the young it is the reason for being in the party’ explained a young member to Borja while assemblywoman Johanna Moreira, a strong proponent of the report by majority, is criticizing Bacigalupo for having referred to a supposedly ‘hysterical’ feminisim.

To make the ID internal divisions quite indecipherable, Xavier Hervas was presumed to be, until recently, at odds with Wilma Andrade he previously attempted to get sanctioned by the party’s ethics committee after a strange case of sweets distributed during the ID electoral meetings in 2021 which may have diverted from a Chinese donation, hence exposing the persistence of old political practices in opposition to Hervas’ stances in favor of new politics (now denounced as an empty rhetoric by disillusioned party members). Indeed, now Hervas is appearing to have teamed with Andrade to get Almeida and Jaramillo demoted.

The debate on abortion is going insane

Meanwhile, Rafael Correa has been very vocal (as much as possibly from someone tweeting from abroad) on the abortion topic with inflammatory comments that made even some of his supporters quite mad:

https://twitter.com/mashirafael/status/1483861000445177858

If defending life is being a right-winger, so am I. For me, life is above all. With the same argument, if the worst fascist is in favor of abortion without time limit, then he would be ‘a left-winger’. These are those absurdities which are hurting so much the left.

Before announcing the constitution of a ‘National Coalition for Life’ and responding to a Correísta feminist lawyer who had stated that, no matter Correa’s position, she and feminists would continue to speak out for women and girls of Ecuador, in his usual and particularly arrogant way of labeling any left-winger disagreeing with him as ‘infantile’:

https://twitter.com/MashiRafael/status/1484171686693855233

How infantile, María Cecilia. That is to say, because we oppose abortion, worse abortion without time limits, we haven’t spoken out for women and girls of Ecuador? To show you the figures of my government, this would be a waste of time. Such vanity and sectarianism only only weaken their ‘stances’

By contrast, Leonidas Iza has expressed his support to feminist protests defending a right for abortion in case of rape:

https://twitter.com/LeonidasIzaSal1/status/1486075542302601216?cxt=HHwWgMC9haH1z...

Our support to the fight of women in favor of a life free of violence. The women victims of sexual violence have the right to abortion in case of rape, it is up to the National Assembly to approve a just and restorative law guaranteeing them fair and decent conditions

For her part, Pierina Correa, in a press conference ‘in favor of life’ given in company of Sofía Espín (UNES), Ricardo Vanegas (PK) and César Rohón (ex-PSC), has suggested that people should be careful with the bodies of unborn babies as this purportedly could feed organ trafficking and the sale of cells for industrial and pharmaceutical purposes before declaring that ‘abortion is not a right neither here nor anywhere in the world’. Vanegas said that ‘there can be neither left or right when it comes to defense of life, we are all in the defense of living beings’.

https://twitter.com/mariasolborja/status/1483895124941754368

As for Abdalá Bucaram (who is, remember, prosecuted in a case of MURDER), he called for a march to ‘defend life’ on last 25 January:

https://twitter.com/abdalabucaram/status/1483969163337121792

And the pro-life PSC assemblywoman Nathalie Viteri (the sister of mayor of Guayaquil Cynthia Viteri) just ridiculed herself in a parliamentary debate by asking if pregnant women would be given ‘sodium chloride so, before he was born, that baby will die’. Sodium chloride being... cooking salt.

The report in majority, which is supported by part of Pachakutik, the ID and the UNES, should be put to vote in the next days but, in any case, President Lasso has already announced he would veto the abortion bill in case it ‘exceeds the mandate given by the Constitutional Court’.

The prefect of Pinchincha under fire for a $480,000 mural painting

It has been disclosed that Paola Pabón, the Correísta prefect of Pichincha since 2019 (who came under spotlight in 2013 when she motioned a bill to decriminalize abortion in case of rape but had to backtrack after harsh critics from Rafael Correa), has awarded without a public tender three contracts for a total worth of $1 million as part of the Bicentenary Project  celebrating the 1822 Battle of Pichincha that ended in the defeat of the colonial troops by Antonio José de Sucre and the liberation of Ecuador from the Spanish rule. In the detail, $480,000 will be spent for a mural painting by renown painter Pavel Égüez (who has previously collaborated with Oswaldo Guayasamín, an icon of Ecuadorian mural painting), $430,000 for the creation and production of communication contents by the prefecture-owned Pichincha Comunicaciones media company and $130,000 for the performance of twelve theater plays.

Such expenses were heavily criticized, notably by Fernando Villavicencio, especially as they have been decided in a context of economic hardships and just after Pabón has announced the introduction of a vehicle tax to fund the improvement of rural roads and an increase of the toll on the Alóag-Santo Domingo road. Pabón has defended herself by stating that the most controversial expense, the mural painting, only accounts for 0.4% of the Prefecture yearly budget.

This is quite similar to the scandal of the Letras Vivas that broke out in last April after irregularities have been detected in the awarding by the municipality of Guayaquil of a $390,000 contract to paint sentences from famous Guayaquil writers on the walls of the city. An investigation was opened over suspicions of bribes and several living writers complained about their work being used without the payment of copyright leading to the firing of the municipality director for culture.

Catholic trade unionist Isabel Robalino died at 104

An important figure of the history of union movement in Ecuador and an interesting character, Isabel Robalino died on 31 January at 104, in the convent of Quito she was living since 2011. Coming from a privileged background, (the daughter of a diplomat), she graduated in 1934 from the Mejía National Institute (one of the first women to do so). She later became the first Ecuadorian woman to obtain a degree in jurisprudence.

In 1938, she participated in the creation of the Ecuadorian Confederation of Catholic Workers (CEDOC) and would later advised the Unitary Front of Workers (FUT) umbrella union on labor law matters. She dedicated her life to create countless local unions, defend collective bargaining and the right to strike and advocating the implementation of the eight-hour workday as well as to groom younger union leaders. She also took part of numerous streets protests, from the 1944 La Gloriosa to the 1999 demonstrations against President Jamil Mahuad and a local protest in Ventanas (Los Ríos) in 2009 when, at 96, she was tear-gased by policemen sent by the PRE mayor.

Additionally, she had a stint in politics, being elected in 1946 a municipal counselor in Quito (the first woman at that office), seating in 1966 in the Constituent Assembly and in 1968 in the Senate (again the first woman at that office) on behalf of the workers of the highlands.

In the 1966 Constituent Assembly also seated León Febres-Cordero (on behalf of industries of the Costa) she had previously opposed in the Fábrica Textil Imbabura when fighting to get the factory’s workers pardoned after a protest to get wages paid turned deadly; Febres-Cordero was one of the owners of the factory. She later once again faced Febres-Cordero when he was president of Ecuador and when he was mayor of Guayaquil; then, Robalino participated in the strike organized by recently fired employees of the municipality.

Robalino’s last public appearances were as a member of the National Anticorruption Commission when she criticized the corruption of the Correa administration, was sued and sentenced to jail with other members of the commission for libel against Carlos Pólit, the comptroller-general, who immediately thereafter withdrew his complaint and would fled the country few weeks thereafter.

https://gk.city/2022/01/31/quien-fue-isabel-robalino-bolle/
https://www.planv.com.ec/historias/perfiles/isabel-robalino-la-maestra-trabajadores

https://twitter.com/CEDOCUT/status/1488195315270361095

[Sir John Johns]

In the few last days, the Constitutional Court has ruled in favor of indigenous communities, environmentalist groups and animal rights defenders in three cases examined by the highest national judiciary:

Decree 751 is unconstitutional and oil exploitation in the Yasuní buffer zone has to be stopped

On February 1, it was disclosed it has ruled as partly unconstitutional the Executive Decree 751 issued in May 2019 by President Moreno which, while expanding the Tagaeri Taromenane Intangible Zone (ZITT) in the Yasuní and creating a buffer zone where no highways, hydroelectric dams nor oil facilities could be built, also enabled the construction of oil drilling and production platforms in said buffer zone and allowed the expansion of oil exploitation in the Yasuní.

As summed up by Pedro Bermeo, a spokesman for the YASunidos:

https://twitter.com/PedroBermeoG/status/1488662333320749060

VICTORY!
The Constitutional Court of Ecuador declares unconstitutional the articles of the Decree 751, which enabled the exploitation within the buffer strip of the intangible area of the Yasuní.

Finally a little justice for the isolated indigenous peoples of the Yasuní!

Here an overview:

In 2018 Lenín Moreno summoned a popular consultation including two environment-related questions, one of them about oil exploitation in the Yasuní and in the territory of the indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation (IPVI)[1]; 68% of the population voted in favor of such question.

The question was: Do you agree to increase the intangible zone by at least 50,000 hectares and reduce the area of oil exploitation authorized by the National Assembly in the Yasuní National Park from 1,030 hectares to 300 hectares?

This question hadn’t any type of annex that specifies how it was going to be implemented, so the government of Moreno, instead of protecting the Yasuní, expanded its exploitation.

This is why an action of unconstitutionality was fielded against Decree 751, that has just been partially accepted by the Court.

In short, the Constitutional Court through the 28-19-IN/22 sentence establishes:

1/ That the Ecuadorian State must understand as negative any type of consultation of the IPVI, in accordance with international human rights standards. [2]

2/ That any type of extractive activity is prohibited within the buffer zone of the Tagaeri Taromenane Intangible Zone (ZITT)!

So, if Lasso intends to exploit this area again, the consultation of the IPVI must be interpreted as negative, in other words: he cannot exploit!

Even if the court set aside many very important aspects of the case by declaring it unconstitutional only for questions of form and not of substance, this is a huge victory for all the persons dedicated to the defense of the IPVI and the Yasuní

The immediate consequence of the ruling is that the construction of seven (out of the nine) oil drilling platforms to exploit the Ishpingo field (making up 87% of the proven oil reserves in the Yasuní) as well as the project to construct one hundred wells more than the forty initially planned are now to be put on a hold, which of course is not pleasing the Lasso administration.

This is happening just after yet another oil spill has happened in Ecuador’s Amazon (with almost 6,300 barrels leaking in a natural reserve), the consequence of a regressive erosion phenomenon and heavy rainfall (I will elaborate in an incoming post).

[1] The Tagaeri and the Taromenane are the two remaining documented groups of uncontacted indigenous living in Ecuador’s Amazon. They are thought to be culturally related to the Waorani (also spelled Huaorani and previously referred to as the Aucas) who have been only contacted in the 1950s (by US evangelical missionaries who infamously ended being killed by the Waorani) with the Tagaeri said to be a Waorani group who split with the rest of the nationality and fled deep into the forest to escape evangelization and forced Westernization by the US missionaries. Latest years have saw several clashes between these uncontacted indigenous on one hand and Waorani and illegal loggers on the other hand.

[2] The ruling is also based on article 57 of the Ecuadorian Constitution which is providing that: ‘The territories of the peoples living in voluntary isolation are an irreducible and intangible ancestral possession and all forms of extractive activities shall be forbidden there. The State shall adopt measures to guarantee their lives, enforce respect for self-determination and the will to remain in isolation, and to ensure observance of their rights. The violation of these rights shall constitute a crime of ethnocide, which shall be classified as such by law’.


The right to a free, prior and informed consent for indigenous communities must be uphold

On February 4, it was announced that the Constitutional Court has upheld a 2018 winning lawsuit brought by the A’i Kofán indigenous community of Sinangoe (in Sucumbíos, a province made up by the Amazonian lands bordering Colombia) against the Ecuadorian government over the awarding of 52 gold-mining concessions on its territory without prior consultation and formulate a jurisprudence to guarantee and strengthen the right to a free, prior and informed consent for indigenous communities in relation to extractive or infrastructure activities carried out on their territories.

https://twitter.com/CofanesS/status/1489711062618456069

Historical victory of the indigenous peoples!

The Constitutional Court rules in favor of our right to decide of the future of our territories in the Amazon and to say no to extractive projects.

The Constitutional Court protects and amplifies the right of peoples and nationalities to say no to extractive projects, and put a stop to the extractivist plans of Guillermo Lasso.

Today is a historical day for Sinangoe and the indigenous peoples.

We celebrate this outcome, the result of years of fighting against the extractive activities in our territories.

Long live Sinangoe!

As per Amazon Frontline, the environmental NGO representing the community in the courts:

Today, the Constitutional (Supreme) Court of Ecuador, the country’s most powerful judicial body, published a ruling recognizing, for the first time, the right of indigenous communities to have the final decision over oil, mining and other extractive projects that affect their lands. Ecuador now has one of the most powerful legal precedents in the world on the internationally recognized right of Indigenous peoples to Free, Prior and Informed Consent, a powerful legal tool for Indigenous survival and the protection of huge swaths of forests and mega-biodiverse ecosystems.

Today’s decision signals that the nation’s highest court backs the right of all Indigenous peoples to have the final say over extractive projects that may affect over 23 million acres of Indigenous lands and forests nationwide.

The ruling highlights the need for the State to obtain the consent of the affected communities before undertaking oil, mining or other extractive plans or projects, based on Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination.

The Court’s decision deals a major blow to President Guillermo Lasso’s plans to ramp up resource extraction throughout the Amazon as part of their COVID recovery economic plans, as Indigenous lands cover 70% of the mineral-rich Ecuadorian Amazon. The recent major pipeline ruptures in April 2020 and January 2022 that spewed toxic oil into Amazonian watersheds in Indigenous Kichwa territory highlighted the dangers of oil production in the Amazon, and the potential shift of decision-making power now that future pipelines will require Indigenous consent to proceed. The Court underlines that the right to consent must be applied even if “the plans or projects pursue the satisfaction of legitimate ends in a democratic society”, a clear nod to government discourse around the need to drill or mine for the greater good of the national economy.

Nonetheless, the Constitutional Court did not completely close the possibility of the State moving ahead with extractive projects against an Indigenous communities’ will in “exceptional circumstances.” The ruling will however require strict justification by the State for doing so and expressly prohibiting the State from implementing projects that imply “unreasonable sacrifices” from the Indigenous peoples. The Indigenous movement maintains that any oil or mining project in their ancestral territories against their will implies unreasonable sacrifices.

In an unprecedented move, five judges of the Constitutional Court traveled in last November to the remote community of Sinangoe to hold a hearing in the reviewing of the case.


Animals are legal subjects

Finally, the Constitutional Court made public yesterday it ruled that animals are legal subjects and part of nature and has ordered the National Assembly to amend the civil law which considers animals as ‘self-propelled movable assets’ in contradiction with the Constitution which recognizes the rights of the nature.

https://twitter.com/MANimalistas/status/1489992477306204163

Victory for animals in Ecuador! The Constitutional Court recognizes the animals as legal subjects, as being part of nature, therefore they are protected under article 71 of the Constitution. Congratulations to the comrades of Victoria Animal [an animal well-being trust].

Even if many issues are pending, this represents a very important progress for animals in Ecuador. The National Assembly will have two years to debate and approve a true law for animal protection with a focus on rights and not only on well-being.

The ruling arise from the case of Estrellita, a woolly monkey taken from its natural habitat when one month old and rise in a human family as ‘one of its members’ (wearing clothes, eating with cutlery and sleeping in a bed) for eighteen years until being seized by authorities under a law prohibiting private individuals from rising wild animals and put in a zoo where she died a month later. The owner of Estrellita went into justice to get the monkey back and, after its death, to recover the body by filing a habeas corpus petition on behalf of Estrellita. The judge ultimately decided to close the case, arguing that this was ‘an unnecessary waste of the resources of the justice administration’ for ‘an inert being’. The court has to rule not over the rights of the owner of Estrellita (it has been agreed her ‘family’ illegally rose it) but on the legal categorization of the animal.

[Sir John Johns]

Diego Ordóñez, a CREO assemblyman for the Rural Quito Electoral District and a leading member of the oficialismo in the legislature, has announced his immediate resignation from National Assembly in a speech full of your traditional ‘responsible right’ political cant. He has accused the legislative body of having dissolved ‘into confrontations, slogans, dogmas and commonplaces and stock phrases’ and of ‘not adequately’ addressing the demands of the country, especially in matter of job creations the National Assembly. According to Ordóñez, such issue has been answered with ‘the demagogy, the populist discourse’ and ‘an offerism that proposes illusory solutions’. Panning the National Assembly for its opposition to the agenda of the government, he also accused the legislators of having a ‘discourse more thought in terms of electoral purposes than in terms of real solutions’ and stated that the legislative body has lost credibility and is disconnected with the average citizen before adding that ‘I come from a world where ideas are confronted, where a truth that could be shared is sought; [the world] of private sector in which efficiency is measured to guarantee results’.

In reality, as reminded by GK, Ordóñez, who isn’t a political newcomer (having served as the secretary to the 1997 Constituent Assembly and a congressman for the Christian Democratic Union in 2007), hasn’t introduced a single bill in his ten-month-long tenure and mostly became a household name for a misogynist tweet he made in last November (in the middle of debates on the Pandora Papers) against a UNES assemblywoman after alleged photos of said assemblywoman in states of undress were circulating on social networks. The National Assembly penalized Ordóñez with a 15-day-long suspension without a pay for ‘verbal assault and clear misogyny’. Rumors such a tremendous job could be rewarded with a position of adviser in the presidency.

Ordóñez’s substitute, Blanca Sacancela, the leader of a rural comuna and an unsuccessful CREO candidate for vice-prefect of Pichincha in 2019, has became a full assemblywoman.

[Sir John Johns]

In recent weeks, Ecuador has been hardly hit by heavy rainfalls that provoked several environmental disasters, resulted in human losses and important material and economic damages. Such phenomenons, not quite uncommon in Ecuador's recent history, partly explain the relative popularity of environmental themes among voters and indigenous activists, especially as they often unveil human-made poor decisions and corruption and incompetence in the ruling and administering class and the business sector and brutally expose the strong social and economic cleavages in the Ecuadorian society (generally, this isn't the wealthiest ones who are seeing their house destroyed or their lands polluted and are waiting for months a response from the government that don't come...)

Deadly mudslide in Quito

On 31 January 2022, in Quito, after heavy rainfalls in the afternoon (75 mm of rain per square meter according to Santiago Guarderas, the mayor of the capital), a torrent of muddy waters, rocks and rubble flooded the urban neighborhoods of La Gasca, La Comuna and Pambachupa, all located on the slopes of the Pichincha volcano in northern Quito, damaging houses, carrying away cars, dumpsters, trees and electricity poles on its path and leaving the area devastated and covered with mud. It has been reported that twenty-eight persons have lost their lives in the catastrophe, most of them being the participants or spectators of an amateur volleyball match who were swept away when the torrent flooded the court. According to the Quito municipality, 52 persons have been additionally injured with one still in critical condition, one person is still missing and some 160 families have been affected by the disaster. Seven houses have been destroyed and 27 houses, 37 cars, 22 motorcycles, 20 electricity poles and an electricity substation have been damaged.

Some 1,300 persons participated on last Saturday in a minga (volunteer community work) to help locals cleaning the neighborhood.

According to the Quito municipality, the mudslide has to be explained by the significant rainfall that caused an ‘oversaturation of the soil’ and the collapse of a rainwater reservoir, El Tejado, with a capacity of 4,500 cubic meters when it had to retain 20,000 cubic meters of rainwater on 31 January and was clogged with mud and trees.

However, the explanation of the Guarderas administration on how it is solely the consequence of a natural phenomenon isn’t convincing everybody. Local residents have blamed the mudslide on the construction of a controversial environment-friendly (or touted as such) crematorium, Cenizario Urkupamba, in a nearby protected forest. After having denied the Cenizario Urkupamba project is to be blamed for the catastrophe (the claim of the mayor is actually shared by some environmental experts) and dismissing allegations he has shares in the company in charge of the construction of the crematorium, Mayor Guarderas has ordered on 5 February the suspension of the project and the withdrawal of its planning permission. The municipal environment secretariat had already rejected the project in 2019 on the grounds it is located in an ecological protection zone but then-mayor Jorge Yunda chose to ignore the advice and awarded the planning permission to the project in June 2020 only to cancel it one year later; on December 2021, Guarderas decided to proceed with the Cenizario Urkupamba project.

Experts interviewed by Plan V are providing other explanations for the La Gasca disaster: the filling of the ravines the neighborhoods have been built on has disrupted the drainage of rainwater; the deforestation of the slopes of the Pichincha volcano which has reduced the capacity of the soils to retain rainwater; the uncontrolled expansion of Quito urban area which has took place without planning. A deadly mudslide, similar to the one that happened a week ago, already had hit La Gasca neighborhood in February 1975.

El Universo is also alluding to the social cleavage between La Gasca, whose woes have been publicized, and La Comuna, of which images of the impact of the catastrophe are less common, but is described by the newspaper as ‘the center of the devastation, the ground zero’. While La Gasca is a middle-class residential neighborhood with shops and sport facilities, La Comuna, which is located at a highest level and where the El Tejado reservoir has been built, is a much more poorest neighborhood, which hasn’t obtained a legal status and is home to workers recently arrived from the coastal and Amazon provinces as well as Colombia and Venezuela.

Cotopaxi province severely affected by floods

Meanwhile, in Cotopaxi (central highlands), the rainfalls have sparked the overflowing of rivers, causing important destruction in this poor, indigenous-populated province. Notably, a section of the Pujilí-La Maná highway has collapsed, hence forcing the closure of the road, while the community of El Palmar has been almost entirely destroyed with some one hundred families having to be  relocated in emergency shelters and the hamlet of Pucayacu has been totally devastated forcing the authorities to evacuate some 100 persons. The parish of Chugchilán has also been affected by a landslide.

The destruction of several bridges, the closure of most roads as well as electricity cuts and problems in a water-treatment plant are complicating rescue work as a few rural communities are reported being totally isolated from the rest of the world.

Yet another oil spill in the Amazon

On 28 January, the Heavy Crude Oil Duct (OCP), one of the two pipelines transporting oil in Ecuador, ruptured again in the nearby of Piedra Fina (Napo province), an area where significant rainfalls had been recorded. According to the OCP Ecuador private company (overseeing the duct for the state-owned Petroecuador), the rupture had been provoked by the fall of rocks on an unburied section of the duct. On 1 February, it was announced that 6,300 oil barrels have spilled in the forest (which is less than the 15,800 barrels spilled in April 2020 when the duct already ruptured and the 11,900 barrels recently spilled in Peruvian waters), polluting 2.1 hectares of which 1.6 are part of the Cayambe-Coca National Park home to animal species like the western mountain coati (Nasuella olivacea), the northern pudu (Pudu mephistophiles), the Andean cock-of-the-rock (Rupicola peruvianus) and various species of amphibians. Oil pollution in the Yasuní National Park was subsequently reported while concerns have been expressed for the indigenous communities living downriver whose water and cultures had already been previously contaminated by spilled oil in April 2020.

After eleven days of interruption to clean the area and repair the duct, the OCP resumed oil transportation on 7 February.

The transportation and even the pumping of crude oil in Ecuador’s Amazon had previously to be temporarily stopped no late than... last December, when OCP Ecuador and the state-owned SOTE suspended their oil transportation activities for three weeks in order to build detours for the pipelines under threat of rupturing. The decision was taken to address the issue of the regressive erosion phenomenon which is affecting the Coca River shores and weakens the nearby soils. In November 2021, a section of the Quito-Lago Agrio highway collapsed, forcing the government to close the road. Few days after the suspension of oil transportation, the SOTE pipeline ruptured in the area of Piedra Fina, the same place where the OCP pipeline would rupture on 28 January 2022. Meanwhile, the nearby barrio of San Luis, which is only existing since less than a decade thanks to the construction of the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant (itself under threat due to the progression of the erosion phenomenon), was reported being under threat as the erosion phenomenon was by then at only 89 meters of it. 52 families are there at risk of losing their homes.

According to the manager of Petroecuador, $528 million were lost in production activities and $57 million in refining activities due to the suspension of crude oil transportation in December 2021; still, the Plan V article, published just when the latest oil spill happened, is indicating that the construction of viable alternative roads and pipelines would be very expensive; the new detours have been constructed on the shore adjacent to El Reventador, a very active volcano, and can’t be built too closer of the volcano.

An article written for Mongabay Latam and Ecuadorian website La Barra Espaciadora and untitled 'New oil spill in Ecuador is adding to the chain of disasters provoked by the erosion of Coca River' is providing some worrying, but not particularly surprising, additional details.

This new environmental disaster is added to a succession of events which began on 2 February 2020, with the disappearance of the San Rafael waterfall, and which unleashed the process of regressive erosion of the Coca River. On 7 April of that same year, the erosive process resulted in the rupture of the same pipeline, as well as that of the Trans Ecuadorian Oil Pipeline System (SOTE) and the gas duct, and at that time more than 15,000 oil barrels spilled in the same watercourses which have been on this occasion affected. More than 27,000 indigenous villagers who live downriver saw their rights to use clean and healthy water and their rights to food infringed and their chacras [small gardens and farms] disappeared underneath the river’s course. Until the date of this publication, they have affirmed not having received any type of compensation from the Ecuadorian State as provided by its legislation.

Since the 2020 spill has happened, the OCP Ecuador private company and one of its contractors, the Welding company, have built seven variants of the pipeline to prevent the interruption of hydrocarbon production, but all have collapsed. Environmental groups and organizations and human rights defenders complain that the Ecuadorian State has privileged the continuity of oil production but has neglected the needs of the inhabitants of the communities whose soils and waters have been contaminated and who are now disconnected due to the loss of a section of the highway connecting Quito with Lago Agrio. The succession of ruptures of the pipelines and collapses of the road haven’t stopped since the regressive erosion began.

Florencia, as she requested us to call her to protect her identity, began working on the site on  the night of Friday 28. She mentions she has been a member of the Petroecuador remediation team for over twelve years and has since always earned the base salary for her work. Her working days aren’t lasting eight hours, but twelve or more. ‘They don’t pay us the overtime hours for which they supposedly give us the rest and the food, wherever we go.’

Jairo Cabrera owned a property adjacent to the San Rafael waterfall. With the beginning of the erosion, he lost his land and with it also his source of income as a tourism entrepreneur. ‘What the 1987 earthquake wasn’t able to do, this sinkhole was able to’, says Cabrera, alluding to an earthquake that on 5 March of that year claimed the lives of more than 1,000 inhabitants and whose epicenter was, precisely, in the area where the sinkhole is located now. ‘The psychosocial harm is of an irreversible nature’, he says.

The inhabitants of the locality assure that the day the last spill happened, it didn’t rain. A local farmer who prefers not to be identified even said that the rains and the stone ‘are lies’ and the reason of the pipeline rupture was ‘due to a bad welding made in a hurry’. Other local residents of El Chaco concurred that there was a stone that slipped and broke the pipeline, but they added that the rock didn’t fall because of the rains or because of the soil degradation, but because ‘there was a machine of the company at work up there and it dumped stones’

Since 10 December 2021, the inhabitants of El Chaco canton, on the side of the Napo province, and those of El Reventador, in Sucumbíos province, are isolated, as a section of the road has collapsed, precisely at the point where the last spill occurred. Two months later, the road connection hasn’t been restored for the residents of the area

[Sir John Johns]

Came across of a detailed account (it’s a 24-page pdf file), written at that time and in English, of the 1978/1979 presidential election that finalized the difficult process of return to democracy and characterized by numerous political developments and twists worth a Netflix show like:

* the inability of the dictatorship-sponsored political front to get its sh**t together

* the ‘legal’ maneuvers to prevent the front-runner, Assad Bucaram, from running for president (ironically helping the CFP to nominate somebody who would turn out being a more electable candidate)

* the maneuvers of the old boss of the Liberal Party, Raúl Clemente Huerta, to displace his own nephew, Francisco ‘Pancho’ Huerta, as the party’s presidential nominee after having initially decline to run on the bogus pretext of his wife’s declining health which, as facetiously noted by the author, ‘improved remarkably after Bucaram’s legal removal’

* the unlikely alliance between the CFP and the DP-UDC Christian left party

* the insane delays to announce the final results with each side accusing the other of electoral fraud and the runoff being finally held nine months after the first round

* the murder of a minor candidate, few weeks after the first round, presumably on the order of the interior minister, Gen. Bolívar Jarrín Cahueñas (who would several years later be sentenced to jail for that crime)

* the insisting rumors of an impending military coup to stop the democratization process which actually never happened, probably thanks to the pressures of the Carter administration

* the incredibly amateurish campaign of the dictatorship-supported PSC candidate Sixto Durán-Ballén (like the candidate wasting his time on trivial things like booking himself the plane tickets)

* the ultimate victory in the runoff of Jaime Roldós in what is still the largest landslide (68.5% vs. 31.5% and all provinces won but one, Loja) in a democratic Ecuadorian presidential election at a time when the relations with his mentor, Assad Bucaram, were already faltering


Some sections of the text about Ecuadorian political parties are still largely applying, sadly (emphasis is mine):

Ecuador’s low level of political mobilization has undoubtedly helped spare the country the pronounced class conflict that has torn apart nations such as Chile, Argentina and Uruguay in recent years. It has, however, also contributed to a weak political party system and rule by unresponsive elite cliques. Until the current election, the country had failed to establish mass-based, national parties.

More than forty years later, there has been only one true national party (but not really a mass-based one), Alianza PAIS, but it fell apart due to an ill-prepared succession that turned very nasty and the end of oil boom which drained the flow of money necessary to maintain the party machine and mitigate quarrels between factions and individuals.

Historically, Ecuadorian political parties distinguished themselves ideologically on the basis on their stance on church-state relations. ‘Left’ parties – Liberals, Socialists – were anticlerical and secularist. Parties of the ‘Right’ – Conservatives, Social Christians – were generally confessional Catholic. By the midtwentieth century, however, the church-state issue had lost any real significance in the nation’s political life. Thus, the old left-right labels now explain little about the individual party’s orientation toward fundamental socioeconomic issues nor do they have much relevance to Ecuador’s contemporary political problems.

While political lore still places the Liberals ‘to the left’ of the Conservatives and Social Christians, the laissez-faire Guayaquil financial oligarchs who dominate the Liberal Party are actually more economically conservative than much of the Conservative Party’s Andean elite. When asked to differentiate themselves from the opposition, spokesmen for all of Ecuador’s major parties – Concentration of Popular Forces (CFP), Democratic Left, Conservatives, Liberals and Social Christians – insist that they are ‘left of center’ on socioeconomic issues. Even the party secretary of the Conservatives (a very traditionalist group currently led by a retired right-wing Colonel from one of the highlands’ most feudal states) and the secretary of the CID (a party closely tied to coastal, big business interests) characterized their orientations in those terms. The fact that such ideological self-definitions bear no resemblance to actual party behavior does not mean that these leaders are consciously deceptive or cynical. Rather, it reflects the fact that, until recently, political parties have been alliances of convenience between powerful factions, in which ideology, programs, or policies have had little importance.

Most political parties self-identifying as ‘left of center’ despite all the evidence of the contrary remain largely true: Moreno and post-Moreno Alianza PAIS continues to claim such political orientation as well as Lucio Gutiérrez in spite of the neoliberal policies he conducted while in office and his very law-and-order stances that are making him not much dissimilar to European far-right parties.

Prominent contemporary leaders such as Deputies Julio César Trujillo (leader of the small but influential Popular Democracy/Christian Democratic Union, DP/UDC) and Rodrigo Borja (leader of the growing Democratic Left) originally joined the Conservative and Liberal Parties, respectively, simply because those groups dominated the regions (highlands and coast, respectively) in which the two men lived. Dr. Trujillo rose to the secretary generalship of the Conservatives (before leaving the party to form a new, more progressive alliance) in spite of deep political differences with other party leaders. Even while serving as the party’s national leader, he was barred from speaking at party meetings in certain Andean provinces where local Conservative officials considered him to be ‘far too radical’.

A mistake about Rodrigo Borja’s place of residence, which was Quito I think, but the remark still applies as the Liberal Party tended by the mid-twentieth century to prevail over the Conservative Party in the country’s capital.

Attempts to place Ecuadorian parties along an ideological spectrum have thus been doomed to failure, since personalities, regional loyalties, and political styles have had overriding importance. Dr. Trujillo vividly illustrated this point to me when he noted that during the 1960s, while still a Conservative Party leader, he served as legal council to a bank workers union. Once, while representing several clerks who had been fired by their bank during a bitter strike, his court room adversary, representing the bank, was the leader of the Socialist Party.

Because of the nonprogrammatic, ideologically confusing nature of the Ecuadorian party system, leading political figures change party affiliations and interparty alliances like discarded sports coats. The current mayor of Quito withdrew from the progressive Democratic Left when he failed to secure its mayoral nomination, and then ran successfully as the candidate of the right-of-center Liberals. During the recently concluded presidential campaign, the Socialist Party originally announced its support for the rightist Social Christian candidate, then withdrew its backing when he selected a populist running mate.

The failure of Ecuadorian parties to define their position on issues has been accompanied by their inability to develop a broad organizational base or to build a mass following among the peasants and urban poor who have been gradually incorporated into the political system in recent decades. Consequently, from 1944 until this year’s election, none of the country’s elected presidents were closely linked to the major political parties. Velasco Ibarra was essentially an independent; Galo Plaza (1948-1952) came out of the ranks of the Liberals (indeed his father, also a president, had been a major party figure) but was elected as an independent Liberal against the candidate of the party’s dominant faction; Camilo Ponce (1956-1960) left the Conservatives to form his small, personalistic, Social Christian Party from which he was elected to the presidency

To illustrate the persistent weakness of political organizations in Ecuador: since the return of democracy, there have been eleven different parties which have held the presidency (not counting the two independent vice presidents who ascended to the presidency after their predecessors had been removed from office) with only the late DP-UDC having ruled the country in two non-consecutive periods (1981-84, 1998-2000) and only the moribund Alianza PAIS having been able to win reelection (three in a raw: 2009, 2013 and 2017).

In short, events leading up to this year’s election support political scientist John Martz’s contention that Ecuadorian parties have been elitist in leadership, highly opportunistic, weak in organization, ineffective in articulating positions, and lacking in fixed ideological orientations. ‘Short term gains’, said Martz, have been ‘prized over long-term ideological consistency... Efforts to create mass parties [have been] unusual... Between elections the organizations [have] concentrated on relations with their counterparts at senior levels and internal elitism [has] negated effective participation of the rank and file’

In hindsight, some assessments of the political situation by local politicians/pundits turned out spectacularly wrong:

Despite his impressive scholastic credentials, his work as a CFP functionary, and a brief stint in the national legislature (1968-1970), however, he was a relatively unknown figure in national politics. Indeed, his designation as CFP nominee appeared to have rested on two factors: his role as a close aide to Bucaram within the party, and his marriage to the party boss’s niece (herself a politically involved lawyer). Not surprisingly, political pundits tended to regard Roldós as an understudy who would surely take his marching orders from his wife’s powerful uncle.

After a few months in office and as hinted by the article, Roldós rapidly broke with the guy who got him elected (not very dissimilar to how Moreno broke with Correa, how Lasso dumped the PSC which helped him got elected by not fielding a candidate and providing him its electoral machine in Guayaquil, how Álvaro Noboa would have certainly broke with Abdalá Bucaram providing he would have won the presidential election of 1998 – you may probably also make comparison with Santos/Uribe and Castillo/Cerrón in neighboring Colombia and Peru), identifying Assad Bucaram as one of the ‘patriarchs of the shady deal’ and founding his own new political party which would quickly decline after the abrupt death of Roldós in an airplane crash.

The CFP wasn’t the only party to fall victim to internal struggles conflated with intra-familial feuds and generational divides as the young Francisco ‘Pancho’ Huerta left the Liberal Party (which suffered an electoral defeat it would never recovered from under his aging uncle) to found his own party, the Democratic Party, which, after quite strong results in the 1984 general and local elections, proved to be only a flash in the pan and was already moribund two years later.

The perception by then-Ecuadorian elites of Osvaldo Hurtado (Roldós’ running-mate who would become president in 1981 after the death of Roldós) as a radical leftist and some sort of closeted communist is particularly ironic in hindsight as, when president, Hurtado implemented austerity policies, launched the ill-fated sucretización program consisting in transferring the external private debt to the state and signed an agreement with the IMF. Later in the early 1990s, he would forced his rival Julio César Trujillo (who would became one of the founders of Pachakutik) to left the DP-UDC and moved the party further right.

[Sir John Johns]

Hilarious news about a funny figure of Guayaquil political folklore:

https://twitter.com/lahistoriaec/status/1491271425583648768

Unwelcome. Although the president of Correísmo, Marcela Aguinaga, has welcomed him in the party, the national bureau of Citizen Revolution has rejected the membership of the Guayaquil councilman Héctor Vanegas for being an opportunist and a camisetero (party-switcher)

Héctor Vanegas is a famous lawyer of Guayaquil, inseparable from his trademark fedora hat, who apparently is flooding local television channels with ads for his law practice.

Of course, the only comment under the video is 'Better Call Saul: Ecuadorian edition...'


Before his failed attempt to join the Citizen Revolution, Vanegas has previously:

* ran for prefect of Guayas in 2009 under the banner of Álvaro Noboa’s party, the PRIAN

* ran for provincial assemblyman of Guayas in 2013 under the banner of Abdalá Bucaram’s PRE (at one point, he was also the lawyer of the former president)

* announced shortly thereafteranother bid for prefect, this time under the banner of Lucio Gutiérrez’s PSP, but this failed to come to fruition.

* ran for national assemblyman in 2017 under the banner of Iván Espinel’s Fuerza Compromiso Social promising to be 'the whip of the corruption' and using said whip in political meetings (when Espinel was subsequently prosecuted for money laundering, he became his lawyer).

* was a candidate in 2019 in Guayaquil local elections for municipal councilman under the banner of Jimmy Jairala’s (another politician with strong convictions) Democratic Center and won his first electoral victory...

… only to leave the Democratic Center few months thereafter. Also, seriously, how many candidates were then campaigning on lowering traffic fines???

* endorsed Yaku Pérez in the 2021 presidential elections as his own brother, Ricardo, was a candidate on the Pachakutik national list:

https://twitter.com/lahistoriaec/status/1359641151880503307

When both brothers were running in 2013 for provincial assemblymen with the support of the PRE Alianza PAIS tried to get their candidacies rejected by the National Electoral Council on the grounds they look like exactly the same on their photographs on the ballot paper (well, they are twin brothers, but them wearing the same glasses and hats surely didn’t help differentiated them).

[Sir John Johns]

The majority report on the bill guaranteeing abortion in case of rape has been approved yesterday by the National Assembly, but not without some changes. Each parliament caucus divided itself on the vote with only the ID having issued voting instructions (that 3 legislators ignored).

The first version of the report put to vote would have enable abortion in case of rape up to sixteen weeks of pregnancy for women over 18 and eighteen weeks for women under 18 and rural and indigenous women. Johanna Moreira, the ID assemblywoman who sponsored the report, had however gradually reviewed her initial report which originally proposed a 28 weeks limit for women over 18 and no limit for women under 18, with the hope it would gathered enough support to get passed. When presenting the report, Moreira acknowledged that ‘this isn’t the fair and restorative bill that I would have liked to present, but that is the one bringing us closer to get the votes in the Assembly’. Nevertheless, it failed to reach the 70 votes required to get approved with legislators voting as followed:

Yes 66; No 40; Abstain 27

Breakdown by parliamentary caucus was the following:

UNES (47 attending legislators): Yes 26; No 10; Abstain 11
BAN (27 attending legislators): Yes 6; No 14; Abstain 7
Pachakutik (23 attending legislators): Yes 14; No 5; Abstain 4
ID (15 attending legislators): Yes 12; No 1; Abstain 2
PSC (13 attending legislators): Yes 4; No 7; Abstain 2
Independents (8 attending legislators): Yes 4; No 3; Abstain 1

Moreira then asked and obtained from the president of the National Assembly a recess to amend her report. After over one hour and half, Moreira submitted a new version of the draft, which reduced to twelve weeks of pregnancy the time limit for abortion for women over 18 and let the time limit unchanged for women under 18 or belonging to disadvantaged groups. Moreira explained that ‘today women over 18 are going to sacrifice themselves for the girls of this country. It seems we do not understand what a raped girl is, it seems we do not understand what a raped woman is’.

In the second vote, the amended report was approved as eight legislators who had abstained in the first vote voted in favor of the new version (notably Salvador Quishpe) as well as two legislators who had voted against the first report (one legislator, who had voted in favor of the initial report, was absent in the second vote):

Yes 75; No 41; Abstain 14

Breakdown by parliamentary caucus

UNES (46 attending legislators): Yes 29; No 14; Abstain 3
BAN (25 attending legislators): Yes 9; No 13; Abstain 3
Pachakutik (23 attending legislators): Yes 17; No 3; Abstain 3
ID (15 attending legislators): Yes 12; No 1; Abstain 2
PSC (13 attending legislators): Yes 4; No 7; Abstain 2
Independents (8 attending legislators): Yes 4; No 3; Abstain 1

The approved law seems to displease a lot of people, on pro-choice like on pro-life sides. It’s now up to President Lasso to veto the law or not it and he is certainly inclined to the first option.


Some reactions:

From the CONAIE
https://twitter.com/CONAIE_Ecuador/status/1494408607722577931

The Constitutional Court decriminalized abortion for rape, today the National Assembly of Ecuador approved a law that neither fair nor repairing. If Guillermo Lasso intends to veto, this will condemn thousands of women victims.

This fight continues, we welcome the positive vote from a sector of Pachakutik

From Pierina Correa (UNES) (no reaction from Rafael Correa on that topic on his Twitter account)

https://twitter.com/pierinaescorrea/status/1494376339335491589

February 17 will be remembered as a dark day in the national history; in a nefarious way has been approved a report which violates the Constitution, but above all which violates the most sacred thing, LIFE. I strongly reject what happened today in the plenary session of the National Assembly

From Ricardo Vanegas (Pachakutik) who sponsored the report by minority:

https://twitter.com/Ricardo_Vanegas/status/1494388857101557760

From my trench, I fought with all my strength to defend life. And I continue saying NO to abortion. President Lasso, it is now in your hands. Our Ecuador doesn’t deserve that more innocents die. I request you to act with the veto. United we can!

#No to abortion law

From Paola Pabón, the Correísta prefect of Pichincha, who in 2013, when an assemblywoman, was heavily criticized by Correa and punished with a one-month-long suspension after having motioned a bill decriminalizing abortion she was forced to withdraw.

https://twitter.com/PaolaPabonC/status/1494385069930209285

We accomplished one more step in the fight that has taken us years and which is not yet completed. New challenges are ahead of us, the possibility to decide about our own bodies without restrictions will be the next one.

[Sir John Johns]

Freile is leaving the AMIGO Movement

2021 presidential candidate Pedro José Freile has announced his resignation from the presidency and his departure from the AMIGO Movement, the result of an intense legal battle over the leadership of the party, the latest registered national political organization in Ecuador (on 3 February 2020 after having obtain the required 186,000 signatures, corresponding to 1.5% of registered voters) whose short history has been a complete farce since the very beginning.

As recorded in this Primicias article from June 2020, AMIGO (an acronym of ‘Independent Mobilizing Action Generating Opportunities’) was at the time of its registration a movement without an identified leadership nor political orientation. Its website (which got offline shortly before the publication of the article) only displayed gibberish illustrated by photos freely available on the Internet while the official headquarters of the party was located in a small apartment in Esmeraldas. When calling the contact phone numbers of the party registered with the National Electoral Council (CNE), Primicias only obtained a non-assigned phone number, a number not answering calls and a person ensuring it was a wrong number.


The ‘national headquarters’ of AMIGO. Almost 190,000 persons are supposed to have signed to support this joke.

The investigation of Primicias then unveiled that AMIGO was actually the creation of Daniel Mendoza, a young assemblyman from Manabí who had already previously founded a provincial movement called MEJOR (‘better’, an acronym for ‘Better Entrepreneurship, Justice and Real Opportunities’). Mendoza had been elected to the National Assembly in 2017 as the candidate of the alliance between the ruling Alianza PAIS and Unidad Primero, the movement of Mariano Zambrano, the then-prefect of Manabí who had been accused of corruption. Zambrano was firstly elected prefect in 2004 as a PSC candidate, reelected in 2009 as the candidate of Paco Moncayo’s short-lived Municipalist Movement for National Integrity and reelected in 2014 with the support of Rafael Correa’s party. After having left office in 2019, he came back to support the PSC in the 2019 local and 2021 national elections.

Primicias also indicated that AMIGO was initially registered under the name of MEJOR EC, that its national director was a former CNE service provider and that its registration had been green-lighted when the CNE president, Diana Atamaint, was facing an impeachment process initiated by CREO legislators. The request for impeachment failed thanks to the negative vote of Mendoza’s substitute, rising suspicions over a shady deal between Mendoza and Atamaint.

Anyway, Mendoza was arrested in June 2020 and impeached by the National Assembly the following month after revelations on his role as one of the main organizers of the corruption network in Ecuador’s public hospitals.



In August 2020, Pedro José Freile, a totally unknown lawyer with a very limited political experience (he participated in campaign meetings of mayor of Quito Rodrigo Paz and presidential candidate Jamil Mahuad in the late 1990s and in street protests against Correa in 2015), emerged as the presidential candidate of AMIGO. When asked by El Universo over his relations with Mendoza, Freile explained that, while seeking a political party to endorse the government plan he had elaborated with his friends, after numerous refusals, he ended meeting with the leadership of AMIGO. He was then announced that there was no plan for the party to participate in the 2021 elections but that, if Freile wanted, he and his friends could take control of it. No money was offered by Freile who claimed that ‘It is totally legal. [Mendoza] has nothing to do with it. We took control and constituted a new leadership’.

A very bizarre story hard to believe but Freile's candidacy went ahead and he managed to place fifth out of sixteen candidates with 2.1%, ahead of veteran politicians like a former president of Ecuador. The platform of Freile, which can be described as some sort of very watered down libertarianism (pro-business policies, promise to duplicate the oil production and support for decriminalization of abortion in case of rape), appears to have mainly seduced urban right-wing voters of the highlands unhappy with the mainstream conservative parties (CREO and the PSC) and finding the ID too much liberal (in the US sense of the word). Such voters have previously voted for Mauricio Rodas (a lawyer like Freile) in 2013 election and you can possibly go back to the candidacy of César Alarcón, a jurist running in 2002 as the candidate of the Freedom Party who also polled relatively well in the Sierra cities. The candidate of AMIGO probably also attracted some protest voters as his party didn’t fielded any candidates in the legislative elections, officially because, according to Freile in his typical rhetoric, AMIGO intended to ‘contribute to regenerate that putrid fabric which is now the national assembly’ (of course especially ironic for a party whose founder was in jail for corruption); possibly because it actually hadn’t the headcount to constitute full lists.

As a side note, the CNE, in its mandatory display of incompetence, misprinted some 6 million of presidential ballots on which the logo of MEJOR EC wrongly appears instead of the one of AMIGO leading to the destruction of said ballots and the reprint of corrected ballots at a time when the electoral institution was facing financial difficulties due to massive cut in government budgets.

Since the first round (he endorsed Lasso in the runoff), Freile has largely moved out of the spotlight, being only mentioned for having signed the ‘Madrid Charter’ (a declaration initiated by the far-right Vox Spanish party and denouncing, among other things, the left-wing governments of the ‘Iberosphere’ as ‘sequestered by Communist-inspired totalitarian regimes supported by drug trafficking’) and for his defense of the right of the Catholic church to ban trans women and women wearing shorts or skirts above the knee from photographing themselves in the outside of a Quito basilica.

He seemingly was mostly busy fighting for keeping control of the AMIGO movement against its founders who apparently never left. The Contentious Electoral Tribunal (TCE) ruled in favor of Freile twice when being challenged as the legal president of AMIGO by alleged infiltrators from the non-registered movement of Bolívar Armijos (a former president of the national council of parish governments of Ecuador whose name was mentioned in 2019 as a possible running mate of Rafael Correa in the 2021 elections) and from unspecified politicians denounced by Freile as belonging to ‘the old politics’ or tied to the São Paulo Forum. Freile is now intending to continue politics with his followers, the so-called ‘Legionaries of the Fifth Power’, and is considering running for mayor of Quito in 2023. The problem is that he has no longer a registered political party to support his candidacy and will be forced to deal with 'the old politics' if he wanted to be on the ballot.

So in short, AMIGO is changing hands for the third time in its only two years of existence as part of an alleged rivalry between people tied to Vox and supposed followers of Rafael Correa.

[Sir John Johns]

Massive update on the ongoing political situation in Ecuador which is currently an indecipherable mess as the National Assembly has been in a state of internal crisis for about a month now on a backdrop of infighting for control of key independent institutions, increasing divisions in parliamentary caucuses and backroom deals between theoretically completely opposed political factions.



To sum up things that I will largely elaborate further, an unholy alliance (doomed to not last for long) between the UNES, the PSC (whose parliamentary leader, Esteban Torres, remember is the local ally of VOX) and the Pachakutik rebel faction (close to Leonidas Iza, a self-described follower of Marxist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui) is currently trying to oust Guadalupe Llori (belonging to the ‘moderate’ faction of Pachakutik, more disposed to accommodate President Lasso) from the presidency of the National Assembly for appointing a new Council of Legislative Administration (CAL, currently dominated by PK, the ID and the BAN). Various attempts have however all so far failed either due to Llori manipulating the legislative rules to delay the vote opening the way for her removal either due to last-minute desertions from the ranks of the UNES and the PSC (rising suspicions of betrayal).

The last straw for opponents to Llori was her alleged maneuvers to delay impeachment proceedings against four councilors of the Council for Participation and Social Control (CPCCS) that voted in early February to discharge the then president of that body (playing a key role in the designation of numerous key offices in the state apparatus), a relative of a PSC bigwig, to replace her with a new president, considered as largely aligned on the Lasso administration. The legality of such move is dubious at best with the intervention of the police in the CPCCS facilities to seat the new president not helping defusing the crisis.

But Ecuadorian politics wouldn’t be Ecuadorian politics if things could be summed up by a simple and clear opposition between a pro-government alliance and an opposition coalition. What we are seeing now is the return of the so-called mayorías móviles (‘mobile majorities’) with the constitution of ephemeral parliamentary majorities to approve or reject bills on case-by-case base. Indeed, few hours after the UNES-PSC-PK rebel coalition had failed by one vote to create a commission to evaluate the work of the CAL, a mass amnesty of social and political activists (comprising mostly indigenous and environmental activists, notably prosecuted for their participation in the October 2019 protests, but also a few Correísta leaders) was passed by the National Assembly by a joint alliance of the UNES and PK (which rediscovered its unity on that vote) as well as half of the ID caucus and defectors from the ruling BAN. The PSC was the only caucus to vote against en bloc and is now denouncing a ‘pact’ between the UNES and Llori to get the amnesty voted in exchange of the PK legislator keeping the presidency of the legislature.

The government was, of course, pissed by the passage of such amnesty the president is constitutionally unable to veto and has also failed to prevent the passage of a law increasing wages of teachers (approved by all caucuses but the BAN despite questions over the financing of such measure) while struggling to get the votes required to get its Law for Investments passed under emergency and prevent the passage of a bill aiming at repealing the fiscal reform passed in last November thanks to the unexpected abstention of the UNES. The planned labor reform the government is currently elaborating also looks like doomed to be rejected.

In that context of stalemate in the parliament, voices are now calling for President Lasso to trigger the muerte cruzada, calling simultaneously presidential and parliamentary by-elections and leaving the president free hands to pass decrees for a six-month period. However, the president is very reluctant to use such radical measure as his re-election (only to complete the remain of the 2021-2025 term in office) is really far from being ensured.



A by-election could pose problems for every major political force:

- Lasso was elected on the platform on reducing taxes and respecting indigenous, women’s and LGBT organizations but, once in office, actually increase taxes and disregard the demands of the aforementioned groups. Additionally, he pissed up his former ally, the PSC, and has bad relations with parts of the business community.

- Said PSC has no national leader as Jaime Nebot has retired and as Cynthia Viteri, the mayor of Guayaquil, is in a vulnerable position with a reasonable possibility the PSC could lose its stronghold in the 2023 locals. Tellingly, a plan was reportedly discussed inside the party to run a very reluctant Nebot for prefect of Guayas in the hopes candidates for mayor down ballot will benefit from the coattail effect.

- Pachakutik is deeply divided between a ‘moderate’ and a ‘radical’ faction with the Llori faction being easy to target as the main responsible of the stalemate in parliament and Iza having been so far unable to mobilize indigenous in the streets at a sufficient extent to force the government to, at least, open real negotiations. Additionally, Yaku Pérez’s Somos Aguas could take Pachakutik some votes but probably not enough to establish itself as a viable alternative.

- the UNES has remained so far united in the parliament but, by the alliance’s own account, its caucus is inexperienced and of low quality. It also has no obvious presidential candidate (already a problem before the 2021 election) with the 2021 candidate it groomed, Andrés Arauz, having left the country and having largely disappeared from public discourse. It will be also haunted by its abstention in the vote on the tax reform, its insistence on trying to get their leaders pardoned even when sentenced in corruption cases (Jorge Glas) and its vote in favor of the amnesty of October 2019 leaders which will hurt them in Quito (and so will be their support for former mayor Jorge Yunda, embattled in a corruption scandal).

- the ID is currently divided between an old guard, leaning towards the center-right, and a younger generation, more inclined to support environmental, feminist and LGBT issues, with rumors on the latter planning to leave the party. Additionally, its 2021 candidate, Xavier Hervas, the major surprise of the last election, has damaged his schtick of pragmatic no-nonsense outsider and flag-bearer of ‘new’ or ‘different’ politics breaking with backroom deals and horse-trading by flip-floping on abortion, participating in internal plots to remove the ID leadership and, already before the 2021 runoff, by publicly endorsing Lasso when the party has voted in favor of promoting the null vote and while he previously said he would no gave vote indication (too much ‘old politics’).



By now, Ecuador has fully returned in the 1990s with:

- unstable and unpredictable parliamentary majorities thanks to unruly legislators, debilitated political parties and unholy alliances between parties having nothing in common but the same enemy

- scramble between the parliament and the presidency for controlling the judiciary and electoral functions at the price of undermining institutions with abuse of impeachment proceedings, prolonged vacancies and politicization of theoretically independent offices

- a president out of step with concerns of average Ecuadorian and unwilling/unable to deal with the mess that is the legislature

- disillusioned voters that are witnessing the sorry spectacle of the political class exhausting itself in sterile power struggles and absurd parliamentary pantomime while the country is plunging into economic crisis.

[Sir John Johns]

'Coup' in the CPCCS

The first act of the ongoing crisis happened on 9 February when the president of the Council for Citizen Participation and Social Control (CPCCS), Sofía Almeida, was removed from office by a vote of four out of seven members of the CPCCS. She was replaced by Hernán Ulloa, a fellow CPCCS member and a former candidate for assemblyman for the SUMA center-right party. The change of president has been made possible by a CPCCS member switching sides,
enabling the constitution of a majority favorable to the Lasso government in an institutional body that is supposed to be apolitical (it never had been since its creation by Rafael Correa under the pretext to end political appointments and distribution of posts between political parties in the high administration).

Sofía Almeida, for her part, is a relative of Luis Almeida (currently a PSC assemblyman after having been years ago a legislator for Lucio Gutiérrez’s PSP). The removed vice president of the CPCCS, now a simple councilor sitting in the new ‘minority’, is David Rosero, a former candidate for parliament for the Popular Union (ex-MPD, connected to the Marxist unions) while the remaining member of the previous ‘majority’ with the rogue councilor is Javier Dávalos, widely seen as a tool of Correísmo.

After about a decade of appointment through competitive examinations plagued by irregularities, accusations of favoritism and interfering from the government, a constitutional reform, approved by referendum in 2018, removed the whole Correa-appointed CPCCS and replaced it by a transitory CPCCS headed by Julio César Trujillo, a veteran politician who has been a founder of both the (then and theoretically) left Christian DP and Pachakutik, which rapidly purged, legally and illegally, the state apparatus from persons linked to Correísmo. The following year, a new CPCCS was directly elected by Ecuadorian voters (at the same time than the March 2019 local elections) in a process tainted by accusations of unconstitutionality and breaching of the electoral rules by the candidates.

Four of the newly elected members, considered as close to Correísmo, were removed by the National Assembly in August 2019 over allegations of irregularities, corruption and forgery of documents. Among the removed members was the president and most-voted candidate (7.1% on the men’s list; there is also a women’s list and a seat reserved for indigenous, ethnic minorities and Ecuadorians abroad), José Tuárez, a priest considered as a follower of Correa and accused of having hide his affiliation to the Socialist Party (making him ineligible) and having used his religious dresses in electoral propaganda in violation of the secular nature of the state (and additionally the guidelines of his religious order). He has since been sentenced to five years in jail for influence peddling during his short tenure as president of the CPCSS. Also removed was Victoria Desintonio who is now an UNES assemblywoman. The removed members were replaced by the following candidates having gathered the most votes.

Tuárez’s successor as president, Christian Cruz, was also impeached by the National Assembly in October 2020, in a process this time not guided by political motivations: revelations about him fraudulently claiming disability benefits (while at the same time making public his participation in martial arts tournaments and mentioning his taekwondo awards on his CPCCS biography!) have made his continuation at the head of the body unsustainable. He was succeeded by Almeida who was herself replaced by Ulloa last month, meaning that the ‘reformed’ CPCCS had hold four successive presidents in only three years of time.

Note that Almeida has however refused to acknowledge her removal from the presidency and is claiming being the legal head of the CPCCS. At the request of Ulloa, the police intervened in the CPCCS building to enable his election and seating as president, a move denounced by Almeida as ‘an institutional coup’ and ‘an interference’ from another state function.  Almeida has filed a complaint against Ulloa for ‘usurpation of office’ arguing the reasons of her removal are bogus: not having summoned a permanent session for 13 days and alleged irregularities in the selection of state office-holders.

Not a coincidence, Almeida’s removal happened while a truckload of key offices have to be renewed or appointed in the next weeks including:
- every member of the National Electoral Council (CNE) and Electoral Contentious Tribunal (TSE)
- the Judicature Council (in charge of selecting judges)
- the Superintendency for Companies (whose last holder has been unanimously removed by the National Assembly last December for his involvement in the Isspol corruption scandal)
- the Human Rights Ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo whose last holder has been removed by the National Assembly last September after he had been arrested for sexual assault while drunken and violating the lockdown rules, a removal supported by CREO, the PSC and the ID but also part of Pachakutik)
- the Comptroller General (whose office is theoretically vacant since May 2017 when Carlos Pólit fled to Florida to avoid arrest in the Odebrecht case; his successor and the pet peeve of Correístas, Pablo Celi, served on an acting and probably illegal basis for four years before sending his resignation in last July from the prison cell he had been sent to after revelations over his involvement in the Las Torres case, a corruption scandal in Petroecuador unearthed by investigations of the US Justice Department)
- the Superintendency for Banks (whose holder has been removed in mid-February by a vote supported by the UNES, Pachakutik and the ID)



The failed attempts to oust Guadalupe Llori

The dispute in the CPCCS immediately moved to the National Assembly where the UNES, the PSC and the rebel wing of Pachakutik joined to request the starting of an impeachment procedure(juicio político against Ulloa and the three other CPCCS members who voted to remove Almeida.

A first problem emerged as the CAL (in charge of examining the requests for impeachment and deciding if they should be put to vote or be dropped) was already clogged with requests for juicios políticos (against the acting comptroller-general whose term in office is anyway expiring, against the solicitor general, against the four incumbent members and a former member of the CNE) with a reported legal impossibility to change the order in which requests for juicios políticos should be processed by the CAL: they should follow the order in which they have been formally submitted. Additionally, the president of the Assembly’s oversight committee, Fernando Villavicencio (independent), is generally an ally of the Lasso administration and, as such, unwilling to cooperate with opposition legislators, especially not the Correísta ones, in their efforts to remove state officials supportive of the president of Ecuador.

Still, on 17 February, the CAL voted to accept two distinct juicio politíco request aiming members of the CPCCS: the one filed by the UNES-PSC-PK rebel alliance demanding only the removal of the four pro-Lasso CPCCS members and another one filed by the Llori PK faction demanding the removal of the entire CPCCS membership and suspected of aiming at torpedo the first request. In a setback for Llori, the CAL voted to prioritize the first motion over the second one, a decision passed thanks to the support of the UNES (Ronny Aleaga), PK rebel (Darwin Pereira), ID’s left-leaning faction (Johanna Moreira) members of the CAL as well as, surprisingly, the first vice president of the National Assembly Virgilio Saquicela, a member of the pro-government BAN caucus, rising suspicions over his loyalty to the Lasso administration (Saquicela may have an interest in the case as he would ascend to the presidency of the National Assembly if Llori is removed from office).

At the same time, a motion fielded by a PK rebel assemblyman to denounce interference from the government in the activities of the CPCCS failed to pass as the UNES caucus divided itself on the vote, a first in the current legislature later blamed on lack of coordination.

The following day, Llori denounced on Twitter a ‘conspiracy’ and the ‘destabilizing attempts’ coming from the rival faction of PK and composed by five or six assemblymen (some initial members like Salvador Quishpe have since distanced themselves a bit from Iza) as was announced a request for the creation of parliamentary commission in charge of evaluating the actions of the CAL (notably on the delays to examine the request for the impeachment of the Ulloa and co. in the CPCCS but also on Llori’s refusal in last January to add on the parliament agenda the examination of a bill to repeal the fiscal reform and her decision to instead firstly submit the text to the Constitutional Court for examination hence further delaying its vote by the legislature). The composition of the future commission, seen as the first step towards a removal of Llori and a complete renewal of the CAL, was also revealed and included members of the five main parties (UNES, PK, PSC, ID and CREO) but members of the two latter groups said their names were included without their knowledge and consent.

The parliamentary session on 24 February turned into confusion as a request to add on the legislative daily agenda the examination on a resolution on the evaluation of the CAL activities motioned by Fausto Jarrín (UNES) was rejected on the grounds four other requests to change the agenda had already been submitted when the law only enables three to be examined in a session. The move was denounced as a trick from Llori and her allies to prevent (or at least delay) the constitution of the commission.

Later during that same session, Esteban Torres (PSC) publicly requested a point of order, a demand rejected by Llori. This caused an uproar among the UNES and PSC benches and the departure of Llori who announced the suspension of the session. First vice president Virgilio Saquicela (BAN) took over the presidency of the session but, as the pro-government legislators also left and as the lights and the microphones were abruptly turned off, he announced that the session couldn’t resumed. Llori subsequently gave a press conference, appearing next to CREO legislators and the coordinator of PK parliamentary caucus, in which she denounced an alleged attempt by the PSC and the UNES to take over the National Assembly and destabilize the country.

The National Assembly then went on recess for the carnival period with the only session, an online one summoned by Llori on 26 February to examine only pending issues like the future of the bill repealing the fiscal reform had to been suspended due to lack of quorum. Most of the PSC and the UNES legislators as well as members of the rebel faction of PK decided indeed to boycott said session they considered as illegal.

In the first days of March, while Llori issued a public video in which she stated not being an ally of President Lasso, defended her management, mentioned her past persecution by the Correa government and indicated the carnavalazo had failed (a reference to the 1972 military coup which overthrow Velasco Ibarra for the fourth time and happened during the carnival), the UNES and the PSC threatened to organize themselves their own parliamentary sessions if Llori didn’t summoned quickly a new plenary session of the National Assembly. The two parties intended to resume their attempt to set up the commission but also noticed that the delay to examine the Law for Investments (planning notably the development of public-private partnerships and the creation of free-trade zones) introduced by Lasso on 22 February under emergency was shortening, leaving only about twenty days before its passage in case no majority had been reached to either reject or approve an amended version of the bill.

Llori summoned a new plenary session for the 9 March, two days after having received the support of the political council of Pachakutik and of the national coordinator of the indigenous party, Marlon Santi as the indigenous movement is still claiming to be united against all evidences.

Then, unexpectedly, the motion to create the commission was defeated twice in the same session. A first attempt, motioned by UNES legislator Pabel Muñoz in the middle of a debate over an extradition treaty with China, was rejected by Llori herself on the ground it was unrelated with the ongoing parliamentary discussion. A second one, this time introduced by Fausto Jarrín (UNES), failed to pass receiving 69 out of the 70 required votes. The motion failed because a UNES legislator and a PSC legislator were missing: the first one, reportedly, for family matters, and the second one because his vehicle had been shot when traveling on the Esmeraldas-Quito road. Internal investigations were announced by the leaders of the two caucus over the absences of the assemblymen and their substitutes, suspecting possible betrayal.

[Sir John Johns]

Mass amnesty for prosecuted social activists

The following day, on 10 March, a motion was introduced by assemblyman Mario Ruiz, a supporter of Leonidas Iza, aiming at pardoning some 268 persons (mostly indigenous, social and environmental activists but also some Correísta politicians) prosecuted both under Correa and Moreno (but especially the latter and especially in relation with the October 2019 indigenous unrest). The amnesty, which is fulfilling a longtime demand of the CONAIE, successfully passed with 99 legislators (91 were needed) voting for and 16 against; 10 abstained and 12 were absent.

The composition of the majority supporting the amnesty didn’t followed the lines of the (technically dead) CREO-PK-ID majority nor the ones of the emerging UNES-PSC-Pachakutik rebels. The UNES and the Pachakutik caucuses unanimously supported the motion as well as seven (out of eight) independent legislators including Fernando Villavicencio (who had previously criticized the bill for including Correísta leaders and being a mass amnesty instead of one on a case-by-case basis), Bruno Segovia (ex-Pachakutik and close to Yaku Pérez) and Daniel Noboa (the son of Álvaro). Half (7) of the PSC caucus predictably voted against and the other half was absent. Meanwhile, the ID divided itself with 7 out of 15 assemblymen voting in favor (notably Alejandro Jaramillo and Johanna Moreira who had previously advocated pro-choice positions) and the remaining eight ones abstaining. The BAN was unable to reach an agreement despite the Lasso administration being totally opposed to the amnesty bill and gave its legislators a free vote: a plurality (13) voted in favor (including Elías Jachero, elected in Pastaza for an alliance between a local party and the PSC; Francisco León and Vanessa Freire who had been both elected for the UNES but are now part of the ruling parliamentary group; and Mariano Curicama, once a time a Pachakutik member, thereafter an ally of Correa and now a supporter of Lasso), 9 against, 1 abstain and 5 weren’t present.

In the detail, 60 out of 268 amnestied persons were prosecuted ‘for having exercised the right to resistance and social protest’ in October 2019, 153 as ‘defenders of the community territories’, 12 for ‘administration of indigenous justice’ and 43 as ‘defenders of nature’. Most of the cases were actually languishing in the justice system due to a lack in magistrates and justice civil servants (the successive purges conducted by both Correa and Moreno didn’t helped), institutional stalemate and internal feuds in the judicial system as well as critical shortage of financial and material resources exacerbated by austerity measures.

The amnestied cases are ranging from pretty obvious cases of political persecution (with prosecutions under extravagant charges of ‘terrorism’, ‘sabotage’, ‘incitement’ or ‘blockage of public service’ that have been extensively previously used by the Correa administration but were subsequently used by the Moreno administration against protesters including, ironically, bigwigs of Correísmo) to relatively minor cases of material destruction and intimidation involving rural communities opposed to extractive activities while also covering more serious cases of destruction and damage of public buildings (including colonial buildings and the seat of the Comptroller General’s Office in Quito), sequestration of military, policemen and journalists committed at the height of the October 2019 protests and for which indigenous and union leaders were held responsible, and cases of alleged illegal mining and trafficking of lands (as part of conflicts between rural communities and mining companies or landowners).

Among the persons prosecuted in connection with the October 2019 protests and now amnestied are:

* Jaime Vargas, the former president of the CONAIE, sued for abduction, terrorism, incitement and acts of hatred. The complaint for terrorism has been fielded by former vice president Alberto Dahik (himself previously described as an ‘economic terrorist’ by León Febres-Cordero) on the grounds the unrest provoked the loss of more than $100 million in oil sector and for the resulting material damages.

* Leonidas Iza prosecuted for abduction, incitement, damage to public property, damage to historic property and terrorism as the then-leader of the Indigenous and Peasants Movement of Cotopaxi (MICC).

* Mesías Tatamuez, the president of the Unitary Front of Workers (FUT) prosecuted for abduction.

* Jorge Calderón Casco, the president of the taxi drivers’ union (Fedotaxis) prosecuted for blockage of public service.

* Severino Sharupi, Andrés Tapia and Marlon Vargas, three indigenous leaders in the Amazon prosecuted for alleged ties to ‘subversive groups’.

* Paola Pabón (prefect of Pichincha), Virgilio Hernández (former assemblyman from Pichincha and a leading thinker of the Citizen Revolution) and Christian González, all three important leaders of Correísmo in Pichincha and prosecuted for ‘rebellion’ in a case of an alleged attempt to overthrow the Moreno administration in October 2019 that led them to be jailed for about two months. Pabón remains prosecuted in a totally unrelated case of overpriced procurement of medical devices.

* Former Correísta assemblyman from Sucumbíos Yofre Poma and Lago Agrio councilor Víctor Hugo Burbano who had been sentenced in November 2019 to four years in jail for blockage of public service for having participated in October 2019 in the occupation of the SOTE facilities in Lago Agrio that led to the temporary suspension of oil production (quite similar to the 2007 Dayuma case for which Guadalupe Llori was arrested by the Correa government). The prefect of Sucumbíos, Amado Chávez (elected in 2019 as the candidate of center-right SUMA but now a supporter of Correa) has previously also been sentenced in the case but benefited from a sentence adjustment).

* Posthumously amnestied was Víctor Guaillas, a water activist from Molleturo (Azuay) who had been arrested in October 2019 for sabotage and sentenced to five years in jail. He has been murdered in last November during the prison riots in the Guayaquil’s Littoral Penitentiary.

Other pardoned persons are:

* Inhabitants of the Merced de Buenos Aires parish (Imbabura province) sued for ‘unlawful association’ after a complaint from Hanrine Ecuadorian Exploration & Mining for opposing mining activities in an area that had been previously left devastated by illegal mining involving criminal organizations like FARC dissidents, to the dismay of the local population. According to Hanrine, anti-mining activists are actually involved in illegal mining. Similar accusations have been raised by a CREO assemblywoman against Mario Ruiz, the sponsor of the amnesty motion and himself an assemblyman from Imbabura, that Ruiz dismissed as a smear campaign on behalf of Hanrine, which would not been incredible considering the passive of mining companies in Imbabura (like sending death threats to anti-mining activists).

* Inhabitants of Gualel parish (Loja province) prosecuted for their participation in a 2020 road blockade to prevent vehicles belonging to a mining company from entering the parish (previously declared ‘free from metallic mining’); a pick-up was then set on fire by protesters.

* Members of the indigenous commune of La Toglla (rural Quito) prosecuted for land usurpation after a complaint lodged by those who considered themselves as the legitimate owners of the lands the residents are living on and are seeing as an inalienable and indivisible ancestral community territory that obtained legal recognition in 1923.

* Ecologist activist brothers Javier and Víctor Hugo Ramírez who are opposing mining in the Íntag Valley (Imbabura) and have been prosecuted by the Correa government for rebellion after a complaint lodged by Empresa Nacional Minera.

* Shuar communities in Morona Santiago accused of intimidation and blockade of public services for having opposed the entry of mining companies employees on their territories.

According to the Constitution, amnesty should be passed by a two-third majority in the National Assembly and can’t covered crimes against the public administration (graft, illicit enrichment, embezzlement, influence peddling and testaferrismo – illegal use of front man or front company) nor genocide, torture, enforced disappearance, abduction and homicide for political reasons or reasons of belief. Apparently, there is no way for the president to veto it while it seems dubious the accusations of abduction against Iza and Vargas can be covered by the amnesty.



From Chile where he went for the inauguration of Gabriel Boric, Lasso expressed his discontent over the amnesty, calling it ‘an injustice’ and expressing his support to the police forces despite human rights organizations having condemned the excessive use of force by the police and the deaths of at least four persons at the hands of the law enforcement officials during the October 2019 protests. A report from Human Rights Ombudsman Freddy Carrión (currently in jail for sexual assault) went as far as concluding that the Ecuadorian police committed ‘crimes against humanity’ in October 2019 and documented some 249 human rights violations committed by law enforcement agencies including the death of six at the hands of the police (labeled as extrajudicial executions), three cases of sexual violence and fourteen cases of physical mutilation (mostly protesters losing eyes). One of the incriminated police officials, Gen. Víctor Araus has since saw his visa revoked by the US government over suspicion of ties with organized crimes. Ironically, one of the authors of the report is Juan Carlos Solines, Lasso’s running-mate in the 2013 presidential election.

Relatedly, just two days before the vote of the amnesty, the Ecuadorian police was criticized for its disproportionate response to a feminist march on Women’s Day when demonstrators and a journalist for Wambra Radio were tear-gassed.

María Paula Romo, the interior minister at the time of the protests (currently living in the United States), criticized the amnesty, stating that ‘those who weren’t able to raise their voices have betrayed Quito and abandoned the police which did its job’. Romo was impeached in November 2020, precisely because of the brutality of the police during the 2019 protests and its use of expired teargas bombs, a removal voted by the Correístas, the PSC and CREO. Note that Romo, ironically, broke with Correa in the early 2010s because of the authoritarianism of the then-president and her party, Ruptura 25, when in opposition, advocated anti-authoritarian, feminist, pro-drug legalization and pro-LGBT stances it immediately abandonned when entering the government of Moreno.

Lenín Moreno, currently the OAS commissioner for disabled affairs, working in Asunción, Paraguay (who has no intention to return Ecuador where he would face justice in the INA Papers corruption case) also posted on Twitter that : ‘those who attacked democracy in October 2019 and intended staging a coup in the middle of protests, sequestrations, destruction of historic cities and acts of vandalism, have been today absolved by 99 votes in the National Assembly as if nothing had happened’.

Meanwhile, Guadalupe Llori stated that the amnesties ‘will reconcile the country’ (good luck with that) and Fernando Villavicencio (himself politically persecuted under the Correa administration) justified his vote for the amnesty by mentioning than ‘more than 80% of its beneficiaries are humble persons persecuted by the governments of Correa and Moreno’ and he didn’t do it for ‘Pabón, Hernández or Iza’.

The amnesty was also strongly criticized by the PSC and its honorary president, Jaime Nebot (who in October 2019 suggested indigenous protesters ‘to remain in the páramo’, a statement widely deemed as racist but faithful to the traditional disdain of Guayaquil elite for the indigenous peasants of the highlands) denounced a ‘pact’ between Pachakutik and the government with Esteban Torres hinting the amnesty was passed in exchange of Llori not being removed from office.

The aforementioned coordinator of Pachakutik and supporter of Llori, Marlon Santi, has since publicly acknowledged the existence of an agreement with the UNES to get the amnesty passed.

Back in October 2019, the CONAIE didn’t minced its words when Correa tried to use the protests as a pretext to get Moreno, the man he himself placed at the helm of Ecuador, removed from office.

https://twitter.com/CONAIE_Ecuador/status/1182744310200057856

Miserable Correa!

We reject shameless opportunism, Correísmo criminalized us and murdered our comrades for ten years, today it intends taking advantage of our platform of struggle. We don’t forget José Tendetza, Bosco Wisuma, Fredy Taish assassinated by their state apparatus.

The PSC (re)gaining a seat in the National Assembly

Right-wing independent assemblyman from Guayas César Rohón abruptly announced his resignation from his parliamentary seat during debates on the Law for Investments. He justified his decision by pointing out the inability of the parliament to pass laws relevant for Ecuadorians and stated ‘it is better to close this assembly’ hinting the muerte cruzada should be triggered. He later clarified such measure would be useless if no reforms were passed during the six months the president could pass decrees without being bothered by a parliament. He also indicated that ‘unicameralism isn’t working since forty years’ and expressed his support for bicameralism, the silver bullet now propelled by some right-wing sectors to solve the chronic problem of legislative inefficiency and stalemate. Ecuador had an upper house between 1837 and 1970 and... uh... this was exactly the same mess than now, at least for the 1945-70 period when elections became competitive and relatively free and fair. There is a reason why nobody in Ecuadorian politics is currently claiming the legacy of Velasco Ibarra, a five-time president between 1934 and 1972, nor none of the presidents of that era bar Galo Plaza Lasso (who was president at the height of the banana boom which certainly helped him not being a failure).

Rohón was elected as an assemblyman for the PSC but seated as an independent after he opposed the stillborn agreement between the PSC, the UNES and CREO to get Henry Kronfle elected president of the National Assembly, only ten months ago. His seat is returning to the PSC as his alternate, Elina Narváez Mendieta, still a member of the right-wing party, is becoming a full assemblywoman. She is the sister of Dalton Narváez Mendieta, since 2019 the PSC mayor of Durán, a low-income fast-growing suburb of Guayaquil which is suffering from lack of basic public services and street gangs violence. Dalton Narváez had already been the mayor of Durán between 2008 and 2013, succeeding to his own mother, Mariana Mendieta, firstly elected in 2000 and forced to resign when sued for embezzlement and smuggling of migrants (she was later absolved). An investigation of Plan V from last month indicated that despite some $47 million having been spent to solve the matter, the vast majority of the population of Durán (70%) still has no running water connection nor (80%) access to sewage in stark contrast with the so-called ‘path to prosperity’ Jaime Nebot desperately tried to sell to voters last year.

[Sir John Johns]

https://twitter.com/LassoGuillermo/status/1503884862318592002

Unsurprisingly, President Guillermo Lasso partly vetoed on last 15 March the bill establishing the legal framework for abortion in case of rape. Why he is pretending his veto is aiming at an absolute concordance with the ruling of the Constitutional Court, his observations issued to amend the bill are seeking to make abortion in practice almost impossible in blatant disregard of previous promises to respect the decision made by the Constitutional Court.

The main observations of Lasso in regard of the text include:

- a reduction of the time limit for having an abortion for teenagers and rural and indigenous women from 18 to 12 weeks to match the time limit for urban women on the pretext of guaranteeing the ‘equality before the law’.

- a change on the title of the law itself, from ‘Organic Law Guaranteeing Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy for Children, Teenagers and Women in Case of Rape’ to ‘Organic Law Regulating Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy for Children, Teenagers and Women in Case of Rape’ and the suppression of a reference to a right to abortion in case of rape. According to the president of Ecuador, there is no right to abortion only an exemption of penalty under certain circumstances and that, as the penal code still punishes abortion, abortion couldn’t be at the same time ‘a crime and right’. Such interpretation is disputed by a constitutionalist expert interviewed by GK.

- the inclusion of requirement to have access to abortion when the original bill specifies that ‘under no circumstances will be required any complaint, examination or prior declaration’ including at least one of the three following: 1/ the filling of a complaint for rape; 2/ the signature of an affidavit by the victim of the rape or her legal representative in case she is minor; 3/ an examination carried out by the treating physician certifying under oath that there are ‘serious indications’ the applicant ‘has been the victim of a rape’.

Additionally, the president is demanding the National Assembly the inclusion in the amended bill of articles ‘guaranteeing all health professionals the enforcement’ of the constitutional principle of conscientious objection, read as a demand to extend it to collective and institutional organizations like private hospitals (public hospitals are expressly excluded from right to conscientious objection in the observations sent by the president).

The observations the president sent to the National Assembly and which would be accepted or rejected by legislators in a delay of thirty days have been criticized for being based on Lasso’s personal and religious beliefs and not on human rights or medical grounds (Lasso is a member of the Opus Dei) and for deliberately ignoring the reality faced by raped girls and women: difficulties to get access to health services in rural areas; rapes against minors mostly taking place in the family environment with the paradox that the rapist of a girl could also be his legal representative required to sign the affidavit (there has been a recent awful case of fifteen girls aged from 10 to 17 sexually abused by relatives – fathers or brothers –, sometimes for years, in the rural canton of Puerto Quito); the slowness if not the corruption of police and justice system especially when the rapist is a notable; the price demanded for the redaction of an affidavit ($40; 10% of a monthly basic salary) unavailable for the average Ecuadorian woman.

Today, Lasso further angered feminist organizations when after having explained he ‘will always be on the side of the police’ and defended the action of the police during the 8 March feminist marches, he clarified his position on abortion by stating that: ‘The possibility exists a raped woman can have access to a medical examination five days after the rape happened, and she can already know if a pregnancy is occurring or not, therefore the twelve weeks are really an excessive time limit’. Which led María Sol Borja, the chief editor of GK, to denounce 'the president who suspects women':

With such words, Lasso not only shows a deep ignorance about the reality of this country in which fourteen girls and teenagers give birth every day, but he also revels the outlook he has on women.

His outlooks stems from suspicion: what a woman says or does always has to be scrutinized in detail because she is probably lying. She is lying to obtain what she wants, she is lying to abort without consequences, she is lying to receive treatment in a hospital, she is lying to evade parental supervision, she is lying just because.

Not only he doesn’t know, it seems that he isn’t interested into knowing. As he isn’t interested in a macho society to leave his little bubble of privileges to understand how is real life.

This real life in which raped girls and women not only have to face the crime experienced by their bodies, but also a State that doubts them, endorsed by the voice of a president who believes that a rape victim picks a stopwatch and starts running: ‘Get up, clean the blood, run to a medical center, don’t cry, open your legs, let them examine you, don’t cry, answer the questions, wait a few days, buy the pregnancy test – with what money -, decide to abort, stop crying, run to the notary, tell him what happened to you, withstand his reproachful look, pay him – with what money -, go to the medical center, say you want to abort, withstand more looks and more judgments, if they are conscientious objectors seek another medical center, move to another city – with what money -, seek another doctor, withstand more looks and more reproaches, oh if you are a minor, run away from home – how –, seek money to pay the affidavit – from where –, see who represents you, don’t cry, abort, bear your guilt, for letting yourself been raped, for aborting, for being bad’. This, in twelve weeks.

The obligation of the president is to ensure the well-being of all. That includes women. That includes abiding by rules that not necessarily goes hand in hand with the personal beliefs of whoever is sitting in the Carondelet Palace. It is also an obligation for who governs to guarantee, beyond rhetoric, that rights aren’t destroyed with the stroke of a pen no matter how many powers the hyper-presidentialist Constitution enables.

https://twitter.com/vilmavargasva/status/1504490909337100295

In the name of my position as a father, son and husband of María de Lourdes*, amen.

* María de Lourdes Alcívar, the very devout wife of President Lasso, who has at various occasions expressed her strong opposition to abortion, even in case of rape, comparing it to murder.

[Sir John Johns]

The second week of March hasn’t been really great for former president (1996-97) Abdalá Bucaram.


On 7 March, the Electoral Dispute Tribunal (TSE) officially pronounced the extinction of Abdalá’s party, Fuerza Ecuador, for not meeting requirements in term of electoral support. The last recourse to save the party was rejected by the TSE on the grounds that the person who filed the recourse wasn’t the legal representative of the party which seems pretty indicative about how there is nobody left in the Bucaram family organization, a mere shadow of the Ecuadorian Roldosist Party that, in the 1980s/1990s, had a strong following in the coastal provinces and was able to sent his presidential candidate to the runoff on three occasions (1988 and 1996 with Abdalá; 1998 with Álvaro Noboa who subsequently left to start his own party).


Two days thereafter, The US Department of State has announced his public designation under section 7031(c) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act for involvement in significant corruption. Consequently, he is barred from entering the US territory (which is quite bad for him because he usually undergo heart surgery in a hospital of Houston and has to return there in next September to change his pacemaker). His wife and his three sons, Jacobo (head of the customs in his father’s administration), Abdalá ‘Dalo’ (former soccer player turned politician who ran for president in 2017) and Michel (investigated with his two brothers and his father in a case of traffic of medical devices) are also concerned by the measure.

STATEMENT BY NED PRICE, SPOKESPERSON

March 9, 2022
Designation of Former Ecuadorian President Bucaram for Involvement in Significant Corruption

The United States is designating former Ecuadorian President Abdalá Jaime Bucaram Ortiz, Sr. due to his involvement in significant corruption, including misappropriation of public funds, accepting bribes, and interfering with public processes. During his tenure as the president of Ecuador, Bucaram engaged in multiple corrupt acts, including accepting bribes and stealing public funds. Former President Bucaram has not yet faced accountability for his betrayal of the public trust.

This public designation is made under Section 7031(c) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2021, as carried forward by the Continued Appropriations Act, 2022. Under this authority, designated officials of foreign governments involved in significant corruption and their immediate family members are ineligible for entry into the United States. The Department is also designating Bucaram’s spouse, María Rosa Pulley Vergara, and sons Jacobo Abdalá Bucaram Pulley, Abdalá Jaime Bucaram Pulley, and Michel Abdalá Bucaram Pulley.

People on Twitter are joking about how it only took 25 years for the US Department of State to realize the Bucaram administration was massively corrupt... but actually back in late January 1997 the then-US ambassador in Quito already publicly denounced the ‘reputation of pervasive corruption’ Ecuador was earning under Bucaram and warned about rigged privatization processes that could cause a financial prejudice worth about $1 billion to the Ecuadorian state. Shortly thereafter, Bucaram was removed by the Congress after only six months in office on the ground of ‘mental incapacity’ in the wake of massive protests supported by the unions, the indigenous organizations, the business community, the ID, the PSC and nationalist segments of the military (Abdalá did a tremendous job alienating all these people in such a short time). Bucaram’s designation has surely however more to do with some of his more recent ‘feats’ like the traffic of medical supplies he is accused of having been a member (and maybe other non yet disclosed criminal businesses the US justice is aware of).


Speaking of what, a Peruvian citizen seek by Interpol has been arrested by Peruvian authorities in Lima on 10 March, the day after the State Department has made public the designation of Bucaram. The Ecuadorian justice has requested her extradition as she is accused of having been a member of the aforementioned medical supplies illegal procurement and sale scheme. She would be a key witness in the trial against the former president and could sent him, finally, in jail.


So, looks like this is the final chapter of Abdalá Bucaram’s long and more than often surreal political career that started in 1979 when appointed by his brother-in-law, President Jaime Roldós, the police intendent of Guayaquil at only 28. And the definitive disappearance of the Concentration of Popular Forces (CFP)'s last metastasis successor.


Also, the vote on the investment law is planned for today and, reportedly, not only the government hasn't the votes to get this landmark bill passed (only the BAN and the PSC are supporting it), but the combined UNES-ID-Pachakutik benches (which have all three publicly expressed their opposition to the bill) have theoretically the numbers to kill and bury it (providing no defections happen, a last-minute deal with the ID and the moderate faction of Pachakutik or a surprise absention on the vote to reject it).

[Sir John Johns]

And the National Assembly has rejected yesterday the Investment Law, then voted to shelve it, hence preventing its entry into force by the operation of law.

The draft bill was intended to favor private investment and included a very controversial section on public-private partnerships that have decried by both Pachakutik and the UNES as paving the way for ‘on-demand privatizations’ including in strategic sectors (like oil extraction but also water, a very explosive topic for the indigenous movement that precisely jumped into electoral politics in the early 1990s to oppose a referendum on water privatization that was ultimately rejected by voters). It was motioned by independent assemblyman Daniel Noboa, also the son of banana magnate/part-time politician Álvaro Noboa and the nephew of Isabel Noboa, the CEO of Consorcio Nobia, one of the largest private conglomerate in Ecuador; Isabel also used to be the wife of Isidro Romero, a millionaire businessman, a former president of Guayaquil’s main soccer club and a candidate for president last year, a good illustration of the mixing of politics with big business. The original text was slightly amended in an attempt to please hesitating legislators but not enough to please Pachakutik that was demanding the complete withdrawal of the section on public-private partnerships.

In a first vote, the National Assembly massively voted against the bill sponsored by Noboa which was defeated with 89 votes against (UNES, Pachakutik, the ID and one independent), 46 for (BAN, PSC and two independents) and one abstention.

Noboa requested and obtained additional time to modify the bill but, after more than four hours, he failed to reappear and Pachakutik assemblyman Darwin Pereira introduced a motion to shelve the law. That motion was approved with 87 votes, far more than the 70 requested, with the UNES, Pachakutik (minus an assemblywoman), the ID (minus an assemblywoman) and two independents (including Bruno Segovia) voting in favor. 44 legislators (BAN, PSC, one ID, one Pachakutik and one independent) voted against and three abstained (two ex-ID and one BAN).

This is a major setback for the Lasso that has spend the last weeks trying gathering votes in favor of the bill and expressed publicly the day before his optimism in the passage of the bill.



But the main political news of yesterday hasn’t been the rejection of the investment bill itself but the accusations thrown by President Lasso as his bill was defeated in the legislature.

Just a few hours before the shelving of the bill, Lasso publicly attacked former ID presidential candidate Xavier Hervas and made against him strong, but unsubstantiated, accusations.

https://twitter.com/Primicias/status/1507092286605303809

President Guillermo Lasso insinuated that ‘there are some politicians that the only thing they want to talk about with the president is: take the IRS off me.’ Afterward, he said he was referring to Xavier Hervas, the leader of the Democratic Left.

Lasso added, about Hervas, ‘see how much he pays in taxes and he says he is an entrepreneur, and I don’t believe that. Either he is an entrepreneur, either he evades taxes’ while also denouncing the fact that ‘It is deplorable to find here certain politicians who are only living their personal reality and have a political party at their service, for enabling them not paying their taxes’ and pretended that ‘they condition their votes in favor of a law generating employment, insofar as the IRS doesn’t recover their, and only their, taxes. From the man whose name is appearing in the Pandora Papers, that’s rich...

Hervas reacted at such accusations by denying any blackmail in exchange of the ID votes, by declaring that the president ‘lied to the country’ and specified that the president not having the power to write off taxes and he, Hervas, being neither an assemblyman nor a member of the ID party leadership, the reality of such blackmail is impossible. He then indicated it is Lasso who blackmailed legislators with the threat of a muerte cruzada and challenged the president to prove his accusations, announcing he is considering legal actions against the head of state for libel.

Once the shelving of his bill had been voted, Lasso double-down by posting a video in which he is calling assemblymen ‘thieves and corrupts’ and claimed the law has been rejected because his government ‘hasn’t accepted the blackmail of assemblymen who came demanding hospitals, electric companies, ministries in exchange of their votes. No additional names than the one of Hervas have been specifically mentioned by the president who has so far not provided a single evidence to support his accusations.


The violent attacks against the opposition, and especially against Hervas whose voting base (urban middle class and small mestizo farmers in the highlands) partly overlaps the one of Lasso, has fueled speculation on the imminent triggering of the muerte cruzada, a move publicly requested in recent hours by both Fernando Villavicencio and Daniel Noboa.

https://twitter.com/VillaFernando_/status/1507169879031492610?cxt=HHwWhMC5_aDBxe...

URGENT| It is time for the people to legislate and audit in the polls. In the face of a blackmailing, corrupt and ineffective majority in the Assembly, it is time for citizens to decide. #Muerte cruzada and #Popular Referendum Now.

https://twitter.com/DanielNoboaOk/status/1507125653338005508?cxt=HHwWiIC58f2yseo...

[Sir John Johns]

This weekend, Guillermo Lasso blew up the last remaining bridges with the ID and Pachakutik by publicly denouncing and starting legal proceedings against politicians he accuses of negotiating support for his investment bill in exchange of financial favors.

The president formally requested before the Internal Revenue Service the opening of an investigation on Xavier Hervas’ fiscal situation. In the letter he sent to the IRS, Lasso mentioned that he met with Hervas on 22 March in the factory the former ID presidential candidate and businessman in broccoli production and export owns in Cotopaxi to discuss the investment bill. During the meeting, the question of a tax inspection on his revenue was arise by Hervas that, according to Lasso, the ID politician intended to include in a political bargaining. Among the points to be investigated by the IRS are a possible revenue tax evasion and anomalies in the sum paid by Hervas in respect of the overseas remittance tax.

https://twitter.com/LassoGuillermo/status/1507869181139689474

He also disclosed the names of five Pachakutik legislators, all belonging to the moderate faction of the indigenous party, who allegedly negotiated a support for the investment bill in exchange of economical benefits during a meeting with advisers of the Presidency, and requested the opening of a judicial investigation on the matter.

The mentioned legislators are the following:

* Rosa Cerda, an assemblywoman from Napo already at the center of a controversy in last July after the leaking of an audio in which she was heard saying in a Pachakutik local meeting: ‘if you steal, steal well, justify well, don’t let see things been seen’.

* Cristián Yucailla, an assemblyman from Tungurahua and member of the Economic Development Commission who participated in the elaboration of the investment bill but didn’t approved the final draft because of the inclusion on a section on private-public partnerships.

* Edgar Quezada, an assemblyman from Sucumbíos who, back in November, claimed that the legislative report on the Pandora Papers high critical of Lasso had been altered by the Pachakutik-UNES majority in the commission for constitutional guarantees.

* Celestino Chumpi, an assemblyman from Morona Santiago and president of the commission of autonomous governments.

* Gisella Molina, an assemblywoman from Cotopaxi, and the lonely Pachakutik legislator who voted against the shelving of the investment bill.



All of this against a backdrop of various corruption allegations made by the pro-Lasso legislators against opposition assemblymen: an UNES assemblywoman is currently investigated by the CAL after a complaint made by a BAN legislator over her alleged intervention in the payment made by a hospital of Machala to a private health devices provider; public accusations of conflicts of interest made against an UNES legislator by a BAN assemblyman over the former’s intervention in the shelving on a bill regulation the activities of interest groups while being also himself the director of a lobbying firm; Fernando Villavicencio has recently accused Fausto Jarrín, a leading UNES legislator and the lawyer of Rafael Correa, to have received $650.000 in the bizarre acquisition of the Casa Coloma historical mansion in Quito he immediately proceeded to, apparently illegally, demolish; and the accusation of involvement in illegal mining made against Pachakutik legislator Mario Ruiz I have already mentioned.

Incidentally or not, Expreso also published yesterday an investigation on the businesses of Joaquín Villamar, the husband of Cynthia Viteri until their divorce in 2021. Villamar notably acquired in May 2020 some 80 lots in Guayaquil’s expansion zone where a residential area is planned to be built, not far away from the planned new airport of the city. The purchase was made just four days after Mayor Viteri had approved the construction of buildings in that area and two days after the municipality had allowed there the construction of private homes and stores. According to Expresso, the lots owned by Villamar may be worth up to $9 million. Five months later, Villamar also acquired a 159.6-hectare plot in Chongón, also in the expansion zone of Guayaquil, the same day than the municipality issued an ordinance enabling the subdivision of the area comprising the large plot into smaller lots.



On March 23, Primicias, not the outlet the most hostile to the current president, published an article titled ‘President Lasso burnt more bridges than he built’ and listing the various sectors the president, who won the 2021 runoff on the promise of a ‘government of the encounter’ (gobierno del encuentro) by contrast with the authoritarianism and disdain toward civil society adopted by Correa when president, has since antagonized: not only the indigenous organizations, the unions or the feminist groups (environmentalist organizations have been omitted, still they have also many reasons to be angry with the government) but also ‘natural’ allies like the PSC (pissed up by the last-minute ‘treason’ that gave the presidency of the National Assembly to Pachakutik), the rice-growing sector, the business community (unhappy with the increase in taxation and the rise of minimum wages), the banana-growing sector (that Lasso managed to irritate with insensitive comments he made on 4 March when banana exporters were requesting the help of the state for shipment problems due to the war in Ukraine: ‘Do not tell me to cry for the rich because their profits have decreased due to war in Ukraine, this is their problem... that they adjust, that they understand this is the risk of doing business and if the war is hitting them, let’s see how they absorb the hit, but the money of the people is for the people) and even the pro-life groups that wanted a complete and not a partial veto of the law on abortion in case of rape. And so now, you can add the ID and the moderate faction of Pachakutik to the groups the president has alienated.

[Sir John Johns]

Towards a mega-referendum

On last 29 March, President Lasso announced he will rule by executive decrees and by-laws, will no longer lost time sending bills to the National Assembly and will governing ‘without considering the National Assembly is existing. As he is constrained by the Constitution, he has however no much leeway to get his agenda passed bar the triggering of muerte cruzada (he has explicitly discarded, at least for now) or the summoning of a consulta popular (‘popular consultation’ when simple bills are put to vote) and/or constitutional referendum (specifically referred to when it is constitutional amendments that are put to vote) to get specific bills or constitutional amendments approved by voters. This is the path Lasso is intending to follow in the next weeks with his government currently working on the elaboration of a dozen of questions to be put to vote including notably the investment bill and the abolition of the CPCCS.

Such mechanism isn’t new in Ecuador and mega-referendums have already being summoned in 1994 (seven questions), in 1995 (eleven questions), in 1997 (fourteen questions), in 2006 (three questions), in 2011 (ten questions) and in 2018 (seven questions) in additions of four one-question referendums (1986, 2007, 2008 and 2017). The ‘tradition’ of referendums with numerous questions had been initiated in 1994 by President Durán-Ballén as a way to bypass a hostile legislature then at the hands of a PSC-PRE alliance and where his party had been reduced to only two seats after disastrous mid-term elections. After having scored then an electoral victory, Durán-Ballén summoned a second referendum with many questions the following year that was however defeated and immediately turned him into a lame duck president. The only other time a government had been defeated in a referendum was in 1986 when Febres-Cordero put to vote a constitutional amendment enabling independents to run for legislative offices, a proposal that was defeated in a landslide (69.5% of ‘no’).

Ministerial reshuffle: Vela out and replaced by a former undersecretary under Correa

The same day, the presidential spokesman, Carlos Jijón, who held this office since its creation on last December, announced his resignation. No replacement has been appointed since, so I assume the position has been abolished in spite of recurring criticisms on the government’s poor communication.

More importantly, the day thereafter (29 March), Alexandra Vela, the ministra de gobierno (minister of government, some sort of super-interior minister/prime minister) also resigned, alleging disagreement with the president on the way to solve the political crisis:

https://twitter.com/AlexandraVelaP/status/1508984533256974339

For not agreeing with the political line defined by President Lasso to face the crisis aggravated by the National Assembly, I submitted my resignation.

Preserving democracy in order to transform the country requires applying the mechanism of muerte cruzada

Her position has been also undermined these last months by rising criminality, expansion of drug cartels activities, an inability to solve the prisons issue (twenty prisoners have been murdered during a riot in a prison of Cuenca last night) as well as discontent among CREO ranks over the fact that the main political operative of the country isn’t a member of the ruling party.
She has been replaced as minister of government by Francisco Jiménez, until then a CREO provincial assemblyman for Guayas (elected last year). This is actually not the first time Jiménez is holding a ministerial job as, between 2008 and 2009, he successively served as an undersecretary of government and a governor (presidential representative) of Guayas in the administration of Rafael Correa. He unsuccessfully tried to be elected an assemblyman in 2013 for Ruptura 25, the ‘new left’ movement led by María Paula Romo (later the minister of government under Moreno in charge of cracking down the indigenous protests of 2019) that had by then broke with Correa over his authoritarianism. Jiménez later joined CREO in 2014 and was the party’s candidate for mayor of Guayaquil in the last local elections, in 2019, placing then third and garnering only 2.9% of the votes far far far away from the two most voted candidates, Cynthia Viteri (52.6%) and Jimmy Jairala (31.8%).

The appointment of Jiménez was welcomed by an UNES legislator as ‘a good news’. Jiménez had been in the middle of a controversy in April 2021 when he apparently hinted during an interview the possibility for the government to pardon Correísta leaders prosecuted for corruption, a proposal he shortly thereafter rebut by explaining their declarations had been misinterpreted.

Meanwhile, the appointment of Patricio Carrillo as interior minister has been strongly criticized by the CONAIE. The Interior Ministry, in charge of policing and internal security, has been reconstituted four years after it had been merged with the Government Ministry. A former police general, Carrillo was in charge of the policing operations during the 2019 protests and has recently expressed his strong disapproval of the amnesties voted by the National Assembly.

Pachakutik and the government trading accusations of corruption

On 28 March, Salvador Quishpe accused an undersecretary in the Ministry of Government of ‘setting political traps and buying assemblymen’. According to Quishpe, the undersecretary for intergovernmental articulation he labeled as ‘the man with the briefcase’ (in reference to a 2008 scandal of vote-buying among constituent assemblymen on behalf of former president Lucio Gutiérrez; itself probably also a reference to the Man in a Suitcase series of the 1960s) had called two Pachakutik assemblymen for a meeting in the house of an official of the ministry and offered them public contracts from the technical secretariat for Amazon.

One of the five Pachakutik legislators accused of corruption by President Lasso, Édgar Quezada confirmed the existence of a meeting with the undersecretary and, while denying money had been offered, stated that public contracts were indeed proposed to the Pachakutik legislators who, according to Quezada, refused them. He also stated that the meeting was about the needs of the assemblymen’s provinces and not about the vote of the investment bill.

On 31 March, the Attorney General’s Office confirmed an ongoing investigation over allegations of sale of public offices in the Ministry of Agriculture. Few hours before, the La Posta website has posted videos showing a man presenting himself as an adviser of Pachakutik assemblyman Celestino Chumpi and negotiating with two other men the purchase of the office of vice minister for Agriculture for $2.5 million, notably via a phone call to a fourth man identified as ‘an economist’. Chumpi has denied any wrongdoing and claimed that the man appearing in the video has never been his adviser while the minister for agriculture has announced the filing of a complaint before the Attorney General’s Office.

This is adding to the already mentioned IRS investigation on Hervas’s fiscal situation and a new one, ordered by Lasso, on Cynthia Viteri’s former husband.

The CONAIE and Pachakutik on the verge of rupture as six legislators had been expelled from the party

On 1 April, the Pachakutik leadership announced the expulsion from its ranks of the six legislators who have voted in favor of the opening of an evaluation process of the CAL and the president of the National Assembly, Guadalupe Llori. Consequently, the number of Pachakutik legislators has fallen to 19 (down from 27 in the immediate aftermath of the election) and the indigenous party is losing a seat in the CAL as well as the presidency of the commission for Economic and Fiscal Framework and the one of the commission for Constitutional Guarantees, Human Rights, Collective Rights and Interculturality.

https://twitter.com/PKnacional18/status/1510007509221785609

The CONAIE has reacted by giving its support to the six expelled assemblymen, by deploring the ‘ideological and political crisis’ faced by the indigenous movement and by strongly criticizing the national coordinator of Pachakutik (Marlon Santi) and the parliamentary leader (Rafael Lucero) of the party (it warned they should not believe being the ‘owners’ of the indigenous movement) and Guadalupe Llori (it basically accuses her, Santi and Lucero of having used the indigenous organizations and its historical fights for their own benefits and to make a pact with the Lasso administration).

https://twitter.com/CONAIE_Ecuador/status/1510119240686260227

The indigenous confederation is also demanding actions in regard with the five assemblymen accused of corruption, including the swearing-in of their alternates as full assemblymen to enable the accused legislators to dedicate their times defending themselves, and is urging the summoning of an emergency broadened council involving basis organizations.

Alejandro Jaramillo expelled from the ID

Just the day before, the ID had announced the expulsion of Alejandro Jaramillo from its ranks.

https://twitter.com/ID12Ecuador/status/1509540130792644614

According to the ID Ethics Council, not only Jaramillo made declarations in medias and on social networks ‘casting doubts on the historical repute’ of the party by criticizing the new president of the ID but ‘it has been found [he] was taking actions aiming at the constitution of a new legislative block’. Jaramillo, who is still the president of the justice commission in the National Assembly, used to be the parliamentary leader of the ID until just four months ago...

[Sir John Johns]

Sorry for the lag in the updates. Really a lot of things happened in the last five weeks but personal issues and the time I spent discussing French politics have restrained me continuing writing on Ecuadorian politics.

Also, to be honest, the ongoing political situation there is absolutely horrendous and disheartening with things going really dirty and with no sign of improvement in sight. Ecuador is heading for failed state status at great speed and the political class as a whole isn’t up to the situation.



Before elaborating, here a summary of what has happened (not a very pretty picture) since early April.

* The UNES-PSC ad hoc alliance has finally managed to gather a majority in the National Assembly to set up the commission to investigate alleged breaches of duty (accusation of influence peddling in the appointment to public offices) committed by Guadalupe Llori, hence opening the way to a removal of this later from the presidency of the legislature and a redistribution of posts in the Administration Council of the Legislature (CAL). However, Llori has showed her willingness to keep her post at all costs and by any means, including by going to the courts and doing dirty parliamentary maneuvers (one leading to the entry into force of the abortion law as amended by President Lasso).



* The disintegration of the parliamentary caucuses is continuing with Pachakutik having lost yet another legislator and having changed its legislative leader while the ruling BAN had saw the departure of Virgilio Saquicela, the first vice-president of the National Assembly, who is plotting to remove Llori to get her job.

It is however the ID that is experiencing the most intense internal divisions as five assemblymen had been expelled from the self-described social-democratic caucus since last March and as there is an ongoing struggle for the post of president of the party as the dissident faction has elected a challenger to the ‘legit’ president, Guillermo Herrera, an ally of Xavier Hervas. The direct consequence is that the ID has no longer the required number of legislators to reclaim the status of parliamentary group while such feuds aren’t very helpful ten months before the local elections.

This is the list of assemblymen who have changed parties or crossed the floor in just ONE year. The legislature is supposed to last another three years...





* The Lasso administration has faced its first major scandal in early April over the revelation on a former military officer ('Don Naza') behind a Ponzi scheme having been able to enter the facilities of the Defense Ministry not less than three times in spite of being seek by the justice. The scammer (who shortly thereafter was found murdered in the Quito countryside) was able to evade an arrest inside the Defense Ministry where he was apparently doing some financial transaction rising questions about the extent of the complicity inside the army and the military hierarchy.



* A massive uproar was caused on 10 April when a random judge granted a habeas corpus to former vice president Jorge Glas, the political heir of Correa sentenced for corruption in three cases, enabling Glas to leave prison and go into house arrest. The Lasso administration, which has appealed the decision, has however struggled to dispel accusations over a shady deal made with the Correístas in exchange of abstention of the UNES caucus on the president’s controversial tax bill.



* In the following days, unquestionable and indefensible criminals (notably a leader of the Los Choneros gang) obtained house arrest or transfer to another prison by requesting habeas corpus the same way than Glas and by arguing of the danger for their lives posed by their incarceration.

Such judicial decisions contributed to fuel violence between gangs and is undermining Lasso’s posture as a champion of the fight against criminality, a major problem the recent imposition of a state emergency and local curfews in three coastal provinces has been insufficient to curb as exemplified by a series of murders of which the most prominent has been a lawyer with political connections killed by a hit man in front of a luxury hotel of Guayaquil.

Similarly, the government has been unable/unwilling to prevent yet another massacre in a prison, blamed on the judicial decision made to transfer there a gang leader.



* The former comptroller-general during the whole Correa presidency, Carlos Pólit, has been arrested in Florida for money laundering and appears ready to cooperate with the US Justice Department, rising expectations among opponents to Correísmo about devastating revelations on the systemic corruption under Correa in the public works and oil sectors, two areas handled by the recently freed Glas.

Maybe there will be some explanation on the exact role played by this one (and by Correa?) over the 2010 decision of the comptroller-general’s office to remove the penalties (glosas) inflicted on Odebrecht, a decision which enabled the Brazilian company to resume its activities in Ecuador, just two years after having been expelled from the country in 2008 by an irate Rafael Correa over accusations of defective construction works and corruption practices. It turned out later the company had restarted said practices immediately after its return in Ecuador...

Revelations on the $14 million bail Pólit managed to pay to the Florida justice and on the property assets he and his relatives have acquired in Miami have also created some scandal.



* The successor of Pólit as comptroller-general, the ineffable Pablo Celi, is also awaiting his trial before the Ecuadorian justice for very similar facts (bribery in exchange of the removal of glosas inflicted on indelicate companies with the money being channeled to Florida through offshore companies). The case is this time involving close associates of Lenín Moreno.



* Meanwhile, the Spanish justice is now investigating allegations of bribery in the construction of the still uncompleted Quito Metro, a scandal that would mostly tarnished the former center-right mayor of the capital, Mauricio Rodas, a former political ally of Lasso who is now retired from politics.



* And the latest scandal, the publications of videos of a discussion recorded in 2014 between Glas and the head of the Agency for Regulation and Control of Hydrocarbons. In a first one, the then vice president is requesting the lifting of restrictions on the sale of fuel and explosives in Amazon to help the embattled Alianza PAIS candidates in local elections. Such decision would have encouraged illegal mining and fuel smuggling with Colombia. In a second one, Glas is demanding the official to not request information and accounts from oil companies without his approval and to not put anything in writing because, by Glas's own avowal, this could be used to send Correa into jail.

[Sir John Johns]

Mayhem in the National Assembly

In the National Assembly, the circus over the removal from office of the president, Guadalupe Llori, is still ongoing but after repeated attempts I spare you the details the UNES-PSC alliance (joined by dissidents from the ID and Pachakutik and by various independents) has finally managed to obtain the creation of a commission to investigate alleged ‘breaches of duties’ of Llori, the first step toward a vote to dismiss her.

The fact there has been a majority of 93 votes to approve a change in the parliamentary agenda to examine the creation of the commission (UNES and PSC joined by dissidents from Pachakutik and the ID as well as various independents) and a majority of 81 votes to subsequently approved it tends to indicate there is now an alternative majority in the parliament, able to change the composition of the CAL and redistribute the key positions in the legislature and eager to obstruct the implementation of President Lasso’s agenda.

In addition to the two complaints filed by the UNES against Llori (one for allegations of diezmos with part of the wages paid to four parliamentary public servants being diverted to pay the rent of a luxury car used by Llori; and one for alleged influence peddling in the hiring by the president of the National Assembly as an adviser of the wife of a prosecutor investigating cases involving Llori), assemblyman Bruno Segovia (Somos Aguas, ex-Pachakutik) has filed a third complaint over presumed influence peddling in the appointment of 23 provincial officials in Orellana.

Llori has however used all means to delay the unavoidable, from requesting and obtaining from justice precautionary measures barring the creation of a commission to evaluate her actions to going to the courts to denounce an alleged usurpation of functions committed by fellow members of the CAL and maneuvering to prevent an override of the presidential veto to the comprehensive abortion reform, hence enabling the entering into force of the heavily amended bill sponsored by Lasso that is making abortion in case of rape virtually impossible (causing massive outcry from feminist groups).

The last episode of the judicialization of the parliamentary business has been the opening of an investigation by the attorney-general’s office against the 93 parliamentarians who voted in favor of changing the agenda of the National Assembly to determine if this constitutes a violation of the precautionary measures previously obtained by Llori.

Nevertheless, the commission has been officially seated on 28 April, after a session disrupted by a false bomb alert in the National Assembly building (blamed by some legislators on another yet attempt of Llori to delay her removal from office...), and is chaired by Pedro Zapata (Galápagos – PSC, but once a member of the Alianza PAIS). Other members are Pamela Aguirre (UNES – Imbabura), Peter Calo (ex-PK – Cotopaxi), Lucía Placencia (ID – Loja) and John Vinueza (independent – Chimborazo, but elected in 2021 for the now extinct Ecuadorian Union).


Saquicela expelled from the BAN

In the process, the first vice president of the National Assembly, Virgilio Saquicela (elected under the banner of Democracia Sí, the party of Gustavo Larrea, a former interior minister of Correa previously accused in the late 2000s of ties with the FARC who nevertheless endorsed Lasso in the 2021 runoff after having being a close adviser of Lenín Moreno), has been expelled from the ruling BAN caucus as it has became pretty obvious he is plotting to replace Llori at the helm of the legislature.

Meaning that the pro-government caucus has lost its single vice presidency in the house as well as one of its two seats in the CAL.

The BAN has just filled a complaint against Saquicela over alleged breach of duties to remove him from his office even if there isn’t probably the votes in the National Assembly to oust Saquicela.


Internal crisis in the ID

 The ID is currently imploding with four additional assemblymen having been expelled from the caucus after the expulsion in March of Alejandro Jaramillo, its former parliamentary leader. Among them are Johanna Moreira (like Jaramillo, a legislator very active in the defense of the legalization of abortion in case of rape and a member of a younger generation of politicians) and the aforementioned Lucía Placencia, who was clearly sanctioned for her support to the process to remove Llori.

However, an extraordinary convention of the self-described social-democratic party has been convened by internal opponents to Hervas, resulting in the election of a new president, a move rejected as ‘illegitimate’ by the outgoing president, Guillermo Herrera (currently the prefect of Carchi), while the Twitter account of the party is at the center of a battle between supporters and opponents to Herrera, especially after a statement ordering the reintegration of Jaramillo and Moreira had been posted on it.

As a result, the number of ID legislators has fallen below the 14-seat number required to be recognized as a caucus and to pretend to the attached rights. It also lost one of the two seats it held in the CAL.


Defection and leadership change in the Pachakutik caucus

Meanwhile, after having confirmed the expulsion of the six legislators closely aligned on the positions of Leonidas Iza, Pachakutik has saw the departure of another legislator, the controversial Rosa Cerda from Napo, who had been heavily criticized for her past ‘if you steal, steal well’ comment and has been mentioned as one of the legislators who purportedly negotiated their vote in favor of government-sponsored bill in exchange of favors. Few hours before, Cerda had been sanctioned by the Napo provincial branch of Pachakutik which ruled in favor of the suspensions of her party rights for 180 days as well as called for her replacement by her substitute.

Additionally, the parliamentary leader of the party, Rafael Lucero, was dismissed from his office after he confessed having met in Mexico with former president Rafael Correa in early April to, according Lucero, discussing the creation of the ‘Truth Commission’, a long demand of the UNES, whose purpose would be the investigation of the trials for corruption against Correísta leaders and, presumably, their absolution of all crimes. This came at the wrong time as Pachakutik was then denouncing an alleged unholy pact between the UNES and President Lasso (see below).

The new parliamentary leader of Pachakutik is Salvador Quishpe, a veteran politician (president of the Ecuarunari in 1999-2001, national deputy in 2003-07 and prefect of Zamora Chinchipe in 2009-19) considered as less friendly towards the Lasso administration (he initially appeared among the rebel wing of the caucus).

On 5 May, Quishpe announced the reintegration of the six rebel assemblymen in the Pachakutik caucus with the indigenous party apparently heading towards letting Llori being removed and renouncing to reclaim the presidency of the legislature.


Infighting within the right-wing business circles

Guillermo Lasso has decided it was the best moment to pick fight with Jaime Nebot he publicly insulted on 30 April, saying the former mayor of Guayaquil ‘hadn’t the balls’ to run for president in 2021 and ‘has [now] envy and is jealous, and is spending the whole day plotting: how can I destabilize the Ecuadorian democracy’. Note that had Nebot ran for president, he would have certainly split the right-wing vote and probably prevented Lasso to go to the runoff.

Lasso also publicly accused Fidel Egas, a powerful banker from Quito (owner of Banco Pichincha and of the influential Teleamazonas TV station), of being a tax evader and criticized him for not having contribute to the vaccination effort.

Hence, perpetuating both the historical rivalry between Guayaquil and Quito’s business communities as well as the tedious internal squabbles of the coastal oligarchy. Still, probably not the best moment to alienate what should be his natural allies...


The deficient communication of the Carondelet Palace

Lasso’s attacks on Egas happened just after the banker from Quito (Lasso is, remember, himself from Guayaquil) had tweeted ‘Lasso needs a Rabascall’, a critic on the communication of the president and a reference to Carlos Rabascall, the main interviewer on the public television channel under Correa regularly accused of being heavily biased in favor of the then-president (indeed he ended being Arauz’s running mate in the last election).

Few days before, Carlos Vera, the man holding the position of main political interview on the public television (kind of acting as the de facto spokesman of the government in the same way than Rabascall under Correa) had been notified the cancellation of his television show. A veteran TV journalist, Vera had served as a minister in the administration of President Durán-Ballén and supported Rafael Correa against Álvaro Noboa in the 2006 runoff before turning into a vocal opponent to Correa and unsuccessfully running for parliament in 2013 for the PSC. Vera came under fire in last December when he invited in his program a fortune teller and questioned her about the high-profile violent death case of a model: the cards then ‘revealed’ it wasn’t a suicide but a murder and that the boyfriend of the model isn’t guilty of the crime. Seems however the cards were wrong as the justice is now considering the said boyfriend, a public prosecutor, as the main suspect of what is indeed a murder after a video showing him beating her partner has been leaked on the Internet.

The communication of the presidency remains however a disaster as recently illustrated by the denial issued on 17 May by Iván Duque in reaction to the premature announcement by Lasso and his economy minister of the sale of one of the two presidential planes to the government of Colombia. The Colombian president has clarified that, while there are negotiations ongoing, no plane will be bought by his administration and the acquisition will be decided by his successor in office. Stuff like that makes Lasso looks like an idiot and will not help restore trust in his word...

[Sir John Johns]

Don Naza and the Big Money scandal

The Lasso administration has faced his first major scandal in early April when a former military officer, Miguel Ángel Nazareno aka ‘Don Naza’ was reported having freely entered the Ministry of Defense, supposedly one of the best guarded places in Ecuador, on at least three occasions, apparently by using his real name and identity numbers at checkpoints.

‘Don Naza’ was wanted by the justice for having setting up Quevedo Inversiones Big Money, a ‘financial corporation’ not even appearing in the company register and paying taxes as a washing machines repair business. ‘Big Money’ made aggressive promotion campaigns on social networks and attracted hundreds of Ecuadorians in Quevedo (Los Ríos province) by promising investors a ludicrous 90% interest within only eight days on sums paid. Predictably, Big Money turned out to be a Ponzi scheme.

The raids of the police in last July on the ‘headquarters’ of the ‘financial corporation’ provoked in the city of Quevedo several protests, firstly when deceived investors who still believed in Don Naza’s promises to reimburse them opposed the justice and the police accused to be in cahoots with big banks, secondly when they realized it was a scam and that they would never see their money back. Five persons were killed during an armed confrontation between fooled investors and the guards of Don Naza’s house. Don Naza himself went into hiding, being searched by the justice but not formally charged, posting from time to time videos on social networks to guarantee investors they will be reimbursed. The scammer’s brother was also briefly kidnapped in December 2021 by men demanding Don Naza the payment of a $3 million sum for his liberation.

The success of the scammer has been adroitly built on the wide detestation of the legal bank sector, perceived (to a large extent rightfully) as being at then hand of greedy white-mestizo oligarchs demanding too much guarantees to borrowers. Don Naza exploited such resent by blaming his judicial problems on his powerful competitors unwilling to propose the fabulous interest rates he was himself ready offering to his clientele, made up by small borrowers and people excluded from legit bank system. Don Naza’s personal background - the son of impoverished Afro-Ecuadorian migrants who moved from Esmeraldas to Quevedo and owed his social climbing to his military career – possibly helped making him popular as were the ‘philanthropic activities’ he organized in the poor neighborhoods of Quevedo, possibly preparing the ground for a mayoral bid. Stuff like food and wheelchairs were then distributed to the impoverished inhabitants of Quevedo in the pure tradition of Ecuador’s politics, comparable for example to the 2020 distribution of hydroxychloroquine tablets by Guillermo Lasso’s foundation against Covid-19 or the ritual comings of Álvaro Noboa in slums and poor rural areas at each presidential election to play Santa Claus and distribute a wide range of stuff from fridges and veterinary products to, already, wheelchairs.

During his third intrusion in the ministry, Don Naza avoided being captured by the alerted military police coming to arrest him and left the ministry facilities, leaving behind him the stolen car he and accomplices had used to travel to the ministry as well as several suitcases full of bank notes, a hint he was still doing some sort of shady business, inside the ministry itself, and that he benefited from internal complicity.

This is another confirmation of the rampant corruption inside the military forces, few months after the US Department of State had revoked the passports of several senior officers. The defense minister, Gen. Luis Hernández, indeed acknowledged the existence of a chain of complicities inside the ministry’s facilities, but the non-disclosure of the identities of the six arrested accomplices of the scammer inside the ministry (one officer and five rank and five soldiers) as well as the angry answer Hernández made to a radio journalist asking him whether he had been one day offered to invest into a pyramid scheme (‘I refuse this question’, ‘this is an offending question’ ‘it offends my honor’) made nothing to help restore the trust in the military institution.

Hernández abruptly resigned shortly afterwards. On 10 May, the new defense minister, Luis Lara Jaramillo, made public that 139 servicemen have deposited money in the Big Money scheme, including three officers.

As if things weren’t enough outrageous, Don Naza was found dead few days after his escape from the ministry in a rural parish of Quito canton, murdered by unknown men after having been tied and tortured according to the police report.

Three suspects have since been arrested.



Glas has been granted a habeas corpus

https://twitter.com/vilmavargasva/status/1513345102290337796

Such scandal, which was already pretty big, was nonetheless overshadowed by the controversial habeas corpus granted on health grounds by a judge to Jorge Glas, enabling the former vice president and Correa’s appointed heir to leave the prison on 10 April.

Glas was in jail since 1,645 days after his arrest and subsequent indictment in two corruption cases (bribes received from Odebrecht and the Arroz Verde illegal political financing case) and is still awaiting a final sentencing in a third case, the awarding of the Singue oil field exploitation plagued by alleged favoritism and deliberate undervaluation of the actual value of the concession. Glas is now under house arrest, barred from leaving the country and required to present himself to a court regularly, but isn’t required to wear an electronic tagging device.

The decision has led to an avalanche of critics against the ruling.

Firstly, the medical diagnosis that motivated the habeas corpus has been questioned. According to the four physicians who testified in favor of the former vice president, Glas suffered from psychotic episodes, experienced hallucinations when seeing blood on the walls of the prison and was taking up to fourteen pills a day to cure his psychiatric problems. The physicians concluded that the remaining of the former vice president in jail was posing a high risk of suicide for him. Glas’s health appears however to have spectacularly improved as, when leaving the prison facilities, he was able to deliver a discourse with political overtones before 400 gathered supporters.

Secondly, Glas benefited from a 2021 ruling of the Constitutional Court eliminating the rule of territorial jurisdiction that enabled his liberation from a prison of Latacunga (Cotopaxi province) after the filing of a request for a habeas corpus by a random UNES activist of Manglaralto (Santa Elena province) before a local judge of said small town. Additionally, a report from the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (an organization Correa has previously challenged the legitimacy and the competence when it came to grant precautionary measures to three of his opponents, by the way) on the dire situation in Ecuadorian prisons was also used to support the habeas corpus request. Nevertheless, this is ignoring that the status of Glas invoked to obtain his exit from prison easily apply to thousands of other Ecuadorian inmates. Consequently, Glas became the first person in Ecuador to benefit from a habeas corpus (a disposition supposed to benefit only suspects and people in pretrial detentions) while having been definitively sentenced. As we will see, this led to even more scandalous abuses.

Thirdly, the past career of the judge from Manglaralto as an adviser to an Alianza PAIS legislator in 2016 and as an under-secretary in the justice ministry in the Moreno administration until November 2017 when he resigned at the same time Correa broke with Moreno (i.e. when Glas was sent in pretrial detention to await his sentencing in the Odebrecht corruption case) cast some serious doubts over his impartiality.

Finally, insert here your obligated rant on the justice favoring the wealthiest and the powerful ones over average citizen and the existence in Ecuador of a real two-tier legal system. Well, done by Karol E. Noroña in GK who is mentioning the case of a 75-year-old woman imprisoned in the same jail than Glas, can no longer walking nor eating without assistance but was denied a habeas corpus because ‘the Constitution forbids it’, the case of a brutally withdrawn young drug-addict who has suicidal thoughts and harms himself but has not even access to adequate medical care or the numerous cases of prisoners awaiting a ruling in a habeas corpus request for over three months when the one of Glas was resolved in only twenty hours. And is recalling terrible figures: there are officially at least 965 prisoners in Ecuador suffering from serious illnesses, 353 of whom suffering from chronic diseases and 271 to severe pathology like AIDS or tuberculosis while, out of 37 prisons, only 25 have a general physician and 2 a health mental program. Numbers way understated by the prison administration as the Health Ministry has found in a single prison 650 inmates suffering form chronic illnesses, almost twice the official national total numbers.

Contrast with how Abdalá Bucaram, while indicted in a case of trafficking of medical devises and accused of having order the murder of one of his accomplices, has been still enable to run for electoral office. He is not even any longer under house arrest in spite of having previously fled Ecuador to evade indictment not one, not two, not three, but four times. All of this, while several of his co-defendants have been since murdered in their prison cell...

And let’s not forget the flight of Fernando Alvarado, a former secretary for communication under Correa sued in a corruption case, who managed to leave Ecuador in 2019 he spite of theoretically wearing an electronic tagging device. Alvarado managed to remove it without the justice being able to notice it and the Moreno administration was only aware of his escape after Alvarado himself posted a message on Whatsapp to inform the justice ministry and several journalists he was no longer in Ecuador...

Ecuadorian people actually fighting for prison reform and alternative to imprisonment may be also genuinely displeased with the freeing of Glas as he was a key member of the Correa administration which has its fair share of responsibility in the ongoing prison crisis. See for example, that figure I recently came across:

https://twitter.com/jpolga/status/1459660971337736194

(not specific to Ecuador, though, this has been a general trend in Latin America)



Renewed speculations over a Lasso-Correa pact

The Lasso administration reacted by denying the liberation of Glas is part of some deal with Correísmo. It announced it will appeal the decision of the judge from Manglaralto with the appeal having been examined and the ruling to be made public in the next days. The Manglaralto judge was for his part suspended for 90 days for ‘obvious negligence’ in a case unrelated to Glas’ habeas corpus.

Not enough to stop an avalanche of harsh criticisms against Lasso with the PSC, the ID and Pachakutik all denouncing a supposed pact between Lasso and Correa, nor to avoid the revival of conspiracy theories about a UNES-CREO agreement dating back to February 2021 when both were purportedly blocking recounts of the votes to prevent Yaku Pérez going to the runoff.

Supporters of the political pact theory are pointing out the surprising abstention on November 2021 of the UNES in the vote on the government-sponsored tax reform that enabled the bill to enter into force followed the next month by the release from prison of Ricardo Rivera (who since has died of Covid-19 in January), the uncle of Glas also indicted for corruption in the Odebrecht case.

The ruling has also been issued just ten days after the appointment to the ministry of government of Francisco Jiménez, a former member of the Correa administration who has showed openness to dialogue with the UNES.

More disturbingly, the top representatives from the ministry for government, the police and the prison administration services (SNAI) all declined to assist the court hearings in such a sensitive and highly political case, preferring instead sending junior public officials. The one representing the SNAI weirdly enough found nothing to object on the diagnosis of Glas’ health status.

Additionally, on 30 March, the lonely CREO member of the Oversight Commission voted with the UNES members to oppose the approval of a report establishing that the signature by the Correa administration of oil presales contracts with China’s Unipec and Petrochina and Thailand’s PTT International Trading have caused prejudice worth $4.771 million to the Ecuadorian state due to corruption and use of intermediaries owning offshore companies.

[Sir John Johns]

A murderer and an international drug trafficker permitted to leave prison

In the days following the exit from prison of Glas, the Ecuadorian justice system has to examine an avalanche of requests for habeas corpus from inmates and ordered two very controversial releases from prison.

On 22 April, a judge from Guayas ordered the exit from prison of Junior Roldán to be placed under house arrest. One of the main leaders of the Los Choneros drug gang, Junior Roldás aka ‘JR’, is incarcerated since 2009 after having been sentenced to twenty-two years in jail for the murder of a family. Such nice man is also suspected to have ordered from his prison cell the killing of some 32 persons and to have participated in the organization of several of the massacres that happened in Ecuadorian prisons these last months.

Predictably, the exit of ‘JR’ from prison provoked a major public uproar especially as the habeas corpus was originally submitted only to enable the gang leader to go to the hospital and as the judge ruled he can be placed under house arrest without an electronic tagging device.

Three days later, a car bomb attack against the prison housing that housed ‘JR’ was recorded and attributed to gangs opposed to Los Choneros as a ‘message’ against the exit from prison of the gang leader.

Since then, the house arrest of ‘JR’ has been revoked and the judge that issued the habeas corpus suspended of his duties.

The JR scandal somehow conflated with the Glas scandal as the Manglaraldo judge that freed JR from jail was seen among a group of people (notably Marcela Aguiñaga, the leader of RC, and controversial Correísta assemblyman Ronny Aleaga) accompanying the freed former vice president to the court for doing his first monthly appointment.

https://twitter.com/VillaFernando_/status/1520076636812681217

Asked by Primicias, Aguiñaga denied the suspended judge being part of the group, a version also confirmed in El Comercio by Glas’ legal representative. Amazingly, the pro-Correa outlet Radio Pichincha wrote an article indicating the suspended judge has actually joined Glas’ legal team (a nice own goal, but I guess this is what happening when your only sources are ‘Twitter, social networks’).



A few days before, a habeas corpus had been granted to a recently arrested Dutch-Albanian drug trafficker seek by the justice of the Netherlands and placed on Interpol red list enabling the criminal to leave prison with the only requirement to present himself before the court every fifteen days. The ruling has been made by another judge of Manglaralto, the jurisdiction that has granted habeas corpus to Jorge Glas. The judge has been since suspended for 90 days as the Judicature Council found that she was incompetent to intervene in a case involving a criminal under a process of extradition.



Prison crisis continuing with no improvement in sight

* On 9 May, another massacre happened in an Ecuadorian prison, this time in the prison of Santo Domingo. According to the authorities, 44 inmates were murdered and 13 injured during gang clashes while some 200 inmates evaded from the prison during the massacre. The police assured having recaptured a majority of them.

The government and the SNAI have blamed the massacre on a justice decision rescinding the transfer of the leader of R7, a splinter group of the Los Lobos (itself a drug gang rival to the Los Choneros), from the prison of Turi (where 20 inmates were already massacred in early April during clashes between the R7 and Los Lobos) to the La Roca prison of Guayaquil. The judge had accepted a habeas corpus request fielded by the R7 leader, who invoked the death threats he had received in La Roca as a risk for his life. Then the transfer of the gang leader to the Santo Domingo jail was ordered in spite of this prison being at the hands of the Los Lobos. The leader of said gang, who had similarly requested and obtained a habeas corpus, is suspected of having planned the massacre in the Santo Domingo jail from the Latacunga prison he had been transferred from La Roca.

The provincial court that granted the habeas corpus to the R7 leader is rejecting the accusation of the government and emphasized it is the role of the SNAI to guarantee the security of the inmates in the prison system. It also accused the national prison administration to be careless during the judicial hearings, being unable to demonstrate the lives of inmates requesting a habeas corpus aren’t at risk and, more than often, not even bothering appealing the granting of habeas corpus.

It should be also mentioned that the official in charge of elaborating a plan to fight violence in the prisons, Bernarda Ordóñez, has gave her resignation on late April from her office of secretary for human rights, citing political differences. Several weeks before she had expressed her unease with the brutal police response to feminist marches on 8 March. As for the direction of the SNAI, it has changed four times in one year while the chairwoman of the commission for penitentiary dialogue and pacification, the Uruguayan-born former nun Nesla Curbelo, has resigned on 22 April, citing personal reasons. Few days before, Curbelo, when presenting a first report of the commission, has denounced the corruption inside the prison administration as well as the prison overcrowding while indicating that ‘the state has been absent from the penitentiary system of the country since over ten years’.


An endless spiral of violence

On 29 April, President Lasso declared a 60-day state of emergency in three coastal provinces (Guayas, Manabí and Esmeraldas), officially to fight there the explosion of criminality and killing (between 4 and 7 persons are killed each day in Guayaquil). He also announced the sending of 4,000 policemen and 5,000 servicemen in these provinces and a curfew in every parishes of Esmeraldas canton, one urban parish of Durán (an impoverished suburb of Guayaquil) and two popular urban parishes of Guayaquil.

The decision, made just before Labor Day, was criticized by both unions, which saw the measure as a way to limit the size of the traditional 1 May marches, and tourism sector for which state of emergency and curfew during holidays aren’t good for business.

In spite of such measures, Walter Vallejo, a high-profile lawyer, was shot to death in front of a luxury hotel of Guayaquil, presumably by a hired killer. Vallejo has notably been the lawyer of Édison Washington Prado aka ‘Gerald’, a drug trafficker dubbed as ‘the Ecuadorian Pablo Escobar’ currently jailed in the United States after having been extradited from in Colombia, where he had been arrested in April 2017. Vallejo has also been served as a lawyer for the two Israeli con men arrested in connection with the traffic of medical devices in which Abdalá Bucaram is accused of being involved, his name having been proposed to the imprisoned Israeli citizens by the former president himself if the leaked audios are to be believed. After having supported the candidacy of Juan Carlos Casinelli (Alianza PAIS) for assemblyman in 2013, Vallejo unsuccessfully attempted to get elected the mayor of Balzar (Guayas) in 2019, this time as the candidate of Lucio Gutiérrez’s Patriotic Society.

On 15 May, it was the leader of the Latin Kings gang who was shot down with his wife by gunmen in Quito.

This is happening against a backdrop of growing number of assassination and assassination attempts against policemen with the bodies of three murdered officers having been found in a single week in late April/early May. According to Insight, Ecuadorian gangs are replicating methods of the Mexican drug cartels with a local journalist interviewed in the article stating that part of these target assassinations are settling of accounts involving policemen tied to gangs.

Two days ago, a group of armed men attacked a military facility in the nearby of Puerto El Carmen de Putumayo, a small city at the border with Colombia, in the province of Sucumbíos (Amazon). Two soldiers have reported being injured during the confrontation with the illegal group managing to steal two rifles.

The same day, the theft of 150 handguns in a police warehouse of Guayaquil was made public with the interior minister indicating that three policemen are currently investigated in the case.

In the night of 18 May, three car bombs exploded in the city of Esmeraldas while a former prosecutor and a military employed in drug enforcement were murdered. Six days before, in the same city, a hospital director was shot to death by gunmen with a driver being also killed. Esmeraldas is supposed to be under both state of emergency and curfew but, as reported by the GK article, ‘police presence is the same, nonexistent’.

[Sir John Johns]

Glas is returning in jail

The habeas corpus granted to Jorge Glas had been nullified by a court of Santa Elena over lack of competence and irregularities. The court has ordered the re-incarceration of Glas, the opening of an investigation on judicial and SNAI officials involved in the case and recommended the destitution of the Manglaralto judge who freed Glas.

The former vice president had surrendered to the police and immediately incarcerated in the Latacunga prison, awaiting his transfer to a prison of Quito.

The decision of the Santa Elena court was more rapid than expected and has possibly been influenced by the recent leaking of a video, seemingly involving the former vice president in irregular and illegal practices.

The Código Vidrio videos

Just few days ago, Código Vidrio (a website which previously sent behind bars the successor of Glas as vice president, María Alejandra Vicuña, after reveals on her requesting diezmos from her advisers when an assemblywoman) published excerpts from a secretly recorded video of a February 2014 meeting held few days before the local elections between Glas, then the vice president of Ecuador, and José Luis Cortázar, the director of the Agency for Regulation and Control of Hydrocarbons (ARCH). Cortázar had previously served as the first head of the National Anticorruption Secretariat under Correa (2007-08) and also held various posts in the state oil sector, notably as acting general manager of Petroamazonas (2016) and general manager of Petroecuador (2017).

https://twitter.com/CodigoVidrioEc/status/1526643647835422721

Rafael Correa and Jorge Glas were desperate. They knew they would lose the 2014 elections. They released the selling of explosives. They ordered the director of the ARCH to illegally increase the quota to sell gasoline. Here the unpublished video of the meeting

In the first excerpt, an anxious Glas is notably heard telling Cortázar: ‘I’m asking you to open the sale of explosives, brother, for the miners, because [we are] losing in Amazon, [we are] losing in Sucumbíos, [we are] going to lose the prefecture. Our mayor [in Lago Agrio] who was given two to one against the opponent is now three points behind. […] And in Sucumbíos, not even the persons campaigning can get gasoline. What are we asking you is to loosen it for three weeks’.

Cortázar is mentioning having been requested by President Correa to eliminate restrictions on the sale of gasoline in border areas and Sucumbíos and warning Glas the suppression of the $10 limit on gasoline sale for a vehicle would cause problems, to which the vice president responded the situation would lasted only for twenty days.

An Amazon province bordering Colombia and the center of Ecuadorian oil extraction, Sucumbíos has been used as a rear base for illegal and criminal groups (this is where FARC leader Raúl Reyes was shot down by the Colombian army in 2008), notably drug traffickers organizations. It is also a hub for gasoline smuggling as the Ecuadorian subsided gasoline is cheaper than gasoline sold in Colombia. A good share of said gasoline is used by cocaine producers, notably to power generators. The Insight Crime article is mentioning that a quarter of the gasoline sold in Colombia is used for cocaine production as 284 liters of gasoline are needed for every kilo of coca paste.

Restrictions and quotas on the sale of gasoline have been periodically implemented in Sucumbíos and other bordering provinces to specifically fight the smuggling of gasoline.

In any case, the loosening of restrictions on gasoline and explosives didn’t prevented the Alianza PAIS candidates to be defeated in the elections for prefect of Sucumbíos and mayor of Lago Agrio.

https://twitter.com/CodigoVidrioEc/status/1526973058321420289

Jorge Glas ordered the director of the ARCH to not request information from oil companies that could later sent in prison the then-president, Rafael Correa. He warned him to not leaving anything in writing. Here the full video.

In the second excerpt, Glas and Cortázar are discussing about the 2012 awarding for the exploitation of the Shushufindi-Aguarico and Libertador-Atacapi oilfields (in Sucumbíos) – part of the so-called ‘Crown Jewels’ – to two private consortia, one constituted by France’s Schlumberger, Argentina’s Tecpetrol and United States’ KKR and one constituted by Tecpetrol, Canada’s Canacol, Schlumberger and Ecuador’s Sertecpet. Cortázar was then the member of a commission investigating a possible miscalculation of the fee to be paid by the two consortia, causing a financial prejudice to the Ecuadorian state.

In the video, Cortázar is informing Glas he had to sue the companies for not delivering documents on the matter in time to which the vice president is answering ‘ask me before doing such stupidity’ and requesting him to no doing anything without his prior consent. Glas also demanded Cortázar being careful when dealing with the matter and to not put anything in writing ‘because, after ten years, with that they will sent the president in jail’.

Glas also expressed concerns over the information being sent to Fernando Villavicencio with the vice president saying ‘I am convinced that Villavicencio is a CIA agent, a type of unionist of Petroecuador who has intervened in everything, everything’ [Villavicencio worked for Petroecuador and was active in the union movement inside the oil company until his firing in 1999 by then president Jamil Mahuad. He clearly has kept contacts inside the company].

Cortázar has since acknowledged the meeting with Glas has indeed take place but denied having being ordered to commit illegal or irregular acts. According to Cortázar, the video has been ‘mutilated’ and ‘interpreted in a biased way’ and leaked with the intention to hurt Glas. What is however unclear is why Cortázar secretly recorded the video (because it is indisputable he placed the recording device on him) and how the video ended up in the hands of an anti-Correa website. The video is also corroborating previous allegations made by the Odebrecht informer on how Glas conducted his shady business in the facilities of the vice presidency (where the meeting with Cortázar happened), how he put music to cover his discussions and how he was very careful not letting any written evidence.

The editor of Código Vidrio has announded that more videos will be published, involving other officials of the Correa administration.

[Sir John Johns]

Deposed comptroller-general out of prison, still awaiting his trial

On last 12 April, Pablo Celi, the country’s comptroller-general between 2017 and 2021, benefited from a house arrest order and left the prison of Quito he was imprisoned since one year.

Celi has been the pet peeve of Correístas who have portrayed him as the man behind the throne under the Moreno administration, having been a key actor in the downfall of Jorge Glas and having attempted to obtain the deregistration of the Social Commitment Force party that the supporters of Correa had hijacked. They even accused him of plotting a coup in the case of a victory of Andrés Arauz in the 2021 election.

From Bucaram to Moreno: the career of Celi

Nevertheless, Pablo Celi had already a long  career when appointed in 2011 an ambassador to Argentina by Rafael Correa, as confirmed by these 1999 and 2004 articles published in the now defunct Hoy newspaper.

Dubbed as 'the first Marxist sociologist to graduate from the Catholic University of Quito', Celi has been successively a member of the Ecuadorian Communist Party and its FADI (Broad Left Front) electoral vehicle, of National Liberation (LN) a ‘social-democratic’ split of said FADI, an adviser to Fabian Alarcón when president of Congress (after a stint as president of Ecuador, an office he usurped, Alarcón saw his political career terminated by a sentence to jail for corruption), an undersecretary of state for education in the Bucaram administration under Sandra Correa (of the Mochila escolar corruption scandal fame; a time prosecuted in the case, Celi was ultimately cleared of all charges in 2004), a professor at the university (his job attendance and teaching skills were then disputed) and an adviser to President Lucio Gutiérrez when he worked with his future boss in the Comptroller-General’s Office, Carlos Pólit.

Additionally, he was reported running a tourism company specialized in trips to Cuba, issued in 1995 a report exonerating vice president Alberto Dahik of any wrongdoings in the reserved funds scandal (the Supreme Court of Justice disagreed and Dahik had to resign and flee the country), once exhibited the abstract paintings he made. When working in the early 2010s for the UNASUR in Buenos Aires, he also published an article titled Regional Security and South American Defense in Línea Sur, an obscure magazine edited by the Argentinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (in the same issue there are also articles written by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Baltasar Garzón...). Truly a man with many talents, a striking example of how public officials are able to pursue a successful career in spite of corruption allegations and political changes (see also Ivonne Baki who has held public jobs in every presidential administration since 1998) and a fine example of politicians posturing as left-wingers while having been part of the Abdalá Bucaram kleptocratic neoliberal freak show (à la Frank Vargas Pazzos, Gustavo Larrea or Lenín Moreno).

In spite of being a sociologist by training, Celi was appointed a delegate comptroller-general in 2014 and the deputy comptroller-general in 2016 before becoming the surrogate comptroller-general (an appointment whose legality has been disputed) in June 2017 to replace the holder of the post, Pólit (in office since 2007), who had fled to Florida the day following the inauguration of Lenín Moreno to escape an indictment in the Odebrecht corruption case.

The Las Torres case

After having contributed to sent Jorge Glas behind bars, Celi is now finding himself indicted in his own corruption case (Las Torres case), in relation to the alleged payment of bribes in Petroecuador.

The case came to light in 2019 when the own nephew of Celi, an employee of Petroecuador, was arrested in Miami in company of an Ecuadorian real estate entrepreneur. As neither one was able to provide an explanation to the provenance of the $250,000 in cash they were carrying, the US justice launched an investigation for money laundering that uncover a corruption network revolving around the Ecuadorian surrogate comptroller-general with connections in Florida.

After a transmission of information from the US justice to Ecuador, Celi has been arrested on 13 April 2021, two days after the victory of Lasso in the presidential runoff, and is now prosecuted for his presumed practices of trading the removals of glosas (penalties imposed on companies or individuals having been found causing prejudice to the Ecuadorian state by malpractices which hamper or block them in the awarding of subsequent public contracts) inflicted by the Comptroller-General’s office on private companies in exchange of kickbacks.

He is notably accused of having demanded and obtained bribes from NoLimit, a subcontractor of Petroecuador, and Conecel, a phone company as well as from China’s CAMC, a company blacklisted by the World Bank for its malpractices that still somehow received an avalanche of public contracts under both Correa and Moreno.

The money hence extorted by Celi and his associates was subsequently channeled to Legalcont, a company registered in Florida and managed by a relative of Celi’s brother, and hence laundered in the United States.

In addition to former comptroller-general Celi, the other persons indicted in the Las Torres case are Esteban Celi, Pablo's borther, including Pablo Flores, the general manager of Petroecuador between 2018 and 2019, and Adolfo Agusto Briones, a businessman whose company is also appearing in the Social Security Institute of the National Police (Isspol) scandal. Adolfo Agusto Briones’ brother, José Agusto Briones, had also been involved in the case but had committed suicide in his prison cell in May 2021. José was a very close associate of Lenín Moreno, having served as a national secretary for planning and development (2018), a general-secretary of the Presidency (2018-19) and a minister for energy and natural non-renewable resources (2019-20).



Former oil minister under Correa denied habeas corpus

Following Glas, Carlos Pareja Yannuzzelli ‘Capaya’ also requested a habeas corpus but was less lucky than the former vice president as it was rejected by a judge on 15 April in spite of being also motivated on health concerns (diabetes, hypertension and suicidal thoughts).

The fall of Capaya over Panama Papers

Successively the president (2007), the manager of refinement (2012-15) and the general manager (2015) of Petroecuador, Capaya later served as a minister for hydrocarbons (2015-16) under Rafael Correa. He abruptly resigned from that post in May 2016, at the same time than Álex Bravo, his successor as general manager of Petroecuador (2015-16), just one month after the publication of the Panama Papers.

Indeed, the names of both men were appearing as the owners or managers of various offshore companies registered with Mossack Fonseca. Also mentioned was Pedro Merizalde, the successor of Bravo at the helm of Petroecuador and a minister for hydrocarbons between 2013 and 2015. Merizalde was permitted to keep a job for a short while, as Correa had publicly requested him to close his offshore company in Panama, but ultimately resigned in March 2017 when it was revealed he was investigated by the Ecuadorian justice for suspicions of money laundering. In the meantime, a police raid had led in November 2016 to the arrest of yet another former general manager of Petroecuador, Marco Calvopiña (in office between 2011 and 2015), and the seizing of $300,000 in the residence of one of the former Petroecuador executives.

The CapayaLeaks

Capaya evaded himself arrest by fleeing to Florida in August 2016 from which he posted a series of videos denouncing vice president Jorge Glas as the ringleader of the corruption network in Petroecuador. Capaya also pretended that the attorney-general, Galo Chiriboga, had phoned him about the compromising information coming from Panama and organized a meeting with Glas in which it was decided that Capaya would left Ecuador for some time, a version dismissed by Chiriboga. The use of a lie detector was supposed to ‘prove’ Capaya was telling the truth. The sensational CapayaLeaks were released just few days before the first round of the presidential election in which Glas was running for reelection as vice president as the running mate of Lenín Moreno.

In late 2017, after Moreno’s inauguration, Capaya and Bravo were both sentenced to five years in jail for bribery. Capaya had go back to Ecuador in August 2017 after a mediation of José Serrano, the president of the National Assembly and the longtime interior minister of Correa. Few days thereafter, Chiriboga was shortly detained by the police in the airport of Quito while apparently trying to flee the country; he has however never been prosecuted since.

Capaya was later additionally sentenced to six years in jail for unlawful association, ten years in jail for illicit enrichment, ten years in jail for embezzlement and six years for influence peddling.

Also sentenced at the same time to six years in jail for unlawful association in October 2017 were Calvopiña and a former manager for refinement in Petroecuador.

The Singue case

Capaya is still awaiting a final sentencing in the Singue case in which is also prosecuted who is now his nemesis, Glas, as well as Wilson Pástor, a minister for non-renewable resources between 2010 and 2013. The three men are indicted for the 2012 presumed irregular awarding of an oil field located in Sucumbíos to Gente Oil, a private consortium founded in Singapore the same year. According to the Ecuadorian justice, the price of a barrel of oil in the calculation of the oil field value was deliberately underestimated, provoking a prejudice to the Ecuadorian state worth $28.4 million (note: this is a case distinct from the two ones currently at the center of the controversy and related to the Glas-Cortázar videotaped meeting; still, the pattern is very similar). Additionally, the company which was awarded the oil field exploitation was registered in Ecuador just before the signature of the contract and hired shortly thereafter Pastór’s own daughter as its general manager, rising suspicions of favoritism even if Pástor’s daughter has been since cleared.

Jorge Glas is prosecuted in the Singue case as a former coordinating minister for strategic sectors (2010-12) and a vice president in charge of the strategic sectors and change of the productive matrix (2013-17), a portfolio including notably the supervision of the oil sector.


According to Correa and his surrogates, Glas is the innocent victim of ‘lawfare’ (a version still pushed in spite on the recently leaked video) and we have to believe the former vice president was totally unaware of the widespread corruption plaguing the public oil sector, that same corruption for which a string of officials (including most of the leadership of Petroecuador and several ministers entrusted with oil sector – there later being all being non-political nominees appointed for their competence and experience in oil sector production) have been arrested and indicted, starting in the last years of the presidency of Correa.

And that’s just for the oil sector, because another area entrusted to Glas, the construction of major public works, turned out being also plagued by massive corruption. The most emblematic case being the payment of bribes by the Odebrecht company, a scandal which could came back under the limelight after the arrest of Carlos Pólit, the comptroller-general during almost the entirety of Correa’s presidency (2007-2017).

[Sir John Johns]

Former comptroller-general Pólit arrested by the US justice

On 30 March, Carlos Pólit, who is living in Florida since his flight from Ecuador in 2017, has been arrested in Miami and formally indicted for money laundering.

As detailed by a statement of the US Justice Department:

Former Comptroller General of Ecuador Indicted for Alleged Bribery and Money Laundering Scheme

The former Comptroller General of Ecuador made his initial appearance today in Miami, Florida, for allegedly engaging in a scheme to use the U.S. financial system to launder money to promote and conceal an illegal bribery scheme in Ecuador.

According to the March 24 indictment unsealed today, between approximately 2010 and 2016, Carlos Ramon Polit Faggioni (Polit), allegedly solicited and received over $10 million in bribe payments from Odebrecht S.A., the Brazil-based construction conglomerate, in exchange for using his official position as Comptroller General of Ecuador to influence official actions by the comptroller’s office in order to benefit Odebrecht and its business in Ecuador. Additionally, Polit is alleged to have received a bribe from an Ecuadorian businessman in or around 2015 in exchange for assisting the businessman and his company in connection with certain contracts from the state-owned insurance company of Ecuador.

Pólit and his son are reported to be the owners of various property assets located in some of the wealthiest residential areas of Miami. This is including notably four flats, an office building, at least one restaurant (US justice documents are mentioning ‘restaurants’ possibly acquired with money coming from bribes), a dry cleaning business and a plot of land.

More than the properties of the Pólit family, it was the $14 million bail the deposed comptroller general managed paid to avoid preventive prison and go into house arrest with a requirement to wear an electronic tagging device that caused uproar. Most of the sum ($11.5 million) is backed by properties belonging to Pólit’s two sons, one, a former Merrill Lynch advisor, having been previously investigated by the SEC only for the case to be dropped out.

The US justice is suspecting that said properties, acquired when Pólit was comptroller-general, had been purchased with money coming from bribes from Odebrecht and Seguros Sucre (the state-owned surety company which had the monopoly of surety contracts for public entities).

On a side note, Seguros Sucre is currently into liquidation, the consequence of mismanagement and a first case of money laundering in Florida as its chairman between 2013 and 2017, a former adviser to Correa, had been sentenced in March 2021 to 51 months in prison for having received and laundered bribes from three British reinsurance companies. The Pandora Papers have since revealed he was also the owner of two companies registered in the British Virgin Islands.

Back in June 2018, Carlos and John Pólit have been sentenced in abstentia by the Ecuadorian justice to respectively six years and three years in jail and the payment of a $40.4 million compensation after having been found guilty of concussion. Carlos Pólit was convicted for having demanded a $10.1 million bribe to Odebrecht in exchange of the removal of the glosas inflicted on the company as well as the drafting of reports favorable to the Brazilian company, hence helping it being awarded public contracts. His son was found guilty of having channeled the money from the bribes to two companies, the first one (Cosani) registered in Panama and the second one (Plastiquim) registered in Ecuador but known to have received money from Odebrecht through its offshore company, Klienfeld.

The expulsion and the return of Odebrecht in Ecuador

The removal in September 2010 by the Comptroller-General’s Office of eight of the nine glosas imposed on Odebrecht and amounting to a total of $70.7 million had enabled the Brazilian company to come back in Ecuador and resume its activities in the country after an agreement had been subsequently reached under which terms the Brazilian company had to pay a $20 million compensation and to repair the defects found in the San Francisco hydroelectric plant (Baños canton, Tungurahua) which have made the plant not operational less than a year after its inauguration (the contract had been awarded to Odebrecht in March 2000 by then-president Gustavo Noboa).

Back in 2008, when the problems in San Francisco had been revealed, President Correa had particularly harsh words about the Brazilian company (‘the more I dig the more I find mud’; ‘these men are corrupt and corrupting, they have bought public servants’; ‘what have been done has been an assault on the country’). After an attempt to reach an agreement with Odebrecht had failed due to the intransigence of the Ecuadorian government, Correa had ordered in September 2008 the seizing by the army of the assets of Odebrecht, the termination of all its contracts with the Ecuadorian state as well as the prohibition from leaving Ecuador of the company executives in the country. Things further escalated when Correa announced his intention to not pay back the $293 million loan granted by the Brazilian National Bank for Economic and Social Development to finance the project and threatened to also expel Petrobras from Ecuador over disagreements on the renegotiation of oilfield operation contracts and culminated in November 2008 with the brief recall of the Brazilian ambassador in Quito.

Nevertheless, once Odebrecht had been restored in October 2011 as a company eligible to be awarded public contracts, the Brazilian company became one of the largest government contractor in Ecuador, having been notably awarded contracts related to the constructions of the Ruta Viva road (connecting Quito with the adjacent valleys and its new airport), the Daule-Vinces Water Transfer Project, the Pacific Refinery near Manta, the Manduriacu Hydroelectric Project, the Pascuales-Cuenca pipeline, the expansion of the Manta deep water port (a project ultimately abandoned) and the Quito Metro.

In stark contrast with his 2008 declarations, President Correa reacted in August 2012 to an article of La Hora criticizing the return of Odebrecht in Ecuador by suggesting during one of his Enlace Ciudadano that the Brazilian company should sued the newspaper for having ‘omitted key information’ and ‘misinformed citizens’. He also complained about the ‘corrupt press’ that was portraying his government ‘as inconsequential, as corrupt’ and dismissed La Hora article as ‘unconstitutional’ because ‘news must be contextualized’.

The national secretary for communication, Fernando Alvarado, also appeared in the broadcast to pretend the article could be part of a strategy of the newspaper to extort advertising contracts from Odebrecht. Alvarado then denounced ‘the unfortunate practices of some commercial medias’ warning internal companies to ‘not fall into that game’. The part of the broadcast about Odebrecht was reposted by 4 Pelagatos on January 2017 as it also includes an excerpt where Jorge Glas, then minister for strategic sectors, is also criticizing La Hora for omitting to mention that Odebrecht had won the public tenders because it proposed the lowest prices (many contracts won by Odebrecht would later been plagued by overcosts). Glas concluded by stating that Odebrecht was providing the best prices and the best offer for the benefit of the whole Ecuadorian people.

So, the Ecuadorian government found itself quite embarrassed when, just few weeks before the general elections, the US Justice Department made public the text of the plea agreement signed with Odebrecht with the section relevant to the company’s activities in Ecuador indicating the following:

In or about and between 2007 and 2016, Odebrecht made and caused to be made more than $33.5 million in corrupt payments to government officials in Ecuador. Odebrecht realized benefits of more than $116 million as a result of these corrupt payments.

For example, in or about and between 2007 and 2008, Odebrecht experienced a number of problems related to a construction contract, and agreed with an intermediary to an Ecuadorian government official with control over public contracts to make corrupt payments to the government official to solve the problems. Odebrecht later delivered these payments in cash to the government official.

Alecksey Mosquera and his Andorra bank accounts

The first arrest in the Odebrecht case happened however only on 21 April 2017, once the runoff had taken place, when Alecksey Mosquera, the minister for Electricity between 2007 and 2009, was imprisoned in relation with the 2007 awarding of the contract for the construction of the Toachi-Pilatón hydroelectric project to Odebrecht. The arrest happened in the wake of revelations made in the Brazilian press about the payment by Odebrecht of a $1 million bribery to a representative of Ecuador’s ministry for Electricity. Also incarcerated was Marcelo Endara, a businessman and a relative of Mosquera.

In one of his last media appearances as president of Ecuador, Correa tried to explain the arrest of Mosquera was unrelated with the payment of a bribe arguing that, as Mosquera was no longer a public official when he received the money from Odebrecht in February 2011, a date on which the contract for the Toachi-Pilatón hydroelectric station had been terminated. Instead, Correa indicated that the actual problem was that Mosquera didn’t declared the $1 million received from Odebrecht, which must be considered as tax fraud and probable money laundering, and infamously labeled the financial transaction between his former minister and Odebrecht un acuerdo entre privados (‘an agreement between private [actors]’) he attempted to differentiate from kickback or bribe.

Few months thereafter, however, a report from the Andorran police confirmed that Endara had opened three accounts at Banca Privada d’Andorra on behalf of three Panamanian companies he owned and that said companies had received $1 million from Klienfeld, the offshore company used by Odebrecht to pay its bribes. The report also concluded that Mosquera was the ultimate beneficiary of payments. Mosquera, who admitted guilt during his trial and acknowledged the transaction happened when a minister (but pretended the bribe wasn’t about Toachi-Pilatón but for insider information over future projects), was sentenced in April 2018 to five years in jail for money laundering.

The never-ending construction of Toachi-Pilatón

As for the Toachi-Pilatón hydroelectric plant, whose first stone had been laid in January 2008 and which was sold by Correa as a flagship project of his administration, fourteen years later it isn’t not yet fully completed. China International Water & Electric Corp. (CWE), the contractor that received the contract for the construction after the expulsion of Odebrecht in 2008, saw its own contract unilaterally terminated by the National Electric Corporation in last March over issues like construction defects, delays and irregularities that led the Comptroller-General’s Office to inflict a series of glosas amounting to $93.6 million. The cost of the project was estimated in 2010 at $240 million but has since ascended to $312 million. In 2019, CWE was accused of having signed a contract for material transport with a truck company that had no trucks but whose legal agent was the cousin of Lenín Moreno’s finance minister. A year later, El Universo revealed that the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network had detected suspicious bank transfers from the Chinese contractor to various companies, notably one registered in Panama that had been previously suspected of having bribe money coming from Odebrecht.

However, the Chinese CWE and the Brazilian Odebrecht aren’t the only ones to be blamed for the problems in Toachi-Pilatón: in March 2017, the Russian company selected for the supply of electric equipment proved to be unreliable and saw its contract unilaterally broken by the Ecuadorian government, suspending the construction for two years.

[Sir John Johns]

Jorge Glas: from vice presidency to jail

Here, this is an episode of Ecuadorian politics I think that is very important to mention as it is crucial to understand both the Moreno/Correa rupture in 2017 (with strong indications it was underway during the election campaign if not even before) and the recent events on the incarceration, liberation and reincarceration of the former vice president and the recent videos published by Código Vidrio, a website named after the alias supposedly used by Glas in his corruption schemes.


The 2017 presidential campaign of Lenín Moreno had been undermined by accusations of corruption against his running-mate, who was not only involved in the Petroecuador case but also in the Odebrecht bribery scandal.

Starting on 2 November 2016, when La Estrella, a Panamanian newspaper, briefly mentioned:

There is a report from Panamanian authorities that is involving the vice president of Ecuador Jorge Glas. Everything indicates this is very serious and compromising.

The legal secretary of the Ecuadorian presidency was here last week trying to prevent the leaking of said report. It contains activities like money laundering.

The government of Rafael Correa wants to prevent what the report is saying from being made public because at this moment it is preparing for a political campaign.

The businesses of Ricardo Rivera in Ecuador and in... Florida

This relaunched past accusations made in 2015 by Fernando Villavicencio and Andrés Páez, a right-wing opposition assemblyman, over money transfers worth $22 million effected by Jorge Glas’s uncle, Ricardo Rivera (a largely unknown businessman in telecommunication sector owning notably a minor television station), and José Alvear Icaza, his lawyer (a former PSC legislator who died in 2014) to offshore companies as well as speculations over a Rivera 2010 trip to China as part of a government delegation when he met with Chinese businessmen while not himself a public official.

In an updated investigation published few days thereafter, Villavicencio claimed that one of the offshore companies involved in Rivera’s alleged transactions, Glory International Industry Corp., has been registered in Florida with Tomislav Topic as its president. A businessman in telecommunication sector, Topic was the owner of Telconet, a company which received contracts for the deployment of optical fiber in Ecuador and for the transmission of electoral data for the 2017 elections. Business and friendship ties between Rivera and Topic were exposed thanks to the divorce proceedings issued in Florida by Topic’s wife who suspected her husband was hiding part of his wealth. When questioned by his wife’s lawyer, Topic acknowledged being the owner of Glory International Industry Corp., being a friend of Rivera and having registered a company related to Telconet using Rivera’s address in Miami. In her request to support her divorce being settled in the United States and not in Ecuador, Topic’s wife is also alluding to the influence on the Ecuadorian justice her husband could exerted due to his ‘extensive business relationship’ he was maintaining with Rivera and Jorge Glas.

In February 2017, just few days before the first round, a bizarre incident that took place in a restaurant of Guayaquil where Ricardo Rivera was slapped in the face by one of the son of former president Abdalá Bucaram, Jacobo, after a heated discussion between Rivera and Jacobo’s brother, Dalo, then also running for president. The incident happened just few hours after Dalo Bucaram had accused Rivera of having received bribes in relation with contracts awarded by Petroecuador and Telconet.

This was however not the first time that the discreet Rivera (of whom no photography was available on the Internet before his arrest) came into the limelight for bad reasons. Back in 2008, when then a general intendant for telecommunications (the only public office he ever held), he, as well as the superintendent for communications Paúl Rojas, was at the center of a controversy over conflict of interest in the wake of revelations made by El Universo. Rojas, who had been appointed on the suggestion of Jorge Glas then the director of the Solidarity Fund (a public entity in charge of managing shares of the state in telephony and electricity sectors companies), appointed in turn Rivera as a subordinate. Both Rojas and Rivera were owners of companies in the telecommunication sector they were in charge of overseeing with Rivera being specifically criticized for having awarded a frequency to Televisión Satelital, a TV station owned by his daughter and previously fined for illegal broadcasting. Additionally, until his appointment in the government Glas has served as the general manager of said television channel while also anchoring a business-related broadcast.

El Universo also indicated then that Glas had omitted declaring being a shareholder of two companies owned by his uncle in electricity sector and that he used to be the director of Televisión Latina, a television station founded by Rivera in Miami but then inactive. Rivera had then registered three other companies in Florida, only one being still active in 2008.

Few days thereafter, Rivera was removed from his post of general intendent for telecommunication as part of an ‘institutional re-engineering’ after it appeared Rivera additionally served in the National Council for Radio and Television (CONARTEL, then headed by future mayor of Quito Jorge Yunda) as a substitute of Rojas and, as such, had voted in favor of restoring a frequency to a radio station owned by one of his longtime friend, Luis Almeida, an opposition assemblyman belonging to the Patriotic Society (who has returned to the National Assembly in 2021 as a member of the PSC). The vote of Rivera in support of Almeida may have strongly displeased the Correa administration and precipitated his removal.



The Caminosca case or how Vidrio came under the limelight

Finally, Glas was at the time of the 2017 presidential election involved in a third corruption case related to the Caminosca civil engineering company. The Australian financial press has reported as early as March 2015 the detection of questionable payments made by Caminosca; the account irregularities were discovered in January or February 2015 by the leadership of Cardno, the Australian company that had acquired Caminosca in December 2012. According to an article of Plan V published in April 2015, the payments were commissions to obtain the awarding of public contracts; Caminosca, which was allowed to be a public contractor in 2008, had been awarded between 2009 and 2015 thirteen public contracts worth a combined $110 million. Among these contracts were comprised consulting activities related to several major projects like the Pacific Refinery, the Monteverde Maritime LPG Terminal, the Quito Metro and the hydroelectric plants of Sopladora, Toachi-Pilatón and San Francisco.

The case came back to the limelight in February 2017 when Expreso  revealed that an audit conducted as part of a 2016 private arbitration between Cardno and its Caminosca subsidiary the Australian company intended to divest had confirmed the payments of bribes to Ecuadorian officials and their transfers to offshore companies. The payment of the kickbacks and the names of the bribed officials were recorded in a diary using abbreviations and codes. Among recorded payments are a $100,000 deposit in favor of a man referred to as ‘Vidrio’ (‘glass’ in Spanish) and two $30,000 cash payments in January and February 2013 for ‘Hydroelectric Vidrio, political campaign’.

On 21 March, just before the presidential runoff, a judicial investigation was opened at Glas’s own request over alleged bribes paid by Caminosca. The following day, as part of a media stunt, Glas testified before a notary not having received money from Caminosca before suggesting Guillermo Lasso, who was facing Moreno in the runoff, should do the same and testify not having assets out of Ecuador; the notary happened to be the father of a third presidential candidate, Iván Espinel.



The arrest of Rivera

After Lenín Moreno’s uneasy victory in the runoff (later blamed on the avalanche of corruption accusations made against his running-mate), the political downfall of Jorge Glas was very fast and brutal as further revelations were made, mostly in relation with the Odebrecht case.

On 2 June 2017, just one week after the inauguration of Moreno, the police conducted a raid at the homes of several suspects in Guayaquil, Quito and Latacunga, an operation ordered by the new attorney-general Carlos Baca Mancheno, who had just replaced Galo Chiriboga. Five persons were arrested, including Ricardo Rivera (whose TV station was also searched), a former employee of the National Secretariat for Water and José Rubén Terán, a former PSC mayor of Latacunga who served as an employee of Petroecuador while being also the brother of an adviser to Mayor of Quito Mauricio Rodas who had been previously arrested in connection with the Odebrecht bribery case. $170,000 in cash were seized as well as a check in the sum of $980,000 made out by Odebrecht. Also raided was the home of Carlos Pólit whose flight to the United States wasn’t yet known. Glas defended himself in the medias by claiming that the Odebrecht leadership was attempting to involve him in the corruption case to avenge its 2008 expulsion from Ecuador in which Glas played an important role and by pretending that he was not seeing his uncle regularly and ‘very rarely’ talked to him.

In late June 2017, were also arrested a former director in Petroecuador and the shareholder of twenty-two companies (half being then in the process of dissolution) who acted a the representative of a contractor of Petroecuador. The arrests were made in relation with the awarding in 2013 of the construction of the Pascuales-Cuenca pipeline to Odebrecht. Meanwhile another businessman, the owner of the Diacelec company accused of having used an offshore company in Panama to transfer the bribery money from Odebrecht to Rivera, surrendered himself to the Ecuadorian justice.

In July, Tomislav Topic testified having provided services worth $5.7 million free of charge to Rivera’s Televisión Satelital ‘as a courtesy’ for the role of intermediary Rivera had played in two negotiations of Topic’s Telconet: one with Odebrecht and one with Chinese investors. Topic denied however such services were bribes.



José Conceição Santos enters the scene

The following days saw the publication of a series of evidences implicating Jorge Glas in the Odebrecht case provided by the Brazilian justice and an informer, José Conceição Santos, a former director of Odebrecht in Ecuador. Said evidences, published by the Peruvian IDL-Reporteros website and the Brazilian O Globo newspaper, severely undermined the position of Jorge Glas who was suspended of his duties by Lenín Moreno on 3 August.

The published evidences were comprising:

* screenshots of chats between Ricardo Rivera, José Rubén Terán and employees of Odebrecht in which werz discussed the preparation of a meeting with ‘JG’ and a financial transfer to a Panamanian bank.

* audios secretly recorded by Santos of discussions he had with Carlos Pólit, including one during which Santos is mentioning that Glas is asking money for contracts through his contact, Rivera, who had told him ‘it is an obligation because the Chinese already paid, and so on’. In another discussion in July 2016, Pólit is apparently alarmed by rumors about imminent revelations in the press over the Odebrecht corruption scheme.

* a testimony before the Brazilian justice of Santos affirming that Odebrecht had paid $14.1 million to Glas between 2012 and 2016 in exchange of the awarding of public contracts. According to Santos, Glas requested a 1% commission on each contract that Santos described as ‘a sort of mandatory toll’. Rivera then served as a middleman and organized meetings with Santos in the room of a luxury hotel of Quito. One of such meetings was secretly videotaped by Santos. In it, Rivera is seen entering his hands in his pockets and leaving the room with a Manila folder while also being heard saying in his discussion with Santos ‘I need money for the campaign of Vidrio’. Out of camera, a check payable to Telconet, the company of ‘Mr. Tomislav’, is mentioned by both men.

According to Santos’ testimony, $5.8 million were transferred to an offshore company and $8.3 million paid in cash to Rivera by the owner of the Diacelec company who received payments from Odebrecht through another offshore company.

Rivera would later affirmed that the ‘campaign’ he was referring to was actually a ‘campaign in a television program’ for analyzing the approvals of Glas’ governance as vice president. He however never denied Vidrio being the alias of Glas, an alias who is also one of the main beneficiaries of bribery according to the Caminosca diary. This admission was considered by the public prosecutor as one of the 28 elements of conviction against the vice president.