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

[Sir John Johns]

Starting this thread to discuss political developments in Ecuador, a criminally underrated country with a  fascinating and very dynamic political landscape, even if one also very hard to fully understand. The nearest elections are expected in 2023 to vote for province prefects, mayors and municipal councils but, considering the strong possibility of a stalemate in the National Assembly, the convocation of referendums by the president to pass his political agenda is quite likely.

Yesterday was the swearing-in of conservative Guillermo Lasso as new president of Ecuador. His inauguration has put an end to almost fifteen years of rule by Alianza País and signify the return of an openly conservative president in the Carondelet Palace since 2003. Incidentally, the ceremony took place on the fortieth anniversary of one of most memorable events in Ecuadorian politics: the death in an airplane crash of President Jaime Roldós, who had been democratically elected in 1979 and presided over the restoration of civilian rule in Ecuador. Whether Roldós’s death was the result of an accident or a sabotage staged by part of the military is still a matter of debate.

Anyway, in an interview gave to El Universo few hours before leaving office, Lenín Moreno stated that ‘without a doubt, I left the country in better conditions than I found it: the economy is in order and accounts transparent.’ Well, there is a reason why he is also the author of books titled ‘The Theory and Practice of Humor’, ‘World’s Best Jokes’ and ‘Laugh, Don’t Be Sick!’.

https://twitter.com/vilmavargasva/status/1396435763672277000

Because he has ended his presidency with a disastrous 9.3% approval rate, far away from the 53.4% approval he got when he was inaugurated his term and the 77% approval he reached in August 2017 in the wake of the dismissal of Vice President Jorge Glas and the announcement of a national dialogue including opposition sectors.



Lasso is inheriting a country mired in a series of crises, especially acute in social, economic, sanitary, institutional, corruption, security and environment areas, the consequence of structural problems dating back from decades, of policy choices decided by Rafael Correa but also of the inefficiency, ineptitude, lack of political acumen, absence of leadership and apparent lack of emotional connection with the Ecuadorian common people (he explained few days ago in a Forum for the Defense of Democracy in Miami that he responded to an Ecuadorian telling him he wished having a better president that he himself wished having ‘a better people too’) of Lenín Moreno, a man who appears to never having much interest into running a country but found himself at the reins of a government, a party and a state apparatus designed to be managed by a single and same person.

In the details:

The economic crisis

On the economic front, the already strongly deteriorated and probably cooked public accounts inherited from Correa, further degraded under Moreno who, after initially continued the interventionist policies of his predecessor, made a neoliberal turn on May 2018 (symbolized by the appointment as finance minister of Richard Martínez, a former president of the Ecuadorian Entrepreneurial Committee). A succession of public cuts, deregulation measures and austerity packages proved totally inefficient to curb the explosion of public debt or revive the sluggish economy (on the contrary).

After a rather weak 3% growth in 2017 (still better than the -1.2% change in GDP in 2016), the Ecuadorian economy experienced an anemic increase in 2018 (+1.3%) and 2019 (+0.1%) before plunging the following year into its worst recession (-7.8%) on record (since 1927 and the establishment of the Central Bank and the introduction of economic measurements). The GDP of the country is expected to grow by 2.5% this year, one of the weakest number in Latin America.

The state debt, that had already sharply increased from $10.234 million (accounting for 16.4% of the GDP) in 2009 to $46.534 million (44.6% of the GDP) in 2017, had continued to steadily grew under Moreno to reach $57.316 million (53.3% of the GDP) in 2019 and $63.163 million (65.3% of the GDP) in 2020 (note that however the calculation method has changed in 2019). Such levels of indebtedness are hardly sustainable for a country that has no control on its monetary policy (the economy has been dollarized in 2000 and reversing such situation would be very unpopular while opening a can of worms) and whose government has been the few last years desperate obtaining liquidity and has struggled to pay the salaries of public servants and the funds allocated to local government authorities.

The latest round of austerity measures passed last year provided a financial respite by securing a disbursement from the IMF, a renegotiation of the external debt and an improvement of the country’s reputation on bond market, hence preventing a default on the debt the Moreno administration would have been unable to handle; this went along with the passage of very much needed anticorruption legislation (that even the correísta bench voted for) but also yet another particularly disastrous in social terms austerity package.

The social crisis

The social situation is absolutely catastrophic, the consequence of across-the-board public spending cuts, failure of public services, economic downturn and implementation of lockdown measures that financially hurt Ecuadorian households, especially the poorest ones. The progresses made in poverty reduction and access to education in the last decade if not even before have been totally erased. Five million Ecuadorians (accounting for 66% of the labor force) are either unemployed either underemployed, not helped by the important layoffs in the public sector (25,000 in 2019) that disorganized health and social services, with 32.4% of the population living in poverty (an increase of 7 percent points in a year) and 14.9% in extreme poverty (an increase of six percent points in a year). Especially affected are rural areas where 47.9% of the population is now living in poverty and households with children (according to unofficial numbers, up to 27% of Ecuadorian children would be suffering from chronic malnutrition). The combined effect of reduction of students scholarship (down from $128 million in 2017 to $73 million in 2021), lockdown measures, decay of public education system and households pushed into poverty, the number of students enrolled fell from 4.506 million for the 2017-18 school year to 4.134 million for the 2020-21 school year. In the area of housing, far from the 325,000 housing units in four years promised by Moreno in 2017 with his Casa para Todos plan, only 123,000 housing units had been built under his administration in a country suffering from a shortage of adequate housing.

The health crisis

The health situation isn’t much better as Ecuador has been very hardly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic (with 57,000 excess deaths having been recorded between March 2020 and April 2021) with no rapid end to the crisis in sight. The management of the sanitary crisis, be it by the Moreno administration or the local governments (in Guayaquil or in Quito alike), has been an utter failure, characterized by complete disorganization (not helped by the fact there have been five successive health ministers in fourteen months; in a leaked audio, one of them complained that his ministerial staff was unable to know how many people had been vaccinated), carelessness (in last March, Moreno candidly admitted the vaccination plan elaborated by the health minister ‘only existed in his head’), absence of transparency and accountability (the government refused to disclose the list of persons already vaccinated, feeding accusations of favoritism in the distribution of the vaccines that turned out largely true), unscientific approach (Guillermo Lasso freely distributed 915,000 hydroxychloroquine tablets to ‘cure’ people infected by the coronavirus as part of his Salvar Vidas ‘humanitarian initiative’, with the strong and vocal support of Jaime Nebot; the guy in charge of Salvar Vidas is now the new vice president of Ecuador in charge of the vaccination program) and above all widespread corruption with countless scandals of overpricing in the awarding of contracts for medical supplies or misappropriation and illegal sale of drugs, surgical masks and coronavirus tests (involving notably the son of the mayor of Quito, the prefect of Guayas and even former president Abdalá Bucaram). So far, only 380,000 Ecuadorians have received the two vaccination shots and 1,585,000 others only one shot.

To make things worse, the Ecuadorian Social Security Institute (IESS) is facing financial problems and is struggling to obtain liquidity as the number of its contributors has decreased (the consequence of rise in unemployment and the persistence of an important informal sector in the Ecuadorian economy) while the number of retirees is increasing and the central state is reluctant to pay off its $16 million debt to the agency and is relieved since 2015 and a decision made by Correa of its obligation to provide the IESS financial resources accounting for 40% of the amount of pensions paid by the social security. And of course, the social security system is plagued by incompetence, misuse of funds (in particular
for electoral proselytism) and corruption with one of its former director on the run in Peru and another one currently facing charges of ‘organized crime’; meanwhile it has been revealed last year that the National Police Social Security Institute (Isspol) had lost some $800 million in dubious financial transactions carried by Jorge Chérrez ‘the Magician’ Miño, a shady Quito businessman who holds several companies domiciled in Panama.

Finally, a new Organic Health Code (COS) should have been adopted to replace the largely outdated one written in the 1930s. After eight years languishing in the National Assembly, a new one had been drafted and passed by legislators but, after intense lobbying from the conservative Catholic circles including Guillermo Lasso, unhappy with parts concerning medical use of marijuana and access to contraception and worrying about the possibility it would open the door for legalization of abortion, President Moreno vetoed in last September the entirety of the code, making the drafting of a new code impossible for one year. Lasso and social conservatives loudly celebrated the abandonment of the new COS at a time when the country was facing pandemic. Anyway, last month, the Constitutional Court ruled in favor of decriminalizing abortion in case of rape (which was until legal in case the raped woman was ‘idiot or demented’; I tell you the COS is largely outdated!) and president-elect Lasso, who had campaigned after the first round on the promise to not put his personal faith over constitutional ruling, had been forced to concede defeat on the matter.

The ethical crisis

Another big issue, whose extent had been hidden by years of silencing of media outlets by the Correa administration, is corruption which is widespread in the central government, in the local administrations as well as in public and semi-public companies (especially oil, infrastructure works and health sectors). While some of the corruption cases disclosed in the last four years may have been used to get rid of political rivals, the reality of the accusations are usually hardly questionable or, at least, largely credible when it involves shady individuals who have, for example, plagiarized their academic thesis, omitted to mention relevant family relationship or are the owners of companies or bank accounts in tax havens.

Among the high-profile politicians (both belonging to correísta and anticorreísta sides) involved in the non-stop avalanche of corruption cases that happened during the last four years have been two former presidents (Rafael Correa, notably in a case of illegal campaign financing; Abdalá Bucaram also charged for having ordered the murder of an imprisoned Israeli con artist in a totally surreal scandal), two seating vice-presidents (Jorge Glas and María Alexandra Vicuña who both ended in jail), a minister of Economic and Social Inclusion (Iván Espinel, a former IESS provincial director who jumped into politics and ran for president in 2017), several assemblymen (including Eliseo Azuero – currently on the run – and Daniel Mendoza – now in jail – who masterminded a corruption scheme to distribute hospitals funds and posts among legislators), a vice president of the Constitutional Court and Correa’s childhood friend who agreed to cooperate with justice against the former president, various high officials and politicians falsely claiming disability benefits (my favorite one is Christian Cruz, the president of the Council for Citizen Participation and Social Control, in charge of selecting and appointing high-ranking officials, who won taekwondo and karate championships and obtained a license to drive a bus or a truck while claiming a visual and auditory disability rate of 81%), the mayors of the two largest cities of the country and, ironically, the two successive general comptrollers in charge of overseeing the awarding of government contracts (Carlos Pólit fled to Florida in 2017 to evade indictment in the Odebrecht case; his successor, Pablo Celi, abruptly sent to jail two days after the runoff for his involvement in a corruption network operating in the state-owned Petroecuador oil company that also comprised José Agusto Briones, a former secretary of the presidency and key ally of Moreno who has been found dead two days ago in his cell in what has been ruled as a suicide).

In the previous legislature, out of 137 assemblymen, 40 were reportedly facing judicial proceedings in some 58 distinct cases ranging from influence peddling, rape, unlawful association and usurpation of public functions to embezzlement, violation of privacy, child sexual abuse and torture. And of course, President Moreno himself is facing accusations of bribery in the building of the Coca Codo Sinclair dam in Amazon which may sent him in jail in the following years. The last official of the Moreno administration caught in a scandal has been Freddy Carrión, the ombudsman in charge of investigating human rights violations, who has been arrested few days ago after being recorded by a security camera getting a scuffle with a former health minister under Moreno with both heavily intoxicated; Carrión later tried to sexually assaulted a woman. All of this happening during a night party organized after the curfew despite the prohibition of such gatherings to prevent the spreading of COVID-19.

The institutional crisis

On of the key features of the Moreno administration was the institutional decay and the quasi-meltdown of the Ecuadorian state, the consequence of the infighting with Correa’s followers, the purges of the state apparatus, the dependence on unreliable and rapidly changing parliamentary majorities after the split of the Alianza País caucus, the fight between political factions for the control of key institutions and, probably the original sin, the lack of genuine popular roots in the Ecuadorian society of correísmo which has always between conceived as a movement led by an omnipotent and omnipresent caudillo who connects with masses without mediation by a strongly organized party, traditional institutions, medias, unions, professional organizations, NGOs, peasant and indigenous confederations or neighborhood committees, all things on which Correa decided to stage a war on.

With Correa out of the picture (and also the end of oil bonanza that had been very helpful to buy political loyalties and the beginning of economic hardships), there was nothing much left to glue together the various factions of the rump Alianza País, a movement built in a hurry in 2006 to support the candidacy of Correa, a man who was totally unknown one year and a half before, and quickly attracted politicians from all shades of the political spectrum. As Moreno began to openly disdain the Alianza País, the ruling party slide into internal strife, lost the support of local elected officials and lost its grip on state institutions. As under Correa, the party, the civil service and even the government had been conceived as appendixes of the president’s office (which decided of basically everything), as the new president abandoned the micromanagement style of his predecessor and basically withdrew from policymaking and party politics, the Alianza País fell apart and the state apparatus rapidly followed.

During the four years of the Moreno administration, there have been four successive vice presidents, four finance ministers, five interior ministers, four foreign ministers, six health ministers, five general secretaries of the presidency, three presidents of the National Assembly, five presidents of the IESS, five presidents of the CPCCS, four presidents of the National Electoral Council (CNE), three attorneys general (fiscales generales) and three general comptrollers. While such levels of turnover in government and public institutions aren’t unprecedented in Ecuadorian history (it was actually the norm in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s when the Congress was heavily fragmented into a dozen of parties competing for the government posts and money and for the control of the legislature and electoral and judicial institutions), it contrast sharply with the relative stability under Correa (who however continued the tradition of frequent ministerial reshuffles despite holding a strong, stable and disciplined majority in the parliament).

In the end, the Moreno presidency saw the restoration of the old partidocracia (rule of parties) and a return to the pugna de poderes (power struggle) characterized by a confrontation between the legislative and executive powers that usually also involved the judicial power either as an institution whose control is at stake either as yet another independent political actor. Unlike Correa, Moreno had to deal with the old parliamentarian practice of juicios políticos (‘political trials’ i.e. impeachment proceedings) aiming at removing seating ministers or high officials from office. The most egregious case was the removal of office on last November of María Paula Romo, the interior minister and Moreno’s main political operator, by a parliamentary majority that made little sense ideologically speaking (CREO, PSC, correístas and even a wing of the Alianza País); its main consequence was the complete collapse of parliamentarian support for the Moreno administration. The resurgence of such practices and the spectacular comeback of the rule of parties demonstrates how frail, superficial and precarious the political hegemony achieved by Correa was.

The destructive battle between supporters and enemies of Correa over the control of key state institutions, the constitution of ‘unorthodox’ parliamentary majorities that collapsed after only few months (like the 2019 alliance between Alianza País and CREO which lasted nine months), the attempts made by parliamentary caucuses to remove electoral officials on not always substantiated grounds of electoral fraud, the blurring lines between politics, business and entertainment, the very common cambio de camiseta (‘change of shirt’: party switching), the spreading by politicians of all shades of zany conspiracy theories, the widespread corruption, the (not very widely publicized) revelations about parties illegally registering by using forged signatures (mirroring the 2014 suspiciously very rapid invalidation of signatures collected to organize a referendum on oil extraction in the Yasuní National Park), the emergence of new parties whose political orientation is undefinable, the complete lack of transparency and accountability in the activities of public institutions, parties and ministries, the absence of internal democracy in political organizations, all of these has participated in a considerable deterioration in the image of democratic institutions and Ecuador’s political class and fed widespread suspicions if not paranoia over the real intentions of this or that politician and for whom he is actually working for.

[Sir John Johns]

The security crisis

Nothing illustrates more the decay of the Ecuadorian state under Moreno than the deterioration of the security situation and the difficulty of the country to assert its national sovereignty. Especially worrying has been the penetration of Colombian guerrillas and paramilitary groups deeply involved in drug trafficking on the northern border of the country, especially in Esmeraldas and Sucumbíos provinces. The beginning of 2018 saw a series of attacks from a FARC dissident group that included the car bombing of a police station, an explosion near a naval checkpoint and the kidnapping and murdering of three journalists followed few days after by those of a couple of Ecuadorian citizens. The killing in December 2018 of ‘Guacho’, the Ecuadorian-born leader of the FARC dissidence, in a joint Colombian and Ecuadorian military operation has put an end to the outbreak of violence in Esmeraldas but the situation remains precarious. In the meantime, Sucumbíos, the Ecuadorian province with the highest homicide rate, is becoming a central hub of drug trafficking at the hands of former FARC mafias which are terrorizing indigenous communities and, occasionally, engaging in gunfights with the Ecuadorian police.

Recent years have also seen the implantation of Mexican drug cartels in the coastal provinces of the country, notably in Esmeraldas and Manabí. In 2020, the Ecuadorian police seized a record 128 tons of drugs, an increase of 61.5% compared to 2019, and, for the only two first months of 2021, already 23 tons of drugs have been seized. Other traffics and criminal activities have developed in Ecuador in the last years, notably illegal logging of balsa wood, fuel smuggling, poaching of endangered species and illegal mining. In June 2019, the Ecuadorian government had to declare a state of emergency and sent the army in La Merced de Buenos Aires (Imbabura, northern highlands) to put an end to illegal gold mining at the hands of criminal groups which also engaged into violence, sexual exploitation and racketeering of indigenous communities. Meanwhile, the town of Huaquillas (El Oro), on the border with Peru, has been the theater last fall of a series of assassinations as part of a rivalry between smuggling gangs.

Last months have been also marked by a series of high-profile assassinations including those of Jorge Luis Zambrano ‘Rasquiña’, a former leader of Los Choneros gang, of Harrison Salcedo, a star lawyer who had defended the aforementioned Zambrano, former vice president Jorge Glas and disgraced assemblyman from Sucumbíos Eliseo Azuero, of Efraín Ruales, a TV presenter and actor who had denounced corruption in his television show, and of Patricio Mendoza Palma, a former assemblyman from Los Ríos province and mayor of Buena Fe accused of corruption and suspected to have ordered the murder of a political rival back in 2003. The homicide rate in Ecuador has increased from 5.7 per 100,000 in 2018 to 6.7 per 100,000 in 2019 and 7.7 per 100,000 in 2020, though still far away from countries like Venezuela (45.6 per 100,000), Honduras (37.6 per 100,000), Mexico (27 per 100,000), Colombia (24.3 per 100,000) or Brazil (19.3 per 100,000).

The Moreno administration has also proved unable, despite the proclamation of two states of emergency in the overcrowded prisons, to address the explosion of gang violence in the country’s penitentiaries which culminated on last February with a series of coordinated attacks that broke out simultaneously in four jails and led to the atrocious massacre and dismemberment of 79 inmates, an outburst of barbarity Ecuador isn’t accustomed to (the 2021 prison riots resulted in more deaths than the 1995 war with Peru). While in 2017, there were 2.14 violent deaths per 100,000 prisoners, in 2020 this rate has arisen to 13.6 and is, so far, 21.25 for this year.

Also must be mentioned the difficulties met by the Ecuadorian government to protect its territorial waters in face of the Chinese fishing fleet poaching off the Galápagos Islands to the dismay of local fishermen and the decision made by Moreno to enable the military use of the archipelago’s airport by the US for anti-drug operations.

The environmental crisis

Finally, the sadly overlooked environmental situation in the country must be evoked and is one of the keys to understand the success of Yaku Pérez in the latest presidential election. A country with already a long history of natural (volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, landslides, floods, droughts) and human-made (oil spills, pollution by overuse of fertilizers, mining and aquaculture industry, deforestation and destruction of mangroves) catastrophes, Ecuador has saw in last decades the emergence of a strong and grassroots environmentalist movement, especially strong among indigenous communities which are already facing strong competition from agro-business in the access to lands and water. Such movement is particularly opposed to extractive activities, mainly gold mining and oil extraction, as the Ecuadorian state has been unable to uphold environment legislation and prevent environmental disasters like the 1993 disastrous landslide in La Josefina (Azuay, southern highlands) provoked by inadequate mining and carrying activities that caused the deaths of 150 villagers and the destruction of entire rural communities or the massive pollution provoked by oil extraction in Sucumbíos by Texaco and Petroecuador which is the subject of a still ongoing legal battle between Chevron (which has bought Texaco), the Ecuadorian state and indigenous communities with the two former using very questionable methods.

Despite the enshrinement of nature rights in the 2008 Constitution and the wide promotion of the sumak kawsay (‘living well’) concept by the Correa administration, the Ecuadorian government has continued to push for the development of extractive activities with the 2013 opening of the Yasuní National Park (northeastern Amazon) to oil exploitation or the beginning in 2019 of the first large-scale mining operations in Mirador (Zamora-Chinchipe, southern Amazon), ignoring the concerns of local communities which weren’t consulted and the opposition of environmentalists who were insulted (being called ‘cavemen’ or ‘retrogrades’), brutally repressed and even prosecuted under charges of sabotage and terrorism.

In the last months, a series of devastating floods, exacerbated by deforestation, erosion and inadequate agricultural practices, have severely affected the country, notably in the central highlands and in the Amazon where it severely hit local indigenous communities. In March 2020, unprecedented flooding devastated the Sarayaku indigenous community in Pastaza (central Amazon), destroying farms, bridges, roads, schools and some thirty houses; the community is currently suing the Ecuadorian state for its failure to help the villagers during the flooding and the subsequent of COVID-19 in the area and to rebuild infrastructure. In last February, it was a spectacular landslide in Chunchi (Chimborazo, central highlands) that damaged two bridges, destroyed 20 houses and forced the government to evacuate 200 families.

Potentially the most destructive environmental disaster is however the phenomenon of regressive erosion in the Coca River Basin that is putting at risk Correa’s flagship project, the Coca Codo Sinclair hydroelectric plant, which is epitomizing every wrong with the Correa government. The plant, whose dimension had been sharply increased by Correa compared to the initial project, was intended to provide most of the electricity consumed in Ecuador. Its construction, overseen by Jorge Glas, was awarded firstly to an Argentinian group without experience in the area then to the Chinese company Sinohydro. Initially planned to cost $1.158 million, the construction ultimately cost at least $2.245 million funded by loans from Chinese banks and government and was plagued with accusations of infringement of labor laws, a strike of workers to protest poor working conditions and the collapse of a tunnel that killed ten Ecuadorian and three Chinese workers in December 2014. Shortly after the inauguration, countless cracks and construction defected were detected forcing the Ecuadorian government to engage expansive repair works.

As predicted by several experts (even if it is still debated whether or not it is the consequence of the construction of the plant), the San Rafael Falls, the country’s largest waterfall and a main ecotourism attraction, disappeared on 2 February 2020 due to a rapid erosion process; its natural bridge collapsed on last February and sank in the water. In the meantime, the erosion had also provoked on 7 April 2020 the breaking of two oil pipelines and the spilling of some 15,800 barrel of crude oil in an area inhabited by impoverished indigenous communities. The worst spill in Ecuadorian Amazon since at least fifteen years, it directly affected some 41,000 inhabitants and rendered water non-potable for several days in the Amazon main towns; additionally, oil production and export had to be suspend for several weeks. Considering themselves as having been totally abandoned by the government, the local indigenous communities are still demanding justice for the oil spilling. The erosion phenomenon is still ongoing and has even accelerated in the latest weeks the consequence of heavy raining, threatening to damage roads and bridges, forcing Petroecuador to displace its pipelines and putting at risk the operation of the Coca Codo Sinclair plant itself.

[Sir John Johns]

A bit late for some updates.

The distribution of parliamentary committees has taken place on 20 May under an agreement made between CREO, Pachakutik and the ID. Clearly, several sectors of the indigenous party are very unease with the alliance with CREO: Bertha Sánchez, elected on the PK national list, was initially very reluctant to vote in favor of the distribution of committees before finally making her mind, voting in favor (and thus casting the decisive vote) and immediately breaking in tears; Ricardo Vanegas, a non-indigenous lawyer hailing for Guayas but elected on the national list as well as the brother of famous (and quite shady) fedora-wearing lawyer Héctor Vanegas, also expressed his discomfort over the agreement with CREO and was one of the last PK legislators to approve it. The election of the next leadership of the CONAIE on 25, 26 and 27 June will be certainly decisive for the political future of Pachakutik and its relationship with the indigenous confederation: the election as president of the CONAIE of the radical Leonidas Iza, one of the main architects of the rebuilding of the indigenous confederation’s bases and one of the main organizers of the October 2019 protests, could mean the rupture between the CONAIE and Pachakutik as well as the emergence of a strong opposition to Lasso, not in parliament with the likes of the PSC or the UNES which both are lacking genuine grassroots organization, but in the streets.

The following days saw the distribution of the chairmanships of the sixteen permanent parliamentary committees. The oficialista (ruling) National Agreement Bench (Bancada del Acuerdo Nacional, BAN; made up by CREO and minor and provincial parties) and Pachakutik received both four chairmanships. The BAN received the chairmanship of the following committees: Workers’ Rights and Social Security; International Relations and Human Mobility; Food Sovereignty and Farming and Fishing Development; Biodiversity and Natural Resources. Pachakutik obtained the chairmanship of these committees: Constitutional Guarantees, Human Rights, Collective Rights and Interculturality; Autonomous Governments, Decentralization, Jurisdiction and Territorial Organization; Education, Culture, Science, Technology and Ancestral Knowledge; Ethics Committee. Meanwhile, the ID received three committee chairmanships: Justice and State Structure; Sovereignty, Integration and Comprehensive Security; Right to Health and Sport.

The UNES got only two committee chairmanships: the pretty useless Transparency, Citizen Participation and Social Control (in which correísmo had ‘exiled’ its most recalcitrant opponents in past legislatures) and the politically irrelevant but now permanent Comprehensive Protection for Children and Adolescents (that should have gone to the PSC but ended in the hands of Pierina Correa, Rafael’s sister). Continuing on its losing streak, the PSC received no committee chairmanship at all and is thus excluded of all key posts in the Assembly for the next two years. The chairmanship of the committee for Economic and Productive Development and Micro-Enterprise went to Daniel Noboa (elected in Santa Elena for the non-aligned Ecuatoriano Unido), a son of five-time presidential candidate and banana tycoon Álvaro Noboa while the chairmanship of the Committee for Audit and Political Control was received by investigative journalist Fernando Villavicencio, elected on an anti-corruption platform on the Socialist Party-Concertación national list.

In a major upset for the ruling CREO, the chairmanship of the powerful committee for Economic and Fiscal Regime and its Regulation and Control, which had been promised to CREO assemblyman Diego Ordóñez (elected from Quito) under the terms of the BAN-PK-ID agreement, ended in the hands of Mireya Pazmiño, a PK assemblywoman for Bolívar, who was elected with the votes of the UNES and PSC members of the committee in addition with her own. Pazmiño has been consequently expelled from the ranks of Pachakutik for having breach the agreement and is now seating as an independent.

Pazmiño is the seventh legislator to defect since the inaugural meeting of the National Assembly, only two weeks ago: the current number of PK legislators is now standing at 25 (down from 27), the one of ID legislators at 16 (down from 18), the one of PSC legislators at 15 (down from 18) while the one of BAN legislators has increased at 25 (up from 21) and the one of UNES legislators is remaining unchanged; seven legislators are now seating as independents.


Andrés Arauz has announced on 22 May he’s resigning the presidency of the Social Commitment Force (Fuerza Compromiso Social, FCS), one of the two registered parties forming the Union for Hope (Unión por la Esperanza, UNES) alliance. He’s leaving party politics for now and will return to Mexico completing his doctorate in economics. This possibly means the end of his political career (at only 36!).

It remains to see how the mess that is currently correísmo will organize and consolidate itself as it is so far consisting of the unregistered Citizen’s Revolution Movement (Movimiento Revolución Ciudadana, MRC), the FCS founded in 2016 by a public health bureaucrat who sided with Moreno in his feud with Correa and is now imprisoned after having been sentenced in 2019 to ten years in jail for money laundering (the party was afterward kind of hijacked by correístas but some of its initial members are still around in the party apparatus) and the Democratic Center (Centro Democrático, CD) owned by journalist-turned-politician and king of opportunism Jimmy Jairala who is clearly using it to advance his own political and financial interests.

[Sir John Johns]

Yesterday, the Metropolitan Council of Quito (the directly elected 21-member municipal council of Ecuador’s capital city) voted in favor of the removal from office of the mayor of Quito, Jorge Yunda (Unión Ecuatoriana, UE) who has been embroiled since months in a series of corruption scandals.

A former surgeon and once the member of the music band Sahiro, Jorge Yunda became a household name as a radio host (under the alias of ‘Loro Homero’) and a TV-presenter while also founding, managing and possibly owning through front men (testaferrismo) the Corporación Canela media company which includes Radio Canela, the most popular radio station in Quito. Yunda entered in politics when appointed by Rafael Correa to the presidency (2007-2009) of the Radio and Television National Council (Conatel), the state body in charge of allocating broadcast frequencies, a position he is accused to have used to expand his media empire. After a stint as the president of Club Deportivo El National, the main soccer club of Quito, he was elected to the National Assembly under the banner of the Alianza PAIS (2017-19), sided with Moreno when this latter broke with Correa, before resigning his seat in the national legislature to run in 2019 for mayor of Quito as the candidate of the Unión Ecuatoriana, a party founded by Correa’s former attorney-general whose ideology and political orientation are vague and undefinable to say the least (officially, it is ‘third-way’ and ‘at equidistance from far-right and far-left’). Running as a populist outsider, Yunda was unexpectedly elected mayor of the capital, placing first with only 21.4% of the vote and defeating the seventeen other candidates including the favorite, former mayor Paco Moncayo (ID), and the candidate supported by Correa. However, in the metropolitan council, the UE won only 3 seats out of 21 with the correísta FCS holding a plurality (9) of seats and the remaining seats being distributed between the social-democrat/social liberal ID (4), César Montúfar's center-to-center-right Concertación (3) and CREO (2).


The logo of Yunda’s party is nowhere to be seen while his slogan ‘Quito Grande Otra Vez’ (Quito Great Again) sounds suspiciously familiar...

Lacking a clear popular mandate and a majority in the council, Yunda has been further weakened by a series of corruption allegations and the opening of judicial proceedings for his alleged negligence in the management of the October 2019 protests that led to the destruction of municipal property and for possible favoritism in the awarding of water management and public works contracts. Since last February, he has been forced to wear an electronic tagging and been banned from leaving the country after his indictment in a case of overpricing in the procurement of 100,000 coronavirus test kits. Yunda’s position became untenable in last April when his own son, Sebastián, came under investigation for ‘organized crime’. The expertise of the seized phone of the 28-year-old Sebastián Yunda, who never has held any official position in the Quito administration, led indeed to the discovery of a series of chats in which the son of the mayor of Quito was discussing with businessmen and city’s officials the awarding of municipal contracts, the sell of municipal plots, the purchase of coronavirus test kits Yunda Junior acknowledged were unapproved by the WHO and the payment of commissions. The young Yunda apparently also tried to negotiate concert contract and commercial sponsoring for 4 AM, a music group for which he is a bass guitarist and a backing vocalist.



Sebastián Yunda, also called ‘Baby Yunda’, the guy in charge of Quito’s public contracts. What possibly could have been wrong?

After debates that lasted over sixteen hours and the surprise withdrawal of a first impeachment motion by its own initiator who claimed it would be useless as the FCS group would have vote in block against it and make it failed, a second impeachment motion was passed against Yunda with fourteen councilmen voting in favor – exactly the minimal votes needed for the motion to be passed –, six abstaining and one voting against. The FCS group in the metropolitan council, which had until then been supportive of Yunda in the last months (probably one of the explanations of Arauz’s disastrous results in the capital in both rounds, but especially the runoff), ultimately divided itself with three councilmen voting for the removal of Yunda, one (Luis Robles who in last April became a national laughingstock when he criticized the press inquiries on Yunda corruption affairs with the line ‘Because as Spiderman has said, with great power comes great responsibility’) voting against and the five remaining ones abstaining.

The mayorship of Quito has been entrusted to the vice-mayor, Santiago Guarderas, a constitutional lawyer and former dean of the faculty of jurisprudence of the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador. A former president of the provincial branch of the Social Christian Party (PSC), Guarderas was elected a metropolitan councilman on the UE list in 2019 and has been an ally of Yunda until very recently; since last April, he has however actively supported efforts to remove the mayor from office, claiming ‘he has betrayed the citizens’ interests’. Guarderas has cast the decisive vote in the impeachment motion against Yunda.

Yunda has three days to lodge an appeal against the impeachment motion with the Electoral Disputes Tribunal (TCE); if he decline to do so or if the appeal is rejected, Guarderas will become mayor of Quito on a permanent basis.

For people interested into Ecuadorian really cheezy pop music, a musical clip of Jorge Yunda’s group, Sahiro, followed by one of Sebastián's 4 AM. Pretty unimpressive and mediocre but both videos have over two million views (!), so that seems very popular in Ecuador.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3FIncAk2jc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mT-82EAmgY

[Sir John Johns]

Guillermo Lasso is beginning his presidency with the highest approvals on record for a newly vested president since the return of democracy in 1979. According to the Cedatos polling institute, 71.4% of surveyed are approving the new president (against 9.3% for Lenín Moreno in his last week in office) with the most supportive groups being inhabitants of Quito (75.0%), women (75.1%), those between 16 and 25 years of age (74.4%) and people from ‘mid-high social economic level’ (79.1%). The less supportive groups are inhabitants of Guayaquil (66.7%), men (67.2%), people over 46 years of age (63.7%) and people from ‘low social economic level’ (68.0%). 61.7% of surveyed trust the word of the president and 73.2% approve ‘the attitude and way of being of the president’. The decision to dismiss the proposed alliance between CREO, the PSC and the UNES is considered as very good by 17.8% of surveyed, good for 45.4%, bad for 15.5% and very bad for 7.1% (14.2% don’t know/don’t answer). 42.1% are approving the work of the National Assembly against 22.9% who are disapproving it while only 21.5% trust the word of assemblymen (still up from 6.5% in April 2021 and 2.5% in November 2020) and 53.5% don’t trust it.

Still, it isn’t unusual for a newly vested president to start his presidency with skyrocket approvals (68% for Roldós in 1979 and Correa in 2007, 67% for Bucaram in 1996 and 66% for Mahuad in 1998 and Moreno in 2017) only to end his term with abysmal approvals (as aforementioned, Moreno has ended with a 9.3% approval after having reached an atrocious 4.8% in March 2021; Mahuad’s approvals were 7% at the time of his removal from office and one can admire the truly impressive and probably never unmatched achievement of Bucaram whose approvals collapsed from 67% to 6% in the six months that lasted his epic trainwreck administration).

Ecuadorians seems to approve the first decisions made by Lasso, beginning with the setting up of a vaccination plan that the inept Moreno administration has not even been able to draft; the removal from the risk center of the credit information of Ecuadorians owing a debt of less than $1,000 (enabling 1.7 million people to once again apply for loans); the repeal of much of the Communication Law, a gag law passed under Correa, and the introduction of a conscience clause and a right to professional secrecy and freedom to exercise their jobs for journalists; the introduction of a new code of ethics for members of the presidential and government administration including the prohibition of the hiring of relatives and the use of state-owned vehicles and lands for private matters; the requirement for government members to hold a least one press conferences every three months; the end of the practice of displaying the president’s portrait in every public office; the severe restriction in use of cadenas nacionales (compulsory broadcast of government announcements initially intended for emergency situations but abused under Correa and, to a lesser extent Moreno, to disseminate political propaganda and insult opponents).

Also rather well received have been the accommodating style of the new head of state as well as his openings to left-wing, indigenous, rural and feminist sectors that materialized during the constitution of the new government with the appointments of Mae Montaño (an Afro-Ecuadorian woman from the impoverished province of Esmeraldas involved in social work, a political heavyweight who was the vice president of CREO and a leading assemblywoman as well as a well-respected and independent-minded politician who had left CREO in 2018 and had voiced support in favor of legalization of abortion in case of rape) as minister for Economic and Social Inclusion, of Gustavo Manrique (an engineer involved in green business since 2001 and the holder of a Guinness World Record in recycling of plastic bottles: 1.5 million bottles in six days) as minister for Environment, Water and Ecological Transition (the first time ‘ecological transition’ is included in the designation of the ministry) and of Bernarda Ordoñez Moscoso, a 30-year-old feminist lawyer involved in fight against gender-based violence, as secretary for Human Rights. Has been also created a secretary for Management and Development of Peoples and Nationalities (in charge of elaborating and implementing public policies in favor of indigenous sectors) headed by Luis Pachala, a former indigenous assemblyman hailing for the remote rural and economically depressed province of Bolívar, and an office of presidential adviser with ministerial rank (kind of ‘czar’) in charge of Public Policies for Fighting Children Malnutrition.

Critics have been however also addressed toward the much more traditional profile of ministers in charge of economic sectors (Simón Cueva, a former IMF representative in Bolivia, as minister for Economy and Finance; Julio José Prado, an economist and former president of the Association of Private Banks of Ecuador as minister for Production, External Trade, Investments and Fisheries; Darío Herrera, a real estate businessman, as minister of Urban Planning and Housing; Iván Correa, a banker, as secretary for Public Administration), the disproportionate political weight in the cabinet, ministries and presidential administration held by persons coming from the pro-free enterprise Fundación Ecuador Libre think tank (notably Ralph Suástegui, the secretary general of the presidency, and Aparicio Caicedo, the influential presidential adviser for governance who published tweets in 2011 supporting tax avoidance; Caicedo has since indicated he now longer held these opinions), the blatant lack of gender parity (7 women for 19 men), the wealthiness of the cabinet (worth $58 million for the combined estate of the president, the vice president and the ministers with Lasso owning alone nine houses), the lack of minister coming from the Amazonian provinces and the inclusion in the cabinet of a few political old-timers like former Azuay prefect and mayor of Cuenca Marcelo Cabrera (now the minister for Transportation and Public Works) or the reappointment of Ivonne Baki, a Donald Trump’s friend who obtained the organization of the 2004 Miss Universe contest in Ecuador, as ambassador to the United States. There seems to be a secret article in the Ecuadorian constitution providing that Baki must obligatorily held a public office because she has performed public functions in almost every Ecuadorian administrations since two decades: already ambassador to Washington under Mahuad, trade minister under Gutiérrez (after a disappointing presidential bid in 2002), ambassador for the Yasuní ITT initiative under Correa, ambassador to Qatar and, once again, the United States, under Moreno.

Additionally, Lasso’s first pick for minister for Energy and Non-Renewable Resources, Roberto Salas, had to withdrew his name after it emerged he was owning shares worth $782,000 in a large Ecuadorian holding which is also the shareholder of a Canadian mining company which is owning three mining projects in Ecuador and the defense minister, Admiral Fernando Donoso, had to deny having sign the ‘Madrid Charter’, a text initiated by Spanish far-right party VOX to ‘defend liberty and democracy’ in the ‘Iberosphere’ against ‘the progression of communism’ embodied by ‘initiatives like the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group’ (of which Rafael Correa is a member). In addition of PSC legislator Esteban Torres who has never hide his sympathies for far-right foreign parties, Ecuadorian politicians having acknowledged having signed the ‘Madrid Charter’ included former presidential candidate Pedro Freile (despite his pro-abortion and pro-drug legalization stances), former vice president under Moreno Otto Sonnenholzner, far-right nutcase Fernando Balda who is suing Rafael Correa for his 2012 alleged abduction in Colombia (ironically, Balda entered in politics as an early member of Correa’s Alianza País) and, amusingly enough, PSC legislator Henry Kronfle, who tried a month ago to get elected president of the National Assembly with the votes of the 'communist' UNES. When asked by journalists, several of these Ecuadorian politicians clarified that, while they have signed the Madrid Charter, they totally rejected xenophobia, homophobia, racism and fascism.

Also, the PSC caucus lost yet another legislator (the third one in a month) as Gruber Zambrano (elected from Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas province) is reportedly leaving without, so far, giving much information. This follows the departure of César Rohón (from Guayas) over the alliance with the UNES and the one of Elías Jachero (elected from the Amazonian province of Pastaza for a local allied party, United for Pastaza) who joined the BAN and has been accused by Jaime Nebot of having been bought by the Lasso administration. The PSC caucus is now reduced to 14 assemblymen while the president of the party since 1999, Pascual del Cioppo, has resigned his post and left the PSC altogether to accept the post of ambassador to Spain.

[Sir John Johns]

Apologies, I made a mistake: the PSC hadn’t lost three legislators in a month but four as María del Carmen Aquino (elected from Santa Elena province) had left in late May to sit in the CREO-led BAN caucus. Which means the PSC has lost over 20% of its legislators in just a month, the reverse situation of what happened in the previous legislature when it actually gained legislators from other caucuses and managed to maintain a remarkable discipline and internal coherency in sharp contrast with other parliamentary groups, notably the Alianza PAIS which almost immediately split between Moreno’s supporters and opponents and the CREO caucus which lost 18 of its 34 initial members in four years.

The main difference now is that the PSC historical leader, Jaime Nebot (who has led the party since the early 1990s, firstly in a sometimes uneasy shared leadership with former president Febres-Cordero and alone after the latter’s death in 2008) has announced last year his retirement from politics after his dramatic decision of not running a third time for president. He has no designated heir to replace him at the head of a party that is reportedly divided between a reformist and moderate line incarnated by mayor of Guayaquil Cynthia Viteri and a much more right-winger line associated with the party’s old guard. Amusingly enough, most of persons being floated to replace Nebot are blonde women once TV journalists: the aforementioned Cynthia Viteri; current prefect of Guayas Susana González; former deputy mayor of Guayaquil Doménica Tabacchi; former national assemblywoman Cristina Reyes.

First cracks are appearing in the Correísta block as the UNES caucus suffered, to the surprise of many, its first desertion: Francisco León, an assemblyman from Guayas, has formalized his departure from the UNES legislative group to seat as an independent. León is a former mayor of Salitre (ninth most populated canton of Guayas with 60,000 inhabitants) firstly elected in 2009 as the candidate of the right-wing alliance between the PSP (Lucio Gutiérrez’s party) and the UNO (a now extinct party founded by… Guillermo Lasso) and reelected in 2014 as the candidate of Correa’s Alianza PAIS; this is a career actually pretty similar to the one of Jimmy Jairala, the leader of the Democratic Center, elected prefect of Guayas in 2009 as the candidate of the PSP-UNO alliance (against Rafael Correa’s own sister, Pierina Correa), and reelected in 2014 this time with the active support of Correa.

In a major upset for the ruling CREO, the chairmanship of the powerful committee for Economic and Fiscal Regime and its Regulation and Control, which had been promised to CREO assemblyman Diego Ordóñez (elected from Quito) under the terms of the BAN-PK-ID agreement, ended in the hands of Mireya Pazmiño, a PK assemblywoman for Bolívar, who was elected with the votes of the UNES and PSC members of the committee in addition with her own. Pazmiño has been consequently expelled from the ranks of Pachakutik for having breach the agreement and is now seating as an independent.

Pachakutik is now examining a possible reintegration of Pazmiño in its ranks.

The composition of the National Assembly is now the following (changes compared to February results):

Union for Hope 48 seats (-1)
Pachakutik 25 seats (-2)
National Agreement Bench (CREO and allies) 25 seats (+13)
Democratic Left 16 seats (-2)
Social Christian Party 14 seats (-4)
independents 9 seats (-4)

[Sir John Johns]

Guillermo Lasso has been discharged from a Miami hospital on last Saturday after having successfully underwent surgery to remove a cyst in the lumbar area. The long-planned complex surgical operation should enable Lasso to walk again without a cane. While in a trip to Madrid in 2013, Lasso had a fall, fractured his right fibula and had to be operated in a Spanish clinic where he suffered medical malpractice that damage the spinal cord and led thereafter to the formation of cysts (several having been previously removed in 2018 in a previous surgical operation in the United States). Lasso is planned to return to Ecuador tomorrow.



On 28 June, on the occasion of the International LGBT+ Pride Day and upon request of Lasso, the rainbow colors lit up Carondelet presidential palace, the only second time such thing happened in Ecuador (the first time happened under Moreno, in 2017, but the practice was dropped after an avalanche of homophobic critics on social networks).

https://twitter.com/LassoGuillermo/status/1409671757510807553

‘In tribute to this special day for LGBTQ+ persons, the Carondelet Palace lights up for #Pride2021

#TogetherWeDidIt for a more equitable and fairer Ecuador providing opportunities for all.

#TheEncounterIsDiverse

That same day, was announced the creation of an under-secretariat for Diversities in the secretariat for Human Rights whose mission, as worded by secretary for Human Rights Bernarda Ordóñez, is ‘to build a public agenda with laws to protect against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation’ and presented as the ‘first public policy in favor of LGBTI community’. The titular of the new under-secretariat is Felipe Ochoa, a young gay lawyer hailing from the province of Loja, who has indicated that his priority will be the closure of the ‘de-homosexualization therapy clinics’ heavily criticized by human rights activists for their brutal methods to ‘cure’ their patients, going as far as abduction, sequestration and rape. Ochoa is reportedly the second gay member of a cabinet in Ecuador, the first one having been Carina Vance, a health minister under Correa who also tried to get the ‘de-homosexualization therapy clinics’ shut down without much success.

The Ecuadorian government also indicated the new under-secretariat will have a budget of $8 million but will have ‘no impact on the budget of the whole Human Rights secretariat’ while in early June Lasso and several public officials attended a religious service to commemorate the consecration of Ecuador to the Sacred Heart (an act made in 1874 by conservative and ultra-Catholic President Gabriel García Moreno), so make of that what you will.



In the meantime, also on 28 June, Pierina Correa attended an anti-abortion protest in Guayaquil during which she signed a ‘Pro-Life Memorandum’, a signature collection aiming at organizing a referendum on abortion, and was seen next a teenager presented as expecting a baby as the result of a rape. This sparked outrage not only among feminists who are now demanding the resignation of Correa as president of the legislative commission for child protection but even among the ranks of the UNES with several Correísta assemblywomen criticizing Correa for her disrespect of the recent ruling of the Supreme Court prohibiting criminalization of abortion in case of rape. Pierina Correa’s anti-abortion positions are in line with the ones of her brother (who, as president, opposed any relaxation of the strict abortion laws and throw a tantrum when an assemblywoman of his party introduce legislation to decriminalize abortion in case of rape going as far as threatening to resign from president if legislators voted in favor of the bill) but appear out of touch with the mood of many left-wing and youth voters who are more and more uncomfortable with the conservative orientations of Correísmo in terms of reproductive and sexual rights.

https://twitter.com/pierinaescorrea/status/1409626464283103237

‘Committed to the defense of life, I accompany actors of civil society in the signing of the ‘Pro-Life Memorandum’ in the San Francisco Square in Guayaquil.

#I’m Pro-Life
#Pierina Is Pro-Life’

A reminder of Pierina es Correa (‘Pierina Is Correa’), her surreal Facebook profile name and campaign slogan for UNES presidential nomination?



In more consequential news, Leonidas Iza has been elected last Sunday the new president of the CONAIE for a three-year term, receiving the votes of 821 delegates against 287 for María Vicenta Andrade Chalán, a veteran indigenous activist from Loja (southern Sierra), and 153 for Marco Guatemal, a former president of the Indigenous and Peasant Federation of Imbabura (FICI), hailing from Imbabura province (northern Sierra); Javier Aguavil, the president of the coastal branch (CONAICE) of the CONAIE, choose to withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Andrade before the vote took place arguing that a woman should led the CONAIE as decided by a 2017 resolution.

A member of the Panzaleo people (living in the central highland province of Cotopaxi) Iza, 39, has been the president of the Indigenous and Peasant Movement of Cotopaxi (MICC) since 2016, a major actor in the rebuilding of the indigenous federation bases as well as one of the faces of the October 2019 protests as well as a member of the delegation that negotiated with Moreno in the aftermath. He is the member of a family very active in the indigenous movement with his uncle, Leonidas Iza Quinatoa, having been a Pachakutik congressman, a MICC president and already the president of the CONAIE in 2001-04. Belonging to the leftist wing of the indigenous movement (he is reportedly a follower of Peruvian thinker José Carlos Mariátegui) and prioritizing economic issues over ethnic demands while also advocating anti-extractivist positions and defending water rights, Iza has demonstrated an ability to mobilize indigenous bases as exemplified by a protest he staged on last 11 June in Cotopaxi to oppose increase in gas prices. As such, he is feared by right-wing sectors and portrayed in conservative press in incredibly harsh terms, being compared to the ‘talibans’, labeled as a arch-violent and arch-radical agitator and depicted as a threat on democracy with Andersson Boscán, the host of a popular political talk-show going as far as stating that ‘from the CONAIE to a mariateguist guerrilla, there is a distance of one Leonidas Iza’.

Nevertheless, Iza’s actual political positions seems a bit hard to pin down while his relations with correísmo are quite ambiguous: after the nomination of Yaku Pérez as Pachakutik presidential candidate, he refused to campaign for him, alleging irregularities in the nomination process, was reportedly having contacts with Correa, still staged a demonstration in front of the Cotopaxi Provincial Electoral Council to denounce electoral fraud against Pachakutik in the last February elections and advocated casting a null ballot in the presidential runoff. The new leader of the CONAIE is widely believed to have electoral ambitions either as a legislator either, more probably, as a presidential candidate if not Ecuador’s first indigenous president.

[Expat in Ecuador]

You have a lot of interesting and important information in this blog Sir John Johns.  I thank you for it.

I do differ with you in a number of important areas.  Your strong bias against former President Rafael Correa and your ignoring of the impressive repression of the Ecuadorian left in order to prevent it’s candidate Andres Arauz from winning the Presidential election are first and foremost among them.

The national elections held this year were not fair.  They could not be.  I’m not alleging fraud, but there was extensive suppression of the left which you, Sir John Johns, have almost completely failed to report on.

It began with Lenin Moreno’s defection from the movement he had previously been in his entire life shortly after his election to the Presidency.  It wasn’t just his disaffection with Correa, Moreno became a traitor to everything he had previously believed in.  Suddenly Moreno became an adherent of neoliberal capitalist economics and a lapdog of U.S. foreign policy, the IMF, and multi-national corporate interests.  No adequate explanation of Moreno’s betrayal has been offered by him.  The idea that he was unaware of corruption going on under Correa is simply not plausible, nor does it explain Moreno’s 180 degree turn on virtually all policy matters. It may eventually come out that he was very well compensated for this betrayal, or it may never be known why he did it.  There were revelations and serious allegations in The Panama Papers about Moreno and his family maintaining offshore accounts, but the National Assembly declined to investigate him in their zeal to see Correa and his associates prosecuted.

After Moreno’s defection, propaganda against Correa and the Correistas became a daily thing which continued for almost four years up to the election.  This campaign was carried out by all major news outlets in Ecuador 24/7 (TV, newspapers and radio).  After Moreno won a shady court decision that stole Alianza PAIS from under the left of the party, the founders and leaders of the party, the Correistas were repeatedly prevented by the CNE from forming their own political party.

Then, after the Correistas managed an agreement to field candidates in the regional elections in 2019, and did well in those elections, that party, Fuerza Compromiso Social, was attacked by the press and the right-wing and was subsequently temporarily suspended by the CNE on shaky grounds.

The Correista Presidential ticket had to fight hard just to get on the ballot this year.  The ticket of Andres Arauz and Carlos Rabascal was the last to be certified and there were continuous efforts by serious political actors to get the CNE to eliminate the ticket up to shortly before the first round, and again before the second round.

Under the conditions of 24/7 press propaganda against the left, constant roadblocks against their candidates, and prosecutions of their leaders, the elections this year can hardly be called fair.  And the election results proved that this repression occurred against Ecuador’s largest political grouping as the Correista-led progressive alliance UNES won by far the most seats in the National Assembly despite all the repression.

The repression of the left was just enough, with the help of the anti-Correista forces in Pachakutik and Independent Left political parties, to eek out a victory for Guillermo Lasso in the Presidential runoff.

Do not get me wrong, I am not a Correista.   I am a democratic socialist from the U.S.  I share some sharp criticisms of Correa’s Presidency and the way the movement around him continues to be organized, but I do not share your one sided view of Correa. 

Correa’s term was a watershed in Ecuadorian history.  Tremendous economic and social progress was made and many barriers which previously effectively excluded workers and the poor were overcome.  Mistakes were made too, such as in dealing with opposition.  Much of this had to do with Correa’s popularity and impressive electoral power, including a period in which Correa had a supermajority in the National Assembly.  Correa could steam roll opposition and sadly he did it too much.  Some of it had to do with Correa’s combative personality, which is the same thing that got him elected and won him so much support - voters wanted a fighter who would be tough on the rich and the capitalists.

As you have probably already noticed, I also strongly disagree with you,Sir John Johns, in your characterization of Correa as repressing the press.  Have you ever been to Ecuador and read the press, watched TV, or listened to radio?  I think if you had you would know that the press here is astonishingly and uniformly right-wing and lacks credibility.  They are shameless and out of control.  Their content and wild accusations would make the British tabloids and Fox News blush.  And they are all vociferously anti-Correista and anti-left. This was balanced to some degree when Correa was President by state owned media, but since Moreno became President the state owned news media runs the same crap as the private media.  I won’t defend all of what Correa did to bring some accountability to this out of control and anti-democratic press, and I don’t know all the details, but something needs to be done to bring responsibility and accountability to Ecuador’s news media.

[Estrella]

Pray tell, noble traveller of multiverses, what alternate reality are you visiting us from?

I am a democratic socialist from the U.S.

Never mind, that explains it.

[Sir John Johns]

You have a lot of interesting and important information in this blog Sir John Johns.  I thank you for it.

I do differ with you in a number of important areas.

Hi, Jonathan! How are you?

I’m glad you appreciate my contributions to this forum (why everybody here is pretending it is a blog?) despite our political disagreements. I need time to address your numerous critics and complaints because they are covering a lot of topics that need to be elaborated on, clarified, nuanced or debunked but I’m opened to discussion and even to reevaluate Correa’s legacy as long as you provide something more than the quite Manichean and simplistic stuff you wrote that sound a bit too much like the content of excessively partisan English-speaking websites.


In a first tough blow for the Lasso administration, Interior Minister (officially ministro de gobierno ‘Government Minister’ in charge of law enforcement, public safety, coordination of the national administration, government relations with provincial and local administrations as well as social and professional movements and, often, legislators and political parties) César Monge, after weeks of speculation about his health condition, has resigned on 14 July his portfolio as he is suffering from a relapse of his pancreatic cancer. On 10 July, he was awarded the distinction of Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit by Lasso, fueling rumors about his imminent departure from the Interior Ministry. The next day, former vice president Alberto Dahik posted a tweet wrongly announcing the death of Monge he had to retract few minutes afterwards. Monge, 48, has been a founder of CREO, a party he led for eight years until his resignation last year after he was diagnosed with cancer. Still considered as Lasso’s main political operative and the chief organizer of CREO, he played a leading role in Lasso’s successful presidential campaign and has been elected a national assemblyman, a mandate he resigned to enter the government two months ago. Monge has been moved to the less demanding post of government adviser for ‘governance management and local affairs’.

The new Interior Minister is Alexandra Vela, the dean of the faculty of law of the private Quito-based University of Americas, who has been intermittently active in politics since over fourteen years, being one of the founders in 1977 of the late Popular Democracy (DP, Christian Democratic).  Among posts she has held, she has been a personal secretary to President Jaime Roldós (1979-81, elected as the candidate of the populist Concentration of Popular Forces), the secretary for administration in the government of President Osvaldo Hurtado (1981-84, DP) who ascended the presidency after Roldós’ death, a municipal council for Quito (1988-96), a congresswoman and the vice-president of the Congress (1996-97), a constituent assemblywoman (1998) and once again a congresswoman (1998-2002) at a time of the disintegration of the Christian Democratic party whose leader, Jamil Mahuad, elected president of Ecuador in 1998, had to deal with a major economic crisis that provoked his overthrow in January 2000. She then left the DP to join Hurtado’s Solidary Fatherland Movement split party, which failed to achieve electoral success and quickly disappeared, and moved out of public spotlight for almost two decades.


Also, the oficialista parliamentary majority could be potentially weakened with the recent sentencing of Mariano Curicama, an assemblyman from Chimborazo for the provincial ‘Intercultural Movement for Active People’ (MINGA, an acronym referring to the minga or minka, the traditional community work for mutual aid in indigenous communities) seating in the BAN caucus, to two months in jail for extortion at the expense of 615 public workers in Chimborazo provincial administration while a prefect (elected for Pachakutik but expelled from the party for his alliance with the Correa government; he also served as undersecretary in both Lucio Gutiérrez and Lenín Moreno administrations) between 2005 and 2019: Curicama and his vice-prefect, Tránsito Lluco, have been accused of having forced the prefecture’s employees to return 5% of their salaries (a common practice in Ecuadorian politics dubbed as diezmo ‘tithe’), collecting between 2013 and 2019 some $824,000 destined to fund MINGA. Denouncing ‘malice, persecution, and racism’, Curicama has claimed the money has been used for social work but according to the court has been unable to provide any evidence. The first sentenced assemblyman of this legislature, Curicama has announced he will appeal the sentence. Reporting the sentencing of Curicama, the right-leaning Diario Expreso is mentioning that Curicama is ‘currently a member of the MINGA movement-National Agreement Bench (correísta)’ while the correísta Pichincha Comunicaciones is running headlines on ‘Pachakutik assemblyman sentenced for extortion’. Now, I remember why I rarely go on these two websites...

[Expat in Ecuador]

I will continue to read your reports Sir John Johns, as you report many things of interest.  However, your failure to report on the extensive repression of Ecuador’s largest left group, the largest single political group in Ecuador, renders your overall analysis unreliable and raises serious questions about your commitment to real and fair democracy in Ecuador.

[Sir John Johns]

I will continue to read your reports Sir John Johns, as you report many things of interest.

I’m surprised that you, a ‘journalist’ in the profession ‘since 1984’ currently living in Ecuador needs the ‘reports’ of an amateur psephologist without university training, unemployed and posting from France on an English-speaking politics forum mostly frequented by US teenagers to get what is basic information on the political situation of the country you’re residing in.

I looked at the very few ‘articles’ you have published on Latin America on crappy far-left activist and ‘citizens’ medias and, well, I knew the level of requirement to publish on these outlets isn’t particularly high, but still. I cannot help but note that, beside of negative remarks about ‘corporate medias’ which constantly pops up in your ‘production’ (a personal beef, maybe?), your ‘articles’ are almost exclusively based on English-speaking outlets of questionable reliability, to say the least, and incredible hyper-partisanship like Venezuelanalysis, CounterPunch, MintPress News or GreenLeft.org.au at the expense of articles written by Latin Americans or, in the case that interests us, Ecuadorian persons.

Which probably explains why your ‘article’ on the Ecuadorian 2019 local elections is plagued by so much gross factual errors, totally inexcusable coming from an on-site journalist. I could mention the province of Manabí being presented as a Pachakutik stronghold (complete nonsense that only a person unaware of basic demographic and political facts about Ecuador could have written: Manabí is home to an insignificant indigenous community and always ranks among the worst province for the indigenous movement, having been Yaku Pérez’s worst province in the 2021 presidential first round) or then-mayor of Quito, Mauricio Rodas, inaccurately described as a ‘popular politician’ when he then didn’t even bothered running for reelection and immediately left politics – at only 44! – after his term in office had expired as his stint as mayor was such a trainwreck and his approvals were in the toilets.

And let’s not forget the highly debatable assertion that right-wing parties hadn’t performed well in the 2014 local elections when Nebot – that you misspelled ‘Nesbot’ – was reelected mayor of Guayaquil without too much effort, when Rodas soundly defeated with a 20-point lead the Alianza PAIS incumbent in Quito in a major upset for Correa who had personally involved into the campaign for mayor of the capital, when openly right-wing parties captured from the Alianza PAIS major and mid-sized towns like Manta, Quevedo, Santo Domingo and Babahoyo or defeated the Correa-sponsored candidates for mayors in cities like Portoviejo or Riobamba or when the combined mainstream right parties (PSC, CREO and SUMA) gained a net total of 35 mayoralships compared to 2009.

While not mentioning the real losers of the 2014 local elections: Correa’s Alianza PAIS, for which it was its first major electoral setback, whose candidates for mayor were defeated in all major cities but Esmeraldas and Durán, which saw five of the incumbent prefects (in Bolívar, Cotopaxi, Imbabura, Loja and El Oro) it had endorsed failing to get reelected and which triumphed in the race for prefectures of Manabí, Guayas, Santa Elena and Napo only thanks to throwing its support to shady right-wing incumbents like Jimmy Jairala (elected prefect of Guayas in 2009 with the support of then-Guillermo Lasso’s party, UNO, and former president Lucio Gutiérrez’s PSP), Mariano Zambrano (elected prefect of Manabí as a PSC candidate in 2004 and reelected in 2009 for the short-lived MMIN, basically a lobby of local elected officials), Patricio Cisneros (a former elected official for Abdalá Bucaram’s kleptocratic PRE and later for the PSC who was elected prefect of Santa Elena in 2009 for the MMIN) or Sergio Chacón (elected prefect of Napo in 2009 as a candidate of the PSP).

Your blatant ignorance of basic facts about Ecuador, your incredibly Manichean and over-simplistic vision of Latin American politics, your repeated inability to correctly spell the name of the president of Venezuela (it’s not ‘Nicholas Maduro’), your unhealthy fixation on ‘corporate medias’ (fantastic 2014 ‘inquiry’ from Oakland, California, on ‘media disinformation’ on protests in Venezuela exclusively based on English-speaking sources and interviews of Venezuelan expats met in pro-Maduro protests on American soil in which the possible economic collapse of the country is presented as a ‘narrative of the corporate media’ pushed by CNN headlines; well, this one didn’t age well…) and your heavy reliance on dubious ‘Global North’ English-speaking sources written by heavily partisan people render your analysis unreliable and raise serious questions about your professional qualifications and your real interest in Ecuadorian political dynamics beyond lazy clichés.

Also, for someone who is pretending to do ‘people’s journalism’, all your production on Latin America is about left-wing or self-proclaimed left-wing incumbent or former presidents or vice presidents being vilified/persecuted, ‘corporate media’ lying, blah blah blah evil capitalists, blah blah blah neoliberal oligarchy, blah blah blah American Great Satan. Where are the workers, the lower classes, the small farmers, the poor in all of this?

Isn’t it stunning that the only guy you interviewed in your article on the 2019 local elections in Ecuador, is Fernando Casado, a Spanish academic who used to be employed by ‘Socialist of the 21st Century’ governments in Caracas and Quito (who is additionally an unabashed apologist of the Maduro regime that, just few days ago, called the ongoing primaries for regional elections in Venezuela a ‘lesson of democracy’, making in retrospect all his whining about the administrative problems met by the Correístas to be on the ballot laughable).

Isn’t it stunning you covered various protests in California attended by a microscopic number of participants but are unable to even mention protests in Ecuador, a country marked by intense social turmoil since at least seven years. Are you aware that, just in the last weeks, the main teachers’ union organized a 32-days-long hunger strike, the Unitary Front of Workers (main union confederation) and the CONAIE staged a protest in Quito against liberalization of fuel prices, rice growers blocked roads in Guayas to demand increases in the rice selling price and measures against smuggling from Peru or indigenous communities interrupted oil production in the Amazonian province of Orellana.



How do I know that and can ‘report many things of interest’. Well, by the Herculean task of, you know, READING THE ECUADORIAN PRESS ON THE INTERNET.

Pro tip: if you want to be informed on a specific country, start by reading the local press. As a French, I’m glad not to have to rely only on the French medias to get informed on the United States because there are often errors, approximations, oversimplifications or misinterpretations, especially in TV coverage and blatant partisan and editorial press.

Unlike what you are conveniently pretending in order to excuse your laziness and your unwillingness to have your ideological bias been challenged by facts, Ecuadorian print medias, while not exceptional and having its fair share of flaws, political bias and blind spots (which medias haven’t any?), is generally doing a good job when it comes to report section. Even the op-ed sections, while usually mediocre and not much informative just like most op-ed sections in the world, aren’t that terrible and certainly don’t ‘make the British tabloids and Fox News blush’ and can hardly compared to garbage medias like, says, Breitbart News, the Daily Mail or Sputnik News in terms of intellectual dishonesty, racism, defamatory content, sensationalism and hyper-partisanship.

However, I would concur that Ecuadorian television is, from what I have read here and there, more than often utter trash, be it before, under and after Correa and be it private or public-owned outlets (see the recent racist attacks on Leonidas Iza made on the state-owned TC televisión in the La Posta ‘infotainment’ program – originally a website mostly centered on a bit unconventional political interviews and spreading of political memes –, which however concluded by the immediate cancellation of the program after a single episode and public apologies of the TC televisión director, something that would have never happened under Correa). I don’t use Ecuadorian television channels (not even their websites) as an information source because, in my opinion, video medias are largely uninformative for the quite important amount of time they required, and this independently of their (as a general rule pretty terrible) quality.

Your assertion about the press being ‘astonishingly and uniformly right-wing’  and ‘all vociferously anti-Correista and anti-left’ is also a blatant lie and, while there has never been a major leftist newspaper in Ecuador (due to the historical weakness of Marxist parties, strong regional divides and the absence of a large blue-collar worker readership), written press, while not free from criticisms, has a long story in Ecuador of challenging the powers-that-be like regardless of political orientations:

* in 1979 El Universo campaign against the military dictatorship to sent the murderers of opposition presidential candidate Abdón Calderón before the courts.

* in October 1986, several private-owned radios refused to broadcast mandatory governmental messages during a general strike against the administration of León Febres-Cordero (a right-winger) and the Ecuadorian Broadcasting Association subsequently suspended the transmission of the programs of its radio and television affiliates for three hours (cadena del silencio) to protest the closing of radios by the government.

* in 2005, the wave of protests that led to the removal from office of President Lucio Gutiérrez was in a large organized in Quito by the alternative left-wing Radio La Luna.

* Fernando Villavicencio’s website, La Fuente, revealed on February 2019 the INA papers offshore accounts scandal involving Moreno’s relatives before being shut down six months later after a complaint if copyright infringement emanating from the presidency of Ecuador itself – in the meantime, La Fuente had also revealed in May 2019, in partnership with Milhojas, another investigative website, the ‘Green Rice’ (referred to as ‘2012-2016 Bribes Case’ in official judiciary documents) illegal campaign funding scandal for which Rafael Correa had been sentenced to eight years in jail in April 2020

* in August 2020, it was the awful La Posta which somehow leaked the structure of the corruption network in public hospitals organized by then-Interior Minister María Paula Romo, Moreno right-hand woman.

Also, if the press was so much right-wing, can you explain me how: Freddy Ehlers, a star journalist on private-owned TV channels Teleamazonas (which Correa himself called a ‘sewer with antennas’) and Ecuavisa for two decades, managed to be nominated the presidential candidate of the left-wing Nuevo País party in 1996 and 1998 (endorsed by Pachakutik in 1996) while still keeping his program and became a tourism minister and a secretary for ‘good living’ in the administration of Rafael Correa (Ehlers even had Andrés Arauz as his employee in the latter post). Or why the editorial director of the state-owned El Telégrafo under Correa, Orlando Pérez, active in leftist clandestine groups in the 1980s and a short-lived subsecretary for Peoples in the Correa administration (and now conducting political interviews on Telesur), was employed according to his own biography, as an editor for right-wing and liberal newspapers like Hoy, El Comercio and El Universo. Or how a former news director for Teleamazonas and a columnist for El Comercio was appointed by Correa as an interim foreign minister after a stint as UN ambassador and a tenure as a host on the newly created state television before becoming the editorial manager of the public medias holding; the guy has a funny name, Xavier Lasso, and yes he is Guillermo Lasso’s own brother.

These are three of the, actually quite large number, of Correísta politicians who had been, at one time or another one, employed by private medias: former vice president Jorge Glas (the host of Gestión empresarial ‘Business Management’ broadcast on the TV channel owned by his uncle); candidate for vice president Carlos Rabascall (also the director of Rabascall Comunicaciones, a communication agency which, according to its webpage detailing its philosophy, ‘breaks paradigms, not only to build corporate brands, not only to manage image and perception, but to add patrimonial value to those brands. Brand, image and recputation [sic] an equation that should bring as a result, something essential on the markets, credibility’); Alianza PAIS constituent assemblyman and governor of Guayas Rolando Panchana; superintendent for communication Carlos Ochoa Hernández; parliamentary coordinator of the UNES bench Paola Cabezas; minister for culture and heritage and ambassador to Chile and the United States Francisco Borja; assemblywoman from Pichincha Marcela Holguín, …

So either the Ecuadorian press isn’t as ‘astonishingly and uniformly right-wing’ and ‘vociferously anti-Correista and anti-left’ than you pretend, either, but I can’t believe that, Correa has stuffed his administration, his party and the public medias with what he has called ‘wild beasts’, ‘cockroaches’, ‘ink hitmen’, ‘scoundrels’, ‘corrupted journalists’, ‘constipated faces’, ‘horrific fatty’ and ‘bonsai Tarzan’ to mention only a very few number of the countless insults (non-exhaustive list)  he relentlessly made against right-wing (and not right-wing) journalists, protesters and opponents of all shades in his speeches and his TV weekly show, Enlace Ciudadano, which was basically the Twitter account of Donald Trump adapted for television albeit with more vocabulary and funded with public money.

Also maybe using publicly and constantly such offensive language towards journalists and repressing the press during a decade (as well-documented by Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch or the Ecuadorian freedom of expression organization Fundamedios) through a press legislation so progressive it heavily inspired the draft law elaborated in 2013 by the far-right mafia ruling Honduras to muzzle the press there aren’t the best ways to enjoy good relations with medias.

To keep be informed on Ecuadorian politics, these are the Spanish-language websites I regularly consult:
* El Universo (center-right but factual in its reports)
* Primicias (clearly pro-business but otherwise serious)
* GK (long and very – sometimes too much – didactic articles; excels in aggregating information on specific topics with a strong emphasis on women’s and environmental issues)
* Plan V (a generally left-wing outlet, very critical of Rafael Correa, with many lengthy reports, a few having been translated in English)
* El Comercio (right-leaning)

I’m less a fan of:
* La Hora (quite average but one of the few to give coverage to less populated provinces)
* La República
* El Telegráfo (an outlet owned by the Ecuadorian state, until few weeks ago a nightmare to load and to weblink, probably because the Moreno administration stopped caring about it; the mouthpiece of the current conservative administration after having been that of the Moreno and Correa ones)

Expreso and Vistazo are usually very bad and so is Pichincha Universal, the media of the Pichincha prefecture at the hands of Correa followers (well until they lose the prefect office in the next election…), on which it is often hard to distinguish the report section from the opinion column and which is rarely reporting original stuff.

4 Pelagatos is an opinion website following a strongly anti-Correa and right-wing but liberal and anti-populist line which occasionally (but less and less frequently) publish interesting things as well as terrible editorials, especially the ones written by José Hernández, I often enjoy reading because they are so preachy and out of touch with reality they are hilarious. Hernández was previously employed by Hoy, which actually did a rather good job on reporting but closed down in 2014 largely because of the hostility of the Correa government. Some of Hoy archived articles, dating back from 1990, can be found here, one of the very few online resources on 1990s and early 2000s Ecuadorian politics. I wish there has been a serious pro-Correa outlet but those I have came across (Confirmado, Radio La Calle) are way too hackish, repetitive, predictable while systematically omitting any inconvenient fact and verging too much into conspiracy theories stuff to be interesting. The few I have seen of the Teleamazonas news website is terrible and actually very uninformative.

Missing is a media voicing indigenous communities concerns due to a limited Internet penetration in the countryside and the lack of indigenous journalists in mainstream medias (confined in the folklore and only-aimed-at-indigenous sections ghetto). Wambra.ec is above all a radio, its website isn't updated frequently and I'm not sure how representative of the indigenous population it is.

On specific topics tangentially relevant for political matters, the US-based Mongabay publishing in English and Spanish is dedicated to environmental questions while InsightCrime is covering in English organized crime in South and Central Americas.

Additionally, there are numerous academic articles available left and right on the Internet (there are relatively ample stuff in Spanish, English and French languages; also apparently in German but I can’t read that language) even if these are long readings published long after the studied events have happened and are often presented in a very user-unfriendly way (huge pdf files). The website of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) of Ecuador is very useful to get access to academic works and specialized political reviews.

[Sir John Johns]

However, your failure to report on the extensive repression of Ecuador’s largest left group, the largest single political group in Ecuador, renders your overall analysis unreliable and raises serious questions about your commitment to real and fair democracy in Ecuador.

Yup, that’s a tweet of then-President Correa (making headlines in Israel) as a response to a tweet quoting former president of Ecuador Osvaldo Hurtado describing in a conference in Panama Correa as ‘the typical fascist’. For some reasons, critics of Correa weren’t convinced of his democratic credentials after such a powerful and convincing argument.

Rafael Correa once said ‘for some people, democracy is legitimate only only when they win elections’, a comment the international supporters of Andrés Arauz should reflect on considering the incredible arrogance they displayed before the election they clearly considered the Correísta as entitled to win, with triumphant announcement on the certainty of Arauz being elected, possibly even in the first round (not helped by the fact they got intoxicated with lot of polls coming from untested or shady polling organizations complacently relayed by leftist outlets and ‘America Elects’), and describing the designated heir of Correa as the ‘favorite of the polls’ and ‘Ecuador’s likely next president’.

All of this while dismissing the candidacy of Yaku Pérez (let’s not even talk about the one of Xavier Hervas) and describing his strong result in the first round as ‘surprising’ when strong indications of the resurgence of Pachakutik were noticeable since at least 2019 with the victories of Pachakutik candidates for prefect in Azuay and Tungurahua, two largely urbanized provinces, and the scale of the CONAIE-sponsored anti-austerity protests. They, of course, didn’t bother elaborating on the electoral breakthrough of Pérez and Hervas and the emergence of strong anti-Correísta left-wing alternatives because this would have required mentioning and elaborating on the numerous shortcomings and betrayals of the ‘Citizens’ Revolution’ and realizing that Correa’s record in office wasn’t that impressive nor especially ‘socialist’.

And, after Arauz’s defeat, they preferred blaming Pérez and Hervas voters or the ‘corrupted corporate medias’ (ignoring that Pérez’s candidacy had no support among right-wing press, that Hervas’s candidacy emerged largely thanks to a ridiculously inexpensive campaign on TikTok that basically required only an electric scooter and a mobile phone and that Lasso received his worst electoral result ever in the first round) rather that acknowledging what was obvious: Arauz was a poor candidate, a technocratic figure largely unknown at the start of the campaign, with no charisma, no concrete policy to be credited with despite a whole decade spent in the Correa administration, no electoral nor party experience, an economic platform as demagogic and unrealistic than the ones of the other candidates while he was supposed to be the economic expert and not in full control of his own campaign with regular unwelcome media interventions from Belgium of Correa making him completely unable to distance himself from the most negative aspects of the Correa administration.

The aforementioned quote from Correa is, ironically, from an interview with Argentinian Kirchnerist newspaper Página/12, during a trip to Venezuela to give legitimacy to the farcical legislative election held by the Maduro government in December 2020. In the interview, the former president of Ecuador denied Venezuela is a dictatorship and blamed the economic catastrophe on the sole US ‘blockade’ (yeah, let’s ignore the massive corruption of the Bolivarian government, the inability to overcome the heavy reliance on oil exports or the price controls criminal economic idiocy). He also mentioned that ‘the main opponents of progressive governments are the medias’; Correa being employed since 2018 by RT en Español, a TV-station owned by the well-known paragon of press freemdom that is the Russian state, I guess he includes himself among 'the main opponents of progressive governments'. Right?

You would notice the irony of a politician who complained about his party having been stolen by his successor in office, about the electoral institutions being biased in his country and who spread rumors about electoral fraud in the upcoming Ecuadorian elections, validating at the same time a joke election held after a shady court decision stole registered parties from their founders and legitimate leaders and in which fake opposition candidates were elected deputies despite not reaching the required number of votes thanks to an election alliance concluded AFTER election day.

This somehow put in perspective the (partly valid) complaints of Correístas about being the victims of an unfair and biased election and justice systems. While not himself a dictator, Correa is not at all committed to ‘real and fair democracy in Ecuador’. He has expressed an outspoken support for oppressive and dictatorial regimes like Venezuela, China, Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Iran (insulting in the process the victims of the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires with a ‘but the NATO bombings in Libya’ comment) or even North Korea in a blatant betrayal of the Roldós Doctrine of defense of human rights on diplomatic stage elaborated by then-president of Ecuador Jaime Roldós at a period when most Latin American countries were ruled by bloody dictatorships (it was then described as a threat to the security of the United States by a US think tank close to Ronald Reagan).

Correa’s tenure as president was, by all accounts, a clear regression in term of human rights and democracy (his regime having been labeled as ‘competitive authoritarianism’ by several scholars) with systematic attacks on press freedom and social movements, full take-over and manipulation of justice, electoral and audit institutions and complete marginalization of the legislature and the parties which became unable to play a counter power role they have, paradoxically, largely abused before Correa. The former president inherited of hyper-partisan and dysfunctional institutions and decided, not to dismantle or fix them, but on the contrary to reinforce and consolidate them at his own benefit. Hence enabling the flourishing of corruption (not a new phenomenon) due to the state being completely in the hands of a single all-mighty clique (instead of the traditional myriads of competing factions) and the parliament, the justice, the audit institutions, the opposition, the journalists and the civil society being unable to fulfill their role of monitoring of the government.

Correa being, once he had left office, the victim of the unfair election and judiciary system he had himself largely designed and consolidated and had zero problem using against his opponents while in office, doesn’t change the fundamental fact that he is a politician with strong authoritarian tendencies, little tolerance for dissent, a profound aversion for accountability and transparency and a pathological inability to assume mistakes. Case in point, since he has left office he has expressed no regret and make no apologies for his objectionable acts as president and, during the last election campaign, made no serious proposals to fix the dysfunctional and corrupted Ecuadorian political system.

Was it worth the improvement of the economic situation, the unprecedented expansion of social expenditures and the historical development of infrastructures (summed up by the phrase pero tenemos carreteras: ‘but we have roads’)? Well, not even the economic and social record of Correa are that exceptional when taking into account the then-world economic situation and when comparing to other Latin American countries and it has its fair share of shortcomings, the biggest one being that it wasn’t sustainable over time.

I will now begin addressing the various claims you made in your first post, but this will probably take time.

[Sir John Johns]

I do differ with you in a number of important areas.  Your strong bias against former President Rafael Correa and your ignoring of the impressive repression of the Ecuadorian left in order to prevent it’s candidate Andres Arauz from winning the Presidential election are first and foremost among them.

If the legal shenanigans to obstruct the candidacy of Arauz (some based on dubious grounds, some on actually justified – or rather justified on the metric previously used by the electoral authorities under Correa – grounds, but I will elaborate later on this) is to be considered as an ‘impressive repression of the Ecuadorian left’ or the ‘extensive repression of Ecuador’s largest left group’ (are you hinting it would have been totally OK to repress them if they weren’t the most-voted political tendency?), how should we describe the decade during which Correa was president, which was characterized by the passage of an ample legislation to criminalize social movements, silence critics, prosecute opponents under disproportionate and questionable charges like ‘terrorism’ or ‘rebellion’, impose self-censorship in medias (I would elaborate later on press freedom) and dismantle the vigorous Ecuadorian civil society (indigenous and campesino federations, trade unions, environmentalist groups, feminists and LGBT activists, human rights advocates, professional organizations, journalists and medias, be they commercial, communitarian or associative).

Among the long series of attacks on social movements, political opponents, indigenous communities, civil society or just ordinary citizens, one can cite, in chronological order:

* the brutal and disproportionate repression by the military and the police of the largely indigenous population in Dayuma parish (Orellana province, Amazon) in December 2007 which had paralyzed oil production to demand their communities actually benefited from oil extraction in their neighborhood (demands included the asphalting of the main road, a functioning drinking water system, more recruitment by the oil company among the local population) as well as the implementation of environmental measures to curb pollution resulting from oil drilling, all measures promised by the Ecuadorian government but never fulfilled. Some twenty-five persons, including two minors of age, were arrested during the protests of which twenty-two were charged with ‘organized terrorism’ including the Pachakutik prefect of Orellana, Guadalupe Llori. Additionally, some 150 persons were arrested for breaking the curfew measures instituted as part of the militarization of the Orellana province where the state of emergency had been declared by President Correa. On his weekly itinerant TV-show Enlace Ciudadano, supposedly dedicated to explain his policies but often also used to insult, threaten and denouncing by name actual or alleged opponents, Correa called Llori an ‘intellectually limited Creole Mama Lucha’ in a reference to Mama Lucha, an infamous extortionist from Quito while proclaiming that ‘No crean a los ambientalistas románticos, todo el que se opone al desarrollo del país es un terrorista’ (‘I don’t believe in romantic environmentalists, all those who oppose the development of the country is a terrorist’). In March 2008, the Dayuma protesters as well as other social activists facing judicial proceedings were granted an amnesty by the Constituent Assembly but Llori remained imprisoned as she was prosecuted for embezzlement until being declared innocent in September 2008. In the meantime, she had been removed from her office of prefect of Orellana but was reelected to that post in 2009 and 2013.

* the arrest in November 2009 of 41 taxi and truck drivers in Loja under the grounds of ‘terrorism’ and ‘sabotage’ after non-violent protests and road blockades to demand measures against illegal taxis. The protests reportedly prevented the presidential motorcade to continue its journey to the neighboring province of Zamora Chinchipe. Correa had previously demand in a broadcast of Enlace Ciudadano the drivers be prosecuted as they had ‘affected the rights of other persons’.

* the sentencing in April 2010 of seven local anti-mining activists from the rural community of Cochapata (Nabón canton, Azuay province) to eight years in jail for ‘sabotage’ for the destruction of property belonging to a mining company during a protest in March 2008, despite having previously benefited from an amnesty in July 2008 for that same acts. The activists went underground until the National Assembly granted them another amnesty in December 2011.

* the arrest in May 2010 of three indigenous water rights activists (including future Pachakutik presidential candidate Pérez Guartambel) under the charges of ‘sabotage’ and ‘terrorism’ (crimes punishable by up to twelve years in jail) followed by their freeing two days later due to the lack of evidence and an indictment for ‘interruption of public services and obstruction of roadways’. In August 2010, the Ecuadorian justice sentenced them to one year in jail, a sentence immediately reduced to eight days in prison, as the court ruled it was an ‘altruistic struggle’. After an unsuccessful appeal in cassation, the three water rights activists went to prison for eight days in March 2013.

* the brutal repression by the police of a student protest in Colegio Mejía (Quito) in September 2011 during which a 17-year-old student was severely wounded in the head by a tear gas canister, leaving him in a permanent vegetative state until his premature death in 2019. A police officer was sentenced in 2013 to two and a half years in jail but declared himself insolvent in order to not pay the compensation to the family. Relatives of the student attempted to sue in 2018 the Ecuadorian state to recognize its responsibility in the brain damage inflicted to the student, to no avail.

* the arrest in March 2012 of nine Marxist students and one professor in Luluncoto (south Quito) for their alleged participation in the December 2011 explosions of ‘pamphlet bombs’ in Quito, Guayaquil and Cuenca to protest a visit of the president of Colombia in Ecuador and for allegedly planning destabilization acts against the government in anticipation of an opposition demonstration. The Luluncoto Ten were sentenced in February 2013 to one year in jail for ‘attempted organized terrorism’ after a judicial process plagued by irregularities and despite the flimsy proofs submitted by the prosecution (cell phones, banknotes, a folder at in the colors of a far-left organization, Che Guevara T-shirts, protest songs records, rubber boots, political books and pirated versions of ‘The Last King of Scotland’ and ‘The Exorcist’ movies but no weapons nor explosives) to support the claim the ten prosecuted persons were part of a subversive clandestine group. In June 2016, the Ecuadorian justice declared the sentences against the Luluncoto Ten extinguished and in September 2018, the country’s ombudsman publicly apologized to the Luluncoto Ten.

* the prosecution in November 2012 for ‘sabotage and terrorism’ of two community leaders of San Pablo de Amalí, a poor rural village in Bolívar (central highlands) for reportedly having led a protest against a private hydroelectric project. Facing a four to eight-year jail sentence, the two community leaders were declared innocent in January 2016. In the meantime, an unprecedented flood, probably provoked by the building in 2013 of the hydroelectric dam, ravaged the village of San Pablo de Amalí leading to the death of three persons and the destruction of twelve houses, one belonging to one of the leaders sued for ‘sabotage and terrorism’ while there is an ongoing legal battle between the rural communities of the area and the hydroelectric company because, due to a miscalculation of the Agency for Regulation and Control of Water, the Hidrotambo company has been awarded an amount of water exceeding the average flow of the river and is denying the farmers the minimum quantities of water they legally have rights to.

* the mass arrest in February 2013 of 67 students (55 being minors) of the Quito’s Colegio Central Técnico after a protest against the change in name of the educational institution that ended with material degradation followed by the prosecution of the twelve major ones for ‘rebellion’, their release after 35 days in jail due to lack of evidence, anew indictment for ‘rebellion’ one month later after President Correa had publicly expressed his discontent with the first court in his weekly TV-show (in which he also called the students ‘cowards’ and ‘spoiled’ and said to the judge that if it is due to ‘lack of evidence, if you want, I will send you the videos’) ending with the twelve students being sentenced in November 2013 to 21 days in jail once again for ‘rebellion’.

* the sentencing in April 2013 of Pachakutik assemblyman Cléver Jiménez and his substitute, investigative journalist and anti-corruption activist Fernando Villavicencio, to eighteen months in jail for libel; the secretary of the Federation of Physicians, Carlos Figueroa, was for his part sentenced to six months in jail in the same case. Their crime: having questioned the official version of the 30 September 2010 police and military mutiny. Villavicencio and Jiménez found refuge in Sarayaku (Pastaza province, Amazon) – a Kichwa community which had successfully sued the Ecuadorian government before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for not having consulted local residents before launching oil surveying and exploitation processes (a judicial lawsuit started in 2003) – until a judge applied in March 2015 statute of limitations to the case; in the meantime, Figueroa had spent six months in jail.

* the sentencing of Mery Zamora, former president of the National Union of Teachers (UNE) and leading member of the Marxist-Leninist Democratic Popular Movement (MPD), to eight years in jail for ‘sabotage and terrorism’ and a $87 fine for having allegedly encouraged her students to participate into street protests during the 30 September 2010 police mutiny. The ruling was annulled by the Court of Cassation in May 2014 due to multiple legal violations committed during the proceedings and declared Zamora innocent. Correa mocked the ruling and claimed it was a ‘gross lie’ that Zamora didn’t incited the students to protest. The case went to the Constitutional Court at the request of Attorney General Galo Chiriboga and after years of proceedings, the court confirmed the innocence of Zamora in August 2018. In the meantime, Zamora had to face the leaking in February 2015 of pornographic photo montages on social networks, blamed on Correa’s Internet troll army as part of a smear campaign against the unionist.

* the sentencing in August 2013 to three years in jail of a left-wing municipal councilor and unionist for ‘assault on public servants, sabotage and terrorism’ after a tear-gas grenade had been launched three years before on a political meeting attended by Rafael Correa. In 2015, the Ecuadorian justice declared the condemnation null. In that same case, a journalist critical of the mayor of the town where the meeting had take place, was also charged with ‘terrorism’ but declared innocent after three years of proceedings after it turned out there was no proof and the witnesses were unreliable.

* the sentencing in August 2013 of indigenous Pachakutik legislator Pepe Acacho and another Shuar leader to twelve years in jail for ‘terrorism and sabotage’ because of their participation in a 2009 protest in Morona Santiago province that ended in the death of a protester, Bosco Wisuma, an indigenous teacher, whose killing remains unresolved (Wisuma either had been killed by the police either accidentally shot by another protester). After a five-year-long legal battle, Acacho saw his sentence reduced to eight months in jail and a $44 fine for ‘obstruction of roadways’, was arrested in September 2018 but pardoned by President Moreno and finally released the following month.

* Insults and defamatory comments made by Rafael Correa in September 2013 during a Enlace Ciudadano broadcast against leftist singer and human rights activist Jaime Guevara (famous for his engagement in the campaign for truth and justice in the unresolved disappearances of the teenage Restrepo Brothers after their arrest in 1988 by a police squadron, the most egregious case of violation of human rights under the Febres-Cordero social christian administration), with Correa calling Guevara a ‘drunkard’ and a ‘pot-smoker’ because few days before the singer ‘disrespected’ Correa by giving the finger at the presidential motorcade to protest his policies, leading Correa to step out of the presidential car and insult and threaten to physically assault Guevara. After it turned out that Guevara was a well-known teetotaler and is suffering from regular epilepsy seizure due to illness, hence possibly explaining his disordered behavior during the incident, Correa ‘apologized’ in his following TV broadcast, arguing he couldn’t knew Guevara has a neurological problem, before reading a ‘rectification’ in which he called Guevara a ‘brat and a liar’ who could ‘have incorrect leftist views’ and is an ‘anarchist, virulent and aggressive’ individual whose illness led him to have epilepsy seizures when ‘he has fits of rage and anger against those who don’t think like him’.

* the dissolution in December 2013 by the Ecuadorian government of the environmentalist Fundación Pachamama organization, in operation since sixteen years, under the pretext its leaders would have attempted to physically assault the Chilean ambassador to Ecuador and a Belarusian businessman during a meeting in Quito with representatives from Chinese, Belarusian and Spanish oil companies that took place just few days before, an act labeled as an ‘interference in public policies’ and an ‘attack against internal safety of the country’. Fundación Pachamama was authorized to resume its operations in Ecuador in November 2017.

* the series of dirty tricks and shenanigans used to obstruct the grassroots campaign organized by YASunidos ecologist collective to collect signatures to force a referendum on the opening of the Amazonian Yasuní National Park to oil extraction (after Correa’s decision in August 2013 to abandon the Yasuní-ITT Initiative) – like the setting up of fake concurrent ecologist campaigns using forms suspiciously similar to the ones of the YASunidos – until the mass nullification in May 2014 by the National Election Council (CNE) of 400,000 collected signatures through a rushed process (107,000 signatures invalidated the last day by 131 verifiers, hence a rate of three signatures invalidated every minute by each verifier assuming they didn’t stop to go lunching) plagued by irregularities and opacity. Hence killing the only popular initiative to organize a referendum which had been able to collect the required number of signatures.

* the mass arrest in September 2014 of 115 protesters (including 55 minors) during a demonstration organized by unions and students’ organizations next to Colegio Mejía which escalated into clashes with the police which brutally dispersed the protesters by using hand to hand methods instead of tear gases. A 17-year-old student who didn’t even participated in the protest was hit and ran over by a police motorcycle, beaten and allegedly tortured by police agents before being sent to the hospital for two days for multiple trauma. After a six-year-long legal battle, one police agent, previously convicted in the case with another police officer for ‘torture by omission’, was ultimately sentenced to 107 days in prison on the minor charge of ‘excess in the execution of an act of service’ (his colleague was cleared of any wrongdoing).

In the meantime, three students have been charged with ‘sabotage’ (punishable by five to seven years in jail) for the destruction of a police motorcycle worth $7,000, a charge reformulated in July 2015 as ‘damage to third-party property’ (punishable by one to three years in jail). I haven't found how the trial ended.

* the petty attempt to evict in January 2015 the CONAIE from its historical headquarters in Quito, handed over to the indigenous movement in 1991 by then-president Rodrigo Borja and a symbol of the fight for indigenous’ rights.

* the sentencing in February 2015 of an anti-mining activist from Íntag Valley, a high biodiversity area in Imbabura (northern highlands), to ten months in jail for ‘rebellion’ for his alleged participation in an assault against employees of the Enami mining company despite the fact he wasn’t on site when the act of violence took place. He was immediately released from the jail following the verdict as he had been imprisoned since precisely ten months, in a move apparently designed to prevent him to sue the state for unjust imprisonment.

To be continued.

[Sir John Johns]

* Then-president of the Ecuarunari Pérez Guartambel and his partner French-Brazilian journalist Manuela Picq (married in 2013 according to indigenous customs, non-recognized by the civil registry), residing in Ecuador where she was employed as a university professor, being beaten up by the police during a large protest in Quito reuniting indigenous organizations, trade unions, pensioners’ and physicians’ unions held in August 2015 which turned pretty violent with clashes between protesters, Correa’s supporters and the police. Pérez Guartambel and Picq were briefly hospitalized with the Foreign Ministry ordering the annulment of Picq’s visa and her deportation from Ecuador, a decision refused by a judge after it turned out there were discrepancies in the police report on Picq’s arrest. Nevertheless, the Ecuadorian government refused to revert its decision to annul Picq’s visa or to return her seized Brazilian passport leading the academic and journalist, whose legal status was unclear, to leave Ecuador only eight days after the protest.

In his TV-show, President Correa claimed that the visa of Picq was annulled because she had assaulted police officers, an assertion contradicted by official police reports which indicated it was Picq who was assaulted by ‘unknowns’, before stating: ‘I know Manuela Picq, we were colleagues for several years at San Francisco, San Francisco University [a private university in Quito], I was a professor and so she was; a very beautiful but very immature woman who loved to be in the limelight, she lived in Miami, she had a gringo boyfriend and was never an indigenist, a leftist nor, worse, a journalist. And now it turns out she is an indigenist, a leftist, a journalist, she said that she was correspondent for Al Jazeera, we found out this is a lie, but by this way she fools people.’ Looks like Correa didn’t do his research…

Manuela Picq was permitted to return in Ecuador in 2018 thanks to a Mercosur visa, the Correa administration denied her.

* the arrest later in August 2015 of 29 indigenous protesters (in addition to eight minors of age and one disabled who were released after several hours) in the rural canton of Saraguro (Loja, southern highlands) after demonstrations against Correa’s policies, notably the closure of bilingual schools, ended with the blockade of the Cuenca-Loja road and clashes with the police. Some 2,000 policemen and military were sent to the Saraguro communities, entered houses without warrants, thrown teargas grenades into homes and beat residents with batons. One elected official and two policemen were, according to the government, held hostage by protesters but the arrested persons were not charged in that case but with ‘paralysis of public service’: in May 2016, two protesters were sentenced to four year in jail while eight ones were declared innocent; meanwhile, among the remaining nineteen prosecuted protesters, the charges were dropped against seven ones due to the lack of evidence while the twelve remaining ones were declared innocent in July 2017. In June and August 2019, the ‘29 de Saraguro’ were all declared innocent but some had saw their lives ruined by the proceedings, the difficulties to have a job and the inability to travel aboard (a couple residing in Spain since fourteen years were visiting their relatives in Saraguro when they were arrested by the police while not even participating neither in the protest neither in the road blockade and, after fifteen days in jail, found themselves blocked in Ecuador being forbidden to leave the country).

* the forced eviction in September and December 2015 of some 40 families from their rural settlement in Tundayme (Zamora Chinchipe, Amazon) and the destruction of their church, their school and theirs houses to enable a mega-mining project decided without local consultation and exploited by a Chinese company.

* the arrest in November 2015 of a leftist protester transporting a sheep cardboard effigy in his pick-up and his prosecution for the totally absurd ‘crime’ of ‘transportation of chemical weapons’, later changed to ‘trafficking of firearms, chemical and nuclear weapons’ and later ‘transportation of weapons and explosives’. After having spent 86 days in jail without a trial, he was granted parole until he was cleared of any charges in June 2017. The case came back under the spotlight before the presidential runoff as an illustration of the grotesque judicial procedures launched against protesters under Correa and in the way of crowdfunding campaign to pay the guy a new pick-up as he had to sold his one to pay his debt after he had lost his driver job because of his judicial problems.

* the brutal police response (with the use of mounted police, dogs and an anti-riot blinded vehicle) to a protest organized in Quito in December 2015 by unions, indigenous organizations and opposition parties. Former centrist assemblyman César Montúfar was arrested for a few hours but released with no charges while Pérez Guartambel and a photographer for El Comercio newspaper were injured by the police. 21 protesters were arrested in El Arbolito park and sentenced to fifteen days in jail and a $200 fine for ‘issuing expressions of discredit and dishonor against policemen’.

The demonstration was organized to protest the passage in a single day by the rubber-stamp National Assembly of no less than fifteen constitutional amendments (which should had been put to referendum if the Constitutional Court filled with Correa hacks hadn’t ruled otherwise) which effectively turned Correa’s Ecuador into an illiberal regime. Amendments included notably the abolition of term limits for elected office-holders (with a transitory disposition, suggested by Correa himself, to postpone its entry into force after the 2017 presidential and legislative elections), limitations on the possibility to hold a local referendum as well as the curtailing the powers devolved to elected local authorities, the reduction of the topics a referendum proposed by popular initiative could be hold on, the definition of communication as a ‘public service’ in a move designed to further undermine independent medias critical of the government and restrain even more freedom of the press, the extension of the military jurisdiction to ‘support in internal security of the State’ which included maintenance of public order and opened the way to street protests being repressed by the army, the abolition of collective bargaining agreements in public sector (denounced by Public Services International) and finally the reduction in the supervisory power of the comptroller general’s office (which wasn’t already particularly effective into fighting corruption in the state).

* the brutal forced eviction in August 2016 of Nankints (Morona Santiago), a 32-inhabitant Shuar indigenous community in the Amazon whose inhabitants’ houses and personal possessions were destroyed to make room for a mega-mining project exploited by a Chinese company and decided by the Ecuadorian government without consultation of the local population. The operation required the mobilization of some 2,000 military and policemen which led to an escalation of violence that culminated in December 2016 with the death of a policeman during clashes with Shuar, the proclamation of a state of emergency in Morona Santiago province and the violent invasion of the Shuar community of Tsuntsuim where the Ecuadorian military forced the residents to flee in the jungle, trashed the village, destroyed the crops and burnt down several houses.

* the dissolution by the government on August 2016 on very questionable administrative grounds of the National Union of Teachers (UNE), the largest union in Ecuador linked to the leftist MPD, a decision criticized by UN human rights experts who pointed out that the Executive Decree 739 regulating social organizations ‘establishes excessive restrictions on freedom of expression and association, which enables the authorities to dissolve organizations on the basis of ambiguous criteria’ and expressed their concerns about ‘this legislation which certainly gives the Executive discretionary powers to suppress the voice of the civil society in the country’. Meanwhile, the International Labor Organization also protested the dissolution of the UNE. Before Correa, only right-winger President Carlos Arroyo del Río (fraudulently elected president in 1940) and the 1970s military dictatorship had banned the UNE. The dissolution process of the UNE was reversed under Moreno.

* the the launching by the Interior ministry in December 2016 of the dissolution process of Acción Ecológica, one of the oldest and most popular environmentalist organization in Ecuador, in the wake of the crackdown on Shuar communities in Morona Santiago, a move criticized by UN rights experts who stated that ‘the government of Ecuador seems to be systematically dissolving organizations when they become too vocal or challenge government orthodoxy’ and complained about the Ecuadorian legislation that gave government authority to ‘unilaterally dissolve any kind of organization’. In January 2017, the Environment ministry annulled the dissolution process due to the lack of evidence about Acción Ecológica’s active participation in the violent clashes in Morona Santiago but warned that the NGO had ‘moved away from its founding principles’.

* the sentencing in April 2017 to one year in jail, public apologies and a fine of the nine members of the independent National Anticorruption Commission (some of them being more than eighty years old and one, Isabel Robalino being then 99 years old and still alive today) for ‘slander’ after they had accused Carlos Pólit, the comptroller general, of being responsible of over-pricing in the ‘building’ of the Pacific Refinery. Just after the sentence had been read, Pólit’s lawyer announced his client, pleased by the judicial recognition of the slander, was withdrawing his complaint to ‘contribute to an environment of peace and conciliation’ in the context of the recent election of Lenín Moreno to the presidency. The Pacific Refinery is one of the most scandalous white elephants of the Correa administration, having never saw the light of day despite having cost according to the latest estimates $1.528 million.

As for Pólit, a shady and dubious character who had previously served in the corrupt administration of Lucio Gutiérrez (elected as a left-winger in 2003 but governed as a right-winger until his removal from office in 2005), he fled to Miami just one month later to evade prosecutions for the countless corruption cases he covered up during his one-decade tenure as comptroller general. He was impeached by the National Assembly in July 2017 with 132 out of 137 assemblymen voting in favor of his removal from office (ironically, the Alianza PAIS assemblyman, Daniel Mendoza, who fielded the impeachment motion against Pólit, is now in jail in a corruption case related this time to embezzlement in the public health sector) with a Correísta assemblyman stating that Pólit had never been part of the ‘Citizens’ Revolution’ despite the fact that Pólit had been one of the very few high officials to keep his office all along the presidency of Correa.

Paradoxically for a self-proclaimed left-wing government, right-wingers don’t appear to have that much problems with the justice under the Correa administration.

One can still mention:

* the case of a CREO municipal councilor of Loja who was sentenced in March 2016 to one month in jail and a fine worth 25% of her salary for having published two tweets demanding the mayor of Loja, José Bolívar ‘El Chato’ Castillo, then an ally of Rafael Correa and the epitome of los políticos de siempre (traditional politicians: a four-time mayor of Loja and three-time national legislator, Bolívar Castilo has been in politics for over forty years in a half-dozen of different parties) so vocally denounced by that same Correa, to ‘stop lying and stealing’, questioning his management of municipal affairs and accusing him of authoritarianism. Referring to a law article passed in 2014 punishing ‘person who, by any means, utters an expression of disrepute or dishonor directed at another one’, the court ruled the tweets were prejudicial to the honor and reputation of Bolívar Castillo, a local caudillo who has relentlessly bring to justice opponents, journalists and critics to silence them. Bolívar Castillo was successfully recalled from office in a popular initiative referendum in 2018 and Arauz only received 20.0% of the votes cast in the runoff in the Loja Canton, one of his worst results in a major city.

* the sentencing in December 2013 to four years in jail of seven persons (including one PSC alternate assemblywoman and a member of Lucio Gutiérrez’s PSP) for ‘sabotage’ for their irruption in the facilities of the state-owned Ecuador TV during the 30 September 2010 police mutiny to demand a fair news coverage of the events (the Correa government then implemented a cadena – mandatory broadcasting on private-owned TV stations of official statements or news coverage provided by public TV stations). They reportedly caused material damages. One of the accused saw his sentence reduced few months later to two years in jail after the court had established he didn’t caused material damages but ‘applauded, a clear signal of his approval of the protest’, which was apparently enough to charge him with ‘sabotage’. Two of the sentenced persons were pardoned by President Correa in July 2015 after having acknowledging their responsibility in crimes they previously had pleaded not guilty while the five remaining ones were ultimately sentenced to eighteen months in jail in October 2015 after the charges had been changed to ‘paralysis of public service’.

* The sentencing in 2012 to two years in jail of former Alianza PAIS member and alternate assemblyman for Lucio Gutiérrez’s Patriotic Society Party (PSP) Fernando Balda for ‘slanderous insults’ after accusation of influence peddling he made in 2008 on a private television against the manager of the public-owned insurance company. A far-right nutcase with close links to Álvaro Uribe’s party, Balda fled to Colombia but was extradited to Ecuador in 2012 and spent two years in jail. He is currently suing Rafael Correa for two alleged attempts to kidnap him while in Colombia supposedly organized by the Ecuadorian secret services (the whole kidnapping stuff looks like so ridiculous it may be actually true; we’re speaking of a country whose president in the 1980s attempted to discredit one of his opponent by getting him arrested in Panama by the Noriega regime for possession of cocaine – predictably, the plan spectacularly backfired).

* The sentencing in 2013 to ten years in jail of former PSP legislator from Los Ríos province Galo Lara for having ordered in 2011 a triple homicide in Quinsaloma (Los Ríos). A leading member of the Audit and Political Control Commission in the National Assembly (2009-13) and a combative legislator when it came to denouncing the alleged corruption in the Correa administration, Lara was initially declared innocent in the murder case but convicted at the end of his term in office. After having fled to Colombia and Panama, Lara was extradited to Ecuador in 2014 and jailed until 2018 when he benefited from a pre-release. According to documents declassified by the Moreno administration, the proofs that led to the conviction of Lara would have been forged by the Ecuadorian secret services. Nevertheless, the justice has rejected a revision of Lara’s trial and confirmed his sentence to ten years in jail in spite of his early release. A justice decision made in 2020 declaring innocent a man previously convicted of being an accomplice of the murders may open the way for a revision of the trial of Lara.

This case however stands out from the aforementioned ones as Lara was sentenced in a criminal matter apparently unrelated, even remotely, to political or social struggles. Lara being a pretty shady politician hailing from a province with arguably the worst political class of the country who additionally loves a bit too much, even by Ecuadorian standards, posturing as a martyr, I wouldn’t put money on his innocence.

[Sir John Johns]

For a comprehensive survey of the Correa administration’s attacks on fundamental freedoms and unsavory record on human rights, see the list of cases of criminalization of social protests established by MPD activist Karla Calapaqui (she has found 98 cases of criminalization in which some 841 persons have been prosecuted for political motives; a handful of cases are debatable though) on the website of the CEDOCUT union; the website of the Regional Human Rights Advisory Foundation (INREDH) documenting since 1993 human rights violations in Ecuador; as well as the special website setting up by Plan V covering infringements of basic liberties and violent deaths imputable to the Correa administration either as the result of a deliberate policy to criminalize social protests, intimidate and silence opponents, either as the result of passivity in face of crimes and violations of human rights not helped by the lack of transparency and accountability of the public institutions and malfunctioning of the state.

Belonging to the latter category as well as in the category of questionable policies from a left-wing standpoint are:

* an inaction in the face of widespread sexual violence against children in educational institutions (882 alleged cases between 2014 and 2017) with one of the most infamous case was involving the own father of Vice President Jorge Glas who managed to fled to Paraguay in 2013 before being extradited to Ecuador where he was sentenced to twenty years in jail in September 2014.

* the persistence of inhumane labor conditions in the Japanese-owned Furukawa abacá plantations which are employing mostly Afro-Ecuadorian workers in Los Ríos and Santo Domingo provinces. One part of the Plan V investigation on labor rights violations and the horrendous living conditions of Furukawa workers has been translated into English. It was only after the case was reported in 2018 to the Ombudsman’s Office and the reports made by Plan V and labarraespaciadora.com website that things began to change. In last April, in one of the few good news on social front, Furukawa has been convicted for modern slavery and sentenced to pay a financial compensation and give a plot of land to the 123 plaintiff workers. It will also have to return its Labor Merit Medal bestowed in 2005 by then-labor minister Galo Chiriboga who later became a minister of mining and oil (2007-08) and an attorney general (2011-17) in the government of his relative, Rafael Correa, and whose name appears in the Panama Papers; for his part, the current manager of Furukawa served as a vice minister for agriculture in the Lenín Moreno administration…

* the failure to address the demands of the relatives of missing persons with the Association of Relatives and Friends of Disappeared Persons in Ecuador (Asfadec) issuing a statement at the end of Correa’s term indicating that Correa ‘has failed to create a comprehensive policy to address the problem of missing persons’ and that ‘our disappeared children, fathers, sisters, mothers and friends have been made invisible with their cold statistics about an alleged effectiveness and are shown to public opinion on national level and to the international community when the Ecuadorian state has been assessed by the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances in Geneva’. Among the critics addressed to the Ecuadorian government have been the underestimation of the number of disappeared persons in official statistics, unfulfilled promises made by Correa and the high turnover among the judicial and police personnel in charge of the disappearance cases: in the emblematic case of Carolina Garzón, a Colombian citizen who disappeared in Quito in April 2012, a total of seven successive prosecutors and four successive police officers had been in charge of the case by 2017.

* the unsolved murder of Shuar environmental activist José Tendetza in December 2012, possibly killed for his opposition to a Chinese mining project, as well as the death of Shuar artisanal miner Freddy Taish in November 2013 killed during a shooting by military during an operation against illegal mining in circumstances that remain unclear due to conflicting accounts of the event and lack of judicial investigation.

* the mass deportation in July 2016 from Ecuador to their country of origin of 121 Cuban migrants in an irregular situation through a procedure denounced as unlawful by human rights groups and in blatant violation of the ‘universal citizenship principle’ enshrined in the 2008 Constitution, the Interior Ministry justifying its decision by citing the 1971 Migration Law, passed under civilian dictator José María Velasco Ibarra.

* the appointment in December 2014 of Mónica Hernández, a pro-life activist linked to socially conservative sectors, to head the Intersectoral Strategy for Family Planning and Prevention of Teenage Pregnancy (ENIPLA) and the shifting of the ENIPLA policy (accused by Correa of having been ‘based on the purest and emptiest hedonism: pleasure for the sake of pleasure’) toward the promotion of abstinence-only education as the way to fight teenage pregnancy, a major public health but also a social and economic problem in Ecuador: in 2019, there have been 51,711 infants born to adolescent mothers of which 1,816 were born to mothers under 14 (the Sierra/Costa divide appearing even in teenage pregnancy rate!). Teenage pregnancy overwhelmingly affects the poorest sectors of Ecuadorian society, especially indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorians (as daughters from wealthy families go abroad to get aborted), forcing young women to stop their studies or delay their integration into labor market, thereby often sliding them into poverty, unemployment or underemployment.

To not help things, significant sexual violence in a traditionally very macho society and while the legislation dating back from the 1930s is totally outdated. But Correa has always refused to relax it and, in October 2013, he forced a group of Alianza PAIS assemblywomen who had motioned a change in the Penal Code to decriminalize abortion in case of rape, to withdraw the proposal after he having blackmailed them and the whole Alianza PAIS caucus with a resignation from president in case the motion would have been put to vote (a totally sane functioning of a democracy; Correa did this thing at least thirteen times when president). The three assemblywomen were suspended for one month after a ruling of the Alianza PAIS ethics commission headed by Carlos Marx Carrasco who was also at the time the head of the Internal Revenue Service.

Correa reasserted his complete opposition to abortion few days before the first round by accusing Yaku Pérez of being not in favor of abortion in case of rape but in favor of ‘abortion by hedonism’ and claiming that pregnant women seeking an abortion up to three or four months do that because they ‘irresponsibly dedicate’ themselves ‘to a frenzied sexual activity’ in insulting comments that moved the abortion issue away from health and social areas towards purely moralistic considerations. Hence hurting Arauz with women and young voters (to the benefit of Pérez and Hervas) and helping Lasso, a devout Catholic and member of the Opus Dei, to successfully posture in the runoff as the candidate more in touch with women and LGBT topics.

On a side note, Hernández’s husband, William ‘Bill’ Phillips, a US businessman and promoter of scout movement then based in Ecuador, is the owner of Grupo Azul, a company which benefited from contracts from Petroecuador, notably for the failed rehabilitation of the Esmeraldas refinery, and is at the heart of a corruption scandal revealed by the Panama Papers. Phillips had additionally been sentenced in abstentia in 2020 to eight years in jail for corruption as part of the ‘2012-2016 Bribes Case’ (Caso Sobornos 2012-2016) in which Rafael Correa has been also sentenced to eight years in jail; the Ecuadorian government requested the extradition of the American businessman whose whereabouts seem to be unknown.


Such stuff may be sound as benign compared to the abuses committed during that same period by other Latin American governments, be it the Bolivarian regime in Caracas or the Uribe administration and its paramilitary allies in Colombia. But even if the Correa administration couldn’t (and shouldn’t) labeled as a dictatorship nor had built a full pervasive apparatus of state repression, such level of attacks on fundamental freedoms was unprecedented in Ecuador’s recent history since the civilian presidency of León Febres-Cordero (1984-88), whose human rights record was arguably worse than that of the 1960s and 1970s military dictatorships and whose administration (dubbed as La Rambocracia for its heavy-handed methods) staged a brutal and blind repression against a pretty insignificant left-wing urban guerrilla, killing, arresting, torturing, raping, sequestrating or ‘vanishing’ hundreds of persons (most of them not even linked to the guerrilla), led a violent crackdown on unions and citizens protesting its half baked neoliberal economic policies, closed down radios and sent the tanks against the Supreme Court building, among other nice things. According to the 2010 final report of the Truth Commission instituted by Correa himself to investigate human rights violations in Ecuador since the return of democracy, the sole Febres-Cordero administration accounts for 310 out of 456 recorded victims of human rights abuses during the investigated period (1984-2007).

Yet, the chairwoman of the Truth Commission, long-time human activist Elsie Monge has accused Correa of having instituted the Truth Commission only for political reasons and complained about the impunity for human rights abusers in Ecuador as only twelve out of 137 cases found by the Truth Commission had been prosecuted and only four fully tried. Additionally, back in 2014, Monge had expressed strong criticisms against the Correa administration stating in 2014 that ‘now we have a marked persecution of those claiming their rights, especially the rural communities affected by mining. They are accused of sabotage and terrorism when they protest. Those who have a different opinion are as well called corrupt and liars. There is no room for criticism and this is incompatible with democracy’.

Human Rights Watch agreed with Monge’s assessment on Correa government, stating in October 2016:

In 2012, Ecuador said its National Police would ‘respect all human rights’. Yet abuses by Ecuadorian security forces against protesters and bystanders continued and have gone unpunished.

Ecuador committed to ensuring that its people could ‘exercise the right to peaceful assembly and protest’. Yet prosecutors have filed disproportionate charges against protesters accused of allegedly committing violent acts – charges such as sabotage, terrorism, and rebellion.

Ecuador accepted recommendations to protect free speech. Yet in 2013, President Rafael Correa signed a communications law granting his government broad powers to punish independent media outlets, and his administration has repeatedly used it to ensure favorable coverage.

Ecuador said it would protect freedom of assembly. Yet in 2013, the president adopted a decree granting his government broad powers to intervene in the operation of nongovernmental organizations. The government has deployed the decree to dissolve an environmental group and the country’s largest and oldest teacher’s union.

Enough for today.

Coming next, the ‘extensive repression of Ecuador’s largest left group’ under Moreno as well as the one that Correa labeled as the ‘infantile left with feathers, with ponchos’ which suddently stopped being infiltrated by the CIA (he is more imaginative when it comes to find insults) when it came to protest against Moreno ‘the traitor’. But this didn't lasted long...

[WMS]

Magnificent.

https://imgur.com/gallery/hACcZEh

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I’m glad you appreciate my contributions to this forum (why everybody here is pretending it is a blog?)

Because it is.

[Sir John Johns]

Sorry for the delays, I have a few personal problems and can’t have as much time as I wish to write my posts that are becoming more and more long. But first and foremost I spent a bit too much times on the relevant topic of corruption with its fair share of legal and technical stuff I’m not always comfortable and also, because some scandals are totally insane and complicate (kind of illustrating the Charles Pasqua theorem about ‘creating an affair in the affair, and if required an other affair in the affair of the affair, until nobody can understand anything anymore’). Still, this hadn’t been do in vain (well, I hope so) because by reconstructing the chronology of the various corruption scandals that happened under Correa (some would be, in part, prosecuted under Moreno) and going more in the details, I realized that corruption under Correa was even worse than I previously thought (and the attitude of the then-president really didn’t help his cause) but also than the roots of the Jorge Glas’s corruption case related to Odebrecht can be found as early as 2008 and, what I didn’t even know, that the Arroz Verde/Sobornos 2012-2016 case (in which Correa had been sentenced in 2020) was made public even before the election Lenín Moreno in April 2017, even if that then went largely unnoticed (it would take two years more for the case to be reopened by the press), being flooded in the deluge of revelations aiming principally Jorge Glas.

Note: Latin American corruption cases will be discussed, so be prepared for totally WTF details.


Shortly after his inauguration as president, Lenín Moreno publicly broke with his predecessor in office and the Correa loyalists in the Alianza PAIS leadership faced an avalanche of judicial proceedings as illustrated by the now infamous selfie of Gabriela Rivadeneira, former president of the National Assembly, taken during a political bureau of Alianza PAIS in June 2017 to dismiss rumors about then ongoing internal struggles among the ruling party.

https://twitter.com/GabrielaEsPais/status/874432656720756737

‘Together we will strengthen the unity, loyalty and historical coherency of the political project. Long live the Citizen Revolution!’

From the left, standing:

* Ricardo Patiño, successively finance and economy minister (2007), minister for Littoral (2007), coordinating minister for Policy (2007-10), foreign minister (2010-16) and defense minister (2016-17) as well as executive secretary of Alianza PAIS (2006-10).

* Rafael Correa.

* Paola Pabón, a former national assemblywoman (2009-15) and national secretary for Public Management (2016-17), who is the Correísta prefect of Pichincha since 2019.

* José Serrano, successively a justice minister (2010-11), an interior minister (2011-16) and the president of the National Assembly (2017-18) who is now controlling what remains of the Alianza PAIS.

* Alexis Mera, the irremovable legal secretary to the Presidency (2007-17) under Correa and once considered as one of the most powerful men in Ecuador. Mera had met Correa when young in the Catholic evangelization groups led by future president Gustavo Noboa before becoming the lawyer of Noboa when this latter managed the Ingenio San Carlos agribusiness company and a legal adviser to Febres-Cordero, then mayor of Guayaquil.

* Eduardo Mangas, a Nicaraguan-born politician who served as a junior minister in Daniel Ortega government before becoming an adviser to Moreno in Geneva (when this latter was the UN Special Envoy on Disability), the manager of Moreno’s 2017 presidential campaign and a short-lived secretary to the presidency between May and December 2017. Mangas is married to María Fernanda Espinosa who served in Ecuadorian governments as a foreign minister (2007, 2017-18), a permanent representative to the United Nations (2008-09), a coordinating minister for natural and cultural heritage (2009-12) and a defense minister (2012-14).

* Vinicio Alvarado, a national secretary for public administration (2007-13, 2014-15), a tourism minister (2013-14) and a coordinating minister for Production, Employment and Competitiveness (2015-17) as well as the communication manager of the Alianza PAIS campaigns from 2006 to 2017 and the founder and majority shareholder of Creacional communication and advertising agency.

* Fernando Alvarado, Vinicio’s brother, a national secretary for communication (2009-15) with full control on public-owned medias and a tourism minister (2015-17).

Sitting:

* Gabriela Rivadeneira, governor of Imbabura (2011-12) and president of the National Assembly (2013-17).

* Lenín Moreno.

* Jorge Glas, successively the chairman of the Solidarity Fund (2007-09) – a public institution in charge of managing state’s shares in electricity and telephony sectors –, a minister for Telecommunications and Information Society (2009-10), a coordinating minister for Strategic Sectors (2010-12) and a vice-president of Ecuador (2013-18). He had experienced a meteoric rise from being a total unknown to the holder of the second highest office in the State in only six years. Glas had met Correa when a teenager in the boy scout group led by the future president.

Out of eleven attendees, five (Patiño, Correa, the Alvarado brothers and Rivadeneira) are now living in exile (well, maybe six since it has been announced few weeks ago that Moreno had relocated in Miami), two (Glas and Mera) are currently imprisoned after having been sentenced in corruption cases, one (Pabón) is forced to wear an electronic tagging and the remaining two (Serrano and Mangas who had sided with Moreno against Correa) experienced political downfalls after the leaking of embarrassing audio recordings.

Also noteworthy, only Rivadeneira, Pabón, Serrano and Patiño (even if only elected an alternate congressman in 1990) were elected officials; the Alvarado brothers, Mangas, Mera and Glas (even if he had been elected vice president as the running-mate of Correa in 2013 and Moreno in 2017) were definitely technocratic/behind-the-scenes figures who had never ran in an election; excepted Mangas, they have also ties with business sectors of the Costa.

The cases of ‘impressive repression’ against Correístas which took place under Moreno, dubbed as ‘lawfare’ by Correa and his followers, are falling into two distinct categories: the prosecutions in corruption cases (mainly against the technocratic/behind-the-scenes figures) and the judicial response to what was considered as attempts to overthrow the Moreno government (mainly against the elected officials), especially during and in the aftermath of the October 2019 protests, for which non-Correísta protesters also faced prosecution. Problems faced by the Correístas with the electoral institutions will be elaborated later on. I will discuss the ones charged with corruption first but I will start with a (way too long) resume of corruption before and under Correa.

A short history of proceedings against predecessors of Correa

It should be firstly noted that former presidents or influential political leaders facing prosecutions in (generally politically motivated as the members of the courts were appointed by the Congress but actually rarely without grounds) corruption cases is absolutely nothing new at all in Ecuador and is even the norm since the 1990s:

* President León Febres-Cordero (1984-88) was prosecuted in 1989 for embezzlement in the 1986 (presumably illegal) hiring of former Mossad agent Ran Gazit to design an anti-terrorism plan for the Ecuadorian government. The former president was however declared innocent in 1990 by the justice. Meanwhile, Febres-Cordero’s minister of industries, Xavier Neira, was charged in 1987 for embezzlement in the awarding of a contract to the Ecuahospital company but fled to Miami until 1990, when the case was dismissed by the Supreme Court of Justice.

* Vice President Alberto Dahik (1992-95), then serving under conservative president Sixto Durán-Ballén, resigned and fled Ecuador in October 1995, while being prosecuted in a case of mismanagement of the state ‘reserved funds’ and alleged bribery and after having avoided an impeachment motioned by his former fellow Social Christian Party mates. Anecdoctally, $10,000 coming from the ‘reserved funds’ were donated to anti-corruption organization Transparency International, of which Dahik was chairman of the advisory council. According to his own biography on the Espiritu Santo University website, Dahik later served between 1996 and 1998 as an adviser to the president of Paraguay, the arch-corrupt, even by Paraguayan standards, Juan Carlos Wasmosy; in 1998, Paraguay ranked 84th out of 85 countries, ahead only of Cameroon, in that year’s Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index.

Also prosecuted in the case, foreign minister Diego Paredes fled Ecuador at the same time than Dahik and went into exile in Miami before surrendering to the Ecuadorian justice in May 1997.

* the short-lived (1996-97) presidency of Abdalá Bucaram is mostly remembered for two things: the antics of Abdalá El Loco (‘The Madman’), a complete buffoon who released a hilariously bad ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ album while in office, and the cartoonish corruption of his administration. And when I say cartoonish: remember that Simpson’s episode where Mayor Quimby is embedded with mobsters to supply rats’ milk to the Springfield Elementary School? Well, Abdalá did it two years before with his government-sponsored low-cost milk ‘Abdalac’ – also appearing as ‘Abdalact’ although Word of God says it is ‘Abdalac’ – (with the face of the president appearing on each milk carton) program aimed at poor children which had to be suspended after a few weeks as it was denounced as unfit for human consumption (blended with a bit too much of water: according to a joke, well I hope this is a joke, it was 91% of water and 9% of water blended with milk). There were also failed plans for state-sponsored bottle-water (‘Abdalagua’) and telephone lines (‘Abdaláfono’)...



‘Ow! My bones are so brittle. But I always drink plenty of… Abdalac?!’ [PRE standing for Abdala’s party, the Partido Roldosista Ecuatoriano].

After his removal from office and his flee to Panama (reportedly he and his closest advisers left the Carondelet Palace carrying trash bags filled with bank notes), Bucaram was charged in at least four distinct cases: defamation against the armed forces, mismanagement of the ‘reserved funds’, corruption and nepotism in the customs administration and the infamous Mochila escolar (‘school bag’) scandal, the awarding of a public contract to a Colombian company for the procurement of overpriced school supplies (including 100,000 school bags) the company failed to deliver (only 3,000 school bags actually reached Ecuador). His education minister, Sandra Correa (no relation with Rafael), went into hiding before being arrested in 2006 and sentenced to three years in jail the following year.

* President Fabián Alarcón (1997-98) was placed in pretrial detention in 1999 as part of the Piponazgo case, a scandal of fictitious jobs (pipones) distributed to members and relatives of congressmen from Alarcón’s party, the Alfarist Radical Front (FRA). He was declared innocent the following year. As mentioned in the Hoy article, Alarcón’s interior minister, César Verdugo, fled Ecuador after his involvement in yet another ‘reserved funds’ scandal, this time related to ‘psycho-social’ or ‘psychosomatic’ studies worth $11 million which, according to Verdugo’s own version of events, he burnt after reading them. After having spent twenty years in Mexico,  Verdugo returned to Ecuador in 2019 once the case had lapsed under the statute of limitations.

* President Jamil Mahuad (1998-2000), who has fled Ecuador when removed from office and is currently residing in the United States, has been prosecuted since June 2000 for ‘prejudice to the state’ for his controversial decision to freeze bank accounts during the feriado bancario. After the reopening of the case under Correa, he was sentenced in abstentia in June 2017 to twelve years in jail for embezzlement (reduced later to eight years in jail). Mahuad was included in May 2014 on Interpol’s most-wanted list but removed from it a year later as the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s files ruled that the case against the former president ‘was predominantly political in nature’. Mahuad’s finance minister, Ana Lucía Armijos, relocated to the United States to evade prosecution in the case.

* President Gustavo Noboa (2000-03) fled to Dominican Republic in August 2003 to evade prosecution for embezzlement in the renegotiation of the country’s foreign debt. Meanwhile, his finance minister, Carlos Julio Emanuel, had been forced to resign in June 2002 after the uncovering of a corruption network he reportedly headed and involving numerous local elected officials and several congressmen. He was subsequently acquitted in 2008.

* President Lucio Gutiérrez (2003-06) was arrested in October 2005 and charged with ‘sedition’ until being acquitted in March 2006. He was however barred from running for president in the 2006 election after the Supreme Electoral Court found him guilty of the illegal funding of his 2002 presidential campaign (Gutiérrez’s campaign reportedly received contributions from Mexico’s Labor Party and Taiwan’s Kuomintang).

In March 2005, the newly appointed Supreme Court of Justice (‘Pichi Corte’), stuffed with Gutiérrez’s loyalists as well as cronies of the president’s new allies in Congress in an attempt to rebuild a working parliamentary majority, decided in a controversial ruling to drop all charges brought against Dahik, Bucaram and Noboa (all three then living in exile abroad), enabling the three men to return in Ecuador. A judicial ruling which precipitated the fall of Gutiérrez three weeks later and the immediate reinstatement of charges against the two former presidents and the former vice president with Dahik fleeing again to Costa Rica and Bucaram to Panama; Noboa was caught by the police and placed under house arrest before having been able to go back to Dominican Republic.

Noboa was pardoned in July 2008 by the Constituent Assembly, a decision ordered by Correa against  the opinion of Alberto Acosta (leader of the leftist and environmentalist wing of the Alianza PAIS who had resigned shortly before from the presidency of the Constituent Assembly due to growing political differences with Correa).

The charges against Dahik were definitely dropped in January 2012, few weeks after Correa had expressed his wish justice would be done in his case; Correa had previously in 2010 referred a bill to the National Assembly granting pardon to Dahik which failed to pass due opposition from left and right opponents as well as part of the Alianza PAIS; Correa had few weeks before called Dahik ‘an honest man, victim of the hatred and barbarity that dominated the country at that time’, referring also to the fact ‘there has been political persecution in the country’. In November 2020, Dahik would be appointed as an (unpaid) economic adviser to President Moreno.

Quite weird for a socialist president to pardon Dahik, considered as the father of neoliberalism in Ecuador and the advocate when vice president of deregulation and privatization policies and once dubbed by Febres-Cordero himself as ‘an economic terrorist’, and Noboa, the architect of dollarization of the Ecuadorian economy and a leading member of the Opus Dei in Ecuador. Until you remember that Correa had been in his youth the member of the Catholic evangelization group led by Gustavo Noboa, the gustavinos (the article also mentioned Alberto Dahik and Ricardo Patiño and his brother Raúl as members of the group).

There even is a photo that emerged on the Internet just after the death of Noboa in last February:

https://twitter.com/lahistoriaec/status/1361796810382180353

Gustavo Noboa Bejarano and the ‘Gustavinos’ in Data [Posorja parish, Guayaquil], 1984. Appearing next to him: Rafael Correa, […] Alberto Dahik, […] Fabricio Correa [Rafael’s brother] […] among other young people of that time whom Noboa trained spiritually for the duty of evangelize.

Álvaro Dahik, Alberto’s brother, was also a member of Correa’s boy scout group and participated in Correa’s 2006 presidential campaign before becoming a presidential adviser (2007) and the president of the National Council for Sustainable Development (2008-09) (the article also says that Correa, at 18, frequently came to the home of the Dahik brothers).

When you add the fact that he had as physical education teacher in high school Abdalá Bucaram (in case you were asking Abdalá was a 100-meter runner in the early 1970s and even participated in Munich Olympics, even as only as a flag bearer because an injury prevented him to participate in the athletic contests), at only 21 Correa had already met two future presidents and one future vice president (well actually two if you count Jorge Glas, but this one owe all his career to Correa), not bad for the 2006 ‘anti-establishment’ candidate he was, in the wake of the 2005 Rebellion of the Forajidos triggered by Gutiérrez’s decision to pardon Bucaram, Noboa and Dahik.

[Sir John Johns]

Oddly enough, Gutiérrez was never prosecuted under Correa neither for the corruption scandals nor the human rights violations (notably the death of a Chilean photojournalist during the repress of a protest by the police the day before Gutiérrez’s fall from power) which took place during his administration. Only Mahuad (everybody’s convenient scapegoat for the feriado bancario he was far from being the only culprit for) and Bucaram (a too much unpopular figure) weren’t allowed to safely return in Ecuador even if there have been allegations, confirmed by Bucaram’s son, Dalo, but dismissed by Correa, about negotiations over a pardon for Bucaram. After having spent twenty years in Panama (minus the three-week-long aborted return in 2005), Bucaram has returned in Ecuador in June 2017, once all the cases he was prosecuted for had lapsed under the statute of limitations.


While most of these proceedings in corruption cases launched against Correa and his inner circle after Moreno’s inauguration were rushed for political reasons and plagued by irregularities (the legal environment of Ecuador has always been severely deficient and the unsatisfactory training and recruitment of magistrates, the usual meddling of the government and the legislature in the judiciary and periodic budget cuts don’t help), the fact remains that the reality of corruption charges are more than often hardly questionable, especially as numerous involved individuals had quite a shady past.

The Correa government wasn’t probably more corrupt in itself than the previous administrations (I don’t even want to imagine how Ecuador would have turned had Bucaram been a president for a decade…) but the legal reforms introduced by Correa facilitated corruption on the cover of speeding up the country modernization process while being unable/unwilling to address the chronic illnesses that are conflicts of interest, nepotism and testaferrismo (from testaferro ‘front man or organization’, a theoretically illegal but widespread practice which makes difficult for the state to identify who are the true owners of the companies benefiting from public contracts). Influential officials suspected of being involved in corrupt deals in the preceding administrations were kept in place (notably in oil sector) or recycled in the Correa administration, while shady individuals entered the new president’s inner circle. Finally, the full control of the government over the judicial and audit systems, the lack of transparency and accountability and the intimidation of medias, opposition (notably the legislature which traditionally played a role of an ‘anti-corruption watchdog’, even if it has been always heavily biased) and NGOs contributed to put in place vast corruption networks at a time when the government benefited from a huge windfall in oil revenue.

Corruption scandals already broke out in the first years of the Correa administration (involving even relatives of the president) but it was truly in the last months that the extent of corruption became obvious (Petroecuador and Odebrecht cases). After Moreno’s inauguration, justice not only prosecuted Correa and his loyalists but also key allies of the new president culminating with the exposure of the massive corruption in public health sector in mid-2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A legal framework favoring corruption

One key element that enabled corruption was the passage by the National Assembly on July 2008 of the Organic Law of the National Procurement System (LOSNCP) which reformed the public contracting system with the aim of speeding up procedures in the awarding of public contracts, especially in sectors labeled as ‘strategic’ by the government (infrastructure, electricity, oil) in order to accelerate the economic modernization of the country. Notably, the prerequisite reports of the offices of the attorney general and the comptroller general needed to conclude contracts were abolished with only a posteriori control remaining in place while a so-called giro específico del negocio (‘business specific activity’) clause was introduced, instituting a special regime of public procurement for state-owned and public companies in strategic sectors to provide ‘dynamism and agility’ in the management of state companies. Such clause will be abused to enable direct contracting without tendering process and had the Petroecuador state-owned oil company had to suspend it in 2016 after a first wave of revelations about the widespread corruption in the company. Note that in the interview the director of Petroecuador was asked why he had acquired a Panamanian company to which he answered that it was because, as he had experience as an oil engineer into maintaining large engines, he had the idea to start a business for providing support to ships and as in Panama there is the canal… (spoiler: this didn’t ended well for the guy as he had later some problems with the justice because he also owned a bank account in Switzerland). Between 2013 and 2016, contracting through special regime accounted for 45% of total public purchases. Finally, the mechanism enabling the president to resort to direct contracting by declaring an ‘emergency’ in certain economic areas (a process already used by Bucaram for his ill-fated Mochila escolar program) was kept and would be abused by the Correa administration.

The 2008 Montecristi Constitution introduced the so-called Fifth Power (Quinto Poder, the Fourth power being the ‘electoral power’, the institutions in charge of administering elections) which main body, the theoretically independent Council of Citizen Participation and Social Control (CPCCS) is dedicated to ‘promote the exercise of participation rights, public social control and accountability’, ‘establish anti-corruption mechanisms and policies and conduct investigations on cases affecting citizen participation, public interest or generating corruption’ and ‘appoint the corresponding authorities in accordance with the Constitution and the law through citizen commissions for selection, lists submitted by the executive or public examinations’. As such, it inherited an important function previously devolved to the legislative power, the appointment of the most powerful non-elected public officials like the attorney general, the ombudsman, the public defender, the comptroller general, the superintendents (in charge of administering particular economic sectors: banks, insurance firms, popular and solidarity economy, telecommunications and news medias) and the members of the National Electoral Council (CNE), the Electoral Disputes Tribunal (TCE) and the Judiciary Council (in charge of managing and overseeing the judicial system).

The selection of the aforementioned public officials as well as the members of the CPCSS themselves was supposed to be no longer based on political quotas following complicated horsetrading between the various political parties represented in the Congress as it had been the case since the return of democracy (appointments were then made by the Congress in which Febres-Cordero’s Social Christian Party held for a long time a plurality of seats, enabling it to enjoy a very incomplete but quasi-inescapable control on judiciary and election system) but on meritocracy, one of the key tenet of Correa’s policy (the former president even created in 2011 an ‘Institute of Meritocracy’), through competitive and merit examinations (concursos de méritos y oposición).

Meritocracy is the new particracy

In practice, the examination processes were tainted by accusations of favoritism, partisanship and lack of transparency and independence from the government as it was usually people close to Correa or who had worked in his administration who ended being appointed to key offices.

Beginning with the members of the successive CPCCS themselves. The four out of seven members of the first CPCCS (2010-15) had previously ran in a legislative election (the only indigenous one was an undersecretary in Gutiérrez administration and is now a member of the Lasso government) while the president of the new CPCCS, Marcela Miranda, had previously been employed in a cooperative founded by then-foreign minister Ricardo Patiño. For his part, the vice president, Fernando Cedeño, had been a local leader of the Alianza PAIS and served as a secretary in the finance ministry under that same Ricardo Patiño; in addition of having ran for assemblywoman for César Montúfar’s centrist party, one member, Tatiana Ordeñana, had been an adviser in the ministry for Littoral then led again by Ricardo Patiño she was also a friend of. In 2012, Ordeñana, still a member of the CPCCS, applied for an examination, organized under the oversight of that same CPCCS, to become a member of the newly established Constitutional Court; she was the highest ranked applicant and served as a justice until 2018.

At least, there was an opposition minority in the first CPCCS because in the following one (selected for the 2015-20 period), all seven titular members had served in the Correa administration either as undersecretaries either as ministerial advisers. Highest ranked applicant (with a score of 92 out of 100 points) Edwin Jarrín, who became the vice president of the new CPCCS, was married to Soledad Buendía, an Alianza PAIS assemblywoman and former minister under Correa, while also being the brother-in-law of the undersecretary for Citizen Participation; he had previously held various posts in the Interior Ministry and served as  secretary for Transparency in the Correa government before holding management positions in the public medias. Another new member of the CPCCS, Tania Pauker, had been an adviser in the Interior Ministry and the Vice Presidency and was married to indigenous academic and Alianza PAIS assemblyman Carlos Viteri. As mentioned in the article of La Historia, the new president of the CPCCS, Yolanda González, had been a member of Alianza PAIS (running for municipal councilor in Guayaquil in 2014) but had resigned from the party just before the examination ‘for ethical reasons’.

Among the most outrageous appointments made by the CPCCS under Correa was the designation of Pamela Martínez, an adviser to the president, to the post of vice president of the Constitutional Court after having obtained a perfect score of 100 out of 100 points in the examination (the fact she had been the president of the rating commission in charge of designating the first Constitutional Court bench in 2011 may have helped). Martínez, who had been a member of the same boy scout club than Correa when young and had apparently a long experience in used-car dealership, also hosted a weekly TV-show on the state-owned TC television station with her husband, Jimmy Salazar, the chairman of the Guayas lawyers’ guild. While Martínez was a vice president of the Constitutional Court, her husband registered his own political party, the Social Justice Movement, as a vehicle for his alleged presidential ambitions, under which banner he ran for prefect of Guayas in 2019 and received 1.7% of the vote. Social Justice would come back under the limelight during the 2021 pre-campaign and illustrate the decadence of political parties in Ecuador.

The 2011 process of selection of the attorney general concluded with the appointment to the post of Galo Chiriboga, a former energy minister under Correa and then the ambassador to Spain, through a process marred by accusations of irregularities and favoritism with allegations about the downgrading of a candidate who had received a higher score than Chiriboga. Additionally, Chiriboga was the defendant of Correa in a 2009 lawsuit opposing the president to Banco Pichincha over a personal financial litigation (1,600,000 sucres, far less impressive when converted in US dollars: 67$) which ended with the sentencing of the bank to pay to Correa a $600,000 compensation for moral damages. Chiriboga is a distant relative of Correa (note that both were ministers in the Palacio administration), a revelation made in the press in the middle of the examination process that the president labeled as ‘a lapse in ethics’, notwithstanding the fact that some 15 relatives of Chiriboga hold various minor offices in ministerial offices and senior civil service.

In March 2017, it was Carlos Baca Mancheno who was selected as the successor of Chiriboga as attorney general after having received a score of 94 out of 100 points. Baca Mancheno had previously served as an adviser to an Alianza PAIS assemblyman and in a ministry before chairing the commission on the 2010 police mutiny and joining the presidency’s office as a political adviser to Correa between 2014 and 2017. His brothers were respectively the chairman of the Electoral Disputes Tribunal and the personal lawyer of the minister who previously had employed Carlos Baca. In an interview, Correa stated that Baca would be ‘a luxury attorney general’ and ‘a source of pride for the whole country’, dismissing critics from the opposition over the close links between the new attorney general and the government by repeating the same convincing argument he already made after the appointment of Chiriboga: in the United States, the attorney general is appointed by the president (ignoring that according to the Ecuadorian constitution, the attorney general is an independent office and isn’t a member of the government and that in the United States the attorney general must be confirmed by the Senate). The ‘luxury attorney general’ would later sent Jorge Glas in jail before being impeached by the National Assembly (including the Correísta caucus) after his involvement in a pretty insane scandal of clandestine audio recording. More on this later.

Same thing with the members of the Election National Council (CNE, also notably in charge of organizing the election of the CPCCS members). Its first president (2008-11), Omar Simón, a relative of then-Interior Minister Gustavo Larrea, who was appointed in March 2014 to the post of general secretary of the presidency, hence rising questions over his political neutrality. His successor, Domingo Paredes (2011-15), publicly joined the Alianza PAIS in 2016 while the renewal of the CNE in January 2015 turned into a farce when a member resigned after only six days in office for ‘personal reasons’ (it seems it was actually because she turned out to be still a member of the Alianza PAIS hence preventing her to perform her duties) leading to a dispute over whom should replaced her between two appointed substitute members, one who had scored 88 points in the examination but hadn’t participated in the swearing-in of the new CNE to denounce alleged irregularities in the examination process, and another one who had scored 87 points in the examination. Beyond all expectations, the seat went to a third person, who had only scored 79.75 points in the examination. Leading to a new internal election of the president of the CNE in which the president since only eight days, Paúl Salazar, a former adviser to Ricardo Patiño, was demoted from his position and replaced by Juan Pablo Pozo, a former secretary of the National Assembly’s Audit Commission employed by assemblywoman Silvia Salgado (part of the pro-Correa wing of the quite insignificant Ecuadorian Socialist Party); the newer member voted, of course, in favor of Pozo, raising questions about a possible deal between the two.



In January 2011, arguing of the increase in criminality in Ecuador, Correa announced a constitutional amendment would be put to referendum aiming at dissolving the nine-member Judiciary Council in place since 2008 to replace it with a transitory three-member Judiciary Council with full powers for eighteen months to reorganize the judicial system and to appoint or remove magistrates; the members of that transitory council would be appointed by the president, the National Assembly and the CPCCS. Correa stated then in one of his Enlace Ciudadano that ‘they will say that we are wanting to get our hands on the courts. Yes, we want to get our hands: for the good of the Ecuadorian people’.

The constitutional amendment was included in a ten questions package (including also the creation of a council regulating medias, longer detentions of suspected criminals without charge as well as more trivial stuff like prohibition of gambling and limitations to bullfighting and cockfighting) which was put to referendum in May 2011 and passed with 52.0% of the valid votes.

[Sir John Johns]

The restructuring of the justice system was facilitated by the proclamation in September 2011 of a 60-day state of emergency in the judicial system enabling a rapid mobilization of financial resources to modernize the infrastructures and recruit new court employees but also easing the firing of magistrates. In eighteen months, the Transitory Judiciary Council appointed 616 new judges while also suspending 182 and removing 244 other judges using often vague motives to get rid of the magistrates. Among the new appointees, the selection in January 2012 of the mother of then-Interior minister José Serrano (also a former justice minister) to the post of judge in the National Justice Court was quite controversial.

The reconstituted and supposedly independent Judiciary Council appointed in January 2013 was stuffed with Correa loyalists, beginning with its president, Gustavo Jalkh, who had previously served as justice minister (2007-09), interior minister (2009-10) and private secretary to the president (2010-12). Other members included another former justice minister as well as a former vice-minister for justice in the Correa administration.

Hence, the government had full control over the judicial system, which is very useful to prosecute opponents and journalists but also to not prosecute or delay the proceedings in embarrassing corruption cases.

Finally, a word should be said about the profile of the comptroller general, the key official in the fight against corruption, during the whole decade Correa presided over Ecuador: Carlos Pólit, whom I already mentioned. Pólit  was firstly appointed to the post in 2007 by the Congress with the votes of Lucio Gutiérrez’s Patriotic Society Party (PSP). Opposition congressmen then claimed that Correa had traded that nomination in exchange for the support of the PSP for his plan to convene a referendum and open the way for a Constituent Assembly. Pólit, who, after a career in the customs administration (a traditional nest of corruption in Ecuador), became one of the most important members of the Gutiérrez administration, serving between 2003 and 2005 as governor of Guayas, minister for social well-being and general secretary of the presidency. In that latter post, he assured that the import from Mexico of electoral material made by Gutiérrez’s 2002 presidential campaign team was legal and was accused of being part of a racketeering scheme at the expense of companies operating in oil sector enabling him to receive a 5% commission on contracts signed (other persons receiving a combined additional 15% commission).

It was obviously the political appointment of a shady politician to a supposedly apolitical office as part of necessary deals (Correa’s party having no seats at all in the Congress), yet, Pólit was confirmed in his post by the Alianza PAIS-dominated Constituent Assembly in 2007 and successfully applied for a new five-year term in 2012 (scoring a perfect score of 100 out of 100 points in the examination) and for yet another five-year term in 2017, just few weeks before Moreno’s inauguration (scoring this time only 95 points but as the second best-rank candidate had only obtained 67.5 points…). Pólit sent a letter of resignation from Miami in June 2017, where he had went ‘for health reasons’, after it had been revealed he was involved in the Odebrecht corruption scandal; the National Assembly overwhelmingly voted in favor of his removal from office the following month. The son of Pólit, a former Merrill Lynch employee, is investigated by the SEC since last year over allegations of money laundering in the buying of at least three expensive properties in Florida.

Once can question the usefulness of the CPCCS as, far from its stated objectives of selecting senior civil servants on sole merits, it actually just perpetuates the old tradition of political and familial appointments even if in less flagrant way that under the worst periods of what Correa has described as the partidocracia (‘particracy’), the 1979-2007 era when Ecuador’s political landscape was characterized by heavy fragmentation, clash of powers (pugna de poderes) between the executive and the legislative (involving struggle over control of the judiciary, the state apparatus and the electoral institutions), widespread prebendalism and clientelism and, paradoxically, very weak political parties undermined by very low party loyalty among elected officials and low voter loyalty.


Corruption scandals under Correa

Prominent corruption scandals which broke out under the Correa administration were the following ones:

The Pativideos

The so-called Pativideos were leaked only five months after Correa’s inauguration, beginning with the airing on Teleamazonas of a secretly-taped video dating back from February 2007, at a time when Ecuadorian government considered a moratorium on the payment of interest of its global bonds, and showing a meeting between economy minister Ricardo Patiño, Armando Rodas, a former economy minister (and brother of future mayor of Quito Mauricio Rodas) and two representatives of Abadi & Co, a US investment firm, in which was discussed what seems to be a manipulation of the debt market. Correa defended his minister by stating he was an ‘honest man victim of a scoundrel’ (the whistleblower, Quinto Pazmiño, a former adviser to Patiño in the economy ministry, had problems with the justice over a land dispute case) and stating that the video had been edited.

A second video was aired three weeks later, again on Teleamazonas, showing a meeting dating back also from February 2007 and attended by Patiño, the president of the Congress Jorge Cevallos (a member of Álvaro Noboa’s right-wing party) and a congressman for the democratic christian UDC. The three men were planning the passage of a bill approving the convening of a Constituent Assembly by the Congress in which Correa’s party had no seat as it didn’t fielded candidates in the 2006 legislative elections to position Correa as a credible anti-establishment candidate in a political gamble that paid off but may also been considered at the root of several weaknesses of Correísmo. Cevallos was apparently asking in return support from Patiño for an infrastructure project (the Carrizol-Chone irrigation system) in his Manabí province.

Patiño was impeached on 14 July 2007 by the Congress with claims made by congressmen over the alleged market manipulation having benefited Venezuelan banks with congressman Luis Almeida (PSP) bragging over new videos to be released, one supposedly involving Correa discussing with Patiño and Pazmiño over their ‘sexual preferences’. Not sure if this should be taken at face value or this was some kind of metaphor. What was in the additional videos (assuming they have ever existed) or in the unedited first video the Correa government had claimed to possess has never been known as an executive decree prohibiting reproduction of clandestinely recorded video or audio without the authorization of those involved was signed by Correa just before the impeachment of Patiño (who remained in the government but moved to another position). The practice of leaking secretly recorded material would came back in the first months of the Moreno administration, affecting key allies of the successor of Correa.

Pazmiño sued Correa for slanderous insults after having been publicly called ‘a liar’, ‘a scoundrel’ and ‘a mentally deranged’ by the president but was himself jailed for a month over alleged threats against Correa. He died in April 2010 from a heart attack; his widow was murdered in October 2011, few months after having escaped a first assassination attempt. The police established the motive for the murder of Pazmiño’s widow was a debt she contracted with Colombian loan sharks but no suspect has ever been arrested fueling conspiracy theories.

‘Check-eater’ and ‘the owner of the circus’

In  December 2008 Raúl Carrión, the minister for sport, was forced to resign after the opening of investigations against an adviser in his ministry, a member of the South American Basketball Championship organizing committee and a contractor for illicit enrichment. A long-time acquaintance of President Correa since both studied at the primary school of La Salle colegio and at the Santiago de Guayaquil Catholic University, Carrión had been recorded in a video leaked in June 2007 bragging about his influence in the government and his close links with the president, describing himself as ‘one of the owners of the circus’; the arrested member of the Basketball Championship organizing committee also knew Correa since the La Salle colegio times while the ministerial adviser was an acquaintance of Rafael Correa’s sister, Pierina, also since the La Salle colegio times. (In)famously, when arrested, the ministerial adviser attempted to eat the three $9,763 checks he was carrying on him.

After almost six years of proceedings (Ecuadorian justice under Correa was much faster when it came to cases of alleged terrorism and press offenses), Carrión was sentenced to three months in jail for embezzlement in the building of sport infrastructure, becoming the first member of the Correa administration to be sentenced in a corruption case. It was followed by a sentencing to four years in jail for embezzlement in another case of sports equipment procurement in April 2015, a sentencing to five additional years in jail for influence peddling in January 2016, a sentencing to five years in jail for embezzlement in April 2016 in the retrial of the case in which he had been previously sentenced to three months,  a sentencing to four additional years in jail for embezzlement in case of purchase of medical equipment in April 2017 and yet five additional years in jail for influence peddling in March 2019.

In November 2020, when prosecuted in twelve distinct cases and convicted so far to a cumulative sentence of twenty-three years in jail, Carrión, who had stopped appearing before a judge as required after his 2019 sentencing since August 2020, was declared a fugitive and ordered to be held in preventive detention. Amazingly enough, besides a year spent in pre-trial detention in 2009 when President Correa visited him and shortly afterward called the detention of Carrión ‘an injustice’ arguing that ‘every person is innocent until proven otherwise, the former minister was never imprisoned as none of the sentencing had been definitive, waiting retrials before appeal and cassation courts. And in early August 2021, Carrión, still on the run, was declared innocent of embezzlement in the case involving the check-eater as the proven facts he had committed actually don’t fell under the definition of embezzlement…

Anyway, the case gave ideas to some, as in December 2011, a municipal employee of Asunción (Paraguay) accused of corruption ate a compromising $300 check when the police came to arrest him...

The small business of Don Fabricio (Part I)

In December 2008, a lawsuit was filed behind a US court by American-owned Cotundo Minerales company against businessman Fabricio Correa, Rafael’s elder brother who played an important role in the fundraising for the 2006 campaign, over allegations that the president’s brother had received bribes and gifts from the Canadian firm Ivanhoe in exchange of lobbying in favor of the awarding by the Ecuadorian government of the Pungarayacu oil field (Napo province, Amazon) to that later company. The complaint was later withdrawn by the plaintiff.

Anyways, in November 2012, the Comptroller General’s office detected numerous irregularities in the contract signed in October 2008 with Ivanhoe under which terms the company would have exploited the Pungarayacu heavy-oil field using its patented HTL (‘heavy to light’) unique technology. Notably, the contract was signed with neither analysis or studies being made by the state-owned Petroecuador company on the HTL technology which turned out to be commercially nonviable; oil fields were awarded to Ivanhoe but to be exploited without using the HTL technology and hence should had been awarded through a distinct bidding process; the duration of the contract (30 years) exceeded the legal 20-year duration established by the law. Additionally, local indigenous communities and environmentalists were opposed to the project in part because of its location in the Sumaco Biosphere Reserve.

The contract with Ivanhoe was terminated in January 2015, six months after oil exploitation had been stopped as the petroleum in Pungarayacu turned out to be heavier than expected. The Canadian company, which received no compensation from the Ecuadorian state for its $61.8 million investments in the Pungarayacu oil field, went bankrupt few months thereafter.

[Sir John Johns]

The small business of Don Fabricio (Part II)

Further revelations were made in the press in June 2009 about Fabricio Correa’s shady businesses (which had been already denounced by former president León Febres-Cordero as early as October 2006) involving the awarding of public contracts worth $80 million to companies the brother of the president had shares in and was controlling through two holding companies registered in Panama. The contracts were awarded by institutions like the ministry for transportation and public works, the ministry for urban development and housing or the program for development of the South (Predesur; one of its former executive director happened to be then the president of Cosurca, a company recently bought by Fabricio Correa through his Panama-based International Energy Overseas Corporation holding company) mostly to build or maintain road projects, bridges or water projects. Furthermore, Quality Outsourcing, another company owned by Fabricio Correa, received contracts worth over $120 million with Petroproducción, a branch of Petroecuador to accomplish environmental remediation while another company controlled by Fabricio Correa, received a loan from the state-owned National Financial Corporation without meeting legal requirements.

The awarding of public contracts to Fabricio Correa would have infringed public procurement rules which explicitly prohibited relatives of elected officials and public servants to conclude contracts with public entities even if there were disagreement whether this prohibition extended to ‘legal persons’ (companies) in which relatives were shareholders and a change in the regulation dating back from April 2009 enabled contracting with ‘natural persons’ (individuals) related to a public official while prohibiting it with ‘legal persons’ related to a public official (the article describes the situation as ‘a legal muddle’).

The legality of Fabricio’s public contracts was initially defended by the government with Alexis Mera, the legal secretary to the Presidency, indicating he knew Fabricio Correa for thirty years and knew he was an honest and upright man and President Correa joking about finding out his brother was ‘little less than Bill Gates’ and demanding the newspaper that exposed the story to demonstrate Fabricio’s contracts had caused prejudice to the state, that it was a case of favoritism and if Fabricio’s companies were a dubious legality… while still requiring the comptroller general’s office to review the controversial contracts and announcing he would passed measures to fight front companies which ‘aren’t illegal but reprehensible’.

In September 2009, the comptroller general’s office established that contracts worth $167 million had been awarded to Fabricio Correa’s companies and detected various irregularities in the bidding and contracting (a company failed to demonstrate the experience of its technical personal as required by law; no up-to-date studies for a road project; a company failing to met the minimum legal requirement of technical employees to work on the site; a 67% overcost in two work orders contracted with Petroecuador; missing certificates; no liability and accident insurance in another contract).

In the meantime, all contracts concluded between public institutions and companies linked to Fabricio Correa had been canceled in July 2009 precipitating a nasty war of words between the two brothers: while Rafael finally acknowledged the illegality of the contracts and publicly stated that ‘greed has seized my brother’, Fabricio made allegations about a ‘pink circle’ (an insinuation with obvious homophobic undertones) surrounding the president and led by Alexis Mera whom Fabricio accused of influence peddling, coercion of justice and illicit enrichment; Fabricio notably claimed that Mera’s legal study had benefited from contracts with the government and alleged he had concluded a pact with Rafael Correa to ‘not sue or denounce public officials fishing offside’. Fabricio was suing Mera since 2008 for moral damage in a legal dispute over intellectual property opposing one of Fabricio’s companies, Aplitec, and a firm defended by Mera. Shortly thereafter, a public tribute to Mera was disturbed by about fifty drag-queens shouting ‘We love you, Alexia’ and ‘Hasta la Victoria Secret’, in one of the first of a long series of clowning from Fabricio.

Fabricio was on fire in September and October 2009, making harsh personal comments on his brother (‘My ñaño dreamed of being an economist when I already owned Aplitec and created jobs. I already had a shrimp farm, a melon farm, a business when he dreamed of obtaining a master’), on Mera (‘red in the outside, white on the outside’), on Vinicio Alvarado (‘according to the IRS website, his Creacional company declared 12.5 times more profit in 2008 than in 2006 when he wasn’t in the government. It caught my attention, I don’t know why nobody is investigating’), on Ricardo Patiño he accused to earn $5,000 a month while on the campaign trail for Correa’s 2009 reelection bid, on the new minister for public works who had canceled the contracts (‘he is a kid who was a boy scout, they are all boy scouts there and, until a few months ago, when someone wanted to make a repair in Carondelet, the leak from the bathtub, the light that didn’t worked, Homero Rendón [a presidential adviser who used to belong to the same scout group than Rafael Correa and Jorge Glas] called him: David come here, change the light bulb; now this is the minister who has been permanently appointed today’), on Lenín Moreno (accusing, well well well, his brother-in-law of having extorted a commission from Cosurca to receive a public contract and alleging Moreno was aware of that fact) and on the Citizen Revolution as a whole he compared to the ‘Sixth Velasquismo’ (after Velasco Ibarra who was president for five non-consecutive terms in office and whose last one was characterized by corruption, authoritarianism and political ineptitude) claiming that some officials have mansions, some have new cars and some even have new wives.

In the end of October 2009, Fabricio Correa delivered to the Comptroller General documents related to alleged bribery paid by Invermun, a casino company, to various officials of the Correa administration. According to Fabricio, the Alvarado brothers, Mera, Juan Carlos Casinelli (an Alianza PAIS assemblyman from Guayas whose legal study had advised Invermun) as well as Luis Monge (the political chief of Guayaquil canton and a relative of the Alvarados whom Fabricio also accused of having intervened in favor of awarding the contract for the building of a bridge to a Chinese company despite unfavorable reports from the comptroller general’s office) would have received bribes from Invermun; but Jaime Solórzano, a former executive director of the casino company who had exposed the case, also claimed that Invermun contributed to the 2009 election campaign of Pierina Correa (Rafael and Fabricio’s sister) for prefect of Guayas. Rafael Correa dismissed the accusations of his brother, publicly accusing him of being a mythomaniac and comparing him to Pedro Collor de Mello who, back in 1992, accused his brother Fernando, president of Brazil, of corruption hence hence precipitating the latter’s downfall.

Such revelations, happening in a context of then-growing unpopularity of the recently reelected president (his approvals sunk from 70% in January 2009 to 44% in October 2009 according to Cedatos) may have put the Correa presidency in jeopardy had Fabricio Correa not being a complete moron who doubled down on histrionic and provocative statements and decided it was the good time to jump into politics only to embarrass himself, rendering all his revelations unreliable. By December 2011, this had turned into a complete circus with  Fabricio Correa holding a press conference in front of the Ecuadorian Institute for Intellectual Property to announce he was registering the ‘Hasta la Victoria Secret’ and ‘Por el Ojo Tuerto te Roban Ñaño’ sentences as exclusive trademarks because his followers on Twitter asked him to do so (in response to the Ecuadorian government’s intent to register ‘30S’ and ‘It is forbidden to forget’ as trademark) while in company of a dwarf disguised as Chucky (of the Child’s Play franchise) in reference to a sentence against a newspaper allegedly written, not by the judge, but by the user of a pirate version of Microsoft Word using the ‘Chucky Seven’ alias; Fabricio was holding himself a ‘Christmas Chucky Seven’ doll. In 2012, Fabricio registered his own political party, Equipo, to support a presidential bid against his brother for the following year (touted as ‘North Correa vs. South Correa’ by Fabricio…); however, the CNE found out most signatures filed by Fabricio’s party were forged or invalid hence preventing Fabricio to run for president. During the 2013 presidential election, Rafael’s brother went to the polling stations escorted by an ‘interplanetary observer’ in a Darth Vader suit…

While the Ecuadorian justice had opened an investigation on the bribes allegedly paid by Invermun, its results were never made public and, like other prominent corruption cases, failed to reach the courts. Fabricio Correa’s demands for a compensation for the cancellation of the contracts were rejected by the justice but he never was prosecuted in the case. Solárzano, the former executive director of Invermun, was sued by the Alvarado brothers and sentenced to three months in jail for insults. The members of the commission appointed by the CPCCS to investigate Fabricio’s contracts were sued by President Correa in 2011 for false testimony after they had affirmed Rafael was aware of the awarding of public contracts to his brother; two of them were sentenced to one year in jail in 2014 and the two others acquitted; both men were later pardoned by President Moreno. Juan Carlos Calderón and Christian Zurita, two journalists which investigated the case and published a book on it untitled Gran Hermano: Historia de una simulación (‘Big Brother: Story of a Simulation’), were also sued by President Correa and sentenced in February 2012 to an exorbitant compensation of $1 million each for ‘spiritual damage’ (Correa was asking for a $10 million compensation). On February 27, after some national and international outrage, Correa announced the withdrawing of his complaint and the justice shelved the case in April 2012.

In the meantime, Rafael Correa had problems because of another relative...

[Sir John Johns]

From Tehran to Miami: the embarrassing cousin

Another relative of Rafael Correa found himself embroiled in a series of scandals, embarrassing the government of Ecuador few weeks before the 2013 general elections: Pedro Delgado, a cousin of Correa, who had been appointed in 2011 to the presidency of the Central Bank of Ecuador, a post he concomitantly held with the chairmanship of the Public Law Management Unit (Ugedep). This last government agency had the task of managing the so-called ‘No More Impunity’ Deposit Guarantee Agency – National Financial Corporation Trust which held assets nationalized or seized from private bankers/oligarchs during the 1998-2008 decade, essentially in the aftermath of the feriado bancario when the Ecuadorian state bailed out and took control private banks to prevent a collapse of the bank sector, exploding the public debt in the process.

The most famous bankers who saw their assets passing under the control of the state are the Isaías Brothers, two corrupt bankers/oligarchs who played a key role in the feriado bancario when their main bank, Filanbanco, had to be nationalized to prevent a complete collapse of the Ecuadorian bank sector. The two bankers, now living in exile in Miami, are claiming to be the victims of ‘political persecution’ as illustrated for example by this article on their English-speaking website entirely redacted in an insufferable hyperbolic style and soberly titled ‘Roberto Isaías: the longest case of political persecution in the continent’; yeah, no less. William and Roberto Isaías were sentenced in abstentia in April 2012 to eight years in jail for embezzlement and Correa has routinely accused the two bankers (who had made donations to the campaigns of US politicians like Carlos Curbelo, Maria Elvira Salazar, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen but also Joe García, Bill Nelson and Debbie Wasserman Schultz as well as to the Obama Victory Fund in 2012) of funding the opponents to his government while in 2015 Ramiro González, a former ally of Correa, accused the then-president of Ecuador of having received money from the Isaías family for his 2006 presidential campaign; neither claims have been substantiated.

Problems for Delgado began in July 2012 when former official in the Reagan and Bush father and son administrations Otto Reich published articles on various English-speaking opinion websites denouncing supposed ongoing negotiations between the Correa administration and the Iranian government over the sale to Iranian banks of the Ugedep-managed Cofiec loss-making bank; such sale would had enable Tehran to circumvent international financial sanctions (Ecuador’s economy being dollarized making it very interesting for Iran). In the following days, it was revealed that Delgado and the Cofiec leadership made several trips in Iran in early 2012 to prepare the partial or complete sale of Cofiec to the Pasargad Iranian bank; however, Pasargad was placed on the US government black list of companies suspected of funding terrorism in early July 2012 rendering the sale of Cofiec highly hazardous. A scheme using a bank account opened by the Ecuadorian Central Bank in Russia was considered in order to facilitate transactions with the Export Development Bank of Iran, a company also on the US government black list. It later emerged that the Iranian embassy in Quito had opened two accounts with Cofiec in November 2011 on which it deposited $1.8 million (an amount accounting for 7% of the total money deposited  at Cofiec) under the form of stacks of $100 bills still wrapped in US Treasury wrappers. Nevertheless, the Delgado case moved from a scandal with possible international proportions against a backdrop of potential money laundering and evasion of US sanctions to relatively more trivial and traditional accusations.

Indeed, in August 2012, a TV report by the US-based Univisión channel disclosed that Delgado had bought in 2011 a villa in North Miami Beach for $385,000 and that his wife, then the Ecuador’s vice-consul in Miami, as well as relatives had created and were running several companies in Florida, a state listed as a tax haven by the Ecuadorian IRS and usually portrayed by Correísta propaganda as a hellhole full of Latin American fascist, tax evader and crony capitalist exiles spending their time plotting the overthrow of every left-wing government south of the Rio Grande. Correa promptly dismissed the allegations about Delgado’s villa as part of a smear campaign staged by ‘American-Cuban fascistoid’ Otto Reich and stated that the villa he called a ‘middle-class’ house (by US standards) had been acquired by Delgado thanks to a 15-year mortgage loan; he also indicated that Delgado resided in the United States for a decade as he had to fled Ecuador when ‘persecuted by the corrupt bankers when they were the owners of the country’ (Delgado, a national intendant for banking during the Mahuad presidency, had been sued by the former president of Banco Popular over allegations he had forged a document used later to prosecute the banker; there are mentions of this case in this 2000 Hoy article).

Such version was however contradicted few weeks later when El Universo claimed that the villa was actually funded by a loan obtained from the Panamanian subsidiary of Banco del Austro, then belonging to Eljuri Grupo, one of the major conglomerates in Ecuador, and two cash transfers worth respectively $35,000 and $165,000. In September 2012, a reception attended by 300 persons was organized in Quito Hotel in support of Delgado during which Correa publicly dismissed allegations made against his cousin,  including new revelations about Delgado having two safes in a Russian bank and the first rumors about his academic background, as smears spread by bankers and private medias and calling El Comercio’s report on the Russian safes as ‘crap’ that would bring the newspaper before the justice.

But by late August (which means few days later), this had been anyway overshadowed by another scandal I haven’t understand everything as it emerged that the Cofiec bank, managed by the Ugedep, had advanced in December 2011 in a record time a $800,000 loan to Argentinian businessman Gastón Duzac (reportedly to develop a mobile wallet project) in violation of the banking legislation (notably Duzac didn’t resided in Ecuador for more than one year) and without the requisite guarantees (well, one of the loan guarantee was the Las Mercedes farm business, a company he had no shares in as it had been seized by the Ecuadorian state from arch-corrupt bankers and managed by the Ugedep, the parent ‘company’ of Cofiec); Duzac never repaid the loan and Cofiec was unable to locate him to get the money refunded (Duzac reemerged later in Argentina).

Opposition assemblyman César Montúfar later disclosed a report of the Central Bank of Ecuador mentioning that Duzac participated in the February 2012 visit of the Cofiec leadership to Iran and Russia (when Delgado reportedly acquired the two safes in that country) but this was strongly denied by the Iranian embassy. The following October, opposition lawmakers disclosed e-mails allegedly proving that Delgado and the coordinator of Cofiec’s secretariat, Francisco Endara, had interceded in favor of Duzac to help him getting the loan; Endara, who happened to be also the brother-in-law of Delgado, was subsequently denounced by the Superintendency for Banks for illegitimately acting as a member of the Cofiec executive board and having irregularly benefited from a $20,000 loan from Cofiec. Two members of the Cofiec executive board (but not Delgado nor Endara) were arrested in the Duzac case but released shortly thereafter, in November 2012, after a judge had decided the nullity of proceedings. On the morning right before, President Correa had visited the two imprisoned bank officials and claimed they were innocent and the victims of ‘injustice’ and ‘sensationalism’.

Two weeks later erupted yet another scandal, this time around the educational background of Delgado, and this one would led to the rapid demise of Correa’s cousin. El Universo then revealed that in a lawsuit against the Isaías Brothers Delgado had made a testimony before the US justice in which he had mentioned not holding a degree from an Ecuadorian university. Yet, he had used a degree from the Pontifical University of Quito to register in the Costa Rican INCAE university from which he had graduated with a master in entrepreneurial economics and a postgraduate degree in bank administration. Correa welcomed the news with his traditional sunny disposition, by tearing a copy of El Universo in his weekly TV-show and denouncing a ‘media lynching’ against Delgado. After a trip in early December of an opposition assemblyman to Costa Rica where the INCAE leadership admitted it couldn’t find any material trace of the Pontifical University of Quito degree and acknowledged the existence of ‘serious doubts on the authenticity of the documents submitted by Delgado to qualify for the master’, it had became obvious that Delgado didn’t held the legal qualifications to hold the office of governor of the Central Bank and had usurped the title of ‘economist’.

On 19 December 2012, Pedro Delgado publicly acknowledged he used a fake degree to register with the INCAE and announced his immediate resignation from both the presidency of the Central Bank and the presidency of the ‘No More Impunity’ Deposit Guarantee Agency – National Financial Corporation Trust. And immediately thereafter took a flight to Miami but President Correa explained then it was to attend the long planned wedding of his son and ensured that Delgado would obviously come back to Ecuador. Shockingly, Delgado never returned but there is still hope as he had been arrested in Miami by the ICE in late August 2021 (Correa government withdrew Delgado’s visa hence putting him in an unclear migration status).

In April 2015, the Ecuadorian justice sentenced Delgado (in abstentia), Gastón Duzac (also in absentia as Argentina never extradited him to Ecuador), Endara as well as three other Cofiec officials to eight years in jail for embezzlement in the Duzac case. All but Duzac were also sentenced to pay a $615,000 compensation to the state. The former president of the Cofiec was pardoned by Correa few days before the end of his presidential term in May 2017. Delgado was furthermore sentenced in January 2019 to five additional years in jail for illicit enrichment after the comptroller general’s office had detected an unwarranted $394,000 increase in his estate.

Delgado made headlines in March 2017, just before the presidential runoff at a time of a captivating political debate to determine who should be blamed for the feriado bancario between Delgado, the right-wing presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso and Juan Falconí Puig, the ambassador to the WTO under Correa, three men who had all served in the Mahuad administration: Lasso as a ‘superminister’ for Economy, Falconí Puig as president of the National Financial Corporation and Delgado as intendent of banking. Shortly thereafter Delgado gave interviews to various Ecuadorian medias and trolled his cousin by posting stuff under the ‘Primoleaks’ alias (primo meaning 'cousin' in Spanish) on Twitter, claiming notably there had been an agreement in the Carondelet Palace to organize his flee to the United States in December 2012, an agreement he claimed Correa betrayed by getting his visa revoked and criticizing the indebtedness of Ecuador with China under conditions similar to those of IMF and World Bank. He mentioned also that he had decided to defend himself after a TV interview in which Correa hinted he had hired Delgado out of pity because of Delgado’s disabled daughter, which Delgado didn’t took well. Few days thereafter, Delgado demanded on his Twitter account an investigation of the accounts of Pamela Martínez, the Vice President of the Supreme Court and an old friend of Correa, alleging she was using them to manage contributions and donations to the Alianza PAIS and evade the audit of the party’s funding. This is the origin of the ‘Green Rice’ or ‘2012-16 Bribes’ case for which Correa would be sentenced to eight years in jail in April 2020, preventing him to run for vice president in 2021.

In an interview conducted in May 2013 in Arrecifes (Argentina) with the now-defunct La Vanguardia magazine, Duzac pretended never having received the money from the loan, to be bankrupted and to never had the guarantees to obtain the loan. He claimed to have only signed papers for which he felt then ‘like the dumbest guy in the world’. As noticed by La Vanguardia reporter, on the address where was supposedly located the house worth $500,000 mentioned in Duzac’s loan application there was only a vacant lot while the headquarters of the software company supposed to develop the mobile wallet project for Cofiec turned out to be unoccupied.

The whereabouts of the $800,000 remain a mystery; what is it known is that after having transited by the Panamanian subsidiary of Banco del Austro, half of the sum transited by the Bank of New York before being deposited on a bank account in Lugano (Switzerland) while the other half transited by JP Morgan Chase New York and was deposited on a bank account in… Newton (North Carolina). Incidentally (?),  Rafael Correa made a trip in late October 2012 to visit the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, in search of inspiration for his planned ‘City of Knowledge’ in Yachay, and met US billionaire David H. Murdock, the chairman of Dole Food Company, the promoter of a diet to live longer and the principal shareholder in the Occidental Petroleum (which operated in Ecuador until being expropriated in 2006 when Correa was economy and finance minister) in the early 1980s until he sold all his shares in 1984 to the company at a price well above market value, earning him lawsuits filed by other shareholders.

In 2015, Cofiec went out of bank sector; as explained in this article, the bank had suffered, in addition of the corruption and shady business of Delgado and his associates, of a nine-year-long (2004-13) legal battle between the Ecuadorian state, two Spanish citizens and five Panamanian companies over the ownership of the Cofiec shares and of the instability of its leadership (seven successive executive presidents between 1999 and 2008).

[Sir John Johns]

Interrupting my series of posts answering Expat in Ecuador’s posts for an update on the ongoing political situation as a lot of stuff has happened in the last months.

The Creating Opportunities Law

The Pandora Papers revelations about Guillermo Lasso having ties to fourteen offshore companies and trusts (eleven having been dissolved several years ago) in Panama, South Dakota and Delaware are coming at one of the worst imaginable time for the president of Ecuador who is trying to get pass into the National Assembly his ‘Creating Opportunities Law’, a so-called megaley (‘mega-law’) aiming at reviving the country’s economy, creating jobs and reducing the indebtedness of the Ecuadorian state. The omnibus bill, which is comprising no less than 335 articles modifying 31 existing laws or regulations, would reform the taxation system and increase the government’s revenues through, notably:

* the institution of a temporary tax on taxpayers with an annual income superior to $24.000
* the institution of a special contribution for taxpayers with estates worth more than $500.000 and profitable companies with estates worth more than $1 million
* the abolition of the inheritance tax for spouses and children
* the abolition of the 2% tax on micro-businesses
* the abolition of the VAT on accommodation for foreign tourists
* the abolition of the VAT on several hygiene products like diapers, masks, alcohol gel or tampons

It also includes large sections dedicated to a reform of labor laws whose key component is the institution of a ‘voluntary and alternative employment opportunities regime’, a euphemism for a new fixed-term employment contract severely undermining employees’ rights and whose duration could amount up to four (!) years. Employers would also be provided with thirteen new motives to terminate the employment of an employee.

Finally, the law is also comprising dispositions to enable delegation to the private sector in electricity sector, to legalize informal aquaculture and fishing activities under certain conditions, to develop remote notarial services, to create a new type of visas for foreign digital nomads and to foster private investment in mining sectors, increase oil concessions and delegate to the private sector oil refinery industry.

Nevertheless, the Legislative Administrative Council (CAL) of the National Assembly voted by five votes against two against putting the megaley to the vote of the legislators, arguing of its dubious constitutionality (too much different areas are addressed by the bill) and complaining of the lack of time to examine a voluminous text (sent to the National Assembly under the regime of economic emergency with only a month for the legislators to approve the bill (if no majority has voted against the bill, it would have pass).

To overcome the current stalemate in the passage of the Creating Opportunities Law, the government is contemplating referring the case to the Constitutional Court, splitting the bill into several minor ones or, the ‘nuclear option’, putting the text to a referendum with the hope that Lasso’s successful management of the vaccination campaign would suffice to convince the voters to vote in favor of the bill. Needless to say that the Pandora Papers revelations could now change the situation and discourage Lasso to convene a referendum; if he lose it, he would be politically done and became into a lame duck president. And there is another, even more nuclear, option, la muerte cruzada, i.e. the dissolution of the National Assembly and the immediate holding of new legislative AND presidential elections.

The disintegration of parliamentary caucuses continues

To make things more complicated, the National Assembly is becoming more and more unruly with a new batch of party defections having happened since July:

* on 21 July, Bruno Segovia, a Pachakutik assemblyman from Azuay close to Yaku Pérez, announced his departure from the indigenous party in protest over the controversial purchase of luxury vehicles for legislators decided by the president of the National Assembly Guadalupe Llori. The former indigenous presidential candidate has since launched his own party, Somos Agua (‘We Are Water’) which self-describes as ecofeminist and started its registration process but without burning bridges with Pachakutik nor the leftist Popular Unity currently under threat of deregistration (Pérez would certainly need the indigenous voting bloc to have some hopes of success).

* on 26 July, Vanessa Freire, an UNES assemblywoman from Los Ríos, decided to leave the Correísta caucus and seat as an independent to protest over the complete take-over (denounced as an ‘invasion’ by another founder of the party) by followers of Correa of the Social Commitment Force (FCS), the party she co-founded with Iván Espinel and led after Espinel’s arrest and sentencing to ten years in jail for money laundering. Nevertheless, she would had never been elected an assemblywoman had she not rent her party to the Correístas.

In any case, with now full control over the historically non-ideological FCS, the followers of Correa had refounded in late August the party as the Citizen Revolution Movement (RC) with former environment minister and national assemblywoman (2013-21) Marcela Aguiñaga as its leader (well, its theoretical leader because we all know what the ‘RC’ acronym actually refers to…). The party is aiming at attracting young, female and environmentalist voters who have played a major role (much more than indigenous voters) in the defeat of Andrés Arauz by not voting for the proxy candidate of Correa.

* On 22 August, it was the second vice president of the National Assembly, Bella Jiménez, who announced her departure from the Democratic Left, just few minutes before the party pronounced her expulsion from its ranks after the leaking of audios in which Jiménez was recorded negotiating the sale of public offices.

A former public official in the Guayas prefecture under Jimmy Jairalá, Jiménez had been a member of Jairalá’s Democratic Center and the Alianza PAIS before joining the ID few weeks before the 2021 legislative election and ended up becoming the second vice president only thanks to political, gender and regional quotas. This demonstrates once more the problems met by political parties to select their candidates, the persistent weakness of such organizations and the lack of loyalty and the cronyism of Ecuadorian politicians. For once, no time had been wasted to rule over the expel of the legislator accused of corruption. Jiménez is now facing an impending proceeding to remove her as an assemblywoman (unanimously approved by the Ethics Committee of the National Assembly).

* On 6 October, the ID lost yet another legislator (being reduced from 18 seats at the time of the opening of the new legislature to, for now, 14) when Eckenner Recalde, an assemblyman for South Quito electoral district, announced his decision to seat as an independent after his party had denounced him before the justice for allegedly racketing his own collaborators.

Ministerial changes

President Lasso has been also politically weakened by the death on 25 July of his main political operative and president of CREO, César Monge, few days after his departure from the Interior Ministry, a victim of cancer at only 48. On 20 August, Guido Chiriboga, an assemblyman from Guayas, a former businessman (having been the regional director of Telefónica) and a former dean of the Guayaquil’s Casa Grande University, was elected to replace Monge as the head of the presidential party.

A government reshuffle followed in mid-September after the minister for Social and Economic Inclusion, Mae Montaño, had been sacked for under the accusation of ‘personalism’ and having her ‘own agenda’, and the Agriculture and Livestock minister, Tanlly Vera, had announced her resignation in the middle of protests of rice-growers. Firing some of the most visible women from your government isn’t probably a very wise move, especially when their replacements (economist and former assemblyman and governor of Azuay Esteban Bernal as minister for Social and Economic Inclusion; businessman in banana sector Pedro Álava González as agriculture minister) were both men with traditional and uninspiring backgrounds.

Pretty embarrassing was also, at the same time,  the resignation of the head of the Ecuadorian Social Security Institute Jorge Madera who claimed there was a ‘mafias’ vendetta’ against his family and himself due to his willingness to fight corruption in the health sector.

The insecurity and prisons problem

The conservative government has also proved ineffective in its efforts to fight insecurity and massacres in Ecuadorian jails. On 14 September, governor of Guayas Vicente Taiano announced his resignation, officially for ‘strictly personal’ reasons but widely believed due to a rise in crime especially in Guayaquil area with 476 violent deaths recorded in the Area 8 (Guayaquil, Durán and Samborondón cantons) in the nine first months of 2021 against 270 for the whole 2020 year and several high-profile incidents like the alleged attack of a Guayaquil jail by drones carrying explosives or a series of grenade attacks between drug gangs in Guayaquil.

On 28 September, the worst massacre in a jail in the country’s history occurred when 118 prisoners died in violent fights connected to internal struggles in drug gangs. One day before, the director of the national penitentiary system (SNAI), Fausto Cobo (a former military officer who played a leading role in the anti-neoliberal 2000 coup against President Mahuad and, ironically, has first-hand experience of prison having been jailed for four months in 2005-06 with his then ally Lucio Gutiérrez), a proponent of a militarized and heavy-handed management of jails (describing prisons as ‘war zones’), had been moved to the unrelated position of director the Center for Strategic Intelligence. Cobo was heading the SNAI since only late July when appointed to address the jail problem just after a previous a coordinated riot in Guayaquil and Latacunga jails had left 22 prisoners dead.

And the Ecuadorian right (it is the brainchild of the PSC but has been picked up by Lasso during the campaign) has come with the most moronic possible idea to fight crime: a draft bill enabling the carrying of arms by ‘innocents’ to defend themselves in the ‘war on crime’ as publicly promoted by mayor Cynthia Viteri (PSC) during the celebration of the 201 years of the independence of Guayaquil. Such ‘Law for Citizen Life and Protection’ would also include the checking of criminal records for any immigrant and the abolition of the tabla de consumo de drogas (establishing the maximum amount of drug a person can carry without being charged with drug traffic).

[Sir John Johns]

Divisions on the left

In that context, the long-awaited meeting between the CONAIE leadership and the government gave no results with President Lasso refusing to comply with one of the key demands of the indigenous confederation, the freezing of the gasoline price. Furthermore, discrepancies have became apparent in the indigenous movement with Javier Aguavil,  the president of the Conaice (the coastal branch of the CONAIE), complaining about being sidelined by Iza (not really new, the numerically less important coastal communities have historically been marginalized inside the indigenous movement, having never held the presidency of the CONAIE despite a theoretical rotation of the leadership between the three regional branches). Meanwhile, the FENOCIN, the main rival of the CONAIE which defended pro-Correa stances in 2007-17 and later was more inclined to dialogue with the Moreno administration, is renewing its less anti-government orientation by agreeing on the constitution of six technical working sessions to reach economic and social agreements.

Divisions in the indigenous confederations are mirrored by similar discrepancies inside the Pachakutik caucus which became apparent in the impeachment proceedings against (Human Rights) Ombudsman Freddy Carrión (imprisoned since last May after having physically if not sexually assaulted a woman and punched a former health minister under Moreno next to an elevator, while at first reportedly heavily intoxicated, and during a clandestine party organized in blatant violation of social distancing rules) who has issued a report heavily critical of the Moreno administration’s police and military response to the October 2019 protests. Pachakutik announced it would vote in favor of Carrión’s removal like CREO, the PSC and the ID; however, hours later, the CONAIE issued a statement in favor of Carrión, describing the impeachment as a ‘clear judicial, political, systemic and illegal persecution against a defender of human rights’, a position also advocated by the UNES bench. Ultimately, fourteen Pachakutik legislators abstained under the leadership of Salvador Quishpe who used the same argumentation than the CONAIE to justify his vote, the rest voting in favor of the removal of Carrión, who was ousted from office.

Meanwhile, Correísmo is also facing some early divisions with Carlos Rabascall, Arauz’s running-mate, having already declared his presidential candidacy for 2025 with the support of the Democratic Center and the party he is trying to register, Surgente (‘Emerging’ or ‘Arising’). Few days ago, the RC drily dismissed Rabascall’s announcement about the constitution of a ‘national progressive front’ in accordance with discussions he had with Rafael Correa, clarifying that the actions of the communicator and economic journalist ‘don’t represent’ the RC and that he ‘hasn’t been invited to join any progressive front’.

The Pandora Papers

As mentioned earlier and widely reported worldwide, the name of Lasso is mentioned in the Pandora Papers with the current Ecuadorian president claiming he has no longer ties with the remaining companies (the other ones having been dissolved before his third presidential bid), he hasn’t lied about his income and assets declaration and paid the corresponding taxes and he is in full compliance with the constitution provision (passed by referendum in February 2017 after the Panama Papers had revealed various high officials in state oil sector owned offshore companies funded with bribes received by various firms) prohibiting elected and non-elected high state officials to own companies in tax havens.

Opponents are unconvinced, especially as another name appearing the Pandora Papers (as the owner of two offshore companies in British Virgin Islands dedicated to investments in Switzerland and businesses in mining sector) is the one of Ecuadorian political strategist Jaime Durán Barba who masterminded Lasso’s successful runoff campaign axed around the Ecuador del encuentro strategy, previously managed Mauricio Macri’s campaigns and used to be the administration general secretary in Jamil Mahuad’s government after having been a Marxist activist in his youth and the founder of a ‘National Institute for Workers and Peasants Education’. Said Durán Barba as well as his colleague Santiago Nieto (also mentioned in the Pandora Papers) were decorated on 10 October by Cynthia Viteri in the celebration of Guayaquil Independence (just before the discourse on the ‘war on crime’).

On 6 October, Yaku Pérez filed a criminal complaint behind the Attorney General’s office for alleged tax fraud and to investigate Lasso’s assets since his first presidential bid in 2013. The following day, a motion put to vote by UNES legislator Ronny Aleaga proposing an investigation of the matter by the Constitutional Guarantees Commission (presided by a Pachakutik legislator) was approved with 105 votes for (UNES, Pachakutik, ID and PSC), 24 votes against (the pro-government BAN) and five (all independents) abstaining. This came just after President Lasso had invited the Oversight Commission (headed by independent assemblyman and journalist Fernando Villavicencio, considered as more favorable to the president and in bad terms with Guadalupe Llori) to answer questions related to the Pandora Papers. The same day, Andrés Arauz reemerged to ask the National Assembly to investigate and take a rapid decision and calling for Lasso’s resignation or removal from office and for a ‘democratic restoration’.

Unhappy with the Llori’s decision to confirm the delegation of the Pandora Papers investigation to the Constitutional Guarantees Commission and parliamentary maneuvers to hamper his legislative work in the case, Villavicencio has denounced a ‘conspiracy and a boycott’ against the Oversight Commission and announced he will investigate on a personal basis every people involved in the Pandora Papers scandals which, in addition to Lasso and Durán Barba, include so far:

* Shady financier Jorge Chérrez already involved in a misappropriation case in the management of the financial assets of the Police Social Security Institute (Isspol) which has irregularly invested some $693 million in Chérrez’s companies between 2014 and 2019.

* the PSC vice-prefect of Guayas and former mayor of Samborondón José Yúnez Parra.

* US-born businessman and boy scout leader Bill Phillips who had already been sentenced to eight years in jail for embezzlement in the Green Rice/Bribes 2012-2016 case (he is currently on the run) and has benefited from irregular contracts in the public oil sector, notably for the rehabilitation of the Esmeraldas Refinery.

* former Petroecuador manager for international trade, Nilsen Arias who, at this post he held between 2012 and 2017, played a major role in the controversial pre-sales of oil to China.