[News] How Ecuador’s US-backed, Coup-Supporting ‘Ecosocialist’ Candidate Aids the Right-Wing

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://orinocotribune.com/how-ecuadors-us-backed-coup-supporting-ecosocialist-candidate-aids-the-right-wing/
How
Ecuador’s US-backed, Coup-Supporting ‘Ecosocialist’ Candidate Aids the
Right-WingBy Ben Norton  –  Feb 6, 2021

*Ecuador’s third-place presidential candidate Yaku Pérez and his US-backed
party Pachakutik supported coups in Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, and
Nicaragua. His supposedly “left-wing” environmentalist campaign is being
promoted by right-wing corporate lobbyists.*

Ecuador’s historic February 7 election could bring a popular revolutionary
movement back from the dead and help fuel a new wave of socialist
governments in Latin America.

The contrast between the two main presidential candidates could hardly be
more stark: On one side is a conservative banker backed by Ecuadorian
elites and the United States, Guillermo Lasso; and on the other is a
youthful left-wing economist, Andrés Arauz, who follows in the footsteps of
socialist former President Rafael Correa and wants to return to his
Citizens’ Revolution.

But a third candidate who has stayed in the race until the end, despite all
polls showing him significantly behind, has helped to divide Ecuador’s
left-wing vote by running what has been marketed as a progressive
environmentalist campaign.

Yaku Pérez Guartambel, an Indigenous leader from Ecuador’s party
Pachakutik, purports to be the true left-wing option in the election. But
his political record suggests he is a Trojan Horse for the left’s most
bitter enemies.

Pérez supported right-wing US-backed coups targeting Bolivia, Brazil,
Venezuela, and Nicaragua, demonizing the countries’ socialist governments
as “racist.”

His political views fuse ultra-leftist, anarchistic critiques of existing
left-wing states with an objectively right-wing political agenda. And his
opposition to state power is deeply opportunistic. While Pérez harshly
criticizes China, he has simultaneously pronounced he “would not think
twice” about signing a trade deal with the United States.

Pérez’s ostensibly progressive ideology is filled with contradictions.
While the Correista candidate Arauz has proposed giving $1000 checks to one
million working-class Ecuadorian families, Pérez has attacked the plan on
the grounds that poor citizens would spend all the money on beer in one day.

The party of Pérez, Pachakutik, identifies as “ecosocialist” and claims to
represent Ecuador’s Indigenous communities. But like the candidate that
leads it, it employs left-wing rhetoric to paper over regressive goals.

Pachakutik is closely linked to NGOs funded by Washington and EU member
states. The party’s leaders have been trained by the US government-funded
National Democratic Institute (NDI), a CIA cutout that operates under the
auspices of the National Endowment for Democracy.

In the past, Pérez and Pachakutik helped lead protests against Ecuador’s
former President Correa, forming an unspoken alliance with the country’s
right-wing oligarchs in a bid to destabilize and overthrow the socialist
president. In fact, Pachakutik played a significant role in a US-backed
2010 coup attempt that came close to undemocratically removing Correa from
power.

The leading right-wing candidate in the 2021 election, the wealthy banker
Lasso, is not threatened by the “ecosocialist” rhetoric of Pérez and
Pachakutik. He seems keenly aware that the label is just a marketing plot.
Lasso publicly declared that if Pérez somehow made it to a second round,
Lasso would gladly support Pérez to defeat the Correistas.

The banker’s endorsement is unsurprising when one considers that, back in
2017, before he changed his name from Carlos to Yaku, Pérez himself
supported Lasso’s presidential bid.
[image: poll perfiles de opinion Ecuador Arauz Lasso]A January poll of
Ecuador’s presidential candidates, showing Andrés Arauz with 43.22%,
Guillermo Lasso with 25.54%, and Yaku Pérez with 19.87%

Pachakutik’s ties to Washington are extensive. One of its most prominent
former members is Fernando Villavicencio, an Ecuadorian journalist who
spearheaded a disinformation campaign targeting journalist Julian Assange,
peddling discredited but deeply damaging claims about the Wikileaks
publisher through the neoliberal British newspaper The Guardian.

Villavicencio’s anti-Correa activism also appears to have been funded by
the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy.

Yaku Pérez and Pachakutik mirror another campaign in South America that
exploited ostensibly left-wing forces on behalf of right-wing ends.

During the lead-up to the US-backed coup against Bolivia’s democratically
elected socialist government in 2019, NGOs that claimed to support
environmentalist causes participated in a disinformation operation to
demonize then-President Evo Morales, the first Indigenous president in
Bolivia’s history, himself a strong supporter of environmental protections.

Regime-change activists from organizations funded by the US and European
governments accused the Morales administration of fueling fires in the
Amazon rainforest that were most concentrated in Brazil, where far-right
President Jair Bolsonaro proudly branded himself “captain chainsaw.”

Yaku Pérez and Pachakutik play a similar role in Ecuador, attacking popular
leftist forces from the left, thereby opening up space for the right-wing
to advance. Supporters of the socialist Correista movement have accused
Pérez and Pachakutik of trying to split the vote to prevent a left-wing
victory on February 7.

As in Bolivia, where Western environmental groups like Extinction Rebellion
helped support the 2019 coup on the grounds of green concern, self-declared
anarchists from the ostensibly progressive organization are heaping praise
on Pérez.

Extinction Rebellion is joined in its praise for the marginal pseudo-left
figure by right-wing corporate lobby groups like the Americas Society and
Council of the Americas (AS/COA), which is funded by planet-destroying
fossil fuel corporations, weapons manufacturers, and banks that have a
vested interest in trying to stop the Correistas from returning to power.

*“Left-wing” support for right-wing coups in Latin America*

Yaku Pérez Guartambel says he wants Ecuadorians to use fewer cars and plant
more trees. He has proposed an end to mining in Ecuador and a restriction
of oil extraction. Pérez criticizes the Correista movement for its reliance
on extraction. With campaign photos often showing him riding a bicycle at
rallies, Perez’s image seems custom tailored to appeal to the sensibility
of Western green activists.

Ecuador is a developing, formerly colonized country and thus relatively
poor compared to Global North imperialist nations. But it has an advantage:
large oil and mineral reserves. These resources have been key to the
political and economic program of Correa and his followers, who used them
to turbocharge development of Ecuador, fund popular social programs, and
invest billions of dollars in universal healthcare, high-quality education,
and advanced infrastructure.

Yet the supposed progressive appearance of Pérez’s political program ends
with his environmental policies. When it comes to international politics,
he has shown himself to be deeply right-wing.

And while Pérez uses his Indigenous heritage to claim to represent
Ecuador’s Native communities, many are in fact strongly against him and his
party.

Indigenous outrage against Pérez especially grew when he supported the
US-backed military coup in Bolivia in November 2019.

In October 2020, Evo Morales’ Indigenous-majority Movement Toward Socialism
(MAS) party won the election in a landslide. Numerous Ecuadorian Indigenous
leaders were invited to the inauguration of MAS President Luis Arce, but
Pérez was not. When asked why, it was made clear that Pérez was shunned
because he had supported the coup.

Even before the violent regime change operation, Pérez was a harsh critic
of Morales, accusing him and Correa of “authoritarianism, machismo,
extractivism, and populism.” Pérez flatly refused to recognize the
legitimacy of Evo’s government.

In 2017, Pérez attacked Evo again, tweeting, “His ignorance is
encyclopedic. Evo is biologically Indigenous; in terms of his identity he
whitewashed and colonized himself and doesn’t feel or understand the Native
cosmovision.”

After backing the coup, Pérez went silent about Bolivia, saying nothing as
the junta, led by racist Christian extremists, massacred Indigenous
protesters.

But the coup in Bolivia is not the only US-led regime-change campaign in
Latin America that Yaku Pérez has supported.

In November 2016, Pérez praised the US-backed soft coup that removed
Brazil’s left-wing Workers’ Party government from power, while endorsing a
right-wing “lawfare” (legal warfare) campaign that had targeted Argentina’s
progressive President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Pérez also openly called for Ecuador’s leftist President Correa and
Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolás Maduro to be overthrown.

“Corruption ended the governments of Dilma [Rousseff] and Cristina,” Pérez
tweeted approvingly. “Now all that’s missing is for Rafael Correa and
Maduro to fall. It is just a matter of time.”

A month later, in December 2016, Pérez condemned the left-wing governments
of Correa in Ecuador and Maduro in Venezuela as “colonial, ethnocidal, and
racist.”

RELATED CONTENT: An Overview of Ecuador’s Presidential Elections (Special
Misión Verdad Report)
<https://orinocotribune.com/an-overview-of-ecuadors-presidential-elections-special-mision-verdad-report/>

In the same vein, Pérez supported a brutal US-backed coup attempt in
Nicaragua in 2018.

After right-wing extremists, with support from Washington, spent months
murdering, torturing, and terrorizing supporters of the socialist
Sandinista Front, Pérez responded by blaming all of the violence on
Nicaragua’s elected left-wing government.

“Who would have thought that the Sandinistas that before fought against the
dictatorship are now shooting their people,” Pérez wrote in October 2018.

*Friendly ties with the US government*

While Yaku Pérez Guartambel has no problem demonizing revolutionary
left-wing governments in Latin America as “colonial, ethnocidal, and
racist,” he is curiously silent about the US government’s massive human
rights violations.

That is because Pérez has fostered cozy ties with Washington, while
advancing its agenda in his country.

Before running for president, Pérez served as the prefect for Ecuador’s
Azuay province, whose capital, Cuenca, has become a major hub for US expats.

Entire communities of North Americans exist in Cuenca, speaking only
English and paying for everything in US dollars (which have been the
official currency of Ecuador since 2000 dollarization, following a 1999
economic crash overseen by former Economic Minister Guillermo Lasso, now
the major right-wing candidate in the 2021 election).

In June 2019, just as the Donald Trump administration’s new representative
in Ecuador, Michael J. Fitzpatrick, was sworn in, Pérez publicized his
meeting with the US ambassador in Cuenca.
[image: Yaku Perez US ambassador Mike Fitzpatrick]Yaku Pérez with US
Ambassador to Ecuador Michael J. Fitzpatrick in June 2019

A month later, Pérez attended a celebration marking Independence Day in the
United States, again welcoming the new US ambassador. He posed for a photo
smiling in front of an illuminated US flag.
[image: Yaku Perez US embassy flag Cuenca Ecuador]Yaku Perez celebrating
United States Independence Day and the swearing in of the new US ambassador
in July 2019 in Cuenca, Ecuador

During his presidential campaign, despite garnering little support from the
Ecuadorian public, Pérez has found an eager audience from the ambassadors
of France and Germany.

https://twitter.com/yakuperezg/status/1304110421570445312

*US-backed “ecosocialists” ally with right-wing in coup attempt against
Rafael Correa*

The deployment of ostensibly progressive “environmentalist” talking points
to destabilize left-wing governments in Bolivia, Venezuela, Mexico, and
beyond was developed over a decade ago, to weaken the democratically
elected government of Ecuador’s former socialist President Rafael Correa.

To undercut Correa, the United States and Western European governments
funded civil society groups in Ecuador that claimed to support
environmental causes and indigenous rights, but ended up serving as
tentacles of the right-wing opposition.

Throughout their tenures in office, Ecuador’s Correa and Bolivia’s Morales
faced heavy opposition to their ambitious infrastructure initiatives.
Environmentalist and indigenous groups, many supported by the United
States, initiated widespread protests in 2011 to try to stop the
construction of a large highway in Bolivia, with similar demonstrations to
obstruct mining projects in Ecuador in 2012.

In September 2010, US-funded opposition groups sought to overthrow
President Correa in a coup attempt. With the backing of police defectors,
who occupied the parliament, blocked major streets, and took over state
institutions, Ecuador’s opposition nearly removed the elected president
from power.

One of the main organizations involved in the coup attempt was the
Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE). CONAIE is
an indigenous organization that advances an ultra-leftist,
anarchist-inspired politics that is deeply suspicious of the state and
industrial development, even if the government is led by a democratically
elected socialist.

CONAIE took a hardline position against Correa, hammering him constantly
and demanding his removal. This undercut Correa’s support from leftists
abroad and drove criticism of his Citizens’ Revolution movement.

What CONAIE did not acknowledge in its constant attacks on Correa was that
its political wing was heavily supported by the US government.

RELATED CONTENT: Ecuador: They Shoot Over Arauz
<https://orinocotribune.com/ecuador-they-shoot-over-arauz/>

Indeed, CONAIE’s de facto political arm is the party Pachakutik, whose 2021
presidential candidate is Yaku Pérez.

During the 2010 coup attempt, Pachakutik published an open call for Correa
to overthrown, expressing public support for the police and soldiers who
had defected.

Journalist Eva Golinger later showed how Pachakutik had been supported by
the US government’s National Democratic Institute (NDI), a subsidiary of
the NED regime-change umbrella that is loosely affiliated with the
Democratic Party and acts as a cutout for the CIA.

A 2007 NDI document showed that Pachakutik had been directly trained by the
US government’s NDI, along with activists from Venezuela’s anti-Chavista
opposition parties Acción Democrática and Primero Justicia, as well as
Mexico’s right-wing National Action Party (PAN).
[image: US NED NDI Pachakutik Ecuador coup Correa]A 2007 document showing
how the US government’s National Democratic Institute (NDI) trained the
Ecuadorian opposition group Pachakutik

In a 2019 report, Ecuadorian-Canadian writer Joe Emersberger exposed
CONAIE’s role as a Trojan horse for the right-wing.

Virgilio Hernandez, a leader from Ecuador’s left-wing Correista movement
who was forced into asylum in Mexico’s embassy following a brutal crackdown
by the US-backed Lenín Moreno government, explained to Emersberger:

Since about the end of the 1990s and the beginning of this century I would
say what is evident in CONAIE is that a current became dominant that we’d
call a ‘conservative indigenist’ current that has put everything into what
they call the ‘ethnic cause’ and left aside the causes of social movements
and the left in the country. That explains … that in the last presidential
campaign they openly supported the candidate of the oligarchy and the
banks, Guillermo Lasso. It is very clear for almost two decades they lost
course and have been useful to the oligarchic groups that have always
rabidly opposed Rafael Correa and the Citizens Revolution.

*Non-Indigenous anti-Correa activist from Indigenous party spreads
disinformation against Julian Assange*

One of the co-founders of Pachakutik, who is not indigenous, Fernando
Villavicencio, played a major but under-acknowledged role in the Russiagate
conspiracy that consumed official Washington during the Trump era.

Villavicencio is an Ecuadorian opposition activist and journalist who
dedicated years of his life to destroying Rafael Correa. Besides his work
with Pachakutik, Villavicencio established an anti-Correa media outlet to
spread disinformation against the leftist president.

Villavicencio hated Correa so much that he publicly called for the United
States to impose sanctions on Ecuador to punish his government, and said he
would lobby the US Senate to do so. (This led Correa to dub Villavicencio a
“traitor.”)

In 2018, Villavicencio went on to co-author a highly dubious report in the
major British newspaper The Guardian, alongside its Russiagate-promoting
reporters Luke Harding and Dan Collyns, accusing WikiLeaks publisher Julian
Assange of holding secret meetings with Donald Trump’s former campaign
manager Paul Manafort.

WikiLeaks strongly denied the report, calling it a complete fabrication and
launching a legal fund to sue The Guardian
<https://www.gofundme.com/f/wikileaks-suing-the-guardian-over-manafort-story>
over the story.

The Guardian removed Villavicencio’s byline from the article, even as the
Ecuadorian activist boasted on Twitter that he had been a co-author and the
apparent source of the questionable claims.

Villavicencio also runs a website that publishes constant questionable
materials demonizing Correa and WikiLeaks. He calls it La Fuente –
Periodismo de Investigación, or The Source – Investigative Journalism.

This publication appears to be funded by the US government’s National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA front founded by the Ronald Reagan
administration to push regime-change in foreign socialist countries.

In its database, the NED has listed annual $65,000 grants for a media
outlet in Ecuador that is “Promoting Investigating Journalism,” using a
description that is almost identical to the about page on Villavicencio’s
website La Fuente.

*Right-wing corporate lobby group AS/COA promotes Yaku Pérez’s campaign*

Articles by anarchist-oriented US environmentalist organizations like
Extinction Rebellion leave readers with the impression that Yaku Pérez
Guartambel is Ecuador’s best choice for the left.

But a look at some of Pérez’s most high-profile promoters, including
powerful right-wing corporate lobby groups, illustrates his ulterior agenda.

On February 1, the US website Americas Quarterly published a puff piece
praising the third-place candidate, titled “Yaku Pérez: The New Face of
Ecuador’s Left?”

The article spread misleading disinformation demonizing Rafael Correa,
trumpeting, “Pérez said he offers such voters an alternative to the
‘authoritarian and corrupt left’ of Correa.”

Americas Quarterly said it conducted a survey of a dozen analysts who
“ranked Pérez further to the left than Arauz.”

The website also happily pointed out, “On foreign policy, Pérez has said he
is open to a trade deal with the United States and has called out China’s
‘aggressive policies around extractivism and human rights.’”

Author Brendan O’Boyle shared the piece promoting “the anti-Correa,
‘ecological left’ that he represents.”

So what exactly is Americas Quarterly? Is it a left-liberal publication
that promotes environmentalism and Indigenous rights?

On the contrary: Americas Quarterly is an arm of the Americas
Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA), a right-wing lobby group funded
by most major US corporations.

AS/COA has played an important role in backing coups against progressive
governments in Latin America and propping up unpopular neoliberal regimes.

AS/COA’s list of corporate members is a Who’s Who of the most powerful
companies on the planet, many of which profit from destroying the
environment and waging war, such as Amazon, Apple, BlackRock, Boeing,
Caterpillar, Chevron, Chiquita, Exxon Mobil, Ford, GE, Goldman Sachs,
Google, JP Morgan, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Walmart.
[image: Council of the Americas ASCOA member corporations]AS/COA’s
corporate members

So why would an organization funded by these mega-corporations, which
normally supports right-wing politicians across Latin America, suddenly
promote a left-wing candidate in Ecuador? And why would it have us believe
that Yaku Pérez is in fact even more left-wing than Andrés Arauz and the
Correista movement?

The answer is that Pérez does not truly represent the left; he is an
insidious vehicle for Washington’s interests in Ecuador. AS/COA has sought
to falsely portray Pérez as the left-wing alternative to Correismo because
it recognizes that he would serve their interests if he somehow managed to
win, and is splitting the left by simply staying in the race, making a
second round more likely.

It is for the same reason that right-wing banker Guillermo Lasso has said
he would support Pérez.

The United States is desperate to prevent the socialist wave that washed
across Latin America during the first decade of the 21st century from
coming back. And in Washington’s bid to stop the tide, “ecosocialist”
figures like Yaku Pérez are perfect tools.

Ben Norton

Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone,
and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with Max
Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
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