[News] Will Andres Arauz Be the Next President of Ecuador?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Will-Andres-Arauz-Be-the-Next-President-of-Ecuador-20210218-0002.html
Will
Andres Arauz Be the Next President of Ecuador?February 18, 2021
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In Ecuador’s presidential election held on February 7, 2021, Andres Arauz
won the largest number of votes but could not prevail in the first round
against 15 other candidates; he won 32.71 percent of the vote, short of the
40 percent needed to win the election outright (a winner also requires a 10
percent lead over the second-place candidate, which Arauz did achieve).

More than a week after that first round, it remains unclear which of the
two candidates who most closely trailed Arauz will go head-to-head against
him in the second round on April 11. Both of these candidates—Guillermo
Lasso and Yaku Perez—each won around 19 percent of the vote and await a
recount to verify who will face Arauz.

A Lasso-Perez pact sought to remove Arauz from the runoff election’s
ballot; this is of great concern for Ecuador’s democracy, although Lasso
now says he has backed away from the agreement.

Against all odds, Arauz won the first round conclusively. Till the very
end, the National Electoral Council (CNE) tried to postpone the elections,
sowing doubts about voting during the pandemic and about the transfer of
public funds to the candidates so as to make the process more equitable.

Defense Minister Oswaldo Jarrin said in late January that the ballots would
not be printed, even though his ministry had made an agreement with the
CNE. Right through 2020, the CNE and other branches of the Ecuadorian
government attempted to suffocate democracy by preventing the candidacy of
both former President Rafael Correa and Arauz.
Hollowing Out the State

When Lenin Moreno took office in 2017, he began a process that led to the
weakening of democratic institutions in Ecuador. The main office-bearers in
several state institutions—such as the Constitutional Court, the Supreme
Court, the attorney general’s office, the comptroller’s office, and the
CNE—were elected during Correa’s tenure in office.

These people would not toe the line drawn by Moreno, who was eager to drive
a policy of privatization, of revenge against Correa, and the destruction
of public institutions.

Moreno began to consolidate his authority by aligning his political forces
with those of the right-wing, such as Lasso’s Creating Opportunities (CREO)
party and the Social Christian Party (PSC). Having produced his right-wing
majority, Moreno went to the people with a dubious referendum that had
seven confusing questions.

The most garbled ones were about constitutional reform, namely, to set term
limits for elected officials (targeting Correa) and to replace the heads of
the state institutions. The other questions—on corruption, children’s
rights, and ecology—had broad support across the country. The majority
voted yes, essentially voting for the good parts of the referendum while
the ugly parts slipped by.

To enact the reconstruction of the state institutions to suit his aims,
Moreno appointed Julio Cesar Trujillo to drive out the elected officials
and put in place Moreno’s favored people; a fragile republic was slowly
gutted.

Trujillo used all kinds of anti-constitutional fictions—such as the
“constitutional vacancy”—to put Moreno fundamentally in charge. Using the
new powers, Moreno appointed his people and those of his allies (such as
CREO and the PSC) to control the CNE; the presidency of the CNE was given
to Diana Atamaint, a member of the Pachakutik Plurinational Unity Movement,
the party of Yaku Perez.
Dirty Tricks

On January 30, the Colombian magazine Semana published a story that accused
Arauz of receiving US$80,000 from the National Liberation Army (ELN), a
left-wing guerrilla group in Colombia; the story was also later published
in the Argentinian paper Clarin.

The report was purportedly based on information from computers seized from
ELN commander Andres Felipe Vanegas Londoño (aka “Uriel”). The Semana
article was published three days after Moreno visited Washington, D.C.,
where he met officials of the U.S. government, the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), and the Organization of American States (OAS).

The Semana report said that after a Progressive International virtual
summit in September 2020, the ELN made contact with Arauz; both Arauz and
the Progressive International denied the story. The ELN, for its part,
released a statement saying that the Semana story was false.

It took an ornithologist to point out that a video purportedly of armed ELN
guerrillas in the “Colombian jungle” that was widely circulating on social
media following the report by Semana is not credible. The birdsong in the
video got the attention of Manuel Sanchez-Nivicela, who heard the sound of
a pale-browed tinamou, which can be seen in Ecuador and Peru, but not in
Colombia.

It’s not the first time the right-wing has tried to delegitimize
politicians on the left and other targets by alleging the latter are
associated with Colombian guerrilla groups.

In 2008, the Colombian periodical El Tiempo published a photo caption that
seemingly linked Gustavo Larrea, a minister in Correa’s government, to the
FARC, a Colombian guerrilla group; a London-based research organization—the
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)—claimed in a report
that Correa’s campaign in 2006 was funded by the FARC (which Correa said
was untrue).

All of this was later retracted (the IISS no longer has the report on its
website). In 2017, the Argentinian magazine Perfil published a report that
tried to link the FARC with an organization called the Resistencia
Ancestral Mapuche whose existence and connection to the Indigenous Mapuche
community have been called into doubt; Argentina’s then-Security Minister
Patricia Bullrich used this to push her government’s attack on the Mapuche
community in Patagonia.

The Ecuadorian media generally took the story of Arauz and the ELN as
gospel truth. It certainly made an impact on the election of February 7.
Lasso-Perez

Right after the first round of Ecuador’s presidential elections, Lasso and
Perez began to collaborate to undermine the election results. They
petitioned the CNE to conduct a recount; their objections and their demands
were “beyond the law,” said Lasso.

The CNE, already controlled by CREO, PSC, and Pachakutik, complied, eroding
faith in the institutions. Rumors spread around Ecuador that Lasso and
Perez were eager to get the CNE to suspend Arauz from the process so that
it would be the two of them who would compete in the second round.

There is no mystery that Lasso is a candidate of the right. Perez, however,
masquerades as an eco-socialist who would be the first Indigenous president
of Ecuador. Curiously, before the election results had fully come in, Perez
announced that the U.S. Embassy in Quito had called him to tell him that he
would be the second-place candidate. He is on record saying that if elected
president, he would be open to conducting a trade deal with the United
States.

The country’s main Indigenous organization—the Confederation of Indigenous
Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)—seems to have distanced itself from
Perez’s deal with Lasso because, as Leonidas Iza, president of the Cotopaxi
Indigenous and Peasant Movement (MICC), said on Twitter, its base is
“against the neoliberal right-wing that looted the country”; to make an
alliance with this wing is “illegitimate and inconsistent” with CONAIE’s
politics.

On February 12, Colombia’s Attorney General Francisco Barbosa Delgado
arrived in Quito to meet with Ecuador’s Attorney General Diana Salazar
Mendez to discuss information that the Colombian government claimed to have
received from the computers of the ELN’s Andres Felipe Vanegas Londoño (who
was killed in October 2020). Ecuador had requested this meeting based on
the Semana story. Perez came out in favor of an investigation.

The OAS, as it did during the November 2019 coup in Bolivia, began to sniff
around with its representative—Isabel de Saint-Malo (a former vice
president of Panama who played a role through the Lima Group in trying to
overthrow Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro)—saying that she was in
discussions with Lasso and Perez about the political situation.

On February 13, a day after he made a deal with Perez, Lasso wrote to the
CNE’s president saying that the agreement was illegal. He said that the CNE
needs to first certify the results of the first-round vote and only then
can there be a complaint filed by the candidates.

The deal seems to be floundering as Lasso, who is less than half a point
(0.36 percent) ahead of Perez, probably calculates that he can defeat Arauz
in a runoff election without a recount.

Will Ecuador have a second round on April 11 with Arauz on the ballot, or
will the U.S., the OAS, the various right-wing parties in Ecuador, and
Moreno’s state apparatus ensure that he will be off the ballot? If that
happens, it will be hard to call the event of April 11 an election.
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