[News] How the US gov't cultivated environmental and Indigenous groups to defeat Ecuador's leftist Correísta movement
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news at freedomarchives.org
Wed May 5 11:37:41 EDT 2021
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/05/04/ecuador-election-us-pachakutik-lasso-yaku/
<https://thegrayzone.com/2021/05/04/ecuador-election-us-pachakutik-lasso-yaku/>
How the US gov't cultivated environmental and Indigenous groups to
defeat Ecuador's leftist Correísta movement
Ben Norton·May 4, 2021
------------------------------------------------------------------------
When socialist Rafael Correa became Ecuador’s president, CIA
cutouts poured money into environmental and Indigenous groups,
while the US embassy cultivated opportunistic leaders to
undermine his constituency. These forces helped secure victory
for right-wing banker Guillermo Lasso in 2021.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The people of Ecuador were hit by a surprise in the April 2021
presidential election: Hard-right banker Guillermo Lasso, one of the
richest and most corrupt oligarchs in the country, who had
unsuccessfully run in two previous races, scored a narrow victory over
leftist Andrés Arauz.
Arauz, a progressive young economist, had served as a minister in the
government of Ecuador’s socialist President Rafael Correa
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/12/13/ecuador-rafael-correa-venezuela-assange/>,
who had declared a “Citizens’ Revolution” that transformed the country
<https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/06/ecuador-election-citizens-revolution/>
during his term from 2007 to 2017.
What was not conveyed in most media reports on Lasso’s surprising
victory, however, was that Lasso only won thanks to the support he
received, both directly and indirectly, from environmental and
Indigenous groups that have been co-opted over that last 15 years by the
US government and its soft-power networks.
The leaders of these opportunistic, pseudo-left organizations have
benefited from millions of dollars in funding from CIA cutouts like the
US Agency for International Development and National Endowment for
Democracy. Together, they formed an alliance of convenience with Lasso
against the Correísta movement.
Some even endorsed the multimillionaire banker openly, overlooking his
well-documented corruption, including offshore bank accounts
<https://www.pagina12.com.ar/333763-los-laberintos-offshore-de-guillermo-lasso-accionistas-del-b>
and tens of millions of dollars of real estate in Florida
<https://cepr.net/tens-of-millions-in-florida-properties-linked-to-ecuadorian-presidential-candidate-guillermo-lasso/>.
Others, including right-leaning leaders in Ecuador’s powerful Indigenous
confederation, CONAIE, called on their followers to vote null in the
April 11 presidential election rather than support the leftist Arauz.
CONAIE’s decision to call for a null vote was perhaps the most important
factor in making Lasso Ecuador’s next president. The 2021 election saw a
massive increase in politically motivated null votes, with 1.1 million
more than in the previous election in 2017. The total of 1.76 million
null votes greatly outnumbered the 420,000 votes that Arauz lost by.
The role that conservative leaders of CONAIE, the confederation’s
political arm Pachakutik, and “green” NGOs played in getting a
notoriously corrupt neoliberal banker elected in Ecuador was hardly a
secret. In fact, Pachakutik’s presidential candidate, Yaku Pérez
<https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/06/yaku-perez-pachakutik-ecuador-us-coup/>,
boasted of defeating Arauz immediately after the election, triumphantly
tweeting in all caps, “Pachakutik and the null vote bury Correísmo
<https://twitter.com/yakuperezg/status/1381972076739784705>.”
The Grayzone documented how Yaku Pérez ran a right-wing, pro-US campaign
<https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/06/yaku-perez-pachakutik-ecuador-us-coup/>
while marketing himself as the face of the “new left” in Ecuador,
adopting a US Democratic Party-style marketing scheme that combined
neoliberal economic policies and support for imperialism with liberal
environmentalism and identity politics.
Pérez revealed after the first round of the election that he had the
support of the US embassy.
<https://twitter.com/RutaKritica/status/1358971944427749377> He also has
a history of publicly boasting of friendly meetings with Washington’s
ambassador to Ecuador, Michael J. Fitzpatrick.
It is unsurprising then, that among the CONAIE and Pachakutik supporters
who did not vote null, the vast majority ended up backing Lasso.
A review of the official results published by Ecuador’s National
Electoral Council (CNE) shows that roughly half of people who had voted
for Pérez in the first round of the presidential election in February
ended up voting null in the second round, whereas approximately 40
percent of Pérez’s supporters voted for Lasso.
Only around 7 percent of Pérez supporters ended up voting for Arauz,
according to a rough estimate provided to The Grayzone by an electoral
expert.
Yet in much of the punditry about the surprising loss suffered by Arauz,
who had been leading in nearly all polls before the election, the names
Yaku Pérez and Pachakutik are not even mentioned. The omission is
particularly prevalent among English-speaking analysts.
Eduardo Enríquez Arévalo
<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-DNcHfEAAAAJ&hl=es>, an
academic expert on Ecuadorian politics at the Simon Bolivar Andean
University, explained in an interview with The Grayzone, “In general one
can say that Pachakutik has had a process of shifting to the right, or
at least becoming increasingly close to the right wing by the 2010s.”
Pachakutik and CONAIE are also deeply embedded in the non-profit
industrial complex. Leaders and prominent activists from the groups work
in well-funded NGOs, some of which are bankrolled by foreign governments.
Pachakutik’s rightward drift, then, is partially an organic phenomenon,
but it has also been heavily incentivized by the huge sums of money
flowing into Ecuador from the United States and Western European
governments and foundations.
The grim reality is that Pérez and Pachakutik are at the heart of a
15-year-long US destabilization project that is little known outside of
Ecuador.
Declassified government documents show how, on the eve of Correa’s
historic election 2006, Washington began reaching out to Indigenous and
environmental leaders and poured millions of dollars into cultivating
these groups, as part of a campaign to divide the country’s left.
State Department cables published by WikiLeaks
<https://search.wikileaks.org/?q=pachakutik> clearly demonstrate that
the US embassy was recruiting opportunistic leaders of CONAIE and
Pachakutik to undermine Correa and his leftist movement.
The documents show that figures from CONAIE and Pachakutik were acting
as informants for the embassy, regularly providing intelligence to a US
political officer. Some right-leaning Indigenous leaders even themselves
contacted the US ambassador and held friendly meetings reassuring
Washington of their support.
WikiLeaks US embassy Ecuador Correa left
A confidential 2009 US embassy cable notes how Ecuador’s socialist
President Correa faced attacks from the “left”
CIA fronts like the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and
the National Endowment for Democracy also launched programs to build and
finance an anti-Correísta opposition. These multimillion-dollar
initiatives focused especially on Ecuador’s environmental and Indigenous
organizations.
USAID worked closely with the CIA during Washington’s terrorist war on
the revolutionary Sandinista government of Nicaragua
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/22/us-war-sanctions-nicaragua-icj-carlos-arguello/>
in the 1980s, funneling money into far-right Contra death squads. The
agency has also been integral in financing the US government’s ongoing
coup attempt in Venezuela, forking over hundreds of millions of dollars
to the unelected parallel regime of Juan Guaidó
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/23/usaid-venezuela-regime-change-trump/>.
A review of USAID contracts reveals that a company called Chemonics was
the agency’s main “private” partner in Ecuador. One of the largest
for-profit recipients of US foreign aid
<https://www.developmentaid.org/#!/news-stream/post/48501/top-10-usaid-awardees>,
with $2.5 billion in USAID funding from 2018 to 2019 alone, Chemonics is
closely linked to intelligence agencies, and functions as a private
intelligence agency. Its wealthy founder said he created the firm to
“have my own CIA
<https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/11/business/cozy-links-to-a-us-agency-prove-useful-to-a-rice-trader.html>.”
Chemonics has been involved in a series of scandalous US regime-change
operations targeting leftist governments in Latin America, aimed at
destabilizing the socialist Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo
Chávez of Venezuela.
Chemonics played a similar role in the US dirty war on Syria. The
Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal has documented how USAID used Chemonics
to funnel tens of millions of dollars to the White Helmets
<https://thegrayzone.com/2016/10/02/white-helmets-us-military-intervention-regime-change-syria/>,
a regime-change lobby group that collaborated closely with
Salafi-jihadist extremist militants, including al-Qaeda, as part of a
Western intelligence operation aimed at overthrowing the government in
Damascus.
As USAID’s top partner in Ecuador, Chemonics was given an $11 million
contract in the year 2013 alone, greatly surpassing any other
contractor, in order to fund “Environmental Protection” initiatives.
When regime-change operations from USAID’s “Office of Transition
Initiatives” were exposed in Venezuela and Bolivia, the Correa
government froze relations with USAID in December 2013, and then
expelled the agency in 2014.
But USAID renewed its activities at an all-time high in Ecuador in 2018,
when Correa’s successor Lenín Moreno took a hard-right turn
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/04/14/lenin-moreno-julian-assange-wikileaks-ecuador/>
and allied with Washington.
USAID Ecuador 2013 climate change environment
In 2013, USAID poured millions into environmental groups to counter
Correa’s infrastructure projects
These Washington-backed environmentalist groups organized large, and
often violent, campaigns to oppose Correa’s ambitious infrastructure
projects, which sought to develop Ecuador’s impoverished and rural
regions and better integrate the country.
In the name of “anti-extractivism” – a buzzword that has become popular
among the same astroturfed pseudo-left networks in North America
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/07/06/dsa-jacobin-iso-socialism-conference-us-funded-regime-change/>
– these US government-funded NGOs in Ecuador also tried to block the
socialist-oriented Correa administration from using the country’s
plentiful oil and mineral resources to fund universal education,
healthcare, and social programs aimed at poverty reduction.
Skeptical local media outlets
<https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/zoo/1/campesinos-detectaron-objetivos-de-ong-financiada-por-usaid>
noted at the time that the “environmental protection” projects run by
USAID and Chemonics in Ecuador happened to be in the areas with the most
natural resources, leading peasants to raise concerns about ulterior
motives and undemocratic US meddling.
The fact that many of Correa’s infrastructure projects involved
contracts with Chinese state-owned companies further motivated
Washington to undermine them.
Correa worked closely with China during his time in office, becoming one
of Beijing’s most important allies in Latin America. The anti-Correísta
opposition on the other hand is staunchly pro-US, and has vowed to
distance Ecuador from Beijing, hyperbolically claiming, “the Correísta
discourse of an independent country ends in the doorway of the Chinese
banks
<https://elpais.com/internacional/2016/01/15/america/1452827107_202694.html>.”
Much of the pseudo-left environmental and Indigenous opposition to
Correísmo has harshly condemned China while cozying up to Washington.
Pachakutik candidate Yaku Pérez made his name opposing China’s
development projects in Ecuador, and was avidly promoted by a British
foundation
<https://dialogochino.net/es/comercio-y-inversiones-es/39773-yaku-perez-la-sorpresa-electoral-en-las-elecciones-de-ecuador/>
dedicated to monitoring Beijing’s activities in Latin America. At
the
same time, Pérez insisted he “will not think twice” to sign a free trade
agreement with the United States
<https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/2021/01/14/nota/9528838/yaku-perez-no-es-descabellado-acuerdo-comercial-estados-unidos/>.
Supplementing the tens of millions of dollars that USAID spent in
Ecuador to help build this pseudo-left opposition were grants from the
National Endowment Democracy, another CIA front
<https://thegrayzone.com/2018/08/20/inside-americas-meddling-machine-the-us-funded-group-that-interferes-in-elections-around-the-globe/>.
NED Ecuador womens rights 2020
2020 NED contracts for women’s rights groups in Ecuador
The NED bankrolled major anti-Correísta politicians
<http://web.archive.org/web/20140109200734/http://www.andes.info.ec/es/noticias/politica-opositora-ecuador-tramita-ayuda-financiera-ned-eeuu-montar-fundacion-agencia>,
while focusing especially on environmental, Indigenous, and women’s
rights groups, along with opposition media outlets.
A prime example of a US-backed, astroturfed Indigenous organization in
Ecuador is the Pachamama Foundation. With the help of annual grants from
the NED going back years, the foundation relentlessly attacked
<https://www.facebook.com/page/303405686423463/search/?q=correa> Correa
<https://twitter.com/FPachamama_Ec/status/978341682121977856>, trashing
him as an authoritarian “extractivist,” while constantly promoting
<https://www.facebook.com/page/303405686423463/search/?q=yaku%20perez>
Yaku Pérez <https://twitter.com/FPachamama_Ec/status/994639616367054848>
as a noble defender
<https://www.facebook.com/fundacionpachamamaec/photos/basw.AbrFSRFi8jjMU2vveXpkXPGxfXAR3s7cRGiQq94fi0kUe6ffr3rAfNxmj6ukP9RSHz5V8Df36J1LpBogZvCGrZ2doliXGm5ZuiyNtoWU83Ejw5gOMOwzjyPGWziSFvIroQNYVnzZI8CPcsRd1IOXEcx_CinpC8_Ak93Au_hYRqXpDg/1683277961769555/?opaqueCursor=AboHLONxiXDkzZXUZjLwFWfA-K2rBmNeK-UkVagaIOIwYrpSIKLAQ0wFzxALpMtO9dsBIw9JmJ0AlBX3xApRuVhcNHFrDkWeHoPlv5ThVsKL4S3k6H1zt_ANAB2xr4XMyAojt7iWYF5K3MQSJMRhV1wbLRWKhawwF-g-FA4WiYCaRGCkGDyjPVwBFuWe2xCKj6o3NlQlGjoSP0zDH520DcBW3XyVkrsANkRVLA_0Y-gsM4ElCvH9V8iFl1zMYulHNggYy-k70jL3FJQYgBEZuJGUXD0yMCiM4TiJefpWjO2psCBdwXfzPXMv8oOh3jgl5U1iNqZLOljgzJpttaQqNP_MIvUEi1LWTPsdeEg3agbv7XAQ_q9_WnBFul3jKljNfHZhdT8OTVFg_QIVqAScoJcfSSetJrB8zQjMbeRHDLbWjGehn1yu5JdX28aBsW6ADwtrv1WHJ6j1JXxnYXtD1s4HihHG1c7ZUeuk6Txr5ihn8WC_Zdd5Xi71YlqGK7Br7liUznxhDJUqUMKq_mj4Vt3sxS9py-fUDAh_Ezkp_i2YGtNeBd63UYM1y3YyRS-VYLeDtH0fj4vfxOukj1BuwfLZSamBt8Jkn5d6xk0d7bP8B94PM1rSPPx09AtimVlAebdhaxoc6Z7m5hqWEjyWOeuqFI_b8X-CdvL_CVMlTLnKlVJOXrBPVIoXuzJmVsvT7EdjUS2d-vTN91irFOBxX7GnTBpEAjAspYHH8Ui_R3hD-MPtSKsF15ULK3LUUzcyQU4>
of the environment.
NED Ecuador Indigenous journalism
2020 NED contracts for Indigenous and environmental groups in Ecuador,
like the Pachamama Foundation
Given its role as a US government-funded opposition group aimed at
destabilizing his elected administration, Correa closed the Pachamama
Foundation in 2013. But President Lenín Moreno re-opened the group
<https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/fundacion-pachamama-ecuador-ong-ambiente.html>
in 2017, the year he openly betrayed his former ally and began to
aggressively repress Correa’s leftist movement.
Fundacion Pachamama Yaku Perez Ecuador NED
The NED-funded Pachamama Foundation promoting Yaku Pérez
The National Democratic Institute (NDI), which is funded by the NED and
loosely linked to the US Democratic Party, was also an active supporter
of the anti-Correísta opposition. It had its own website specifically
focused on Ecuador
<http://web.archive.org/web/20120902234446/http://www.ndiecuador.org/>,
which boasted of the US government-backed institute’s activities in the
country (this webpage was later removed).
Leaders of the Indigenous Pachakutik party were directly trained by the
NDI
<http://web.archive.org/web/20101008062106/http://www.centrodealerta.org/documentos_desclasificados/usaidned_funding_political_.pdf>,
alongside other right-wing groups from Latin America, including
Venezuela’s conservative Primero Justicia party and Mexico’s National
Action Party (PAN).
The NDI also published lengthy how-to manuals
<https://issuu.com/ndiecuador/docs/guia_practica_codigo_de_la_democracia_y_organizaci>
for the Ecuadorian opposition, which helped them lobby against Correa’s
reforms and sought to replicate the US political system in their country.
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
Washington’s strategy of recruiting Indigenous leaders to oppose
Correísmo echoes an operation the CIA ran in Nicaragua in the 1980s,
in
which the spy agency cultivated disgruntled leaders of the Native
Miskito community
<https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/03/weekinreview/miskitos-are-arguing-with-themselves.html>
in order to destabilize the revolutionary Sandinista government.
Similarly, the far-right government of Brazilian President Jair
Bolsonaro won support from Indigenous communities living on the border
with Venezuela and used them to help launch attacks on Venezuelan
soldiers
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/17/brazil-paper-reveals-bolsonaro-terror-plot-venezuela/>.
In Mexico, meanwhile, the US government has funded environmental and
Indigenous NGOs that oppose progressive President AMLO’s infrastructure
programs, such as the Maya Train, which aim to develop the country’s
impoverished southern region.
This is not to say that the left-wing governments of Ecuador, Nicaragua,
Venezuela, and Mexico have had perfect relations with Indigenous
peoples, or that these communities do not sometimes have justifiable
grievances. But Washington and its right-wing allies, even open racists
like Bolsonaro, have shown a willingness to exploit and mislead
Indigenous communities to advance their geopolitical interests.
When Washington embarked on its strategy to use Indigenous people as a
wedge against Correa, it was in fact actively working against the rights
of Native peoples internationally. A declassified State Department cable
published by WikiLeaks shows that the US ambassador in Ecuador condemned
and lobbied against the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights
of
Indigenous Peoples
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06QUITO1386_a.html>, arguing it was
“fundamentally flawed.” (The Correa administration, for its part,
supported the UN declaration.)
WikiLeaks Ecuador US UN Declaration Rights Indigenous
A 2006 State Department cable in which the US government condemns the UN
Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples as “fundamentally flawed.”
For the imperial US bureaucrats assigned to South America, and dedicated
to pushing back its leftist “Pink Tide,” weaponizing minority identities
against popular movements became practically second nature.
The same tactics were honed back at home. The US Democratic Party and
neoliberal leaders like Hillary Clinton have mastered the art of using
unsubstantiated allegations of racism and sexism to undermine
social-democratic figures like Bernie Sanders, while the Republican
Party has leveraged corporate money
<https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/minister-minstrelsy/> to
cultivate a small handful of Black and Latino voices, promoting them to
disrupt civil rights coalitions and advance regressive policies. (In a
particularly glaring example of the tactic, Black Republican Supreme
Court Justice Clarence Thomas
<https://isi.org/intercollegiate-review/founding-father-black-conservative-movement/>
was mentored by Jay Parker, a former registered lobbyist for the
Transkei bantustan of apartheid South Africa
<https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/08/opinion/l-judge-thomas-s-south-africa-connection-needs-clarification-858891.html>.)
The CIA itself has openly adopted this strategy, promoting
“intersectional” feminism
<https://twitter.com/aishaismad/status/1388963034274701316> and liberal
anti-racist and LGBTQ rhetoric in its recruitment ads.
It is an age-old imperial tactic: divide and conquer. And the United
States has perfected this strategy in Latin America – one of the most
impoverished regions of the world, where the many millions of dollars
that Washington throws around to advance its interests go a long way.
In April 2021, the US government’s 15-year program finally saw its first
major success with the election of Guillermo Lasso, a member of
far-right Catholic sect Opus Dei
<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1983/07/their-will-be-done/>,
whose neoliberal policies represent the legacy of the CIA-backed Chicago
Boys who wreaked havoc on Chile’s economy under the iron-fisted rule of
General Augosto Pinochet.
A look at how Ecuador’s anti-Correísta opposition successfully divided
the left, with US backing, is very instructive, because these tactics
have been refined and exported in Washington’s operations throughout
Latin America and across the globe.
How US-backed banker Guillermo Lasso won the 2021 election
Much of the analysis of Andrés Arauz’s surprise electoral loss has
focused on the fact that the media was uniformly against him, and
constantly spread lies about Correísmo; or that the multimillionaire
banker Guillermo Lasso had an enormous campaign war chest that
overpowered his opponent.
Both points are correct, and these factors were important; but, alone,
they are not sufficient to explain the outcome. Over the course of
multiple successful campaigns for the presidency, Rafael Correa had
faced the same obstacles.
In fact, some of the fake news stories used to smear Arauz were just
slightly modified versions of attacks on Correa. Right-wing media
outlets, for example, simply replaced the name of the Colombian
guerrilla group FARC with the name of another, ELN, to generate a phony
scandal based on the lie that it had supposedly funded the Ecuadorian
leftist’s campaign
<https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/15/us-oas-colombia-steal-ecuador-election/>.
But Correa always had a substantial enough support base to overcome the
odds.
Then there is the fact that Ecuador’s current president, Lenín Moreno
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/05/12/lenin-moreno-persecution-ola-bini/>,
had been Correa’s vice president, and had originally claimed fidelity to
the Citizens’ Revolution during the 2017 electoral campaign, before
later doing a political 180. Moreno allied with the right-wing oligarchy
and Lasso, humiliatingly subjugating his country to the United States,
and withdrew from regional institutions like the ALBA economic alliance
and UNASUR political union, while implementing unpopular neoliberal
economic reforms and overseeing large-scale corruption
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/04/14/lenin-moreno-julian-assange-wikileaks-ecuador/>.
The past associations that the deeply unpopular President Moreno enjoyed
with Correa did repel some voters from Arauz. But this association
should not be overstated, because for his entire term, Moreno had openly
persecuted Correa and his movement
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/06/ecuadors-moreno-persecutes-coronavirus/>,
exiling and imprisoning leftist politicians and activists who supported
the Citizens’ Revolution, and clearly throwing his weight behind Lasso
and other conservative forces.
By the end of Moreno’s term, his alliance with Lasso was so clear
that
the Correístas were campaigning on the slogan “Lasso is Moreno.”
Some progressive Ecuadorian activists who spoke with The Grayzone also
privately conceded that Arauz, a young, highly educated, and soft-spoken
technocrat who ran a relatively moderate, center-left campaign, was seen
as a relatively weak candidate. In contrast, Correa was a firebrand
populist who had played on popular anger against the country’s parasitic
oligarchy and was willing to challenge the US empire head on.
All of these variables contributed to Arauz’s loss. But the most
important factor came in the form of a call for “ideological” null
voting, dividing the left and giving Lasso just enough electoral space
to swing ahead.
According to official results <https://elecciones2021.cne.gob.ec/> from
the Ecuadorian government’s National Electoral Council (CNE), Arauz got
4,236,515 votes compared to Lasso’s 4,656,426 — a difference of just
419,911 votes.
CNE results Ecuador election 2021 null votes
The official CNE results from Ecuador’s April 2021 presidential
election, showing 1,761,433 null votes
But there was a very significant third group that ended up swinging the
election for Lasso: null voters. According to the official CNE results,
there were 1,761,433 null votes, making up a staggering 16.3% of total
votes.
This was a whopping 10% increase in null votes in comparison with the
previous election. Official CNE statistics from previous Ecuador
elections
<https://cne.gob.ec/documents/Estadisticas/Publicaciones/LIBRO_RESULTADOS_2017.pdf>
show much smaller levels of null voting.
In Ecuador’s 2009 election, only 496,687 null votes were cast,
comprising just 6.3% of the total. In 2013, there were 684,027 null
votes, or 7.2% of the total. And in 2017 there were 670,731 null votes,
6.3% of the total.
Voting in Ecuador is legally mandatory, and participation in 2021 held
at the median level: 83% participation in 2021, compared to the same as
in 2017 and 82% in 2013.
There are reasons to doubt the accuracy of the CNE’s results, given the
council’s clear politicization under the corrupt government of Moreno,
which declared all-out war on the Correísta movement and stacked the
body exclusively with opposition figures
<https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/2018/11/21/nota/7060776/atropellada-primera-reunion-nuevo-cne/>
from Pachakutik and Lasso’s party CREO.
The left-wing Union for Hope (UNES) party of Arauz said it detected
irregularities in 5,000 actas
<https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/pleno-cne-resultados-balotaje-provincias.html>,
or vote tallies, a significant problem given that the average acta in
Ecuador includes roughly 270 votes. However, several technical experts
told The Grayzone that, although there indeed appeared to have been
irregularities, they were not substantial enough to change the result of
the election.
The most salient difference in 2021 was simply the gigantic increase in
null votes. And what accounted for this massive increase? Ecuador’s
Indigenous confederation CONAIE, its political arm Pachakutik, and their
presidential candidate Yaku Pérez had called on their constituents to
vote null.
CNE Ecuador elections null votes
Official CNE results from previous Ecuador elections, showing much
smaller levels of null votes
The right-wing shift of Ecuador’s US-backed Indigenous party
Pachakutik
CONAIE does not represent all Indigenous communities in Ecuador,
although it is the largest and most influential Native organization. The
country’s Indigenous leaders are divided, and Native politicians,
both
inside and outside CONAIE, can be found across the political spectrum.
Some Indigenous leaders, such as Citizens’ Revolution National Assembly
candidate Ricardo Ulcuango
<https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/01/academic-letter-censor-grayzone-ecuador-yaku-perez/>,
a former vice president of CONAIE, are avid supporters of the Correísta
movement. But numerous prominent politicians from CONAIE and its
political arm Pachakutik have a history of forming opportunistic
alliances with Ecuador’s conservative elites, and with the United
States, especially when Correa was in power.
In 2017, Pachakutik’s Yaku Pérez openly endorsed Guillermo Lasso
<https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/2017/02/22/nota/6059647/perez-guartambel-es-preferible-banquero-dictadura/>
for the presidential election. Just days before the vote in February
2021, Lasso returned the favor, stating that, if Pérez won in the first
round, the banker would endorse him
<https://elmercurio.com.ec/2021/02/03/lasso-anticipa-su-apoyo-a-yaku-perez-si-este-llega-a-segunda-vuelta-en-su-lugar/>.
That same year, a small Ecuadorian environmentalist organization called
Yasunidos met with Lasso and signed an agreement in support of the
banker. Yasunidos, whose protests against Correa were strongly promoted
by the Western press
<https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2014/04/140414_ecuador_petroleo_parque_yasuni_mxa>,
then went on to strongly advocate for Pérez in the 2021 election.
Pérez was by no means the only rightist Indigenous leader to support
Lasso. In the 2017 election, Fanny Campos, a former coordinator of the
Pachakutik party, not only backed Lasso but even joined his campaign
<https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/politiko-2017/3/excoordinadora-de-pachakutik-se-une-a-compromiso-ecuador-de-lasso>.
Pachakutik politician Salvador Quishpe also publicly endorsed the
wealthy banker. And he revealed in 2016 that the Indigenous party was
discussing potentially running Pachakutik leader Lourdes Tibán as
Lasso’s vice-presidential candidate
<https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/salvadorquishpe-guillermolasso-lourdestiban-politica-ecuador.html>.
In 2021, Pérez, Pachakutik, and CONAIE decided to indirectly help Lasso
by calling on their followers to null vote in protest of Correísmo. This
decision, which led to Arauz’s defeat, also created conflicts within the
Indigenous confederation.
CONAIE’s then-president, Jaime Vargas – who represented a
left-wing
faction that had led huge protests against Moreno’s neoliberal
IMF-mandated economic reforms
<https://thegrayzone.com/2019/10/07/ecuador-revolt-lenin-morenos-neoliberal-drone-zangano/>
in 2019 – broke with his own organization and endorsed Arauz for
president in April.
Days after his endorsement, Pachakutik expelled Vargas for daring to
support a Correísta candidate. Next, CONAIE condemned him
<https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/politica/consejo-de-gobierno-de-la-conaie-cuestiona-a-su-presidente-jaime-vargas-y-anuncia-sanciones-nota/>,
announced it would sanction Vargas, and vacated his seat
<https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/actualidad/44/leonidas-iza-es-candidato-a-la-presidencia-de-la-conaie>
as the confederation’s president. Vargas responded by criticizing
Pachakutik
<https://www.telesurtv.net/news/lider-expulsado-pachakutik-critica-intereses-movimiento-20210406-0031.html>
for acting against the interests of Ecuador’s Indigenous communities,
accusing it of collaborating with the right wing.
Meanwhile Pérez’s running mate, Virna Cedeño, the official
vice-presidential candidate of Pachakutik, publicly endorsed Lasso
<https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/politica/excandidata-vicepresidencial-de-yaku-perez-anuncia-que-votara-por-guillermo-lasso-nota/>.
Echoing conservative rhetoric, she claimed the banker could help save
Ecuador from the clutches of the “failed and deceptive Socialism of the
21st Century,” a reference to the leftist economic model created by Hugo
Chávez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. (To save face,
Pachakutik decided to expel Cedeño as well.)
The Grayzone documented how Yaku Pérez personally advanced a raft of
right-wing and imperialist policies
<https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/06/yaku-perez-pachakutik-ecuador-us-coup/>,
while deceptively claiming fidelity to the left. He supported the
violent US-backed coup in Bolivia in 2019, which overthrew the country’s
first and only ever Indigenous president, Evo Morales, as well as the
soft coup against Brazil’s Workers’ Party government in 2016. Pérez also
backed right-wing putsch attempts in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Pérez’s support for coups and alignment with US foreign-policy interests
in Latin America led Rafael Correa and other Correísta leaders to brand
him “Yankee Pérez
<https://twitter.com/MashiRafael/status/1369676359325392896>.”
During his presidential campaign, Pérez demonized his country’s
impoverished masses, opposing a proposal by Andrés Arauz to give $1000
checks to 1 million working-class Ecuadorian families by claiming they
would spend it on beer in one day
<http://ecuadorya.com/yaku-perez-los-pobres-se-gastan-la-plata-en-cerveza/>.
At the same time, Pérez said he would happily sign a free-trade
agreement with the United States, telling a journalist, “I will not
think twice.”
While Pérez ran on clearly right-wing policies, his campaign weaponized
themes of identity, environmentalism, and gender and sexuality to attack
the leftist Correísta movement (and to smear The Grayzone’s reporting)
<https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/01/academic-letter-censor-grayzone-ecuador-yaku-perez/>.
Pérez’s candidacy was heavily amplified by Western corporate
media
outlets and US right-wing lobby groups like the Americas Society /
Council of the Americas (AS/COA), which is funded by Western
corporations, including a who’s who of the extraction industry.
Pérez quickly became a favorite
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ctrc8JRAPA> on CNN en Español
<https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2021/02/10/yaku-perez-lider-indigena-contendiente-sorpresa-elecciones-ecuador/>,
where he spread baseless accusations of “fraud
<https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2021/02/18/yaku-perez-en-conclusiones-el-fraude-se-hizo-a-todo-el-pueblo-del-ecuador/>”
after narrowly losing first round of the presidential election. And in a
friendly interview on CNN following Lasso’s April 11 victory, Pérez
absurdly claimed that socialist former President Correa and his leftist
movement represent “the new right
<https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/video/ecuador-yaku-perez-correa-derecha-conecta2/>.”
Eduardo Enríquez Arévalo, an Ecuadorian sociologist, spoke with
The
Grayzone about the shifting political orientation of CONAIE and Pachakutik.
“Pachakutik was born as an electoral instrument of CONAIE in the
mid-’90s, but in the 2010s it became increasingly autonomous of CONAIE,
which is visible in CONAIE’s criticism of the closeness that Pachakutik
has had to Lasso and the right wing in recent years,” Enríquez explained.
In the 2010s, as Correa solidified a massive support base in Ecuador and
expanded mining to fund popular social programs, Pachakutik began to
openly ally with the right. In the 2014 mayoral election for the capital
city Quito, Pachakutik’s candidate Milton Castillo openly endorsed
conservative Mauricio Rodas
<https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/elecciones-2014/3/presidente-de-la-conaie-repudia-apoyo-de-milton-castillo-a-mauricio-rodas>,
calling on Indigenous supporters to vote for the right wing in order to
defeat the Correísta candidate, Augusto Barrera.
Thanks in part to the Pachakutik candidate’s endorsement, the rightist
Rodas won the election and began to use Quito’s local government to
undercut President Correa. CONAIE leadership responded by publicly
criticizing Castillo.
“That right-wing shift can be understood possibly as a clarification of
the ideological differences of the different classes within Indigenous
communities in Ecuador,” Enríquez said, “but also as
a generational
conflict between younger leaders like Leonidas Iza and Jaime Vargas, who
maintain a more left-wing perspective, or are at least more radical in
their forms of struggle, when compared to the older leaders who are
closer to the political elites of the country, such as Assembly member
Salvador Quishpe and Lourdes Tibán, who show a clear willingness to
collaborate with the right wing.”
“In 2019 Pachakutik not only found itself supporting the right-wing
government of Moreno but also taking a turn toward social conservatism,
when it opposed the decriminalization of abortion in cases of rape, when
even the majority of the legislative bloc of the Citizens’ Revolution
supported that decriminalization,” the scholar noted.
CONAIE again censured Pachakutik
<https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/conaie-legisladores-pachakutik-ley-aborto.html>,
its own political arm, for this vote against decriminalizing abortion in
cases of rape.
In October 2019, the Moreno government tried to ram through a series of
unpopular neoliberal economic reforms demanded by the International
Monetary Fund. The left-wing faction of CONAIE helped organize protests
against the proposed austerity measures.
After 10 days of demonstrations, CONAIE met with Moreno
<https://www.dw.com/es/ecuador-ind%C3%ADgenas-cesan-protestas-tras-acuerdo-con-moreno/a-50818814>
and came to an agreement to end the protests. The confederation’s
willingness to negotiate with the notoriously corrupt right-wing
president drew sustained criticism from the Ecuadorian left, given
CONAIE leadership had on occasions refused to negotiate with Correa when
he was president.
The 2019 protests were led by Jaime Vargas, the former CONAIE president
who was later expelled from Pachakutik for endorsing Arauz, as well as
Leonidas Iza. Given his role in the popular rebellion, Iza later sought
nomination to run in the 2021 presidential election as Pachakutik’s
candidate, but the party rejected him in choosing the right-leaning Yaku
Pérez.
Pérez was noticeably not one of the leaders of the anti-neoliberal
protests. In fact, just a few weeks after the demonstrations ended,
Pérez quickly reconciled with the Moreno regime
<https://www.primicias.ec/noticias/politica/yaku-perez-reconcilia-con-gobierno/>,
holding a press conference with one of its ministers. It was a clear
sign to Moreno that he was willing to play ball.
In the 2021 election, Pérez went on to run a hardline anti-Correísta
campaign, spreading lies and smears against Correa and Arauz. Pérez
incited against Venezuelan immigrants
<https://twitter.com/Ecuador_On_Q/status/1362126157605466114>, accusing
them of stirring up chaos in Ecuador, and even echoed the thoroughly
debunked right-wing propaganda that falsely accused Arauz of being
funded by Colombian socialist guerrillas in the ELN.
Iza, from CONAIE’s left-wing faction, was so disturbed by Pérez’s
reactionary campaign that he publicly warned that the Pachakutik
candidate was collaborating with the right wing, revealing that members
of Lasso’s conservative CREO party were in Pérez’s inner circle.
Pérez never came close to victory; he managed to win only 19% of the
vote in the first round of the presidential election. When it was clear
that he had lost, Pérez desperately called on Ecuador’s military to
intervene in the election
<https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/10/ecuador-yaku-perez-military-nullify-election/>,
and for the Moreno administration to nullify the results of the first
round and prosecute Arauz for supposedly taking ELN money.
While he ultimately lost the election, Pérez managed to fulfill his
second goal, accomplishing what many right-leaning Pachakutik and CONAIE
leaders – and their allies in Washington – had unsuccessfully tried to
do in past elections: confuse progressive-minded Ecuadorians and divide
the left-wing vote with his call for null voting, thereby handing a
victory to Guillermo Lasso.
Pérez’s sabotage of a left-wing resurgence in Ecuador represented the
culmination of a years-long operation conceived in Washington.
US embassy cultivates anti-Correa Indigenous leaders
Classified US State Department cables published by WikiLeaks provide a
host of examples of Washington cultivating opportunistic Indigenous and
environmental leaders to weaken Ecuador’s left, going back to the
eve of
Rafael Correa’s first electoral victory.
When Wikileaks first revealed these documents, the US embassy’s
collaboration with Native Ecuadorian leaders was reported on in Spanish
by TeleSUR
<https://www.telesurtv.net/news/Revelan-tratos-entre-EE.UU.-y-cupula-indigena-de-Ecuador-20150807-0034.html>,
but it was almost entirely ignored in English-language media.
Numerous 2005 and 2006 US embassy
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06QUITO817_a.html> cables on
Indigenous-led protests in Ecuador reveal that many leaders
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06QUITO1837_a.html> of CONAIE and
Pachakutik were in regular contact
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06QUITO694_a.html> and participating
in meetings with <https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05QUITO1420_a.html>
the embassy’s political officers, frequently providing Washington
with
valuable information.
One of the cables identified US diplomat Vanessa Schulz
<https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessa-schulz-zenji-77b363136/> as a
political officer (referred to in the documents with the abbreviation
PolOff) who was communicating with Indigenous informants.
WikiLeaks Ecuador CONAIE Pachakutik US embassy
2006 State Department cables released by WikiLeaks show that
opportunistic Indigenous leaders of Ecuador’s CONAIE and Pachakutik were
in regular contact with a US embassy political officer (PolOff)
At this time, Washington’s top priority was the passage of a free
trade
agreement with Ecuador and other countries across Latin America.
A 2005 US embassy cable
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05QUITO586_a.html> noted, “Most
indigenous groups remain skeptical of a Free Trade Agreement with the
U.S. and critical of Plan Colombia, but open to dialogue with us.”
The document revealed that “CONAIE asked the USG [US government] to
intervene with the [Ecuadorian] President to get CONAIE representatives
back in these [Ecuadorian] government institutions.”
“CONAIE’s new leadership seemed open to dialogue with the
Embassy, while
maintaining their distance from certain USG priorities,” the cable said.
The US embassy identified “More Moderate” Indigenous leaders who were
potentially interested in a free trade agreement, such as CONAIE Vice
President Santiago De La Cruz, who it disclosed “appeared eager to
engage in dialogue with us” and “said he believed the U.S. was ‘not all
bad.'”
WikiLeaks Ecuador CONAIE US embassy
A 2005 embassy cable discusses support for the US within Ecuador’s
Indigenous CONAIE leadership
In August 2006, just weeks before Correa’s historic election, an
Indigenous leader from the confederation CONAIE invited the US
ambassador to his city for a friendly meeting.
A US State Department cable reported positively on the reunion with Auki
Tituaña, mayor of the city of Cotacachi. Using patronizing language,
the
embassy referred to him as a “counterweight within the main national
Indigenous organization to the CONAIE leadership’s increasingly leftist
and globaphobic insulation
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06QUITO2225_a.html>,” adding that
Tituaña had requested the meeting with the US ambassador to show
“pragmatic openness to collaboration with diverse forces to promote his
people’s development.”
“During the hour-long meeting, Tituaña clearly sought to set
the
Ambassador at ease, evincing pragmatism,” the cable went on. “He did not
criticize the USG [US government] and, at one point, told us privately
that the major problem with an FTA [free trade agreement] in Ecuador was
simply a lack of information.”
Tituaña made it clear to the US government that he opposed Correa. The
embassy recounted, “Tituana told us he had ruled out an alliance for
fear of Correa’s polemic and divisive style.”
The cable acknowledged that there were significant political splits
within Ecuador’s Indigenous community. It praised Tituaña, stating that
he “signaled rare political openness, citing his personal friendship
with PSC Mayor of Guayaquil, Jaime Nebot,” referring to a powerful
right-wing politician in Ecuador.
Tituaña’s closeness to the right became undeniable in 2012, when the
Indigenous leader announced that he would run as Guillermo Lasso’s vice
presidential candidate
<https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/politica/auki-tituana-completa-binomio-guillermo.html>
in the next year’s election. CONAIE responded by expelling him.
WikiLeaks US ambassador Ecuador CONAIE indigenous
A 2006 US embassy cable discusses how Ecuador’s indigenous
CONAIE/Pachakutik leader Auki Tituaña wanted closer relations with
Washington
When Correa took power in 2007, the US embassy cables show that the
State Department was supporting not only his right-wing opponents, but
also the so-called “left opposition,” and even had regular contacts
inside Ecuador’s police
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07QUITO345_a.html>.
Numerous cables reveal that a representative from the AFL-CIO’s
NED-funded
<https://www.solidaritycenter.org/national-endowment-for-democracy-ned-ndi-iri-cipe-and-solidarity-center-welcome-increased-funding-from-congress/>
Solidarity Center, Patricio Contreras
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08QUITO921_a.html>, was an “embassy
contact <https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05QUITO1403_a.html>” – a US
government informant, providing constant information on Ecuador.
A 2009 cable reporting on Indigenous protests
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09QUITO849_a.html> against Correa’s
government showed that the US embassy was still in regular communication
with Native leaders, revealing that the national director of the
Federation of Evangelical Indigenous People of Ecuador (FEINE) was
giving information to Washington’s political officer.
Another 2009 US embassy cable
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09QUITO873_a.html> monitoring
Indigenous opposition to Correa noted that the leftist president “called
some of the leaders ‘rightists’ with ‘golden ponchos.'”
Reporting on CONAIE’s 2009 demonstrations against Correa, the US embassy
wrote: “The indigenous protestors, apparently armed with shotguns
and
spears, allegedly opened fire on police, injuring 40 police and killing
one of their own, a Shuar teacher named Bosco Wisuma. The killing of
Bosco Wisuma, although reportedly an incident of ‘friendly fire,’
galvanized CONAIE supporters.”
The 2009 death of this Indigenous supporter had been used by the
international media
<https://www.newsday.com/news/nation/ecuador-indians-trade-blame-for-bloody-clash-1.1490619>
to condemn Correa, smearing him as authoritarian and anti-Indigenous,
but the internal documents prove that Washington was well aware that he
was killed by his own community members in a violent protest.
Perhaps the clearest sign of the US embassy recognizing the power of
pseudo-left opposition to Correa is a classified 2009 cable signed by
the charge d’affaires, Andrew Chritton. Titled “Correa and Social
Movements: Attacks from the Left?
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09QUITO951_a.html>“, the document
noted: “President Rafael Correa now faces strong but fragmented
opposition from leftist groups that were part of his political base. In
the last few months, the GOE has confronted striking teachers, students,
and indigenous groups.”
The cable recalled that Correa accused some of these ostensibly
left-wing opposition groups of “‘doing the work of the rightists’ and
‘imperialists.'”
“It is ironic that Correa, the self-proclaimed ’21st century socialist,’
is facing his most active opposition from the left of the political
spectrum, all the while accusing them of falling prey to manipulation
from the ‘rightists,'” the embassy cheerfully noted.
The cable acknowledged, “Rumors in the indigenous community suggest that
corporate interests in Guayaquil, or the losers in the last presidential
election, funded the most violent protests during the September
indigenous strike.”
In a blunt admission, however, the US embassy’s charge d’affaires
conceded that “many of these organizations do not have much support from
the general population.”
‘Private CIA’ and top USAID contractor cultivates anti-Correa
environmental groups
Some of the environmental and Indigenous groups in the opposition to
Rafael Correa and his progressive Citizens’ Revolution were funded by
the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
<https://thegrayzone.com/2018/08/20/inside-americas-meddling-machine-the-us-funded-group-that-interferes-in-elections-around-the-globe/>,
a front for US intelligence created by the Ronald Reagan
administration’s CIA in the 1980s.
While the NED’s publicly available grants database
<https://www.ned.org/wp-content/themes/ned/search/grant-search.php>
shows hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of grants distributed to
these individual groups, the most substantial sums of money in Ecuador
flowed from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
In 2006, in the final months of Ecuador’s neoliberal government, USAID’s
top activities in the country consisted of ostensible anti-drug
operations, with “counternarcotics” initiatives making up
the majority
of its budget.
USAID’s official statistics
<https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/ECU?fiscal_year=2006&measure=Obligations>
show that its top partners that year were the Pentagon, State
Department, and Ecuadorian government, respectively. The contractor
Chemonics had a comparatively small $1.2 million contract as part of the
agency’s “Environmental Support Program.”
USAID Ecuador 2006
USAID’s funding for Ecuador in 2006
But by 2009, Correa was publicly challenging US imperialism,
collaborating with other leftist leaders in Latin America, particularly
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and turning Ecuador into a member of
the Bolivarian trade alliance ALBA. So USAID’s priorities in the region
quickly shifted.
The for-profit firm Chemonics became a top recipient of USAID Ecuador
contracts, raking in $5.4 million in 2009 to work on “Sustainable
Forests and Coasts
<https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/ECU?fiscal_year=2009&measure=Obligations>,”
suddenly one of USAID’s top programs in the nation. Now, Washington was
committed to funding an environmentalist opposition to Correa.
Though it was wracked by a series of scandals, including accusations of
corruption
<https://www.pri.org/stories/2012-10-05/usaid-contractor-chemonics-cited-numerous-mistakes-haiti>
and racism,
<https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/nov/21/top-us-government-aid-partner-to-pay-500k-damages-to-african-american-job-applicants>
Chemonics was an ideal partner for outsourcing gray operations and
ensuring plausible deniability for foreign meddling.
Indeed, Chemonics has long acted as a US intelligence pass-through, with
its founder explaining to the New York Times that he created the firm in
order to “have my own CIA
<https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/11/business/cozy-links-to-a-us-agency-prove-useful-to-a-rice-trader.html>.”
When Washington and its allies launched a dirty war on Syria in 2011,
Chemonics was used to funnel tens of millions of dollars to the White
Helmets, a faux humanitarian initiative that functioned as a propaganda
ancillary for the jihadist gangs
<https://thegrayzone.com/2016/10/02/white-helmets-us-military-intervention-regime-change-syria/> the
US had armed and trained to destabilize the country.
By 2013, USAID was pouring a plurality of its Ecuador budget into
anti-Correa environmental initiatives
<https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/ECU?fiscal_year=2013&measure=Obligations>.
“Climate Change Mitigation and Adaption” and “Sustainable Forests and
Coasts” were USAID’s top activities, and “General
Environmental
Protection” was the largest sector, with $16 million that year.
Chemonics was USAID’s top partner in Ecuador, with $11 million in
2013
alone (significantly greater than the second-biggest recipient, the
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, with just $4 million that year).
USAID Ecuador 2013 climate change environment
In 2013, USAID poured millions into environmental groups to counter
Correa’s infrastructure projects
2013 became a very controversial year for the US agency. Bolivia’s
socialist President Evo Morales, a close ally of Correa, expelled USAID
from his country, condemning it for supporting opposition groups and
destabilizing his democratically elected government.
As with Ecuador, Chemonics had been one of USAID’s top partners in
Bolivia, with a $10.5 million contract for “democracy-building”
<https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/05/01/180382925/bolivian-president-evo-morales-expels-usaid>
in the country.
The “Strengthening Democratic Institutions” program that USAID ran in
Bolivia happened to share the same name as a regime-change scheme
targeting the government of socialist President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.
That year, WikiLeaks published an explosive 2006 US embassy cable that
revealed that USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) had a
“5-point strategy” for regime change in Venezuela
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06CARACAS3356_a.html>: “1)
Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez’ Political
Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital US business, and 5)
Isolating Chavez internationally.”
Morales and Correa understood that this USAID-OTI plan was a
regime-change blueprint, and Washington was using the same tactics
against them.
Around the same time in Ecuador, local media outlets had begun to ask
questions about USAID and Chemonics. A 2012 report in the newspaper El
Telégrafo, titled “Farmers discover ‘aims’ of NGO funded by USAID
<https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/zoo/1/campesinos-detectaron-objetivos-de-ong-financiada-por-usaid>,”
noted that Chemonics’ “Sustainable Forests and Coasts” program was based
in the provinces of Esmeraldas, Guayas, and Manabí.
“The project is exerting suspected political interference because
its
site of operation is in the areas with the most minerals and natural
resources,” the newspaper wrote. “The same occurs in other parts of
Latin America when the region tries to economically and scientifically
manage these resources for itself.”
A Correa administration official, Gabriela Rosero, told El Telégrafo,
“We realized that those who are implementing this project do not even
have legal representation in Ecuador, but rather are in another country
or are remotely controlling it from where the resources come from.”
These projects “are causing us doubts,” the Ecuadorian government
official said.
USAID’s cover had been blown. In December 2013, the Correa government
froze its cooperation
<https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/usaid-cierre-oficinas-ecuador-eeuu.html>
with the US agency.
In 2014, USAID announced that it was leaving Ecuador
<https://www.larepublica.ec/blog/2014/09/30/usaid-sale-ecuador/>.
Washington’s reaction was muted, but it was clear that Correa had
forced
the agency to leave. His government simultaneously expelled the US
embassy’s military attaché and its anti-narcotics group as well.
“We will not accept being a colony of anyone,” Correa proclaimed at the
time, adding that his country did not need USAID’s assistance.
By Correa’s last year in office in 2017, USAID Ecuador funding was at an
all-time low of $18 million. But then next year, something dramatically
changed: The Moreno government turned on its constituents, threw its
weight behind the right-wing oligarchy and Washington, and declared war
on Correísmo.
Moreno invited USAID back into the country, and Washington returned the
favor by helping to bankroll the conservative regime he was
constructing. The agency’s contracts in Ecuador suddenly skyrocketed in
2018 by over 440%, from $18 million to $80 million. Moreno was being
rewarded for his turncoat behavior.
The drastic increase reflected how USAID functions not as a traditional
aid agency, but as a semi-covert soft-power arm of US empire.
The large sums of money that the US government handed out to opposition
groups in Ecuador, along with the declassified embassy cables published
by WikiLeaks – and even the words of CONAIE and Pachakutik leaders
themselves – paint a clear picture of how Washington systematically
divided Ecuador’s left.
Ecuadorian politics today remains deeply polarized between Correístas
and anti-Correístas, much as politics in Venezuela is polarized between
Chavistas and anti-Chavistas, and in Nicaragua between Sandinistas and
anti-Sandinistas.
The Citizens’ Revolution has built a mass base in working-class and poor
communities, while other political forces have been unable to
substantially erode its foundation.
Instead of challenging this popular core of Correísmo, smaller groups
have managed to whittle away at the margins, targeting the middle class
and educated youth, who are more susceptible to liberal
identity-centered politics.
With millions of dollars in grants and control over media narratives,
the US government has helped to astroturf a pseudo-left that has
abandoned working-class politics and anti-imperialism while exploiting
race, gender, and environmental issues to divide Ecuador’s progressive
forces and weaken Correísmo.
In April 2021, when these small contingents managed to swing the
presidential election in favor of a right-wing banker, Washington’s
subversive long game had finally paid off.
And it is only a matter of time before this divide-and-conquer strategy
is repeated
<https://thegrayzone.com/2020/08/04/usaid-document-nicaragua-coup/> in
another Latin American country with a left-wing government.
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