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<font size="1"><a href="https://orinocotribune.com/how-ecuadors-us-backed-coup-supporting-ecosocialist-candidate-aids-the-right-wing/">https://orinocotribune.com/how-ecuadors-us-backed-coup-supporting-ecosocialist-candidate-aids-the-right-wing/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">How Ecuador’s US-backed, Coup-Supporting ‘Ecosocialist’ Candidate Aids the Right-Wing</h1>By Ben Norton – Feb 6, 2021</div><div class="gmail-content"><div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Pérez supported right-wing US-backed coups targeting Bolivia, Brazil,
Venezuela, and Nicaragua, demonizing the countries’ socialist
governments as “racist.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<img src="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/poll-perfiles-de-opinion-Ecuador-Arauz-Lasso.jpg?fit=700%2C380&ssl=1" alt="poll perfiles de opinion Ecuador Arauz Lasso" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="412" height="224">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%
<div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Villavicencio’s anti-Correa activism also appears to have been funded by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy.</p>
<p>Yaku Pérez and Pachakutik mirror another campaign in South America
that exploited ostensibly left-wing forces on behalf of right-wing ends.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>“Left-wing” support for right-wing coups in Latin America</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Indigenous outrage against Pérez especially grew when he supported the US-backed military coup in Bolivia in November 2019.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>After backing the coup, Pérez went silent about Bolivia, saying
nothing as the junta, led by racist Christian extremists, massacred
Indigenous protesters.</p>
<p>But the coup in Bolivia is not the only US-led regime-change campaign in Latin America that Yaku Pérez has supported.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Pérez also openly called for Ecuador’s leftist President Correa and
Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolás Maduro to be overthrown.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
</div>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><a href="https://orinocotribune.com/an-overview-of-ecuadors-presidential-elections-special-mision-verdad-report/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RELATED CONTENT: An Overview of Ecuador’s Presidential Elections (Special Misión Verdad Report)</a></p>
<p>In the same vein, Pérez supported a brutal US-backed coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Who would have thought that the Sandinistas that before fought
against the dictatorship are now shooting their people,” Pérez wrote in
October 2018.</p>
<p><strong>Friendly ties with the US government</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>That is because Pérez has fostered cozy ties with Washington, while advancing its agenda in his country.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<img alt="Yaku Perez US ambassador Mike Fitzpatrick" width="820" height="884">Yaku Pérez with US Ambassador to Ecuador Michael J. Fitzpatrick in June 2019
<p>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.</p>
<img alt="Yaku Perez US embassy flag Cuenca Ecuador" width="672" height="566">Yaku
Perez celebrating United States Independence Day and the swearing in of
the new US ambassador in July 2019 in Cuenca, Ecuador
<p>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.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/yakuperezg/status/1304110421570445312">https://twitter.com/yakuperezg/status/1304110421570445312</a></p>
<div>
<p><strong>US-backed “ecosocialists” ally with right-wing in coup attempt against Rafael Correa</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>What CONAIE did not acknowledge in its constant attacks on Correa was
that its political wing was heavily supported by the US government.</p>
<p><a href="https://orinocotribune.com/ecuador-they-shoot-over-arauz/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RELATED CONTENT: Ecuador: They Shoot Over Arauz</a></p>
<p>Indeed, CONAIE’s de facto political arm is the party Pachakutik, whose 2021 presidential candidate is Yaku Pérez.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
</div>
<div>
<img alt="US NED NDI Pachakutik Ecuador coup Correa" width="1066" height="694">A
2007 document showing how the US government’s National Democratic
Institute (NDI) trained the Ecuadorian opposition group Pachakutik
</div>
<div>
<p>In a 2019 report, Ecuadorian-Canadian writer Joe Emersberger exposed CONAIE’s role as a Trojan horse for the right-wing.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote><p>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.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Non-Indigenous anti-Correa activist from Indigenous party spreads disinformation against Julian Assange</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>WikiLeaks strongly denied the report, calling it a complete fabrication and launching a legal fund to <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/wikileaks-suing-the-guardian-over-manafort-story">sue The Guardian</a> over the story.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Right-wing corporate lobby group AS/COA promotes Yaku Pérez’s campaign</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But a look at some of Pérez’s most high-profile promoters, including
powerful right-wing corporate lobby groups, illustrates his ulterior
agenda.</p>
<p>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?”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>Americas Quarterly said it conducted a survey of a dozen analysts who “ranked Pérez further to the left than Arauz.”</p>
<p>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.’”</p>
<p>Author Brendan O’Boyle shared the piece promoting “the anti-Correa, ‘ecological left’ that he represents.”</p>
<p>So what exactly is Americas Quarterly? Is it a left-liberal publication that promotes environmentalism and Indigenous rights?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>AS/COA has played an important role in backing coups against
progressive governments in Latin America and propping up unpopular
neoliberal regimes.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<img alt="Council of the Americas ASCOA member corporations" width="1170" height="1514">AS/COA’s corporate members
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It is for the same reason that right-wing banker Guillermo Lasso has said he would support Pérez.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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</p><h5>
<span>
Ben Norton </span>
</h5>
<div>
<p>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.</p>
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