How Ecuador's US-backed fake 'eco-left' helped a right-wing banker win the election

Moderate Rebels

Foreignpolicy, Politics, War, Journalism, Middleeast, News, News Commentary

4.7 • 673 Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2021

⏱️ 114 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ben Norton discusses Ecuador's 2021 election results, and how the US government and intelligence-linked billionaire foundations spent decades funding and cultivating liberal environmental groups and rightist Indigenous leaders to divide the left and weaken the socialist Citizens' Revolution movement launched by former President Rafael Correa.

* Read Ben's investigation "How the US gov’t cultivated environmental and Indigenous groups to defeat Ecuador’s leftist Correísta movement" here: thegrayzone.com/2021/05/04/ecuador-election-us-pachakutik-lasso-yaku

State Department cables released by WikiLeaks show how the US embassy recruited members of the Indigenous confederation CONAIE and its political arm Pachakutik, which has been directly supported by US government soft-power weapons like the NDI. CIA cutouts USAID and the NED poured tens of millions of dollars into building a fake "left" opposition to Correísmo, using "anti-extractivism" as a cover.

The result was Pachakutik/CONAIE and its coup-supporting neoliberal candidate Yaku Pérez got more than 1 million extra Ecuadorians to vote null in the April 2021 vote, compared to previous elections, thereby handing the victory to right-wing banker Guillermo Lasso.

After left-wing candidate Andrés Arauz conceded losing by 400,000 votes, Pérez boasted of "burying Correísmo." The US-backed fake "left" had succeeded in defeating a real leftist movement.

Norton documents how these tactics mirror US imperialist strategy targeting Bolivia, Nicaragua, Mexico, and more.

VIDEO: youtube.com/watch?v=k8FHNlbGKC0

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, this is moderate rebels and I'm Ben Norton. I was invited to give a talk on
0:09.3	just what went wrong in Ecuador on the April 11th election. The leftist candidate
0:16.4	Andre Zaras, following in the footsteps of former socialist leader Rafael Correa, he lost.
0:23.4	It was a close race, but the left lost, and instead, a right-wing U.S.-backed banker,
0:29.6	Guillermo Laso, who is extremely corrupt, won the election.
0:33.3	He will be the next president of Ecuador.
0:35.4	He immediately celebrated by thanking Juan Guaido,
0:40.3	the US-backed fake president of Venezuela.
0:43.8	So I think that really says a lot about the direction
0:46.8	that Ecuador is unfortunately heading in
0:49.3	in the next few years with more suffocating neoliberal
0:53.1	austerity policies, structural adjustment programs imposed
0:56.5	by the IMF, and total subservience to Washington, totally following U.S. foreign policy in Latin
1:04.2	America and around the world. But I have not been satisfied with almost all of the analysis I've seen of the election in Ecuador,
1:13.2	at least in English. There's been some better analysis in Spanish, but for our audience who are
1:18.1	English speakers, I want to help translate and explain what was going on, analyze the situation,
1:24.5	and really show the few factors that you can't understand this historic loss without keeping in mind.
1:33.3	And this includes the most important factor I have not seen in basically all media reporting on Ecuador,
1:39.3	and that is how the United States and big billionaire-funded foundations and NGOs helped cultivate a fake
1:48.0	left in Ecuador that's similar to the kind of neoliberal fake left of the Democratic Party
1:53.8	or the Labor Party now in the UK and in Western Europe.
1:58.7	And that fake left actually allied with Guillermo Laso, with the political
	...

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