All right, welcome to moderate rebels.

I'm Max Blumenthal, and I'm here with Ben Norton, who is in Quito, Ecuador.

Ben has been covering the first round of a historic presidential election in Ecuador,

where it appears that, or it appeared that the pink tide that had receded in past years across Latin America

and has been returning would sweep through Ecuador next with a victory by Andresa Raus,

who is essentially the successor to the socialist-oriented former president, Rafael

Correa. And for the past year or so, past several years, Ecuador has been under the control

of a Trojan horse figure, who is the former VP to Correa, Lenin Moreno,

who has instituted an administration of harsh repression against his opponents, implemented

IMF austerity policies, mass privatization, had a disastrous performance on COVID.

And this all fueled the popularity of Arouse.

But we've seen a very interesting and unusual and I would say deeply disturbing result in the first round that Ben's going to talk about.

Ben has been covering the election for the past week,

and several of his articles have really broken through and helped explain to people what is

actually happening and hinted very strongly that the U.S. has already interfered in this historic

election. Ben made a really

important documentary for us at the Grey Zone. It's sort of a mini documentary or a long report.

It's about 15 minutes long. You can find it at our YouTube channel. And it's on the site,

the grayzone.com. But I wanted to just, before bringing Ben in, just

lead in with a part of that documentary because I think it really helps explain the background

for this election very well. So let's just go to that real quick.

The South American nation of Ecuador is currently suffering through its worst economic crisis

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