The hope of sunlight in Ecuador appears frail indeed, but let us be thankful for small mercies rather than none at all, Martin Sieff writes.
A shaft of still weak and vulnerable sunlight is piercing through the gloom that the new Biden administration in Washington has already spread over hopes for a revival of democracy across Latin America.
The first round of voting in Ecuador’s elections on February 7 left the social democratic candidate as the clear frontrunner with 32 percent of the vote, guaranteeing that the vast fake-democratic U.S. liberal-Wall Street consensus pull out all the stops to prevent him winning the second round run-off vote scheduled for April 11.
Social Democrat economist Andres Arauz, the loyal heir of popular outgoing President Rafael Correa and invariably described in U.S.-conditioned Newspeak press reports as “left wing,” won the first round with 32.7 percent of the vote.
Arauz is hardly a revolutionary firebrand: He ran on a platform of increasing taxes on the ultra-rich, improving consumer protections and expanding public banking and local savings and credit organizations. His real crime in the eyes of the global elite is that he wants keep little Ecuador (population around 18 million) out of the clutches of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The Biden administration’s clear choice to face off against Arauz in the April run-off vote will be environmentalist lawyer Yaku Perez, 51, a classic puppet front figure in the glorious tradition of Juan Guaido in Venezuela, trailed way behind with 19.38 percent.
However, Perez has already fulfilled his crucial role of splitting the vote and preventing a first round landslide victory for the social democratic forces. Had Perez not run, it is clear, Arauz would have swept home to a landslide election victory over banker and hardline right wing candidate Guillermo Lasso, 65 who only won a derisory 19.74 percent.
Now Perez is battling Lasso for the right to face Arauz in a runoff race on April 11.
Before that, in the mini-battle between Lasso and Perez, National Electoral Council (CNE) president Diana Atamaint said there would have to be a recount of all the votes in Guayas province, the most populous in the country and of half the votes cast for the two candidates in 16 other provinces
Perez, painted as an “environmentalist” would be a much easier sell for the dim, Mainstream Media (MSM) to the brainwashed U.S. suburban middle class with their “Green” romantic obsessions and to similar European popular opinion as a plausible “stop Arauz” candidate than the hapless Lasso.
Statistically, the odds should still strongly favor Arauz, but friends of genuine democracy and social justice across Latin America should watch like hawks for the kind of destabilizing dirty tricks and other U.S.-inspired moves to wreck the economy that have so often been the prelude to military coups and anti-democratic takeovers in other countries across the region from Bolivia to giant Brazil.
Nevertheless, Arauz’s clear first round election victory in Ecuador, coming so soon after the return of true democracy and freedom in Bolivia to the south shows that a new specter is haunting all of Latin America to the horror of Wall Street and U.S. policy planners: It is the specter and threat of genuine Social Democracy.
In Bolivia, on October 18, 2020, Movement for Socialism (MAS) leader and former economics minister Luis Arce won an election landslide with 55 percent of the vote and clear majorities in both chambers of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly.
The return of popular democracy to Bolivia, now followed by Arauz’s initial success in Ecuador, fills the paranoid policymakers of Washington’s endless termite mounds (usually inaccurately described as think tanks) and the Artificial Intelligence-guided Platonic Philosopher Moguls of Silicon Valley with genuine horror, loathing and outright fear.
Any return of communism does not bother them at all. Fascism, they have eagerly fanned across the world – and always more than ever across Spanish and Portuguese speaking America – for more than 70 years. Radical, extremist Islam, they have never feared: Rather, they have eagerly used it and continue to do so to fan the flames of hatred against first Russia and now also China. But Social Democracy? That has always been their most hated and feared enemy.
Back in 1954, the CIA, with the full approval and enthusiastic support of the now-deified Dwight D. Eisenhower, toppled the genuine democratic government of President Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala and unleashed a dark age of continued slaughter, torture, rape and pillage on the Mayan and other indigenous peoples of Central America.
In the 1970s, the truly neo-Nazi military dictatorship in Argentina tortured, raped and slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens with the full support of successive U.S. administrations including the supposedly saintly and sweet (another lie of Goebbels proportions) Jimmy Carter.
They might have turned Argentina into a permanent Nazi state complete with its own local genocides for Jews, native peoples and other minorities had President (and former death squad commander) General Leopoldo Galtieri not made the mortal error of seizing the Falkland Islands in 1982 from previously enfeebled Britain at a time when it was being run by the far-from-enfeebled Iron Lady herself – Margaret Thatcher.
Even then, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick, still revered across the West because of her hatred for the Soviet Union, passionately urged President Ronald Reagan to support the mass murdering Argentine leader rather than America’s supposedly closest ally.
The U.S. war on genuine free and fair elections and on peaceful, democratic elected left of center governments across the Western hemisphere therefore long antedated President Donald Trump and his outrageous and bullying CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
During current President Joe Biden’s eight years as vice president to Barack Obama, he had no objection or worries when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton bizarrely demanded that the CIA collect DNA samples of leaders around the world. Nor did Biden ever express any sympathy or regret, let alone suspicion, when two Social Democratic presidents of Brazil in a row and the democratically elected president of Venezuela all came down with virulent and sometimes extremely rare cancers.
As I noted in these columns on February 16, Biden loyal as ever to the dim and contemptible foreign policy record of his old boss Obama, initially appears determined to continue this contemptible record in deliberate know-nothing hypocrisy.
Biden and his foreign policy team are clearly passively going along with the campaign they inherited from Trump to topple repeatedly democratically elected President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. And neo-fascist President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, a particular favorite of Trump and Pompeo, looks assured of Biden’s support as long as he mutters a few incoherent empty promises to “respect the environment” as he completes the annihilation of the Amazon rain forest.
Against this dark history and bleak present, the hope of sunlight in Ecuador appears frail indeed, but let us be thankful for small mercies rather than none at all.
