{"id":1613867,"date":"2024-04-16T17:10:25","date_gmt":"2024-04-16T17:10:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therealnews.com\/?p=312050"},"modified":"2024-04-16T17:10:25","modified_gmt":"2024-04-16T17:10:25","slug":"former-ecuador-fm-says-embassy-raid-signals-a-deeper-political-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/04\/16\/former-ecuador-fm-says-embassy-raid-signals-a-deeper-political-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Former Ecuador FM says embassy raid signals a deeper political crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: Noboa vs. AMLO: The embassy raid and Ecuador&amp;apos;s deeper crisis w\/Guillaume Long\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"152\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/6JR78nwEhyhf0xdj8UbBBT?si=40ec2b240d23423c&#038;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">Ecuador has been thrust into the international spotlight following a flagrantly illegal raid on the Mexican embassy on April 5. President Daniel Noboa ordered the raid to arrest former Vice President Jorge Glas, who had sought asylum on the embassy grounds since Dec. 2023. Mexico has responded by severing diplomatic ties with Ecuador and filing a complaint with the ICJ, specifically requesting that the court expel Ecuador from the UN until an apology is given. Governments across the Americas and the world have joined the chorus of denunciations, noting the violation of diplomatic immunity as a severe breach of international law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ecuador once stood out in the region for its relatively low crime rate and steadily improving social progress, yet its fortunes have radically reversed in the past decade. The fall of the left-wing Correistas unleashed a tide of neoliberalism and narco-trafficking in the country, sending poverty and crime soaring. Noboa, who is the son of Ecuador&#8217;s wealthiest man, came to power on promises to address the security crisis\u2014but so far, has only managed to haul the country into a three-month long state of emergency. To understand recent events and place them in the proper context of Ecuador&#8217;s contemporary politics, The Real News speaks with <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/GuillaumeLong\"  rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Guillaume Long<\/a>, Ecuador&#8217;s former Foreign Minister.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>Studio Production: Ju-Hyun Park<br>Post-Production: Alina Nehlich, Cameron Granadino<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-transcript\">Transcript<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ju-Hyun:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Welcome to the Real News podcast. I&#8217;m your host, Ju-Hyun Park, Engagement Editor here at The Real News. Today, we&#8217;re discussing major developments in the nation of Ecuador, where a recent government raid on the Mexican Embassy is sparking a major international row.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As always, before we start, I&#8217;d like to take a second to appreciate all you listeners out there. The Real News is a totally independent, not-for-profit news outlet. We don&#8217;t charge you subscription fees, we don&#8217;t torment you with ads and we don&#8217;t have big corporate backers. We think it&#8217;s important for our integrity to remain this way so that you, our audience, knows that we can&#8217;t be bought. But making the news costs money, and the only way we can keep doing that is through your donations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Help us keep plying you with the kinds of thoughtful, informed reporting and love. Head over to therealnews.com\/donate to become a monthly sustainer of our work. And if you want to stay in touch and get regular updates about the latest and greatest stories from us, then sign up for our free newsletter at therealnews.com\/sign-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Last Friday, April 5th, Ecuador&#8217;s right-wing government, led by President Daniel Noboa, kicked off an international firestorm when it raided the Mexican Embassy in Quito to arrest Ecuador&#8217;s former vice president, Jorge Glas, who had been living on the compound since December last year seeking asylum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Former Ecuadorian President, Rafael Correa, who Glas served under as VP has since reported that Glas has attempted suicide following his arrest and is currently on hunger strike in prison. Mexico swiftly severed diplomatic ties with Ecuador following the raid and governments across the region and around the world have condemned Ecuador&#8217;s actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even the Organization of American States and the US have made statements decrying the embassy raid. Mexico has kicked up the pressure by filing a complaint with the International Court of Justice, asking the court to suspend Ecuador&#8217;s membership in the UN until an apology is made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Joining The Real News today is Guillaume Long, Ecuador&#8217;s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, and former Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent. Long is a trained historian who holds a PhD in international politics from the University of London. He is currently a senior research fellow with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Guillaume, welcome back to The Real News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Guillaume Long:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thank you very much for having me on the show. It&#8217;s a real pleasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ju-Hyun:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Let&#8217;s go ahead and get started with the basics. Why was the Noboa administration after Jorge Glas? And why were they willing to go as far as to raid the embassy of a foreign country?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Guillaume Long:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, that&#8217;s a great question, and there are a few hypotheses but I don&#8217;t think we have a clear answer. I think part of it is that there&#8217;s a lot of unawareness in the Noboa government. I mean, we could go further and call it incompetence. It&#8217;s not a very well-lubricated political machine, to say the least. And a lot of people, it&#8217;s their first time in government. He&#8217;s very young himself, and I just think &#8230; I mean, it sounds crazy, but I just think they weren&#8217;t expecting this international response, this international backlash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I mean, it&#8217;s pretty obvious that if you&#8217;re going to storm an embassy it&#8217;s going to be bad, but they just thought there would be a cost, for sure, but they didn&#8217;t expect as high a cost on the international front. Ecuador right now is completely isolated, as you rightly noted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so the cost, that was the cost, which I think they underestimated, but the win for them was, I think it was an electoral gamble. There are elections on April 21st in Ecuador, a referendum with 11 questions, and we saw in the polls on a few questions the government was starting to look like it might lose. The government is the one proposing this referendum. And there were a few questions that were looking tight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The assumption being that the government was going to win this referendum from a few, I mean, it&#8217;s a recent government, recently sworn in, Noboa has only been in power since November. He&#8217;s kind of still in his honeymoon. There&#8217;s a very desperate situation in Ecuador concerning security and insecurity with extremely high homicide rates and a lot of narco crime, and Ecuador&#8217;s like the new frontier of the war on drugs right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So people are desperate, and so Noboa launched a referendum on security issues. He also managed to sneak in a couple of questions that have to do with economics and directly benefit his own business empire and his family&#8217;s business empire. But the other nine questions were on security issues, enabling the military to get involved in law enforcement, longer sentences, allowing for extradition of Ecuadorians, essentially, to the United States and those kinds of measures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, those measures in the context of the spiraling insecurity and the spiraling homicide rate in Ecuador was, yeah, I mean, they were bound to be popular. And despite this, we&#8217;ve seen in the last few weeks, the polls still favoring Noboa on most questions, but not favoring Noboa on a couple of questions, particularly the economic questions that he sneaked in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, I think he was worried that he might not win and he really needs this win because he&#8217;s only a caretaker president. He&#8217;s in there to finish his predecessor&#8217;s mandate. His predecessor faced an impeachment process and then eventually resigned and so had to call for new elections. And the Ecuadorian constitution allowed for these new elections, which Noboa won, but he&#8217;s only allowed to finish this mandate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, his mandate finishes in May next year, 2025, and there will be elections in February. So he has very little time. This is an electoral year, and he wanted this referendum to do a few more months on the victory on a high and have some political oxygen. And he really wants to be reelected, so he basically stormed the Mexican Embassy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, why would that be popular? I&#8217;m not sure it is actually going to be popular. I think that it might be a complete miscalculation. But he definitely did that I think as part of his electoral campaign to look like he&#8217;s a strong man, that he has an iron fist that he he has resolve. Because Ecuador&#8217;s insecurity situation is so dire and Ecuador is fast becoming a narco state, his goal is to project this image that he is a tough guy and to storm an embassy achieves that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And of course, inside the embassy, he was achieving a double goal because inside the embassy, there&#8217;s a senior opponent to his government, a former Correista vice president, former President Rafael Correa&#8217;s vice president, who&#8217;s actually been persecuted over these years. It&#8217;s quite a terrible situation he&#8217;s faced. He&#8217;s just come out of four-and-a-half years in jail and there was a new court case started against him. He was wanted, there was a pretrial detention order, not even a guilty sentence yet, but a pretrial detention order. And he thought, &#8220;Right, the Ecuadorian judiciary is completely politicized,&#8221; and therefore sought asylum in this embassy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, Noboa thought, &#8220;Right, I&#8217;m going to get this guy. Nobody&#8217;s going to run away from Ecuadorian justice, and I don&#8217;t care whether I violate the sanctity of the Mexican Embassy. And I&#8217;m going to look like a tough guy, I&#8217;m going to win these elections.&#8221; I think that&#8217;s the long answer to your question of why Noboa did this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I do think there is a miscalculation there because the international response is huge. It&#8217;s isolating Ecuador. I don&#8217;t think Noboa was expecting this. He was this young guy who&#8217;d just been elected who was looking like a new promise in the region because he&#8217;s so young and a new wind of change in the region. And now he just looks like someone who&#8217;s a tyrant, anti-democratic, someone who violates international law, and I can&#8217;t see a lot of his neighbors wanting to be in the picture with him or inviting him to their country. I think he&#8217;s going to be pretty isolated for the remainder of his term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ju-Hyun:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thank you. That&#8217;s some really important context to just help our listeners understand the general political situation, and specifically what&#8217;s happening with Noboa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As you&#8217;re mentioning, Noboa is a political novice. I believe he&#8217;s something like 36 years old, very young to be a head of state. Also the son of one of Ecuador&#8217;s richest families, literally the child of a billionaire who has now ascended to this very important position within the government. And I want us to talk a little bit about the program that Noboa has been pushing, because Noboa is, as you&#8217;re saying, really running on issues of security and insecurity within the country, really pushing the so-called tough-on-crime approach. And since January has actually had the entire country under a state of emergency because of the escape of notorious drug trafficker and cartel leader, Jos\u00e9 Adolfo Mac\u00edas Villamar, better known as his alias, Fito.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I&#8217;m wondering, we get this narrative of Ecuador is falling apart, it&#8217;s got this massive crime problem. I&#8217;m not trying to say that these are not in fact issues, but I would appreciate a little bit more insight into what exactly is the situation on the ground for Ecuadorian people right now? And what is the Noboa agenda doing or not doing to actually address people&#8217;s real needs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Guillaume Long:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah. So, the situation is really bad, undoubtedly. And you just mentioned January 8th and 9th, huge crisis with the escape of several drug lords, including alias Fito. Several drug lords, others as well escaping on those days from the penitentiary system under Noboa&#8217;s watch. So that didn&#8217;t look great for him. So that&#8217;s just sort of an addendum to your prior question, right? I mean, because he didn&#8217;t look so great, because he let all these drug barons flee or escape. Well, I mean, he didn&#8217;t let it happen, but it was under his watch. He wanted to look tough here. And despite the fact that this is not at all a drug baron, he&#8217;s got nothing to do with it, it&#8217;s a political opponent, and I would argue someone who&#8217;s facing a lot of political persecution and lawfare, which is something we can also talk about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But yeah, the situation in Ecuador was really bad. Last year, 2023, Ecuador closed with one of the highest homicide rates in the Americas. Just to contextualize, Ecuador was traditionally pretty peaceful place in South America. It didn&#8217;t suffer from the rampant insecurity that its two larger neighbors have historically suffered from, so Colombia and Peru. It was one of the few countries that, well, first of all was not a producer of cocaine. Colombia is right on the other side of the border. It was a transit country. It had some issues there. And also because Ecuador was dollarized, the economy was dollarized in the year 2000, so there was some incentive for criminal organization to launder money in Ecuador. So I mean, it wasn&#8217;t completely immune from the drug trade, but it was always considered a much lesser problem than many other countries in the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In fact, when the Left arrived in power in 2007, when Rafael Correa was elected Ecuador&#8217;s homicide rate, the homicide rate is a pretty good proxy, particularly in the context of the war on drugs, for how bad the security situation is, right? And Ecuador&#8217;s homicide rate inherited by Correa in 2007 was 16, 17 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. That&#8217;s the Latin American average. So, it&#8217;s not great because Latin America has a higher homicide rate. But compared to some of its immediate neighbor, including Colombia and other countries that have really struggled historically with insecurity and with narco trafficking driven organization, it was relatively benign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But despite this, Correa really invested in first improving the efficiency of his security system and the police and the intelligence services. And so, on the one hand, so kind of a traditional, if you like, law enforcement approach, but also with some decentralization of police capacity, so sort of neighborhood police forces, which was a whole model that was actually heralded by the Inter-American Development Bank and the OAS itself as a successful model, but still law enforcement approach on the one hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then on the other hand, of course, the social approach, the long-term reduction of poverty and inequality with a massive reduction of poverty during his tenure year mandate under Correa and probably the champion in the region. Ecuador was the champion in the region in the reduction of inequality. And so, this resulted this dual approach, better security, but also redistribution, social, labor and human rights resulted in the homicide rate dropping from 16 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants to 5.8 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. This is one of the greatest success stories in crime reduction and in violent crime reduction and reduction of lethal violence in Latin America in just a decade. 5.8 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, last year in 2023, the year closed in Ecuador with 46 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. So we&#8217;ve gone from 5.8 homicides to 46 homicides per a 100,000 people in just six years. This is one of the sharpest increases in Latin American history of the murder rate. And it can be explained by a number of things, but primarily the rolling back of the state, the closing of institutions, the growth of poverty. Before the COVID pandemic, the poverty rate in Ecuador had already risen by 17% between 2017 and the end of 2019. And after the COVID pandemic, Ecuador has been the country that&#8217;s had the slowest post-COVID recuperation. So the worst post-COVID growth rates in the region. So really bad on the economic front, really bad on the social front. Of course, the COVID pandemic was a problem throughout the region. In fact, there was an increase in crime throughout the region in Latin America, but it was particularly bad in Ecuador because of what I&#8217;ve just described.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then just neoliberal austerity, closing down ministries. Incredible, but Ecuador actually, that closed down the Ministry of the Interior, which runs the police. It closed down the Ministry of Justice, which runs the penitentiary system. Closed down the Coordinating Ministry of Security, which was one also hailed as a success story, including by inter-American institutions, such as I just mentioned the Inter-American Development Bank, which is not exactly a leftist institution, but still saw this as an efficient oversight and coordination between the different security forces and intelligence services, and so on. They closed all that down to cut the budget. Neoliberal austerity came, and that was it. That was the end of a number of institutions that had been successful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So the end result is from 2020, 2021 onwards, after the pandemic, you start seeing the loss of the Ecuadorian state&#8217;s control over key parts of Ecuador&#8217;s territory. There&#8217;s a vacuum and organized crime loves vacuum, right? Criminal organization, just that&#8217;s what they do. They fill vacuums. And particularly on border areas. And also Ecuador has seven maritime ports that are of significant importance on the Pacific coast, and therefore those were very interesting, obviously, for narco trafficking organizations. So a lot of the fighting has been over the control of those maritime ports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But what really happened is that Ecuador lost control of its penitentiary system. And the loss of the control of the prison meant that gangs operated from the prisons, including the hierarchy of the gangs, the big drug barons, the big bosses of the organizations, and prison massacres started occurring. So, since 2021, 500 people have been literally massacred in large scale massacres like 70 people here, 40 people there, 60 people there being killed. One pavilion storming another pavilion and killing everybody. So rival gangs fighting each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And it&#8217;s been very, very traumatic because, as I&#8217;ve just explained, Ecuador was a relatively peaceful country in the regional context. In fact, Ecuadorians called their country the Island of Peace because they were used to hearing terrible news coming from either Ecuador or Peru. Ecuador didn&#8217;t have a history or as much of a story of civil armed conflict as Colombia did, or even as Peru did. And so this was very traumatic, and we&#8217;re talking about massacres with beheadings and gruesome stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that&#8217;s how we arrive to 2023 in the war being elected, the campaign being fought fundamentally on security issues, because people are desperate, and people are now leaving the country en masse, so you&#8217;ve got a huge migration crisis. Ecuadorians are now the first or second, it changes every other month in numbers on the US southern borders trying to cross into the US from Mexico. It&#8217;s Venezuelan and Ecuadorians, and Ecuadorians often, late 2022 and 2023, the number of Ecuadorians actually overtook the number of Venezuelans trying to cross the border. And obviously they go through the Darien Gap, which is run by, the whole traffic of people is run by terrible mafias and gangs. And yeah, it&#8217;s a really bad state of affairs for Ecuador.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so, young Daniel Noboa one wins the campaign on a gung-ho security campaign, law and order approach. Obviously this is inevitably conservative. When you have campaigns that are run on law and order issues, it&#8217;s usually bad news. You have candidates competing amongst themselves to see who&#8217;s going to be the most gung-ho kind of approach to crime and all this kind of stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And because under his watch there&#8217;d been further actions and violence being committed by these gangs, he&#8217;s had to double down and look tough. And so, as you rightly said, we now have got a state of exception with a curfew and now this super hawkish referendum in which he&#8217;s kind of, as I said, sneaked in a couple of questions that benefit his companies. But the purpose of the referendum is essentially security driven. And yeah, he&#8217;s just wanting to look like the new Bukele in South America. That&#8217;s essentially what he&#8217;s trying to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ju-Hyun:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m glad you brought in Bukele because I want to close off this conversation with a little bit of discussion about this rise of what I think can be described as a new Latin American Right that&#8217;s emerging in the region. The chronicle you&#8217;re giving of Ecuador&#8217;s recent history is very illustrative of a lot of the core problems that are facing many countries just in the developing world, in particular in the Global South. And really the dual approaches that can be taken to the question of insecurity, to the question of people&#8217;s wellbeing and quality of life, do we primarily take a tough on crime approach? Which has at its basis, this kind of neoliberal logic wherein we divest from the commons, we take resources away from the social question, resources away from the economic side in the sense of lifting up the vast majority of people in favor of privatization, in favor of expanding the repressive capacities of the state. Is that the way that we solve the development question?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Or is it more in line with what you were describing under Correa where there is this dual approach where the social question is given its proper place and proper resources, so that the people have institutions that are supporting them so that there can be function in government. And then at the same time recognizing that, yes, narco organizations are a serious threat to, and that there has to be law enforcement efforts to combat them. Wanted to frame some of your comments more recently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But getting back to this comparison to Bukele, I mean, Bukele, Javier Milei in Argentina, Noboa in Ecuador, these all seem like some version of the same guy. They&#8217;re young, somewhat inexperienced political leaders from pretty wealthy backgrounds who are pushing platforms that emphasize being tough on crime, and also more covertly want the country to be more friendly to foreign investment, ignoring the history of how institutions like the IMF, how proximity to the dollar, in Bukele&#8217;s case trying to turn his country into a Bitcoin island, have not really resulted in great outcomes for the vast majority of working people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, I&#8217;m wondering if you can comment on how Noboa fits into this rising new Latin American Right, and how the :eft can effectively respond?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Guillaume Long:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yeah, it&#8217;s a great question. I mean, it&#8217;s actually a bit of a surprise in Noboa&#8217;s case because unlike Milei who announced this kind of libertarian anarcho-capitalist from the campaign, Noboa didn&#8217;t do that. Noboa in fact ran on a platform which was essentially about putting an end to the polarization between left and right. So he argued that he was the candidate of, the typical candidate of post-politics. &#8220;I&#8217;m not a political guy, I&#8217;m an outsider,&#8221; which of course is clearly a right-wing sort of approach to politics anyway. There&#8217;s no such thing as post-politics or an absence of ideology. We know that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But still for Correismo defeated in the second round, Noboa won 52 to 48 against the Left, it&#8217;s important just to briefly establish that the Left which, and the strongest force on the left is Correismo by far. Then Correa&#8217;s, the Citizen&#8217;s Revolution is still the strongest political force in the land. It is the country that has the largest block in the Parliament, in the National Assembly, of Congress, if you like. It is the party. It&#8217;s the only real functioning party. It&#8217;s the only party out of the eight candidacies in 2023 that had both its candidates for president, vice president actually being party members. All the other parties, the other seven, neither the candidate for the presidency or the vice presidency, and all seven cases were actual members of the parties that were launching them, which I think says a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So you do have a strong party. It&#8217;s also a party that has a lot of territorial presence. It&#8217;s got the mayors of the capital city, Quito, of the Guayaquil, the other big city Cuenca, the third-largest cities, all the main governor, we call them prefectos, but essentially the equivalent of US governors of the different provinces, of the most important, demographically important provinces are in the hands of Correismo, of the Left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So it&#8217;s very much a thriving party, and it wins in the first round, usually with 32%, 33% of the vote. But in the second round, it&#8217;s everybody against the Left, including the media. And I would argue in a very sort of surreptitious fashion, the United States. And there, you lose, or the Left loses twice in a row, now 52 to 48. So it doesn&#8217;t manage to win the presidency in the second round, but it&#8217;s still very much a strong political force that&#8217;s part of the political system now, which is interesting to think of the Left as part of the political system because of course before Correa the left was totally marginal. It wasn&#8217;t at all a part of the political system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, there is a climate of polarization because if the Left wasn&#8217;t strong, you wouldn&#8217;t have this polarization. It&#8217;s because there&#8217;s a real possibility of a return of the Left that you have this kind of polarization between Left and Right, and between the very, very right-wing media and the Left, which is essentially the media is really the party of the Right in Ecuador.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, Noboa arrives and says, &#8220;I am against this polarization. I will transcend this polarization.&#8221; And he actually crucially says, &#8220;I am not anti anything.&#8221; And because a lot of people define themselves as anti-Correistas, people understand that he&#8217;s going to stop the persecution against Correismo. Nobody was expecting him to be a leftist. As you rightly said. He is the son of the most wealthy man in Ecuador, billionaire, banana magnate, Alvaro Noboa, who actually Correa defeated in 2006 the first time he won, and now it&#8217;s his son who is running the show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, nobody expecting him to be particularly progressive, but at least, and the climate&#8217;s been so bad for Correismo with a lot of persecution, not unlike what&#8217;s happened in other parts of Latin America, including in Brazil against Lula, and so on and so forth, that it was kind of like, &#8220;Oh, maybe at least we can normalize democracy a little bit.&#8221; There can be a little bit less aggressiveness in comparison to the two prior governments, which really judicialized politics or politicized the justice, what we call lawfare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And he started off making some deals. But as soon as the security situation deteriorated, he made the call to the US, &#8220;Come and save me.&#8221; He made the call to SouthCom, &#8220;Come and save me.&#8221; And from one day to the next, we see a renewed intransigence, a renewed anti-democratic intransigence towards the Left. All the possible negotiations agreements again, as an end to to all this, judicialization of politics starts anew, including against Jorge Glas, who&#8217;s the guy that was seeking, was in the Mexican embassy who&#8217;d just been granted asylum by the Mexicans. And we get back, so back to the future situation, back to the past where we have a renewed political onslaught against the left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, what I&#8217;m trying to say here is that unlike Milei and Bukele, particularly unlike Milei, he has radicalized over the last few months, but he hadn&#8217;t originally announced that he was going to be a nostalgic of the military dictatorship, nostalgic of right-wing political persecution, libertarian. He seemed like some kind of business guy, but a bit of a pragmatist who only had 14 members of parliament, whereas the Revoluci\u00f3n Sudana, Correa&#8217;s party, had 50 members of Parliament, a big difference between 50 and the President&#8217;s 14. And so he needed to make deals and he was prepared to make deals, and he wanted to lower the climate of polarization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With this move, moving into the embassy, assaulting the Mexican embassy and violating every rule in the diplomatic rule book, including the 1961 Vienna Convention, the 1954 Caracas Convention on asylum, the 1951 Geneva Convention on the status of refugees, and so on and so forth, I could continue, he really has irked the international community. He&#8217;s lost I think, some support domestically, including on the Right, because some people who are more institutionalists, if you like, don&#8217;t really want to be associated with this kind of rogue behavior. And he&#8217;s really doubled down and gone back to this polarized politics of trying to basically annihilate the Left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So far, it hasn&#8217;t worked. Despite all the persecution, despite former President Correa himself being granted political asylum by Belgium for political persecution, despite a lot of Correa&#8217;s former, a lot of people in Correa&#8217;s former cabinet, ministers, former members of parliament, whatever, being in asylum in Mexico, in Argentina, in other parts of the world, the party still exists. As I&#8217;ve just argued, it&#8217;s actually the only really functioning party in Ecuador, the one that has membership and has the capacity to have a large group in Congress, and to have a number of mayors and governors and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So far, that strategy&#8217;s failed, but Noboa is doubling down on it, which is something he is betraying the platform that he was elected on. So, we&#8217;ll have to see how that goes for him and whether the Ecuadorian people accompany him in this process. I think if he manages to deliver on the security front, the Ecuadorian people are so desperate that he might be in for a chance to win next, I mean, it&#8217;s a long way away, but next year&#8217;s presidential election. If he doesn&#8217;t, if he doesn&#8217;t deliver on that front and he continues the same as old practice of lawfare and cracking down on civil and political rights and locking up people and so on, I imagine that&#8217;s not going to work, play out too well for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Either way, the Left, because I think of successful governance between 2007 and 2017 is still alive and well, despite the fact that a lot of its leadership is in exile, and I think eventually this strategy of trying to censor it and just stamp it out is not going to work and it will eventually be a return. One day, that second round of that presidential election is not going to be 52, 48, it&#8217;ll be 48 for 52. It&#8217;ll be the other way around. So I think that will eventually happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As a broader comment on the Latin American Right, yes, I think the big tragedy of Latin American politics over the last few years is that after the Pink Tide, which lifted 100 million people out of poverty between 2000 and 2012 and had unprecedented growth rate, you have to go all the way back to the commodities boom of the &#8217;70s to have similar growth rates. And even that, it depends where, but it&#8217;s not always, well, it&#8217;s not always comparable. But yeah, you have to go back a long time to have similar growth rates. Certainly, the neoliberal decades of the &#8217;80s and &#8217;90s were disastrous, even in very orthodox economic terms, the very terms that the neoliberals used to evaluate their success, it was a radical failure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, after successful governance from the left of center, very heterogeneous Left in Latin America, one would have expected the right-wing, the right wing return, which happens from roughly 2015, 2016 onwards, and then is accompanied by Trump, one would have expected the right-wing return to learn from its mistakes of the past, to not bring back the policies of the &#8217;80s and &#8217;90s, to not bring back the IMF, to not bring back authoritarianism and to learn a little bit from the left, even if it&#8217;s just in a politically utilitarian fashion. But they didn&#8217;t. They really double down on neoliberal ideology in every possible aspect. And in fact became even more extreme applying certain forms of libertarianism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And so, I think that&#8217;s a big tragedy because instead of acquiring a certain modernity in where you have sort of Left and Right still vying for power in a democratic context in Latin America, but having moved a little bit closer to the center and having a less feudal right wing, less of a plutocratic right wing defending the bank and the plantation, which is essentially what the Latin American right wing defends, the basically agro exports, primary economy, low levels of innovation, low levels of capitalist modernity, very feudal land-owning right wing. Instead of having that, you&#8217;ve got a doubling down and a radicalization of those pre-modern practices, of this right-wing ideology of wanting to get rid of the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And that&#8217;s a real historic failure, and it&#8217;s a real shame because it means that even if we have democratic pendulous wings, it&#8217;s going to be very difficult to have some kind of social and political pact that enables developmentalist policies to go forward over the long run we&#8217;ve seen in other parts of the world, including in East Asia. You do have a very pre-modern feudal right wing that prevents development, I would argue, in Latin America right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ju-Hyun:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, thank you so much for your time and for this really in-depth analysis into what&#8217;s going on in Ecuador presently, and the historical context that it&#8217;s emerging from. Guillaume, how can our audience keep up with you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Guillaume Long:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No, thanks for the invitation. It&#8217;s a real pleasure. Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter @GuillaumeLong. That&#8217;s G-U-I-L-L-A-U-M-E, Long. And I&#8217;m on other social networks, but I think Twitter&#8217;s a good start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ju-Hyun:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All right, excellent. Well, that&#8217;s all for today. Thanks again to Guillaume Long for stopping by. Before we close, I&#8217;d like to give a shout out to the Real News Studio team, Cameron Grenadino, David Hebden and Kayla Rivera, for making this episode possible. And to our audience, thank you once again for listening. We&#8217;ll catch you next time here on The Real News.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"syndicated-attribution\">This post was originally published on <a href=\"https:\/\/therealnews.com\/former-ecuador-fm-says-embassy-raid-signals-a-deeper-political-crisis\">The Real News Network<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Novice President Daniel Noboa overplayed his hand and now faces international backlash\u2014all because his administration is fundamentally unable to address Ecuador&#8217;s crisis of insecurity and poverty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25078,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1013,3971,5582],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1613867"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25078"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1613867"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1613867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1613870,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1613867\/revisions\/1613870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1613867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1613867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1613867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}