Lenín Moreno, a hijacker of the popular mandate | …

By Gustavo Veiga

Lenín Moreno likes to project. Since taking office in May 2017, he has already been talking about long-term plans. Two years later, he presented the National Accord of 2030. But his distant goals never reached the speed with which he abused the popular mandate. In an unimaginable raid and while Rafael Correa still smiled alongside him for electoral success, he took step after step to distance himself from the former president. He had been her vice president twice. In whatever language we call treason. A crime that also affected the majority of the Ecuadorian people who voted for him. “The triumph over the empire and its subjugates,” as Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales defined it four years ago, has become an unconditional alignment with hemispheric politics in the United States. Today Ecuador is another country, a regional council pawn that has lost its decision-making autonomy and has returned to the neoliberal herd under Washington’s watchful eye.

The metamorphosis of the outgoing president, almost a work of Kafka, took place in a dizzying manner. He broke his electoral contract and dismantled the measures taken during Correa’s two terms or raised on the platform of Alianza País, the force that led him to government. His path in the opposite direction had at least no heir who could do the same damage to popular credibility. Ximena Peña, his candidate in the last elections, barely won 1.53% of the vote. Moreno, a stubborn man, believes – as he wrote on his Twitter account a few days ago – that the country has regained “international confidence”, that “the economy has been cleaned up” and that it has conquered ” new business destinations “.

He won the election to the same candidate who was competing with Andrés Arauz, the banker Guillermo Lasso, but he ruled as if he was another representative of the bank. He was the first Ecuadorian president to visit the United States in 17 years when he was received by Donald Trump. He joined his free trade zone, handed the economy over to the IMF, and sought help from the American International Development Finance Corporation. This state bank granted him a loan of $ 3.5 billion over eight years. He signed the agreement on January 21, a few months after leaving government. He had to repay part of his debt to China and land companies like Huawei.

According to Financial Times, the US State Department imposed the country’s membership in the “clean network” to exclude Beijing companies from building the 5G network. Moreno’s docility allowed North American interests to be privileged in accessing Ecuador’s major resources such as petroleum. He also backed the appointment of Trump’s frontrunner, Mauricio Claver Carone, to control the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)., violating a tradition since its founding in 1959. The entity had always been run by a Latin American.

Just as Correa demanded the return of the Manta base to the United States once a usufruct contract ended in 2009, his ex-vice pledged to lend the Galapagos Islands – the natural heritage of the humanity for UNESCO – in 2019. He violated the constitution because it allowed the use of military planes. Moreno describes this type of initiative as “refreshing our international relations”.

In October of the same year, he ordered the suppression of a popular uprising against rising fuel prices. The president’s government in its last days cut subsidies, jailed and killed representatives of indigenous peoples, workers and students. A few months earlier, in April 2019, Julian Assange, the first WikiLeaks reference, had been handed over to the British authorities after spending nearly seven years as an asylum seeker at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Moreno was justified in that the Australian activist had “repeatedly violated international conventions and a protocol of coexistence”. The United States government celebrated his arrest more than anyone while awaiting his extradition.

The pandemic has caught America’s helpful friend off guard. Ecuador became a country ravaged by the virus in the first half of 2020. The corpses piled up in the streets. Moreno even overtook his colleague Jair Bolsonaro in the changes of health ministers. He named four, but in a shorter period of time. Juan Carlos Zevallos is the one who lasted the longest, almost a year. He was replaced by Rodolfo Farfán involved in a VIP vaccinations case who in turn was replaced by Mauro Falconi – it only lasted 19 days – and the latter by the current one, Carlos Salinas. It was not easy to break the mark of the Brazilian president, but the politician who now fears for his safety in Ecuador, has succeeded.

He also raged through the law with his mentor and a benchmark for socialism in the 21st century. The Portuguese Boaventura De Souza Santos maintains in “Ecuador: from the center to the end of the world” a text he wrote for CLACSO in 2020: “the persecution against Correa for alleged corruption, which Moreno sponsored, was only a another version of the new American strategy, to neutralize the leaders who endanger the interests of the companies of this country, in particular the oil sector: the alleged fight against corruption ”. Retired, the President of Ecuador will be remembered forever and without subtlety with a phrase from the popular legacy: he turned like a bottom.