April 6, 2020
Coincidently the day after this article came out former President Correa and his Vice President Jorge Glas were sentenced in absentia by the Ecuador’s National Court of Justice to 8 years in prison on alleged bribery scheme charges. Meanwhile Ecuador’s current president Lenin Moreno has been covering up the deaths and the collapse of the public health services from Covid – 19. Despite official claims of 145 deaths, the Minister of Health Juan Carlos Zevallos has told CNN that in the city of Guayaquil alone over 1500 people have died from the pandemic. “The corpses and the dead people in the street can’t be hidden,” he said. -editorial
Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa said that his soul was shattered by what was happening in his country, especially when he saw the terrible images of his native Guayaquil, with bodies in the streets over COVID-19, reported Radio Habana Cuba.
Speaking to Argentinean channel C5N, the former president said he was distressed and could not sleep at night because of the anguish caused by the effects of the pandemic on his nation, with its collapsed health system.
From his home in Belgium, Correa cited how in 2009 Ecuador was praised for fighting swine flu and today we have become the worst example, we are the worst country in the region in the fight against the novel coronavirus and Guayaquil has more deaths than entire nations, he said after commenting that the crisis is appalling and has been poorly managed.
For three years, we have been persecuted, destroyed, and our world turned upside down. The leadership was called authoritarian, the division of the country was called dialogue, and building hospitals was considered wrong.
This pandemic has taken us with a shattered health system, with a ruined economy and without a government, he pointed out in reference to the management of the Executive under Lenin Moreno.
With the images of Guayaquil circling the internet, where people are seen dying in the streets and corpses waiting for days to be picked up, Correa declared that this is a city where 60 percent of the people are self-employed, informal, taxi drivers, ice cream vendors, and must go out and earn their living day by day. If you want to keep them in isolation you have to provide them with food, with basic goods. They didn’t do anything.
There were no logistics, no economic measures, no support, he said. For the leader and statesman, several important steps had to be taken to combat the pandemic from the beginning, namely isolation, he said, but for that, you needed to distribute food and basic consumer goods to the households, which they did not do.
They needed to bring tests to detect the networks of infection, and they said they were bringing two million kits, which was a lie. Our doctors are dying because they don’t have masks and there are no respirators in hospitals. What has been done is absolutely criminal, Correa said, adding that the harshest part is that there is no way to bury the dead.
We have gone from a country that opened hydroelectric dams, millennium schools, hospitals and roads to a country that digs mass graves, he lamented.
Source: Cuba Debate, translation by Internationalist 360º