By José Steinsleger on February 17, 2021
In the February 7 presidential elections in Ecuador, the Union for Hope (UNES) coalition, led by economist Andrés Arauz, obtained 32.71 percent of 10.6 million valid votes. However, as no party reached the required number of votes to win in the first round (40 percent), a run-off vote will be held on 11 April.
Really? Ten days after the elections, and after the scrutiny of 99 percent of the ballots, the National Electoral Council (CNE) has not pronounced itself on who will go to the run-off. Which, logically, would be the neoliberal banker Guillermo Lasso (Creo party, 19.74), in second place after beating the chameleonic Yaku Pérez (Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik, MUPP, 19.38) by tenths of a percentage.
And in fourth place, the unknown tiktokero Xavier Hervé (Izquierda Democrática, 15.69), followed by a dozen minor candidates. All of them, without exception, enemies of the citizen’s revolution promoted by the government of former President Rafael Correa (2007-17).
In fact, the anti-Correa vote was double that of Arauz. However, no ballot can accurately predict the outcome of a run-off. Even less so in Ecuador, where, while bashing the Correa supporters, all the candidates (with the exception of Lasso) lamented the consequences of the neoliberal model imposed by Lenín Moreno in 2017.
After the results were aired, Yaku denounced that Lasso and the gentleman in Belgium (i.e. Correa) were plotting outright fraud. Bingo! With poncho and all, the empire already had the Andean version of Juan Guaidó (in the making).
And the fact is that for years, Ecuador being a strategic country in Washington’s geopolitics in South America, the empire’s electoral engineers had been wondering how to divide the indigenous movement, the most organized in the country. Well. With Yaku, they succeeded.
Former governor of the province of Azuay and president of Ecuarunari between 2013 and 2019 (one of the three regions of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities, (CONAIE), the US managed to make Yaku a real Trojan horse within the confederation.
CONAIE questioned Pérez’s candidacy. But after the powerful popular uprising of 2017, the MUPP (which emerged at the end of 1995), began to receive growing support from some indigenous and pure anti-politicians, NGOs financed by the USAID and ecologists skilled in gardening, feminist fronts and veteran Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist fighters; many fallen into alcoholism.
The MUPP was then dynamically guided and advised, among others, by the French-Brazilian journalist Manuela Picq, Yaku Pérez’s partner since 2013, and comes with a very good resume. Let’s see.
2003: international relations specialist for the governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, and co-coordinator of the participation of civil society organizations in the ministerial trade meeting of the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
2005: Member of Front Line Defenders, an NGO funded by the European Union, Taiwan, the Ford Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society.
2016: professor at the elite San Francisco University in Quito, awarded a scholarship for her anti-correista activism as a human rights defender, and two years later by the publication Global Americans, sponsored by the NED, an arm of the CIA.
2019: In September 2019, on the eve of the coup in Bolivia, Ms Picq published an article calling President Evo Morales a patriarchal, macho, rapist, anti-women, ecocide and perpetrator of genocide. She also called for Western governments to create a no-fly zone in northeastern Syria.
So, while the CNE was plucking the daisy to choose the participants in the ballot, the Colombian prosecutor, Francisco Barbosa, landed in Quito shouting: eureka! Barbosa (a crony of the genocidal president Iván Duque), brought hard evidence of the National Liberation Army’s financing of Arauz’s campaign.
Proof? An investigation by the Bogotá-based magazine Semana, questioned by one of its own journalists. There you have it, no different from the video that another Colombian genocidaire, former president Álvaro Uribe, released in July 2009 to link the FARC with Rafael Correa.
Finally… what are the CNE, Lenín Moreno, Washington and Yaku Pérez up to? It doesn’t take much intelligence to figure it out: if the CNE and the judiciary decide to legally set aside UNES and Andrés Arauz, the ballot will be between the banker Lasso and a Trojan horse in Ecuador’s combative indigenous movement.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau