Embattled Haitian president vague about making life better for his people

Amelie BARON. AFP. October 23, 2019

Port-au-Prince (AFP) - Haitians fed up with poverty call him corrupt and incompetent and want him to resign, but President Jovenel Moise is evasive about yielding and offers only vague ideas for making things better.

The poorest country in the Americas has been roiled for two months by protests that were triggered by fuel shortages and have now turned violent.

And they have morphed into a broader campaign against the president, who come to power in 2017 in an election that some called fraudulent.

Asked if he would consider ending his term early, Moise said Tuesday in exclusive interview with AFP that he is not "attached to power" but rather "attached to reforms because this country has been suffering for decades."

He said his priorities were constitutional reform, changes to the energy sector, instituting use of computers throughout all government agencies and customs reform.

The protests are spreading: in recent weeks, various professional or social groups have taken to the streets against the president one after another, such as university students and artists. On Tuesday, it was Catholics, singing prayers and some holding rosaries, who took to the streets to denounce the president.

There is no dialogue under way with the opposition, and the already weak economy is starting to suffer. Companies hungry for business are laying people off, such as hotels in Port-au-Prince.

"It's true. There is a problem," said Moise. "People are fed up, exasperated."

"But we must find a way to profit from this crisis, to turn it into an opportunity," said Moise.

He said this process "requires much self-transcendence, wisdom and serenity."

- 'Looking for work' -

Things are so tense in Haiti with violence breaking out at protest rallies that schools have been closed for more than a month.

Moise called on "my brothers and sisters in the opposition" to work with the government to get the schools back open.

He offered no concrete proposal for emergency measures to take on crime gangs that block roads to rob people or prey on them in cities.

"People who seek ransom out on the roads, who set up barricades, they are looking for work," said Moise.

He said the police are spread very thin: there are only 20,000 of them in a country of 12 million people.

Even before this crisis erupted, Moise was accused of corruption.

An auditors court probing two billion dollars in aid from a Venezuelan oil fund found that companies run by Moise before he became president were "at the heart of an embezzling scheme."

The money was part of a program called Petrocaribe, in which Venezuela under Hugo Chavez provided Latin American countries with oil at cut rate prices.

In Haiti, it did so from 2008 to 2018 and the aid was seen as a source of waste and corruption for the four successive Haitian governments that administered it.

After the auditors court came out with its report in June, Moise asked for help from the Organization of American States to audit Petrocaribe. Critics saw this as a way to dodge and defy the Haitian justice system.

"Some think it amounts to interference in affairs of state but we are founding members of the OAS," Moise said.

"It is not a matter of trust. To the contrary, the idea is to instill trust in everyone and say to everyone that there has to be a fair process," said Moise.

The Summer 2019 Uprising: Building a New Puerto Rico

Pedro Cabán. NACLA. October 21, 2019

The summer uprising of 2019 in Puerto Rico was a repudiation of politics as usual and revealed that Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) and Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) dominance of the island’s political system is no longer assured. The political landscape has been transformed by the popular uprising, and new actors and forces are emerging that may cause Congress to rethink the terms of Puerto Rico’s colonial subordination.

Little has changed in the last half-century to differentiate the political parties.For decades the PPD—a proponent of commonwealth, or the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA)—and the PNP, a proponent of statehood, have preached with almost religious fervor that the foremost issue that confronts Puerto Rico is the resolution of its territorial status. The PNP has been promoting Puerto Rico’s incorporation into the Union as the 51st state. The PPD has continuously campaigned since the inception of ELA in 1952 for enhanced self governing powers. Little has changed in the last half-century to differentiate the political parties. Electoral campaigns are now ossified political rituals far removed from the people’s daily struggles to lead dignified lives in a broken economy. The PPD and PNP know that as long as the population remains polarized between statehood and commonwealth, it will be distracted and fail to grasp the duplicity of the political class in creating the financial crisis and enforcing austerity. The politics of status is losing its grip on the electorate. Puerto Ricans are turning away from the voting booths to register their rejection of the parties and what they represent. Electoral participation rates, which were historically very high in Puerto Rico, have been steadily declining. They dropped from 81.7 percent in 2004 to 78.2 percent in 2012, and then plummeted to 55.5 percent in 2016. Ricardo Rosselló won the governorship in 2016 with only 41.8 percent of the vote, the lowest plurality in modern electoral history.

The uprising exposed the status issue—the ideological bedrock of both political parties—for what it is: a false dichotomy between two political organizations, neither of which has the credibility nor the requisite support to motivate Congress to effect a change of Puerto Rico’s colonial status. The protestors sent Washington two clear messages: the people reject the politics of territorial status change, and the political class that perpetuates the charade is no longer capable of managing the colony. Both parties are in trouble and neither has any idea on how to extricate Puerto Rico from its crisis.

The Political Machinations of the Uprising

The uprising is often portrayed as a vibrant collective catharsis spurred by societal trauma and the relentless indignaciones foisted by an uncaring government. But it was also a historic event that marked the collapse of the colonial state’s legitimacy. Rosselló designated former Resident Commissioner, and political rival in the PNP, Pedro Pierluisi as his replacement, despite warnings that the Puerto Rican senate would not approve the appointment. Rosselló defied his party and appointed Pierluisi as his successor. Pierluisi is despised for working as a consultant for the Financial Oversight and Management Board, or junta. The Senate did not approve the Pierluisi appointment, and the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico ruled that his appointment as governor was unconstitutional. Pierluisi served as governor for five days, the shortest gubernatorial tenure in Puerto Rico’s history. Secretary of Justice Wanda Vásquez, an unelected cabinet official with ethical challenges of her own, was sworn in as governor on August 7. The governorship fell to Vásquez because Secretary of State Luis Rivera Marín, who was in the constitutional line of succession to replace Rosselló, was implicated in the infamous Telegram chats and resigned in disgrace. The botched gubernatorial transition was emblematic of the moral corruption and incompetence that plagued the Rosselló administration from virtually the start. The nominations of both Vásquez and Pierluisi antagonized the resistance, and provoked protests in San Juan.

The massive marches were remarkably non-partisan.The massive marches were remarkably non-partisan. In photos from the protests, none of the banners or standards seemed to reference the PPD, PNP, or Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), among the thousands of Puerto Rican flags that the protesters briskly waved. For many of the protestors, democracy in Puerto Rico was nothing more than a hollowed formulaic exercise of casting votes to select which faction of the political class would control the colonial state. They demanded a new Puerto Rico built by the very people victimized by the colonial state and the junta. The uprising reconfigured insular politics.

The PNP has weathered the collapse of the Rosselló administration and the public spectacle of the PNP at war with itself over his replacement. The once reviled Vásquez has made a seemingly effective display of combatting corruption. She purged the administration of incompetent Rosselló hangers on. She is diplomatically engaging the opposition in conversations. But on September 27,in a televised message, Vásquez endorsed the junta’s financial plan to reduce Puerto Rico’s debt. The Federation of Teachers denounced the plan as unfair to the pensioners. The PIP immediately criticized the fiscal plan claiming that the junta continued to put the burden of paying down the odious debt on the backs of workers, students, retirees, and the poor, who in effect became human collateral for a highly speculative financial gambit that collapsed.

But, despite the seeming return to political normalcy, the political party system is in crisis.But, despite the seeming return to political normalcy, the political party system is in crisis. The leadership of the PNP has not been decided. Resident Commissioner Jennifer González and Senate President Tomás Rivera Schatz are scheming to get the PNP nomination for governor. The PPD is dormant and barely visible during this period of political uncertainty. Its leaders know the antiquated Estado Libre Asociado, which was established almost seventy years ago is an anachronism. It has been repeatedly discredited by Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. The junta, which has supremacy over the legislature, was the death knell for the ELA, whose leaders falsely claimed guaranteed Puerto Rico’s autonomy. The PPD’s presumptive candidate for governor, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, does not enjoy the full backing of the PDP leadership and has been criticized for her administration of San Juan.

A New Front

As the PPD and PNP flounder in search of credibility and legitimacy, the PIP, the asambleas de pueblo, and Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana (MVC) are trying to fill the political vacuum. The PIP, once seen as the only viable—albeit electorally inconsequential—proponent for self-determination converted the demands of the protestors into legislative measures. The PIP proposed setting up an Asamblea para un Nuevo Puerto Rico, which would write a “new constitution based on the sovereign power of the people of Puerto Rico.” PIP legislator Juan Dalmau called on the legislature to respond to the protestors demand for “greater democratic participation, transparency in government operations and amendments to the constitution.” The PIP is hoping to assume leadership of the popular forces that are challenging the colonial regime. But the party will face resistance from the asambleas de pueblo.

The asambleas de pueblo are the opening salvo of an island-wide movement to create a new democratic structure that is accountable to the people and not to foreign capital.The asambleas de pueblo are the opening salvo of an island-wide movement to create a new democratic structure that is accountable to the people and not to foreign capital. The asambleas are planning a people’s convention to draft a constitution to replace the discredited ELA. The asambleas refuse to debate Puerto Rico’s territorial status and are fiercely independent of the political parties. At present, they reject an alliance with PIP and the MVC and appear confident that an organized citizenry will create the New Puerto Rico.

The summer 2019 uprising may have given the MVC, a new political party in the making, needed credibility to emerge as an alternative to the PNP, PPD, and PIP. Launched in March 2019, by September 29 the MVC had obtained 24,880 of the required 47,406 signatures needed for certification as a political party for the November 2020 elections. On September 9, the MVC convened a national organizational assembly to “organize the structure” of political party. The participants decided to create a network comprised of four sectors: the university system, civic organizations and other groupings, the 78 municipios, and the 5.4 million strong Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States. The MVC may be the only political party to include Puerto Ricans living abroad in its organizational structure. The MVC is led by an emerging national leadership, much of it young and leftist. One of its founding members Alexandra Lúgaro Aponte ran as a politically unaffiliated candidate in the 2016 elections and obtained 11.3 percent of the popular vote. Her popularity, which shocked the leadership of the three political parties, was an early warning that the electorate was growing tired of the ping pong elections between the old-fashioned PNP and PPD. The MVC platform is wide-ranging and ambitious, but its key elements are fundamentally reformist. Some of its demands echo those of the asambleas, including an end to government corruption, cancelling the debt, moving to a parliamentary system, environmental justice, labor rights, and protection of the pensions. The MVC wants to decolonize Puerto Rico, which could mean either statehood or independence.

There is a sense in Puerto Rico that politics as usual has been permanently broken. The citizenry is dismayed with the political parties and their leaders. The 2020 electoral campaign will probably disregard territorial status politics and focus on which party can deliver economic and social justice. If neither the PPD or PNP win the governorship, Puerto Rican politics will have been irrevocably transformed. Invariably the U.S. will need to alter the terms of Puerto Rico’s colonial subordination. This does not necessarily mean that Congress will accept Puerto Rico as a state of the union, or grant it independence. For example, Congress can delegate to Puerto Rico increased powers for self rule. But for now this is foreseeable only with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. The political future of Puerto Rico remains uncertain.




Pedro Cabán, is Professor of Latin American, Caribbean and Latina/o Studies at the University at Albany.

The Hernández Brothers

John Perry. LRB. October 22, 2019

Donald Trump said last year that migrant caravans, mainly of Hondurans, were coming to the US from ‘shithole countries’. But now he says that the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, is doing a ‘fantastic job’. Trump and JOH recently reached an agreement declaring Honduras to be a ‘safe place’ for asylum seekers trying to reach the US.

JOH also promised to help the US tackle transnational criminal organisations. He’s well placed to do this. Last November, his brother Tony was arrested in Miami and accused of drug trafficking and possessing illegal weapons. At his trial in New York, which concluded last week, the jury found Tony Hernández guilty. He faces at least 30 years in prison for bringing 200,000 kilos of cocaine into the US between 2004 and 2018, in packets often stamped with his own initials.

In an imprudent tweet two days before the verdict, the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa praised the Honduran government for joining the US in ‘the fight against drugs’. In August, however, JOH was accused of accepting $1.5 million in drug money for his 2013 re-election campaign. One of the witnesses in the trial of Tony Hernández was Alexander Ardón, identified as a drug trafficker five years ago. He has confessed to involvement in 56 murders. He told the court in New York that the Mexican cartel boss ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, sent to prison for life by a US court in July, visited Honduras twice and paid JOH $1 million in protection money. Ardón said that he had himself paid $4 million in bribes to JOH and his predecessor, Porfirio Lobo. Lobo’s son was convicted of trafficking in the US last year and his wife has just been imprisoned for fraud. In a separate case, JOH’s cousin was indicted for trafficking in the US in September. JOH responded on Twitter that those testifying against him are liars and ‘confessed murderers’.

The prosecution concluded that drug traffickers ‘infiltrated’ and ‘controlled’ the Honduran government. A trafficker who gave evidence, Chang Monroy, was asked why he had previously lied about knowing Tony Hernández. ‘I was scared,’ he said, ‘because I’m like other drug traffickers that are violent, but no other drug trafficker has a brother that’s the president of a country that controls the police and the military.’ Witnesses alleged that Tony Hernández had arranged the murder of two of his rivals, in one case by a former death squad member who was later promoted to head of the Honduran police. A cartel that Hernández was linked to, Los Cachiros, has carried out at least 78 assassinations. The victims include three journalists.

The emergence of the narco-state began with the military coup of June 2009. In elections contrived to validate the coup (and approved by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state), Lobo became president in 2010. JOH succeeded him in 2014. The constitution was changed in 2015 to allow a president to serve more than one term, and JOH stood again in 2017. The election was riddled with fraud, but Trump still congratulated him on ‘a close election result’.

Following Tony Hernández’s conviction in a US court, any previous US president would have distanced himself from JOH. Trump, however, is untroubled by criminal behaviour and his judgments are based on electoral calculation: is his base more worried about drugs coming into the US, or Central American migrants? With more than 240,000 Hondurans apprehended at the US border so far this year, Trump backs a foreign president who acts tough. He’ll ignore the poverty and violence that drive the migrants to leave their homes: instead, he’ll continue to support the policies that produce them.

In an Explosive Honduras Drug Case, It Was a Trial by Twitter

Emily Palmer. New York Times. October 24, 2019

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

I didn’t think much of it when the first lady of Honduras tagged me in a tweet about her husband. Or when, a few days later, she tagged me in another one. And then on Friday, President Juan Orlando Hernández tagged me, too — about 12 hours before his brother was found guilty of trafficking massive amounts of cocaine into the United States.

For much of Honduras, the trial of Tony Hernández, the president’s brother and a former congressman, played out like a narco-novela come to life. Except that instead of daily installments on television, the drama unfolded largely on Twitter.

Tony Hernández was arrested in Miami last November and charged with four counts related to drug trafficking. In August, the United States government identified President Hernández (frequently referred to by his initials, J.O.H.) as a co-conspirator in the case. The man who had helped pass a law enabling the extradition of drug traffickers to the United States was tangled up in drug money, prosecutors said.

Many Hondurans took to Twitter, where they could hear from reporters who had been inside the courtroom in Manhattan.

On Day 1, El Chapo made a guest appearance, as prosecutors claimed that in 2013 the Mexican drug lord, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, then the most wanted man in the world, had flown to Honduras and hand-delivered Tony Hernández $1 million for the current president’s election campaign.

Mr. Guzmán made headlines from his cell at a supermax prison in Florence, Colo., where he was taken shortly after receiving a life sentence from a Brooklyn judge this July. He played second fiddle only to another absent character: President Hernández. The president, whose name was mentioned frequently by the five cooperating witnesses in the case, has not been indicted and has denied any wrongdoing.

A few days after prosecutors introduced the jury to Chapo, Amílcar Alexander Ardón Soriana — a former small-town mayor who admitted to killing 56 people — entered the courtroom to bring the narrative full circle. Detailing a $1 million deal made around his dining room table, Mr. Ardón said that the president had later acknowledged receiving Chapo’s bribe.

When I reported these developments, many Hondurans tweeted back at me. So did the Casa Presidencial — the Honduran equivalent of the White House — who responded in Spanish: “How can one trust in a narcotrafficker and confessed killer? That is something that never happened. That is a total lie.”

Throughout the trial, everyday Hondurans engaged directly with what was said in the courtroom, largely expressing distrust in their president (who continued to deny the accusations).

Such a movement might seem unremarkable, except that the country of more than 9 million people rarely uses the site. Twitter declined to provide specific data regarding its use in Honduras, but according to StatCounter, a web analytics service, Twitter use among Hondurans increased from 2.26 percent in September to 6.39 percent in October so far. Additionally, many Hondurans shared tweets via WhatsApp, which is commonly used throughout Central and South America.

Most Honduran news outlets are distrusted in the country. For all the drama that passed through the courtroom, comparatively few Honduran media outlets came to New York to cover it. (One notable exception was UNE TV, which runs independently from the government.)

After all, one of the main television channels, TNH, is run by the government — common in Latin American countries — and most other media outlets, like TN5, Canal 10 and Q’Hubo TV, are known as “medios tarifados,” which exchange taxes for government publicity which is “established exclusively with the president of the Republic” or another delegate.

The law enabling such a deal passed under President Hernández, then the head of the National Congress, and within months of Chapo’s visits to Honduras. Some other outlets are widely believed to be supported by cartels, while another now-defunct newspaper, Diario Tiempo, was owned by the Rosenthal family, mentioned in court in conjunction with the same conspiracy, until 2015 when members of the family were indicted on money laundering charges. Another newspaper now uses that name.

After Friday’s verdict, the newspaper La Prensa, whose owner also supplies pharmaceuticals through the government, published a soft-hitting profile of Tony Hernández, complete with pictures of its subject skiing and riding a horse. Its headline read: “Tony Hernández, a lover of sports and dressing well.”

Someone else appeared uninterested in the news coming from the courtroom. Even as federal prosecutors called President Hernández’s CZ Scorpion, a machine gun engraved with his name, “an embodiment of what state-sponsored drug trafficking looks like,” President Trump went on Twitter to praise the accused co-conspirator with helping curb emigration.
President Hernández retweeted Mr. Trump’s accolades, then referenced the machine gun with his name on it — and me. “How ridiculous,” he wrote, tagging me and others in a collage of guns engraved with the names of American presidents. President Hernández would tag publications and reporters in tweets throughout the trial — using it as a main platform to respond to the accusations coming from court, which he likened to the narrative of “Alice in Wonderland.”

At 12:08 p.m. Friday, the jury returned a verdict of his brother’s guilt on every charge. In the hours after, Hondurans again took to Twitter — this time to thank reporters in the courtroom. One user called the team of reporters there an example of people doing a job “sin fronteras” — without borders.

Ecuador’s Austerity Measures, Repression Based on Lies AP Happily Spread

JOE EMERSBERGER. FAIR. October 23, 2019

Bernie Sanders tweeted an Associated Press article in the LA Times (10/14/19) about Ecuador’s recent protests, in which eight protesters were killed in 11 days. “Economic elites keep pushing austerity worldwide, making life unbearable for working people,” Sanders declared. Unfortunately, that AP piece was itself a good example of how elites push for austerity.

Under the headline “Ecuador Deal Cancels Austerity Plan, Ends Indigenous Protest,” the article claimed that former President Rafael Correa—in office from January 15, 2007, until May 24, 2017—left Ecuador “deeply in debt.” AP’s Michael Weissenstein and Gonzalo Solano said Ecuador’s current president, Lenin Moreno, had agreed to work with indigenous leaders to “reduce Ecuador’s unsustainable budget deficits and public debt.”

In fact, Ecuador’s government does not have a high debt load. The table below shows the Ecuadorian government’s gross debt-to-GDP ratio compared to various other countries that (like Ecuador) cannot issue their own currency. (Ecuador adopted the dollar as its currency in 2000, after its entire financial sector collapsed after decades of imposing the right-wing economic policies that the IMF “recommends” to developing countries; the other countries in the table below are part of the Eurozone.)

Note that Ecuador’s debt to GDP ratio has continued to increase under Moreno, because he has implemented the policies that Ecuador’s elite always liked—and which are the exact opposite of what he promised on the campaign trail in 2017. That said, Ecuador’s public debt is not high now, and was even less so when Correa left office.

Another AP report that was published by the New York Times (10/15/19) stated that Ecuador has a $64 billion public debt and a “budget shortfall” of $10 billion. The IMF, which is hardly inclined to underestimate these figures, says the government’s gross debt will be $53 billion in 2019 and its budget deficit $37 million. (AP appears to have included in its “shortfall” estimate all the principal and interest due on Ecuador’s foreign bonds this year—which is not how governments calculate their budget deficits. Governments almost always “roll over” their bonds—pay off principal by issuing new bonds.)

Oil prices collapsed in the last quarter of 2014 and stayed low for years. That hurt Ecuador badly because about half its export earnings had been coming from oil. Ecuador was also hit by a massive earthquake in April 2016, the most destructive in decades. A significant rise in the value of the US dollar since mid-2014 also hurt Ecuador’s competitiveness, because Ecuador (unlike countries that have their own currency) cannot devalue to help the prices of its exports stay competitive. Those external shocks did cause an increase in public debt in Correa’s last two and a half years in office.

But Correa did not impose austerity measures, nor did he run to the IMF (as Lenin Moreno has) for one of its infamous “structural adjustment” loans, where spending cuts, attacks on workers’ rights, central bank independence and privatization are all part of the “deal.”

By the time Correa left office, poverty was cut by about one-third, and extreme poverty by about one-half. The homicide rate was dramatically reduced. Vast and long overdue improvements had been made to Ecuador’s public infrastructure. Eight hydroelectric plants were built, and roads drastically improved throughout the country. That’s why Lenin Moreno was able to run his successful 2017 presidential campaign as a staunch Correa loyalist (FAIR.org, 2/4/18).

The AP deceptively stated that:

Moreno served Correa as vice president before he became president, and the two men went through a bitter split as Moreno pushed to curb public debt amassed on Correa’s watch.

The AP here buries Moreno’s remarkable cynicism. The “bitter split” happened very shortly after the votes were counted in 2017. Within weeks of taking office, Moreno went completely over to the side of the rich and, what amounts to the same thing, the side of the private media barons who had always vilified Correa. Moreno quickly made changes to Ecuador’s public media to ensure that they followed suit. In a nationally televised interview in January 2018, both public and private media journalists reinforced Moreno’s attack lines against his former allies (Counterpunch, 1/21/18).

Armed with that media monoculture, Moreno attacked his former allies with wild allegations that the media spread uncritically. That was key to saddling his former allies with criminal charges and investigations. He has accused Correa of spying on him from Belgium (where Correa lives with his Belgian wife) through a hidden camera in Ecuador’s presidential palace, and alleged that Correa improved Ecuador’s roads in order to facilitate drug trafficking.

Moreno knows that no charge is too outlandish, provided it reinforces what the powerful and their media outlets want to hear. Moreno accused WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange of smearing feces on the walls of Ecuador’s embassy in London, where Assange had been granted asylum by the Correa government. One of Moreno’s ministers said she found it suspicious that journalists in Ecuador working for Russian state media covered the recent protests.

It’s important to note that oil prices (chart below) recovered significantly since Moreno took office on May 24, 2017. They have, on average, been about 25% higher under Moreno than they were in Correa’s last two years. Ecuador has not been hit by a major natural disaster since Moreno took office. So why has Moreno, who is supposedly deeply preoccupied with reducing the public debt, increased it instead?

He has done it by implementing policies the elite always wanted, for both ideological and self-serving reasons: giving tax cuts to the rich, giving away revenue to transnational oil and mining companies, making it illegal for the government to finance itself internally (therefore forcing it to turn to the private sector) and refusing to impose import tariffs. Incidentally, import tariffs were crucial to Ecuador avoiding austerity or a deep recession during Correa’s last two years in office.

The AP article said that:

Foreign Minister José Valencia told the Associated Press on Sunday that the Moreno administration believed Correa, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Colombia’s far-left FARC and ELN guerrillas are working to destabilize Ecuador. He offered no proof beyond the fact that a handful of Correa loyalists and some Venezuelan nationals had been detained during the protests.

Surely the fact that a government has arrested some of its political opponents should not be taken as any kind of “proof” of foreign subversion. Among the political arrestees referred to offhandedly by AP as “a handful of Correa loyalists” is Paola Pabón, the governor of of Pichincha, the second-most populous province in Ecuador. Yofre Poma, a member of the National Assembly, was also arrested, as was the former mayor of the canton of Duran, Alexandra Arce, along with Magdalena Robles, an online journalist who supports Correa.

Another sitting National Assembly member, Gabriela Rivandeneira, and former assembly member Virgilio Hernandez took refuge in the Mexican embassy after police broke into their houses.

Unlike President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Moreno is not confronting a US-backed opposition that briefly seized power in one military coup and then attempted five others (FAIR.org, 5/20/19). The Western media would be overflowing with outrage over Moreno’s abuses, long before these protests, if he had not tightly embraced Washington’s agenda.

Seven right-wing governments in Latin America immediately backed Moreno’s claim that Venezuela was behind the protests in Ecuador. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on October 11 that the US:

supports President Moreno and the government of Ecuador’s efforts to institutionalize democratic practices and implement needed economic reforms. We are aware and monitoring claims of external actor involvement in these demonstrations.

By “external actor involvement,” Pompeo didn’t mean the IMF, effectively an extension of the US Treasury Department in developing countries. Moreno is jailing elected political rivals and has authorized lethal tactics precisely to impose his deal with that external actor.

Ecuador's indigenous group says government talks on hold due to 'persecution'

Reuters. October 24, 2019

QUITO (Reuters) - Ecuador’s indigenous movement said on Wednesday that it paused talks with President Lenin Moreno because of the government’s “persecution” of the group’s leaders since a halt to violent anti-austerity protests.

Jaime Vargas, head of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, or CONAIE, said the group had entered the talks “in good faith,” but an atmosphere of trust did not exist. “We cannot be at the table while they are pursuing us,” Vargas told reporters.

Ecuador’s state prosecutors’ office on Tuesday opened an investigation into Vargas for allegedly promoting “subversive groups” after he had told supporters at a rally on Saturday that CONAIE would ceate its “own army.”

In response, CONAIE said this referred to a “communal guard” to protect its territory, in accordance with the rights of self-determination granted to indigenous communities in Ecuador’s constitution.

After days of protests, Moreno last week ditched an IMF-backed plan to terminate decades-old fuel subsidies and started negotiations with the indigenous and other social groups to seek an agreement that would keep them from returning to the streets.
Moreno’s change of heart over the subsidies was a major victory for Ecuador’s indigenous peoples, who have led uprisings that helped topple at least three governments but have struggled to make a mark in day-to-day politics.
Before the protests were suspended, Moreno had refused to backtrack on the subsidy cuts, which were intended to aid Ecuador’s finances after a $4.2 billion loan deal with the International Monetary Fund.
At least seven people died, several hundred suffered injuries and more than 1,000 people were arrested during the protests, which began on Oct. 3, according to authorities.

‘There Could Be a War’: Protests Over Elections Roil Bolivia

Ernesto Londoño. New York Times. October 24, 2019

President Evo Morales of Bolivia on Wednesday claimed that he won Sunday’s election by a margin wide enough to avoid a runoff, escalating a dispute over a vote marred by allegations of irregularities and by violent clashes.

Mr. Morales, who has been in office since 2006, asserted that he would declare a “state of emergency” to fight back against what he characterized as a foreign-backed coup attempt.

“I want the world to know that until now we have stood by patiently to avoid violence,” he said during a news conference in La Paz, the seat of the presidency.

The outcome of the vote has been in dispute since election officials released preliminary results on Sunday night that pointed to a runoff between Mr. Morales and Carlos Mesa, a former president — only to backtrack within 24 hours. On Monday night, election officials released an updated vote tally showing Mr. Morales leading by 10 percentage points, the margin required to avoid a runoff.

The announcement provoked a wave of huge demonstrations and attacks on election facilities on Monday night. Protesters took to the streets again on Tuesday night in La Paz and other cities.

Many chanted “Fraud, fraud, fraud!”

Election observers from the Organization of American States, which deployed a large mission to monitor the vote, issued a withering assessment of the integrity on the process on Monday night. The mission said that the trend reversal between Sunday and Monday was at odds with independent tallies of the results and asserted that the outcome warranted a second round.

As of Wednesday morning, with nearly 98 percent of the ballots counted, the latest official count showed Mr. Morales with 46.76 percent of the vote, exactly 10 percentage points ahead of Mr. Mesa.

Union leaders and activists called for a strike on Wednesday to protest what they regard as Mr. Morales’s attempt to steal the election.

The legitimacy of Mr. Morales’s mere candidacy was in dispute well before the vote. The president in 2016 convened a referendum seeking to do away with term limits. Voters narrowly rejected that effort. But a year later, the country’s constitutional court ruled that term limits violated an international human rights treaty from the 1960s, a decision questioned by many experts.

As of Wednesday morning, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal had not issued a final comprehensive count of the vote. Concerns about the fairness of the process grew when Antonio Costas, a vice president on the tribunal, resigned in protest over his colleague’s decision to stop issuing periodic vote tally updates on Monday, breaking with what had been the norm in previous elections.

A few hours before his resignation was announced, Mr. Costas said in an interview on Tuesday that he had no reason to believe fraud had been committed.

The president’s rival, Mr. Mesa, has called for mobilizations across the country, saying he fears that Morales loyalists could be working to rig the vote behind the scenes.

“It’s clear there is a gigantic fraud in the works,” said Mr. Mesa. “We will be permanently mobilized, and I will stand with you, until there is recognition that the second round must take place because it is legitimately the vote of the Bolivian people.”

Bolivians are bracing for growing violence and unrest as the dispute goes on.

Judith Contreras, 57, a currency trader in downtown La Paz, watched Tuesday as security forces barricading a road to the presidential compound held back a group of protesters by lobbing tear gas canisters.

“I fear there could be a war,” she said. “They’re going to have to oust him by force.”

Ms. Contreras said she voted for Mr. Morales and had high hopes for him when he was first elected in 2005. “The hope was that since he was a humble person, we all felt he would do good things,” she said.

But in recent years, Ms. Contreras said, she has come to distrust many of the people Mr. Morales surrounded himself with, seeing them as greedy, corrupt and authoritarian.

“We’re essentially stumbling into a democracy,” she said. “They’re not making our votes count, and that is the most painful thing.”

Abel Peredo Guerrero, 27, a medical resident who is training to become a surgeon, said many young Bolivians believed that the economy was showing signs of strain — and that Mr. Morales had squandered money on questionable projects, like a new 29-story presidential compound, which he travels to by helicopter.

“Most professionals want to leave the country,” Mr. Peredo said, noting that his $580 monthly salary makes it hard to make ends meet. “This country needs a change, and that change will only come with a new government.”

He said he had been feeling a mix of hope and fear since Sunday, as critics of Mr. Morales took to the streets in large numbers.

“All throughout the country, a spark has been lit for democracy,” he said.

But bloodshed, he said seems likely: “The consequences are very serious.”