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Ecuador

The Urban Gardens Where Gender And Climate Justice Grow

September 15, 2024 Peter Yeung, Next City. , , ,
Up in the lung-busting altitudes of Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, 71-year-old Maria Achiña and 70-year-old Alegria Irua are busy digging up soil and plucking weeds from their modest allotment of kale, onions, broccoli and cilantro. The green-fingered pair are part of a group of local women who till the land beside the neighborhood’s health clinic, which is free to them under the city’s celebrated participatory urban agriculture project focused on gender, climate and food justice. “It gives us good food to eat and a bit of income to help pay the bills,” says Achiña, who lost both her husband and daughter in recent years. “And besides, us old ladies, we need to fill our time with something.”

Secret Chats Expose Decade Of US Meddling In Ecuador

September 5, 2024 Oscar Leon, The Grayzone. , , , ,
Exclusive interviews and leaked messages reveal how a key ally of the US weaponized the fight against corruption and criminal organizations to selectively prosecute Ecuador’s heads of state, viciously persecuting Rafael Correa and his Revolución Ciudadana movement on flimsy evidence, while delaying investigations into much graver crimes allegedly committed by his successors. Recently-leaked secret chats obtained by The Grayzone expose how Ecuadorian prosecutor Diana Salazar leaked information to a subject of an ongoing investigation, undermining the prosecution of associates of Ecuador’s current and previous US-aligned presidents, and acted hand-in-glove with the United States government, which essentially selected and controlled prosecutions from Washington.

Ecuadorians Call For An End To Noboa’s Austerity Measures

July 4, 2024 Pablo Meriguet, People's Dispatch. , , ,
Ecuadorian trade union the Unitary Workers’ Front (FUT), has called for a national mobilization on July 4 against the increase in gasoline prices in the country. On June 26, through Executive Decree 308, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa ordered the elimination of gasoline subsidies in accordance with the provisions of the International Monetary Fund. The government has already reached agreements with some transportation unions to prevent them from joining future protests. According to the government, these unions will receive monthly compensation for the increase in gasoline costs. This agreement has been seen by some social leaders as an act of betrayal against the rest of the political and labor organizations.

Source Reveals US Secret Services Enabled Jorge Glas Kidnapping

May 15, 2024 Aidan Jonah, Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , ,
A well-placed individual speaking on the condition of anonymity has informed The Canada Files that US secret services embedded in Ecuador – through spying on Mexico’s embassy – ensured President Daniel Noboa knew of Mexico’s plan to get former Vice President Jorge Glas to Mexico after granting him political assembly, enabling Noboa to order the illegal raid on Mexico’s embassy and kidnap Glas. The kidnapping of Glas, who has faced political persecution through Ecuador’s judiciary since 2017, sparked international outrage as a blatant violation of the Vienna Convention and Mexico’s sovereignty. Mexico cut off diplomatic relations with Ecuador and has taken Ecuador to the International Court of Justice for this violation.

ALBA-TCP Holds World Gathering For A Social Alternative

April 18, 2024 TeleSUR English. , , , , , ,
Starting April 18, Venezuela will host the World Gathering for a Social Alternative, a two-day event organized by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-People's Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP) and the Simon Bolivar Institute (ISB). This international meeting seeks to promote a common agenda to protect the Latin American people from the different forms of contemporary imperialist aggression. This event will bring together member countries of the bloc, leaders and social movements of the region in activities and working meetings to be held in the city of Caracas.

Ola Bini Sentenced To A Year In Prison; Ecuadorian Court Overturns Acquittal

April 9, 2024 Tanupriya Singh, People's Dispatch. , , , ,
A court in Ecuador has sentenced Swedish software developer and digital rights activist, Ola Bini, to one year in prison for “Attempted Non-Consensual Access to a Computer System”. The ruling by two out of three judges of the Provincial Court of Pichincha overturned the unanimous verdict issued by the Court of First Instance (trial court) in Quito in January 2023, which had declared Bini innocent. The acquittal had come nearly four years after Bini was arrested in April 2019, the same day as his friend, WikiLeaks founder and journalist Julian Assange was seized from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Latin America Condemns Ecuador’s Storming Of The Mexican Embassy

April 7, 2024 Zoe Alexandra, People's Dispatch. , , , , , , , ,
The decision by the government of Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa to forcibly enter the Mexican Embassy in Quito with dozens of police officers to arrest former Ecuadorian official Jorge Glas has been met with widespread repudiation across Latin America and the Caribbean. Xiomara Castro, Honduran president and the president pro-tempore of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), announced on Saturday that two emergency meetings of CELAC would be held on Monday April 8 and Tuesday April 9 to address the situation in which the American Convention on Asylum and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations were both violated by Ecuador against Mexico.

US Troops Will Return To Ecuador, Decades After Removal By Correa

February 23, 2024 Benjamin Zinevich, Resumen English. , ,
Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa ratified military cooperation agreements between Ecuador and the United States on February 15. The agreements regarding joint operations to combat illegal maritime activity and the status of US troops in the country were signed by Noboa’s predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, in September 2023. They were ratified by the young president after a ruling by the Constitutional Court on January 23, 2024 that the agreements do not have to go through the legislature.  The approval of the agreements comes in the second month of the “internal armed conflict” declared by Noboa on January 8, 2024 following a spike in violent crime by drug trafficking groups in the country.

Capitalism And Drug Trafficking In Ecuador

February 4, 2024 Andrés Tapia Arias and Andrés Madrid Tamayo, People's Dispatch. , , , , , , ,
Ecuador is experiencing a wave of organized crime violence that is linked to structural problems. It is the product of a complex context divided between the increase in poverty, new drug routes worldwide and the emergence of a local narco-bourgeoisie. Amid all this, a global crisis of neoliberal capitalism, and consequently, the decomposition and rupture of the social pact between classes, peoples and hegemonic blocks. In this context, the Government of Daniel Noboa has decided to confront the wave of drug crime that is drowning Ecuador through the declaration of internal armed conflict. In other words, war against the poor, forcibly financed by the poor, supported by the middle class, and certain sectors that have been trapped by the Government’s punitive discourse.

SOUTHCOM Chief: United States Has A ‘5-Year Plan’ For Ecuador

January 26, 2024 Orinoco Tribune. , , , ,
The commander of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), General Laura Richardson, stated that the United States has a “five-year plan” in terms of security for Ecuador. “There are several things that we have done very recently with Ecuador,” General Richardson said in an interview with the Ecuadorian media Primicius on Tuesday, January 23. “For example, we have the Security Assistance Roadmap, called ESAR, with Ecuador. There is only one other country in the region with which we have signed this roadmap.” According to Richardson, the ESAR is a five-year plan that outlines “cooperation in security matters,” and it includes a binational working group to facilitate the exchange “between the Pentagon and Ecuador.”

Wealthy Corporations Use Investment Agreements To Extract Millions From Developing Countries

January 25, 2024 Nicholas Kusnetz and Katie Surma, Scheer Post. , , , ,
When Rafael Correa entered Ecuador’s presidency in 2007, the nation faced an opportunity and a challenge. Ecuador’s economy depended on oil, and global crude prices were near a record high. Much of the oil was extracted by foreign companies, however, so as prices surged more wealth began flowing overseas. More than a third of Ecuadorians were living in poverty, and Correa had come to power as a leftist promising “radical, profound and quick changes to the current model of so much exploitation, of so much injustice.” Soon after taking office, Correa increased a recently enacted windfall tax on oil companies. The idea was to use the tax as leverage to extract better terms from the companies, and this fight against foreign firms quickly became a high-profile pillar of Correa’s broader campaign to assert the nation’s sovereignty.

The US Military’s Real Intentions In Ecuador

January 22, 2024 Alejandra Garcia, Resumen English. , , , ,
History repeats itself. For centuries, the United States has sought ways to intervene in Latin America to strengthen its military presence and dominance in the region whenever a country is in crisis. And it is happening again. The current security crisis in Ecuador is presented as an opportunity for the United States to deepen its military presence in the Andean country.  Under the guise of “contributing together to a safer and more stable region,” Washington announced on January 12 that it was sending the head of the Southern Command, General Laura Richardson, and other senior counter-narcotics and diplomatic officials to Ecuador to discuss with the government of President Daniel Noboa how to combat organized crime.

Violence In Ecuador Is Result Of Deliberate Dismantling Of The State

January 12, 2024 Ricardo Perez, Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , , ,
The systematic violence which has immersed Ecuador is the product of a process of deliberate destructuring of the rule of law derived from policies implemented by the last three neoliberal governments, warned Jorge Paladines, an academic at the Central University of Ecuador and a professor of law and political science, in an interview with Sputnik. That, today, Ecuador is in a situation of internal armed conflict, that the country has been plunged into a state of emergency, and that a live television program was interrupted by armed men, is not the result of spontaneity or chance.

Ecuador In Crisis: A Country Broken By Neoliberalism

January 11, 2024 Gerardo Szalkowicz, People's Dispatch. , , , ,
People across the world were shocked to see a drug gang waving rifles and grenades in the TC Television studios in Guayaquil, and the scene was perhaps the cinematic peak of successive days of explosions, riots, lootings, shootings, car explosions, and widespread panic that has paralyzed the country. However, the shocking and unprecedented episode on the public channel in Guayaquil—and the events that preceded and followed it—are just the latest chapter in a spiral of organized violence that has lasted for about five years and that has metastasized in the last two. It is the sad metamorphosis of a country that went from being the second safest in Latin America to becoming the most violent, with a homicide rate that has grown almost 800% since 2019.

Ecuador’s Election Could Have Lasting Consequences

October 16, 2023 Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research. , , ,
Imagine a developing country where a 43-year-old economist with a PhD from the University of Illinois, who is relatively unknown as a politician, runs for president and wins. Despite the preceding decades of corruption and institutional rot, he puts together a competent government and gets the economic policy right. The numbers tell much of the story: in the 10 years of his presidency, poverty fell by 41 percent; income per person grew at more than twice the rate of the previous 25 years; and public investment and government expenditure on health services doubled as a share of the economy.
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