Ecuador's 2017 choice: continuity or change!
- By Earl Bousquet
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 27, 2017
With the keenly-contested April 2 presidential run-off election in Ecuador imminent, the last official popularity polls before the elections predicted a win for the ruling party's left-wing candidate Lenin Moreno.
Moreno and his vice-presidential running mate, Jorge Glas, of the governing Alianza Pais party, have a narrow lead over former banker and finance minister Guillermo Lasso and his running mate, Andres Paez, representing the conservative Creo-Suma alliance.
On March 16, 22 indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorean and social movement organizations publicly endorsed Moreno, who led Lasso by over 10 percent in the first round vote.
According to El Telegrafo newspaper, Romelio Gualán (of the national peasant organization Coordinadora Campesina Eloy Alfaro) desribed Moreno's platform as best benefitting the country's neediest, while Gisella Chalá Reinoso, coordinator for the national Afro-Ecuadorean commission, said Moreno's campaign had shown the "wisdom and awareness to follow advice" about how to best develop the country.
A proposal by Lasso to privatize the small South American nation's security forces is under heavy fire, being likened to an earlier one that led to a major surge in paramilitary violence in Colombia.
Lasso insists: "Security must be strengthened to coordinate actions between the National Police and private security companies (to) let them act with more freedom and more professionalism," but Daniela Pacheco, a Colombian specialist on development projects, argued it would ultimately undermine public safety.
She told the Venezuela-based Latin American news agency, teleSUR, “We are evidently facing a proposal that seeks to establish a social control mechanism, through a false idea of strengthening of democracy. Security in the hands of private entities has worked as an instrument of coercion and repression in Latin America, with the sole objective of maintaining the status quo of economic and political domination of the elites.”
For Pacheco, Lasso's proposal “would ultimately legitimize violence as a tool of social control.”
Ahead of the election, Ecuador denied entry on March 5 to Venezuelan opposition figure Lilian Tintori, who had flown from Miami to campaign with Lasso, but without a valid visa.
“They are not letting me enter because they know that ‘change is coming' to Ecuador,” she said in a video clip posted on her Facebook and Twitter accounts, quoting the Lasso campaign's slogan.
In 2013, Tintori's husband, Leopoldo Lopez, was jailed for 14 years for his role in violent protests that claimed the lives of 43 Venezuelans.
Shortly before her Ecuador trip, Tintori met U.S. President Donald Trump, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Senator Marco Rubio at the White House, later thanking Trump for “standing with the Venezuelan people.”
Lenin Moreno is confined to a wheelchair after having been shot during a robbery attempt in 1998, but his popularity has always remained high. He has published 10 books on issues ranging from philosophy to humor.
Now, he is campaigning on Ecuador's achievements in education during the Citizens Revolution (2006-2016) he led alongside outgoing President Rafael Correa, whose “21st Century Socialism” saw a vast improvement in the social conditions of the poor and a return to economic stability and progress.
During the past 10 years, levels of access to education and quality of schooling have soared. According to the National Education University, during the Citizens Revolution, access to education increased by 30 percent at high school level and 59 percent in higher education institutions across the country.
Increased investment in education saw children receive three million free books, almost two million breakfasts, plus one-and-a-half million uniforms in 2016.
Former banker Guillermo Lasso, the right-wing candidate, is at the opposite end of the political spectrum, promising to cut social spending and implement neoliberal policies more in line with what Correa steered it out of.
Countering the Allianza's expanding education proposals, Lasso has proposed an education voucher system and greater independence for educational institutions, to give parents a greater ability to choose between sending their children to public or private schools.
Critics argue though, that his voucher proposal will privatize education and result in making quality schooling accessible only to those who can afford.
However, Lasso's real problems are not about education.
Rafael Correa announced on March 17 that he is under legal investigation by the country's Internal Revenue Service (SRI) for illegal activities involving his offshore companies.
The day before, Argentine investigative news agency Pagina 12 had released an in-depth report revealing Lasso's connection to 49 companies in offshore tax havens based in Panama, the Cayman Islands and Delaware.
The right-wing banker candidate is alleged to have boosted his fortune 30-fold by speculating on government bonds ahead of the dollarization, which dumped the Sucre and replaced the US dollar as the national currency.
Last month, Ecuador became the world's first country to pass a law banning public officials from having assets or capital in offshore tax havens.
Public servants and elected officials now have one year to bring any offshore investments in to Ecuador, or be removed from office for violating the policy aimed at combating tax havens and increasing accountability of public officials.
Moreno is promising to continue the 21st Century Socialism of the past decade, while Lasso promises heavy doses of modern capitalism as a passport to national prosperity. On April 2, Ecuadoreans will, therefore, make a choice between continuity and change.
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