Ecuador: Colonialism and Dictatorship

By Carol Murillo Ruiz on August 6, 2018

President Lenín Moreno’s tour of Europe has left a political hoof smell because of his discourses that gave material to the media and social networks with such minimal judgements and sense of the social history of our people. It has caused a repugnance uniting our country with the post medieval concept that gave the world economic machinery at the time with the first idea of colonial globalization.

Moreno ignores who we are, at the beginning of his speech “Coming out of the Abyss” in Spain, when he repeated the phrase that hides a submission for all Latin Americans; the dignity of the homeland. On such a trip an Ecuadorian with a basic education and a conviction of freedom would have spared the public there to hear any premises of business – but no, this was precisely the direction of his talk. It was for the benefit of those from here and there who looked at Ecuador as a new conquest. The flattering phrases on foreign soil was enough to understand why the authorities of Ecuador are looking at the globe as a foreign place and are waiting to be enlightened by businessmen when they come to tell us how to make money and get us out of the abyss in which the previous government left us in.

One of the most serious things about the Moreno government is its vision and notion of international relations and contemporary geopolitics. The return to the idea that only through traditional business, finance and trade (both nations and people) is to seek foreign investment at any cost to mobilize the economy. And even more so if you have the audacity to make the naïve believe that the infrastructure that Ecuador has today is the product of the magic of unpredictability.

It is known that today a country, however small it may be, is part of a transnational machinery that counts for a great deal when it comes to instituting relations of any kind whether it be political, economic, diplomatic, commercial, military, etc. In the last 15 years, our country has entered an ideological and political trend that marked the history of the beginning of the 21st century in Latin America and the world. Many people call this tendency left-wing and others progressive. The central idea is that this tendency gave the state the public character that the right-wing (liberal and conservative) deny it. But the most important thing is how in several countries progressivism collapsed because there was an ideological dis connect inside the country or a thought that, in political terms, had not penetrated societies eminently co-opted by the easy premises of entrepreneurship, individualism, popular or human capitalism, or the well-known phrase that in a system as free as this one those who do not work do so by choice.

Ideas as simple as these involve a deep understanding of the world and its inequalities. In today’s Ecuador, ruled by a government without any underlying political shame, an economic package is now being prepared that hides very well behind the communications matrix built since it was installed in Carondelet [presidential palace]. But such a trap cannot not last forever. Energy Minister Pérez could no longer hide the imminent measures that fuel subsidies will be reviewed. He also confessed that polls had been conducted to find out how the population would take such a decision; supposedly the public is aware that it is time to raise the gas, gasoline, etc. Maybe the minister is not lying. The work of the Executive/Media has been and is efficient. Only recently a television channel presented a report on how the national vehicle fleet has grown and how its owners have benefited from such cheap fuels. The journalist gave the example of diesel. How does this reporter and his media understand the role of the State? Where is the liberal idea of the common good that a state assumes in front of everyone?

Supine illiteracy to make up for the futility of subsidies in a society in apparent crisis, an idea of crisis (almost apocalyptic) created by the government and the elites to justify the return of the practice of privatizing public services, social investment and political sovereignty of our country. The author Naomi Klein, in a classic book entitled The Doctrine of Shock, pointed out that it is necessary to create a situation of terror, crisis, despair, fear and conditions of collective psychological uncertainty so that certain powers that run a country can make decisions that would otherwise be impossible. The Moreno regime, perhaps without knowing this text, has created such conditions. There is massive demoralization, public and private unemployment, minimal information on its economic policy (even though it has placed representatives of the elite in key ministry posts), cession of our sovereignty to the United States with the return of military cooperation, an open door to bilateral investment treaties with minimal restrictions, constitutional rupture through a Transitional Participation Council that puts key officials on the map. Such political chaos is neither seen nor felt because it is shown to be necessary after the rush. From now on, everything that the government and its allies do will be seen as a cure for a disease called the state.

Doesn’t it seem suspicious that the apocalypse invented by the elites serves precisely to return to the previous stage of the republic, and does it not seem suspicious, for example, that justice forgives criminals and that today are the ones who are pushing the construction of public opinion that are exhibited in the media that affect the rulers of the day?

In the two examples: the discourse in Spain and the doctrine of domestic shock (Ecuadorian style), a new mental and social colonialism is concealed. Moreno slips through the cracks because he neither notices nor is interested in it in conceptual terms. But the truth is that Ecuador, so small but symbolically strong for its regional geopolitical location is currently experiencing one of its worst political and economic moments. The colony must decide on matters of a diplomatic nature (Assange Case) or international economic duties (BITs), or the installation of a Northern military base in Ecuador or the relative suppression of subsidies (at the request of agencies that lend us money as a country) outlines a new and dishonorably calmed colony. Tutored by an internal servility that in the name of breaking the cycle of a progressivism that put the poor on the concrete social map. Today without compassion they are left in the pile of statistics, that is to say, that poverty and unemployment that is growing here is only data.

The really bad news is that Ecuador has been under a dictatorship of elites for several months now. And poverty is one of the abuses of that dictatorship. Colonialism and dictatorship, is that why we stay quiet and shiver?

http://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org/2018/08/06/ecuador-coloniaje-y-dictadura/

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano, translation, North America bureau