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American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Ecuador: Moreno no longer head of his party

Ecuador’s President Lenín Moreno has been removed from his post of leader of the governing Alianza País party by the party’s national leadership committee.

Mr Moreno’s position as the country’s president is not affected but the committee said that Alianza País would now be led by the former foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño.

Supporters of Mr Moreno said they did not accept the committee’s decision.

It has to do with Rafael Correa,

Moreno, who is seeking presidential term limits via a referendum to revise the constitution, has sidelined another top Correa ally from the vice presidency, and is overseeing a corruption probe that has ensnared former high-level officials.

Allegedly, Correa expected to run for president again after Lenín served one term.

But Lenín has other plans, including a proposed referendum,

Such a referendum would, however, defy some of the rules laid down by the previous government headed by Rafael Correa, such as unlimited reelections, capital gains legislation and the restructuring of the Citizen Participation Council, all controversial matters that further divide Ecuadorian society.

Not exactly what Correa had in mind when he left for Belgium.

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John Batchelor: Ecuador & Argentina discard transparency.

Mary O’Grady was in the Batchelor show discussing how Ecuador & Argentina discard transparency.

Mr. Correa has been president since 2007. He runs the country’s largest media empire and controls the legislature, the judiciary, the top command of the army, and the national police. All members of the CNE have links to his government or his party, the PAIS Alliance. The head of the electoral appeals tribunal is the brother of Mr. Correa’s attorney general.

Mr. Moreno freely used government resources to campaign and played dirty. Fake Lasso ads in which he promised to privatize health care popped up on city buses, though Mr. Lasso had made no such proposal. With government control of more than 20 mass-media organizations, including television and radio stations, newspapers and magazines, Mr. Moreno blanketed the nation with his message. The government often interrupted programming on channels not owned by the state to run campaign spots.

The European Union observed Ecuador’s 2009 presidential election and issued a report critical of Mr. Correa’s use of government resources and power to influence the outcome. This time around the CNE blocked an EU observer mission.

Listen here:

Also don’t miss O’Grady’s column on Venezuela,

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Ecuador: Demonstrations on the street while Correa says left’s on the mend

The glass is half-full, and half-empty:

Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa Sees Latin America’s Left on the Mend. ‘There are going to be a lot more triumphs for the left,’ departing leader says after his preferred candidate’s victory

President Rafael Correa has watched one after another of his leftist Latin American allies get impeached, beaten at the polls or excoriated as antidemocratic, as his own government faced growing disenchantment amid an economic downturn.

This week, he hailed a reversal in that trend as Ecuadoreans elected his preferred successor, former Vice President Lenin Moreno, in a tight race against a conservative rival. The outcome, he said, highlighted the left’s resilience at a moment when analysts see the region’s politics moving to the right.

“I think it marks an end to that change,” Mr. Correa said in an interview late Wednesday at the presidential palace. “We’ve won in very adverse conditions.”

while the demonstrators take to the streets and twitter,

“The people of Ecuador will NOT be fooled. We want democracy and freedom for all Ecuadorians asking for #RecountNOW”

The CNE says the results are “official and irreversible.”

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Ecuador: Leftist mob attacks opposition’s presidential candidate VIDEO

A mob of Lenín Moreno supporters disrupted a soccer game Guillermo Lasso was attending, and attacked attacked Lasso and his family as they left the stadium.

Frances Martel reports,

A leftist mob, some have identified as paid agitators, violently attacked Ecuador’s center-right presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso and his family Tuesday night as they attempted to leave a soccer match in the nation’s capital, Quito.

The mob – reportedly armed with bottles, sticks, stones, and knives – jeered the presidential candidate and his family and injured police detail assigned to escort the family out of Quito’s Atahualpa Olympic Stadium where Ecuador’s national soccer team was facing Colombia’s for a spot in the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The crowd shouted, “out, banker!” at Lasso – whose pre-politics career was in finance – while making noise with vuvuzelas and hurling projectiles at the family.
. . .

“When we left the stadium, Alianza Paz [leftist party] militants began throwing bottles, sticks, and threatened us with knives,” Lasso said in a statement to the press. “All I could do was protect my wife with my body and receive the blows from the objects on my head.”

Lasso tweeted video of the incident,

The video clearly shows violent crowds pelting police officers and the Lasso family while hurling epithets at them. The younger Lasso accuses the government of socialist president Rafael Correa of hiring paid agitators to attack the family.

“My son Santiago narrates what we went through yesterday. The images speak for themselves. We don’t want this Ecuador for our children”

While the official surveys show Moreno ahead by five percentage points, 16 percent of their respondents said they were undecided.

Correa’s party has a lot riding on this election, as Mary O’Grady noted,

Mr. Moreno is Mr. Correa’s proxy in this election. A Moreno triumph is important if Mr. Correa is to be protected from the wide array of corruption investigations that his opponents are demanding.

Mr. Moreno would also act as a placeholder for Mr. Correa until the 2021 election, as Dmitry Medvedev was for Vladimir Putin from 2008-12. Legalized indefinite re-election would take care of the rest.

Correa vowed to annul the election results if Moreno doesn’t win next Sunday, through a maneuver by which the Ecuadorian Constitution allows him to dissolve the Executive and Judiciary branches and call for new elections.

In-country sources confirmed that OAS election monitors will not be allowed to be present at the electoral board headquarters.

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Ecuador: DOJ won’t release names of Ecuador officials implicated in Odebrecht case

Jim Wyss reports that the DOJ won’t release names of Ecuador officials implicated in Odebrecht case, despite Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s repeated requests:

The U.S. Department of Justice will not provide U.S. lawmakers with the names of Ecuadorian officials who might have been implicated in the sweeping Odebrecht corruption case — as long as the investigation is active.

In a statement Thursday, Miami Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen said the DOJ had denied her Jan. 6 request to make the names public, citing the department’s policy of not discussing “ongoing investigation[s]” or publicly naming “unindicted co-conspirators.”

The request is politically charged, as the South American nation heads into a tight April 2 presidential runoff that will determine the successor of President Rafael Correa and where corruption allegations have taken center stage.

Ecuador’s Attorney General Galo Chiriboga has been tweeting about all the cooperation on the Odebrecht case, including his February 4 meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz under the Obama administration,

when they signed a cooperation agreement,

Chiriboga tweeted that Swartz did not release names,

Rafael Correa doesn’t want to disclose,

In Ecuador, authorities have not provided names about who might be involved. But Correa has said the case was being manipulated by U.S. authorities to try to skew the election, where his hand-picked successor, Lenín Moreno, is running in a tight race against former banker Guillermo Lasso.

UPDATE
Trending at Bad Blue.

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Ecuador: A reprieve, a runoff

Mac Margolis is enthusiastic,
Ecuador’s Voters Turn Back Latin America’s Pink Tide

So 10 million Ecuadoreans will have a second go at the polls in a runoff April 2. Suddenly, the whiff of competitive democracy in this patch of the Andes, where so-called Bolivarian socialists once called the shots, has voters in a lather. They streamed by the thousands into Quito this week to stand vigil as the National Electoral Council inexplicably drip-fed its tally.

Outside observers saw no foul play in the delay, but the anxiety was understandable. For the last decade, after all, this small and mostly poor Andean nation has lived in the shadow of Rafael Correa, a headstrong populist who ruled with one hand on the balcony and the other on the oil drum. Courting the poor, feeding the bureaucracy, bullying critics and hushing the media — all of these were part of the palace script. The Ecuadoran media watchdog Fundamedios documented 981 attacks on journalists over the last two years. (Correa’s response: Try to dissolve Fundamedios.) And if elections weren’t quite rigged, their rules were crafted to assure three-time President Correa and his ruling Alianza Pais coalition the upper hand.

More importantly, it reflects economic disasters,

In fact, Correa’s errors were merely masked by plenty, including a windfall in oil revenues, which he splashed on social programs and the bottomless bureaucracy. His aura dimmed with the end of the commodities boom, when the slump in oil prices led the way into deep recession in 2016, with only modest growth projected for this year. If once Correa could thumb his nose at foreign creditors — he defaulted on $3.2 billion in sovereign bonds in 2008 — the downturn has forced his hand. Fitch Ratings reported that Ecuador needs some $10.3 billion this year to close its deficits. In five years, the country’s debt burden has swelled from 18 percent of gross domestic product to 40 percent today, Fitch said in a client note on Feb. 14. That’s a hole not even lavish Chinese loans can cover.

I’m cautiously optimistic on the elections, in a “live to fight another day” way.

(h/t JC)

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Ecuador: No election results until . . . Thursday? UPDATED

One thing for sure, had Lenín won by a large margin, there would be no wait.

Ecuadoreans are growing impatient at the slow pace of vote counting with the results of the presidential poll delayed until Wednesday or Thursday.

National Electoral Council President Juan Pablo Pozo called on Ecuadoreans to “wait for the results with calm”.

“There are very tight margins to establish whether there will be a second round or not,” he said.

He blamed the delay on “numerical inconsistencies” in 5.5% of the ballots, while he said others were missing signatures from polling station officials.

Carlos Alberto Montaner voices concern on electoral fraud (video in Spanish), since a Lasso could win a second round,

Rafael Correa says he’ll move to Belgium at the end of his term (why Belgium?), but there’s speculation as to whether he’d run again in four years.

UPDATE
Last night’s demonstrations,

“Ecuador awakened after a ten year nightmare”

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Ecuador: Runoff unlikely

At The Guardian, Ecuador election: Moreno facing runoff as 40% vote looks out of reach. With almost 90% of votes counted, candidate for incumbent party just short of 40% required for outright victory

With 87% of votes counted early on Monday morning, the national electoral council gave 39.09% to Moreno, who was a former vice-president under the outgoing Rafael Correa, and 28.28% to Lasso, a 61-year-old former banker. For an outright win a candidate needs 40% and a 10-point lead over his nearest rival.

Moreno was already celebrating.

As the WSJ points out,

The election is the first time in a decade that Mr. Correa, who was legally barred from running, wasn’t on the ballot.

The opposition demands a recount,

These are 5 things you need to know about Ecuador’s elections.

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