Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Ecuador: Partial recount results predictable

Predictably,

Following a recount of almost 1.3 million votes in Ecuador, the electoral council has confirmed left-wing candidate Lenín Moreno as the winner of the presidential poll held on 2 April.

The recount slightly boosted Mr Moreno’s margin over his conservative rival, Guillermo Lasso.

Mr Lasso had demanded a full recount citing allegations of fraud but the national electoral council only agreed to a recount of 10% of the votes.

Cue Capt. Louis,

Where’s the OAS?

But monitors from the Organization of American States said they considered “a recount of this magnitude and under these norms to be an exercise in transparency”.

More like an exercise in futility.

UPDATE:
Linked to by Silvio Canto. Thank you!



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Ecuador: OAS congratulates Moreno

Luis Almagro, head of the Organization of American States, made it official,

The WSJ has the details:
Ecuador Presidential Vote Fair, Says Election Observer. International election observes didn’t find evidence of fraud in vote, OAS says; group congratulates ruling-party candidate Lenin Moreno

Mr. Moreno, who changed his profile on his Twitter account to president-elect of Ecuador, was congratulated on Monday by the leaders of Peru, Chile and Argentina, as well as the OAS’s secretary-general. In a statement, the Washington, D.C.-based OAS urged Mr. Lasso to address any of his fraud complaints through Ecuador’s institutions.

“There were no discrepancies between the analyzed ballots and the official data,” it said. The organization sent 77 observers to 480 polling stations across Ecuador, including at the electoral council’s data center.

Many Believe That the Left’s Election Victory in Ecuador Was Fraudulent:

. . . three out of the four exit polls released as voting concluded on Sunday showed Lasso with a lead between three and six points. Exit polls can be wrong, but the one that predicted a Lasso win of six points was spot-on in predicting the results of the first round of voting in February. In that election, leftist Lenín Moreno (yes, his first name was given him for ideological reasons) won 39 percent of the vote, narrowly missing an outright victory that wouldn’t have required a runoff. The final results of that first round were delayed for days, as the government-controlled election machinery stalled and dithered until finally admitting that a runoff was needed.

Even more disturbing was the decision of President Rafael Correa, who handpicked Moreno as his chosen successor, to fire General Luis Castro Ayala as the chief of staff of the Ecuadorean army after the first round. General Castro Ayala is said to have played a crucial role, through his moral influence on the National Election Council, in ensuring an accurate count of the first election round. The day after the first round of voting, he sent a letter to the Joint Command of the Armed Forces, requesting that it consider its constitutional responsibilities to ensure an accurate count. Following his firing, General Castro Ayala told the media that “the armed forces did not handle the entire chain of custody of the ballots in these last elections” as it is normally charged with doing.

Lasso will be challenging the results in all of Ecuador’s 24 provinces,

Part of the problem is the opposition’s distrust of the National Electoral Council, which it says has become an appendage of the executive in the way the electoral board in Venezuela has all but lost independence under President Nicolas Maduro, a key ally of Correa.

As for Assange,

“I cordially invite Lasso to leave Ecuador within 30 days (with or without his tax haven millions)”

UPDATE
The WaPo’s Nick Miroff (who’s married to the daughter of Cuban G-2 founder and KGB protege Manuel “Barbarroja” Piniero) declares that Lenín Moreno, A kinder, gentler leftist aims to bridge angry divisions after Ecuador win.

That’s “democratic socialism” for ya.

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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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Venezuela gets worse

Johns Hopkins Prof. Steve Hanke tweets,

Venezuela: It’s Only Getting Worse – Oil Markets Daily

Summary

  • Venezuela’s oil production, according to secondary sources, stands at 1.987 million b/d.
  • With inflation rising and economic turmoil continuing, we expect Venezuela’s oil production to decline another 300k b/d this year.
  • Lower oil prices will continue to hamper high cost oil production globally, and our obsession over how much high cost production will decline is our main bullish long oil thesis.


Venezuelan Supreme Court Annuls Act of Congress, Parliamentary Immunity (emphasis added)

With the application of this ruling, the Supreme Court may annul any action of the National Assembly that violates Article 200 of the Constitution, which indicates that the deputies of the National Parliament “shall enjoy immunity in the exercise of their functions.”

Also, the ruling in question could lead to the prosecution of deputies for “treason to the mother country” in military courts, analysts report.

Over at the OAS,
Venezuela in showdown with OAS, U.S. over political prisoners

As expected, Venezuela pushes back against OAS suspension warnings. The Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS) has called for Venezuela to be suspended from the group unless it holds fresh elections. Ahead of a special OAS meeting, Caracas called the proposed move illegal

In this speech (5:30 into the podcast, in Spanish), OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro stated that the United States Treasury Department has frozen nearly US $3 billion of Venezuela Vice-President Tareck El Aissami’s assets, “an amount equivalent to half the cost of the country’s 2012 food imports.”

Post corrected for HTML error.



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Venezuela: Maduro fiddles on TV while Rome burns

Nero couldn’t fiddle while Rome burned, since, for starters, fiddles had not yet been invented, but Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro is still on TV attempting diversions from the country’s chaos. . . and failing,
Maduro’s awkward TV shows raise hackles amid Venezuela crisis

A girl complains that hungry classmates are fainting at school, and Maduro chides her for not doing more for them. A boy says he missed a big soccer game because he was hospitalized, and Maduro recommends he find it on YouTube.

The unpopular leftist president’s hours-long televised visits to clinics or schools are meant to soften his image, but foes say they instead highlight his disconnect from a national economic crisis in which millions of people are missing meals.

The facts (emphasis added):

Steeped in the fourth year of a recession, around 93 percent of Venezuelans cannot afford to buy sufficient food and 73 percent of them have lost weight in the last year, according to a recent study by three universities.

People protest that their local bakeries are closed.

Criminality is horrific: Venezuela shocked as children arrested for soldiers’ killings

The authorities in Venezuela say they have arrested six children in connection with the killing of two soldiers.

The soldiers, two sergeants from the national guard, were stabbed to death near a bar in the capital, Caracas, last weekend.

The crime has shocked the country, as the ages of the children now in custody range from six to 15 years.

They are said to belong to a gang called Los Cachorros (The Puppies).

At the OAS, secretary-general Luis Almagro

is lobbying the 34-nation, Washington-based body to oust Venezuela from its ranks unless President Nicolás Maduro permits elections and eases a clampdown on opponents and the press.

UPDATE
Linked to by Designs on the Truth. Thank you!

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OAS requests Venezuela suspension

OAS Chief Urges Suspension of Venezuela’s MembershipSecretary-General Luis Almagro calls on President Maduro to hold elections, take measures to support democracy to avoid possible suspension

The head of the Organization of American States on Tuesday recommended suspending Venezuela from the 34-nation body unless President Nicolás Maduro’s government moves quickly to hold general elections.

In a 75-page letter, OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro urged the Maduro administration to call elections within 30 days, free political prisoners, appoint independent Supreme Court justices and reinstate laws that were passed by the opposition-controlled congress but annulled by his government.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan dissident Lilian Tintori, wife of political prisoner Leopoldo López, was not allowed to enter Ecuador (link in Spanish), where she had been invited by opposition members.

“We are harassed by immigration at Guayaquil airport, we are taped and have our passport taken away. The Government of Ecuador violates our #HumanRights”

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The jitney Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean

The total disintegration of Venezuela has brought muggers traveling in jitneys to formerly safe neighborhoods:

My cleaning lady is upset and scared, and near tears when she tells me the stories.
In the past three weeks the area has become very unsafe in day time. People that walk the streets are now getting mugged broad daylight. And she has more trouble than ever to get food.  Why?

The invasion of bachaqueros in the area follows a clear modus operandi.

They arrive in “busetas”, those worn down mini vans or mini bus that can carry up to 20 people, more if necessary… These unload the bachaqueros in front of a given store. The group arrives and breaks to the front of the line threatening as needed the locals, who terrified give them sway, the more so when home made weaponry is shown (chuzos like those made in Venezuelan jails). Sometimes more busetas arrive when from some magical knowledge they learn that this particular store will get more supplies than usual. There is indeed deep internal corruption links with some of the employees of these grocery stores. They get their cut of the loot.

ARGENTINA
OAS chief accuses Macri’s Argentina of obstructing moves to censure Venezuela.‘Games like this should not be played,’ says secretary general Luis Almagro, amid reports of effort to secure Caracas’s backing for Argentinian UN leader candidate. You heard it here first.

BOLIVIA
Narco-barcos con bandera boliviana

BRAZIL
Some NBC staffers refuse to travel to Brazil for Olympic coverage over Zika virus fears. Can’t say I blame them.

HAITI
‘Miami Vice’-style coke bust on the Miami River

MEXICO
Former Governor of Mexico’s Nuevo Leon State Faces Fraud Charges

Prosecutors in Mexico’s northern state of Nuevo Leon have accused former Gov. Rodrigo Medina and 10 senior members of his administration of fraud involving some $200 million in land sales and other dealings.

PERU
Peruvians Vote for President

VENEZUELA
Socialism for the 21st Century: Venezuela’s Discovery of Hunger



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Venezuela: Argentina’s OAS tit-for-tat

As mentioned earlier, OAS chief Luis Almagro called for a meeting to discuss Venezuela’s human rights violations of the Democratic Charter.

Almagro needs at least eighteen votes to sanction Venezuela, which may prove difficult.

Caricom countries are still hopeful they could continue their very profitable Petrocaribe arrangements with Venezuela, as described in this article from Jamaica,

In essence, when the market price of oil exceeds $40 per barrel, the monetary value representing between 30 per cent and 70 per cent of each sale is loaned to the Government of Jamaica. This loan is to be repaid over a period of 25 years at the rate of 1 per cent per annum. Where the market price of oil is below $40, the monetary value representing between 5 per cent and 25 per cent of each sale is available to the Government of Jamaica as a loan for 17 years at 2 per cent. In either case, therefore, Jamaica receives a loan from Venezuela on concessionary terms.

Whether their hopes are realistic remains to be seen, but for now they are siding with Venezuela.

Another hurdle comes from Argentina. Casto Ocando, writing at Vértice (link in Spanish), reports on the internal battle lead by Argentina against the OAS sanctioning Venezuela.

Ocando has the documents,

Venezuela is trying to buy time and calls for “dialogue”; John Kerry, consistent with the Obama administration’s never-ending streak of “smart diplomacy“, supports this call for “dialogue,” and so does Argentina’s ambassador to the OAS, Juan José Arcuri.

Why Argentina?
Diplomatic sources revealed to Ocando that Argentina’s current foreign minister and former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s chief of staff, Susana Malcorra, has pledged to support to Venezuela at the OAS in exchange for Venezuela’s vote at the UN.

in practical terms this means that Malcorra will block OAS sanctions against the Venezuelan communist regime so she gets to be chief of the United Nations. Great values for a Secretary General at the UN cesspool.

And she has Macri’s backing because it will add to his administration’s “achievements.”

H/t Alek Boyd’s FB feed.

UPDATE
Trending at BadBlue.



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