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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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#SOSVenezuela, Maria Corina, and the OAS

As I reported yesterday, the OAS voted yesterday to shut out the media and the public from Maria Corina Machado’s testimony. Here’s the video she prepared for the OAS:

“34 OAS ambassadors didn’t see [the] video; 385,000 citizens have”

Thanks to Panamanian ambassador @ArturoVallarino, Maria Corina was able to testify at the OAS, albeit behind closed doors:

In an unusual move, Maria Corina Machado, an opposition lawmaker whom the Venezuelan government is trying to put in prison, was made a temporary member of Panama’s delegation to have access to the organization, which so far has largely failed to act on, or even publicly debate, the continuing crisis in Venezuela.

“We did it!!! The voice of the Venezuelan people was heard at the OAS!!!”

The OAS’s closed-door vote is a shameful spectacle, a triumph of autocracy over democracy.

In violation of the OAS charter,

the representatives of these so called “democracies” had to start by protecting the repressor, Dictator Nicolas Maduro, violating not only the Charter of the OAS, but Ms. Machado’s rights and that of the opposition to be heard in a forum which is supposed to be there to defend the basic rights of people across the Americas.

And while I can understand the strong dependency of the weak Caribbean economies on the stupid (or is it?) largesse of the even more stupid revolution, I was most disappointed at how so many of these Latin American countries were ready to prostitute themselves in order to protect their mercantile interests. It is remarkable how low these mostly leftists Governments have fallen. Despite being democratically elected, they were not willing to give a voice to the over 50% of Venezuelans that find themselves discriminated against and repressed by the Maduro Dictatorship.

And in doing so, they are trying to defend the most repressive Government, save for Cuba, to have risen in the region in the last two decades. How these representatives and their Governments can sleep at night is beyond me, more so when some of them were victims of similar repression in the past.

But somehow they are short sighted enough in thinking that this will not happen again in their countries and that their commercial interests are being protected by their unethical actions. Both premises are actually wrong. As the world turns, their countries may swing back to repression and they may need the same type of solidarity Venezuela’ opposition deserves today. But more importantly, their belief that their actions in support of the Maduro Dictatorship will somehow lead to payment of Venezuela’s debts with their countries or companies is simply wrong. As stated by Minister Ramirez or the President of the Central Bank, Nelson Merentes, there is no money to pay anything but the foreign currency budget they have established for the year 2014.

So, forget it! You will not collect under Dictator Maduro. In fact, you would probably have a better chance under a change in Government that would put order in the economy and reduce some of the absurd subsidies present in the Venezuelan economy. Only in this case, could Venezuela receive loans and cut subsidies which would, with very strict management, allow it to pay its debts with these countries, that so easily supported what can not be supported under any moral framework.

While Maria Corina was allowed to speak at the OAS, a student, and the mother of one of the protestors killed were not, as the Brazilan ambassador labeled their presence “a circus“.

These countries voted for openness:

Canada
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
USA
Guatemala
Honduras
México
Paraguay
Perú

Daniel Duquenal sees the vote as a breakdown of the OAS.

Simeon Tegel of Global Post writes on Why the OAS doesn’t want you to hear what this woman has to say
The Organization of American States blocked press access to hear a staunch opponent of Venezuela’s government

Machado faces the prospect of being jailed like Leopoldo Lopez, another opposition leader who has encouraged the demonstrations against widespread food shortages, skyrocketing inflation and the horrendous violent crime wave engulfing Venezuela.

Separately, two opposition mayors have been arrested in the last 48 hours — with one already sentenced to 10 months in jail — for failing to remove the street barricades put up by some of the protesters.

Upon her return, Maria Corina will be facing charges of murder and treason,

The attempt to silence Machado on trumped up charges follows the pattern of treatment opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez has experienced. Lopez was arrested in February on charges including murder, arson and incitement and immediately placed in a military prison. Some of those charges were later dropped but charges of incitement remain.

Venezuela journalist Nelson Bocaranda writes that Maduro’s paying Cubans to vandalize.

While this is going on, Maduro claims that Venezuela’s the country with the highest democratic participation, and that his government has eradicated hunger. I can’t wait for the US lefties to repeat those two gems, the way they tout how Hugo Chavez “improved the economy drastically and ameliorated poverty drastically”, and Cuba’s “excellent free healthcare”.

Food shortages in fact now run at 47.7% of what’s demanded, along with shortages of water and electricity.

Antigovernment demonstrators in Caracas faced off against riot police armed with tear gas and water cannons on Friday after Wednesday’s arrest of another opposition leader:

There’s another demonstration scheduled for today, too. The official protest death toll in Venezuela is up to 31.

RELATED:
VENEZUELA’S MADURO THREATENS TO ARREST MORE OPPOSITION MAYORS

UPDATE:
Linked to by Doug Ross and Babalu. Thank you!


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LIVE: OAS hearing on Maria Corina Machado blacked out?

UPDATE:
4:40PM EDT: AFP reports OAS bars press for session on Venezuela

Among the countries voting with Brazil to keep out the press were Nicaragua, Uruguay, El Salvador, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and all but one of the Caribbean countries. Barbados abstained.
…
Panama had accredited Venezuelan lawmaker Maria Corina Machado to its delegation so she could speak about the situation in Venezuela where 31 people have been killed anti-government protests since February 4.

Voting with Panama against closing the OAS session were the United States, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Honduras.

Machado said the vote against opening the session reflected “the totalitarian vocation of the Venezuelan regime.”

Machado is a proponent, along with jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, of an opposition strategy called “the exit” which seeks to force President Nicolas Maduro’s resignation under pressure of street protests.

The government is threatening to strip her of her parliamentary immunity and charge her with murder over the street protests.

The Venezuelan case was discussed two weeks ago at the OAS in a special session of its permanent council, which also was held behind close doors.

Caracas Chronicles:

Out of the 17 Spanish speaking countries in OAS, 9 voted against the Maduro regime, just 8 for it.

In fact, all we saw today was the payoff from a long-running strategy by the Chávez regime to buy off small, weak Caribbean island states with oil subsidies. The thirteen smallest countries in OAS voted as a block to support the government, including every Caribbean statelet and every non-Spanish speaking country except for the U.S. and Canada.

All today’s vote really shows is that the government went on a shopping spree in the Caribbean, buying off weak states on the cheap. But it’s a funny kind of Bolivarian alliance, isn’t it, where 14 out of 22 countries supporting you don’t speak Bolívar’s language.

UPDATE:
11:07AM EDT: Session closed. No more video.

EARLIER:
10:10AM
Will democracy survive the OAS today?

I was attempting to connect to the Organization of American States hearing where Venezuelan Assemblywoman and national opposition leader Maria Corina Machado is scheduled to speak. Surprise! The http://www.oas.org/ website is down:

Service Unavailable

Sources in DC say that the servers in the US government and Congress cannot access the OAS site, either.

Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua want the meeting closed to the press.

Panama demanded this meeting three weeks ago. Canada, the US, and Peru insist on proceeding according to OAS rules. Allan Culham, the Canadian ambassador, was particularly eloquent.

10:59AM
They are voting now (watch at OAS Live). 22 votes in favor of closing, 11 against, 1 abstained.

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US endorses Insulza to continue as head of OAS

Following Insulza’s shameful behavior during the Honduran crisis, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton backs him for another term as head of the Organization of American States (h/t La Gringa):

The United States will support Chile’s Jose Miguel Insulza in his bid for another five years as head of the Organization of American States, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday in a letter to the OAS secretary-general that was seen by Efe.

In the letter, Clinton said that it was a “pleasure” to inform Insulza that the Barack Obama administration will support his reelection and that of the assistant secretary-general, Alberto Ramdin, of Suriname, at Wednesday’s special OAS General Assembly in the U.S. capital.

The vote of confidence by Washington comes despite the campaign against Insulza launched a month ago by certain Republican lawmakers and the editorial page of The Washington Post.

As you may recall, the WaPo has gone on record requesting that Obama press for change at the OAS

Despite the adoption in 2001 of a “democracy charter,” the OAS has done little to stem what has been a steady erosion of free elections, free press and free assembly in Latin America during the past five years. When Honduras’s president was arrested and dispatched to exile by the military last year, the organization was aggressive but clumsy — and ended up making a democratic outcome harder to achieve. In the case of countries where democracy has been systematically dismantled by a new generation of authoritarian leaders, including Venezuela and Nicaragua, the OAS has failed to act at all.

The embodiment of this dysfunction has been OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza. A Chilean socialist, Mr. Insulza has unabashedly catered to the region’s left-wing leaders — which has frequently meant ignoring the democratic charter. Last year, he pushed for the lifting of Cuba’s ban from the OAS, even though there has been no liberalization of the Castro dictatorship. When Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez launched a campaign against elected leaders of his opposition, stripping them of power and launching criminal investigations, Mr. Insulza refused to intervene, claiming the OAS “cannot be involved in issues of internal order of member states.” Yet when leftist Honduran President Manuel Zelaya tried to change his own country’s internal order by illegally promoting a constitutional referendum, Mr. Insulza supported him, even offering to dispatch observers.

The WaPo reasonably requested that

The United States should make clear that it will not support any secretary general whose platform on democracy issues is inadequate. Congress should meanwhile consider whether the United States should continue to provide the bulk of the funding for the OAS when it fails to live by its own charter.

The request fell on the deaf ears of “smart diplomacy.”

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