Ecuador / Chavez has found another close ally in his Latin American socialist project

Roberto Pinto

QUITO - Rafael Correa, a leftist nationalist and a close ally of Venezuela's anti-U.S. president Hugo Chavez, clearly defeated the banana tycoon who rubs shoulders with America's rich and powerful, in Sunday’s presidential runoff election in Ecuador, as per the results partially indicated.

With almost two-thirds of votes counted, Mr Correa had almost 63% of the vote while his conservative rival Alvaro Noboa polled about 38%.

This win by Correa would make him Ecuador's eighth leader in a decade and bolster Chavez's campaign to forge an alliance of left-wing governments to counter U.S. influence in the region with his own brand of socialist revolution. Thereby, Ecuador will join Venezuela and Bolivia as Andean countries who advocate state role in the economy.

Claiming victory before the official results, Correa called his win a defeat for a "political mafia" that he said had ruled the country for decades and implemented free-market, neo-liberal economic policies that the United States promoted in Latin America in the 1980s and '90s.

"This is a clear message that the people want change…We receive this very high honor that the Ecuadorian people have bestowed on us with profound serenity, with profound hope," Correa told a news conference.

His opponent, Alvaro Noboa, however, rejected poll results, with full results due on Tuesday, saying he would wait for the official count to be finished.

With about 21 percent of the ballot counted, Correa had 65 percent compared to 35 percent for Alvaro Noboa, according to Ecuador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal. The results were consistent with an unofficial quick count by the citizens election watchdog group and two exit polls.

The 43-year-old Correa, who is an outspoken admirer of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, has pledged a "citizens' revolution" to clean up the discredited political system of the country. Ecuadorians have driven the last three elected presidents from power and Correa appealed to voters as a fresh face in a field of established politicians.

In the first round, Correa called President Bush "dull-witted" and threatened to reduce payments on Ecuador's $16.1 billion foreign debt and use the money for social programs. He was favored to win the first round but came in second to Noboa in the field of 13. He also promises not to renew US rights to a military base premusably used for anti-drug operations.

Noboa, a 56-year-old billionaire who has touted his close relationships with the rich and powerful in the U.S., said he would not concede defeat until the official count is completed.

Noboa had run a corrupt populist campaign handing out computers, medicine and money to the people and giving speeches peppered with religious references. Before voting earlier Sunday in the coastal city of Guayaquil, he read a passage from the Bible in the midst of a mob of supporters pushing to touch him.

Imitating Jesus Christ, ‘he fell to his knees, asking God for his support and saying all he wanted was "to serve, to serve, to serve" the poor.

"Like Christ, all I want is to serve ... so that the poor can have housing, health care, education, jobs," he said.

The winner will face the tough task of ruling this poor, politically unstable Andean nation which has had eight presidents since 1996, including three who were driven from office by street protests.

Correa, who has a doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois, is new to politics. He served just 106 days last year as finance minister under interim President Alfredo Palacio, who replaced Lucio Gutierrez in the midst of street protests in April 2005.

Correa pledged to construct 100,000 low-cost homes and copied Noboa's promise to double to $36 a "poverty bonus" that 1.2 million poor Ecuadoreans receive each month. Ecuador is an oil-exporting country, but three-quarters of its 13.4 million inhabitants live in poverty.

"He's lost two elections. It's time he wins so that he can help the neediest as he has been doing up to now giving away so many things," he said.

Noboa had pledged to build 300,000 low-cost homes a year, financing them through government bonds, and to create jobs by persuading his rich foreign friends to invest in Ecuador. He counts the Kennedys and Rockefellers among his friends.

He also proudly pointed out he is Ecuador's biggest investor, the owner of 114 companies. He said he would use his business skills to bring Ecuador's poor into the middle class.

Ecuadorian people believe that, in order to respect the public support, the new President will have to put major emphasis on issues like poverty eradication through well-fare payments, increasing employment opportunities and mass-education in the country.

Rafael Correa will seek a bigger share of oil profits from foreign energy companies

El Financiero en línea

Mexico, November 29.- Ecuadorean President-elect Rafael Correa will seek a bigger share of oil profits from foreign energy companies when he takes office, a newspaper said.

Correa, who yesterday was declared the winner of Ecuador's presidential election, plans to renegotiate oil contracts with foreign producers, including Brazil's Petroleo Brasileiro SA, as soon as he is sworn into office on Jan. 15.

A law passed in April requires companies to split export profits equally with the government, though some older contracts allow companies such as Petrobras, as Brazil's state-controlled oil company is known, the keep 80 percent, the daily said.

Of the 500,000 barrels of oil exported from Ecuador daily, foreign companies produce about 200,000 barrels, or 40 percent, the newspaper said. Petrobras produces about 15,000 barrels a day in Ecuador. (Information provided by Finsat/MOB)

Return to the grassroots

Guest Column Tyler Walker Williams, HT

November 25, 2006

To many Americans, and to some Indians as well, the recent win of a radical Left group like AISA in the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU) elections probably seemed like an anachronism: according to the logic of the current neo-liberal regimes in both countries, Marxist and Communist thought and political relevance died with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s.

The spokespersons of neo-liberalism and free market policies in the Bush government, as well as their counterparts (or agents) in the UPA government here in India, clearly agree that US military and economic hegemony — for they are two sides of the same coin — are unavoidable, and are close to being established in every last corner of the globe. (The Indian public has not forgotten the statements by not only the UPA but earlier the NDA that one must cater to the demands of a world-power like the US on everything from nuclear policy to domestic economic initiatives.)

Elite ideologues in both countries try to give support to this theory: Francis Fukuyama and company have declared the ‘end of history’ and that ‘the last man’ has been reached — i.e. capitalism has triumphed as a world system leaving no viable alternative. The cult of globalisation seems to have gripped every intellectual and policy-maker in every country: talking heads babble about some amorphous angel of globalisation that will open every market, flood it with knowledge and products, and liberate the stupefied masses of the developing world from their ignorance and backwardness.

Why then do we suddenly see a resurgence of Left thought and political action across every developed and developing nation from India to France to Venezuela? It would seem that the more blatant American imperialism becomes and the more exposed its relationship with the ruling classes of developing countries like India becomes, the more clearly the working masses of these countries understand the nature of their exploitation and who is responsible for it. The complicity of the ruling elite in India with the Bush government in implementing anti-worker, anti-people policies has at this point become so naked that no fig-leaf can hide it: the signing of nuclear agreements, creation of Special Economic Zones, and imposition of new patent laws in recent months have only reinforced the public’s conviction that India’s rulers are only looking out for their own.

In the US, decades of conservative rule have been slowly eating away at the rights of workers, minorities and women, rights that were won after long and hard battles culminating in the victories of the 1960s and 70s. The social welfare programmes that were created through their struggles have been gradually dismantled by the successive administrations of Reagan, Bush Sr, and now Bush Jr, with the Clinton administration allowing them to be further eroded during its tenure, dissolving any remaining doubts in the public mind that the ruling elites of both the Democratic and Republican parties could not care less about the working classes of the country.

Interestingly, however, the explicit imperialist designs of the current Bush administration and its anti-worker, anti-poor policies have provided conditions in which a united pro-people movement can take shape.

Abroad, the Bush government sends the young women and men of the working classes to their graves in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan so that corporate partners of the administration can profit from contracts to ‘rebuild’ these decimated countries, while at home it lets the poor of Louisiana drown under flood waters, tries to take basic reproduction rights away from women, and cuts spending on education and healthcare while giving tax cuts to the richest of the rich.

The more severe the anti-people, anti-democratic policies of the Bush administration become, the more aware the American people become of their repression and exploitation. The more tyrannical and fascist the Bush administration reveals itself to be, the more clearly the American people see who their real enemy is.

The cult-like discourse of pro-globalisation forces has also backfired in a certain sense: it has made the working poor of various countries more aware of their common exploitation and their common enemy. It has shown the working poor of countries like India and the US just how much they have in common. The standardisation of multinational corporations’ anti-human work culture across the globe gives us all a first-hand experience of how we’re all being equally exploited.

The workers in Costa Coffee outlets are not even allowed to choose the music playing in their restaurant, whether it’s in London or Delhi; call centre workers from the US who lost their jobs to outsourcing come to India to find their replacements are being subjected to the same long hours and inhuman working conditions that they endured in the US.

One thing has also become clear: we cannot rely upon the elite ideologues of any of our countries to lead us out of our poverty and exploitation; we will have to do it ourselves. The workers of all nations are realising that policy discussions between heads of state and their elite intellectuals in air-conditioned five-star boardrooms will not render any solutions to their problems. It is for this reason that people are beginning to re-discover the power of grassroots mobilisation.

Whether it be the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the protests in the North East against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, or the protests of adivasis and peasants in Kalinganagar and Singur against the government-brokered usurpation of their lands by corporations, we see a return to grassroots mobilisation, to the belief that the only thing that will stop the state or the private corporations it patronises from treading on our rights is a large-scale movement of common people.

Not only that, but these separate groups are beginning to see the necessity and benefit of joining together to pursue a larger pro-people agenda, as evidenced by cross-cooperation of pro-student, pro-worker, and pro-minority groups. In the US too, the anti-war movement has provided a space in which students, workers and minorities have united and begun to develop a broader agenda. For the first time in several decades, the workers, students, and minorities of America are talking about systematic inequalities in US democracy, and about how to pursue a common agenda of economic and social equality for all.

The recent election of Left parties, especially of a radical-Left party like AISA of which I am a part, is a sign of a shift in the consciousness of students and the student movement as a whole in India. It is a sign that students see their destiny as inter-linked with the destiny of workers, farmers, the poor and the marginalised. It is a sign that students are becoming aware of their responsibility as educated, privileged members of society to be the voice of those who have none in government. And it is a sign that across the world, students, workers, and the oppressed have awakened to their common bonds and their common programme of establishing true equality and democracy across the globe.

(The writer is the first foreign national to be elected vice-president of JNUSU.)