Fwd: [social-movements] [WSMDiscuss] [climate justice now!] Open Letter to the Editors of Jacobin Magazine and Monthly Review : Stop Racist and Misogynist Attacks on the Emergent Indigenous, Eco-Feminist Left in Latin America; Address the Crisis in Today's Ecuador
Jai Sen
Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Ecuador in movement…, Abya Yala in movement…, Politics in movement…, Ideas in movement…, The Left in movement…, Movements in movement…
[Here, for those interested, is the Final version of the Open Letter to the Editors of Jacobin Magazine and Monthly Review which was posted on this list for signatures, last week. I’m copying in the initiator of this letter, Paul Amar :
Open Letter to the Editors of Jacobin Magazine and Monthly Review : Stop Racist and Misogynist Attacks on the Emergent Indigenous, Eco-Feminist Left in Latin America; Address the Crisis in Today's Ecuador
Paul Amar, Sonia Correa, Ghaitai Paul Males Castañeda, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Mara Viveros Vigoya, and others
JS
Open Letter
--Stop Racist and Misogynist Attacks on the Emergent Indigenous, Eco-Feminist Left in Latin America
--Address the Crisis in Today's Ecuador
Dear Editors of Jacobin Magazine and Monthly Review,
March 1st, 2021
We, the signatories of this letter, have to come together to demand the retraction or clarification of two
recent articles that smear political movements and leaders in Ecuador. The gains of Yaku Pérez and the
coalition around the Pachakutik party in the 7 February 2021 elections represent an exciting and emergent
new left comprised of Indigenous organizations, eco-socialist politics, feminist and LGBTQ+ activists,
anti-racist movements, and anti-extractivist causes. On 24 February 2021, these movements came
together in the streets of Ecuador, to demand that every vote be counted. Silencing and discrediting
Ecuadoran voices as well as new popular movements—while demanding fealty to state capitalist leaders
associated with the extractivist “left” in Ecuador and across the region—must end. Ben Norton’s “How
Ecuador’s US-backed, coup-supporting ‘ecosocialist’ candidate Yaku Pérez aids the right-wing,”
(republished by the Monthly Review on 8 February 2021) [1] and Denis Rogatyuk’s “Ecuador’s Election
Was a Massive Repudiation of Neoliberalism” (published in Jacobin Magazine on 18 February)[2] do not
reflect the traditions of Monthly Review—the “longest continuously published socialist magazine in the
United States.” [3] Both articles contradict Jacobin’s founders’ goal to develop a “product of a younger
generation not quite as tied to the Cold War paradigms that sustained the old leftist intellectual milieu.”
[4] The editors’ openness to new generations is at odds with the sustained offensive against a new
Indigenous eco-socialist and feminist political left in Latin America.
Rogatyuk’s article in Jacobin condemns the eco-socialist candidate Pérez and his partner, Manuela Picq,
pointing out they “have for years attempted to portray Correa as an anti-Indigenous, anti-environment
leader that pursues an ‘extractivist’ model of development.” Yes, they have, as have most independent
social scientists who have looked at the wreckage of the Correa legacy. [5] There is a vibrant, Indigenous,
and youth-led coalition of leftists who have critiqued Correa’s misuse of “el buen vivir” principles in his
policies. These policies nourished new extractive industries. Under Correa, the state criminalized
Indigenous groups,[6] LGBTQ+ populations, and exploited new mining resources and areas such as
Yasuní.[7] Rogatyuk mocks the new left in Ecuador as a “ragbag” and “surreal” group who “absurdly”
make claims about the partiality of electoral commissions. Rogatyuk overlooks the extensive and historic
struggles of Indigenous identity, genocide and sovereignty, as well as the multiple battles against
extractivism and ecological devastation, gendered injustices, political/social misogyny, [8] and
homophobia. The article willfully ignores the organizational and social momentum and innovation that
fueled Pérez’s electoral success. It ignores these movements’ critiques of extractivist statism and
monolithic personalism. Rogatyuk suggested that “Pérez’s political record suggests he is a Trojan horse
for the left’s most bitter enemies.”
Similarly, Norton’s Monthly Review article disdainfully dismisses environmentalists, whose critiques of
extractivism or racist policies of the statist left he portrayed as “opening up space for the right.” The
author singles out “Extinction Rebellion” as a right-wing tool. He rages against the language of
“decoloniality” and the eco-socialist left’s critique of statist leaders’ complicity with whiteness and
colonial-economic and social legacies. In a typically authoritarian thrust, the article demonizes anyone
who allies themselves with NGOs, branding them as supporters of imperialism.
Norton’s widely circulated Monthly Review article aimed at fracturing the left and eroding social
movement support for Pérez as an alternative. The piece was published at a crucial moment in the
Ecuadorian presidential election. Conventional media outlets have used it to discredit and damage a
candidate of the eco-socialist/Indigenous/feminist left. Norton’s article wove together a series of Pérez’s
tweets critiquing the statist and extractivist left. Of course, many members of the progressive left,
including some of us writing this letter, disagreed with these proclamations as well as Pérez’s support of
neoliberal candidates as a strategy to defeat authoritarian elements. But we contextualize these positions.
The Monthly Review article spotlights Manuela Picq, Pérez’s partner, in a misogynist and homophobic
diatribe that mocks and attacks her feminist, queer studies, and eco-social politics. Generating absurd
conspiracy narratives, this article designates her body as evidence of Pérez’s imperialist complicity. It
stinks of rumor-mongering, noting that she took classes at Princeton in a building named after Ronald
Reagan, as if this would prove that she was a stooge of the Reagan administration. At age 25, Picq was
part of a civil society dialogue in the FTAA negotiation process where she organized critics of the FTAA.
Instead of mentioning this history of radical praxis, she is accused of being a “CIA cutout” and an agent
of “billionaire George Soros,” a familiar anti-Semitic accusation. She is also incriminated for teaching
classes in queer studies and feminist theory. The author claims that because Picq teaches “Latinx
Studies” and “Queering Notions of Modernity,” she is an enemy of global class struggle and complicit
with imperialism. Norton does not acknowledge the long list of Picq’s other publications on queer theory,
international relations, social movement struggles, or resistance to authoritarianism. Most tellingly, the
author does not mention that Picq was arrested and deported from Ecuador by the Correa government for
having participated in united Indigenous, feminist, and anti-extractivist protests.[9]
These two articles do not explore in detail the context of Pérez’s political momentum in the organization
and revitalization of CONAIE—the Indigenous confederation that led the largest set of protests in
Ecuadorian history in October 2019, uniting Indigenous groups, feminists, students, and workers
movements to fight back against the imposition of a wrenching IMF accord and to demand the end to
ecocidal plunder and land dispossession. This moment consolidated the leadership of a younger
generation. CONAIE’s legacy, of uniting movements in October 2019, lent popular and movement
support to Pérez’s candidacy and might bring him perhaps to second place in the polling. The article does
not mention the historic October 2019 uprising or CONAIE and Pérez’s roles in it.
We are concerned that a significant number of today’s left-wing actors, across the Americas and the
world, align themselves with extractivism, agrobusiness, authoritarian statism, [10] and stand against
Indigenous, anti-racist, and anti-patriarchal movements, ideas, and leaders. We worry that the former is
acting to eject the latter from the conversation by labeling them as right-wingers and allies of imperialism.
We should not be distracted from the wave of violent, ultra-racist “populism,” and military and
parliamentary coups that have swept the region in the past years. It is exactly these authoritarian
developments that make it irresponsible and dangerous to brand those who critique the extractivist left as
allies of Yankee imperialists or sympathetic to Bolsonaro-type populists who are encouraging genocide,
femicide, racial exterminations, and homophobic assassinations. We stand against authoritarian statism
focusing on individual male populist figures and armed, militarized “machocratic” patriarchy. Against
this model, a new progressive alternative for the left has been emerging—led by Indigenous, Black, and
feminist as well as class and worker-identified justice movements—to advocate redistribution of wealth,
land, and autonomies to forge new modes of collective, bodily, and eco-social participation and rights.
After Ecuador’s 7 February 2021 election, civil society groups across Ecuador raised concerns that an
effort was underway to “find votes” needed to bring Lasso’s totals above Pérez’s. This would serve both
sides of what Chilean writer Andrés Kogan Valderrama has labeled the “binary” political equation [11] of
extractivist left and neoliberal right. Both sides saw Pérez as the most threatening opponent, for he might
win and, more than that, dismantle the binary political equation that has been making true redistribution
and eco-social justice unimaginable. The Ecosocialist Feminist Network stated, “We reject the role that
‘Correismo’ [Rafael Correa’s regime] has played in this moment, exacerbating racism and delegitimizing
social struggle through media campaigns…We know that the struggle continues and what will be the
mobilization and unity of the popular field will permit us to sustain the gains accumulated in October
[2019] and resistance against this system of death.” [12] We deplore the demonization of both Pérez and
movements that brought him so close to the run-off election. A left-wing global community deserves
better, and we call on the editors of Monthly Review and Jacobin to reject these simplistic and dangerous
analyses which feed right wing structures of hate in Latin America.
Signed,
Paul Amar, Professor, Director of Orfalea Center, University of California, Santa Barbara
Sonia Correa, Co-Chair, Sexuality Policy Watch
Ghaitai Paul Males Castañeda, Comunidad Indígena de Compañía, Líder Espiritual Cristiano-Andino de Jóvenes
Macarena Gómez-Barris, Professor, Pratt Institute
Mara Viveros Vigoya, Profesora Titular, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, LASA President (2019-2020)
Lisa Duggan, Professor, New York University
Cristina Yépez Arroyo, McGill University
J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Professor, Wesleyan University
William C. Smith, Professor Emeritus, University of Miami
Rita Laura Segato, Professor, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina
Pamela Martin, Professor, Coastal Carolina University
Mario Pecheny, Professor, University of Buenos Aires
Cruz Caridad Bueno, Assistant Professor of Black Studies, SUNY-New Paltz
Javiera Barandiaran, Associate Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara
Michelle Artieda, Florida International University
Mieke Verloo, Professor, Radboud University, The Netherlands
Lena Lavinas, Professor, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Sherene R Seikaly, Associate Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara
Gita Sen, DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), Fiji
Gloria Careaga, Facultad de Psicología, UNAM, Mexico
Rosalind Petchesky, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Hunter College &The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Rina Pakari Marcillo, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador
Steve Stein, Senior Professor, University of Miami
Markus Thiel, Associate Professor, Florida International University
Dominique Chiriboga, Activista Feminista y LGBT, Ecuador
Flavio Carrera V., Project Coordinator, Universidad San Francisco de Quito
Daniela Cabascango, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Ecuador
Kiran Asher, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Carolina Benalcázar, Concordia University
Fernando Luz Brancoli, Associate Professor, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Diana Coryat, Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar, Ecuador
Bila Sorj, Professor, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Pablo Ospina Peralta, Docente de la Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador
Antonia Carcelen-Estrada, Profesora investigadora, Universidad San Francisco de Quito/Northumbria University
Jennyfer Masaquiza, Universidad San Francisco de Quito
Claudia Sofía Garriga-López, California State University, Chico
David Paternotte, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Carlos de la Torre, Director, Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida
Miriam Lang, Professor, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador
Carmen Diana Deere, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of Florida; LASA President (1992-1994)
Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Guilherme Leite Gonçalves, Professor, Rio de Janeiro State University
Johannes Waldmüller, Research Professor, Universidad de Las Américas, EPN
Sylvia Cifuentes, University of California, Santa Barbara
Larry Lohmann, The Corner House (Environmental and Social Justice), UK
Gareth Dale, Brunel University, UK
Alvaro Jarrin, Associate Professor, College of the Holy Cross
Alberto J. Olvera, Profesor Titular, Instituto de Investigaciones Histórico-Sociales, Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico
Benjamin Arditi, Professor of Politics, UNAM, Mexico
Margarita López Maya, CENDES-UCV, Venezuela
Les Levidow, Senior Research Fellow, Open University, UK
Javier Corrales, Professor, Amherst College
Patrick Bond, Professor, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Joan Martinez-Alier, ICTA, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Catalonia (Spain)
Zillah Eisenstein, writer, Prof. Emerita, Ithaca College
Iokiñe Rodriguez, Seniour Lecturer, University of East Anglia, UK
Rehad Desai, University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Cristina Vega, Profesora Investigadora, FLACSO Ecuador
Muhammad Reza Sahib, KRuHA - people's coalition for the right to water, Indonesia
Monroe Edwin Jeffrey, International Tribal Association, United States
Francesco Martone, Senatore della Repubblica, Italia
Barry Gills, University of Helsinki, Finland
Pedro Gutiérrez Guevara, Researcher, Kaleidos Center of Interdisciplinary Ethnography, Ecuador
Rosemary E. Galli, independent researcher, Observatório das Nacionalidades, UK
Elisa Van Waeyenberge, SOAS University of London, UK
Markus Kröger, Associate Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland
Gabriel Roldos, ROLPRO SAS Publishing House, Ecuador
Tom Kucharz, Ecologistas en Acción, Spain
Lisa Rofel, Professor Emeritus and Research Professor, Co-Director, Center for Emerging Worlds, UC Santa Cruz
Marcelo Coelho, Journalist, Folha de São Paulo, Brasil
Alejandro Bendaña, Activist, Nicaragua
John Francis Foran, Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara
Melissa Weiner, Associate Professor, College of the Holy Cross
Ashish Kothari, Global Tapestry of Alternatives, India
Elisabeth de Souza Lobo, Psychologue, Université Paris 7, France
Noah Zweig, Investigador Independiente, Ecuador
Devin Beaulieu, University of California, San Diego
Bárbara Sepúlveda Hales, Asociación de Abogadas Feministas, Chile
Eng-Beng Lim, Director of Dartmouth Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality; Assoc Professor WGSS, Dartmouth College
Pallav Das, Editor, Radical Ecological Democracy
Roxana Erazo, University of Toronto
Santiago Acosta, Lecturer of Spanish, University of California, Davis
Andrea Sempértegui, Lafayette College, USA
Najwa Mayer, Postdoctoral Fellow, Dartmouth
Judith Butler, Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Marisol de la Cadena, Professor, University of California-Davis
Benjamin Arditi, Professor of Politics, UNAM, Mexico
Rosa Jijón Co-founder, A4C Arts for the Commons, Italy
Donald E.Pease, Professor, Dartmouth College, USA
Grace Delgado, Data Analyst, Dagan Inc., Estados Unidos
Tamra L. Gilbertson, Professor, University of Tennessee and Indigenous Environmental Network
Danid Barkin, Distinguished Professor, Metropolitan Autonomous University, Mexico
Jai Sen, Researcher and listserve curator
Catherine Szpunt, Occupational Therapist, BOE, USA
Fabio Luis Barbosa dos Santos, Professor, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Brasil
Hugo Ceron-Anaya, Associate Professor, Lehigh University, United States
Salvador Schavelzon, Professor, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Brasil
André Luiz de Oliveira Domingues, farm worker, DSA IC Americas, USA
Mia Yee, alumni, College of the Holy Cross
Juan Wahren, Investigador y Profesor, Universidad de Buenos Aires/ CONICET
Pablo Solón, Fundación Solón, Bolivia
Gina Vargas, Feminista, Peru
Sandra Macedo, Sociologa e artista visual, Brasil
Eduardo Erazo Acosta, Professor, University Nariño, Colombia
Judith Dellheim, Researcher, Zukunftskonvent Germany, Deutschland
Silvia Spitta, Dartmouth College, USA
Carolyn D'Cruz, La Trobe University, Australia
Dr MK Dorsey, Club of Rome, Spain
Didice Godinho Delgado, Activist, Germany
S A Hamed Hosseini, Alternative Futures Research Network, Common Alternatives, University of Newcastle, Australia
Céline Veríssimo, Associate Professor, Federal University of Latin American Integration, Brazil
Nina Isabella Moeller, Associate Professor, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, England, UK
Kevin Bruyneel, Professor, Babson College, United States
JM Pedersen, Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University
Julien-François Gerber, Researcher and Teacher, Institute of Social Studies, The Netherlands
Mirella Pretell Gomero, Syracuse University
Pamela Calla, Profesor, New York University
A. Naomi Paik, Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Carla Rodrigues, UFRJ, Brasil
Gayatri Gopinath, Professor, New York University
Teresa Armijos Burneo, Lecturer, University of East Anglia, UK
Trevor Hirsche, Instructor, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Bolivia
Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Professor, New York University
Stefania Barca, Zennström Professor of Climate Change Leadership, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
Éric Fassin, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, Paris 8 University (Vincennes - Saint-Denis)
Suzana Sawyer, Associate Professor, University of California, Davis
Cristina Rojas, Professor, Carleton University, Canada
Nadine Lefaucheur, CNRS Retraitée, Martinique France
Helena Hirata, Directrice de Recherche Emérito, CNRS, France
Angela Freitas, Coletivo Feminista 4D, Brasil
Dennis Altman Professor, LaTrobe University, Australia
Isabelle Stengers, Prof. emerita, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Emmanuelle Picard, Assistant Professor, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France
Valentine Olivera, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne
Picard Elodie, OpenEdition, France
Daniel Fischer, Food Not Bombs, USA
Margaret Wiener, Associate Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Ana María Goldani, Brazil LAB, Princeton University
Paola Minoia, University Lecturer, University of Helsinki, Finland
Lucas Savino, Associate Professor, Western University, Past-Chair of Ethnicity, Race and Indigenous Peoples Section (LASA)
Marco Aurelio Maximo Prado, Professor, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Breno Bringel, Professor, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Tristan Partridge, Research Fellow, University of California, Santa Barbara
Geoff Goodwin, London School of Economics, UK
Aida Matilde Marcillo Perugachi, Concejala del Canton Otavalo, Ecuador
Stalin Herrera, Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos, Ecuador
George Yudice, Professor, University of Miami
Malvika Gupta, University of Oxford, UK
Aida Luz Lopez, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de Mexico
Enrique Leff, Senior Researcher/Professor, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Giorgos Kallis, Professor, ICTA-UAB, Spain
Mariana Walter, Phd. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
Angus McNelly, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Dalena Tran, Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA-UAB), Spain
Isabelle Darmon, Lecturer in Sociology and Sustainable Development, University of Edinburgh
Bárbara Sepúlveda Hales, Asociación de Abogadas Feministas, Chile
John Cavanagh, Director, Institute for Policy Studies, USA
Anna Storti, Dartmouth College, USA
Robin Broad, Professor, American University, USA
Alberto Acosta, Expresidente de la Asamblea Constituyente (2007-2008), Ecuador
Marinalva de Sousa Conserva/ Profa. Dra., Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brasil
Maria aparecida Ramos, Assembleia Legislativa da Paraíba, Brasil
Bryan Winston, Dartmouth College, USA
Margherita Scazza, University of Edinburgh, UK
Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project
Mateo Martínez Abarca, National Autonomous University of México, Ecuador
Kristina Lyons, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Clara Keane, Occidental College, USA
Edgardo Lander, Citizen's Platform in Defense of the Constitution, Venezuela
Julio César Díaz Calderón, University of Florida, México
Christian Gros, Professeur Honoraire, Institut des hautes études de l'Amérique latine, Paris
Paula Castells Carrión, FARO (Foundation for the Advance of Reforms and Opportunities), Ecuador
Ximena Francisca Andrade Jorquera, docente e investigadora, UEM FLCS, Mozambique
Notes
[2] https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/ecuador-election-arauz-hervas-perez-neoliberalism
United%20States.
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20190711101435/
http://idiommag.com/2011/03/no-short-cuts-interview-with-the-jacobin/
[5]There is extensive literature that examines how the period of Rafael Correa's government as a time of impunity and human rights violations.
See: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8675.12117
[6] In 2017, CONAIE fought to get amnesty for all activists of the indigenous movement who had been prosecuted and sentenced for protesting
Correa’s government and Chinese mining companies, and defending water resources. The government misused anti-terrorism laws dating from
the 1970s military dictatorship to incarcerate indigenous leaders protesting extractivism. At that time, 98 individuals faced criminal prosecutions
for resistance to authority, terrorism, sabotage, etc. See: https://www.planv.com.ec/historias/politica/conaie-la-lucha-la-amnistia
and https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-22656374
[8] Correa’s sabatinas, weekly speeches televised in different locations around the country on Saturdays, were spaces which could last up to three
hours. There he presented his visions and proposals, and attacked citizens, journalists, human rights activists, academics, and environmentalists.
The Media Observatory of Ecuador (OME) has counted 95 grievances against women and for sexist language in the 152 Correa’s weekly
speeches between 2013 and 2016.
See: https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/05/23/planeta_futuro/1495560980_079621.html
On Saturday December 28, 2013, one of the last during Correa’s first administration, the former president criticized "gender ideology." On the
same occasion, Correa affirmed “defending the traditional family” and declared opposition to abortion "has nothing to do with the left or the
right," but are simple “moral issues.” See full video here: https://youtu.be/ODXFdqtGsyo?t=6341
[9] See: https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/case/case-history-manuela-picq
[10] In 2013, Rafael Correa issued Executive Decree No. 16 to control NGOs and establish limitations on the independent and autonomous
functioning of unions and social organizations. The decree was harshly criticized by local and international organizations.
https://sobrevivientes.planv.com.ec/decreto-16-y-las-amenazas-a-las-ong/
Correa arbitrarily punished journalists who did not agree with him and actively attacked indigenous environmental activists who opposed oil and
gas extraction or open-pit mining on their lands. https://rsf.org/en/news/what-future-free-speech-ecuador-after-presidential-election
[11] https://oplas.org/sitio/2021/02/14/andres-kogan-valderrama-yaku-perez-y-el-fin-de-los-binarismos/
[12] https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article7033
att
Paul Amar, Sonia Correa, Ghaitai Paul Males Castañeda, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Mara Viveros Vigoya, and others, March 2021 - ‘Open Letter to the Editors of Jacobin Magazine and Monthly Review : Stop Racist and Misogynist Attacks on the Emergent Indigenous, Eco-Feminist Left in Latin America; Address the Crisis in Today's Ecuador’, dt March 1st 2021
Jai Sen
Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Hola Gina
No, you are very much there; as below. Unfortunately, the list has not been organised alphabetically either by first name or surname, and so it’s not easy to find one’s own name or anyone else’s. (The advantage of this though, is that if one really wants to know, then you have to scroll through the names – and so you get to ‘meet’ so many new people !)
In solidarity,
Jai
[Extract :]
André Luiz de Oliveira Domingues, farm worker, DSA IC Americas, USA
Mia Yee, alumni, College of the Holy Cross
Juan Wahren, Investigador y Profesor, Universidad de Buenos Aires/ CONICET
Pablo Solón, Fundación Solón, Bolivia
Gina Vargas, Feminista, Peru
Sandra Macedo, Sociologa e artista visual, Brasil
Eduardo Erazo Acosta, Professor, University Nariño, Colombia
Judith Dellheim, Researcher, Zukunftskonvent Germany, Deutschland
Silvia Spitta, Dartmouth College, USA
[SNIP]
On Mar 2, 2021, at 2:30 PM, gina vargas via WSM-Discuss <wsm-d...@lists.openspaceforum.net> wrote:I send my signature since the beginning, and I am not there... well, a pity, next timeGina Vargas
Begin forwarded message:From: "mutualaid10" (via social-movements Mailing List) <social-m...@lists.riseup.net>Subject: Re: [social-movements] [WSMDiscuss] [climate justice now!] Please support Ecuadorian progressives contesting extractivist politics (from Quito to NYC) - an Open Letter sign on if you have a momentDate: February 28, 2021 at 2:10:35 PM ESTTo: David Watson <DWa...@cranbrook.edu>Cc: Discussion list about emerging world social movement <wsm-d...@lists.openspaceforum.net>, Jai Sen <jai...@cacim.net>, Water Warriors <waterw...@fwwatch.org>, "Post CJN!" <c...@lists.riseup.net>, Post CJA International <climat...@lists.riseup.net>, Post Social Movements Riseup <social-m...@lists.riseup.net>, Post RED <radical_ecolog...@googlegroups.com>, Post Debate <debat...@fahamu.org>Reply-To: mutua...@gmail.comHello David,I am generally against coups. Apparently, you believe that, under some circumstances, they should be supported. You have not been clear about what those contexts are?Is it that supposedly Morales, Chavez, and other popular leaders (perhaps Lula?) "kleptocratic" (your characterization)? Or is it that they are elected or rule, according to you, in violation of 'democratic norms'? Hugo Chavez multiple times.I believe an international left can/should both oppose coup d'etats and advance environmental goals by being supportive yet critical of popular governments in the global south that advance their peoples' well-being through exploiting their natural resources. For my part, I believe supporting coups is not leftist, but why be dogmatic. Supporting coups (soft vs. Lula; hard vs. Chavez/Maduro) as well as militarism generally is destructive. Those acts are also illegal and drive world politics towards environmentally unsustainable dynamics (competition, arms races, military action) and resulting suffering. Environmentalists and leftists should be advocating for CBDR under Kyoto instead of supporting coups; we should be challenging neoliberalism and promoting degrowth in the overconsuming North.
So, to be clear, do you join Yaku Perez, the 'ecosocialist' candidate from Ecuador, in supporting coups in Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, and Nicaragua? And which of the many coups that the U.S. has supported in the 21st and 20th centuries do you find resulted in benefits for democracy or environmental stewardship?By the way, I'm not sure if you were stating that Ben Norton's article is from Global Research. If so, you are mistaken, it is from https://thegrayzone.com. Here's another: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/06/ecuador-election-citizens-revolution/RobertOn Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 10:35 AM David Watson <DWa...@cranbrook.edu> wrote:Mutual Aid, you ask: “What context is necessary?” Because, apparently, “coup d'etats supported by the US against these leftist governments” explains it all? With this rusty Occam’s Razor, there’s never any internal problem with, say, Evo trying to grab power for himself no matter the cost. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/12/03/evo-morales-bolivia-tarnished-savior/
In a Manichean universe, there is nothing ambiguous or contradictory, no loose threads; everything can be rationally explained by the machinations of the Behemoth. No accidents, no paradox.
Maybe the necessary context is the glaring public secret that so many of these left populist governments have become authoritarian-gangster kleptocracies? That basic democratic norms (and enduring social-ecological change) actually matter, even if Comandante Hugo or Madero or Ortega or Mugabe or Assad or Milosevic or the Khmer Rouge assure us otherwise? Mutual Aid—really?
Sadly, pace the authors of the open letter, (and despite good things published there) one of the articles in question does generally reflect the “traditions” of Monthly Review, at least in matters such as these—look at the godawful rubbish MR Press has published on the Balkans (e.g. the Diana Johnstone book), its apologetics for the Milosevic regime and denials of war crimes and genocide in Bosnia and Kosova. The enemy of my enemy is my friend—and a virtuous one, a Great Leader even?
Shall we abolish having more than one thought in one’s head at a time? Must the question be for the People’s Front (united or popular): which is to be master? So take sides? Imperialist oil, bad; People’s oil, good?
And the article you are arguing about came from Global Research, a paranoid, conspiracy-mongering, stalino-manichean cult of Milosevic and Assad apologists, 9-11 “truthers,” and antivax pandemic deniers. This is where the Bizarro left manufactures dissent.
http://balkanwitness.glypx.com/chossudovsky.htm
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/global-research/
https://countervortex.org/russiagate-syria-and-the-left/
http://balkanwitness.glypx.com/syria.htm
I look forward to a day when an authentic international left might emerge that is wise enough to reject the double blackmail.
I sympathize with Jai’s concerns, and have not yet signed the letter, because I am tired of clicking and signing, and I am a Nobody (who are you?). But I am glad people have signed. And that Patrick sent it.
Salud!
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Subject: Re: [WSMDiscuss] [climate justice now!] Please support Ecuadorian progressives contesting extractivist politics (from Quito to NYC) - an Open Letter sign on if you have a moment
CAUTION: This email has been received from an external email address. Please do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
" Of course, many members of the progressive left, including some of us writing this letter, disagreed with these proclamations as well as Pérez’s support of neoliberal candidates as a strategy to defeat authoritarian elements. But we contextualize these positions."
I think Norton's article documents Perez's support for coup d'etats supported by the US against these leftist governments.
What context is necessary?
On Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 7:52 PM Jai Sen <jai...@cacim.net> wrote:
Friday, February 26, 2021
Thanks for posting this sign-on letter, Patrick. Agreed, it’s a good letter, about important issues, and therefore worth signing, and I have tried to do so.
But I’d like to use this opportunity to raise a small issue of everyday practice in such politics : In short, when the letter even announces itself as being “an Open Letter”, why is it framed in such an exclusive, brahminical manner that to sign on, you have to declare your affiliation to an ‘institution’ ? And so, implicitly, to have the necessary ‘credentials’ and ‘legitimacy’ to be included in the list of signatories ? And where it’s therefore in reality “open” only to some ?
Yes, those interested in signing can – if one tries - work our way around these portals (as I have tried to – let me see if that works), but I’d guess that it’s almost certainly not a coincidence that as a result, the vast majority of those who have signed… are professional academics, and not activists, let alone unaffiliated, free individuals.
This is a pity, for a letter that seeks to stand for the important principles that it spells out. Yes, this could well be a function what the software used for the sign-on demands or dictates – but then why did the organisers of this letter decide to use this software ? (And to boot, why have they also chosen to use software created by one of the world’s largest corporations – despite all that they say in their letter ?!)
It’s time that we all paid a little more critical attention to such ‘smaller’ issues, and practices, of everyday life and politics. Just ease of use is not reason enough. And where some more of us, including those institutionally affiliated, could also consider rebelling against such strictures, and refuse to give this kind of information.
Jai
On Feb 26, 2021, at 3:57 AM, Patrick Bond <pb...@mail.ngo.za> wrote:
(This is a good letter to sign on to, so our close comrades in the U.S. left ezines Jacobin and MR Online get a sense of problems caused, when their writers take up a misleading line of argument that denigrates so many important activist struggles in the Ecuadorian Andes and Amazon. From there, over the past few decades, we've all benefited from inspiring community-building, concrete work against extractivism and climate catastrophe, indigenous and eco-feminist - and eco-socialist - ideological advances, anti-racist politics, and ecological stewardship.
For example, their mass protest in Quito on Wednesday - here's AlJazeera's report with stunning photos - keeps the democratic struggle alive, over concerns that votes for the Pachakutik party in the recent presidential election were not properly tallied in the majority of districts.
Please click here to add your name, if you agree: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdnmLqU5WOHwE5FKE4ps00TbmtCSCz_MwSAkwQGBrdnXOe23g/viewform?fbzx=-9118106535556794191
Thanks, muchas gracias!)
Open Letter to Editors of Jacobin Magazine and Monthly Review:
Stop Racist and Misogynist Attacks on the Emergent Indigenous, Eco-Feminist Left in Latin America, and Address the Crisis in Today's Ecuador
We, the signatories of this letter, have to come together to demand the retraction or clarification of two recent articles that smear political movements and leaders in Ecuador. The gains of Yaku Pérez and the coalition around the Pachakutik party in the 7 February 2021 elections represent an exciting and emergent new left comprised of Indigenous organizations, eco-socialist politics, feminist and LGBTQ+ activists, anti-racist movements, and anti-extractivist causes. On 24 February 2021, these movements came together in the streets of Ecuador, to demand that every vote be counted.
Silencing and discrediting Ecuadoran voices as well as new popular movements—while demanding fealty to state capitalist leaders associated with the extractivist “left” in Ecuador and across the region—must end. Ben Norton’s “How Ecuador’s US-backed, coup-supporting ‘ecosocialist’ candidate Yaku Pérez aids the right-wing,” (republished by the Monthly Review on 8 February 2021) [1] and Denis Rogatyuk’s “Ecuador’s Election Was a Massive Repudiation of Neoliberalism” (published in Jacobin Magazine on 18 February)[2] do not reflect the traditions of Monthly Review—the “longest continuously published socialist magazine in the United States.” [3] Both articles contradict Jacobin’s founders goal to develop a “product of a younger generation not quite as tied to the Cold War paradigms that sustained the old leftist intellectual milieu.” [4] The editors’ openness to new generations is at odds with the sustained offensive against a new Indigenous eco-socialist and feminist political left in Latin America.
Rogatyuk’s article in Jacobin condemns the eco-socialist candidate Pérez and his partner, Manuela Picq, pointing out they “have for years attempted to portray Correa as an anti-Indigenous, anti-environment leader that pursues an ‘extractivist’ model of development.” Yes, they have, as have most independent social scientists who have looked at the wreckage of the Correa legacy. [5] There is a vibrant, Indigenous, and youth-led coalition of leftists who have critiqued Correa’s misuse of “el buen vivir” principles in his policies. These policies nourished new extractive industries. Under Correa, the state criminalized Indigenous groups,[6] LGBTQ+ populations, and exploited new mining resources and areas such as Yasuní.[7]
Rogatyuk mocks the new left in Ecuador as a “ragbag” and “surreal” group who “absurdly” make claims about the partiality of electoral commissions. Rogatyuk overlooks the extensive and historic struggles of Indigenous identity, genocide and sovereignty, as well as the multiple battles against extractivism and ecological devastation, gendered injustices, political/social misogyny, [8] and homophobia. The article willfully ignores the organizational and social momentum and innovation that fueled Pérez’s electoral success. It ignores these movements’ critiques of extractivist statism and monolithic personalism. Rogatyuk suggested that “Pérez’s political record suggests he is a Trojan horse for the left’s most bitter enemies.”
Similarly, Norton’s Monthly Review article disdainfully dismisses environmentalists, whose critiques of extractivism or racist policies of the statist left he portrayed as “opening up space for the right.” The author singles out “Extinction Rebellion” as a right-wing tool. He rages against the language of “decoloniality” and the eco-socialist left’s critique of statist leaders’ complicity with whiteness and colonial-economic and social legacies. In a typically authoritarian thrust, the article demonizes anyone who allies themselves with NGOs, branding them as supporters of imperialism.
Norton’s widely circulated Monthly Review article aimed at fracturing the left and eroding social movement support for Pérez as an alternative. The piece was published at a crucial moment in the Ecuadorian presidential election. Conventional media outlets have used it to discredit and damage a candidate of the eco-socialist/Indigenous/feminist left. Norton’s article wove together a series of Pérez’s tweets critiquing the statist and extractivist left. Of course, many members of the progressive left, including some of us writing this letter, disagreed with these proclamations as well as Pérez’s support of neoliberal candidates as a strategy to defeat authoritarian elements. But we contextualize these positions.
The Monthly Review article spotlights Manuela Picq, Pérez’s partner, in a misogynist and homophobic diatribe that mocks and attacks her feminist, queer studies, and eco-social politics. Generating absurd conspiracy narratives, this article designates her body as evidence of Pérez’s imperialist complicity. It stinks of rumor-mongering, noting that she took classes at Princeton in a building named after Ronald Reagan, as if this would prove that she was a stooge of the Reagan administration. At age 25, Picq was part of a civil society dialogue in the FTAA negotiation process where she organized critics of the FTAA. Instead of mentioning this history of radical praxis, she is accused of being a “CIA cutout” and an agent of “billionaire George Soros,” a familiar anti-Semitic accusation. She is also incriminated for teaching classes in queer studies and feminist theory. The author claims that because Picq teaches “Latinx Studies” and “Queering Notions of Modernity,” she is an enemy of global class struggle and complicit with imperialism. Norton does not acknowledge the long list of Picq’s other publications on queer theory, international relations, social movement struggles, or resistance to authoritarianism. Most tellingly, the author does not mention that Picq was arrested and deported from Ecuador by the Correa government for having participated in united Indigenous, feminist, and anti-extractivist protests.[9]
These two articles do not explore in detail the context of Pérez’s political momentum in the organization and revitalization of CONAIE—the Indigenous confederation that led the largest set of protests in Ecuadorian history in October 2019, uniting Indigenous groups, feminists, students, and workers movements to fight back against the imposition of a wrenching IMF accord and to demand the end to ecocidal plunder and land dispossession. This moment consolidated the leadership of a younger generation. CONAIE’s legacy, of uniting movements in October 2019, lent popular and movement support to Pérez’s candidacy and might bring him perhaps to second place in the polling. The article does not mention the historic October 2019 uprising or CONAIE and Pérez’s roles in it.
We are concerned that a significant number of today’s left-wing actors, across the Americas and the world, align themselves with extractivism, agrobusiness, authoritarian statism, [10] and stand against Indigenous, anti-racist, and anti-patriarchal movements, ideas, and leaders. We worry that the former is acting to eject the latter from the conversation by labeling them as right-wingers and allies of imperialism. We should not be distracted from the wave of violent, ultra-racist “populism,” and military and parliamentary coups that have swept the region in the past years. It is exactly these authoritarian developments that make it irresponsible and dangerous to brand those who critique the extractivist left as allies of Yankee imperialists or sympathetic to Bolsonaro-type populists who are encouraging genocide, femicide, racial exterminations, and homophobic assassinations.
We stand against authoritarian statism focusing on individual male populist figures and armed, militarized “machocratic” patriarchy. Against this model, a new progressive alternative for the left has been emerging—led by Indigenous, Black, and feminist as well as class and worker-identified justice movements—to advocate redistribution of wealth, land, and autonomies to forge new modes of collective, bodily, and eco-social participation and rights.
After Ecuador’s 7 February 2021 election, civil society groups across Ecuador raised concerns that an effort was underway to “find votes” needed to bring Lasso’s totals above Pérez’s. This would serve both sides of what Chilean writer Andrés Kogan Valderrama has labeled the “binary” political equation [11] of extractivist left and neoliberal right. Both sides saw Pérez as the most threatening opponent, for he might win and, more than that, dismantle the binary political equation that has been making true redistribution and eco-social justice unimaginable.
The Ecosocialist Feminist Network stated, “We reject the role that ‘Correismo’ [Rafael Correa’s regime] has played in this moment, exacerbating racism and delegitimizing social struggle through media campaigns…We know that the struggle continues and what will be the mobilization and unity of the popular field will permit us to sustain the gains accumulated in October [2019] and resistance against this system of death.” [12]
We deplore the demonization of both Pérez and movements that brought him so close to the run-off election. A left-wing global community deserves better, and we call on the editors of Monthly Review and Jacobin to reject these simplistic and dangerous analyses which feed right wing structures of hate in Latin America.
Signed:
Paul Amar, Professor, Director of Orfalea Center, University of California, Santa Barbara
Sonia Correa, Co-Chair, Sexuality Policy Watch
Ghaitai Paul Males Castañeda, Comunidad Indígena de Compañía, Líder Espiritual Cristiano-Andino de Jóvenes
Macarena Gómez-Barris, Professor, Pratt Institute
Mara Viveros Vigoya, Profesora Titular, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, LASA President (2019-2020)
Lisa Duggan, Professor, New York University
Cristina Yépez Arroyo, McGill University
J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Professor, Wesleyan University
William C. Smith, Professor Emeritus, University of Miami
Rita Laura Segato, Professor, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina
Pamela Martin, Professor, Coastal Carolina University
Mario Pecheny, Professor, University of Buenos Aires
Cruz Caridad Bueno, Assistant Professor of Black Studies, SUNY-New Paltz
Javiera Barandiaran, Associate Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara
Michelle Artieda, Florida International University
Mieke Verloo, Professor, Radboud University, The Netherlands
Lena Lavinas, Professor, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Sherene R Seikaly, Associate Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara
Gita Sen, DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), Fiji
Gloria Careaga, Facultad de Psicología, UNAM, Mexico
Rosalind Petchesky, Distinguished Professor Emerita, Hunter College &The Graduate Center, CUNY
Rina Pakari Marcillo, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador
Steve Stein, Senior Professor, University of Miami
Markus Thiel, Associate Professor, Florida International University
Dominique Chiriboga, Activista Feminista y LGBT, Ecuador
Flavio Carrera V., Project Coordinator, Universidad San Francisco de Quito
Daniela Cabascango, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Ecuador
Kiran Asher, UMass, Amherst
Carolina Benalcázar, Concordia University
Fernando Luz Brancoli, Associate Professor, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Diana Coryat, Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar, Ecuador
Bila Sorj, Professor, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Pablo Ospina Peralta, Docente de la Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador
Antonia Carcelen-Estrada, Profesora investigadora, Universidad San Francisco de Quito/Northumbria University
Jennyfer Masaquiza, Universidad San Francisco de Quito
Claudia Sofía Garriga-López, California State University, Chico
David Paternotte, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Carlos de la Torre, Director, Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida
Miriam Lang, Professor, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador
Carmen Diana Deere, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of Florida; LASA President (1992-1994)
Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Guilherme Leite Gonçalves, Professor, Rio de Janeiro State University
Johannes Waldmüller, Research Professor, Universidad de Las Américas, EPN
Sylvia Cifuentes, University of California, Santa Barbara
Larry Lohmann, The Corner House (Environmental and Social Justice), UK
Gareth Dale, Brunel University, UK
Patrick Bond, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Notes
[1] https://mronline.org/2021/02/10/how-ecuadors-u-s-backed-coup-supporting-ecosocialist-candidate-yaku-perez-aids-the-right-wing/
[2] https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/ecuador-election-arauz-hervas-perez-neoliberalism
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monthly_Review#:~:text=The%20Monthly%20Review%2C%20established%20in,magazine%20in%20the%20United%20States.
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20190711101435/
http://idiommag.com/2011/03/no-short-cuts-interview-with-the-jacobin/
[5]There is extensive literature that examines how the period of Rafael Correa's government as a time of impunity and human rights violations. See: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8675.12117
[6] In 2017, CONAIE fought to get amnesty for all activists of the indigenous movement who had been prosecuted and sentenced for protesting Correa’s government and Chinese mining companies, and defending water resources. The government misused anti-terrorism laws dating from the 1970s military dictatorship to incarcerate indigenous leaders protesting extractivism. At that time, 98 individuals faced criminal prosecutions for resistance to authority, terrorism, sabotage, etc. See: https://www.planv.com.ec/historias/politica/conaie-la-lucha-la-amnistia
and https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-22656374
[7] See: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/andes-to-the-amazon/2013/oct/15/ecuador-president-misleading-yasuni
[8] Correa’s sabatinas, weekly speeches televised in different locations around the country on Saturdays, were spaces which could last up to three hours. There he presented his visions and proposals, and attacked citizens, journalists, human rights activists, academics, and environmentalists. The Media Observatory of Ecuador (OME) has counted 95 grievances against women and for sexist language in the 152 Correa’s weekly speeches between 2013 and 2016.
See: https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/05/23/planeta_futuro/1495560980_079621.html
On Saturday December 28, 2013, one of the last during Correa’s first administration, the former president criticized "gender ideology." On the same occasion, Correa affirmed “defending the traditional family” and declared opposition to abortion "has nothing to do with the left or the right," but are simple “moral issues.” See full video here: https://youtu.be/ODXFdqtGsyo?t=6341
[9] See: https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/case/case-history-manuela-picq
[10] In 2013, Rafael Correa issued Executive Decree No. 16 to control NGOs and establish limitations on the independent and autonomous functioning of unions and social organizations. The decree was harshly criticized by local and international organizations. https://sobrevivientes.planv.com.ec/decreto-16-y-las-amenazas-a-las-ong/
Correa arbitrarily punished journalists who did not agree with him and actively attacked indigenous environmental activists who opposed oil and gas extraction or open-pit mining on their lands. https://rsf.org/en/news/what-future-free-speech-ecuador-after-presidential-election
https://amazonwatch.org/news/2018/0418-new-report-shines-light-on-dark-days-for-amazon-earth-defenders-in-ecuador
[11] https://oplas.org/sitio/2021/02/14/andres-kogan-valderrama-yaku-perez-y-el-fin-de-los-binarismos/
[12] https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article7033
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Jai Sen
Independent researcher, editor; Senior Fellow at the School of International Development and Globalisation Studies at the University of Ottawa
jai...@cacim.net & js...@uottawa.ca
Now based in Ottawa, Canada, on unsurrendered Anishinaabe territory (+1-613-282 2900) and in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325)
Check out something new – including for copies of the first two books below, at a discount, and much more : The Movements of Movements
Jai Sen, ed, 2017 – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ?. New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press; hard copy only also at The Movements of Movements
Jai Sen, ed, 2018a – The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our Dance. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press; hard copy only also at The Movements of Movements
Jai Sen, ed, 2018b – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ? (Indian edition). New Delhi : AuthorsUpfront, in collaboration with OpenWord and PM Press. Hard copy available at MOM1AmazonIN, MOM1Flipkart, and MOM1AUpFront
SUBSCRIBE TO World Social Movement Discuss, an open, unmoderated, and self-organising forum on social and political movement at any level (local, national, regional, and global). To subscribe, simply send an empty email to wsm-discus...@lists.openspaceforum.net
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Jai Sen
Independent researcher, editor; Senior Fellow at the School of International Development and Globalisation Studies at the University of Ottawa
jai...@cacim.net & js...@uottawa.ca
Now based in Ottawa, Canada, on unsurrendered Anishinaabe territory (+1-613-282 2900) and in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325)
Check out something new – including for copies of the first two books below, at a discount, and much more : The Movements of Movements
Jai Sen, ed, 2017 – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ?. New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press; hard copy only also at The Movements of Movements
Jai Sen, ed, 2018a – The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our Dance. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press; hard copy only also at The Movements of Movements
Jai Sen, ed, 2018b – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ? (Indian edition). New Delhi : AuthorsUpfront, in collaboration with OpenWord and PM Press. Hard copy available at MOM1AmazonIN, MOM1Flipkart, and MOM1AUpFront
SUBSCRIBE TO World Social Movement Discuss, an open, unmoderated, and self-organising forum on social and political movement at any level (local, national, regional, and global). To subscribe, simply send an empty email to wsm-discus...@lists.openspaceforum.net
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____________________________
Jai Sen
Independent researcher, editor; Senior Fellow at the School of International Development and Globalisation Studies at the University of Ottawa
jai...@cacim.net & js...@uottawa.ca
Now based in Ottawa, Canada, on unsurrendered Anishinaabe territory (+1-613-282 2900) and in New Delhi, India (+91-98189 11325)
Check out something new – including for copies of the first two books below, at a discount, and much more : The Movements of Movements
Jai Sen, ed, 2017 – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ?. New Delhi : OpenWord and Oakland, CA : PM Press. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press; hard copy only also at The Movements of Movements
Jai Sen, ed, 2018a – The Movements of Movements, Part 2 : Rethinking Our Dance. Ebook and hard copy available at PM Press; hard copy only also at The Movements of Movements
Jai Sen, ed, 2018b – The Movements of Movements, Part 1 : What Makes Us Move ? (Indian edition). New Delhi : AuthorsUpfront, in collaboration with OpenWord and PM Press. Hard copy available at MOM1AmazonIN, MOM1Flipkart, and MOM1AUpFront
SUBSCRIBE TO World Social Movement Discuss, an open, unmoderated, and self-organising forum on social and political movement at any level (local, national, regional, and global). To subscribe, simply send an empty email to wsm-discus...@lists.openspaceforum.net
Patrick Bond
Really, there must be higher standards for this kind of
discussion. Ben Norton is quite the charlatan, it appears. I just
scribbled this friendly note to his zine, asking that it be
published - but it might not be (not to worry, I won't cry
"censored!"):
***
I haven't looked at Gray Zone before, I confess. There
are lots of interesting articles. But I'm not sure what to trust
and what needs debunking, especially because this journalist is
new to me.
But is he a particularly smeary and sloppy contributor - or is that the norm over there? I just saw a couple of paragraphs in this article below, making odd allegations about me:
|
Another prominent signatory of the open letter, Patrick Bond, is a distinguished Trotskyite political economist who has spent the last decade leading a campaign to destroy the BRICS, a political and economic framework led by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa that sought to provide the Global South with an alternative to the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which many Latin American left-wing leaders have condemned as neocolonial institutions. Bond, who harshly criticized Brazil’s leftist leader Lula da Silva, edited an entire anti-BRICS book for Haymarket, the former publishing arm of the US Trotskyite group the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which also supported US-backed coups and regime-change operations targeting Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, China, Syria, Libya, Iran, the former Soviet Union, and former Yugoslavia. |
"Trotskyite"? Huh? In my neighbourhood, that's terminology from a
political camp whose name begins with S.
And genuine South African Trots will be having a giggle if
they read this label. Many comrades in the half-dozen small
revolutionary groups with which I've variously worked with or
fought with and sometimes against - and never as a member - over
the past three decades, know I try to apply classical Marxist
political-economy, political-ecology and social reproduction
theory. Sometimes persuasively, sometimes not.
But they're bemused, I'm guessing, because everyone here
knows I'd be utterly hopeless if it ever comes to doing hard
Trotskyist work of party building, grassroots and shopfloor
organising, or
holding to a strong revolutionary political line.
So to find evidence of alleged Trotskyism, this supposed journalist has to link me to Haymarket Books - whose main publisher Anthony Arnove was once a leading member of the International Socialist Organization. He is also a literary agent, representing Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy, who've published many times with Haymarket and who are both definitely not Trotskyists.
The 2015 book I co-edited book on BRICS first had co-publishers in Johannesburg (Jacana which is mainly petit-bourgeois progressive); London (Pluto which is indy-left); and Delhi (Aakar which mainly republishes Indian and classical leftist thought from a variety of traditions). My Brazilian co-editor Ana Garcia and I were very happy to mention this book to Haymarket, which always does a great job of publishing and distribution, and they joined to handle North American sales. I've never seen whether they actually sold any copies or ever provided our contributors any royalties - that's typical, no one writes for money - but it doesn't matter.
Tellingly, the bizarre world view of this journalist is also
revealed in his insistence that the BRICS are an alternative to
the West. Many of my allies conclude that the BRICS firms and
states they see in action on the ground actually offer amplification
and accompaniment - not alternatives - in ways the West is
most wicked: financial power, corporate exploitation,
extractivism, ecological destruction, imperial-multilateral
legitimation, etc. The Brazilian dependency theorist Ruy Mauro
Marini coined a term, "subimperialism," which applies to the BRICS
in many ways, through "antagonistic cooperation."
Rather than address this critique, which was joined by some leading scholars in our 2015 book (Wallerstein, Panitch, Sam Moyo and many others before and since), the scholarly writing I've done proving this point - alongside a bit of activism - is caricatured as:
leading a campaign to destroy the BRICS, a political and economic framework led by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa that sought to provide the Global South with an alternative to the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, which many Latin American left-wing leaders have condemned as neocolonial institutions.
Now that link -
https://michael-hudson.com/2020/04/the-hard-fist-of-american-imperialism/
- is to an interview implying that Michael Hudson is a supporter
of the BRICS because the Western financial system is so
exploitative. But the transcript makes clear that although Gray
Zone tries to push this line, Michael certainly doesn't buy
it and gives no affirmation whatsoever to their wild, juvenile
theory. By now, anyone in this field should know:
- When the Chinese, Brazilians, Indians and even Russians raised
their voting shares in the IMF in 2015, which was the last
opportunity (by 37, 23, 11 and 8% respectively, though South
Africa lost 21% and Venezuela and Nigeria lost 41% of their
shares each), this led to the corrupt neoliberal Christine
Lagarde's reconfirmation as IMF MD (with no BRICS oppo) and even
harsher IMF conditionality measures in sites like Argentina,
Ecuador, and Jordan leading to mass protests.
- The fabled BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement - as a $100 bn
alternative to the IMF - has never ever appeared, even when
South Africa took out an IMF loan with great protest in the
society last August.
- The BRICS New Development Bank is just as corrupt,
eco-destructive and inappropriate for meeting people's needs as
the World Bank; and the NDB and World Bank have an agreement to
collaborate on financing projects and even sharing staff.
- Promises of a BRICS alternative credit rating agency (instead of S&P, Fitch and Moody's) never appeared.
So, thanks for the "alternative," BRICS.
And thanks for being so silly, Gray Zone, that I am reaffirmed in supporting Ecuadorians who have such powerful indigenous, ecologist, feminist and eco-socialist orientations, and for those values, are also being smeared in an utterly incompetent manner by this punk, Ben Norton.
***
I hope the lad grows up one day and gets serious about politics
and eco-social analysis; poor chap has a long way to go.
Robert, do please raise your own standards of what is
"instructive," too!
Cheers,
Patrick
On Wed, Mar 3, 2021 at 9:20 AM mutualaid10 <mutua...@gmail.com> wrote:
Greetings all,I found this response to the open letter instructive and worth considering:Best,Robert
________________________________________ ** Inspired by the World Social Forum, WSMDiscuss – the successor to a list named ‘WSFDiscuss’ started in 2005 - is an open, unmoderated, and self-organising forum for the exchange of information and views on the experience, practice, and theory of social and political movement at any level (local, national, regional, and global), including the World Social Forum. Join in ! ** _______________________________________________ World Social Movement Discuss mailing list POST to LIST : Send email to wsm-d...@lists.openspaceforum.net
Patrick Bond
Pablo Ospina Peralta is a historian, professor at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, researcher at the Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos, and a member of the Comisión de Vivencia, fe y política
Elections in Ecuador. Another left is possible
February 25th, 2021
By Pablo Ospina Peralta
Ecuador’s presidential elections resulted in remarkable growth by Pachakutik, the leftist indigenous political movement led by Yaku Pérez. In this article, its author, an Ecuadorian historian and researcher, explains why the indigenous movement does not support Andrés Aráuz, Rafael Correa’s stand-in.
Spanish version of this article was originally published in La Marea
________________________________________
Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández once said that the only thing to their left was the wall. Their words translated into a common problem in all the countries that saw the emergence of progressive governments during the so-called “pink wave” in Latin America. Facing this emergence of administrations that worked to reinforce State intervention in the economy and society, following two decades of a near-absolute dominance of neo-liberal agendas, which had preached that the State is nothing but a drag on the economy, there was practically no other political space available for alternatives. Any criticism and autonomous options among grassroots supporters were merely written off as supporting the conventional right wing, or in the best of cases, as a purely symbolic show with no basis in reality.
Ecuador’s most recent elections showed a clear break with this trend. The candidate representing the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, Yaku Pérez Guartambel, obtained nearly 20% of the vote, and as I write this article, is still disputing a second-place finish with the banker Guillermo Lasso, which will put one of the two on the ballot in the runoff election. Yet another candidate, one from a traditional centrist party, to a certain extent social-democratic, with a professional background in the export business sector, won just over 15% of the vote. With this, the inescapable dichotomy between Correaism and the traditional right was completely deconstructed, both from the center as well as from the left.
While Yaku Pérez’s platform, as well as that of Andres Arauz, the candidate supported by Rafael Correa, have similarities, especially in terms of increasing taxes on large fortunes and reinforced state control of the economy, their policy agendas reflect major differences. Rafael Correa’s electoral victory in 2006 was preceded by major and intense social demonstrations led by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), the main organization of indigenous peoples and nationalities in the country, reflecting their opposition to a free trade agreement with the United States. Another series of intense demonstrations, this time opposing mining, were also noteworthy in 2006: the camps of several foreign companies who had been granted metallic mining concessions were looted by local communities in resistance. At the time, Correa’s candidacy benefited from these demonstrations, as well as by a general disposition marked by people having tired of economic liberalization and a reduced size of government.
However, Correaism quickly distanced itself from these movements, with policies that were plainly hostile to social demonstrations. Despite his having benefitted from such movements, and the fact that during the first two years of his administration he had been able to orchestrate a certain level of political alignment with them, an administration that called itself the “citizen revolution” was much more reflected in the ideas and susceptibility of a refined technocracy, one fanatical of order, than chaotic grassroots movements. The difference can be summed up as follows: a truly grassroots agenda does not merely require the State to “resuscitate;” it is important to carefully analyze which interests are behind that reinforced State. Rafael Correa reinforced public education, in the strict and limited sense that it is not paid education. As far as its content, this was the same education in public obedience as existed before, but with computers and better restrooms. The flagship quality improvement program in public schools was that known as an “international baccalaureate,” with the aim that private schools would not be the only ones to offer a degree comparable to a North American high school education, and also provide the poor with an opportunity to obtain an English-language education in which a graduate could pass international standard tests that require a quality education. There was not even a shadow of any efforts to promote, even experimentally, alternative education in which teachers and mothers play a leading role; one centered on the community and developing critical thinking. The issue is not that this was never achieved, but rather that no attempt was even made. Public education went in another direction.
There are a multitude of examples. Public health policies were focused on improving hospital infrastructure and centralizing business management of clinics, resulting in a resounding failure of primary care or disease control programs and problems that require care in the home, such as malnutrition or infant mortality. In general, anything that required community participation or when professionals were expected to manage themselves autonomously, ended up being a failure. Reforms of the university system that went against the professors themselves; a healthcare reform to the detriment of doctors and healthcare professionals; and an education reform that went against teacher’s unions. Hostility toward autonomous social demonstrations took on epic proportions: persecution, division, criminal prosecutions with completely disproportionate charges (terrorism and sabotage) to sow fear, despondence, and stagnancy. It was a citizen revolution without the citizenry.
In an alternate universe, it would have been possible to accept progress in free public education to later move toward education with grassroots, emancipatory content. However, the government not only discouraged participation, but actively and systematically dedicated itself to dismantling it. Correaism did not use the same strategies as Peronism, which substituted existing union leaders with their loyalists. Correaism discouraged all social organizations for a simple reason: such organizations did not fill any role in public policies or in the balance of power. The Correa administration attempted to create parallel indigenous unions and organizations but failed because the absolute power of the technocrats in the State stifled any social autonomy or any organized will of the people outside of the State construct. Why organize in the shadow of Correaism if that did not give you even minimal social or state power?
The Ecuadorian indigenous movement is the diametrical opposite of this kind of political agenda. Its base focuses its efforts on seeking out and defending communal autonomy. Their keyword, “Plurinational state,” has the precise aim of building such social and territorial autonomy. Their center of power and prestige has not been the State, although they have used it many times at the municipal level; rather, it has been social mobilization. Yaku Pérez’s victory itself would have been unthinkable without the successful organization of the intensive and massive demonstrations in October 2019 in opposition to the economic austerity measures implemented under the Lenin Moreno administration. Oftentimes incoherent and not clearly delineated, the indigenous social instinct leads them to prefer participation and democracy on each issue, whether in terms of education, health, or social and productive project management. Instead of a “single water authority” to review and audit the granting of concessions, it proposed a “plurinational water council” with the participation of local and territorial organizations. The idea behind this project is the will to build an alternative and organized grassroots group outside of the State construct to progressively take charge of public management. This means a different State, not just a return of the State.
Such a proposal is a risky bet, since not everything is automatically better just because it is decentralized, local, or has collective participation. The State, technocrats, and grassroots political parties could all contribute. There is a wide open field for experimentation and a search for social balances between the autonomous power of the State and the autonomous power of the different groups in society. It must be said that Rafael Correa never accepted anything less than the most absolute centralization of decisions in his erudite hands and those of his closest allies. This he did with the repressive force of the State, and with the most absolute obstinacy of a person who believes autonomous organizations to be his enemies. The obvious result was a colonization of the political agenda of the technocracy of Correaism by a series of business groups that became economically dependent on government contracts. As Antonio Gramsci said at the time: “It also happens to be that many intellectuals believe that they themselves are the State; a belief that, given its imposing stature, tends to have striking consequences, and leads to unpleasant complications for the fundamental economic group which, in reality, is the State.” However, these technocrats are not themselves the State, and they ended up being colonized by those who actually are.
Andrés Aráuz, Rafael Correa’s stand-in, could perhaps change all this, apply self-criticism and seek a reconciliation. Maybe. Thus far there has been no indication that this could happen. However, it is evident that without a clear and decided distancing from Rafael Correa, any possibility of coming to an agreement with the indigenous movement seems out of the question. If Yaku Pérez does not make it into the runoff, the most likely outcome is that Pachakutik, Conaie, and the other grassroots movements that support him will end up casting a null vote. And this could well be the smartest thing to do if the goal is to move toward building another kind of left.
***
Paths and Forks in the Road for the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement
February 2021
Spanish version of this article was originally published in NUSO
By Pablo Ospina Peralta
Results from the first round presidential elections once again put the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement in the spotlight, as its candidate, Yaku Pérez, nearly split the second place vote with banker Guillermo Lasso to participate in the runoff elections. The schisms within Pachakutik, which acts as a sort of political-electoral arm of the indigenous movement, are complicated and cannot be reduced to a mere “class-based” vs. “ethnicist” argument. However, confrontations with Rafael Correa’s administration do explain part of their positions and internal divisions.
The Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement, which has assumed dead and then miraculously resurrected numerous times over the past thirty years, alongside its main organization, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie), continues to surprise and baffle the nation. In the movement’s most recent show of his power, Yaku Pérez, the candidate for Pachakutik, which is the political organization sponsored by Conaie, nearly made it into the runoff, after receiving nearly 20% of votes, in what turned out to be a near tie with the conservative politician and banker Guillermo Lasso, who appears to be the candidate that will take on Andrés Arauz on April 11. Regardless of this outcome, the first round results have been a runaway success for Pachakutik, giving it a political position for the future, along with a major parliamentary bloc in the next National Assembly.
This indigenous movement has been unanimously acclaimed by progressive and left-wing Latin American progressive thinkers as being a democratizing force that reflects a renewal of emancipatory struggles, expressing the fight against racism and internal colonialism. However, for a certain part of the left, during Conaie’s conflicts with the Rafael Correa administration (2007-2017), it was transformed into some sort of tool of the Empire, becoming an expression of exclusionary ethnicism and a geopolitical arm of “liberal environmentalism.” With the possibility of Yaku Perez making it into the runoff election against the candidate supported by Rafael Correa, these accusations became particularly violent, oftentimes mixed with expressions bordering on being openly racist, like when Pérez was decried for allegedly having changed his name to “Yaku” (which means water in Kichwa; he began using this name legally in 2017).
Since 1990, Conaie and the indigenous movement, like the entire country, has lived through major social, cultural, and economic changes. These changes include an increased urbanization of its social base, a broad professional diversification of the movement’s leaders, greater penetration of state services, and a major, though still limited, increase in schooling. The presence of NGOs, parties competing to include indigenous candidates, along with public offices and agencies that offer scholarships and a wide range of social projects, have continued and arguably increased, although this trend dates back to the 1980s. The previous relative isolation of indigenous areas is now no more than a relic of the past, although the phenomenon does continue to some extent, especially in the Amazon region. Despite this fact, and at the same time, indigenous groups continue to be the poorest and most abandoned ethnic category, with the nation’s worst social indicators.
Traditionally, the Ecuadorian indigenous movement was decentralized and heterogeneous, both in ideological and organizational terms. Since the 1970s, the inseparable mix of class-based (“we are poor”) and ethnic (“we are indigenous nationalities”) discourses has been associated with environmentalist demands, leveraging existing national and international opportunities. More slowly, and in a patchier way, feminism also penetrated the communities, although supralocal organizations exclusively made up of indigenous women have not been formed as has happened in Bolivia. Meanwhile, a persistent moral conservativism, typical of almost all rural areas, interspersed with the influence of the evangelical and Catholic churches, have limited, for example, the incorporation of reproductive rights agendas within indigenous organizations.
The conflict between Conaie and the Rafael Correa administration affected all the ideological, social, and organizational fractures of the indigenous movement. It is far from true that only one of them has prevailed. By this, I mean that neither the most “class-based” nor the most “ethnic” leaders had a common position related to Correa (whether for or against him). For example, Carlos Viteri, a renowned Amazonian indigenous intellectual, native of Sarayacu, imbued with a strong ethnic discourse, became an active member of Correaism. His community of origin is world famous for its radical opposition to oil production in its territory, a position they have held since the 1980s. Viteri, however, was the parliamentarian in charge of issuing the report that made oil exploitation viable in the Yasuní Reserve back in 2013. Emphasis on the values of ethnicity can perfectly be combined with the benefits of extractivism.
This shows that there is no evidence whatsoever that social and generational changes or the conflict with Correa reflect a more profound “ethnicist” character of the movement. Ethnic and class tendencies continue to coexist and mutate in the movement’s interior. The popular uprising that happened in October 2019, for example, was based on an essentially economic agenda, and demonstrations against the Lenin Moreno administration resulted in a strengthened leadership position for Leonidas Iza, a Kichwa leader from Cotopaxi Province, who is known for an agenda with a “class-based” emphasis. The outline of an economic program that, under the Conaie leadership, was conceived in the months after that uprising, takes up all the issues of a redistributive agenda.
Yaku Pérez was the most visible leader of tendencies within the movement that were most radically opposed to the Correa administration. The reason for this is quite simple. A rural organizational leader of an area of the southern Mountain Region that has gone through a relatively recent process of intermarrying (the last two generations), and the threat of a mining concession in his territory brought him closer to Conaie, which had a long history of opposition to extractive activities, especially in the Amazon Region. Pérez ended up becoming president of the Mountain Region branch of Conaie, called Ecuarunari, the largest indigenous organization in the country. Later, as prefect-elect, he fought for a referendum that would prohibit all large-scale metallic mining in the province of Azuay. While the Constitutional Court ended up rejecting this request, popular approval of a more limited referendum on prohibition of metallic mining activities in the headwaters of five rivers in the province’s capital city, Cuenca, just recently garnered 80% of the vote, and it will not be easy for any future administration to ignore such a landslide outcome.
This anti-mining struggle unleashed an internal process of recovery and reinvention of the ancestral Cañari identities in these communities. Such identities provided a practical contribution to the fight, in addition to giving them pride and a sense that it was possible to offer economic and living alternatives rooted in local tradition and the local past. The Correa administration’s obsession with promoting large-scale metallic mining in a country (and regions) that never had a mining tradition in the past led it to systematically persecute social leaders, including Yaku Pérez, who was imprisoned four times. However, this was not merely a personal attack on Pérez alone: the State Prosecutor General’s Office recognized that between 2009 and 2014 there were 400 cases brought per year for crimes against national security, including more than a hundred per year for crimes of sabotage and terrorism. There is no other such precedent in all of 20th century Ecuadorian history. As one of the main victims of that repressive wave, for Yaku Pérez, the Correa administration’s end was matter of survival. It is within this context that he made a famous statement in the 2017 runoff election between Guillermo Lasso and Lenín Moreno: “I prefer a banker to a dictatorship.”
I cannot quite see how this environmentalist movement could be called “liberal environmentalism.” No liberal that I know is against mining in Ecuador. Nor does it make sense to assume that the opposing political side, aka Rafael Correa, which involves granting mining concessions to Chinese companies, could be classified as being national or grassroots. The environmentalist group closest to Yaku Pérez is Acción Ecológica, which is widely recognized in both Ecuador and the world as being the most militant of all the grassroots environmentalist organizations. In the campaign leading up to the February 7 elections, Pérez had a radical yet feasible position: optimizing oil production in regions where it already exists, but not expanding the extractive frontier. Combined with environmental oversight, his position included respecting mining contracts currently in the production phase and terminating those that have only reached the exploration phase thus far.
The most well-known dispute within the indigenous movement occurred as the group was selecting who would be Pachakutik’s candidate for the February presidential elections. Jaime Vargas, a Shuar leader for the southern Amazon Region and president of Conaie, along with Leonidas Iza, publicly complained about the selection process, which, in their opinion, was organized to favor Pérez. Vargas, like most of the Shuar leaders, is associated with the more “ethnic” side of the movement, while Iza is closer to the “class-based” side. However, we should remember that ideological labels are fluid, ever-changing, and ever-present. This means there is no recognizable shift, but rather an ongoing negotiation and coexistence of two sides of a political identity walking its own ideological tightrope.
This type of internal dispute over candidacies is nothing new and happens frequently within Pachakutik. However, the sheer volume of votes for Pérez from indigenous areas in 2021 disproves any significant division in the Conaie bases. Its base appeared to feel electorally well represented by Pérez. As a result, the conflict between leaders was buried under an avalanche of votes. Nevertheless, this conflict with Iza in particular will most certainly reappear in the future. It is clear that the political weight of Yaku Pérez has been greatly enhanced within Conaie after obtaining almost 20% of the national vote. It is the first time that an individual has appeared on the scene who can give national electoral weight to Conaie’s social and organizational power. The situation seems comparable to that of Evo Morales in Bolivia after the 2002 elections, when he obtained more than 21% of the vote and came in a surprising second place. No other figure will equal Pérez’s personal political weight inside of the movement.
The great challenge facing the indigenous movement, as the undisputed benchmark for organizations and grassroots movements in Ecuador, will be to find a way to wisely manage this electoral victory and navigate the immense political capital gained. After several attempts, at last this movement managed to successfully bring itself to the political stage as a third political option between Correaism and the traditional right. It did this thanks to another ancient tradition: combining demonstrations taken to the streets (the October 2019 uprising) and electoral participation.
The conflictive relationship with Correaism will undoubtedly be a crucial component to this difficult navigation. Will Andrés Aráuz be the architect of a generational shift towards a more open policy by Correaism towards social movements? There is still no indication that such a thing will happen, but it is clear that if Arauz wants to win the runoff, he will have to distance himself from his mentor, who despite being his sole political bolster in the first round, now becomes his main liability in the runoff.
Another of Pachakutik’s major challenges going forward will be to add more detail to its programs and agendas, as outlined in the recent campaign, and in the documents behind the economic program stemming from both the October 2019 uprisings and “Minka for Life,” the name given to Pérez’s economic and social agenda. It is clear that a strong environmental commitment is essential to guide the legislative and executive agendas, but that is not enough. To meet this challenge, Yaku Pérez has not only his own personal experience and individual inclinations, but also thirty years of cumulative collective experience.
Ivonne Yanez
Compañeras y Compañeros (I am not in many of the lists so I hope that this message will arrive at least to some of them)
Thank you Patrick for all your arguments with which I fully agree.
I would like to add a few things to this discussion, as questions as well. It seems that the progressive-conservative left does not really care what Yaku Perez says, thinks or does (with whom Accion Ecologica has worked for 20 years), what this progressive-conservative left only cares about - and takes Yaku only as an excuse - is to perpetuate the correismo in Ecuador.
Let's forget about our brother Yaku Perez (and all the racist and neocolonial venom that runs through the blood of parts of the critics of conservative progressivism) and let's ask some questions:
- do they really believe that correismo is ecosocialist? do they really believe that correismo is an anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist option for Ecuador? those who did not live during the 10 years of the correato do not know it. No compñaer@s, It is not.
- do they really believe that the correismo is an option for the people in Ecuador? just look at Rabascall's tweet; Arauz's vice-presidential candidate about how well he did in his meeting with the Chamber of Mines. And, in case you didn't know, Arauz is the son of an oil businessman !!!! and studied in the most expensive school in Ecuador (of the Evangelical Alliance, and gringo arm in private education in Ecuador!). Arauz comes from this background! And just for comparison, Yaku is a campesino from the south of Ecuador who has defended water from privatization and mining contamination for more than 20 years.
- Do they really believe that BRICS are not sub-imperialist? with the chains of indebtedness with China and the invasion and devastation of its mining and oil companies in the Ecuadorian Amazon; for us they are.
- Or, equally, do they believe that integration spaces such as ALBA - promoted by conservative-extractivist and patriarchal progressivism - is an anti-capitalist integration option? just look at their plans with the former-named IIRSA (now COSIPLAN). Massive extractivism and infrastructures over fragile, protected areas and indigenous territories!
the debate is not whether Yaku is an ecosocialist or not, but whether the left - of conservative progressivism - is willing to look at itself and feel some shame supporting Arauz for the presidency, and also to support massive human rights, women rights, indigenous rights and nature rights violations. Answer please do you support this? Do you really promote extractivism and think that it will be good for the Ecuadorean people? Do you like seen women imprisoned because they have an abortion? Do you like mosigyny and machismo? And please do not use Yaku as an excuse to avoid the answers.
The voto nulo in Ecuador is growing, mobilizations are announced. Women's organizations -which massively supported Yaku, since correismo is extremely macho and misogynist- are preparing to march in a few hours.....
Millions of young people -who were teenagers during correismo, hate the word "socialism" because it is what they knew and saw with the dictatorzuelo Correa. And it is his fault. That is why millions of young people voted for Yaku, for water, for the territories, for life. They will be the ones who will return to the streets, as in October 2019, whoever wins, the banker Lasso or the oil/miner Arauz.
the resistance continues...
Ivonne
NB: some images attached. A tuit from Arauz vecepresident and a feminist meme after Correas declaraion abour abortion
Reposting with new title for ease of reference.Robert
Patrick,
I trust you are well.
We understand now that you deny that you are a Trotskyite but you do/did criticize BRICS. You also join in descriptions of BRICS as a form of "subimperialism" and "just as corrupt, eco-destructive and inappropriate for meeting people's needs" as the IMF.
I have not delved into leftist political theory or history sufficiently to know what being or not being a Trotskyite means. Nor have I examined the impacts of BRICS members trade and international finance policies. I believe that some BRICS member governments have been meeting their people's needs much better than their neoliberal predecessors. That said, you certainly detail a scenario of opportunities that BRICS members failed to use to challenge austerity. And the environmental impacts of BRICS wealth creation are certainly important as are the impacts of non-BRICS wealth creation.
But Norton's focus was not on whether or not you are a Trotskyite or whether BRICS is valuable or harmful to a left agenda. His focus - still unanswered - is whether Perez deserves or does not deserve the label "eco-socialist" despite his support for coups, despite these coups being driven by racists and neoliberals against socialist governments, and despite his statements against Ecuadorian government COVID relief because of (his view of) the irresponsibility of Ecuadorian working class families.
Norton provides documentation of extensive funding by the USG's National Endowment for Democracy to Pachakutik, Yaku Perez's political party. He writes that members of the Indigenous Confederation, for which Pachakutik is the political arm, have various political orientations but that they are mostly right-wing.
Norton writes: "Pachakutik’s tactics echo those of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), another fringe US-backed party that played a leading role in a violent 2018 coup attempt against the Central American nation’s democratically elected Sandinista government. Like Pachakutik, the MRS is supported by the US government and works closely with Western-funded NGOs. Both groups act as though they are principled left-wing critics of popular leftist movements, when in reality they form de facto political alliances with right-wing oligarchs."
Understood: you are not a Trostkyite and you oppose BRICS because of its failure to challenge neoliberalism effectively.
So what did Ben Norton get wrong about Yaku Perez? Yes, I do find his well-documented piece instructive, especially the section titled "“Left-wing” support for right-wing coups in Latin America".
Didn't Perez support coups and right-wing governments? Do you support them? Haven't Correista -policies benefited many Ecuadorians? Is there a better - "lefter" - way to affect Ecuadorian and other leftist movements/governments in Latin America than to support such characters who lay groundwork for US Responsibility to Protect narratives predictably resulting in interventions?
Your nitpicky response ignores these key questions that your signature on the open letter and Ben Norton's response to it raise.
Rob
Patrick Bond
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March 14, 2021
Atawallpa Oviedo Freire
Andean Philosopher, Founder of Movimiento al Buen Vivir Global, Director of Escuela Superior Alteridad
The original Spanish text was published in Alteridad, https://www.alteridad.net/2021/03/14/respuesta-a-la-carta-abierta-de-boaventura-de-souza/.
Dear Boaventura,
I’ve read several times, with great sadness, your “Open
Letter to Two Young Indigenous Ecuadorians” [1], in
which, once again, and without intending to, you end up
supporting progressivism. This, despite the fact that
you say you are critical of it and do not want to
provide advice. Like other decolonial thinkers, such as
Dussel and Grosfoguel, who have also supported Latin
American progressivism and who, in the same way, without
intending to, remain Eurocentrics, even though they say
they are not or say that they question it.
The hegemony of Western perspectives, in their
right-wing and left-wing (especially the left-wing
self-named progressive) manifestations are resistant to
losing their conceptual and factual privileges. The
progressive faction has fought against us [the
Indigenous movement] more aggressively than the right
wing, supposedly the antagonist side. Progressive people
in Latin America have persecuted, criminalized, and
assassinated us, and you are asking our people to be
masochists and vote for them so they can continue these
abuses. Neither the right-wing, nor the monarchists
before, managed to divide the Indigenous movement in
these 500 years as have the exponents of Socialism of
the 21st Century, and you tell us that the progressives
are our allies. Ironically, in the right-wing
governments we were stronger and more unified, until the
right-wing’s progressive faction came into power to
divide and dismantle us. And you are asking us to repeat
this history.
You reminded us in your letter what the Stalinists did
to all who questioned them, under the argument that they
had to defend the revolution in spite of its mistakes.
And you saw how that turned out, so as to recognize that
it was a mistake to support the Stalinists. This is the
same case now, but you are asking us to forget what
happened in all of the worldwide history of the left,
with its persecutions against those who disagreed with
their dogmas, under the argument that the right-wing’s
neoliberal faction and imperialism are the real danger.
The truth is that, for us, both sides are dangerous, and
it is not obvious which is the most dangerous. Both are
self-defeating, not only for humanity but for life as a
whole, because the extractivist model is maintained and
reproduced regardless of whether the left or the right
holds power.
In the end, it seems that you have joined the global
network of progressives, echoing the same Stalinist
discourse. You say that Yaku Pérez supported the coup in
Bolivia. You only did not add that Yaku was in agreement
with Janine Añez and that he supported the deaths of
Senakaba and Senkata, which is the full narrative of the
Correist discourse that you have accepted uncritically.
You should have substantiated your claims, proving that
Yaku supported the coup. So far nobody I have challenged
has been able to prove it. Yaku, just like Mallku
Quishpe, and many of the Indigenous and social
movements’ leaders, and even in a way Choquehuanca
himself, criticized Evo Morales for his eagerness to
stay in power forever and for rejecting the results of
the referendum in which the Bolivian people, including
those in the MAS political party, told him that he
should make way for someone else.
Are we to suppose that the rejection of the referendum
was not also a coup against democracy? Who began to do
coups? Did you criticize that coup? Did you criticize
blocking the alternation of power that Indigenous
philosophy demands? This is something that, after Añez’s
coup, Morales himself recognized, that he erred in his
idea of perpetuating himself in power. And, given that
it appeared that he won that election by fraud,
something that has not been demonstrated that it did not
occur, the victory of MAS in the last elections does not
necessarily confirm that there was no fraud. Yaku
criticized all of this, but you are repeating what the
Correists are saying.
In the whole letter you criticize Yaku, and you only
neglected to say that he is part of the right wing, even
though you indeed say that Pachakutik supported the
right-wing’s neoliberal Lenin Moreno regime. Prove that,
too. Indeed, there were a few members of Ecuador’s
legislature who supported certain projects, but they
were questioned and criticized by Pachakutik. But you
are repeating the Correist narrative that Pachakutik was
allied with Moreno, and in doing that you are joining an
international network of progressives in the dirty
campaign against the Indigenous movement and, in
particular, against Yaku, as Salvador Schavelzon has
demonstrated [2].
We in the Indigenous movement and the left fought for
several years against the corruption of the Correist
progressives, much more than did the right, and now you
are also trying to sell to the public the story of
“lawfare.” And what do you think of what Correism did
when it “stuck its hands in the justice system”, as
Correa himself said? Is that not also “lawfare”? You
cite Alberto Acosta in your letter. You should read all
that he has written about Correism, and also the three
great books by several intellectuals who wrote about it,
of which Acosta was one of the editors. These are in
addition to the number of books that we have produced
individually about the implications of Correism, which
are not about the great advances that you highlight.
Furthermore, the right-wing governments of Colombia,
Panama, and Paraguay reduced poverty much more than
Correa.
When you were in Quito, six years ago, and you
personally met with several intellectuals, we explained
to you the situation that we were going through, but
this did not have a substantial effect. Since that
encounter, I felt that you did not completely understand
our struggle. Time has confirmed that, as you have
always ended up aligning with the side of progressivism.
Your letter to which I am responding here makes clear
what your position is and confirms once more that we are
on different paths.
We are on different paths because we have two different
ways of understanding reality and how to live. I am part
of those who function with the ancient collective
rationalities and “pensasientos” [thought-feelings],
which remain alive and latent in the majority of the
planet, in spite of the “epistemicide” that Eurocentrism
has tried to accomplish but has not succeeded, not even
in Europe where the Indigenous Celtic movement is
reviving. I don’t know if you know it, it would appear
that you don’t know about it in detail, but what is
certain is that you do not produce your reflections from
the point of view of the Awen or Druid philosophies of
the land of your birth. This collective philosophy from
Indigenous Europe is beyond the “epistemologies of the
South,” and is consistent with Indigenous philosophies
from all over the world, since there is no major
difference between the Celtic philosophy and the Inca,
Maya, Hindu, Chinese, Bantu, and other philosophies.
To not speak from the perspective of an ancient
collectively-constructed philosophy is to speak from a
Eurocentric vision, or more precisely a Hellenic one,
which the Greeks systematized and called civilization.
This is a paradigm that the Christianized Romans imposed
on the Indigenous cultures of Europe, and which the
civilized or indoctrinated Europeans have continued to
reproduce, but which the Celtic movement is now
challenging.
But the majority of European intellectuals of the left
still have not taken them into account, as is also the
case in the rest of the Western world and its
satellites, in which all speak from a Eurocentric vision
of the left or right. For this reason, right-wing and
many left-wing movements criticize the Indigenous
philosophies, or look down on them because they do not
know them, and, above all, because they do not function
from those ontologies and epistemes.
And hence, all over the world these left movements
ridicule this ancestral knowledge, with labels of
Pachamamism, Abyayalism, Essentialism, Ethnicism,
Culturalism, Fundamentalism, and lately even Fascism.
And in the present case, they also speak of movementism,
suggesting that it has fallen into apoliticism, which
makes clear that they do not know the Ecuadorian
Indigenous movement very well. And it appears that they
think the same of Zapatismo, that it is just a
movementist action of the NGOs funded by the Global
North.
So, we the Indigenous people of all colors from all of
Mother Earth have risen up to reclaim sumak kawsay
(Abya Yala), Ubuntu (Africa), Swaraj and
Tanxia (Asia), Awen (Europe), to mention
a few concepts, all of which could be translated into
English as “everybody living in harmony under the sky,”
as the ancient Chinese say. It is from the perspective
of these ancient collective epistemologies that we speak
and interpret our reality, and that is the difference
with all the rest who speak from the perspective of the
Eurocentric epistemologies of the South and North, some
more and others less but after all Eurocentric, and I
think there still remain in you some leftovers from
Eurocentrism.
They are Eurocentric because they do not make their
criticism from the point of view of an epistemology that
has been developed collectively by the peoples
themselves, but from their individualist particularism
formed in the Eurocentric paradigm and not from the
serious study of the non-Western philosophies. That is
to say, they have not taken a collective turn to speak
from epistemologies and ontologies built over thousands
of years, but speak from constructs shaped by
individuals or by small groups created in the interior
of the West.
Ultimately, progressivism is part of that, which is the
postmodern expression of the media and academic sectors
that seek to displace the social movements (especially
the Indigenous movement) or co-opt them to be under
their social-democratic or even Christian Democrat
tutelage, under the heading of “New Left.” For that
reason, we’ve been clashing, because we are no longer
following the Eurocentric path of “Socialism of the 21st
Century,” but are contesting its conceptions and
horizons. Because they want to keep having us only as a
mass base or Indigenist or feminist or environmentalist
or popular arm. And because we have taken up a struggle
which is no longer only about class or morality (as they
want it to be) but is an ontological and
trans-civilizational struggle. This is what is behind
one position and the other.
Open letter to two young indigenous EcuadoriansAN Original2021-03-15By Boaventura de Sousa Santos
ACCEDA A LA VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL AQUÍ ACEDA À VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS AQUI My dear young friends
I appreciate the time you have spent conversing with me over these past few weeks, discussing the election process now underway in your country. As I told you then, I was truly perplexed by the international controversy among the various party families on the left regarding that process. To recap: It seems like a case of the cunning of reason that in recent weeks the political process unfolding in Ecuador – a country located, as its name suggests, at the center of the world – has become the arena of a fierce dispute between intellectuals and activists on the left, not only from Ecuador but also from other countries in Latin America, Europe, the US, South Africa and India. The reason for the argument is the ongoing presidential election process.
The winner of the first round, albeit without an absolute majority, was Andrés Araúz, who represents, to a certain extent, a return to Correismo (a term used to describe the years of Rafael Correa’s rule, from 2007 to 2017). Guillermo Lasso, who represents the oligarchic right, was second (after a few recounts), and Yaku Perez, an indigenous candidate from the Pachakutik movement, was third.
At first, the conflict focused on possible electoral fraud, which had allegedly robbed Perez of second place. But the legal-electoral debate that ensued was in fact a reworking of the earlier campaign to prevent Andrés Araúz from running on account of his ties to Rafael Correa. It is worth bearing in mind that typical lawfare strategies had been used to prevent Correa from running as Arauz’s vice president. Once this issue seemed settled, the conflict became about the decision over which candidate to support in the second round. In no time the controversy spilled beyond the country’s borders and gave way to savage insults and counter-insults, calls for censorship and counter-censorship.
I found all of this not only surprising but actually quite baffling. That was why I got in touch with you over these past few weeks. It turned out that, once again – and it has always been the case in Ecuador –, the indigenous peoples were playing a key role in political change, but the overwhelming majority of the voices in the debate, both in Ecuador and abroad, were not their own. All that was known about the indigenous movement was that it was divided over Yaku Perez, given that the candidate had initially been chosen not by the indigenous peoples and nationalities, but by the Pachakutik movement. Although Pachakutik first came on the scene as the political arm of CONAIE (the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador), its subsequent political trajectory and, in recent years, its alignment in some issues with Lenín Moreno’s neoliberal right-wing government in particular, has caused some tensions with the indigenous movement.
Especially puzzling was the silence coming from the young indigenous leaders, who, let us remember, had had differences with indigenous leaders and with the government in the past – a situation I myself followed closely, as you well know. When, on August 15, 2014, I chaired the Special Room on the Yasuni National Park – in the context of the Ethics Tribunal for the Rights of Nature, chaired by my friend Vandana Shiva –, you, along with the indigenous peoples, were the tribunal’s best allies.
These were the reasons that led me to consult with you. Today I am writing to let you know that I have decided not to be unconditionally aligned with one or the other side. I am aware that you will be disappointed in me; you may say legitimately say that I have wasted your precious time. That is why I want to explain to you the reasons for my decision. My reasons are, in fact, perplexities.
1. Does democracy come first?
One of the lessons learned by the left in recent decades, both in Latin America and other regions of the world, is that the forces of the left are the sincerest supporters of liberal democracy, even as they recognize its many shortcomings and strive to use it in order to radicalize democracy, that is to say, to turn power relations into relations of shared authority. Experience tells us that the right is not at the service of democracy, but rather uses it when it finds it convenient to do so and discards it when it does not. I have a vivid memory of September 30, 2010 – the day the police forces attempted a coup against Rafael Correa. My friend Alberto Acosta came by my hotel and we rushed to the CONAIE headquarters, where we spent the entire day. The indigenous movement already had some just complaints against Correa at the time, but the priority, at that moment, was not so much to defend Correa as the democracy that he stood for.
If this is true, once the courts had decided that there had been no fraud in the 2021 election, the political debate should have focused on each candidate’s political platform. So why does it continue to focus on the integrity of the candidates rather than on their platforms? We must bear in mind that the neoliberal right of various countries on the continent has no platform other than the usual neoliberal recipes, and therefore has been playing the morality card against the candidates on the left, accusing them of corruption. In addition, two disturbing facts need to be taken into account.
First, a veritable legal warfare – or lawfare – is being waged in Ecuador for crimes allegedly committed by Rafael Correa, with the sole apparent purpose of neutralizing him politically. This war has been an attempt to damage André Araúz, the candidate who claimed Correa’s legacy. There have been similar campaigns of political neutralization waged against Manuel Zelaya (Honduras), Cristina Kirchner (Argentina), Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff (Brazil) and Evo Morales (Bolivia). In all these instances there has been clear interference on the part of the US. I find it perplexing that many of those who have signed statements against candidate Araúz have also signed statements against Evo Morales and have refused to acknowledge that there was ever a coup in Bolivia.
The second disturbing fact is that, at the time of writing, a last attempt to invalidate the election or remove the most voted for candidate has not been ruled out. In fact, it was this very suspicion that recently prompted the UN Secretary-General to make a statement to the effect that everything should be done to hold the runoff election on the scheduled date. Only a few weeks ago, Colombia’s Attorney General went to Quito expressly to present “proof” that Araúz had received money from the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Colombian guerrilla group, to finance his campaign. Prompt denials by both Araúz and the ELN and the blatant improbability of the allegations were not enough to prevent “investigations” from being initiated. We know that Colombia is now a US satellite and that OAS secretary Luis Almagro – a sinister character who engineered the coup in Bolivia – met in Washington with Ecuador’s President, Lenín Moreno, who has made no secret of his preference for Lasso, with Perez his second-favorite candidate. Ecuadorian law is clear in this regard: candidates have immunity, and electoral laws cannot be changed during the election period. However, as we have seen in the case of Brazil, one never knows how far the persecutory wrath of lawfare will go.
2. Does the left come first?
Intellectuals and activists on the left, notably from feminist and environmentalist groups, have been playing a key role in the Ecuador debate. Some of the participants are colleagues and friends of mine, for whom I have great regard and with whom I have worked over the years. If we accept that Araúz is of the left, at least when compared to Lasso, all our energies should be expected to be invested in the cause of defeating the candidate of the right, and the indigenous movement should be deeply involved in the effort. But that is not what is happening, and one of the organizations that integrates the CONAIE has decided that casting a null vote would be the sensible thing to do. One cannot belittle the reasons for such a stance. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that in the current conditions of the continent one may be neutral when faced with a candidate coming from the democratic left (however problematic) and one that is an Opus Dei banker. Are we talking about the labor pains of the birth of a new left in Ecuador, a left truly in line with the 21st century? As far as I know, this labor is always bound to be painful. Hence the next two perplexities.
3. What is the left?
The left has long been conceived of as the set of transformative political theories and practices that, over the last one hundred and fifty years, have stood up to the expansion of capitalism and to the kind of economic, social, political and cultural relations generated by it, driven by a belief in the possibility of a post-capitalist future and an alternative society that will be not only more just – because it will be geared toward the satisfaction of the real needs of people – but also more free – because it will focus on creating the conditions for the effective exercise of freedom. For many reasons that I will refrain from detailing in this letter, the above definition has been the subject of much debate, of which I will offer only a brief outline. As popular movements across the world became more acquainted with each other, it also became clear that the political divides obtaining in many countries do not express themselves in terms of the left/right dichotomy.
Even in those countries where that dichotomy exists, a huge debate has erupted about the actual meaning of the two terms. Thus, for example, social and political struggles against injustice have greatly expanded the dimensions of injustice and, hence, of domination. In addition to economic and social injustice there was ethno-racial injustice, sexual injustice, historical injustice, linguistic injustice, epistemic injustice, as well as injustices based on disability, caste, religion, etc. This raised new questions, such as the hierarchy of injustices and, consequently, of the struggles against them. Renewed attention was paid to the various specific contexts in which these struggles take place, and it became more and more necessary to distinguish between important and urgent struggles. It became possible, for example, to argue that the three main forms of domination created by Eurocentric modernity are capitalism, colonialism (which, after the colonies gained political independence, changed only in form) and patriarchy.
On the Latin American continent, these debates took on other, especially important dimensions. Here are the three main ones. The first was the questioning of the left/right dichotomy, in light of the models of economic and social development adopted by left-wing governments during the first decade of the century. This meant that the polarization was now between the advocates and opponents of neo-extractivism (social redistribution based on the unprecedented exploitation of natural resources, accompanied by the expulsion of native and peasant peoples, ecological crisis, and conservatism related to ethno-cultural, ethno-racial and sexual/heterosexual discrimination). “Progressivism” was the term coined to describe the governments that claimed to be of the left but were not regarded that way by the opponents of neo-extractivism.
The second dimension was the statism/movementism polarization. In the sub-continent (as in much of the world), the political forces of the left have traditionally been mostly in favor of the need to control the State in order to use it as the foundation on which to achieve the desired social transformation. Disappointment with historical experience (Stalinism being the most flagrant illustration) worsened at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as a result of the neo-extractivist developmental projects carried out on Latin America. Such projects were led by the State, almost invariably in conjunction with global neoliberal capitalism, and that, in the eyes of the opponents of neo-extractivism, meant the continuation of colonial exploitation. Hence the importance attached to conceptions such as “[to] change the world without taking power” (a John Holloway’s phrase often misunderstood), which caused the proposals of the left to focus on the struggle for a new hegemony (that of the rights of nature) and on a valorization of community projects based on the notions of self-determination and plurinationality.
While the statist conception tended to inflate the transformative power of the State – whose matrix, after all, is basically capitalist- colonialist, patriarchal and monocultural –, the movementist conception ran the risk of depoliticizing social movements, such risk being all the greater when it became evident that the support received by the latter came from non-governmental organizations financed by the Global North, for the most part in an attempt to prevent the social movements from becoming political movements.
The third dimension, although not an exclusive characteristic of the sub-continent, is the very rapid transformation of the parameters of political polarization. In face of the aggressive, and sometimes putschist, vindictiveness of the right-wing governments that followed the progressive governments, the principal form of polarization was between democracy and dictatorship. And then, in face of the particularly dramatic and painful situation caused by the incompetent, and even criminal, way in which the right-wing governments dealt with the health crisis, the main form of polarization was between politics of life and politics of death. This latest mutation is mostly to be found in Brazil and Ecuador.
The debates within the forces of the left remain open. On the one hand, they have brought visibility and political potency to a wide variety of social struggles. On the other, they have given rise to new differences that have proved difficult to reconcile. Unless this obstacle is removed, the struggles waged by the left will lead to further fragmentation instead of articulation and grow increasingly weaker instead of stronger. Two obstacles in particular are having a paralyzing effect: differences regarding the role of the State and institutional struggles; and differences regarding the hierarchical order not only of the driving forces of the struggles (social classes? ethno-racial or sexual identities?) but also of the social goals of the struggles (social redistribution? the recognition of diversity?). Underlying these difficulties is the mega-difficulty generated by the differences between developmentalism/extractivism and buen vivir/rights of nature.
The only sure takeaway from all these debates, for now, is probably that the forces of the left know better what they do not want than what they do want. They have long suffered from the political pandemic that predated Coronavirus and which took over the world after the 1980s – the notion that there is no alternative to capitalism and that we have therefore come to the end of history. Interestingly enough, the first strong signals that the forces of the left may be feeling immune to the virus of neoliberalism have come from Ecuador. Let’s see.
The Ecuador debate is being strongly influenced by the undermining of the left’s imaginary in the wake of Rafael Correa’s centralism and technocratism. More than any other left-wing political leader of the 2000s, Correa conceived of the left as a sovereignist, top-down, centralist and monocultural anti-imperialist project, committed to social redistribution, but conservative with regard to women’s reproductive rights and averse to any constructive dialogue with organized civil society. This period coincided with a phase of renewed creativity on the part of the forces of the left, which in turn resulted from several factors, among which I would highlight the end of the Soviet bloc and the emergence of new political subjects, notably women, indigenous peoples, peasants, the ecological movements, and the World Social Forum.
The whole idea of alternatives gained new life with these changes and was further boosted by the political Constitutions of Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009), which pointed the way to a plurinational refounding of the State and to alternatives to capitalist development based on the philosophies and practices of indigenous peoples. Although still unsure about where their struggles were ultimately headed, the new lefts seemed certain that they would necessarily involve broad processes of democratic participation, the recognition of ethnocultural diversity and of the rights of nature, the plurinational refounding of the State, and the fight against colonialism and patriarchalism. Thus, the anti-capitalist struggle – with its demand for, at the very least, better social redistribution – became articulated with the struggle against colonialism (including racism, ethno-racial discrimination, land concentration, the expulsion of native and peasant peoples, xenophobia, and the monoculture of scientific knowledge) and patriarchy (hetero-sexual domination, domestic violence and feminicide).
In view of the discrepancy between Correa’s governance and the changes in the forces of the left and the indigenous movement, frustration mounted and is very much alive, as we can see. Hence my next perplexity.
4. Who is Rafael Correa anyway?
Had Correa been only, and for all Ecuadorians, the leader I have just described, is it even imaginable that the candidate with the most votes would be the one who claims his legacy? Of course not. Because Correa’s administration had many other dimensions that, although played down by certain sectors of the population, were of great importance to others. Correa maintained political stability for ten years, no small feat in a country that had had no less than seven presidents in the preceding ten-year period. He was internationally praised for launching Ecuador’s debt audit commission, which led to significant debt reduction. He made social redistribution a priority, ensuring that social benefits reached many people who had lived their entire lives without decent living conditions. Poverty dropped from 36.7 percent in 2006 to 22.5 percent in 2016, there was a decrease in inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient, and the middle classes saw their prospects improve. Correa introduced free education at all levels of the public education system and raised teachers’ salaries. He built much urgently-needed basic infrastructures and established himself as a nationalist leader, the guardian of Ecuadorian sovereignty against US imperialism (I remember the impact of the closing of the Manta base in 2009), even though, over the years, he was forced to come under another foreign influence – that of China.
The truth is that, despite all the social unrest, Rafael Correa managed to get Lenín Moreno, his vice president, elected as his successor, although shortly afterwards Moreno subserviently surrendered to the IMF and to the US geostrategic interests in the region, in addition to being complicit in the political persecution of Correa. What all this means is that the least that can be said is that at the end of his mandates Ecuador was a more just society, at least in some respects, than the country that had been ruled by successive waves of right-wingers controlled by the oligarchic elites. So why is it that now, when the oligarchic right again has a candidate in the runoff election, it is not evident in the eyes of some of the forces on the left that the thing to do is to endorse Araúz? I submit, as a working hypothesis, that part of the difficulty stems from the fact that today Ecuador is probably the country in the entire sub-continent with the widest gap between economic-social redistribution and ethno-social recognition and the fewest means to bridge it. Hence my next two perplexities.
5. What is transition?
One of the main problems with which the lefts that are currently in labor will be faced is the question of transition. We are increasingly aware of the fact that we want an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-patriarchal, ecological, feminist, plurinational, radically democratic, self-determined society. We are aware of the fact that what we are talking about is a civilizational paradigm shift. How do we fight for it? First of all, we have to be aware of the fact that the fight we are talking about is eminently political. The seemingly apolitical banners of the NGOs have only one purpose, which is to disarm the popular movement. That is why they are heavily funded by the countries of the Global North. I can understand that many of you have grown so frustrated with formal politics that you would rather engage your activism outside the party system.
However, while you believe that that system has any relevance, it is better to know what is at stake. Even if we conceive of the struggle as being political, organizing it is no easy task. We know institutions are not to be trusted, but we cannot live without them. We will have to fight with one foot in the institutions and the other outside of them. We will have to fight within, against and outside the State, resorting to different ways – some of them never tested before – of organizing our struggles. And what about allies? We are unlikely to find them among the forces of the right. Whenever the right returns to power, it does so with a vengeance. Take the case of Bolsonaro in Brazil, Macri in Argentina, or the putschist Añez in Bolivia. Is it wise to take the same risk with Lasso in Ecuador? Of course, everything will be easier if Araúz unequivocably shows himself attuned to the transition and not to a return to the past. You are young, the future of the country is in your hands. There are three areas to which you should pay special attention: transition away from extractivism, intercultural education, and co-government with CONAIE, aimed at bringing to fruition the plurinationality enshrined in the 2008 Constitution. The first two areas are part of Araúz’s platform, but all three of them depend on your organized political pressure, which must continue (and not end) after the election. The most important thing is to learn from the mistakes of the past.
My dear young friends:
My perplexities do not end here, but those listed above should be enough to justify my not intervening in the debate now under way in Ecuador. My wish is that you Ecuadorians, and the Ecuadorian youth in particular, will be the ones to decide the open issues with which you are faced and for which, in all truth, there are no straightforward solutions in sight. What is important is that your decisions are made after careful reflection on the conflicts now raging in your country and without any external interference from well-meaning internationalist intellectual-activists like myself – who, myself included, may very well be wrong – or from foreign countries, be they the US, European countries, Latin American countries, or China. One thing is certain: If your democracy is preserved, whatever you decide will have major consequences, whether positive or negative, for the future of those who, in the rest of the world, see themselves reflected in these polarizations. There are definitely consequences to being at the center of the world.
Patrick Bond
The eco-territorial turn in Latin America: a conversation with Maristella Svampa
This is a translated interview conducted by Johannes Waldmüeller, from the original video available here.
[00:00] Thank you for being with us. The first question is, tell us a little bit about the actual situation of the eco-territorial and eco-social conflicts in Latin America. And, related to it, what is its relevance in the global context in times of fake news, in times of new populisms that arise everywhere in the world.
[00:22] Well… First of all, it has to be said that there has been an expansion of socio-territorial, socioenvironmental and eco-territorial conflicts in Latin America. And there is a phase of exacerbation of the extractivism within the conservative and neo-liberal framework, that is expanding in the whole region, or at least an important part of the region. In continuity with the previous phase, but an exacerbation phase that can be seen very clearly with the expansion of the energy frontier with fracking, offshore fields, oil sands, with the emergence of territorial crimes (01:00) linked for example to illegal mining, and also the biggest repression that we can witness is against environmental activists. [01:12] Let us not forget that Latin America, is the place in the world where the most environmental activists are assassinated per year. In 2016 and 2017, approx. 200 activists were assassinated in the world, of which 60% in Latin America. [01:28] This is a very worrying phase, in which, what we experience is a retraction, a setback, in terms of democracy. This heated moment of human rights violations goes hand in hand with an increasing repression.
[01:43] Secondly, with respect to the global situation, well, I read it more with a socioecological lens. We have entered a new era, the Anthropocene, in which humankind has taken a role of global reach and geological relevance, right? And the extractivism and neo-extractivism are an expression of the Anthropocene, of this socioecological crisis of global scale. And I think that in these times of a turn to Rightist politics in terms of discourse, it’s good to keep in mind that this new political grammar supports the ecoterritorial fights, which aim at a fairer society, at a different relation between humans and nature, that is a new environmental rationale and also a new process of democratization of decision-making. [02:35] And I think that these new concepts of horizons are related to a new political order, and these open up toward a new type of society.
[02:45] And, in this context, what is the role of, in your opinion, traditional academia, in terms of teaching and researching?
[02:51] Well, let’s see, there are a lot of things to say. First of all, with respect to ecoterritorial conflicts, there is an expert knowledge, independent from the hegemonic vision, from corporations’ power, and also from the state discourse, that has spread in Latin America and has therefore being accompanying these fights. There is a dialogue of knowledge in which we participate as intellectuals coming from academia, which implies on one side the construction of the problematic through an interdisciplinary lens, because these are very complex problems. [03:28] Secondly, this implies a connection, a link, a respect towards local and ancestral knowledges. However, this a minority line in what is the varied world of academia, and especially the mainstream in which the hegemonic vision predominates and where, furthermore, there is no openness to debating development models. In this line, I think that our function, as public function intellectuals, is to put these demands on the agenda, these big social debates and try to give visibility to these fights and these new horizons that are being outlined behind these fights. [04:12] This is a very asymmetric fight, not only in the fields where these fights evolve, but also in academia. And, yet, the hegemonic knowledge has a great capacity to deactivate criticism stemming from intellectuals who challenge these models of development. In Argentina, clearly, it’s seen when it comes to criticizing the agribusiness, or the soy model that is the heart of the economy, then all the powers join forces in order to disqualify those scientists or intellectuals that challenge it.
[04:52] Thank you very much.
No, please, thank you.
Key Concepts (excerpts taken from: “The ‘Commodities Consensus’ and Valuation Languages in Latin America” by Maristella Svampa, available on http://www.alternautas.net/blog/2015/4/22/the-commodities-consensus-and-valuation-languages-in-latin-america-1
Extractivism and Neoextractivism:
Extractivism, in a nutshell, refers to postcolonial national economies heavily based on export-oriented resource extraction by the use of foreign capital and know-how. Neoextractivism entails a reinforced extractivist model, yet under a scheme of governmentally controlled re-centralization and nationalization of these industries or resources, higher export taxes and the establishment of “compensatory” politics through increased social and infrastructural spending.
Amongst all the extractive activities, the most controversial today in Latin America is large-scale metal mining. Indeed, there is no country in Latin America with large-scale mining projects that does not have social conflicts — that bring communities into conflict with both mining companies, on one side, and governments, on the other — associated with them: Mexico, several Central American countries (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama), Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. According to OCMAL, there are currently 184 active conflicts, five of them cross-border, involving 253 affected communities across the region. This context of social unrest contributes directly or indirectly to the judicialization of social-environmental struggles and to the violation of human rights that in several cases, including Peru, Panama and Mexico, have ended in the murder of activists.
Commodities consensus:
The expression ‘commodities consensus’ has not only an economic but also a political-ideological connotation. It alludes to the idea that there is an agreement — tacit, although with the passing of the years ever more explicit — on the irrevocable or irresistible nature of the contemporary extractivist dynamic. This is particularly so considering the concurrence of the increasing global demand for primary goods and the current wealth levels, amplified by the ‘eldoradista’ vision of Latin America as a place with abundant natural resources par excellence.The confirmation of Latin America as an ‘adaptive economy’ in relation to the different accumulation cycles, and thus the acceptance of the place of the region in the world’s division of labour, is located at the core of both the Washington Consensus and the commodities consensus. This remains the case regardless of the industrializing and emancipatory rhetoric of progressive governments in the region asserting the economic autonomy and national sovereignty or the construction of a political Latin American space. In the name of ‘comparative advantages’ or the pure subordination to the global geopolitical order, depending on the case, progressive and conservative governments alike tend to accept the ‘destiny’ of the ‘commodities consensus’. Svampa is therefore interested in highlighting that, despite the differences in the political regimes existing today, the ‘consensus’ on the irresistible character of the extractivist approach ends up working as a historical horizon or threshold annulling the possibility of a debate on alternatives. The acceptance — tacit or explicit — of such a ‘consensus’ contributes to consolidating a new ideology of scepticism or resignation that strengthens, on its limits, the ‘sensibility and rationality’ of a progressive capitalism, imposing the idea that there are no alternatives to the current style of extractivist development. Consequently, every critical discourse or radical opposition is ultimately perceived as anti-modern, a negation of progress or simply in irrationality and ecological fundamentalism.
Eco-territorial turn:
In this context, the explosion of socio-environmental conflicts has corresponded to what Enrique Leff named “The environmentalisation of the indigenous and peasant struggles and the emergence of a Latin American environmental thought”. Within this social grid we can also find new environmental social movements, rural and urban (in small and medium-sized localities), which have a multi-class composition and are characterized by assembly-like types of governance and an increasing demand for autonomy. At the same time, some environmentalist NGOs — particularly small organizations that combine lobbying activities with a social movement logic, and cultural collectives, including those of intellectuals and experts, women and young people — play a significant role and accompany the actions of organizations and social movements. These actors should not be considered as ‘external allies’ but as stakeholders within this organizational and social grid.
In this context, what is particularly novel is the articulation amongst the different stakeholders (indigenous-peasant movements, socio-environmental movements, environmental NGOs, intellectual and expert networks, cultural collectives) which translates into a dialogue of knowledge and disciplines. This fosters the emergence of an expert-knowledge independent from mainstream, dominant discourses and the valuation of local knowledge, many of which have peasant-indigenous roots. These valuation languages of territoriality have promoted the approval of laws, even of legal frameworks, oriented toward the construction of new environmental institutional frameworks opposing the current extractivist public policies.
In general terms, and beyond specific differences (depending largely on the local and national contexts), the dynamics of socio-environmental struggles in Latin America have taken what we have called an ‘eco-territorial turn’. This entails a common language that illustrates the cross-over between the communitarian-indigenous matrix, defense of territory and environmentalist discourse: the commons, food sovereignty, environmental justice and buen vivir are some of the terms that express this productive engagement.
In sum, what Svampa calls an eco-territorial turn refers to the expansion rights as well as a societal dispute as to what could or should be understood as ‘true development’ or ‘alternative development’, ‘weak or strong sustainability’. At the same time, it puts concepts such as sovereignty, democracy and human rights at the centre of the debate: in effect, be it in a language of the defence of the territory and the commons, of human rights, of the collective rights of indigenous peoples, of the rights of nature or ‘buen vivir’, the demand of the communities is inscribed in the horizon of a radical democracy. This includes the democratization of collective decision-making and, indeed, the rights of peoples to say ‘no’ to projects that strongly affect the quality of life of the most vulnerable sectors of the population and compromise the livelihood of future generations.
Patrick Bond
(Below, see https://newpol.org/the-many-faces-of-the-left-in-ecuador/
- "The Many Faces of the Left in Ecuador: A look at the debate
between the progressive and Indigenous sectors" by Salvador
Schavelzon
With Pachakutik an immediate disappointment in the Congress, you can see Yaku Pérez and his new team of Somos Agua ecofeminist water defenders launch their movement's next actions here.)
The leader of the 'We are Water' movement, Yaku Pérez, announced that he will join the day of protests called by the FUT and Conaie, for next Tuesday, October 26, against the Government. "We are not violent but we are going to resist irreverently."
https://twitter.com/tomebamba/status/1450221659030540290
Sensitive to a painful reality that we are living as never before in Ecuador, we want to first of all to express our solidarity with our peasant farmer brothers and sisters of Canchis of the Guayas Manabí rivers who do not receive a fixed price for the price of milk, potatoes, potatoes, bananas, rice, coffee, cocoa bananas, rice, coffee, cocoa among others. Raising the cost of petrol month after month is an act of violence against the poorest. Sensitive to this reality and along with several of the country's social organisations, we join the call made by the workers. We too, as a political movement, are not alone, for elections. But we activate all the time in the defence of water, of the territories of life, of territories of life and hope. We invite all Ecuadorians to participate in a process of resistance will begin on Tuesday, 26 October in the main capitals of the country to tell Mr. Guillermo Lasso not to play with fire with the increase in gasoline prices, with mining and oil extractivism, with the precarisation of labour, with neoliberal policies. And we will be there in peaceful protest. We are peaceful. We are not violent. We will take to the streets… Then you will be complaining, you will be saying that we are that we are destabilising. We are not violent but if we are going to resist, it should and it must start with rebellion in the whole country in the face of neoliberal policies.
***
Yaku Pérez presents his own movement: Somos
Agua
The former presidential candidate parted ways with Pachakutik after the elections. He announced that they will participate in the 2023 sectionals and in the 2025 presidential elections.
On August 14, 2021, the former presidential candidate and former mayor of Azuay, Yaku Pérez, launched his new national political movement Somos Agua . After this, the organization will begin the registration process before the National Electoral Council (CNE).
Pérez assured that it will be an "ecofeminist" movement that will be based on four principles: environmentalism, the importance of education, community economics and ethics.
He announced that there will be those who oppose the registration of Somos Agua; but they hope to be able to participate in the sectional elections of 2023 and the presidential elections of 2025. For their registration, the movement will need to present the accessions of at least 1.5% of the register, that is, some 196,000 signatures.
Pérez also stressed to his followers that they seek these adhesions "without pressure" to the other political organizations, specifically mentioning Pachakutik and Unidad Popular. “They are not our adversaries. The real enemies are this government of bankers, oligarchs and transnational companies,” he said.
The
former presidential candidate separated from Pachakutik a few
days after the second electoral round, after that party joined
the ruling party for the election of Guadalupe Llori as
president of the Assembly.
***
Why Lasso may dissolve Ecuador's congress and trigger new elections
The possibility of the national assembly's dissolution and new presidential and parliamentary elections has surfaced in Ecuador, where three political opposition parties have become a major obstacle for President Guillermo Lasso.
After a bill containing labor, tax and investment reforms was sent back by the assembly without debate in a plenary session, Lasso warned lawmakers that if they continue to block his bills, he will use the so-called muerte cruzada mechanism.
This constitutional mechanism allows a president to dissolve the assembly but also requires the same leader to call new presidential and legislative elections.
The constitution says that this power can be exercised only once, in the first three years of a president's term.
Lasso's CREO party only has 12 seats out of a total of 137 in the assembly, but with its legislative alliances it can reach 26 votes. The three biggest opposition parties: the indigenous Pachakutik movement, the Social Christian party, and the UNES coalition of former president Rafael Correa, together have 88 legislators.
Before making the more drastic decision of muerte cruzada, Lasso is expected to try to exhaust the option of further dialogue with the assembly by meeting with the different legislative groups. He will also break up the rejected bill into three separate bills with modifications, and the labor, tax and investment bills will be submitted with priority status.
The assembly's treatment of these bills and the strength of several protests being prepared against the government are seen as key factors in Lasso's decision regarding muerte cruzada.
The indigenous movement, unions and various social groups are pressuring the government to freeze fuel prices - which have been adjusted every month since last year to be brought in line with international prices and end subsidies - and to meet a series of requests from each sector.
Local market observers consulted by BNamericas view the use of muerte cruzada as highly likely.
“I think we will probably arrive at muerte cruzada, Walter Spurrier, president of local consulting firm Grupo Spurrier, told BNamericas.
"It's clear that the Lasso government is not willing to govern with its hands tied. It's a risky bet but the president is not going to give in to the pressure," said Spurrier.
***
Ecuador’s legislature to
investigate president over Pandora Papers
AFP. October 11, 2021
QUITO — Ecuador’s legislature on Sunday voted to open an investigation into whether President Guillermo Lasso broke the law by keeping assets in tax havens, after the Pandora Papers leaks.
Lasso, Ecuador’s first right-wing president in 14 years, is among scores of politicians, businessmen and celebrities who appear in the Pandora Papers, an investigation by an international consortium of journalists that exposed secret offshore accounts.
The probe of Lasso’s activity will be conducted by the country’s Constitutional Commission within 30 days, the legislature said in a statement.
The investigation is meant to determine whether the 65-year-old president “may have breached” the norm that “prohibits candidates and public officials from having their resources or assets in tax havens,” the legislature said.
According to the Pandora Papers, Lasso controlled 14 offshore companies, most of them based in Panama, and closed them after the passage of a law in 2017 that prohibited presidential candidates from having companies in tax havens.
Lasso, who took office in May, has said that
years ago he had “legitimate investments in other countries” and
that he got rid of them to compete in the presidential election.
***
Ecuador: President Lasso
Rejects Indigenous Peoples Proposals
TeleSUR. October 5, 2021
On Monday, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) announced that it will continue to fight for President Guillermo Lasso to suspend the increase in fuel prices, extend the expiration date of credits contracted by citizens, stop mining in Indigenous territories, and reform his labor flexibilization bill.
"Our policy alternatives to deal with the economic recession prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic are just and efficient,” the CONAIE President Leonidas Iza stated and condemned Lasso’s continued refusal to approve them.
Indigenous peoples, farmers, workers, and students took to the streets in Quito to support the dialogue between the Lasso administration and the CONAIE. In this round of negotiations, Iza condemned that Ecuador’s financial system earned over US$377 million in 2020, while thousands of families went bankrupt.
"This situation exacerbated the emigration of 100,000 Ecuadorians," he stressed and insisted on the need to adopt policies to generate employment and stabilize prices of basic goods.
To this end, Iza urged Lasso to repeal three decrees whereby President Lenin Moreno (2017-2021) allowed fuel prices to increase monthly until they reached international prices.
"Oil is indispensable in all productive and commercial activities. An increase in its cost makes the price of all products more expensive," Iza warned.
Lasso claimed that his administration could not approve these proposals since it needs more time to analyze them. "In a two-hour meeting, we cannot cover all these issues," he stressed.
***
https://newpol.org/the-many-faces-of-the-left-in-ecuador/
The Many Faces of the Left in Ecuador
The elections in Ecuador earlier this year continue to inspire international debate among competing left currents over lessons to be learned and may serve as a revealing window through which to analyze the class interests of Latin American progressive movements stemming from the “Pink Tide.” The article challenges a widely circulated interpretation of the events (see, e.g., this DSA-sponsored forum), and will inform ongoing debates in North America and elsewhere over the meaning of “solidarity” and with whom and how that should be expressed. While the narrated episode concerns the candidacy of the Indigenous leader Yaku Pérez, the article is not an assessment of that candidate’s merits or demerits (indeed, the article concludes by directing focus away from electoral politics), but uses the lens of these events, particularly, the progressives’ desperate attacks against Pérez between the first and second rounds of the elections, to shine penetrating light into the nature of the Correist movement and their progressive allies worldwide and their fateful actions in alienating and persecuting the Indigenous movements that first brought them to power.
It is striking the fury with which defenders of the South American progressive governments, from different countries, devoted themselves to biased criticism and mudslinging against an Indigenous presidential candidate during a critical moment of the Ecuadorian election process earlier this year. In the first round of the Ecuadorian elections that took place on February 7, 2021, Yaku Pérez, of the Quechua-Cañari people, with a long history in the defense of water against mining projects in his region, and a leader of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and of the Confederation of Peoples of Kichwa Nationality (ECUARUNARI), received 1,800,000 votes (exceeding 19%) and fell short of second place by just a few thousand votes. The result, which meant that the banker Guillermo Lasso, rather than Pérez, would face Andrés Arauz, the candidate of Rafael Correa, who is exiled in Belgium, in the runoff election of April 11, was contested without success in the courts.
This episode can be read as emblematic for understanding the limits and dilemmas of a politically weakened progressivism that needs to face up to the costs of the kind of politics it implemented.The social media campaigns against Yaku Pérez came into play while the vote count from the first round was being determined and for several days the Indigenous candidate remained in second place. When the count was concluded, the banker Guillermo Lasso, of the political party CREO, Creando Oportunidad (Creating Opportunity), reached second place. This was thought to be a more favorable result for the Correist candidate, Andrés Arauz, of the political party UNES, Unión por la Esperanza (Union for Hope), who had received the most votes, 32%, in the first round.Yaku Pérez is an attorney and has earned advanced degrees in the management of watershed basins, environmental law, Indigenous justice, and criminal law, and resigned his position as prefect of Azuay Province in order to run for president. He was also jailed several times in connection with water defense struggles, was kidnapped by a Chinese mining company, and suffered the expulsion of his partner, of foreign nationality, also an activist, after a mobilization during the time of Correa’s government.
Juan Carlos Monedero, a politician from the Spanish political party Podemos with political ties to Latin American progressivism, participated in the February 7th elections in Ecuador as an election observer. In an interview with teleSUR the day after the election, Monedero set the tone for what would be heard for several days. He considered Pérez’s candidacy to have been manufactured in a lab, financed from abroad. He spoke of a “false candidate” and “fake Indigenous people”, while he defended Arauz as the candidate who would enable Ecuador to “take its rightful place in the world again”. This distrust concerning Yaku Pérez’s Indigenous identity and his candidacy arises from Monedero’s notion that the adoption of an Indigenous name could only be intended to deceive, and out of ignorance of the Indigenous world he compares it to adopting a new name when entering a Catholic religious order. For an aggrieved Monedero the anti-mining struggle is not genuine either, and he denied that Yaku Pérez has any collective support or a plan for the country.
Monedero warned on TV of a plot to prevent the election of Andrés Arauz. This plot consisted of seeking to replace Guillermo Lasso with Yaku Pérez in the runoff election since the latter was thought to have greater possibilities of defeating Arauz, the candidate who replaced Correa, who could not run for either president or vice president due to his conviction on corruption charges. The operation would be supported by the United States and carried out by means of favorable coverage in the media. It is strange to see this analysis coming from one of the founders of Podemos, which became a phenomenon in Spanish politics exactly in this way, with extensive media coverage of a candidate who would create a space beyond the prevailing tradition of polarized politics. Within a few days progressive analysts and political actors would carry out a smear campaign against Yaku Pérez, which they only dropped once the banker Lasso came out ahead of the Indigenous candidate in the vote count, and there was no longer the threat of a difficult race against Pérez. Another Spaniard close to the South American progressive governments, Alfredo Serrano, of the Latin American Strategic Center of Geopolitics (CELAG), declared, “We can say that Yaku is a non-progressive candidate who managed to get part of the progressive and Indigenous vote“, and also denied that the votes really reflected support for Pérez himself. Downplaying Pérez’s own strength as a candidate, he wrote that these votes could have been for any other Indigenous leader who ran, while failing to apply the same line of reasoning to the Correist candidate.
For some days the goal was to to
deconstruct Pérez’s candidacy, whether to prepare for a runoff race
against him or to stop the electoral results from being
questioned.The high number of votes for the Pachakutik
Plurinational Unity Movement (MUPP), the political arm,
founded in 1995, of the now-divided Confederation of
Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), is explained
by the growth of the Indigenous movement in the Amazon and
mountain regions of the country, and undoubtedly reflects
the political impact left by the eleven days of blockades
and protests in October 2019. Begun in protest against an
increase in fuel prices ordered by President Lenín Moreno,
with a decisive role played by CONAIE, the protests voiced
the concerns and discontent which was also manifested by a
million spoiled ballots. In the October uprising CONAIE had
made clear that its rejection of the government of Lenín
Moreno would not mean a rapprochement with Correa, who during his time in office
criminalized hundreds of Indigenous leaders, and that
opposition which extends across the Correa/anti-Correa
divide was expressed in its choice of Yaku Pérez.
These first-round election results were a defeat for President Lenín Moreno, who after breaking politically with Correa, to whom he was vice president and the successor candidate, ended up on the sidelines due to pressure from the streets. But it was also a disappointing result for the Correists, who had hoped to win in the first round, capitalizing on the disrepute of the current government. The traditional right, in a front headed by Lasso, was also weakened, affected by the mishandling of the pandemic in Guayaquil. For Pachakutik it was a victory which allowed them to take up the October 2019 anti-neoliberal struggle again, as well as advance its anti-extractivist agenda that seeks to give rise to a different model of development for the country.Alicia Castro, whose background is in the Peronist renewal union movement of the 1990s and who was formerly the Kirchnerist ambassador to Venezuela and the United Kingdom, joined the smear campaign against Yaku Pérez and asked, via Twitter, “Who is the candidate @yakuperez who wants to upset the elections in #Ecuador, allied with @Almagro_OEA2015; he can confuse some misinformed people as an ‘environmentalist’, ‘Indigenist’, or ‘New Left’. But he is a fraud. Nothing new under the sun, since La Malinche.”
Questioning people’s
self-identification as Indigenous is a common part of the
usual strategies of colonial dispossession. The argument of
“fake Indians” is used to promote expansion of the agricultural
frontier into Indigenous territories all over South America,
and to defend development projects that threaten their water
and ways of life. Allied with the power of agribusiness and
large-scale mining interests, the Correists know that Yaku
Pérez and CONAIE are an obstacle to the predatory model with
which they govern. The election attacks, with charges of
plots that proved to be groundless, should be understood,
then, as a continuation of the strong repression and
harassment against Indigenous organizations and territories
that took place in the Correa years.
Persecution by progressive South
American governments against leaders of Indigenous movements
and environmental struggles is nothing new on the continent.
Nor is the greater comfort that progressives feel in running
against right-wing candidates, as they wage dirty campaigns
against possible alternative candidates in the first round
of a presidential election. But that an Indigenous candidate
would challenge a progressive candidate from the left is a
new phenomenon in Ecuador as well as in the rest of Latin
America. The new parliamentary left that looks for
institutional space in the region also participated in the
campaign against Yaku Pérez. This kind of left which brings
together dissidents, “critical support”, new leaders that run in
presidential elections in Chile and Peru, typically stays
under the wing of the political influence of progressives or
leftists who were in or remain in government, thus
reinforcing its political influence and resistance to
change. Timid criticism of a dependent model that makes life
unviable is only made behind closed doors and serves to
portray the economic model and the consensus views of those
in power as the only alternative.
The hope that Pachakutik would
reach second place unified a divided Indigenous movement.
Conflicting leaderships and visions were divided over to
what degree class should be emphasized, openness to
alliances with the mestizo sectors, willingness to engage in
confrontation in the streets, and which individual leaders
to support. At this juncture, however, they set out to mobilize in defense of the vote, while still maintaining their
political differences. Facing a weak right wing, and a
progressivism whose support had eroded and that is unable to
raise a debate over the model of development in the whole
region, the various tendencies of the Indigenous movement
and of the critical non-developmentalist left display
tendencies, contradictions, and agreements which truly
matter as a possible step forward in South American
politics. In these debates some proposals of
Yaku Pérez are criticized by Leónidas Iza, who played a
leading role in the October uprising, and other leaders. It
is a necessary debate in which progressives did not take
part, as they threw themselves into a campaign marked by a
logic of electioneering and of polarization with the right
that would leave no room for anything else.
The Pérez campaign challenged the
election results with technical data, asking for a recount
of 20,050 observed voting records (out of a total of
39,000). The Electoral Court only agreed to review 31 voting
records, which was later reduced to 28, and with which the
Pachakutik vote was increased by 612 votes, confirming that
votes had been wrongly attributed in the initial count to
candidates who were below third place. Based on this
discrepancy there were mobilizations, and an appeal was
presented which was not heard in the Court and was
subsequently also denied by the Electoral Commission. Alarms
were sounded among the progressives when, with the vote
count undetermined, a meeting was held with Lasso to jointly
request a recount in some provinces, a meeting which did not
end up settling the matter. It was Lasso who abandoned the
recount request once his slight advantage was established.
Yaku Pérez denounced fraud aimed at keeping him out of the runoff election, presenting indications of irregularities. Progressives considered this claim to be part of another fraud, one against Arauz, and that risked causing a constitutional crisis, discrediting Pérez once again, whose presence in the game would be merely a maneuver by the right and the United States to stop the Correists. As progressives from other countries also enter the fray, a certain short-circuiting manifests between legalistic, militant, and fake news lines of argument and state authoritarianism: First they used their own power to criminalize leaders or militarize Indigenous territories to impose mining projects, as in the Shuar and Sarayaku cases, and later we see them trying to raise public sympathy for themselves in South America as the victims of “lawfare”.
If, following the CLACSO
researchers Adoración Guamán and Soledad Stoessel, we understand “lawfare” as “a widely used tool that combines media
manipulation of public opinion, physical and legal
repression, imprisonment and criminalization of the
political opposition”, we see that this is exactly the
situation that the Indigenous movement faced with Correa in
the defense of their territories, and also Yaku Pérez in the
smear campaign that denied his Indigenous identity and the
legitimacy of his struggle and election to high office. But
the researchers are applying the concept to the persecution
of Correa and are even joining the wave of suspicion against
Yaku Pérez by using another common argument in the media
deconstruction that the candidate suffered, that depicts him
as isolated from an Indigenous movement that the
progressives imagine to be aligned with the Correists.
The dirty campaign also denied
his environmentalism and linked him to the right and to
imperialism, accusing him of being a channel of U.S.
interventionism. In the days after the election, progressive
militants prepared to denounce a coup, as they did in
Bolivia in 2019 and in Brazil in 2016. Latin American
progressives saw Yaku Pérez as an ally of Luis Almagro, the
Secretary General of the Organization of American States
(OAS), which played a part in tipping the scale toward the
resignation of Evo Morales in 2019 when it recommended that
the elections be held again after being invited by Morales
himself to observe the elections. The philosopher Luciana
Cadahia, a Correist sympathizer, denounced in a public Facebook post a pact between Yaku
Pérez and the banker Lasso that would be a “little Hegelian trick” orchestrated by Almagro,
and with the help of the press, in which the “supposed” Indigenous movement, acting out of an
accord with the oligarchs, would find a sophisticated way to
defeat Arauz by forming an alliance between the second and
third place candidates in the election, while avoiding the
“high price” that Almagro had to pay for his involvement in the Bolivian crisis.
Faced with the strength of the
Yaku Pérez campaign, another approach would have been to
open up a political dialogue about the model of development
and the agenda of October 2019. In an about-face to the
dirty campaign, and showing how unfair the questioning of
Yaku Pérez’s left and Indigenous credentials was, after the
election Andrés Arauz himself stressed on his Twitter
account: “Progressivism + Plurinational Unity + Social
Democracy = 70%. On February 7th, the Ecuadorian people already won”, adding
together the Correist votes with those of Yaku Pérez and
also those of the fourth-place candidate, Xavier Hervas of
the Democratic Left Party. Far from denying the
anti-neoliberal stance of his opponents, and even drawing
near to them to gain their voters and presenting the banker
Lasso as the principal opposition to Correism. But it is doubtful to what extent, beyond
elections, anti-neoliberal and environmentalist agendas
could be advanced by the progressives.
The ambiguous nature of this game
stands out as different faces of progressivism are
displayed, on different occasions, to achieve the objectives
of what is, nevertheless, one and the same movement. Before
the election the Correist movement was focused on defending
against an attack that involved the Attorney General’s Office of Colombia, which claimed that evidence had
been found on the cell phone of a captured soldier of the
Army of National Liberation (ELN, by its initials in
Spanish) showing that the Colombian guerrilla organization
had funded the Arauz campaign. The damaging press coverage
that followed incited the mobilization of institutional
progressive networks in response. The Puebla Group, which
brings together ex-presidents, academics, and legal experts
(among others, Andrés Arauz and Rafael Correa) and
participated as election observers, denounced an attack on democracy.
With the signatures of Axel Kicillof, Guilherme Boulos, Daniel Jadué, Gustavo Petro, Pablo Iglesias, and Verónika Mendoza, the “Espacio Futuro” (Future Space) forum, which forms the nucleus of a younger generation of progressive leaders, issued a declaration opposing any change in the dates of the elections, thus joining the campaign that dismissed, without knowledge, the charges of irregularities that the Indigenous candidate was bringing before the Ecuadorian Electoral Court and Commission. In a political game in which they appeal to the rule of law when it serves their purposes and cast themselves as observers of the elections to protect democracy, they did not pay the least attention to the evidence of irregularities that was presented. The tactic is to use academically prestigious cadres to broadcast talk of a coup, which has, in many cases, justly defended progressivism, but then maintain a partisan silence concerning similar practices within their own camp.
Against the Indigenous movement a very different face appears, involving criminalization, pursued not by democratic legal argumentation under the rule of law, but involving persecution by police and legal harassment, not to mention the very assaults on territories against which Yaku Pérez and CONAIE resisted. The campaign against Yaku Pérez, which is reminiscent of Correa’s defamatory TV broadcasts against the Indigenous leader and his partner, Manuela Picq, also an activist, spread over social media when Pérez appeared to be headed to the runoff election and the progressive movement imagined a new version of a “new kind of coup”. Fears already awakened by the machinations of the right (which indeed exist) mobilized a media machine that, arrogantly and rapidly ceased to distinguish its institutional mandate as a media organization from a project of power that, in the name of the people’s interests, and faithful to the style of the statist authoritarian left, is unable to cope with differences.
Correa’s Citizen Revolution carries tensions and ambiguities that are expressed, as in the MAS party in Bolivia and other places, by the international alliances that support them. In contrast to the claims of lawfare that unite Correa and Cristina Kirchner to the legalist defense with which the Workers Party (PT, by its initials in Portuguese) responded to the political trial of Dilma, the very different accusations against Yaku Pérez coming from media associated with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela tend to allege collaboration with imperialism or the right.
Against this narrative that
painted Yaku Pérez as a supporter of South American coups,
and as a potential instrument of a U.S.-backed coup against
Correa, stands the fact that on June 12, 2019 Yaku Pérez declared his support for Lula da
Silva as a representative of the Andean
Coordination of Indigenous Organizations (CAOI, by its
initials in Spanish). In the vigil held across from where
the ex-president was detained pursuant to a warrant issued
in connection with Operation “Lava Jato”, he declared, “I am here to support you, Lula. We are with you,
and we will not rest, we will be in resistance.” Concerning
international investment, Pérez complained about the
aggressive attitude of China in connection with extractivism
and human rights violations. Concerning the United States,
however, he said that “the hawk is a hawk”, but spoke positively about
some policies of Biden.
The automatic alignment of South American progressives against an Indigenous candidate is quite striking if we look at the positions that the Correists are defending, not only concerning socio-environmental issues. Three days before the elections, at the close of Correa’s campaigning efforts from exile, he appealed to conservative voters by criticizing Yaku Pérez for his position approving abortions up to three or four months of pregnancy, referring to the position in terms of “hedonistic abortion” and “because I carelessly dedicated myself to a frenzied sexual activity, I can just get rid of the child without meeting any requirement.” Rafael Correa went so far as to threaten to resign in 2013 if the legislature approved abortion, and proposed expelling the women who supported this position from the party. His conservatism goes beyond the war that was declared against Indigenous peoples for their natural resources and can also be seen in the push for the Family Plan, whose recommendation for sex education was “abstinence and values”.
A tweet by Yaku Pérez from November 2016,
recirculated by Correa and others when Pérez was contending
for second place, evidenced Pérez’s anti-corruption stance, saying: “#Corrupción is what brought down the
governments of Dilma and Cristina; now what’s left is for @MashiRafael and Maduro to fall.
It’s only a matter of time.” Naturally, those today
who criticize the lawfare against Cristina Kirchner or
against Correa himself, or who see the fall of Dilma and Evo
as operations orchestrated from Washington to impose
right-wing governments, will be inclined to distrust Peréz.
But anti-corruption stances,
however liberal they may seem, are not just banners used by
the right against progressives. It is almost mandatory for
any new left, as it was for Podemos in Spain, which despite
political ties stopped defending governments like those of
Maduro and Ortega, or new lefts in Chile and Peru, when
progressivism came to power. Nor is opposition to Dilma
Rousseff unusual, given that she approved anti-terrorism
laws, criminalized activists, and allied herself with
conservative pastors, agribusiness leaders, banks, and large
mining interests, even ceding government ministries to these
sectors. Like the highway in TIPNIS in Bolivia, and the
petroleum in Yasuní National Park in Ecuador, Dilma is
paying the political cost of having authorized Belo Monte, a
mammoth and badly conceived dam, whose incalculable harms
are already being seen, which financed her campaign and is
emblematic of the environmental and ethnocidal destruction
that is taking place in the Amazon region. In a recent
video, referring to the popular June 2013 protests in
Brazil, Dilma Rousseff referred to talks with Putin and
Erdogan in which her political downfall was interpreted as,
more than a coup or lawfare, a hybrid war promoted by the
North American power.
Only out of complete ignorance of the dynamics of Indigenous organizations of the last decades is it possible to characterize NGOs as being able to manipulate Indigenous peoples into mobilizing to oppose projects that, in fact, leave their territories polluted with cyanide or without water. A dirty campaign can be spoken of because its promoters are well aware of the history of the Indigenous organizations (with which progressives were allied) as well as the role of Yaku Pérez and CONAIE. The discourse about NGOs influencing Indigenous groups to attack national sovereignty is nothing more than a campaign to defend economic and political interests, favorable to large-scale mining and unrestrained oil exploration. It is exactly the same discourse used by Bolsonaro and the Peruvian or Colombian right wings to encroach on the Amazon.
On the other hand, tweets of
little impact from years ago were recirculated in an effort
to undermine a candidacy, denouncing a coup. But in reality,
this shows how worried they were to face a more competitive
candidate in the second round who knew how to put his finger
in the wounds of progressivism’s shortcomings and who directly represented the
social movements. What remains ignored is the political
debate that has been taking place ever since the
progressives made clear their developmentalist agenda and
went on the offensive against the historic Indigenous
organizations throughout the region. A more Bolivarian line of
deconstruction of Pérez’s candidacy, even by movements
aligned with the Chinese government, is seen through an
article published in the website of the Landless Workers’
Movement (MST, by its initials in Portuguese) of Brazil,
summarizing an article by the North American journalist Ben
Norton, signed by the editors, with the title “The Ecosocialist Candidate of Ecuador:
Indigenous and a Supporter of Coups d’état in Latin
America”. From the Bonifacio Foundation, tied to Aldo
Rebelo, ex-minister of Lula and Dilma from the Communist
Party of Brazil (PCdoB, by its initials in Portuguese), it
was affirmed that Yaku Pérez was a trojan horse of foreign powers. The article states that foreign
interests are being defended under identity,
environmentalist, and Indigenist banners, by means of
contact with NGOs. In the Cubadebate portal, Atilio Borón
would take the same approach, declaring that the Indigenous candidate’s
Indigenous and left discourse was nothing more
than a ploy to serve imperialist interests.
On Kawsachin News, an
English-language news service of the federations of coca
producers of Chapare, Ollie Vargas accused Yaku Pérez of using fake news
to incite crimes against Venezuelan migrants in Ecuador. The
Indigenous candidate had referred to allegations of
intervention by “Venezuelan brothers” in a conversation that went
viral, without us being able to know the context, in a short
video which associates him with the anti-Venezuelan and
xenophobic discourse of Lenín Moreno. The popular Brazilian
YouTuber Jones Manoel associated Yaku Pérez with Ernesto
Araújo, Bolsanaro’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, of the extreme
conservative right wing, and other political figures in
Brazil. The attacks, slanders, and fake news that circulated
concerning Yaku Pérez reflect the position of the recent revisionist wave of Stalin. Accordingly, José Correa Leite has likened them to
the Stalinist operations of “amalgam” in the 1950s.
Progressives who are in government or who are struggling to
return employ every kind of resource, with a wide spectrum
of politics and discursive styles.
This line of accusation, which
must be understood in the framework of a heated
communications war in which imperialism, Communism, and
Nazism are common currency, was based on the tendentious construction of Ben Norton, who in his blog criticizes
postmodernism and anarchist, environmentalist, and primitivist
currents, and depicted the Indigenous candidate as a coup
supporter backed by the United States. A photo with the
United States ambassador taken while carrying out official
functions as Prefect of Azuay Province, the tweets
concerning displaced South American leaders, and a curious
combination of arguments about the Pachakutik Party and the
Indigenous movement. It is striking how, on the one hand,
Yaku Pérez is depicted as a leader who is isolated from the
rest of the movement, while, on the other hand, funds of
Third World aid from North American foundations sent to the
Indigenous movement are presented as proof of his role in
service to the United States, without specifying any details
about these funds or showing any direct link to Yaku Pérez.
An open letter criticizing
Norton’s article and another article from The Jacobin
magazine, signed by academics and intellectuals such as
Isabelle Stengers, Arturo Escobar, Miriam Lang, and Alberto
Acosta, “Stop Racist and Misogynist Attacks on the
Emergent Indigenous, Eco-Feminist Left in Latin America,
and Address the Crisis in Today’s Ecuador”, led to the immediate removal of
Ben Norton’s article by the North American left publication
Monthly Review. The progressives’ double game short-circuits
as their institutional behavior and rhetoric contradict: In
the most recent electoral contests in Brazil, Argentina,
Bolivia, and now Ecuador, in order to avoid problems with
the justice system and opposing votes, they have chosen to
back moderate and liberal candidates (Haddad, Fernández,
Arce, and Arauz). But when it comes to these social media
quarrels and not actual governing, they strike a more
radical Bolivarian, Leninist, and nationalist tone.
The letter, signed by dozens
seeking redress, rightly seeks to defend Yaku Pérez and his
partner against the misleading attacks by framing the
discussion in its real terms: state-developmentalist
progressives, who combine populist and liberal faces,
seeking to attack an anti-extractivist left that expresses
the Indigenous position in the conflicts of the Correist
years, as well as the position of other progressive banners
such as women’s, plurinational, and LGBT rights which the
Correists either did not know how to represent or abandoned.
But for Ben Norton in his article, environmentalist
criticisms against progressives are just marketing spin.
With reports from Venezuela and Nicaragua, as well as
Ecuador, the article depicts the United States as “desperate” to avoid the “socialist wave” that spread through Latin America
in the first decade of the 21st Century, and found in Yaku
Pérez a “perfect tool”.
In another letter, the Indigenous leader is
presented as a candidate who “fights against the neoliberal offensive while
breaking from the vices of caudillismo and the systemic corruption of the
old authoritarian left, and challenges, in the name of life
and land, the serious limitations of the extractivist
development model”. This letter denounced the misleading and
abusive social media campaign and was signed by Marina
Silva, who experienced a severe dirty campaign herself when
she ran against Dilma Rousseff in the 2010 and 2014
elections. Latin American intellectuals who suffered media
lynchings for their criticism of the Bolivian and Venezuelan
governments, such as Rita Segato and Maristella Svampa, also
signed the letter.
In one of Yaku Pérez’s tweets quoted by his
detractors, he compared the policy of intervention by Correa
in CONAIE Indigenous organizations with Evo Morales’s treatment of CONAMAQ, the Confederation of
Allyus and Marqas of Qullasuyo. In both cases organization
headquarters were invaded, and efforts were made to create
parallel organizations in favor of projects of territorial
destruction, with co-optation or buying-off of leaders with
state benefits. The tweet also compared the case of Yasuní
in Ecuador with that of TIPNIS in Bolivia. In the case of
the former, Correa opened up oil exploitation in the Yasuní
National Park after a failed appeal to the world for money
to protect the park from such exploitation, which Correa
initially argued would be harmful. It was in this spirit
that Article 71 of the Constitution approved in 2008
introduced the legal framework of the Rights of Nature, and
although attempts are made to disguise the fact, Correa’s
break with this agenda is undeniable.
TIPNIS was a turning point in Bolivia, in 2011, when the government of the MAS
party pushed a campaign and political move to build a
highway that would run through the largest national park and
Indigenous territory of the country, with opposition from
the historic Indigenous movement that was brutally
repressed. In February 2021, as campaign manager for the
regional elections, Evo Morales offered to continue the
construction of the highway in exchange for
votes for his candidate in the Department of Beni. In his
tweet, Yaku Pérez compared Correa with Evo Morales with
respect to several common characteristics: “Both ran for re-election, authoritarianism,
machismo, extractivism, and populists.” These stances are
consistent with the position of the Indigenous movement in
the continent and are not a position taken with elections in
mind.
In a similar dispute, García Linera spearheaded the Bolivian government’s criticism of the Indigenous movement and the NGOs that accompanied the Indigenous struggles that brought the MAS party to power and in which he himself had been an advisor. The line of argumentation that converges with that of the military and the Latin American conservative right, in saying that the Indigenous are playing for foreign interests, dishonestly mixed foundations tied to the North American power establishment with NGOs which provide militant and legal support to Indigenous people. As we see in the government of Bolsonaro, presenting Indigenous people in favor of agribusiness or creating pro-government Indigenous organizations, like in Bolivia. One of the accusations that Ben Norton made against Manuela Picq was precisely to mention that she denounced the ecocide of the Bolivian forest fires of 2019. According to Norton, she thereby helped to pave the way for the coup. In reality, she helped to denounce how, with decrees in favor of forest burning, obtained by powerful agribusiness interests allied with the MAS party, the government was incentivizing deforestation, just as it happened in Brazil where this was criticized by progressives.
On the one hand, the Puebla Group, Espacio Futuro, and the Progressive International, with social-democratic or progressive heads of state and other political actors, reject maneuvers like those of the Colombian attorney general, with sensitivity to the disputes that took place in the Electoral Court, and sought to prevent the recounting of votes. On the other hand, the campaign of character assassination against positions which in reality ought to be debated; media lynchings and personal attacks like those which the MAS party carried out against Gualberto Cusi, the Aymara judge who won the most votes in the 2011 direct election to the high courts and was dismissed under pressure from the government; as Rafael Correa routinely defended extractive exploitation, framing protests as a negative phenomenon by means of anti-terrorism laws, as did Bachelet with the Mapuche.
There is no way to correct or soften these maneuvers that are carried out frequently at different scales, and they are indispensable elements of a type of political construction that should raise concerns among their honest supporters. Against the eternal patience of the “critical left”, one wonders how many outrages are necessary to understand that the defense of extractivism is a top political priority, even though it involves violating rights and breaking with Indigenous peoples. In the end, the calculation that considers it strategic to maintain popular support through state policies that are detrimental to respect for Indigenous territories always prevails. It is also by this logic that the February 7th elections worried progressives. The rivers of oil money for public policies during the Correist years, and the marketing campaigns with much more money than the Indigenous movement, were not sufficient to allow electoral victory by an ample majority that would give legitimacy to the policies of this political project. It is there that the strength of an uprising such as that of October 2019 should be considered.
Raúl Zibechi is right when he
says that “popular insurrections do not fit in the ballot
box”, observing how, even as much as the October
uprising was a watershed moment in recent history,
expressing the resistance of rural communities and
medium-sized cities, the ballot boxes do not change the
balance of forces of a parliament dominated by support for
extractivism and that does not question the neoliberal
model. In her Facebook profile, Alejandra Santillana assesses after the
elections that, “The streets and the construction of organized
social fabric continue to be a determining path for what
happens on the electoral plane. Imagining a feminist,
popular, Plurinational, peasant project continues to be a
pending matter that will not be resolved solely by dialogue
with the state, our entry into it, or institutional
reforms”.
Once the matter of the need to
reject a dirty campaign is clear, it is pertinent to discuss
the differences concerning Yaku Pérez’s proposals that generated
internal opposition within the CONAIE Indigenous
movement, and the different strategies of confrontation and
dialogue that also created differences during the government
of Lenín Moreno. The protests experienced in several Latin
American countries before the pandemic remain latent and
open up a debate that does not fit within the restricted
parameters of the right vs. the progressives.
Criticism of the legal harassment
of progressive leaders, and the advance of the right in the
region, should not mean ignoring the contradictions and the
conflicts of anti-neoliberal, Indigenous territorial, and
class struggle that will mark the period that is emerging,
beyond the limits of progressivism. The extreme right is
growing in the region, in fact, because the progressive
governments joined the political class which the majority
see as disconnected power elites. Leftists of order, who fit
comfortably in the realm of an authoritarian state, cannot
propose another model of development even if, on some level,
they understand the legitimacy of the Indigenous struggles.
As a supporter of the Correists, Valeria Coronel acknowledges that “Arauz would have to be much more emphatic that
his agenda is that of the October protests, would have to
get closer to the Indigenous movement and break down the
barriers that were established at some point between Correa
and the Indigenous movement”. This does not seem possible,
and in the different countries there were many efforts on
the part of the State to get closer to the Indigenous
leaders. In the aforementioned text by Guamán and Stoessel it is stated that, “The Ecuador that today is expressed in the ballot
boxes has shown its willingness to overcome said
polarization [Lasso/Correa]. This reveals the urgency of
renewing public agendas with a more progressive element in
the area of rights (sexual, reproductive, associative,
union, and citizen participation) and concerning the
ecological question.” But is that really possible for the
Correists who persecuted and imprisoned Indigenous leaders,
and who seek to reach conservative and religious audiences
with talk of hedonistic abortion just a few days before the
election?
In an overview of current Latin
American politics, Claudio Katz distinguishes between moderate and
radical progressives, the moderates in the Brazil of the PT
and in the “latecomer progressivisms” of Mexico and Argentina
today, and the radicals in Bolivia and Venezuela, though
there are questions concerning the successors of Chávez and
Morales. Katz advocated voting for Arauz, as the only
alternative that the Indigenous movement should get behind
in the runoff election. He admits that the statements of
Yaku Pérez in the 2017 elections, in which he declared, “I prefer a banker over a dictator,” and which
from a binary logic is read as supporting neoliberalism, is
a consequence of the “very intense conflict”, with the government
insisting on expanding mining extraction, and that included
more than 500 prosecutions against Indigenous leaders. But
he returns to the lap of progressivism whose radical and
moderate faces appear to be two moments of one and the same
classic rhetorical game in the nationalisms of the 20th
Century, always closing ranks with the defense of order of a
single project of power. This position flows out of his
characterization of the Indigenous movement in two aspects,
one that is oriented to class, which could converge with the
Correists, and the other that is “ethnicist”, of Yaku Pérez, with corporate
demands, suspect links to NGOs, and echoes of neoliberal
ideology. Katz also suggests that the ethnicist current
could bring bloody ethnic conflicts like those of the
Balkans, the Middle East, or Africa to Latin America, citing
analysis along these lines by José Antonio Figueroa.
Together with progressives that
use legalistic denunciation and make accusations of
collaboration with imperialism, “critical” progressives close ranks under the
impossible hope of a rapprochement with those actors whom
they persecute and seek to destroy through media attacks.
The solution of Katz and others points to Bolivia, where “the leaders of the MAS party introduced the
plurinational State, respect for the languages and customs
of the communities, and the proud recognition of the
Indigenist tradition”. For them it is the incorporation of
the Indigenous agenda in order to be able to continue with
the agenda of development. When followed up with political
actions, this incorporation can only mean intervention of
the State in the Indigenous movement in order to divide it.
It means clearing the path of elements of resistance and
struggle against the extractivist model, while conceding
merely cosmetic reforms, and continuing to pursue the model
of private or state-run businesses exploiting natural
resources, while lacking the strength and hegemonic
legitimacy that progressives in Latin America today know
they have lost.
In the end, the Correists’ strategy of mud-slinging and co-optation proved unable to return them to power, because the Indigenous movement resisted it, calling for voters to cast spoiled ballots in protest. Between the first and second rounds, the Correists engaged in a fierce campaign to divide the Indigenous movement and to win the support of what leaders it could. After the congress of CONAIE approved a call to cast spoiled ballots, its president issued a statement supporting the Correist candidate. The Indigenous movement was thus divided into two positions: spoil the ballots (the majority position, backed by the movement’s collective decisions), and vote for Arauz. Though falling short of the majority needed to legally invalidate the elections, the number of spoiled ballots was the highest in the nation’s history, 16%. This contributed significantly to the banker Lasso’s upset victory over the candidate of Correa on April 11, which, in turn, has inflamed renewed Correist resentment towards the Indigenous movement, which they blame, rather than their own long history of betrayal, co-optation, and persecution against the Indigenous movement, for their candidate’s defeat.
The Correist stances were echoed in social media by progressive militants throughout Latin America. The dirty campaign of the first round of the elections quickly gave way in the second round to traditional progressive rhetoric against neoliberalism, banks, imperialism, etc., framed in terms of the age-old struggle of Good vs. Evil. But the ferocious attacks against an indispensable critique of extractivism, carried out by “good” progressives, which were a root cause of the split between the Indigenous movement and Correism, should move us to think beyond the elections. When electoral representation and language are the dominant focus, it is hard to transcend the media wars that prevent substantive discussion of the social model’s functioning at its roots. The rebuilding of the Indigenous movement’s unity and strength in resisting assaults on territories will also need to take place beyond the electoral realm.
Salvador Schavelzon is an Argentine-educated social anthropologist working as a professor at the Federal University of Sao Paulo. He has researched and published on Latin American politics with articles and papers examining political processes in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, and Argentina. He is the co-author, with New Politics contributor Jeffery R. Webber, of a book chapter entitled "Podemos and Latin America."
Patrick Bond
The Guardian
Want to know what a just transition to a green economy looks like? Ask the workers
People don’t need catchprases: they need resources and empowerment so they can secure good green jobs
- Anna Markova is the Trades Union Congress’s co-lead on climate and industrial policy
If you really want to know what a just transition looks like, don’t start with the official speeches of Cop26. Ideally, don’t even ask me. Ask those who need it most.
Ask a teenager in south Wales, where coal mining jobs have not been replaced by alternatives and unemployment levels are among the highest in the UK. Ask the oil rig worker who has been travelling to work by helicopter for 15 years but is having to pay £2,000 for yet another helicopter safety training course to be able to work on a wind turbine. Ask the Eurostar driver who does not know if the train she drives will still be running in two months’ time. Ask, if you can, one of the Uyghur people forced by Chinese authorities to work in a labour camp to make polysilicone for solar panels.
They can tell you about an unjust transition – the opposite of how we want to change our lifestyles and economies to meet net zero. Just transition mustn’t become a global policy-speak catchphrase, reduced to the intersection between environmental and social concerns, or vague promises of skills training. A real just transition makes sure people don’t lose out as their lives and livelihoods are transformed by climate action. Like the up to 600,000 workers in UK manufacturing and supply chains, whose future employment relies on government and industry investing to retool and decarbonise.
Here’s who is building a just transition: the Scottish fabrication yard worker, who is campaigning to make the foundations for offshore wind turbines being built in sight of their town. It’s the car engineer in Birmingham fighting to transition the factory to make electric vehicles. The Swedish steel mill worker making the world’s first batch of zero-carbon steel, soon to be used to make Volvo cars. The postie, perhaps the one who delivered your online shopping this morning, working with colleagues to manage the switch to an electric vehicle fleet for Royal Mail.
Or it’s the South African coalminer marching in the streets for a transition plan that gets her and her colleagues a clean power job in a public energy service. The teacher, perhaps in your child’s primary school, asking her class what they need from their education to face a future of climate chaos while the national curriculum lags far behind.
These people – all of them real union reps – might not be on the podium at Cop26 in Glasgow, but they are among the world’s real climate leaders.
So what do they need from the rest of us? First: resources. To give the at-risk jobs of today a future, governments must invest to build the pioneering zero-carbon steel plants, the fabrication yards and ports, and the domestic supply chains that the industries of tomorrow need. The TUC has called for £85bn of green infrastructure investment over the next two years. And where public funding takes the first step, private capital will follow.
Governments must invest, too, in the public sector. They must give more resources to local councils to insulate homes in their area and support the NHS’s net zero plan. And they need to invest worldwide: industrialised countries are well behind on their $100bn climate finance pledge to the global south.
Second: a say over how the transition happens. The postie knows what they need from the delivery rotas of the future. The oil worker knows what training he requires. The coalminer knows what she wants to do when the mine closes. This knowledge should shape the transition. Each workplace needs a formal agreement negotiated between unions and employers about the nature and pace of change – and a plan for how good jobs will be protected. This needs to be supported with commissions both locally and nationally, where unions, employers and governments listen to each other and devise a common plan for their industries and areas. The lack of planning and coordination in the UK is a key reason why we’re lurching from one crisis to the next today.
Third: the removal of barriers. No worker should see their income plummet or have to pay to retrain if their workplace shuts down. And no worker should be barred from the jobs of the future, whether by biased recruitment practices, lack of support for parents or for disabled people, or by institutional racism.
Fourth and finally: job quality. Green jobs must be great jobs. If a job involves back-breaking work and pays badly, if the work is unreliable or on a precarious contract, if the employer doesn’t recognise unions and if employees have to pay for their own training, then no wonder workers aren’t lining up to switch careers.
Any job can be a good job. If we want workers to move from high carbon jobs to net zero jobs, climate movements must help unions fight for decent pay, terms and conditions. When these four challenges are met – enough resources, workers’ voices listened to, barriers brought down, every green job a good job – climate action will be made with people, not done to them.
So let’s make a start. Join a union. What can you do in your community, in your workplace, to support those whose jobs are on the line, and bring about the just transition that we all need?
-
Anna Markova is the Trades Union Congress’s co-lead on climate and industrial policy
Patrick Bond
The Guardian
Ecuador’s embattled president dissolves congress in bid to avoid impeachment
Guillermo Lasso announces move a day after the start of an impeachment trial that seems likely to lead to his removal
Ecuador’s embattled president, Guillermo Lasso, has dissolved congress in an attempt to escape impeachment – a radical maneuver that comes amid a backdrop of wider democratic backsliding and political turbulence across Latin America.
Lasso announced the dramatic move on Wednesday morning, a day after the start of an impeachment trial that seemed likely to lead to his removal from power in the coming days.
“Ecuadorian women and men: this is the best decision to find a constitutional way out of the political crisis … and give the people of Ecuador the chance to decide their future at the next elections,” tweeted the 67-year-old conservative businessman, who was elected in April 2021 after defeating the leftist economist Andrés Arauz.
Lasso’s decision to trigger a constitutional “mutual-death” clause dissolving his country’s 137-member national assembly will allow him to govern without the legislature until fresh elections are held. Some observers believe it could benefit the president, who will be allowed to stand in that contest.
However, the suspension of congress is also a setback to Ecuador’s democracy and the latest flare-up of political disruption in a region that has this year grappled with an uprising in the Peruvian Andes, accelerating authoritarian crackdowns in Nicaragua and El Salvador, an alleged military coup attempt in Brazil, democratic regression in Mexico and an explosion of gang violence in Haiti.
Lasso’s 11-page decree, which comes into force immediately, states that his decision was taken as a result of “severe political crisis and domestic upheaval” and orders electoral authorities to call elections in the next seven days. The decree describes the measure a way of preventing a “violent escalation” such as the mass protests that brought the capital, Quito, and other parts of the country to a standstill in June last year.
In his inaugural speech after taking power in May 2021, Lasso called himself a “man of action” who would lead Ecuador’s 18 million citizens into an “eternally democratic” future of social equality and economic stability. But the former banker has faced major obstacles – including the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic and a horrifying upsurge in drug-related violence linked to the growing presence of Mexican cartels – and has repeatedly locked horns with the opposition-controlled national assembly.
Lasso survived the opposition’s first attempt to impeach him, in June last year, but looked set to be removed from office later this week after the start of an impeachment hearing based on embezzlement accusations which he disputes. His decree means those proceedings will end.
Opposition lawmakers needed 92 votes, out of 137 to remove Lasso in a session of the national assembly which began on Tuesday.
“The only way out is the impeachment and exit of the president of the republic, Guillermo Lasso,” said Viviana Veloz, an opposition lawmaker who was leading the impeachment process.
Supporters of the president had gathered outside the assembly on Tuesday, but by Wednesday morning police and members of the military had encircled the building, allowing no one inside.
Earlier, the chief of the joint command of the armed forces, Nelson Proaño, had pledged “absolute respect for the constitution and the laws” in support of Lasso’s move.
Santiago Basabe, a political scientist at the Latin American Institute of Social Sciences in Quito, said the move would “generate a political balance in the country” as fresh elections would allow for an exit to the current political crisis.
But Leonidas Iza, the leader of the powerful Conaie Indigenous federation, slammed Lasso’s move in a tweet: “Not having the necessary votes to save himself from imminent dismissal, Lasso carries out a cowardly self-coup with the help of the police and the armed forces, without citizen support, turning himself [sic] into an imminent dictatorship.”
The group, which can muster tens of thousands of members for street demonstrations, had previously threatened to hold fresh marches this week.
Last year, Conaie led protests throughout Ecuador that almost unseated Lasso. It was also at the forefront of demonstrations against the lifting of fuel subsidies in 2019 which turned deadly when huge numbers marched on the capital.