Political Analyst David Villamar on Violence in Ecuador: After 7 Years of Neoliberalism the Disastrous Consequences are Obvious (Interview)

Joe Emersberger interviews Ecuadorian political analyst David Villamar on how Ecuador became the deadliest country in the Americas (Part 1 of 2).

Despite the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Ecuador’s violent crime problem is such an incredible disaster that it manages to attract international attention. Criminals have recently taken over live newscasts. Supporters of the rightwing governments that created the disaster (for example, The Economist) have declared Ecuador to be the deadliest country in the Americas. It’s difficult for Ecuador to get international news coverage. In recent years, it generally has to be something very bad (or sports-related).

I’d ask readers to look over the chart below because it tells so much of the story that dishonest outlets like The Economist lie about. Since 1980 the homicide rate in Ecuador had been steadily increasing under neoliberal governments. But Rafael Correa’s leftwing government (2007-2017), known by its supporters as the Revolución Ciudadana, brought about a stunning 2/3 reduction. The chart below (H/T Ollie Vargas) is only updated to 2022. The homicide rate is now over 40 per 100,000 people.

The return of the violent crime problem has coincided with the return of US-backed rightwing governments, and fierce persecution of the leftwing Correaist movement that had made Ecuador safe.

Quito-based political analyst and economist David Villamar was kind enough to discuss Ecuador with me last week.

Joe E: I wanted you to help me update people who don’t know about the persecution of Correaists that has been going on since 2017. It doesn’t surprise me that it has continued under the new rightwing president Daniel Noboa. Ex-President Rafael Correa’s former vice president, Jorge Glass, is in the Mexican Embassy where his request for political asylum is being processed. A minister of Noboa’s has said that safe-passage will not be granted to Glas if asylum is granted. Meanwhile, the fiercely anti-Correa Attorney General, Diana Salazar, has been trying to link Correatsis to drug trafficking and gangs through the so-called Metastasis case.

David V: The explosion of crime has made headlines all over the world. Ecuador also made international headlines in recent years over its catastrophic COVID response in Guayaquil. We saw bodies abandoned in the streets, the use of cardboard coffins, and the emergency importation of cremation ovens. That made headlines worldwide and now again for something terrible.

De-institutionalization, which has been going on for seven years now, once again makes Ecuador an example of everything that should not be done. It’s sad, because during President Correa’s years in office (2007-17), Ecuador was on international headlines for scholarships, hydroelectric projects, and social advances. But now, after seven years of neoliberalism, the disastrous consequences are obvious.

Ecuador’s media tries to assist Diana Salazar with her renewed persecution of Correa and his movement. It began a couple of months ago with the Metastasis case as she called it. It’s a kind of rehash of allegations. Diana Salazar persecutes but then tries to pass herself off as the victim. The Metastasis case is very thin and contrived.

It focuses on a drug trafficker who died more than a year ago, just as the National Assembly begins to investigate and discuss the possible impeachment of Diana Salazar. She has been the Attorney General since 2019 . The Assembly begins to investigate Diana Salazar’s gross misconduct and obvious political bias. When it comes to Correistas, there are raids. Everything is instantaneous. There are arrests. There is pre-trial detention. But when it comes to the investigation of Correa’s rightwing opponents, for example the Gran Padrino case [also known as the Leon deTroya case] which involves alleged corruption by former President Lasso’s brother-in-law (and donor) there is extreme lethargy and permissiveness. There are no raids. There is no pre-trial detention. Danilo Carrera, after being banned from leaving the country over corruption allegations, was seen in the Davis Cup in England. No one ever gave an explanation of how he left the country and if his passport was taken away.

It’s a sui generis thing. Salazar uses the Prosecutor’s Office as a weapon of political persecution. It is unheard of that you have more speed in cases from seven years ago than in the case of Gran Padrino which drove President Lasso out of office last year. Lasso evaded the impeachment process by calling early elections. And Salazar continues to drag her feet. She treats it as a second-class issue, because for her the priority is the persecution of Correa.

So once in the newly convened Assembly, where Correaist have a majority in the Oversight Commission, the possibility of an impeachment trial against Salazar appears. So she launches this Metastasis case and tries to claim that she is the persecuted one.

In the Metastasis case she cherry-picks chats and focuses heavily on a mid level drug lord named Norero. Why so much focus on him? Because it turns out that Norero participated in a program of “gang pacification” Correa implemented 15 years ago to legalize gangs that gave up crime.

So they want to say that that’s where the problem with the drug traffickers began, or that there was an alliance with the drug traffickers.

There are even international academic studies that say that one of the most successful ways to stop the entry of drug traffickers and drug-related violence was the pacification of the gangs because by giving them possibilities within public life, within society, not marginalizing them, not imprisoning them, the government took “raw material” away from the drug mafias because what they did was to take advantage of the gangs to build local drug movement routes. When you give gang members a legal lifestyle option, they’re not going to go for the drug trade. All these initiatives were eliminated in 2017 and many of the previously pacified gangs, once the government turned his back on them, relapsed into alliances with the drug traffickers. So you’re not actually seeing the failure of gang pacification, but the interruption of it.

Joe E: Attorney General Salazar also controls judges and other officials like that with her attacks doesn’t she? If they step out of line she quickly attacks them, pulls something out on them. That’s how it works from what I see.

David V: I am not aware of evidence of direct control of judges per se, but in practice Diana Salazar functions in much the same way as J Edgar Hoover did in the U.S. With her power she is always investigating, spying on officials, judges, legislators. It is highly possible that she has them in her pocket under threat of investigating them.

For example, Salazar’s power over the Social Cristianos [a right wing party that is still known by that name] stems from a raid in September 2021 against José Joaquín Franco, a very important Social Cristiano operative and Jaime Nebot’s right hand. [Nebot is a prominent Social Cristano leader and former long-time mayor of Guyaquil, Ecuador’s most populous city]. This investigation is still open and has had no new development in 2 years. It is a kind of Damocles’ sword and, naturally, the Social Cristianos are terrified of Salazar because she could start investigations at any time.

Joe E: I like that you made that comparison to J. Edgar Hoover because it’s something that people abroad who know politics will understand quickly. They know how J. Edgar Hoover worked against Martin Luther King, and how Hoover was always looking for dirt on everyone.

David V: Yeah, I think it is a fair comparison. Our Attorney General’s actions are very similar. The ways of persecuting, the ways of pressuring, the biases that drive her priorities, the dirty politics that she serves. J. Edgar Hoover did it against communists and leftists. Diana Salazar does it against Correaistas. One difference is that I consider J. Edgar Hoover to have acted more autonomously, whereas I consider Diana Salazar to be just a pawn, a puppet of somebody much more sinister. It is only my opinion because it’s hard to prove, but consider the Metastasis case now that is in the news. Despite chats that implicate important operatives of the now defunct Lasso government and many others, guess who is being battered over the chats in the media? From Diana Salazar and the press the blows rain down specifically against Correismo and against the journalists of La Posta (a rightwing media outlet that instigated the investigation of the Gran Padrino that led to the downfall of Lasso). What do they both have in common? They are both enemies of María Paula Romo. If I had to look for a puppeteer, I would start right there.

María Paula Romo is one of the main self-proclaimed enemies of Correismo. She is one of those responsible for the debacle we are experiencing because it was under her control [under the Moreno government] that our security apparatus was dismantled. Ministries related to security were merged such that María Paula Romo ended up with much more power in the government.

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La Posta on several occasions accused María Paula Romo of being the one who had made a pact with the drug traffickers in the prisons. La Posta investigations claim that it was Romo who, during the pandemic, sold control over hospitals to politicians in exchange for legislative support, and that she cut deals in the prisons with Los Choneros to the detriment of other gangs. La Posta basically declared war on both María Paula Romo and Lasso, and afterwards Diana Salazar declared war on La Posta.

Romo is an unscrupulous woman and we have seen Diana Salazar’s attacks targeting Romo’s two great enemies. There is no such thing as coincidences in politics.

Joe E: La Posta is vehemently anti-Correa media. They supported Lasso in the 2021 election (were literally dancing with joy when he won) but soon after they fled Ecuador for fear that something was going to be done to them by Lasso.

David V: Yes. There’s a post on Twitter by Luis Eduardo Vivanco, one of the two founders of La Posta (Vivanco and Boscan). It is a photo of a bed full of wads of bills from a drug capture that was made in 2017. Vivanco captioned it with the words “on these mattresses rests the revolution” . Vivanco was taking a blow against drug traffickers that was made by the Revolucion Ciudadana [as Correa’s government is also known] and twisting it into the opposite. And they both declared themselves to be persecuted under Correa. Ironic that they later discovered what a persecuting government linked to the narco-mafias is really like.

Joe E: So, going back to Jorge Glass, now imagine the evil of wanting to put him back in that prison system. He has already been imprisoned for five years based on a trumped up case. As I understand it, he is still in the Mexican embassy.

David V: Diana Salazar knows very well that it’s worked for them to have political hostages. When you have political hostages (such as Jorge Glass, Alexis Mera and even -in 2019- the current governor of Pichincha, Paola Pabon and other comrades) and keep them inside a rotten uncontrollable prison system, the message they send is clear: “Keep opposing us and we’re sending your friends from this jail to a much worse one”.

There was always a veiled threat that Glas was going to be transferred to increasingly dangerous prisons since he was first jailed. Glas was first sent to Prison 4 (in Quito) and later, he was transferred to Latacunga. This happened 2 months after María Paula Romo was appointed minister of Government. And there was always the implicit threat of sending him to one of the much more violent coastal prisons, that is, to the prisons where the worst massacres took place. It is obviously an absolutely illegitimate and illegal mechanism of pressure.

Once Glas was released from prison, the government lost its main political hostage and they soon realized that, in order to put more pressure on Correismo, they needed to hold Glas hostage again.

Jorge [Glas] was able to take refuge in the Mexican embassy and, as you point out, he is still there. The Noboa government has signaled that it will not give him safe-passage if he is granted political asylum by Mexico.

Joe E: It seems obvious to me that Noboa will be as tyrannical towards Correaists as Moreno and Lasso. The persecution of Correaists will not stop.

David V: Yes, but in something I differ. I don’t think Noboa is the same as Lasso and Moreno. He has shown to have greater political intelligence despite being young and inexperienced.

Let us remember that Lasso reached out to Correismo to negotiate the formation of the authorities in the national assembly in May 2021. The negotiations involved all the major parties with seats in the national assembly . We made it clear that it was only a negotiation to form the authorities of the Assembly, the key commissions, but Lasso chickened out.

Joe E: And this is also something, it must be clarified, this is inevitable to a certain extent because of what Moreno did by dispersing the national assembly so that majorities were extremely difficult to achieve.

David V: And let us not forget that Moreno managed to make a majority against Correismo, allying himself with other traitors within Correismo (who still had seats at the time), with Pachakutik, Social Cristianos and other right wingers.

When Lasso arrived in 2021, his position in the National Assembly was much weaker than Moreno’s. He only had about 13 or 14 assembly members from his CREO bloc. He had no choice but to reach out to Correaists to attempt to try to achieve some form of governability. The press immediately attacked Lasso, saying that he must not “unite with the mafia”.

They put him on the ropes and Lasso showed himself to be a coward. He backed out of negotiations with Correimo, and even betrayed his own electoral allies, the rightwing Social Cristianos.

That condemned Lasso to total ungovernability, and to having to pay each newly-made short term ally through the nose for every vote. These allies ended up being unscrupulous characters like Guadalupe Llori of Pachakutik, who was installed as president of the assembly. In 2008, she allegedly put dynamite on the bridges in Dayuma in one of the first attempts by some rightwing indigenous leaders to rise up against the Revolucion Ciudadana.

Lasso became a bit of a hostage to minorities who come to the assembly to literally do business. And that is what finally took away his political capital and ended up burying Lasso:

Joe E: Noboa is a little different in the sense that he was willing to face the criticism for negotiating with Correaists in the national assembly.

David V: Yes. And now the key legislative commissions, the presidency and the vice-presidencies of the assembly, are much more in line with the popular vote. The parties that won the most seats in the assembly are the ones that control the majority of the commissions.

Joe E: In the United States, J Edgar Hoover, who you compared to Salazar, worked in a developed country, an empire. Under Hoover, who was in power from 1925-1972, the US never had a homicide rate like Ecuador’s, so that gave him more room to persecute without destroying the whole country. What they have done in Ecuador is destroyed the whole country, with no end in sight, for now

David V: It’s surreal that the national and international information apparatus today wants to blame the government that has brought violent death rates to a historic minimum, that imprisoned medium and high-level drug lords.

The idea is to convince people that what we are experiencing today has nothing to do with the reduction of the budget for the police, nothing to do with eliminating the government’s capacity to have intelligence in the prisons, nothing to do with changing the way prisoners are assigned in the wards, nothing to do with eliminating the Ministry of Justice, nothing to do with eliminating the Coordinating Ministry of Security. No, it has to do with the policies adopted by a government that managed to apprehend drug traffickers and dramatically reduce the levels of violence in the country, I mean, it’s crazy.

(Substack)