Is It Treason to Take Chavez’s Money and Destroy Your Own Country?
By Pedro Camargo
16.03.06 | Andean region media sources have identified, among many others, several strike leaders in Ecuador this week who are on the take with Chavez-backed funds which is fueling multiple province wide violence and massive domestic infrastructure damage. On March 16, El Universal in Caracas reported that the President of Ecuador’s Congress on Colombian radio blamed Chavez as `very probably’ fueling violent, destructive acts across Ecuador.
Current Ecuadorean presidential candidate Rafael Correa, who announced on Telesur, February 19, that he fully supported Hugo Chavez’s regional movement, is joined by another Chavista-backed newcomer, `journalist’ Marcelo Larrea, a well known Pachakutik Indigenous leader, now teamed with CONAIE, whose candidacy is actively promoted by the Venezuelan Communication and Information Ministry (www.minci.gov.ve). Larrea is well-known as a founding member of the pro-Chavez Bolivarian-Alfarista Alliance for the Third Republic, along with the former commander of Ecuador’s Army, retired General Rene Vargas Pazzos, notable for his pro-FARC activities. Larrea and Pazzos have mobilized military and social activists, labor leaders and indigenous leaders. Chavez’s pet mobilizers: Larrea, Pazzos and the CONAIE violence across Ecuador are cited as coup supporters-golpistas- against the government (AFP; HOY, 3-16-06).
Ecuador’s President Palacio, who gives new meaning to the term `lame duck,’ has successfully behaved in a lame fashion and has lamely ducked every responsibility of his high office. By March 15, 2006, his Minister of Government, Alfredo Castillo resigned. Castillo is notable not only for his enthusiastic embrace of the Chavez regional take-over plan, also called the Bolivarian Revolution, but also for his comments that the destructive so called strikers against the government were a good thing. With schools, businesses, transportation and commerce feeling the shut down in many regions, Ecuador needs to know that this is not a good thing. Castillo had no grounds to applaud such wide spread violence. And moreover, Minister Castillo acted against his high office and his own government by encouraging the destructive strikers, which in fact are state terrorists and criminals, in what we now know as an asymmetric war being waged across South America for political sic. oil domination. Castillo's only known exit interview was pre-arranged with Telesur and no Ecuadorean-based media.
For his part, President Palacio has a sole obligation to defend and protect that state. When his own cabinet members and/or inner team encourages the Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro Bolivarian destruction of the state, numerous Ecuadoreans are asking if Palacio and members of his inner team are not committing treason. It is a valid question.
Ecuador cannot financially afford these destructive acts of violence against its own state. Supposedly the protesters are against the USA, against the free trade deal on the table, and against common sense. For this, in many provinces this week, all normatives are suspended while violence flares, ruling the days and nights. Multiple indigenous communities across Ecuador have refused to participate in these province-wide destructive acts. They tell us that bags of cash are rolling around the provinces, greasing well the paid actors. It is a testament to Ecuadoreans that the bulk of the Indigenous communities know this string of paid violence for what it is and have refused to join the Bolivarians in breaking the law. What is reprehensible is that those who abide by their laws are getting no credit, no relief, and no protection as they watch what little infrastructure go up in dynamite. And still we ask: who is delivering and purchasing the dynamite and who is stopping these depraved acts? The Indigenous communities have not that kind of money. Nor do they have the funds to restore the vast infrastructure they have just destroyed. Maybe Palacio will hand a repair bill to the paid organizers of this wide spread destruction: Hugo Chavez and his paid agents.
Every single Chavez affiliate and agent has failed Ecuador, bringing with them increased violence and destruction. Always delivering crude acts of destabilizing violence and turmoil, the Chavez plan is to instill hatred for progress where development should proceed.
With the public exposure of so many named Chavez agents inside Ecuador such as Sr. Bastardo, operating out of the Venezuelan “embassy” in Quito to fuel the violence in the name of the great new Bolivarian take over reunification plan of Hugo Chavez, Palacio has no choice but to recall his ambassador to Caracas and send home all Chavez’s political change agents, closing down the Venezuelan Embassy. And to this, Palacio should attach a repair bill for Chavez to reimburse the people of Ecuador for massive damages, now in the multiple millions. To not do so is to let criminality run rampant and to force Ecuadoreans to pay for massive violence not of their doing and frankly, of no benefit to anyone. These recent so-called protests are not about free speech: they are about violence and craven acts of destruction to destabilize democracy to provide an upheaval to bolster the Bolivarian take over. The facts are on the table. Any adult who fails to connect the dots today is himself guilty of crude partisan politics to assist and gloss over the damages crafted by the Bolivarian column using pre-paid political activists such as Ecuador’s political group, CONAIE which had long ago jumped into Chavez’s Bolivarian bed. Although Chavez’s bedmates are getting pretty crowded, it is noteworthy that Chavez is not too selective about who jumps in to his bed -it seems he will take just about anything from old school anarchists to neo communists and older KGB agents as well as Muslim fanatics and every leader of any disaffected, angry group and rogue regime such as North Korea, Iran, etc. Such paid or bribed bedfellows of illegal extra-state actors on the take from Chavez, are not only an odd cacophony but in fact are too fractious to hold. Put another way, Chavez’s bedmates are criminal thugs or paid participants. Nowhere are agents of development or stabilizing nation-building in this gang of thugs. This too is not democracy building but is democracy destroying.
We say: send the repair bill to Hugo Chavez. And cancel all diplomatic relations with Hugo Chavez unless and until Venezuela ceases to fund state-wide destructive and criminal acts. There can be no relations with criminals who destroy whole countries.
If Alfredo Palacio cannot bring himself to defend and protect his own country, he too needs to help pay for the hefty repair bills. And lost jobs, lost school time, lost security and lost lives.
We predict that Ecuadoreans this week are finally fed up with this politically based criminality of such a wide spread degree, just as so many of the Indigenous communities are today. We doubt that Ecuador’s media will cease its complicity with the Bolivarian activists and yet even the media seems to grasp the public’s disaffection with this ill-conceived tantrum of violence by Hugo Chavez.
What is needed is for all of Ecuador to stand united, denounce these criminal acts, and not simply decry one more week of violence. For it will come again and again unless corrected. But Ecuador has shown itself repeatedly averse to making adult-like decisions and drawing the line against systemic turbulence. With feckless leaders and weak decision makers, Ecuador barely demands functioning state-hood. Even-handed law and order should be an assured benefit of the state: not an infrequent happenstance, hindered by a weak state with too many of its own leaders on the Bolivarian payroll.
With the Chavez-backed thugs organizing old school socialist unions like the MPD party, while also targeting Indigenous communities, whose own provincial funds are always short, the Bolivarian actors have committed the worst sort of racism: targeting the poor who have little chance of rebuilding and never had much state provided protection anyway. That is a real crime. The victims, once again, of this asymmetric warfare are indeed the uneducated and the lowliest who always suffer the primary blows. As in Venezuela, the “poor” are seeing first hand in Ecuador this week that the Chavez-backed warfare is hitting their own backyards and its effects are devastating. Part and parcel to this asymmetric war is a concurrent propaganda war which Hugo Chavez has instilled to control information.
With utterly no counterbalance to this hefty propaganda war by any sustained effort, the criminals of this nasty asymmetric war may yet win the hearts and minds of Latin Americans by deception, by physical coercion (combining violence with extortion and pay offs) as well as manipulation of complicit, weak, and morally bankrupt so-called civil society who make a living off fomenting neo-socialism.
Asymmetric warfare is today’s reality and it is as real as the grenades detonated in the oil rich fields of Ecuador and the on-going false data presentations by the disinformation agents. Nowhere is this action plan more evident than in Ecuador. With far less than 10% of the nation, no less than Al-Jazeera news would have the public believe, through its poor reporting, that all local citizens demand the same claims as the current crop of criminal actors, which is foremost some oft-repeated demand for institutional separation and isolation from the state and full exemption from national norms and laws for all Indigenous. In Ecuador, this means a demand for all state benefits and free hand outs with no responsibility to build the state per se through income tax, exemptions from national laws and the formal legal system, as well as control over educational content, where it may or may not exist, which is currently at such a low level in the poor provinces that its own residents are doomed to a life of ignorance and banality for the erstwhile collective good of the collective state envisioned by these asymmetric Bolivarians.
Equally important to Ecuador’s week long violence is the stubborn attack on U.S. businesses in the region. Although to date this week only the oil company AGIP’s offices have been destroyed by the protesters, singled out for direct hatred this week is the mid-size oil company, OCCIDENTAL which operates under a turn-key agreement with Ecuador. In 8 provinces this week, the same Chavez-backed violent protesters demanded that OCCIDENTAL’s business be confiscated on false grounds that the company tried to sell its contract to a Canadian company. In fact, Occidental broke no law and never sold anything to any Canadian company. Fueled by the illicit abuse of his high office Ecuador’s grossly corrupt Attorney General Borja, and his complicit father who laughingly heads what is called the Anti-Corruption Commission, the lies and violent attacks against OCCIDENTAL are now the centerfold of the Chavez-backed violent rampages. This false attack, based on phony charges by government leaders, is now echoed by the Greek Chorus of Chavez’s foot soldiers in the Andes; this is untenable and exhibits how sustained corrupt acts by a small number of corrupt governmental actors such as Borja are enjoined and exploited by the Bolivarian take-over actors. What is interesting about the phony foment against OCCIDENTAL is that nowhere to be found are anti-OCCI environmental protesters, because OCCI has shown itself as a good steward in instilling best practices across Ecuador. For this, Ecuadoreans should be grateful that someone, anyone, has acted with responsibility to help their central revenues which feeds a whopping 70% of its budget in union-backed or heavily padded governmental payrolls of the central state. In fact, Ecuador may yet come to its senses and terminate its own self-defeating, in-bred lunacy which has become its national anthem: passive-aggressive diplomacy of ignorance that destroys the very thing that sustains its own nation. If Ecuador fails to restart real anti-corruption practices, and not the phony Anti-Corruption showpieces of Sr. Borja as originated by US AID and its multiplying variants, its own passive-aggressive inanity will cede its very sovereignty to the Bolivarian take-over plan. Its Republic will cease to exist.
Alfredo Palacio attempted to calm his nation on Wednesday evening, March 15 in an almost `Beware the Ides of March’ effort. With about as much success as the first soothsayer of this line, Palacio will repeat history unless and until he takes responsibility for his own actions, his own deeply flawed cabinet of pro-Chavez sycophants, Ecuador’s corrupt and incompetent Attorney General and corrupt actors in every level of Ecuador’s government. In what became a Cri de Coeur, Palacio begged for calm in Ecuador.
In fact, he should uphold his own medical oath as a doctor: first do no harm. For this, Palacio will need to reverse the harm done to Ecuador first by Gutierrez and then on his own watch:
1) remove the tumors that feed Ecuador’s rampaging cancer: its own corrupt actors, Palacio must close down all of Chavez’s cash cows in this asymmetric war,
2) stop playing footsie with the FARC -Colombia’s El Pais this week reported a “massive” FARC enclave in the provinces, especially rural Sucumbios. Palacio’s stupidity that the FARC somehow warrants sovereignty is a shop-worn Chavez enabling tactic,
3) firmly agree to supporting over ½ of Ecuador’s jobs and small businesses by signing the Free Trade Agreements,
4) suspend the slanderous attacks on OCCIDENTAL by his own governmental actors who are behind the scenes scurrying like rats, seeking profit through extortion and bribes and finally,
5) release fact-based data pertaining to the paid criminal actors who are actively waging this asymmetric war in the Andes.
Any one of these five recommendations is welcome and would yield productive results. Without even-handed action on any of these five critical steps, Palacio’s band aid approach to reform his nation under his proposed neo-socialist constitutional plebiscite will finally hand over to Chavez what he has long sought: geo-political control of Ecuador under a replica of the distinctly undemocratic Chavez constitutional plan for centralized governmental control by party apparatchiks and hand-picked political cronies.
Further compounding Ecuador’s unconstitutional acts is Palacio’s latest gambit before his Congress: a new proposed law that would rejigger all North American related oil contracts to an untenable, deal-breaking level under an illegal voodoo payment system to the state.
Today, Palacio needs to first do no harm by applying even-handed justice and upholding his state by removing the Chavez-backed perpetrators. To avoid his obligations in stopping these out of state actors and criminals is to commit a treason by default and a very real dereliction of duty. And then Beware the Ides of March. Ecuador has allowed these criminal actors to grow inside their own borders, dithering instead of acting, while their rolls grew to the point where instability threatens to destroy the state. That is the end result of the false prophets of enabling who now wait to stab Ecaudor's democracy in the back.
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