Ecuador’s president-elect Rafael Correa has not even donned the sash yet and already he is exposing himself as one of the most badly educated voices in Latin America, quite visible among the many uneducated voices on the political mess that is South America today, trying to speak as one voice. That one voice bears analysis and real facts which of course are not occurring.

            Rafael Correa menacingly has revealed his capacity to defraud Ecuadoreans of what little is left of their constitutional democracy and convert that Republic into a state run oil kleptocracy for the Chavez –backed group of state run kleptocrats and gangsters. The inclusion of Brazil’s LuLa to benefit PetroBras is no comfort either, being a quasi-privatized energy delivery company of murky hedging capacities as well. Correa vows a de facto caducidad of all extant oil contracts and is already misaligning Ecuador’s oil futures with the Chavez politburo of preferred and very murky/shadowy contractors of questionable integrity.

            This, then is the future of Ecuador under Correa’s vacuous leadership: an oil state pledged to unproven, shadowy characters for self-enrichment.

             On December 9 in Bolivia, Hugo Chavez called for regional unity under his "political Viagra" plan of action: a false boost to his manly political persona, a perfect symbol for Chavez's false front of a chemically supplied machismo. For alignment and preferred status in the Chavez man-boy club, Rafael Correa has signaled that he will turn over Ecuador's oil(and potentially gas) reserves to Hugo Chavez's pan-continental oil monopoly under PDVSA and PetroBras. What this really means is that Chavez is willing to boost his political presence by any means possible....either by chemically-induced staying power in office or by buying and retaining his manliness from a pill or otherwise.

            True leaders do not need to induce charisma by purchasing power, false fronts or fake allure. But Chavez is uniting a team of unemployed Hollywood characters, questionable North American and European politicos for hire and determinedly anti-democracy leaders in South America, rallying them to unity by treating their incompetency with a prescription to overcome "dysfunction."

              While Chavez's synthetic prescriptive political rallying may serve some subliminal regional benefit, we believe that when the real facts are analyzed about the Chavez plan for total state controls and authoritarian machinations across Latin America are known, there will not be enough "Viagra" to boost or raise his flawed, dishonest and very dishonorable intentions. There is no pill to elevate what Chavez is selling. Left to its own devices (sans Viagra), Chavez's Bolivarian Plan, or what he now calls an “Alternative Democracy" in an altered, parallel, topsy-turvy universe, will fall flat naturally. Unfortunately, Chavez, who controls Venezuela's total oil revenues and its military, is on a weapons buying spree to amass an offensive military. This then is Chavez's "Viagra," the real machismo- the ever-expanding newly-inserted Chavez military which he has bought and sold: the real machismo to retain control in the Andes over what was once a free and open society that had matured in its rejection of military dictatorships and caudillos.

              Ecuador's president-elect Rafael Correa, in the last week. has daily fallen into lock step behind Hugo Chavez's regional rule by synthetic or false means...his political Viagra. When asked about the horrific loss of almost 1/2 of Ecuadorean jobs and national income as free trade with North America expires in six months, Correa exhibited an appalling lack of knowledge of diplomacy, history, fiscal responsibility, treaties, and Ecuadorean law as he commenced screeching like a spoiled and badly informed adolescent, demanding respect but being horribly unprepared and undeserving of same. Correa's self-imposed ignorance (and subsequent rejection)of the basics of statecraft is worrisome enough but his capacity for childish temper tantrums and adolescent insistence that he alone has the sole "plan" to naively devolve Ecuador in to a stateless and lawless oilpatch, servile only to the Chavez thugs, informs us that Rafael Correa has no comprehension of adult statecraft or reasonable benchmarks for requisite leadership once the "Viagra" provided by Hugo Chavez to his  followers seeking instant gratification wears off. Correa today can be found stamping his feet and demanding adult respect while insisting that Ecuador will enable the FARC, move its oil reserves into the Chavez price fixing monopolistic bloc, and refuse sustainable development for Ecuador under the dysfunctional, naive government of his new age caudillo reign of the "lash."

             The problem for Correa and Chavez is this: due to the profoundly dysfunctional (and corrupt) incapacity of Ecuador and Venezuela to install any meaningful commercial laws that bar product patent theft and maintain legitimate manufacturing controls, the region is overrun with illegally manufactured Viagra, which is of course precisely why the U.S. government insists on patent protection and consumer safety, roundly dismissed in Ecuador and Venezuela. This unappealing characteristic of Venezuela and Ecuador as two nations overrun by uncontrolled gangsterism running illicit pharmaceuticals (among weapons, narcotics and human slaves) has forced normative relations with these nations to wither inasmuch as normative relations are almost impossible when the Chavez-backed politburos are constantly redefining their almost-missing structures even while depleting state assets. t should be useful for Chavez and his new

“teenager" side kick, Correa to stop running from commonsense pharmaceutical regulations and actually take a tally of how many have died in the Andes from the fake/pirated Viagra. This should bring a sense of deflation to their buoyancy. We would also remind that Chavez's shallow rallying cry to demand "Political Viagra" carries the same menacing warning as pirated Viagra sold around the clock on the street corners in Andean countries: caveat emptor....buyers and users beware....there is no safety, no assurance of governmental-backed fiscal soundness, and no integrity to be found at all. Sound politics and government requires comprehensive planning and balanced governance which never exists without informed consent, never sustained without education of the facts, and is certainly not found in a pill.

              -Pedro Camargo