April 23, 2007    The Editors of ECrisis are adamantly opposed to senseless witch hunts, blogger warfare and endless conspiracy theories. We note with scorn rumors and warnings in Quito this last week about the crimes of Rafael Correa's criminal father/padre. In fact, we agree that children- whose parents are said to be abusive [physically and/or mentally] are the victims of a crueler crime when none in their family or their community act to protect and defend the child. This often leads to a wider shame...the community, by choosing to remain uninvolved, enables the criminals to carry on and the illness spreads, often fostering increasing or unchecked dysfunction. This is standard, garden variety psychology 101. This appears to have been the case which colors the very person of Rafael Correa, the adolescent princeling of Ecuador.
 
But here we have this princeling as a president of a country, Rafael Correa -himself never a polished or well educated economist [using his so called economics education as a platform to support communism and financial crimes] as incorrectly stated by some-  who knowingly covered up, among many other items, well known criminal reports about his father. Correa is even less skilled a national leader than he was as an economist. But he is very skilled at teaming up with Chavez's propagandists, goon squads, minders and foot soldiers of communism and crime. Correa has frequently but fuzzily alluded to his father's abusive nature. In fact, he has commended his father's heavy hand with beatings to detail how he would whip his opponents, staging theatrically his personal victimhood which he now turns on his own people.

Correa rarely speaks of the horror that he is said to have witnessed as a young person when his father staged his own suicide for the viewing pleasure of his own son and family. The Editors of this site are loath to speak ill of persons, especially when the facts are scant. In this case, the facts are self revelatory and most are already part of public knowledge: they must be part of a public discourse on the values of hiding the facts. The standard human approach is to say and do nothing to protect the so called victim, even as the parental or spousal abuse continues unchecked. This is never helpful and always leads to wider problems.

Had anyone sensibly intervened on the child's behalf -in this case the younger Rafael, the current president Correa's personal feelings of abandonment by adults in his family and/or community may have been assuaged. But Ecuadoreans rarely if ever carry the age old reminder that community building begins with an appropriate commitment to serving others. Caring commitments to one's community are rarely, if ever, seen in Ecuador as if the cynicism is preferred to compassion. And there was scant praise or compassion for anyone to perform anything meaningful in the years of the dictators in Ecuador -the very years that young Rafael grew up in. Dictators are useful to some, typically their self enriching politburo but not good at all for the rest of the country. This was the case in the 1960s and 1970s. Correa failed to learn this lesson about dictatorships as he himself is today one for any realistic analysis.
 
This discussion of Rafael Correa's horrific personal past  is only relevant when one, as a nation could and should do, analyzes what kind of a creature today demands full controls of the entire operating systems of their government, which in Ecuador translates to their entire lives.
 
We have interviewed police and anti-crime officers about the phenomenon of what happens to children of imprisoned narcotraffickers.

We suggest that a larger pathological analysis be performed by wiser heads than ours. But we are reminded that functional enforcement agents always note that whenever a person claims that they were committing a crime because they needed the money [or whatever reward or benefit], the officers know full well that the criminal has just confessed. It is standard for criminals to claim a 'need for money.'

The point is this....most all criminals complain that they 'just needed the money.' That line of defense is so shop worn and so disgusting that it must be rejected as a self defense out of hand, because it leads to a society chock full of excuses for causing harm.

But Rafael Correa was indeed let down by his father's lack of morality and a principled life. He was let down by his family who failed to intercede either out of shame or out of laziness or out of an ill-founded desire to protect the abuser's civil rights. No one seemed too concerned about young Rafael Correa's rights.... a right to grow up outside the abuse or the criminal mindset, chock full of excuses and denial.

With not one moral compass active in his daily life or community, Rafael Correa appears to be stuck in that moment in time when his own father staged his brain-blowing messy death in front of his young son.
Correa, however went on through school and his life and -to his credit- seemed to make some progress. He became addicted to his own manipulations of fact, history and self enriching crimes as president of the Republic of Ecuador. No one today forces Rafael Correa to lie. And lie he does. He even lies about his own stature as an "economist" and cheerfully stated that he was a "Chicago School" educated economist when this too is a glaring lie. This lie is his alone.

In fact, Correa himself keeps altering the dates and timeline of key events in his life, not only about his father. In his drive to grab power, Correa will say or do anything. Rafael Correa would do well to remember that dictators never come to good ends unless they seriously reform. Correa has his own family to consider and increasingly he appears to not care about what horrors they will face when history looks back on his regime of criminals and propagandists. A game of payback in hatred to law enforcement officers and a "system" which arrested his father is not only dysfunctional but professionally aberrant.
 
Today, Rafael Correa's community of enablers want to help him have and hold all powers of government. He rules Ecuador today by Presidential Decree and has no checks and certainly no balances on his ongoing power grab. At the heart of this is a teen ager who will actively engage in denying his past, denying his present and  denying his actions, which to date include installing an illegal congress, installing an illegal kangaroo court,  bribing governmental officers, lying to the media and his voters, welcoming narcoterrorists into Ecuador, turning Quito into a summer camp for the FARC, and persuading Ecuadoreans that his statist system of Castro style socialism [ which is really communism] is the only salvation for their rampant corruption, their refusal to hold a modicum of global appeal, and spiraling unemployment.
 
Ecuadoreans themselves like to pretend that they are all victims. Victims of a system that is not theirs. Ecuadoreans are victims of many things but their truest victimhood is self inflicted and reprehensibly stems from a well entrenched Ecuadorean refusal to stop their own addiction to victimhood. This is a higher and more uniquely pervasive art form than the Brazilian dependencia system or the Western system of welfare dependency.

Ecuadoreans themselves have the tools to self enhance but choose instead to disregard the troubling and messy steps required to grow up and act responsibly, preferring to be locked inside some adolescent mindset where one is neither a functional adult nor an open minded teen and always never quite on the level. Claiming, as we all hear daily, that no Ecuadorean can stand on principle because they are not educated and thus look to other nations for assistance is pure hype and self delusional.

Ecuadoreans, who enjoy universal suffrage and education, have a higher literacy rate than many second and first tier nations. Ecuadoreans themselves simply fail to use their education and lazily abandon their own self growth, preferring instead to blame others while rejecting the clarion call to stand on educated principle, claiming falsely their own ignorance.....by choice. Choosing to remain ignorant and feckless crafts a moral dilemma across Ecuador where crime goes unchecked , political opponents are beaten freely, and small children watch their father blow his brains out. Rafael Correa is the perfect symbol of Ecuador's national past time: lie, cheat, steal and claim victimhood and poverty as the root cause.
 
What are we to make of the obvious dirty deal revealing revelation by Lucio Gutierrez's political party member regarding Correa's father's career as a narcotrafficker? Gutierrez knew of this tawdry past long ago and preferred instead to apply a deal with Correa over this extortion for small gain plan by his party actor.

Rushing to abet Correa, the New York Times on April 15, 2007 hastily churned out a puff piece regarding Correa of such proportions that one can only assume that staffers from U.S. Senator Chris Dodd's office, who routinely feed pufferies to that formerly august newspaper, and the so called NGO groups so aligned with both Dodd and the pro drugs crowd so well ensconced in ambassador Jewell's Quito-based retinue provided rapid story fillers. Without a question, what is the point here is not what U.S. ambassador Jewell did or did not do with the story line or real profile she has had for some time [as had many Ecuadoreans] that Correa's father did hard time for a crime and was supposedly then transferred to Ecuador on an early release on the condition that he complete his sentance under the watchful eye of the.....then dictatorship, which apparently dropped all promises to jail the narcotrafficking Correa padre, thus reminding us all that dictatorships are often the best and most trusted form of government  for preferential criminals and drug runners who claim they "just needed the money."

Dictators, including Ecuadorean dictators who became remarkably  greedy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, claim they just "need the money" too. What should be asked is.....what Palacio and Lucio Gutierrez knew about the padre Correa and when, for they knew.

Moreover, the question is not what Linda Jewell knew and when or why she too chose errantly to remain silent or deliver any functional due diligence on her ally Rafael Correa as president, but why any responsible adult in this passion play for teen agers run amuck ignored the all too obvious signs that a political figure- not just a city council member- but the president of a nation- must first and foremost be understood for who and what he is.
 
It is mandatory for any responsible adult to understand that when Rafael Correa lies before his own nation, he does so with a personal commitment to lying. When Rafael Correa demands that the counternarcoterrorism units cease to function to enable the narcoterrorists, as he does so out of his personal foolish and misguided affection for narco terrorists, and he does so with a familial dysfunction so deep and so base that it colors his judgment, which is totally clouded and today enhanced by Correa's self selected court of advisors who actually applaud drug runners. And unless and until one can actually prove that true functional adult rehabilitation for this sorry tale has occurred, it has not and the same person or persons remain badly, sadly in need of rehab -which they will probably not receive as long as enabling and cover up continues to grow-. And this leads us to the current state of affairs: a failed nation state.
 
If Ecuadoreans seek to suspend their self-manipulating addiction to victimhood and walk out of their self-created prisons, first they must act as adults and review the facts and reject their own self-imprisonment.

To withhold the facts is to aid and abet. To fail to demand the facts is to deny self growth, self determination and creates a nation of hapless lemmings cheerfully abandoning all principal as Correa, to make himself feel better, leads them off a cliff. Just as his father led young Rafael off a cliff. Suicide is not a good option for anyone or a nation. But Correa has been begging for help to stop his self emulation for a long time. It never happened, shamefully. And now Rafael Correa will repeat this suicide on a massively larger scale so that all can watch.

The young Rafael deserved and needed an adult to protect him from crime and pathological abuse. The real crime is that none did so- then or now. Rafael Correa is still looking for an adult with principles to guide him out of his own nightmarish hell of crime, abuse and false security. No Ecuadorean is willing to serve on principle for this or any other rectification of organic life in Ecuador. Unless and until this transpires, we will be plagued with foppish, fawning tales from the New York Times that criminals just need the money.
 
Rafael Correa wants us to believe that his father just needed money and so he enjoyed a life of crime. What remains is the real story: Ecuador, at the time Correa claims his father needed money, was smack dab in the middle of a raging dictatorship which increasingly stripped Ecuadoreans of any personal or financial liberty.

Communism robs the soul of a person or a nation. If Correa blames anyone for his father's life of crime, he should start by honestly blaming the communist system which he so adroitly reveres as a saving structure for Ecuador. In this, his rehab-needing pathology has gotten in his way and his judgment, truncated as it is, is deeply misguided and criminally bound.

While the dictatorship may have sprung Correa's father from hard time and freed him, the dictatorship did nothing to free common living standards and kept all Ecuadoreans inside their prison of flawed communism and imprisoned their souls and lives. Correa is wrong to assume that saviors come from dictatorships. Dictators may have freed his father from one prison but all were imprisoned of a wider sort.
 
While we do not wish ill on the dead or the living, we do insist that due diligence always be performed responsibly and perfunctorily. That is an adult obligation.

What we do note is that the very dishonest Rafael Correa is incompetent and unfit to serve to lead Ecuador, for he is indeed leading Ecuador- quite noticeably- off a cliff, while blaming everyone else for his failure to lead responsibly.

Currently, the mobs are focusing on blaming their private sector for Ecuador's criminally negligent government. Transference of self made problems and projections of delusions never helps, but it does feed the pro communist rabble.
 
In our rush to enable this increasingly erratic and dictatorial princeling and, out of pity or self serving laziness, we fail ourselves.

Rafael Correa, among other deals, just signed opaque ones with Hugo Chavez for some of the largest oil fields in Ecuador with a new refinery to be built near Manabi. This is Correa's legacy: a full, total and illegal partnering with Hugo Chavez.

Any student of current affairs knows that Venezuela under Chavez is a buffoonish nightmare. Chavez's open wallet for himself and his cronies has ravaged their massive oil income and will do the same for Ecuador.

Correa is responsible for this dysfunctional marriage with dictator Chavez and he is quite guilty of same.

Who remains in Quito to demand the legal right to review the Chavez deals? The kangaroo Congress? The kangaroo courts? The increasingly useless media? The increasingly bribed and senseless private sector, already scrambling to sell anything or anyone to Hugo Chavez's operatives? The citizens who are themselves dazed and confused? Who stands on form to ask even this simple question: why would dictator Correa surrender Ecuador's patrimony, its  oil wealth, to dictator Hugo Chavez's wallet problems?  After all, like any good criminal....they just needed the money. Will we all continue to enable this gang of criminal thugs called the Bolivarian or alternative democracy partners....just because they need the money? 
 
Latin Finance has this to say about that:
"Daily Brief
Don't Ignore Ecuador Default, Says AllianceBernstein
Investors should not ignore the threat of default in Ecuador, says James Barrineau, head of research at AllianceBernstein, which has $7.5bn in EM debt, speaking Thursday at an EMTA panel. Comparing the sell-side to "an abused spouse" after Ecuador unexpectedly paid a bond coupon in February, Barrineau warns that even if a May payment is made, the fundamentals are still deteriorating. "[President] Correa has stopped beating us and gave us flowers, so everything is fine with the situation now," says Barrineau, lampooning the view being touted by sell-side analysts. Barrineau raises concerns about Petroecuador, the oil stabilization fund and says the incentives to default will grow through 2007. "It's an absolute wild card and no one knows what these guys are going to do," says Barrineau. He also raises the prospect of deterioration in Pemex seriously undermining Mexico's credit rating. "The decline in production in Pemex has a very good chance of creating a real crisis in Mexico in a 24-30 month timeframe," says Barrineau. "There, in the absence of an energy reform, is a place where you can buy protection awfully cheap," he concludes. "

We remind that we have no gain from the Wall Street crowd's application of Psychology 101 but their analysis of the pattern is apt. Correa, true to  form, beats and abuses then offers flowers. Ecuadorean roses. He does the same domestically. "The fundamentals are deteriorating." PetroEcuador is now under new management: Correa and Chavez. Correa handed submanagement to the self enriching and very confused Ecuadorean military as his most illegal bribe to date. Like Chavez, Correa controls the military and the oil patches.What precisely is PetroBras's role in all this remains cloudy. For Chavez's benefit, Ecuador will now sell its oil to the Chinese in an opaque and illegal deal. Ecuador's Correa is only a wild card because some profit from his criminal pathology. They just need the money.