May 16, 2007   Ecuador is Latin America's fifth largest oil producer. Ecuador sits on a wealth of oil and gas which it has failed to develop, protect or even honor for its contracts. PetroEcuador, the state oil company, has self enriched its backers, its executives and its global money washers for as long as it has existed, thanks to the state monopoly advocates who crafted this self enrichment scheme. That crafter would be terror group amnesty grantee former president Rodrigo Borja of Quito, who today seems to have taken on a new paid role as advocate for the 'Chavez is Just All Right With Me' cult campaign which lately wants to tell us all that this Pope - and all preceding Popes -are wrong and that Chavez knows better about Catholicism.

Borja makes a ridiculous parody of Chavez by demanding that Ecuadoreans line up with the Chavez revisionist cult that Marx and Jesus Christ were soul mates and that the Catholic Church is dead wrong. This offends anyone who grasps the concept that pure Marxism never existed and never will. Never mind that Christ himself warned of this. And never mind that in today's world communism always takes over what romanticists call Marxism or state socialism and communists always drive out true Christianity in favor of criminal state adoration which, as the last Pope- himself a victim of first the Nazis and then the harsh Russian communist repression in Poland- reminded us, always and everywhere kills the spirit and harms freedom lovers. One cannot love freedom and love the captors of freedom, those who are progenitors of deception and authoritarian power controls, at the same time.
 
Then again, this should not come as a surprise. Rafael Correa, as part one of his theatrically staged love in with Iran and Venezuela {sometimes called his presidential inauguration, staged a bizarre theatre of the absurd during his Inaugural love fest with global criminals and failed state leaders. Correa oversaw a phony pseudo religious cult like ceremony with fake shamans and even fake so called Indigenous feathers which appeared to the naked eye as fake feathers no doubt manufactured in China for circus clowns. And clowns they were and clowns they are. But Correa wants you to believe, with all his smoke and mirrors and all his phony cult like obedience to Chavez and Fidel Castro that theirs is the one, true religion that will save us all. And Ecuadoreans, in their lazy incompetence, making excuses for this phoniness, have said and done not one thing against the assault on religion and common sense underway today. It is the common sense part, which is freely available to all in Ecuador with no attendant standard excuses permissible, whose death so offends these days.

Surrendering common sense is precisely what Correa and Chavez depend upon and they have been handed a real gift in Ecuador with the surrender not only of principled positions by well known leaders in Ecuador but by all Ecuadoreans who have abandoned their obligations to themselves- each and every one- their birth right which is liberty and freedom....and its core component- common sense, without which liberty is meaningless.
 
But Rodrigo Borja, a silver tongued devil as always, appears to be on the Chavez-Correa payroll of propagandists and pundits to further disavow the fundamentals of what is going on here.  And what is going on in Ecuador is a state kleptocracy installation so deep and so wide that unless their criminal acts are suspended soon will take much longer than it took Poland to rebuild after the communist rape of Poland....and that has taken a long time indeed. Just ask the Poles.
 
Even so, Borja's apparent pet money machine, Petroecuador is formalizing what Correa promised the military of Ecuador this week. That is- a bribe.

Petroecuador will now be under new management: the military of Ecuador for more fun and profit which is now fully under Correa's control. Rafael Correa delivers more of his remarkable lies when he cheerfully tells us all that he must give Petroecuador's management over to their dazzlingly corrupt military because...as he puts it, too many paid disruptions have harmed the oil fields. Never mind that these are Correa's paid disruptions. See AFP wire story here.
 
Of course this mimics Hugo Chavez's amazing dictatorial chutzpah in Venezuela where their military- make that Chavez's military since August 2004- oversees their PdVSA which of course means giving true protection to the Chavez racketeering crimes to strip all state oil assets for the Chavez politburo. Rafael Correa is stupidly following the Chavez plan. More than stupidly, he is criminally installing Ecuador's military, as a full bribe for their loyalty, to oversee Ecuador's state oil fields.
 
Today we see that there is nothing- nothing at all- left outside the Chavez and Correa illegal manipulation of the state, the beliefs (and the wallets) of  its own citizens, and what remains of same.  The current Pope spoke truth to power in Brazil last week when he said, "the Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful destruction of the human spirit."  We ask: who you gonna' believe: the Pope ....or the silver tongued Rodrigo Borja and phony theatrics of Rafael Correa and his cult leader, Hugo Chavez?
 
And if the Pope's words are not enough, perhaps Ecuadoreans may listen to the highly respected Walter Molano writing in the May 14, 2007  Latin Business Chronicle that while all the love-ins with the CHE boosters in the Andes and all the phony shaman theaters of the absurd continue, what is really occurring is the remilitarization of the Andes by criminal petro-regimes who are themselves spoiling for a fight.
 
- Pedro Camargo for Ecrisis