August 12, 2008  None of us are off the hook this week and not one involved in almost all aspects of Andean affairs is looking very good or productive today as matters deteriorate because no one yet puts on the table one single factual analysis about the region based on demonstrable data and verifiable activities. But we are all complicitous in this rush to inertia based on sloppy, lazy behaviors and this helps nothing. Yes, yes yes- Peru, Chile and Colombia are making demonstrable and glorious progress while all around them are morasses of their own dishonesty and refusal to grow up and act responsibly. Nowhere do we see this better than Bolivia and Ecuador and Venezuela.
 
Hugo Chavez has for over 20 years remained a stubborn acolyte of Fidel Castro and he has not once changed from this ridiculously cult like addiction to the Cuban communist cartel. None should have been lulled in to supporting Chavez and no one today should believe one word from Chavez's dictatorial mouth without demonstrable facts to back it up.  Hugo Chavez has a 20 year track record of lying like a dog while he has yet to change his spots in any verifiable fashion.
 
Rafael Correa of Ecuador is even more like Castro than Hugo Chavez, if the truth be told- which it is not. Indeed, Correa is spending lots of Venezuelan and Ecuadorean.... and U.S. taxpayer monies to lie a lot to the U.S. government and all of North America in his unrelenting war of attrition. Correa is truly a hard line Chavista and is more correctly known as a hard line Castroite, as he himself has always stated. Here is the real story: 

 
The Wall Street Journal    
August 11, 2008 
 
 THE AMERICAS
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY   
 
Chávez Sees Cuba as a Model
August 11, 2008; Page A13
It is no secret that Hugo Chávez wants to be just like Fidel Castro someday. And last week he took a step closer to that goal by laying down 26 new decrees designed to eviscerate property rights and further consolidate economic power in the presidential palace. He also nationalized the third-largest bank in the country.

Yet it is not only in the economic realm that Hugo is mimicking his Cuban idol. What has been less publicized is the Venezuelan president's expanding collection of political prisoners, and his other sinister methods of neutralizing opponents.

The economic measures of the Bolivarian Revolution are worrying enough on their own. The government has proclaimed food production and distribution a public good, which means that the state can intervene in any way it wants. Indeed, it already has; and many believe that Mr. Chávez now has the Venezuela food processor and beverage maker Polar targeted for nationalization.

Mr. Chávez has spent nearly a decade trying to transform Venezuela into a centrally planned economy. The results are dismal. There are food shortages, private-sector investment and employment are shrinking, and inflation for the past 12 months was almost 34%. A rising homicide rate suggests that civil order is breaking down.

Nevertheless, Mr. Chávez appears pleased with the circumstances, illuminating another way in which he resembles Castro: Both men are narcissists above all else, and both have been driven by an intense desire to rule as the omnipotent caudillo. The welfare of the nation is beside the point.

In political terms, this means that all challengers to the president's power must be put down, and forcibly if necessary. Contrary to claims by both Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd and Jimmy Carter that Mr. Chávez's Venezuela is a democracy, this government is trying to annihilate its political competition.

Mr. Chávez hasn't had to play hardball with many Venezuelans. Few are secure enough to challenge him, and many have been easy to co-opt by tying their financial survival to his agenda. Moreover, Venezuela is a notoriously corrupt place, and it's not only the inner Chávez circle that is enjoying the party.

There are, though, the few upstarts who can't be bought or intimidated; and for them, Mr. Chávez has had to make use of his own version of "the law."

Last week, his handpicked supreme court ruled that 260 aspiring candidates for the November municipal and gubernatorial elections -- most of whom oppose him -- will be barred from the ballot because they have been accused of corruption.

Of course this doesn't quite work under Venezuelan law, because an individual may only be barred as a candidate if he is convicted. But the Chávez government got around that problem: None has been tried but the National Controller -- a chavista -- has declared them guilty by fiat.

More ominous is the growing list of political prisoners. One is Ivan Simonovis, the former chief of the Caracas metropolitan police, who during his tenure earned a reputation as a disciplined professional and dedicated crime fighter. He was the top cop in the city on April 11, 2002, the day of a mass protest that provoked the brief resignation of the president.

Seventeen people were murdered that day, and an independent police force would have tried to figure out who was behind the killings. But Mr. Chávez took over the metropolitan police. Mr. Simonovis was arrested on Nov. 22, 2004, accused of being responsible for three of those deaths.

His wife Bonny is one of his lawyers, and I spoke to her by telephone on Thursday. She told me it is against Venezuelan law to hold a suspect for more than two years, but her appeals for his freedom have been rejected. She also said that during his entire three years and eight months of incarceration, her husband has been held in solitary in a four square-meter cell that has no windows and no ventilation. His health has deteriorated.

His trial, which began on March 20, 2006, is now the longest in Venezuelan history. Closing statements were supposed to be heard last week, but the judge granted the prosecution more time to review the arguments. Mrs. Simonovis tells me that this means the case can drag on for months longer, though no evidence to convict her husband has ever been presented.

Another political prisoner is National Guard Lt. Col. Humberto Quintero, who was responsible for capturing Colombian terrorist leader Rodrigo Granda in Venezuela in December 2004 and turning him over to Colombia. Mr. Quintero ought to be treated as a hero in Venezuela. Instead he has been thrown into a maximum security prison and has been allegedly tortured.

    These men are being punished for nonconformity with chavismo. But their arrests also serve as warnings to the rest of the nation: Get in the way of Mr. Chávez's caudillo aspirations at your peril.

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We at ECrisis note that the same can be said about Rafael Correa: get in his way and your life is no longer your own. Indeed, as the USA's White House knows well, Rafael Correa has repeatedly sworn publicly to install the exact Cuban system inside Ecuador, debasing all that remains and destroying all democracy. For this act of craven duplicity, the USA will wildly and irresponsibly increase US AID's money to Ecuador in 2009 to aid, abet and enable Rafael Correa's installation of the Cuban system in Ecuador. Just check what the USA spends its money on and study the so called constitution which the USA's contractors do illegally support and ask yourself WHY? Then ask yourself why you have not requested a cease and desist politesse for the USA to cancel its fraudulent destruction of Ecuador's democracy while calling their acts as supportive of democracy.

Ecuador's HOY reports on what the Correa government has refused to disclose which is the severity and depth of its marriage to Iran and Hezbollah and reveals the depth of the Correa-Chavez money laundering for Hezbollah/Iran, also called yet one more marriage of convenience for Ecuadoreans, who are very much in favor of dishonest marriages of convenience: this time between Ecuador's Central Bank and the Hezbollah money movers. Read it here and know this: marriages in name only where nothing is honest is still an effrontery to integrity and never satisfy the essentials of any quality of life indicator except....living off of someone else's money or so called prestige which is the case here. Ecuador de facto and de jure is now the banking central for Hezbollah and Iran's dirty money for Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Ecuador while hiding from the U.S. Treasury officials. This from HOY on the illicit merger of Ecuador and Iranian central banks:

..........Un mercado como el iraní, que tiene un alto nivel de tecnología, también tiene interés de invertir en el Ecuador en las áreas de vivienda social, infraestructura vial, prospección minera, biocombustibles, petroquímica, vehículos y tractores.

Aunque aún no se definen las estrategias para poder colocar los productos ecuatorianos en Irán, Salvador dice que hay que desarrollar sistemas de transporte logísticos que faciliten los procesos. En ese sentido -señaló- se trabaja en la firma de un convenio entre los bancos centrales de ambos países para facilitar las transferencias (SC)
 
We are proud that some brave students know well that their historic forebears would be horrified today to see the rape of Ecuador under the Correa-Chavez-Cuban [and Iranian] team and know too well that freedoms end is with all Ecuadoreans, just as these historic icons are suffering the removal of all they stood for: 
 
 
Foto: EL COMERCIO 
 
 
Foto: EL COMERCIO 
 
And still Correa's duplicity continues: this time with even more theft of state oil contracts. Correa's claim that PetroEcuador will shape up and expand its operations if and only if all partners denounce essential rights to rule of law, notable arbitral rights under the UN and World Bank's bi lateral investment treaties which permit a choice of arbitration, while demanding that one and all be subjected to Correa and Chavez's non laws and rigged courts is a disgrace. We note that PetroBras, dirty as they are, will see its bribes rewarded with Correa's PetroEcuador and will cheerfully be conferred essentially no bid contracts because Brazil and Venezuela want no part of functional legality. The CALGARY, Canada HERALD reported on 8-9-08, " Contract talks with Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, and Andes Petroleum Ltd., owned by China National Petroleum Company International Ltd., will begin next week, Chiriboga told reporters in Quito on Friday. Chiriboga, in a radio interview Friday, said oil companies must agree to several terms, including dropping arbitration before the World Bank's International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes, which Ecuador considers biased, and accepting that changes in taxes don't amount to changes in contracts with the state.
 
Among other lies, Correa's team states that these illicit, unbid contracts with Correa for oil and gas will be "more transparent." Notably absent in all that Correa and his cartel thugs do is any semblance of transparency.
And still Ecuadoreans refuse to self educate and grasp the importance of Ecuador's marriage of convenience with Russia's proxy state of Iran. Correa claims that Ecuador just needs the money for its illicit polygamy of convenience with criminal Iran and Venezuela. We remind: Ecuador does NOT need Iranian, FARC or Venezuelan monies although Correa's team is growing quite fat off these criminal cartels already. With no rule of law and no respect for common law, nations sometimes act with gay abandon and break all bounds of fellowship and comity while enshrining the illicit and legalizing all that should never be legalized. Ecuador is one such place today as is Venezuela. Russia is the largest exemplar of what happens when integrity and honesty are legalized, here seen devouring a tiny democracy named Georgia:

Tuesday, August 12, 2008 

 

Like Correa claiming that theft and unnatural acts such as narcoterrorism are necessary because he just needs the money, as his own father claimed when running drugs for the Alfaristas and Shining Path-FARC triad, so too do Chavez-Correa dishonestly claim that their weapons build up in the Andes, notably their new joint base, as agreed to recently, in Manta, is for "self defense." 
 
-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis