(Imagine that. The Biden administration and the so-called left in this country attacking left-leaning elements in other countries in order to make sure they never rise to power again. 'But Scott they are socialists and commies!'... are they? Are they really?)
from Drop Site by Ryan Grim and Jose Olivares
The messages show how Ecuador’s attorney general is using her office to attack the left—in alliance with the U.S.
You may remember a few months ago when Ecuador briefly stumbled
onto the global stage, first when narco gangs broke out of prison and took over a TV crew live on air and then when President Daniel Noboa’s government launched a genuinely shocking raid of the Mexican embassy, dragging out Jorge Glas, the leftist former vice president of
Rafael Correa, who was being given asylum by Mexico. You may also
remember it took the U.S. a disturbing amount of time to issue a
statement even mildly skeptical of the extraordinary breach of
diplomatic norms.
How did Ecuador go from one of the
safest countries in the Americas, a rising and stable social democracy,
to a rogue, flailing narco-state with a surging crime wave? U.S.
hostility to any social democratic government that attempts to chart an
independent path, it turns out, is a central part of the answer.
Drawing on more than a thousand text messages sent by Ecuador’s top prosecutor, Diana Salazar—a rising star recently fêted in Time magazine by USAID’s Samantha Power—my
colleague José Olivares and I have produced a new investigation mapping
out the way the social democratic movement of Correa has been
systematically undermined—hollowing out Ecuadorian state capacity and
making way for an alliance of right-wing oligarchs and narco-traffickers
to seize power—all under the guise of battling corruption. The U.S.,
with some notable exceptions, does not exert power through the blunt
force of military coups or armed-and-funded paramilitaries in the way
that it used to. But in many ways, the result is the same...
read more here