Takeovers Captivate Ecuador (U.S. Manta Air Base "host")

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Washington Post

Takeovers Captivate Ecuador
Government Links Its Seizure of TV Stations to Corruption Case

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 19, 2008; A08

QUITO, Ecuador, July 18 -- The tip came to the old journalist at midnight about the decision at the presidential palace: The police were on their way.

Lolo Echeverría in turn called his colleagues at Gamavision, one of Ecuador's prominent television stations, who drove to the studio through the deserted streets of Quito under the looming mass of an Andean volcano. They were in time to see police scale the white metal fence, break locks and force their way into the offices, the beginning of a swift government takeover of more than 190 businesses this month that has captivated this small and volatile nation.

Gamavision went blank briefly on the morning of the takeover, Echeverría said. In one of his last acts as vice president of news, he ordered that the word "censored" appear on the screen. Within a few seconds, he said, the warning disappeared.

"We've had dictatorships, governments of ultra-right and ultra-left," said Echeverría, who spent 32 years at two television stations before resigning July 8. "But there has never been a problem between the government and the media like with this administration."



Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/18/AR2008071802952.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. More from the article:

~snip~
Attempts to prosecute the brothers on embezzlement charges have dragged on for years, amid charges of judicial corruption and malfeasance. For many in Ecuador, the Isaías brothers have become a symbol of why this country remains mired in poverty.

The government, which wants the United States to extradite the brothers, intends not to nationalize the companies but instead to sell them off to recoup losses, said Fernando Bustamante, Ecuador's minister of government.

"We believe that justice requires that all those people who have defrauded their clients and the state answer with their assets," Bustamante said. "We are defending those who have been robbed.

"For nine years, the Isaías family has had an enormous control over the politics, the authorities, over the judges," Bustamante added. "And this has prevented us from acting until very recently."

Very interested in seeing the results of this action as time goes by.

[bemildred]

2. Well, I give Correa high marks for doing this.

For knowing the score and taking action. It is interesting that the military has been unwilling to interfere.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Ecuador's problem with prosecuting the Isaias brothers sounds like OUR problem

with prosecuting the thieves and malefactors of the Bush Junta. The Isaias brothers held Ecuador in a mafia-like grip, such as the Bush Junta has done here--with bought or threatened legislators and judges:


"Government officials said the companies are all part of the Isaías Group, run by brothers and former Ecuadoran bankers Roberto and William Isaías, who now live in Coral Gables, Fla., and are accused of owing $661 million to the Ecuadoran state and to the customers of Filanbanco, which crashed as part of Ecuador's financial collapse a decade ago.

(snip)

"'I think that this is something that Ecuador was demanding for about 10 years, and basically no one had the guts to do it,' said Ana María Correa, a political analyst and newspaper columnist in Quito. 'The Isaías family had the justice system taken over basically through mafia-type actions.'"

Elsewhere the article says that "polls suggest that a majority of Ecuadorans approve of the seizures."

----

Here, Enron, for instance--darling of the Bush White House--stole $10 billion from the people of California, and the Bush Junta prevented California from recovering the money (through control of federal reg agencies), then, of course, fast-tracked Diebold touchscreen voting machines in CA, and activated other corrupt systems (Larry King, Time magazine) for the installation of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor (further protection for Texas energy giants, who had stolen a total of $80 billion from CA taxpayers).

And, what is worse, the Bush Junta has control of the U.S. military, Homeland Security, and the entirety of the federal government, for corrupt contracting and massive looting of public coffers, and can bully any private corporation into doing their bidding, with promises of "protection" (the Bushites own Congress and the judiciary), as we just saw with the Telecom immunity act (immunity for the telecoms for illegal spying on all Americans). Further, they can enrich their super-rich friends by failing to regulate items like mortgage speculation and gas gouging.

The list is endless of corporations who have paid the Bush Junta for "protection" (their CEOs and board members raising millions for Bush/Cheney) and have ravaged their workers, their customers, and their small investors, and then--more often than not--moved all the jobs out of the country.

Ecuador's Isaias brothers seem like a small-scale version of the Bush cartel--unprosecutable in Ecuador because they owned the legislature and the courts. They crashed Ecuador's economy, hung on looting and pillaging while their protection racket still held, then fled to Florida. The amount of money they owe the Ecuadoran government, investors and others may seem small to us. The Bush Junta burns amounts like this (almost $700 million), just in corrupt contracts, every day (if not every hour)--all on credit from China and Saudi Arabia. They are crashing our economy out of greed and hatred for democracy, and are getting away with it, and will continue getting away with it--even after they've moved their loot to foreign currency, and are fled to the United Arab Emirates (not Paraguay any more--it has gone leftist!)--unless and until we restore democracy here and elect good leftists as our public servants, as Ecuadorans have done (and as most of South America has now done).

Then we will have the difficulty of getting our money back--trillions and trillions of dollars. The U.S. economy is much more complex than Ecuador's, of course, and the looting and rampant lawlessness will be harder to sort out. Which corporate assets should we seize?

The Bush Junta and their corporate lapdog press hate Rafael Correa for more reasons than his alliance with Hugo Chavez (and Evo Morales, and Lula da Silva, and Cristina Fernandez, and Daniel Ortega, and Fernando Lugo, and Tabare Vasquez, et al--all the new leftist leaders), and not just because Ecuador controls one of the biggest oil reserves in the western hemisphere (which Correa, like the others, believes in using to benefit the poor), and which makes Ecuador the second biggest Bushite target for destabilization and toppling in this hemisphere (after Venezuela). They hate and fear THE EXAMPLE of a government DOING THE RIGHT THING by its people, and being legitimately elected, and having genuine popularity and support. Do the "will of the people" these days, and you will get trashed by the corporate 'news' monopolies, and you will live with a Bushite bull's eye target on your back, every minute of every day.

As for the Washington Post's publication in this article, of the context for the Correa government's actions--which makes it seem like they are doing their job as reporters, for once--we should never forget how evil the Washington Post is, and we must look for the most evil motive here. And I think it could be this: This article provides a cover story for a Bush Junta assassination of Correa, which could then be attributed to the Isaias mafia.

The Washington Post does not publish any article about a global corporate predator/Bushite target like Rafael Correa without some sick motive--to lie, to slander, to spread disinformation, to propagandize, to cover up corporate crimes, to promote the corporate agenda. And when they give such a target even the slightest bit of seeming fairness in a 'news' story--here couched in negativism and surrounded with cries of "dictator!"--we need to ask why. For instance, is the Isaias Group an entity that the Bushites or Bushite pals are cutting loose for some reason? Is there a conflict of Bushite interests? Or, did the Isaias Group--for all their criminal ways--balk at doing something for the Bushites? Or, did they fail to pay their Bush "protection" fee? The Washington Post is serving global corporate predator interests, in some way, with this article. What is it? Another possibility is to immunize their readers against some other (real) investigation that is in progress and threatening to break. They want to get the story told in a certain way--with all the "dictator" quotes padded round certain truths that may be about to leak out from less powerful news sources.

But I think assassination of Rafael Correa is a very likely Bush Junta intention, to get control of the oil, of course, also to retain the U.S. air base at Manta, Ecuador (which Correa has pledged to evict), and for reasons connected to the FARC hostage release saga, which I won't go into here, but which include Correa's subsequent purge of CIA operatives in Ecuador's military. Correa is a tiger, and he is very, very popular in Ecuador and throughout the region. There is also the reason I mentioned above--they hate this EXAMPLE of good government--of a peoples' champion--and they want to teach the poor a lesson, with the easy elimination of a hero of the poor (--as they have so often tried and failed to do to Hugo Chavez). By identifying the Isaias Group as mafia-like, the Washington Post is quite possibly setting up a scenario for vaguely blaming that group for this evil deed.

The Washington Post take their orders directly from Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. They do not publish an oil target article without consulting them (and may get the actual copy, or at least the desired narrative, directly from them). We are seeing their intentions--their dirty rotten schemes--played out in some way, in this article. We should always re-read a WaPo article on this kind of topic, with this in mind: Why would Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld want this to be published?

Rumsfeld, after all, is the one who published the following, as a WaPo op-ed, the very weekend that Hugo Chavez (at Colombia's request) was getting the first two of six FARC hostages released--the ones whom the Colombian military then bombed on their way to their freedom (12/1/07). In his first paragraph, Rumsfeld states that Chavez's help with hostages releases was "not welcome in Colombia." Was it Rumsfeld himself who orchestrated this attack on the hostages, or Brownfield in the U.S. Embassy "war room" in Bogota, with Rumsfeld setting up the narrative (diplomatic disaster for Chavez, with dead hostages)? (Chavez got those hostages out safely, a bit later, and then four more--so their scheme failed, and they then had to bomb the FARC hostage negotiator's camp, inside Ecuador's border, this March, to violently end these leftist humanitarian successes, which is where Rafael Correa comes into the story. He was trying to get Ingrid Betancourt released.)

"The Smart Way to Beat Tyrants Like Chávez*," by Donald Rumsfeld, 12/1/07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113001800.html

*(i.e., Rafael Correa).