*Save democracy sister
*“Plan Colombia” for Ecuador
The dramatic situation that Ecuador is experiencing after the assassination perpetrated the day before yesterday of the practically defenseless right-wing candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, 59, at the exit of an electoral rally in a school in the center of Quito, highlights the inviability as a nation that they intend to establish the powerful criminal gangs of the sister country. It is not, therefore, a question of acquiring any political status or of negotiating subjugation laws, but, even further, of bending the Ecuadorian institutionality and reducing the presidential joust to the size of his shameless criminal will.
As things were, Colombian-educated journalist and former parliamentarian Villavicencio was advancing successfully in his chances of qualifying for the second round of elections in the coming days, judging by the polls, and then competing for the presidential ticket in the ballot in October against the political agents of the fugitive ex-president Rafael Correa. In this scenario, the murderous bullets took the lead to get him out of the democratic day, after the electoral anticipation decreed by the acting president Guillermo Lasso, and produce one of the most tragic episodes in the recent history of this small, but emblematic country of North America.
Even a few days ago, Ecuador had seen the mayor of Manta and eight other people fall while crude killings have become routine, inside prisons, among criminal factions. All of which has led to the declaration of a national emergency and the use of martial law, the result of widespread destabilizing claims that have shaken the territory, with greater rigor since the pandemic, and which today would seem like a land hopelessly conquered by internal clans in connection with the Mexicans and their Colombian arms, especially on account of their almost free control of the Colombian-Ecuadorian coast on the Pacific and the expeditious process towards the waters of the Central American nation.
For the rest, Villavicencio was also known in our country for his recent complaints about existing links between parliamentary sectors of the so-called “correísmo” and Nicolás Petro, son of the Colombian president and currently in negotiations with the Prosecutor’s Office as a result of the violations of the law that the eldest son has said were committed in the presidential campaign that brought his father to power. Likewise, the immolated Ecuadorian candidate had, so to speak, a mood similar to that of the Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci, not long ago assassinated in Cartagena under the same criminal mentality that runs through Latin America, so as not to remember in the same way what happened with the Colombian mercenaries in Haiti a couple of years ago, about how the tentacles of criminality unfold on the continent.
In any case, with the assassination of the day before yesterday a tragic historical design was unfortunately fulfilled, since, on the other hand, no longer doubting it, Villavicencio will have to be remembered as the Ecuadorian Luis Carlos Galán, as the reiterative comparison has already been made, both by virtue of his resounding denunciations, especially during the Correa era and now in front of his political heirs, as well as by the constant death threats until the last day of his life. The difference would perhaps be that one of the many criminal factions associated with drug trafficking and acute criminal mining claimed responsibility for the crime almost immediately (although rectifying itself in confusing circumstances), implying that nothing will happen to them in court while they pretend to be the heroes of the criminal Olympus and gain leadership with impunity.
At the same time, it would be a conceptual mess to simply point out, as Correa did from Belgium, that Ecuador is a “failed state”, paraphrasing the perverse epithet with which Colombia came to be known several decades ago and with which it only seeks to make a profit. immediate politicians even at the expense of his country, acquiring a false messianic tone. But rather, the Ecuadorian nation is only the mirror of what is happening elsewhere, becoming the territorial platform and one of the favorite enclaves of the gigantic criminal enterprise that has been coming from Mexico for decades, as a multinational concert to commit crimes; it has another autonomous pincer in Brazil; it keeps Venezuela at the spearhead and transcends the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia.
To tell the truth, that description of “failed State” about our country, among others, adopted in the studies on democracy in the world of the Rand Corporation, served in part to achieve Plan Colombia, when decades ago the nation avoided the collapse. This is what is urgently needed today: an Ecuador Plan. To turn a deaf ear on the part of the United States on the matter and only focus on the war in Ukraine today would be a colossal mistake.