Hmm, seems to me Correa has been on the side of the poor folks all along.
Ability to enter the middle class in Ecuador has much to do with your
color--how light or dark you are. And rich folks like to pass on their
entitlement to their kids to insure that dynasties--political and
otherwise--hold through the generations. You can call this
"family-friendly." I call it anti-democratic, because it depresses
opportunity for those not born into that entitlement.
Getting rid of term limits, however, is a sign of stupid overreach--happens
to the best of men when they get into power--but the rest sounds pretty
good to me.
On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 8:31 PM, Gary Schiltz <g...@naturesvisualarts.com>
wrote:
> [A long post follows - I hope it is interesting to at least a few on
> the list (I'm thinking especially of Ivan Ordoñez)]
>
> Despite living here in EC for 7 years, I'm still trying to figure the
> place out. There are so many things I could say about it, but most
> would be just sort of gut feelings. My Spanish reading skills have
> only recently reached the point where I can read newspapers with
> little enough pain to make it worthwhile.
>
> First, the good things. The country is extremely varied
> geographically. It is about the size of NM, with a population of about
> 13 million. We have Amazonian jungle, mountains over 21,000 feet,
> Pacific beaches, and then of course the Galapagos. I live at about
> 6500 feet elevation, so I don't need much heat, and never any cooling.
> It's amazing living on the west slope of the Andes. I can drive half
> an hour and get an increase in temperature of about 10 degrees F,
> another half an hour for another 10 degrees. Or, I can drive half hour
> up our gravel road for a decrease of 10 degrees. So, up to a 30 degree
> temperature range in an hour and a half of driving. It's very
> beautiful where I live, but quite cloudy (that's why it's called cloud
> forest :-) People are generally very friendly here, but the idea of
> "the truth" seems to be a little flexible. Non-prepared food is cheap,
> especially fruits and vegetables. It is still legal for foreigners to
> own land here, and land in rural areas can be bought for between the
> low hundreds of dollars per acre, up to thousands. You can get
> permanent residency by several means; Karen and I did so by investing
> more than $25K by buying land (and then building two houses on it).
>
> In my opinion, the bad things pretty much begin with the current
> government. Rafael Correa swept into power in 2007 on a populist
> platform modeled laregly after Hugo Chavez of Venezuela - many have
> called him "Chavez Light". At first, he was pretty moderate, and spent
> all of Ecuador's income from oil (I believe we are a member of OPEC),
> which was high because of the price of crude, on infrastructure
> projects. I wholeheartedly support investing in infrastructure. So
> though I was initially a little skeptical, after 8 years of GW Bush, I
> had convinced myself that leftist governments are a good thing.
> However, within a couple of years, the entire national assembly was
> from Correa's party, and the populist rhetoric, replete with
> rich-vs-poor talk, steadily increased. Then he loaded the courts with
> his supporters, so with all three branches of government, he has
> pretty much gotten whatever he wants. He has a huge ego and hates to
> be criticized. So, he started passing laws restricting legitimate
> criticism, much like Chavez. After a couple of journalists were fined
> millions of dollars for "libel" against Correa, criticism pretty much
> died, and many people became genuinely fearful to say anything
> negative about him in public.
>
> When the price of crude dropped dramatically, there wasn't enough
> money to feed his newly created huge bureaucracy. So, he turned to a
> few countries, especially China, and got high-interest loans. At the
> moment, I believe EC is in debt to the tune of $35 billion, and even
> with crude prices going up somewhat, there still isn't enough cash
> being collected to maintain the bureaucracy. At first, he merely added
> "safeguards" (basically import quotas and higher import duties). After
> all, this only affected "the rich". Even that wasn't enough. So, he
> made a mistake that may (I hope) be his downfall. He proposed large
> capital gains taxes on real estate (I'm not sure, but my impression is
> that this may even apply when you don't sell).
>
> But the extremely unpopular thing that he did was to propose
> progressive high inheritance taxes. EC, like most latin countires, is
> very family oriented. He made the mistake of criticizing the ability
> to pass property down to heirs with little tax, and that struck a
> nerve. One remark that he made went like this: if you have property or
> a business worth, let's say $500K, and you have five children and ten
> people working for you, you can leave each child $100K, which would
> put them into the 72% tax bracket, which would mean they would each
> have to raise $72K just to receive their share. But, why not divide
> the estate into 15 parts, leaving $33K to each child, as well as to
> each worker? That would put them all into a much lower bracket,
> allowing them all to inherit their small amount tax free. That's
> pretty much when the shit hit the fan. Even communist-leaning folks
> tend to have a dim view of leaving the same thing to their workers as
> they do to their kids, especially here in family-oriented Latin
> America.
>
> So Ecuadorians have recently found their voice, especially the middle
> class. Emboldened by anger over his anti-family stance, people have
> finally started vociferously criticizing Correa. Starting a couple of
> weeks ago, people have been peacefully demonstrating in the streets by
> the tens of thousands in Quito, and even more in Guayaquil. I believe
> there were estimates of up to 300K people in Guayaquil alone
> demonstrating against Correa on June 26. In Quito, a group numbering
> in the tens of thousands marched to as close to the presidencial
> residence as they could get, chanting "Fuera, Correa, Fuera!" ("Out,
> Correa, Out!"). [#FueraCorreaFuera] They even broke through the police
> lines, but Correa himself was off somewhere else giving a speech to
> his mass of supporters, numbering in the low hundreds in that
> particular location.
>
> So, it isn't clear what's going to happen. Oh, the other thing that
> Correa has been pushing for is a change to the Constitution to remove
> term limits (he is two years away from the end of his second term,
> which is all that is currently allowed). The assembly apparently could
> amend the constitution by itself, but polls show over 70% in favor of
> a national referendum, which almost certainly would go against
> indefinite re-election, and thus, against Correa.
>
> The next few months will be pretty interesting, to say the least.
>
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Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
me...@emergentdiplomacy.org
mobile: (303) 859-5609
skype: merlelefkoff
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