Hugo Chavez’s Multi Billion Dollar Effort to Take Over Ecuador
By Pedro Camargo
August 22, 2005 | After weeks of planning, the activist political arms of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, under the guise of the Bolivarian Revolutionary Party, staged an enormously destructive two province-wide oil production shut down. This was no mere tire burning event so often staged by protesters in Latin America. Rather the so-called protest was actually an orchestrated criminal assault on both government and privately owned property and assets in Ecuador’s most vital petroleum producing region. It was no ideology-based protest for human or indigenous rights: it was engineered politically through the numerous groups, such as Ecuador’s Movimiento Popular Democratico (MPD) party, to cause vast harm and is part of a planned destruction of property to squeeze Ecuador, which has scant margins for error, by cutting off its oil production and make it fall in to the arms of its seducer, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez that is. This is, of course, rank political extortion by destruction of oil production to financially force Ecuador into a binding geopolitical agreement with Chavez.
The government of Ecuador is called upon to demand immediate due diligence on every situation involving its own mineral rights and any government backed financial “deal.” This includes any relationship with Chavez, including the so-called medical doctors on 'loan' (with barely a year of training); or the Ecuadoran oil-backed bond debt deal (to bail out private speculators whose bond holdings collapsed when Gutierrez failed to return); plus the refinery and oil purchases offered by Chavez (currently backed by an ever-changing, always mysteriously opaque verbal deal). Each must be examined with full transparency under Ecuadoran law. Ecuador must also demand full disclosure of identities of agitators that took it to criminalize the productive oil areas: who paid them to be in the provinces, commandeering almost 1/10 of Ecuador’s sovereign territory? To this must be added a demand for payment of restitution to the people of Ecuador for the property damages these `protesters’ inflicted. No one, even under the guise of thoughtful protesting, can render millions of dollars of property lost and assume that the hapless citizenry of Ecuador will cheerfully pick up the tab, leaving scarce resources for education, transportation, infrastructure and healthcare. In other words, the criminals who caused the millions of dollars in losses should repay the people of Ecuador and not leave taxpayers to cover what never should have taken place. We suggest: send the bill for damages and lost revenues to the creator of the planned attacks: Hugo Chavez. American media reports that Ecuador will negotiate with these protesters cum criminals. With pro-Gutierrez rogue elements of the Ecuadoran military assisting this destabilizing auto da fe last week, it can be hoped that the military will at last cease its aversion to military compliance under law. We suggest that all who participated in last week’s armed assaults on two provinces, complete with bombings, lootings, pipeline attacks and oil well destruction, will be happier residing in Cuba instead and should be deported. As if to avoid any responsibility for the enormously expensive criminal destruction of Ecuador’s assets, Chavez announced on August 21, 2005 that he would provide all necessary replacement petroleum, ostensibly the oil lost (by his goons) last week, for Ecuador. No word yet on who supplied the dynamite, mortars and bullets that terrorized a significant portion of Ecuador… or why the attacks were permitted to escalate for so long.
There is no question that Chavez has set his eyes on adding a new nation, read Ecuador, to his Bolivarian neo-communist regime. Chavez has stated this on numerous occasions as well as having, quietly, funded numerous political activist groups in the Andes to help his take over plans. Although the Chavez disinformation regime routinely denies it, it is widely believed that Chavez has assisted in funding union and political groups in Latin nations and has installed Venezuelan government operatives, under the cloak of embassy officials, into government offices as “advisors.” As is now well known, the current president Palacio’s predecessor -Lucio Gutierrez- had engaged with Chavez’s advisors, the name Gustavo Bastardo springs to mind, across his administration and engineered, with full Chavez complicity, the power sharing of his own government with an ousted president, Abdalla Bucaram. Although Bucaram lives like a pasha in Panama with no known legitimate income, Gutierrez organized the ousting of Ecuador’s upper courts by years’ end of 2004 and the installation of a puppet court which was aptly nicknamed “the De Facto Court”, whose sole purpose was to pardon Gutierrez's cronies, threaten non-compliant actors and return Bucaram, who promptly announced that he had gone chavista. Indeed, Gutierrez and his inner group had already gone “chavista” and had commenced installing the Chavez court packing plan, politically and financially colluding with Chavez through PetroEcuador as well as militarily to insure the full allegiance to Chavez, as well as commencing support for PetroSur, TeleSur and additional financial collusion. Today, Gutierrez is at the border with Ecuador. With no upper court sitting, i.e. no constitutional justice or Supreme Tribunal and pending mobocracy, Lucio Gutierrez’s military cronies and his Chavez-paid political operatives are well positioned to assist whoever is in power and to elevate their “special” interests. Gutierrez has trumped up a false dossier before a receptive-to-bribes- judge who will soon claim that the Congress of Ecuador’s impeachment of Gutierrez will be vacated. Voiding the April 22, 2005 impeachment by Congress will soon see Gutierrez in a triumphant return to the Presidential Palace. By destroying Ecuador’s court system, Gutierrez almost insured success for his latest gambit. Either way -through Ecuador’s timidity to denounce the dirty tricks of Chavez over the $ ½ billion petroleum shut down of August 15, 2005 or through Gutierrez’s return, Chavez’s agenda wins. For his part, Hugo Chavez has hired highly paid lobbyists, propaganda and misinformation specialists, has teamed up with Cuban spinmeisters and media managers in numerous countries to build his dominion. The Chavez domain, stated frequently by Chavez, is a military dominated neo-communist regime seeking co option of all the Andean nations.
Hugo Chavez has removed any semblance of democracy in his own country by stripping the high courts of Venezuela, commandeering the electoral processes, controlling the puppet Congress and coordinating kangaroo courts which exhibit no justice whatsoever. The essential ingredients of functioning democracy: rule of law, independent institutions, separation of powers, governance of the people/by the people and legitimate courts have been destroyed by Chavez. Chavez broke the OAS `Democracy Charter’ years ago. Ecuador’s Gutierrez followed the same path. Add to this Chavez’s insistence on breaking Venezuela’s agreements with the USA and the UN plus the OAS on counternarcotics activities, coupled with Chavez’s avowed support to the FARC and his opposition to collaborate on blocking drugs transshipments -probably to augment his own faltering military budget- and one sees a nation that has failed in all ways except criminality. Venezuela today is a failed nation based on criminal activities ostensibly for the greater glory of neo-communism. Under the Chavez plan, Ecuador would be subsumed, with no sovereignty, under this neo-communist bloc.
Chavez needs a win to show off his successes, which to date amount to none at all. He wants fresh meat, so to speak. He wants a political gain and a financial gain. Ecuador would unwittingly give him both. With vast untapped natural gas fields and incredibly underperforming petroleum fields, Ecuador presents a land ripe for abuse and take over. Chavez, having drained Venezuelan resources to the breaking point by his on-going financial bailouts to Fidel Castro (which of course help no one in Cuba except the corrupt Castro-Chavez inner circle who are cheerfully profiteering from spot sales of the Chavez oil gifts to Cuba while Cubans suffer in the dark with no power at all). Chavez has made no small point regarding his interest in regaining the Panama Canal as well as squeezing Colombia into submission to his take over plans by surrounding Colombia and isolating Uribe with pro-FARC, anti-Plan Colombia state actors. While Chavez and Castro grant their corrupt cronies sole source dominion over oil transport, refineries, oil price rigging and election jiggering (to insure on-going price controls), his minions are busy cutting off- the- books oil deals. There is no legal structure remaining for Venezuela’s state oil entity, PdVSA, which has morphed in to a rogue oil vendor and under-the-table oil price fixer for speculators and hedge fund operators.
A scant survey of regional media indicates a vigorous, factual contra-Chavez presentation by both Cuban Americans and former Venezuelans. Former executives of PdVSA openly advise Ecuador and other nations to avoid entanglements with the now-corrupt PdVSA. Medical societies in Brazil and Paraguay openly rejected the so-called doctors from Cuba, funded by Chavez, for their poor training. Numerous medical societies have urged that Latin America's nations avoid entanglements with Chavez and Castro on what they call a communist peace or medical corps. Wall Street itself has rejected Ecuador’s bond deal, so reported as an urgent national priority, as a speculative nightmare and have rejected the Gutierrez era bond debt deals. Venezuelan media itself makes strong presentations daily to extol the deterioration of their own country, against great odds considering the repercussions of violating the loosely worded and highly subjective chavista Gag Law. Of course no free press exists in Castro’s Cuba- only state controlled media propaganda. Media across most of the Americas already exhibits a natural tendency to portray the far left as saintly saviors of the poor and barely covers the region with actual analysis or factual reporting. This partial black out of the news contributes to a miserable influx of old KGB style misinformation specialists, currently beavering away in the Chavez propaganda machine.
Nothing from the Chavez government is dependable or factual. In fact, it is not a government at all but rather a funding mechanism for the Castro-Chavez alliance and it wretched plan of continental expansion, covered over by propaganda. Like the installation of the Smartmatic voting machines in Venezuela that reportedly render mirror voter results, Chavez’s spin machines issue proclamations daily which are the exact opposite of the facts in a parallel sociopathic world of false mirrors. Just as Chavez’s courts are puppet courts, his government is a puppet government, all answering in lock step with the Castro regime. This is not democracy. This is not legitimate. And this is not a government that anyone should do business with. Certainly not Ecuador.
President Palacio has not the strength to hold his nation together while combating the psycho-social gamesmanship of the Chavez-Castro team. Often called a destabilizing political influence in the region, the pair is actually far more insidious than noted before. This duo, through its vast network of informers (often called `sports trainers’ or `medical doctors’) and diplomats- as-spies, have teamed with ideologically attuned in-country actors and have for many years infiltrated the highest levels of all South American nations except Chile and Colombia.
These team efforts are thorough, rapid, insidious and insistent. They will stop at nothing less than full conversion to the Castro – Chavez Bolivarian neo-communism under military control. Under their grand vision, all Republics cease to exist. Patriotism is subsumed under a revisionist and utterly phony abuse of the historical Simon Bolivar and his lover Manuela Saenz. In this, and all matters related to Chavez and Castro, there is no attention to the actual facts, no integrity in governance, no transparency, no legitimacy, no freedom of the press, no justice, no free commerce, no personal liberty, and no democracy. All state and private lives are subsumed under the on-going feeding trough to benefit greedy caudillo-style inner circle actors. Lest one doubt this evaluation, start by questioning Chavez’s refusal to report, as required by law, the activities of PdVSA through CITGO, to the U.S. SEC. This crime exposes Chavez’s fear of fact finding. Actual reporting will expose a series of scandals far worse than Enron. CITGO and PdVSA have become the darling of offshore oil speculators who have driven up oil prices and some are said to be motivated by anti-US persuasions to harm the U.S. financially. Its myriad global speculators and actors inside the CITGO and PdVSA web is so corrupt that even Chavez is at a loss to clean it up. Thus Venezuela has ceased to exist as a nation state and is today controlled by its revenue depleting alliance with Castro and its dominant dependence on unsavory speculators to bolster its national product. Both ends serve neither the Venezuelan public nor the furtherance of legitimate democracy. Any relations between Ecuador and the false reality that is Venezuela today can only be fraudulent.
camargo_pedro@yahoo.com.br
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