00:00Also in the context of Ecuador's general elections, let's welcome political
00:04scientist Eduardo Menezes. Hi Eduardo and thank you very much for joining us today.
00:10Thank you for the invitation. Ecuador's elections have been overshadowed by a
00:16non-precedented social insecurity, economic fall, energy crisis. But to
00:21understand today's reality, let's go backwards. In what way the return to
00:25neoliberalism in 2017 has impacted and transformed Ecuador's social and
00:30economic landscape?
00:34Well, we need to understand that what is happening right now in Ecuador is the result of a very coherent policy from the
00:45elite of the country. The richest people of Ecuador, which is a very few
00:51people who have this economic power and have been opposing the progressive
00:57policies for many years, when they arrived to the government, what they
01:03did were, I would say, two main things. The first one was definitely changing
01:10totally the direction of the economic policy, which was translated by first
01:19making a liberalization of all the bank system. The problem is that Ecuador is a
01:25dollarized country. We do not have our own currency, we do have the dollar, the
01:29United States dollar. And opening and making this liberalization of the
01:35banking system, what resulted was, in fact, in the possibility for all these
01:42economic elite and all these rich families from the country to bring their
01:47dollars, who were being invested or forced to be invested in the country, and
01:52bring them to external banking out of Ecuador. And that was a huge blow to the
02:00country, because we cannot produce our own currency. We are dependent on these US
02:05dollars. And while the richest people of the country, the biggest economic elite,
02:10was bringing those dollars outside, our internal economy was being deeply
02:18impacted and being reduced each time more. The answer to this economic
02:23recession that was created by these policies was, in fact, to start a very
02:28accelerated and deep program of loans with the EMF. We have already known all
02:36these loans with the EMF for decades before, in the 80s and the 90s. And it's
02:41what has generated a big dependency in this multilateral organism, because it's
02:47not a debt that we can pay. In fact, we are taking each time debt just to pay
02:51the interest of the precedent debt, and we are just going down and down into a
02:57spiral of debt that cannot be solved. And that's what has caused the big
03:03crisis, the economic crisis in Ecuador, which resulted in having the biggest
03:10poverty rate since the pandemic, resulted in having more than 60% of the
03:16people of Ecuador being in the informal sector of the economy, meaning that they
03:20do not have social rights, they do not have contracts for working, they are
03:26working in very precarious conditions, and also has resulted in a huge increase
03:32of the public debt directed to these organs like the EMF.
03:37Precisely, you mentioned in the US, Ecuador's multidimensional crisis has
03:41skyrocketed the migration of its nationals abroad, especially towards the
03:45US. How this reality could reshape Ecuador's diplomatic relations with the
03:50US amid the xenophobia and massive deportations that are being unleashed by
03:55President Donald Trump?
03:57Well, there are two things here. First is that the fact that we have this big
04:05migrant population, Ecuadorians living in the US, is not something new. In fact,
04:11it's new the fact that we do have a big wave that started during the last years,
04:16I would say, just after the pandemic, there was a huge wave. But in fact, there
04:23was also a previous wave in the 90s, we were all exactly the same EMF recipes
04:29that pushed out millions of people out of Ecuador. And in fact, I would say that
04:34it is possible to have a sovereign diplomacy with the United States, even if
04:40having, even if we have all these families and this, this big amount of
04:46migrants living in the US working, even if it's not always in a legal way, but
04:52being there, what has changed is not essentially that fact, what has changed
04:58is the fact that the external, the foreign policy of the government of
05:04Ecuador since the 9th, 2019, has totally shifted into a non sovereign policy,
05:12where we, we have seen our presidents been defending the US interests, rather
05:18than the Ecuadorians people interests. We have seen all of our presidents start
05:25even violating our constitution for allowing, for example, the presence of
05:30military bases from the US in our country, the entrance of military forces
05:37from the United States to our country. So I would say that what has changed from
05:41the Ecuadorian side, is more an internal perspective on how do we drive our
05:47foreign policy. But now that we have this turn of events with Trump, the US,
05:54who is taking out all, all these migrants that have been arriving from
06:00this late wave, that will be a big problem, an economic problem to the
06:05country, because a lot of the US dollars that were coming to our economy, and
06:11again, I will reinforce that we have a dollarized economy in a context where
06:15our banking system has been liberal, liberalized. So all of our dollars from
06:21the economic light is being brought out of the country. The dollars that were
06:29coming in from those migrants who were working in the US, who were sending
06:34money to their families, was a huge contribution to the Ecuadorian economy.
06:39Now, this will definitely have a big blow in our economy, not only in terms
06:45of how these migrants are being treated, and we haven't seen any reaction from
06:51the Ecuadorian president towards that, but also in the economic perspective,
06:56which will bring an even more difficult situation to the country.
07:03Let's stay on topic regarding foreign policy. How might the election result
07:07affect its foreign policy, particularly regarding Latin American integration?
07:12Well, we have seen in the last seven years, the same, since Lenin Moreno
07:18arrived to the government, we have seen little by little Ecuador passing from
07:27one of the countries who was pushing the most for the regional integration,
07:31integration of all South American and Latin American countries into a same
07:36region that could implement policies towards our people, toward the
07:43development of the region, sovereign policy. We have seen a radical shift
07:50towards Ecuador becoming one of the main factors of disrupting the integration
07:59process. I could definitely say that Ecuador, Argentina, are two in the South
08:06American side, are two of the main countries for being defending the US
08:12position who has historically been against the integration of our continent,
08:16against the integration of South America, against the integration of Latin
08:21America, because obviously, if we are divided, it's much more easy for the US
08:27interests to be penetrating our economy, penetrating our political
08:32class, defending the US interest instead of our people's interest. And sadly,
08:39Ecuador has become, I would say, with Argentina, the two main countries who
08:44are breaking all the possibilities of the regional integration, who are not at
08:52all participating in the dynamics that could interest, that could be in the
08:57interest of our people in creating regional policies, industrial policies,
09:02policies to develop our internal commerce between our countries. And we
09:07have seen Ecuadorian policies going exactly the opposite way.
09:11Thank you. Thank you, Ramon, very much. Eduardo, my pardon for your remarks on
09:16this paramount event.
09:18Sorry, I couldn't hear your question.
09:24I was saying that thank you very much for your time hearing from the South.
09:28Thank you. Thank you very much.
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