On October 3rd, 2019, President Lenín Moreno announced the enactment of Decree 883 which effectively ended decades of government fuel subsidies, causing the price of gasoline and diesel to jump sharply overnight.
In a televised speech on Oct. 3, Moreno announced executive order 883 which “liberates the price of diesel and extra gasoline,” justifying his decision by saying that the Ecuadorean state allocates more than US$1.3 billion a year in fuel subsidies.
A day later prices increased by 25 to 120 percent, as the gallon of gasoline will go from US$1.85 to US$2.30. While diesel, used by most freight transport, will increase from US$1.03 to US$2.27. A measure that was part of the US$4.2 billion deal with the International Monetary Fund. [Source]
The following quote from Amazon Watch correctly identifies the decree as part of austerity measures related to a package loan deal from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made in the early part of this year.
The indigenous movement is calling on President Moreno to revoke Decree 883, which imposes draconian austerity measures on the country as a condition of a recent $4.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The measures cut subsidies on gasoline and diesel fuel, which will result in immediate and massive increases in all basic goods and services, and implemented creatively titled reforms like “wage bill realignment” and “public wage restraint” which unilaterally decimate labor rights and benefits. ~Amazon Watch
The IMF loan of $4.2 billion is really only part of a larger $10.2 billion suite of loans aimed at propping up Ecuador’s government and public debt, with funds being dispersed by the United Nations.
The International Monetary Fund announced Wednesday that Ecuador will receive $10.2 billion in financial assistance to cover its national budget deficit and reduce pressure on the repayment of previous obligations.
Of the total, $4.2 billion will come directly from IMF with the balance coming from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Latin America Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, the Latin American Reserve Fund and the French Development Agency. ~Ecuador News
The public outcry can be heard internationally. Quito is besieged by tens of thousands of demonstrators, steadily increasing as large numbers, in the tens of thousands, of indigenous people are coming from Ecuador’s Amazon region and the Andes to Quito to voice their discontent with their traitor president. Government tyranny is rampant. Moreno declared a 60-day state of emergency – with curfew and a militarized country. As a consequence, Moreno moved the Government Administration to Guayaquil and ordered one of the most severe police and military repressions, Ecuador has ever known, resulting within ten days to at least 7 people killed, about 600 injured and about 1,000 people arrested.
The protests are directed against the infamous Government Decree 883, that dictates major social reforms, including an increase in fuel prices by more than 100%, reflecting directly on public transportation, as well as on food prices; privatization of public services, bringing about untold layoffs, including some 23,000 government employees; an increase in Aggregated Value Taxes – all part of the so-called “paquetazo”, imposed by the IMF. Protesters called on Moreno, “Fuera asesino, fuera” – Get out, murderer, get out! – Will they succeed?
The IMF’s guns are needlessly imposed debt, forced privatization of social services and public assets as railways, roads, and worst of all, health, education, water supply and sewerage services. Unemployment rises, extreme poverty skyrockets, public service tariffs – water, electricity, transportation – increase, often exponentially, depriving people from moving to work or look for new employment elsewhere. Diseases that otherwise may have been curable, like cancers, under the new regime lack medication. Patients die prematurely. Depression brings about rapidly rising suicide rates, as the British medical journal Lancet has observed in many IMF oppressed countries, but especially in Greece.
Targeted are primarily those nations that do not want to bend to the dictate of Washington, and even more so those with natural resources the west covets, or countries that are in strategic geographic locations, where NATO wants to establish itself or get a stronger foothold, i.e. Greece. The IMF is often helped by the World Bank. The former providing, or rather coercing, a ‘debt-strapped’ country into accepting so-called rescue packages, billions of dollars of loans, at exorbitant “high-risk” interest rates, with deadly strings attached.
The latter, the WB, would usually come in with loans – also euphemistically called “blank checks” – to be disbursed against a matrix of fulfilled conditions, of economic reforms, privatizations. Again, all usually resulting in massive government layoffs, unemployment, poverty. In fact, both the IMF and the WB approaches are similar and often overlapping – imposing “structural adjustment” (now in disguise given different names), to steal a countries resources, and sovereignty, by making them dependent on the very financial institutions that pretend to ‘help’ them.
The three most recent and flagrant cases of IMF interference were Greece, Ukraine and Argentina.
Greece was doubly destroyed, once by her brothers and sisters of the European non-Union that blackmailed them into staying with the euro, instead of exiting it and converting to their local currency and regaining financial sovereignty.
Ukraine, possibly the richest country in terms of national resources and with an enormous agricultural potential due to her fertile soil, was “regime changed” by a bloody coup, The Maidan massacre in February 2014, instigated and planned by the CIA, the EU and NATO and carried out through the very US Embassy in Kiev. This was all long-term planning. Remember Victoria Nuland boasting that the US has spent more than 5 billion dollars over the past five year to bring about regime change and to convert Ukraine into a fully democratic country and making it ready to enter the European Union?
The western allies put a Nazi Government into Kiev, created a “civil war” with the eastern Russia-aligned part of Ukraine, the Donbass. Thousands of people were killed, millions fled the country, mostly to Russia – the country’s debt went through the roof, and – in comes the IMF, approving in December 2018a 14-month Stand-By Arrangement for Ukraine, with an immediate disbursement of US$ 1.4 billion. This is totally against the IMF’s own Constitution, because it does not allow lending to a country at war or conflict. Ukraine was an “exception”, dictated by the US. Blamed for the ever-changing and escalating Ukraine fiasco was Russia.
Another IMF victim is Argentina. In December 2015 through fraudulent election, Washington put a neoliberal henchman into the Presidency, Mauricio Macri. He carried out economic and labor reforms by decree and within the first 12 months in office, increased unemployment and poverty from about 12% he inherited from his predecessor, Christine Kirchner, to over 30%.
Within 15 years of Kirchner Governments, Argentina largely recovered from the collapse of 2000 / 2001 / 2002, accumulating a healthy reserve. There was no need to call the IMF to the rescue, except if it was a pre-condition for Macri to become president. In September 2018, Argentina contracted from the IMF the largest ever IMF loan of 57.1 billion dollars, to be disbursed over a three-year period, plunging Argentina in an almost irrecoverable debt situation.
The Bretton Woods Organizations – World Bank and IMF, were created in 1944 precisely for that reason, to enslave the world, particularly the resources-rich countries. The purpose of these so-called international financial institutions, foresaw an absolute veto power of the United States, meaning they are doing the bidding of the US Treasury. They were created under the UN Charter for good disguise, and are to work hand-in-glove with the fiat monetary system created in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act. The pretext was to monitor western “convertible” currencies that subscribed to the also newly modified gold standard (1 Troy ounce [31.1 grams] of gold = US$ 35) , also established during the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.
Both organizations started lending money – the Marshall Fund, managed by the world Bank in the 1950s – to war devastated Europe, moving gradually into economic development of “Third World” countries – and, eventually, in the 1980s showing their evil heads by introducing the neoliberal doctrines of the Washington Consensus worldwide. It is a miracle how they get away with spewing so much misery – literally unopposed for the last 30 – 40 years – throughout the world. Why are they not be stopped and dismantled? – The UN has 193 members; only a small proportion of them benefit from the IMF-WB financial crimes. Why does the vast majority – also potential victims, remain silent?
In the protests, thousands have been injured and detained, as many as seven people killed, oil facilities around the nation have been besieged, and the government of president Moreno was forced to flee capital of Quito.
Unfortunately, however, this isn’t how the IMF, the World Bank, the UN, the Catholic Church, and the various banks and agencies of international development work. Two weeks of social unrest are hardly a deterrent for the vanguards of neoliberalism. Just ask the people of Greece who put up a mighty fight against banker imposed austerity in 2011.
In 2015, former World Bank staffer Peter Koening labeled the World Bank a neoliberal institution and spoke out about the real and present dangers of this globalist ideology, foreshadowing the events we see in Ecuador today.
It [Neoliberalism] finds that representative democracy has been perverted through fear, putting central political decisions in the hands of power groups with special interests.
The social impact of this process has been devastating, with a polarized income distribution, falling wages, increased precarious jobs, rising inequality, and extreme violence. Health conditions have also deteriorated and disorders associated with violence, chronic stress, and a changing nutritional culture have become dominating. ~Peter Keoning
Professor Noam Chomsky along with several other recently chimed in on the situation in Ecuador, identifying neoliberalism as the political philosophy responsible creating the complex and destructive dynamic we see emerging in Ecuador today.
“As we write these lines Ecuador government’s response has taken lives, injured and detained people…but protests that resist this humanitarian crisis extend in all the region,” the statement reads, referring to Colombia’s government scrapping of the peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the political crisis in Peru, the exponential increase in poverty in Argentina or the deepening of inequality in Chile and Brazil.
According to the academic thinkers, this is just a result in which the “one percent” collects the “fruits of all the society with the necessary support of a dominant national elite and even those that don’t belong to the one percent.”
It is for this very reason they conclude hoping that someday “a society will be capable of building a world for all and not only for a minority chosen by a god who never chose them.” ~Noam Chomsky, et al.
Furthermore, we know how the financial organs of neoliberalism operate, in large part because of the work of John Perkins, whose 2004 book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman blew the lid off one of the greatest scams in the history of the world.
In the book, Perkins details his professional work for the Boston-based strategic consulting firm Chas T. Main. He explains a new, non-military system of conquering nations by selling corrupt leaders on loan packages that essentially puts the nation’s natural resources up as collateral for gigantic, high-interest loans that can never possibly be repaid.
The essence of the scam is that the money is effectively never even given to debtor nations because loan packages require the money to be spent on infrastructure projects carried out by development firms working directly with the IMF, the World Bank, and other international creditors. This gives globalist, neoliberal organizations a foothold to establish financial and military dominance over any nation who falls into this trap.
Perkins describes this here:
We are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks. Like our counterparts in the Mafia, EHMs provide favors. These take the form of loans to develop infrastructure — electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industrial parks.
A condition of such loans is that engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco. Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest.
If an EHM (Economic Hit Man) is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor still owes us the money—and another country is added to our global empire. ~John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Interestingly, in the book Perkins talks of his personal involvement in the corporate takeover of Ecuador which began with the oil boom in the 1970s, highlighting the fact that today’s events have a long history which is not being discussed in international news.
Because of my fellow EHMs and me, Ecuador is in far worse shape today than she was before we introduced her to the miracles of modern economics, banking, and engineering. Since 1970, during this period known euphemistically as the Oil Boom, the official poverty level grew from 50 to 70 percent, under- or unemployment increased from 15 to 70 percent, and public debt increased from $240 million to $16 billion. Meanwhile, the share of national resources allocated to the poorest segments of the population declined from 20 to 6 percent.5 Unfortunately, Ecuador is not the exception. ~John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Without consideration of these inconvenient truths, understanding Ecuador’s current situation is impossible. And with all of the recent public concern over reported fires devastating wide swaths of the Amazon jungle, those who genuinely do care about the fate of this critically important global natural resource would be wise to consider the ramifications of having the United Nations and the Catholic Church appear as impartial arbiters of justice.
If you were to visit the country today, you would see one of the world’s most biologically diverse and beautiful areas under total domination by oil development, Chinese road and dam developments, mining interests, and logging on an epic scale, all accompanied by poverty and a clear agenda to colonize and subjugate any remaining indigenous holdouts. You would also see modern offices and massive Catholic churches built directly on top of Inca ruins, direct reminders of the brutal conquest of South America’s indigenous cultures by Catholicism.
Sadly, the people of Ecuador are being duped by a crooked government who who will do anything to survive a revolution. If the resisters fall for it now, it is almost certain that the president will unveil a deal which somehow undermines their sovereignty ever more, while allowing globalist corporate interests even greater access to Ecuador’s priceless forests and resources.
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