Ecuador: WikiLeaks cables show US how used 'democracy promotion' to push corporate interests [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Ecuador: WikiLeaks cables show US how used 'democracy promotion' to push corporate interests
Monday, September 1, 2014
By Linda Pearson

Ecuador's pro-US neoliberal president Lucio Gutierrez was ousted in 2005. Since then, relations between Ecuador and the United States have deteriorated, with the Andean nation’s increasing rejection of US hegemony.

The government of Rafael Correa, first elected in 2006, has broken from the neoliberal doctrines Washington has imposed on Latin America. It has embraced regional integration, moving closer to its neighbours and further away from the US.

Diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show how hard the US fought to control Ecuador's future post-Gutierrez.
They show a key element of US efforts to control Ecuador’s political and economic direction in the post-Gutierrez years was the US Embassy’s “democracy promotion” activity.

So-called “democracy promotion” came to prominence as a method for maintaining US hegemony in the 1980s.

Professor William I Robinson says a shift occurred when Washington policy-makers realised the traditional method of supporting authoritarian client states tended to produce just the sort of movements for radical change the US wanted to avoid. An example was the rise to power of the left-wing Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

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This article is the second of a series exploring diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Ecuador published by WikiLeaks. They are based on research of around 1000 WikiLeaks cables from the end of the Gutierrez administration onward, most of which have not been reported on in the English-speaking press before. Read part one here:[font https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/57183

More:
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/57240