Well, maybe not new, but a new manifestation of it.
Pretty shocking to see what happened in Ecuador, where indigenous and leftist groups voted null for the presidential election, handing a victory to Lasso, an far right neoliberal ghoul who will continue the hand over of the country to the IMF.
The Correa government (leftist president whose term ended in 2017) had its faults, and wasn’t great on social issues, indigenous issues, or environmental ones, but this anti-extractivist left is such a clear fucking op. While the mainstream media in Ecuador was firmly right wing, the grassroots indigenous and social movements that led the vote-null campaign after their candidate Yaku Perez was defeated in the first round have handed the country over to a guy who is a member of Opus Dei ffs. So when the vote-null crowd wrote “abortion rights” and “women’s rights” on their ballots, they are in effect choosing the far worse of two evils?
You will see this same playbook in Peru, where Castillo, who is leftist economically but socially conservative, will be tarred and feathered as a bigot (which to be frank, he probably is) but the alternative is Keiko Fujimori.... the other leftist candidate, Veronika Mendoza, who is leftist socially as well, came in third in the 2016 election, but fared worse this time.
Castillo deserves very critical support, and led a massive teachers strike in 2017. His victory in the first round was a repudiation of the urban elites by the working class people of the provinces, as well as the indigenous. It will be interesting to see if a similar playbook is followed here. I don’t think Mendoza will be a US asset in the way Perez clearly was, but will the “let’s vote against the leftist because they are bad on some social issues” narrative that serves only to put the far right in power will be weaponized to help Fujimori.
This shit just sucks. The Arauz loss in Ecuador Is a major blow, given how much that country has suffered under the IMf austerity politics of Lenin Moreno...
Edit: looks like Peru’s second place finisher may be a guy named Hernando de Soto, who was dictator Alberto Fujimori’s economic advisor. Though Keiko Fujimori and Rafael Lopez Aliaga are right on his heels.
Aliaga is the Opus Dei volcel guy who has been compared to bolsonaro, but rejects that because bolsonaro hates gay people and Aliaga follows Pope Francis’ word on the matter, but is anti-abortion. Plus:
In a recent radio interview, López Aliaga said he represses his sexual desire by thinking of the Virgin Mary and flails himself with a cilice, a sackcloth garment with points that stick into the body, a practice from early Christianity.
Tarring leftist leaders as socially right wing is the "new" op. If the leftist leader is very obviously(corbyn wasnt being obvious enough) socially progressive, then the playbook doesn't work so well, right?
I don’t think you can compare with the west. More of a global south phenomenon, where there are growing feminist and lgbt movements as well as a strong indigenous movement, and that is what the CIA (through its cut out orgs obviously) are seeking to exploit.
There is also the fact that poorer communities within these countries tend to be more social conservative, or at least take the position of - have civil unions and limited abortion, I just don’t want to see the protest people that I don’t like.
And so it seems that as leftist/feminist/lgbt movements educate and agitate in these socially conservative areas ,around them(intersectionality) shift the social lens around them the leftist leaders that pop up will shift with them.(seeing as how the leaders in these areas come from the people anyways.)
Hope so, but they are being, at least in Ecuador, heavily co-opted, where the Eco-Socialist, lgbt friendly anti-extractivist candidate supported the coup governments in Venezuela and Bolivia, called for a coup in his own country after he lost, likes the ImF and wants a closer relationship to the US, and told his supporters to not vote in the runoff. And many of these movements followed him.
Furthermore, check out this crazy letter from academics. Fucking wild: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/01/academic-letter-censor-grayzone-ecuador-yaku-perez/
How it started: Pride parades being sponsored by Goldman Sachs
How it's going: this shit you're describing
Also, @gammison is better versed in this topic. Hopefully they’ll chime in
what was the question lol.
If you click the context link you can see what was being asked
Read it, unclear on what the concrete question is. Like what's the nature of intra-left conflicts in South America, specifically Ecuador? Is it a CIA playbook?
I don't think it's a CIA playbook. I mean it's good for the US state department Lasso won, but the CIA did not have to do anything to drive the wedge between Correismo and CONAIE (and CONAIE already did not like Perez, the guy they wanted came in second in the pseudo-primary process Pachakutik runs, but Perez had real bona fides in indigenous environmental water rights organizing that won people over). Like as far as CONAIE is concerned, the environmental and industrial development policies of Correa were a colonial project (one that under a different government used to be explicitly called colonial in the 1990s), and one that would be done no matter what government was in power. Under Correa more wealth would stay in the country, but frankly they do not care much about that when it's their land destroyed and their autonomy that is violated either way.