Ecuador Bows to US and IMF, Entering New Neoliberal Era

Elliot Gabriel

Mint Press News

The warmth displayed by authorities over the past month to visiting U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and the IMF, respectively, further proves that Ecuador is melting back into the arms of international financial interests.

UITO, ECUADOR – Ecuador’s passionate re-embrace of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) offers one of the clearest and most dramatic signs that the country’s leadership is dead-set on shedding any vestiges of the “post-neoliberal” era it was said to have entered a decade ago during former President Rafael Correa’s Citizens’ Revolution.

 

The warmth displayed by authorities over the past month to visiting U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and a team from the IMF, respectively, further proves that Ecuador is melting back into the arms of international financial interests. Yet, despite authorities’ almost apologetic attitude toward foreign capital over the spats and breakups of the past, the people of Ecuador appear destined to suffer further abuse at the hands of the domestic and transnational capitalist interests that inflicted such grievous harm on it in the past.

Pence’s visit to the Andean nation last month to meet with President Lenin Moreno offered one such occasion for the groveling attitude the once-proud government of Ecuador has adopted toward the U.S. and IMF. It comes amid the rolling reversal of fortunes faced by the wave of left-nationalist social democratic governments that rose in response to the devastation wrought by U.S.-dictated neoliberalism.

On June 29, Economy and Finance Minister Richard Martinez told reporters at the Carondelet Presidential Palace in Quito, that the country requires U.S. backing to obtain new loans from international institutions amounting to nearly $4 billion.

“We communicated to the vice president the need for support to permit multilateral organizations to generate sources of financing with favorable conditions for Ecuador,” said Martinez.

Days prior, the Ecuadorian presidency received approval from the National Assembly to move forward with the Law on Productive Development, which critics blasted as a threat to the country’s social services and welfare programs. The law will require that the government approves only budgets that result in revenue — i.e., taxes– outweighing expenditures on such vital state functions as public education, health care, national defense and public security.

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