Ecuador: WikiLeaks cables show US how used 'democracy promotion' to push corporate interests
Monday, September 1, 2014
By Linda Pearson
Graffiti opposing the US military base in Manta, which has been closed by the Rafael Correa government. WikiLeaks cables revealed the US Embassy was deeply concerned about the threat posed to the US base by Correa.
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.
As the Quito cables illustrate, the goal of this strategy is not the promotion of genuine democracy, in the sense of popular participation in the running of society.
Rather, it is the creation and maintenance of what Robinson calls “polyarchy” in his 1996 book Promoting Polyarchy. This means “a system in which a small group actually rules and mass participation in decision-making is confined to leadership choice in elections carefully managed by competing elites”.
The overarching aim of “democracy promotion” is preserving the global capitalist order. Under this order, countries in the global South play a subordinate role to those in the North and governments serve the needs of transnational business before their people.
By targeting civil society groups in developing countries, such as political parties, trade unions and NGOs, “democracy promotion” programs are intended to foster a network of like-minded elites and promote consensus around key economic and political issues.
This consensus translates into government policies that toe the US economic and political line, while radical ideas are filtered out.
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FULL @ SOURCE - here.
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This is a fantastic article and a great example of how US interests/transnational business interests creep in with an agenda to quietly 'colonise' other nations.
The fallen soviet satellites are developing nations and the US has been stirring the pot in that region for a couple of decades.
Academics, university graduates, leaders, political figures and so on, all come out of the same 'sausage factory' of US/US NGO/Corporate shaping and influence, which, as the article says, is designed to build consensus (which serves US interests).
The US has been playing with Eastern Europe for decades and has been cultivating Ukraine intensively for a couple of decades.
