A view of part of Guayaquil, Ecuador's second most populated city and main port, which is now dominated by violence as a hub for shipping drugs out of the country to the United States and Europe. CREDIT: Carolina Loza León / IPS

By Carolina Loza
GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador, Feb 12 2024 (IPS)

“For a couple of years now we’ve been seeing the violence growing so fast,” said José, who asked not to give his last name for fear of reprisals he may face in Monte Sinai, a low-income neighborhood in Ecuador’s most populous city, Guayaquil.

José, a 45-year-old Venezuelan, came here looking for a better life in 2019. “You could scrape by, barely, but you could make a living,” he said.

For José, Ecuador offered an opportunity for a peaceful life that allowed him to cover his expenses and raise his three children, something he could no longer do in his native Venezuela. He first moved to a shantytown in this part of western Guayaquil, which is also the country’s main port and one of its two economic hubs, along with Quito, the capital.

José paused before telling IPS: “In the last two years, the violence has accelerated, it’s impossible to live.”

This South American country has recently become one of the most violent in Latin America and the world. And José’s anxious observations coincide with the analysis of different organizations and experts.

Ecuador’s geographic position between two cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru, make it a strategic location for drug distribution across the Pacific Ocean.

The demand for drug trafficking, the gradual economic devastation and the weakening of the country’s political system exacerbated in 2023 with the dissolution of the legislature and a call for early elections, helped strengthen criminal gangs, which began to take root in Ecuador as part of the chain of trafficking of cocaine and other drugs.

Growing institutional corruption enabled the gangs to infiltrate the police and the prison system, making it easier for imprisoned criminal leaders to turn prison facilities, intended for rehabilitation, into their centers of operations and expansion.

In the gangs’ struggle to gain control, in 2021, the first large-scale massacre inside a prison in Ecuador occurred, something that became routine as the violence escalated.

For years in Ecuador, criminal organizations have been coordinating their actions against the State, according to Renato Rivera-Rhon, an organized crime and security analyst. “Prisons are an environment of opportunity for organized crime in Ecuador,” he said in an interview with InSightCrime, an organization that focuses on criminal activities.

Rivera-Rhon mentioned that networks within prisons facilitate dialogue, and gang leaders have lawyers within the network, indicating the existence of a web of a certain level of agreements between organized crime gangs.

Police officers prepare to patrol the streets in Guayaquil, on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, days after the declaration of a state of emergency as the government tries to combat the drug gangs that have turned Ecuador into one of the world’s most violent countries. CREDIT: Carolina Loza León / IPS

José told IPS how he went from being a street vendor outside schools in Guayaquil without any complications to becoming a victim of extortion, forced to make “protection payments” known locally as “vacunas” or vaccines.

Monte Sinai was one of the first areas in Guayaquil where residents and business owners became the victims of criminal gangs who began demanding “vacunas”, although none of the residents consulted by IPS would identify the group that controls the area, and they never refer to it by name.

The extortion method varies depending on the business and the payment can be demanded weekly, monthly or, as in José’s case, daily. “One of them (a gang member) would hang around when I was selling outside the schools, and would keep track of how much I sold and charge me a third of what I earned that day,” José said.

“You can’t live like this. They don’t let you do anything, you can’t survive,” he complained.

One of José’s three sons was also a victim of extortion when he set up a fast food business selling mainly hamburgers.

Friends of José told him that when they rode on public transportation buses, people would get on and ask for “a little donation,” which was actually another form of extortion. The charge was one dollar, which they had to plan for on top of the 0.35 cent fare.

“You prefer not to ride the bus, because you don’t have the money to pay a dollar for each trip,” said a friend of José’s who preferred not to be identified.

Monte Sinai is a rapidly growing neighborhood, a city within a city as some demographers call it, where a large number of people make a living in the informal economy.

In Ecuador, a country of some 17 million inhabitants, where more than 3.6 million people live in Greater Guayaquil, over 50 percent of the economically active population works in the informal economy.

The growth of gangs in Ecuador took hold gradually, in poor areas such as Monte Sinai, and their presence and control boomed during the last two years. Bomb threats, sporadic detonations, leaflets in which gangs threaten individuals or groups such as immigrants, and an increase in robberies are reflections of the violent control exercised by these groups.

The activity of the gangs has spread throughout the country, in an escalation that has reached the point of total chaos at times, such as on Jan. 9.

That day, a television station was taken over by a gang in Guayaquil, there were bomb threats in several cities and shootings near judicial entities, which led the government to declare a state of emergency.

The state of emergency allowed for joint military and police action in the streets and prisons, under the premise that the State is in conflict with armed criminal groups.

Lorenzo and his teenage son Carlos are photographed on one of the unpaved streets of Monte Sinai, a low-income neighborhood in northwest Guayaquil, which they had to flee because of threats and extortion by criminal gangs in the area. CREDIT: Carolina Loza León / IPS

Rivera-Rhon stressed that on Jan. 9, the alliances and ties between criminal gangs were demonstrated by the scope and coordination of the chaos in the country and the fear provoked among the public.

He said that “if you look at things from the point of view of someone in the capital, law enforcement has a monopoly of force, but this is not the case in rural areas, where there is total abandonment by the State.”

The expert on crime mentioned how in localities on the border with Colombia, there was already a social order imposed by armed groups that “generated a contagion to other areas of the country” and wondered whether the State had control over the exercise of force in other parts of the country and neighborhoods in cities such as Guayaquil.

Carlos Carrión, secretary of the Fundación Desaparecidos en Ecuador (Foundation for Missing People), said abandonment by the State has been going on for decades. A resident of Jaramijó, a fishing village near the port city of Manta, for years he has led petitions for the repatriation of fishermen imprisoned in the United States for transporting drugs.

Carrión pointed to the lack of response at the State level and the growing control of drug trafficking networks that recruit fishermen, without any control by the armed forces. “Nobody seems to have cared for years, and look where we’ve ended up,” Carrión told IPS by telephone from Jaramijó, some 190 kilometers north of Guayaquil.

Lorenzo, 46, said the Jan. 9 violence was nothing new. In 2023 he had to move from Guayaquil to the port of Posorja, after he became the victim of robberies and closed down his small business.

“Outside the store there were four guys on a motorcycle. From far away, one of them pulled a gun on me and I didn’t know how to get away. I had a backpack, where I carried my phone. I also had my watch and money that I always carry, about 20 or 40 dollars. They took everything,” said Lorenzo, who had worked hard to open a small store selling food and other products in Monte Sinai.

He told IPS that “they said to me: ‘get out of here.’ They left quickly, after going around the same street twice.” It was the last episode of violence and extortion he put up with in Guayaquil and the one that led him to decide to close his shop and look for work in Posorja, a small fishing port 113 kilometers away.

“I used to live here, but now we’re doing better. I had my monthly income from the store, but I had to leave the house in Monte Sinai to rent in Posorja,” he said during one of his last Sunday visits to the neighborhood to see friends and check on his now empty house.

One of his sons, teenager Carlos, was with him on the Sunday he was interviewed by IPS in Monte Sinai. His two older sons have also moved out of the neighborhood.

Businesses are closed in a small shopping center on Delta Avenue, near the main university in the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil, due to people’s fear of going out in certain areas of the port city. CREDIT: Carolina Loza León / IPS

Lorenzo’s biggest fear before leaving Monte Sinai was that something would happen to his children. He even considered emigrating in 2022, crossing the Darien Gap, after hearing about people who had made it through that dangerous stretch of Panamanian jungle to the United States.

Both José and Lorenzo lived in fear of the impact that the violence and increased insecurity could have on their families.

According to José, violence during 2023 in the area “increased by 70 percent.” And so far, according to his former neighbors, the armed forces have not yet arrived in Monte Sinaí, despite the fact that a state of emergency has been declared and that the area is notorious for the violence suffered by local residents.

José stays in contact with his former neighbors, a community that welcomed him with solidarity and to which he will always be grateful.

“I love Ecuador, I was welcomed here, but the situation had become unlivable,” he said from Quito, the capital, where he now sells candy at stop lights. At the end of January, José decided to move to Quito and check out the possibility of settling in this city, where he feels safer.

With most of Monte Sinai’s schools closed due to the violence, José had no alternative when he was left without a source of income and became subject to constant threats, he told IPS during a second meeting in Quito, 430 kilometers from his old life.

His eldest son sold the supplies for his fast food business and returned to Venezuela, while his two teenagers are still in Guayaquil, waiting for their father to get everything ready in Quito.

Lorenzo is no longer returning to Monte Sinai, he told IPS by telephone from Pasorj
a a few days after the interview there, because both he and his son Carlos received new threats. He is looking for alternatives to move to the coastal province of Manabí, which is also affected by violence, although to a lesser degree than Guayas province, of which Guayaquil is the capital.

José finds some consolation in living in Quito and being able to go out on the street with a little more peace of mind. He quotes a friend who stayed in Guayaquil: “Back there, the only thing they don’t charge us for is breathing.”

Oil workers are busy on the banks of the Tiputini river, on the northern border of the Yasuní National Park, in Ecuador's Amazon region. CREDIT: Pato Chavez / Flickr

By Carolina Loza
QUITO, Oct 9 2023 (IPS)

The decision reached by Ecuadorians to put an end to oil production in Yasuní National Park, in a popular referendum in August, was a triumph for civil society and a global milestone in environmental democracy. But when it comes to implementation, the result is less promising.

Despite being a democratic decision, taken by the majority of Ecuadorians, who voted to halt oil exploration and production in the park, the authorities say the verdict is not clear."The referendum process sets a precedent because it is a way of establishing what is called an environmental democracy, where the people decide what to exploit and what not to exploit. These principles in practice are in harmony with the rights of nature that are mentioned in the Ecuadorian constitution, to protect nature above and beyond economic profit." -- Ximena Ron Erráez

During the Aug. 20 presidential and legislative elections, 59 percent of voters voted Yes to a halt to oil extraction in one of the most biodiverse protected areas in the world, part of the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest that has been a biosphere reserve since 1989.

At the same time, 68 percent of the voters of the Metropolitan District of Quito voted against continued mining in their territory, in order to protect the biodiversity of the Chocó Andino, a forest northwest of the capital that provides it with water.

In the midst of an unprecedented political and criminal insecurity crisis in Ecuador, the two votes were a historic landmark at a democratic and environmental level, in addition to demonstrating that Ecuadorians are increasingly looking towards alternatives that would move Ecuador away from the extractivism on which the economy of this South American country has depended for decades.

But the No vote, i.e. the answer that allowed oil extraction to continue in the Yasuní ITT block, won in the provinces where the national park is located: Orellana and Sucumbíos. This is one of the arguments of the current authorities to stop compliance with the referendum, arguing that the areas involved want oil production to go ahead.

Constitutional lawyer Ximena Ron Erráez said the Ecuadorian government cannot escape the obligation to abide by the result of the referendum.

“As far as the Ecuadorian constitution is concerned…..it must be complied with in an obligatory manner by the authorities; there is no possibility, constitutionally speaking, that the authorities can refuse to comply with the results of the referendum,” she told IPS.

One of the murals that still remain on the streets of Quito from the campaign for the August referendum on whether or not to keep the oil wealth underground in Yasuní National Park, to which voters decided “yes”: leave it untouched. CREDIT: Carolina Loza / IPS

Ron Erráez also complained about a lack of political will.

On Sept. 5, Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso, in a meeting with indigenous communities, described the referendum as “not applicable”.

A leaked video in which he made the statement drew an outcry from civil society groups that pushed for the referendum for more than 10 years. Yasunidos, the group that was formed to reverse the 2013 decision by the government of then President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) to begin oil drilling and production in Yasuní, has declared itself in a state of permanent assembly.

The Correa administration had proposed a project that sought to keep the oil in Yasuní ITT (Ishpingo, Tambococha, Tiputini), also known as Block 43, in the ground, on almost 2,000 hectares, part of which is within the biosphere reserve and the rest in the so-called buffer zone.

The initiative consisted of asking for international economic compensation for not exploiting the oilfield, which contains more than 1.5 billion barrels of reserves, in order to continue to preserve the biodiversity of the park and its surrounding areas. But the proposal did not yield the hoped-for results in international financing and the government decided to cancel it.

This is despite the fact that Yasuní, covering an area of 10,700 square kilometers in the northeast of the country within the Amazon basin, is home to some 150 species of amphibians, 600 species of birds and 3,000 species of flora, as well as indigenous communities, some of which are in voluntary isolation.

Environmental activists and organizations working in favor of keeping Yasuní’s oil in the ground say the management of the project showed the dilemma of finding alternatives to the extractive industry and the lack of real political will on the part of the political powers-that-be to come up with solutions.

View of one of the rivers inside the Yasuni park, in northeastern Ecuador, which preserves an incomparable biodiversity. CREDIT: Manel Ortega Fernández / Flickr

Ron Erráez mentioned an important fact: Lasso, in power since May 2021, will be an outgoing president after the second round of presidential elections is held on Oct. 15, and it will be his successor who will have to fulfill the mandate of the referendum on the national park.

One difficulty is that his successor, who will take office on Nov. 25, will only serve as president for a year and a half, to complete the term of Lasso, who called for an unprecedented early election to avoid his likely impeachment by the legislature.

Alex Samaniego, who participates in Yasunídos from Scientist Rebellion Ecuador, said it was clear from the start that the campaign for the Yasuní and Andean Chocó referendums was a long-term process, which would not end with whatever result came out of the vote.

“We know that we have to defend the result, defend the votes of the citizens and make sure that the referendums are fully complied with,” he told IPS.

According to the environmental activist, the democratic process behind the referendums will serve as an example for many countries, including Brazil, where communities are waging a constant struggle to combat climate change by seeking alternatives to the extractive industries.

Capture from a video of the Quito Free of Mining campaign, which triumphed in the popular referendum on Aug. 20. CREDIT: Carolina Loza / IPS

“We are told about all the money that oil brings to the economy, but very little money stays in the communities,” said Samaniego, who mentioned alternatives such as community-based tourism and biomedicine and bioindustries as economic alternatives to oil production.

Ron Erráez said “the referendum process sets a precedent because it is a way of establishing what is called an environmental democracy, where the people decide what to exploit and what not to exploit.”

“These principles in practice are in harmony with the rights of nature that are mentioned in the Ecuadorian constitution, to protect nature above and beyond economic profit,” she added.

Ecuadorian voters decided at the ballot box, and their decision should accelerate the possibility of a transition to alternatives for their economy. But what will the implementation look like?

The referendum on the Andean Chocó region covers a conservation area of which Quito is part, which includes nine protected forests and more than 35 natural reserves, in order to avoid the issuance of mining exploration permits, a measure that will be implemented after the vote.

There are contrasting views over the halt to oil exploration and production in Yasuni. The state-owned oil company Petroecuador highlights the losses for the State and presents figures that question the studies of groups such as Yasunidos.

The referendum gives the government one year to bring oil production activities to a halt. But Ron Erráez said it could take longer to dismantle Petroecuador’s entire operation in Yasuní ITT. Meanwhile, operations in Block 43 continue.

Sofia Torres, spokesperson for Yasunidos, said that despite all the talk during the campaign about economic losses, the vote showed that a majority of Ecuadorians question the country’s extractivist industry status quo.

In her view, although government and oil authorities insist that oil resources are indispensable for the country’s development, Ecuadorians have not seen this materialize in terms of infrastructure, social measures or services.

For this reason, they decided that “it is better to opt for the preservation of something concrete, such as an ecosystem that provides us with clean water and clean air and that is something like an insurance policy for the future,” she told IPS.

On Oct. 15, Ecuadorians will choose between left-leaning Luisa Gonzalez, the protegé of former President Correa, and businessman Daniel Noboa. It will fall to one of them to enforce the majority vote on the future of Yasuní and the halt to oil industry activity in the park.

Ecuadorian Environment Minister Tarsicio Granizo speaks during an interview with IPS in his office in Quito. Credit: Nina Zambrano/IPS

By Ela Zambrano
QUITO, Jul 20 2018 (IPS)

Ecuador has decided to move towards a bioeconomy-based development model, “which must be sustainable,” because otherwise “the remedy could be worse than the disease,” said the country’s Environment Minister Tarsicio Granizo, who is spearheading this innovative approach.

In this interview with IPS, Granizo explained that the proposal represents a response to an extractivist model which cannot be followed forever. His ministry is working hand in hand with other ministries, productive sectors and the governments of the 24 provinces of this South American country of 17.7 million people.

Ecuador is a megadiverse country, but it is also rich in minerals and fossil fuels. The current model of development is based on its underground riches, but now the aim is to move towards a post-extractivist model, focused on the sustainable use of the country’s biological resources.

As a first step, the government is drawing up an inter-ministerial environmental agenda with the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to identify the administration’s current environmental actions, in order to design a new cross-cutting strategy.

The minister pointed out that it is not yet possible to talk about a “transition” or timeframes because “the new forms of economy are just being thought out.” But he stressed that “the concept of the bioeconomy at the state level is already in place.”

IPS: You’re leading what’s called a transition from extractivism and fossil fuels to the bioeconomy. Why?

TARSICIO GRANIZO: The bioeconomy is one of the many ways forward for this country which has an economy based on oil and minerals extraction. There may be other ways out, but let’s remember that we are a megadiverse country and that we have to make sustainable use of our megadiversity, with the highest technology.

IPS: What is the future for mining and oil in this model?

TG: We are talking about a long-term transition, whether we like it or not we have to continue exploiting oil and mining, we still have important resources in both sectors that support the country.

IPS: With a time limit for the exploitation of fossil fuels due to climate change…

TG: There is a deadline for oil exploitation; and, mining will always be there, but it must be organised. We cannot yet say that we are in a process of transition, we have just started thinking about these new forms of economy that will allow Ecuador to leave behind extractivism one day.Of course, not everything bio is necessarily sustainable, because I can replace oil with another product and run out of that product. The sustainable bioeconomy is based on that: the sustainable use of biological resources, and that includes a circular economy in waste management.

IPS: But can you put a timeframe on the goal of implementing the bioeconomy?

TG: We cannot… How long will fossil fuels last?

IPS: Experts say Ecuador’s fossil fuels could run out in 20 years, including officials from your ministry…

TG: Maybe 20 years, but in mining, we’ll have to see how things go for us. Mining revenues have to be greater than the environmental liabilities. In this respect, we cannot yet set timeframes.

IPS: What is the bioeconomy model you envision for Ecuador?

TG: We are thinking of sustainable bioeconomy as a model for which several elements are necessary: conservation, innovation, investment, and markets.

IPS: What comes first?

TG: Conservation. Ecuador’s soil is already conserved, through protected areas, protective forests that cover 30 percent of the national territory. Innovation is where we are most concerned, where we still have a long way to go.

IPS: How is the sustainable use of megadiversity included?

TG: Of course, not everything bio is necessarily sustainable, because I can replace oil with another product and run out of that product. The sustainable bioeconomy is based on that: the sustainable use of biological resources, and that includes a circular economy in waste management.

IPS: You stress the need to move towards a circular economy, one based on produce-consume-recycle rather than produce-consume-throw away…

TG: The circular economy is a part of the bioeconomy, for example waste can be a good business and an alternative for those already working as waste pickers. We see examples in many parts of the world where waste management is an option. What arrives at the treatment centres is minimal, everything stays in the factories. Little by little we have to make progress towards that.

IPS: They say the bioeconomy will favour the development of the most vulnerable segments of society. Is that true? Why and how?

TG: Of course, for example, it is the poor who rummage through and separate the garbage. We need to help them out of poverty and help them become small-scale entrepreneurs and have a better quality of life. We have identified about 500 bio-enterprises; the thing is that most of them are small-scale or pilot projects. We work mainly with the Popular and Solidarity Economy (an economic organisation institutionalised in 2011 in the country, whose members, individuals or groups, are based on cooperation and solidarity).

IPS: Is there an example that serves as a letter of introduction to what Ecuador already does in bio-economics?

TG: There are projects with guadua bamboo cane to make furniture and laminates. This is a fast-growing, abundant resource in the coastal and Amazon regions, which resprouts easily. It is also very interesting what is happening with vicuña wool in (the province of) Chimborazo. Vicuña wool fetches a very high price on the international market. In this country, Chimborazo is the only place where vicuñas (a South American camelid) are found, and that is why we are in the process of teaching local communities how to shear vicuñas, and to treat and use their wool so that it has added value.

IPS: How much does the bioeconomy currently represent in Ecuador, and what share of the country’s GDP is it expected to represent?

TG: Currently the bioeconomy represents about 10 percent of the industrial GDP, and we plan to double that in the coming years.

IPS: In how long?

TG: We are taking a series of measures, we have created the country’s Bioeconomy Network and the 2015-2030 Biodiversity Strategy, we have created an entity with the Private Technical University of Loja to promote bioeconomic initiatives. We are launching the brand BioEcuador.

IPS: Have you encountered resistance in the economic and productive sectors?

TG: Fortunately, the ministries of production, mining and hydrocarbons, and foreign trade are very well aligned. We have managed to position the bioeconomy as a state commitment also in the productive sectors. We have also talked with the banks to establish soft credit lines with certain benefits to promote the bioeconomy in aspects such as nutraceuticals (‘nutrition’ and ‘pharmaceutical’ – natural foods that provide medical or health benefits). The concept of bioeconomy is already positioned at the state level.

IPS: What are the strategies?

TG: To use the rich biodiversity that we have in order to provide economic alternatives for the country. In the bioeconomy we do not rule out the improvement of monocultures, for example we have selected five sectors to work in: oil palm farming, shrimp, flowers, cattle and bananas. We want to reach an agreement with these producers so that they do not expand their agricultural frontier, but improve their productivity within their current range. That’s one aspect.

IPS: Since the bioeconomy is a long-term project, how can we ensure that future governments maintain this direction and do not change it?

TG: As soon as producers see that the bioeconomy is a real alternative, it will not matter which government is in power.

IPS: Is this being established at a legislative and policy level?

TG: It is included in the Organic Environmental Code and above all in the 2017-2021 National Development Plan. We are working on the development of public policies.

IPS: Environmentalists criticise aspects of the bioeconomy, such as the use of biofuels based on monocultures. What is your view on this?

TG: Biofuels have their pros and cons. The problem is that land that should be aimed at guaranteeing food sovereignty is allocated to meet transport needs.

IPS: So you don’t rule out biofuels?

TG: No. I always say that everything can be done in Ecuador as long as it is done where it should be done and is done properly.

IPS: Are there other countries in Latin America looking towards the bioeconomy?

TG: There was a bioeconomics summit in Germany (in Berlin in April), attended by some Latin American countries. Several are in our line of sustainable bioeconomy. Others see the bioeconomy as the improvement of their monocultures. We don’t rule out that possibility either.

IPS: So, Ecuador is betting on different formulas, not only on the bioeconomy?

TG: Of course, we can think about the sale of services; in providing banking services to other countries; and, the sustainable bioeconomy. We have to look for alternatives for post-extractivism.

IPS: So the bioeconomy is one path, although a privileged one…

TG: Yes, but sustainable, it must be sustainable, otherwise the remedy could be worse than the disease.

Excerpt:

Farmers are trained in sustainable land management in the Coquimbo region, in northern Chile, bordering the region of Atacama, home to the driest desert on earth. Initiatives such as this are part of the measures to combat soil degradation in Latin America. Credit: National Forest Corporation (CONAF)

By Orlando Milesi
SANTIAGO, Jun 13 2018 (IPS)

Consumers can be allies in curbing desertification in Latin America, where different initiatives are being promoted to curtail it, such as sustainable land management, progress towards neutrality in land degradation or the incorporation of the bioeconomy.

Ecuador is cited as an example in the region of these policies, for its incentives for intelligent and healthy consumption and promotion of sustainable land use practices by producers and consumers.

This is important because 47.5 percent of the territory of that South American country is facing desertification and the worst situation is along the central part of its Pacific shoreline.

On Jun. 15, the second phase of a Sustainable Land Management (SLM) project, promoted by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Ecuador’s Environment Ministry, will be launched with funding from South Korea.

The plan promotes the strengthening of the capacity of communities affected by degradation. In the first phase 348,000 dollars were invested.

Juan Calle López, of the FAO office in Ecuador, told IPS from Quito that the project’s aim is “to improve the capacity of local community and institutional actors, to address and implement SLM in degraded landscapes.”

“The project seeks to have pilot sites serve as a reference for communities to verify SLM efforts and their potential to adapt to local conditions,” he said.

“It also seeks for these practices to have a landscape approach that integrates the management of remaining ecosystems and agricultural areas to maintain local environmental services in the long term, such as regulation of the hydrological cycle and sustainable land use,” he said.

Calle López explained that “the project will work together with local municipal governments, local parishes, and producers’ associations, to jointly define best practices for each area depending on the social and environmental conditions of each site.”

“Local farmers will be the direct stakeholders in the project since their involvement is a prerequisite for developing the different practices on their farms,” in a process which will use tools already tested by FAO and the results of the National Assessment of Land Degradation, carried out in the country in 2017.

Ecuador is also the country that will host this year’s global observance of World Day to Combat Desertification, on Jun. 17. This year’s focus will be on the role of consumers on sustainable land management through their purchasing decisions and investments.

Under the theme “Land has true value. Invest in it,” one of the objectives is to “encourage land users to make use of the land management practices that keep land productive,” said Monique Barbut, executive secretary of the UNCCD.

Symbolically, the event will take place at the Middle of the World Monument, located exactly on the equator, from which the Andean country takes its name, about 35 km from Quito, to symbolise the union of the two hemispheres, the UNCCD coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean, José Miguel Torrico, based in Santiago, Chile, told IPS.

Ecuador’s commitment to innovative initiatives to combat soil degradation and to promote sustainable land management, which also include advances in the transition to a bioeconomy, is also recognised by its choice as host.

Tarsicio Granizo, Ecuador’s environment minister, defined the bioeconomy as “an economic model based on renewable biological resources, replacing fossil resources,” which has special meaning in a country that has depended on oil exports for decades as one of the pillars of its economy.

“Experts agree that this model combines economic progress with care for the environment and biodiversity,” Granizo said during the Second Global Bioeconomy Summit, held in Berlin in April.

The minister warned, however, that “this is not a short-term issue. We are only just beginning to develop a framework to transition toward a bioeconomy.”

Meanwhile, in Santiago, Torrico pointed out that “desertification entails losses of 42 billion dollars in annual global income, while actions to recover land cost between 40 and 350 dollars per hectare.”

“On the other hand, the returns on investments in actions against degradation at the global level are four to six dollars for every dollar invested,” he said, explaining the benefits of mitigation projects.

This also applies in Latin America and the Caribbean, where it is estimated that 50 percent of agricultural land could be affected by desertification.

In this region, “13 percent of the population lives on degraded lands, which varies from country to country: in Uruguay 33 percent of the population lives in degraded areas, compared to just two percent of the population in Guyana,” said the UNCCD regional coordinator.

“The annual costs of land degradation are estimated for Latin America and the Caribbean at 60 billion dollars per year, while globally they are estimated at 297 billion per year,” Torrico added.

He warned that “inaction in the face of land degradation will mean that global food production could be reduced by more than 12 percent in the next 25 years, leading to a 30 percent increase in food prices.”

“In direct terms, 40 percent of the world’s population (more than 2.8 billion people) live in regions undergoing desertification, while around 900 million people lack access to safe water,” he said.

“Estimates indicate that in order to supply the world population by 2050 (which is projected to reach nine billion people), agricultural production will have to increase by 70 percent worldwide and by 100 percent in developing countries,” he said.

Otherwise, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population (5.3 billion) could live under water stress conditions. This would mean that 135 million people would have to migrate by 2045, as a result of desertification,” he added.

According to Torrico, “In Latin America and the Caribbean, the most immediate situations are related to how to deal with droughts, for which the Drought Initiative has been implemented in eight countries of the region: Bolivia, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Grenada, Paraguay and Venezuela.”

This strategy, he explained, “seeks to harmonize public policies to address this phenomenon.

“The other emergency has to do with the fulfillment of the 2030 Agenda, where 26 countries in the region have established a programme of goals to achieve,” he said.

This new commitment is that “what we take from the earth, we have to replace and maintain productivity,” Torrico concluded, on the commitment by its 195 States parties to achieve this neutrality by 2030, assumed in 2015 within the framework of the UNCCD.

Excerpt:

In the Plaza de San Francisco, where the church and convent of the same name stand, fences have blocked off the construction site for the Quito subway for months, as work has been stalled while archaeological finds are assessed. Quito’s historic centre is the biggest in Latin America. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
QUITO, Nov 30 2016 (IPS)

Success can kill, when it comes to cities. Spain’s Barcelona is facing problems due to the number of tourists that it attracts. And the historic centre of Ecuador’s capital city, Quito, a specially preserved architectural jewel, is losing its local residents as it gentrifies.

This paradox was pointed out by Fernando Carrión, president of the Latin American and Caribbean Organisation of Historic Centres (OLACCHI) and a professor at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO) in Ecuador.

“Quito’s historic centre lost 42 per cent of its population over the last 15 years, a period in which it gained better monuments and lighting, and became cleaner,” he said. According to official census figures, the population of the old city dropped from 58,300 in 1990 to 50,982 in 2001 and 40,587 in 2010.“The subway is a good solution, which will reduce the use of private buses that pollute, and will help solve congestion in a city where the traffic passes through the north-south corridor.” -- Julio Echeverría

The effort to revitalise the historic centre was based on a “monumentalist policy,” on the restoration of churches and large buildings, which led to a process of gentrification, driving up housing prices and the conversion of residential into commercial property and pushing out low-income residents, he told IPS.

“I fear that the subway will drive away more people,” exacerbating the tendency, he added.

Two stations of the first subway line in Quito started to be built in 2013 by the Spanish company Acciona. “Phase two”, the construction of a 22-kilometre tunnel and 13 other stations, got underway in January 2016 and is to be completed by July 2019.

The consortium that won the bid is made up of Acciona and Odebrecht, Brazil’s largest construction company, which has built subway lines in several Latin American countries.

Only one station, in the Plaza de San Francisco, will be located in the historic centre. “Projections estimate that 42,000 passengers per day will pass through that station,” that is to say that “with the subway the same number of people will arrive but by a different means of transport,” Mauricio Anderson, the general manager of the Quito Subway Public Metropolitan Company (EPMMQ), told IPS.

Underground transport “will reduce traffic congestion, vibrations and pollution” by replacing cars and buses, he said.

The aim of the new mass transport system is to improve the quality of life of people in Quito, by reducing travel time, generating socioeconomic inclusion of people in the lower-income outlying neighbourhoods, saving fuel, cutting the number of accidents and creating a cleaner environment, according to EPMMQ.

“Each day about 400,000 people in Quito will use this system,” said Anderson. “This will help optimise other services and increase the average travel speed in Quito, which for surface transport is now 13 kilometres per hour, and by subway will be 37 kilometres per hour.”

A dedicated lane system trolley bus and one of its stations, in Ecuador’s capital. Critics of the subway in Quito argue that it would be better for the city to extend and improve the tramways. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

As Ecuador’s capital has an elongated shape, stretching from north to south, the 22-kilometre subway line with 15 stations will enable most of the city’s residents to take the subway or catch a bus that hooks into the system within less than four blocks of their homes or workplaces, according to studies that guided the system’s design.

The subway, with trains that will hold up 1,500 passengers each, “will connect the entire integrated transport system.”

According to 2014 statistics, there were 2.8 million daily trips in the public transport system of the Metropolitan District of Quito, most of them by conventional buses and the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, which uses bus-only lanes.

Opponents of the subway argue that by optimising the BRT system, which serves the same north-south route, it could transport more passengers than the subway, with a significantly lower investment.

But “Quito’s surface is saturated, there are no real dedicated lanes and the roads are narrow,” said Anderson, stressing the greater speed and efficiency of the subway, which benefits both passengers and the environment.

Building the subway will cost just over two billion dollars, “that is 89 million dollars per kilometre, a figure that is below the region’s average,” said the manager of the Quito subway.

The project was designed by the Spanish public company Metro de Madrid. A fare of 45 cents of a dollar will cover the first line’s operational and maintenance costs, according to the company.

But Ricardo Buitrón, an activist with Acción Ecológica, said “They will cost much more than that,” noting that building a subway in Quito is complex and arguing that it cannot be cheaper than in Panama, for example, where each kilometre cost 128 million dollars to build.

The Cerro del Panecillo hill, which divides north from south of Ecuador’s capital, seen from the Museum of the City, at the heart of the historic centre. The rugged topography represents a challenge to mobility in this highlands city. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Besides, with what is being invested in the subway “260 kilometres of exclusive lanes for electric buses plus 40 kilometres of tramways could be created, like the system being built in Cuenca,” in southern Ecuador, he told IPS.

And a 45 cent fare will require subsidies, which he estimated at 100 million dollars annually. In other countries, the operational cost per passenger is over 1.5 dollars, he said.

“Subsidies are inevitable in public transport, but they should contribute to improving the system,” said Buitrón. In Quito, for example, they should bolster the use of electric buses, remedying the setback represented by the replacement of electric articulated buses with diesel-run buses that are more economical, he said.

In Ecuador, diesel fuel is poor quality and heavily polluting, as seen in the black smoke they emit, he said.

“The subway is a good solution, which will reduce the use of private buses that pollute, and will help solve congestion in a city where the traffic passes through the north-south corridor,” said Julio Echeverría, executive director of the Instituto de la Ciudad and former professor of political science in several universities in Ecuador and Italy.

But this responded to a “linear and longitudinal” moment in Quito’s urban development which is long past. Now the city has changed, it is “scattered, fragmented, it stretches toward the valleys and other agricultural areas of great biodiversity,” he said.

Quito, with an estimated total population of 2.5 million, has the largest and least altered historic centre in Latin America, having been declared in 1978 a Cultural Heritage of Humanity site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).

Founded in 1534 on a long and narrow plateau on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains next to the Pichincha volcano, some 2,800 metres above sea level, Ecuador’s capital has a very well preserved centre with more than 50 churches, chapels and monasteries, and dozens of squares.

The negotiated relocation of some 7,000 street vendors to formal markets in 2003, and a pedestrianisation of the historic centre program carried out in the first decade of the century, bringing art to the squares and streets every Sunday, helped to attract local residents and growing numbers of tourists.

The great impact of building a subway under the old city worries many people. “The subway is not a good thing for the poor; it is faster than the trolley bus, but more expensive,” said 52-year-old Manuel Quispe, who earns a living cleaning shoes in Plaza de San Francisco.

Jorge Córdoba, another shoe shiner in the square, agreed that the subway is faster, but told IPS he believes it will be impossible to build, since “Quito was built on filled-in gullies” and it will be hard to open tunnels. He complained, like Quispe, of the many months that the works have been stalled, blocking half of the square and reducing their already meagre incomes.

Panama City, one of the fastest growing metropolises in Latin America. The Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) will be held in Quito in October and will adopt the New Urban Agenda. Credit: Emilo Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jun 30 2016 (IPS)

The declaration that will be presented for approval at the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in October has again sparked conflict between the opposing positions taken by the industrial North and the developing South.

The aim of the conference, to be held in Quito, Ecuador from October 17-20,  is to reinvigorate the global commitment to sustainable urban development with a “New Urban Agenda,” the outcome strategy of Habitat III.

Developing countries want the declaration to include the right to the city, financing for  the New Urban Agenda that will be agreed at the meeting, and restructuring of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) to implement the agreed commitments. “Long term goals must be put in place that will generate management indicators that can be measured by governments and civil society. Experience related to the social production of habitat should be taken into account, (like that of) people living in informal settlements who have built cities with their capabilities and skills.” - Juan Duhalde

Another bloc, headed by the United States, Japan and the countries of the European Union, is striving to minimise these issues.

In the view of representatives of civil society organisations, these issues should be incorporated into the “Quito Declaration on Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements for All,” the draft of which is currently being debated by member states in a several rounds of preparatory meetings.

Juan Duhalde, head of the Social Research Centre at Un Techo para mi País (A Roof for my Country), a Santiago-based international non governmental organisation, told IPS that these are “key” issues and must be included as part of the discussion and be reflected in a concrete action plan.

“They are the general guidelines that will inform national public policies. The only way forward is for these commitments to be translated into long term agreements for the future. Right now discussions are mainly political and may fall short when it comes to bringing about the progress that is required,” said Duhalde.

The Chilean researcher stressed that “the right to the city goes hand in hand with achieving a paradigm shift away from the present situation, which is biased in favour of profitability for an elite rather than collective welfare for all.”

Stark North-South differences were plainly to be seen at the first round of informal intergovernmental talks held May 16-20 in New York. They will continue to fuel the debate at further informal sessions, the first of which will last three days and is due to end on Friday, July 1.

In the run-up to Habitat III, to be hosted by Quito in October, Ecuador and France are co-chairing the preliminary negotiations. The Philippines and Mexico are acting as co- facilitators.

Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Mexico lead a bloc promoting the right to the city. Together with defined mechanisms to follow up the declaration, funding for the New Urban Agenda and implementation measures, the right to the city is major irritant at the talks. Among implementation measures is the creation of a fund to strengthen capabilities in developing countries.

The right to the city, a term coined by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) in his 1968 book of the same title, refers to a number of simultaneously exercised rights of urban dwellers, such as the rights to food and housing, migration, health and education, a healthy environment, public spaces, political participation and non discrimination.

Household possessions dumped on the pavement: a family was evicted from the historic centre of Mexico City. The United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) will address the right to the city and the problems faced by people living in informal settlements. Credit: Courtesy of Emilio Godoy

Lorena Zárate, head of the non governmental Habitat International Coalition (HIC) which has regional headquarters in Mexico City, advocates the inclusion of social production of habitat in the declaration. However, it is not explicitly mentioned in the draft declaration.

“We want it to be included, as otherwise it would mean turning a blind eye to half or one-third of what has been constructed in the world. But there is little room to negotiate new additions, because they are afraid of acknowledgeing them, and consensuses have to be built,” said the Argentine-born Zárate, who is participating in the New York meetings.

The concept recognises all those processes that lead to the creation of habitable spaces, urban components and housing, carried out as the initiatives of self-builders and other not-for-profit social agents.

The most recent version of the draft declaration, dated June 18, bases its vision “on the concept of “cities for all” recognises that in some some countries this is “understood as the Right to the City, seeking to ensure that all inhabitants, of present and future generations, are able to inhabit, use, and produce just, inclusive, accessible and sustainable cities, which exist as a common good essential to quality of life.”

States party to the declaration emphasise “the need to carry out the follow-up and review of the New Urban Agenda in order to ensure its effective and timely implementation and progressive impact, as well as its inclusiveness, legitimacy and accountability.”

Moreover they stress the importance of strengthening the Agenda and its monitoring process, and invite the U.N. General Assembly to “guarantee stable, adequate and reliable financial resources, and enhance the capability of developing nations” for designing, planning and implementing and sustainably managing urban and other settlements.

They also request that UN-Habitat prepare a periodic progress report on the implementation of the New Urban Agenda, to provide quantitative and qualitative analysis of the progress achieved.

The process of report preparation should incorporate the views of national, sub-national and local governments, as well as the United Nations System, including regional commissions, stakeholders from multilateral organizations, civil society, the private sector, communities, and other groups and non-state actors, the draft declaration says.

A building being renovated in Havana, Cuba. Developing countries want the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development to provide the necessary funding to promote the New Urban Agenda, to be adopted by UN-Habitat. Credit: Courtesy of Emilio Godoy

The outline of the draft declaration report has section headings on sustainable and inclusive urban prosperity and opportunities for all; sustainable urban development for social inclusion and the eradication of poverty; environmentally sound and resilient urban development; planning and managing urban spatial development; means of implementation and review.

“It’s (like) a soap opera saga. Right now we are trying to contribute ideas to strengthen the proposal for the right to the city. In the draft, this issue is diluted out; we do not want it to be further diluted,” a Latin American official participating in the negotiations told IPS.

“The United States and China do not want the text to contain references to human rights,” the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity.

It is expected that the draft declaration will be finalised at the meeting of the Habitat III preparatory committee (PrepCom3) to be held July 25-27 in Indonesia, and be presented for approval by U.N. member states at the full Habitat III conference in Quito.

To avoid a repetition of the sequels to the 1976 Vancouver Habitat I conference and the 1996 Habitat II conference in Istanbul, which were not evaluated afterwards, Duhalde and Zárate both wish to see a comprehensive review and follow-up programme established.

“Long term goals must be included and management indicators must be created that can be measured by governments and social actors. The experience in social production of habitat acquired by people living in informal settlements who have built cities with their capabilities and skills must be taken into account,” said Duhalde.

“We are keen to see the generation of evidence and promotion of research into real problems on the ground, in order to generate practical solutions,” he said.

In Zárate’s view, progress cannot be made in debating a new agenda without having evaluated fulfillment of the previous programme goals.

“There must be a means of discerning what is new and what is still ongoing, what has been successfully done and what has not been achieved, why some things were done and why some were not, and what actors have been involved. There have never been clear mechanisms for review monitoring nor for prioritisation,” she said.

“We are adamant that this should not happen again. But they are not going to include goals or indicators, and there is not much clarity about review and monitoring mechanisms,” she said.

The Latin American official consulted by IPS downplayed the likely achievements of the summit. “Habitat III will only be a reference point. There will be no major changes overnight after October 21. National governments will do whatever they intend to do, with their own resources, their own political and social forces, and their own governance,” he predicted.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez. Translated by Valerie Dee.

Hundreds of Cubans gathered outside the Ecuadorean embassy in Havana in an infrequent public display of discontent, protesting Quito’s decision to require that Cubans visiting Ecuador obtain a visa. Many held up the airplane tickets they had already bought, asking to be given visas or to be reimbursed for the money they had spent. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Dec 10 2015 (IPS)

The crisis that has broken out at several border crossings in Latin America as a result of thousands of Cubans attempting to reach the United States has revived a problem that remains unresolved between the two countries in spite of agreements, negotiations and the diplomatic thaw that started a year ago.

In the meantime, measures taken by Havana to curb the exodus of health professionals have led to reversals in the flexibilisation of the country’s migration policies which was part of the reforms being adopted, and have given rise to reflection on the causes and the consequences for the country of the growing wish to move abroad.

Analysts say it’s time to discuss why so many young people want to leave Cuba, despite the risks of failing in their attempt. In October 2012, the government of Raúl Castro lifted the restrictions that for decades kept Cubans from going abroad, eliminating, for example, the requirement of an exit visa to leave the country.

But the main hurdle was still the visa demanded by the United States, the main recipient of immigration from Cuba, and nearly all other countries. “Two friends of mine are stuck in Costa Rica and another was about to buy a ticket to fly to Ecuador when that country began to demand an entry visa, starting on Dec. 1,” a young local musician who preferred not to give his name told IPS.

In response to the announcement that Ecuador would no longer be one of the few countries to which Cubans can freely travel, around 300 people protested outside the Ecuadorean embassy to demand a solution. Some cried while others asked for visas or to be reimbursed for the money they had spent on plane tickets.

Meanwhile, on Monday Dec. 7 the Cuban government put into effect Decree 306, approved on Oct. 11, 2012, which regulates travel abroad of health professionals – a measure that upset a sector that contributes some eight billion dollars a year to state coffers from services provided to third countries.

“Everyone is against the measure, and protesting,” Graciela Nantes, a retired doctor who still works at a hospital in Havana under short-term contracts, told IPS. “Some people were even crying because they have sons and daughters and other relatives outside the country. But what can you do? The measure is a step backwards with regard to a right that had been won.”

Aspiring immigrants to the United States wait in line in the Cuban capital outside the U.S. embassy, which was reopened this year after the two countries reestablished diplomatic ties. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

The authorities have stated that the idea is not to ban travel abroad, but to require that doctors with specialties considered essential or key to scientific research and final year residents apply for a special permit to leave the country, in order to guarantee the stability and functioning of the country’s health services.

According to official data from 2014, Cuba has more than 50,000 health workers on assignments in 66 countries. Over 60 percent of them are women and around half are doctors. The main recipients of Cuban health professionals in Latin America are Venezuela, Brazil and Ecuador, in that order.

The protest outside the Ecuadorean embassy took place while more than 5,000 Cuban migrants remained stranded, on Thursday Dec. 10, at the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, due to the latter country’s refusal to let them in. Another 1,000 are waiting to cross the border between Colombia and Panama.

From Ecuador, on their grueling journey to the United States, Cuban migrants go through Colombia and Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and other Central American countries before crossing Mexico and reaching the U.S. border.

Sources in the United States estimate that over 43,000 Cubans reached that country between October 2014 and September 2015, mainly entering across the Mexican border. According to human rights groups, Mexico is where migrants face the greatest threat of being robbed, raped, or even killed.

Costa Rican Foreign Minister Manuel González told IPS in San José that “These people are brought in by the mafias, the international people trafficking networks; without a doubt they are risking their lives. We have received reports of women who have been raped, who have crossed through jungles, and of children who are put in danger. The conditions are deplorable.”

For years Latin American migrants have used the route through Central America to try to make it to the United States. The trafficking rings charge Cubans up to 10,000 dollars for smuggling them into that country. But the flow was cut off when Costa Rica adopted measures against human trafficking in early November.

The crisis coincided with a new round of the periodic migration talks between Cuba and the United States, held to assess the implementation of the agreements reached in 1994 and 1995 aimed at ensuring “safe, legal and orderly” migration. Until the thaw agreed on Dec. 17, 2014, the negotiations were the only regular dialogue between Washington and Havana.

In the talks on Nov. 30, as on previous occasions, Cuba repeated its request for the repeal of the 1966 U.S. Cuban Adjustment Act’s “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which guarantees residency one year on to any Cuban who sets foot on U.S. soil

In the meantime, “balseros” or “rafters” intercepted at sea are returned to Cuba in compliance with the bilateral accords. And during these talks and in official statements, before and after the restoration of diplomatic ties in July, Washington ruled out any changes in its migration policy towards Cuba.

Havana argues that these policies foment illegal migration, and that the 2006 Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program encourages Cuban medical personnel to leave their posts in third countries and go to the United States.

That programme has drawn over 5,000 Cuban doctors to abandon their overseas assignments. This, together with the freedom to emigrate that health professionals have enjoyed, the retirement of doctors, and the number of medical workers who have switched to other economic activities “have made it even more difficult to maintain the domestic health services,” analyst Jesús Arboleya wrote in an article on the issue.

Experts like Antonio Aja, author of the book “Al cruzar las fronteras” (When Crossing Borders), say Cuba is a source of immigrants, and emigration will continue even under optimal domestic economic conditions.

According to his estimates, one out of three or four people living in Cuba have relatives abroad.

He said social networks are one of the factors that draw people to other countries, along with the search for better economic conditions, jobs and wages. “The thing is, when they get to the United States, they tend to declare themselves as immigrants motivated by political reasons, for their immigration status,” Aja told IPS.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Women and children hold up signs at a rally against corruption in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 8 2015 (IPS)

A woman is stopped at a checkpoint; she gives birth, and dies. Another is sold in a slave market. A boy is killed by a tank. A young man drowns at sea, trying to reach a haven safe from oppression and poverty.

These were just some of the examples that Rima Khalaf, executive secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), touched on during a panel discussion on the importance of the rule of law held at the U.N. headquarters on Jul. 7.

In each of scenarios laid out above, Khalaf said, had the person in question been of a different race, ethnic group, gender or religion, they might have been spared an untimely or violent death. In other words, they might have been under the protection of the law.

All too often, however, citizens are either unable or unaware of how to demand their legal rights – be it access to food, jobs or justice.

As the U.N. closes a 15-year chapter of poverty eradication efforts defined by the eight ambitious Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and moves towards a new, sustainable development agenda, legal experts came together Tuesday to discuss how the rule of law can help bolster the post-2015 blueprint for global change.

Organised by the International Development Law Organisation (IDLO), an intergovernmental body devoted to empowering citizens and enabling governments to establish robust legal systems worldwide, the two-part event series revolved around Goal 16 of the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aims to build inclusive societies by providing equal justice to all.

Promoting and strengthening the rule law in the realm of international development would seem, as IDLO Director-General Irene Khan pointed out, “a no-brainer”.

“There is a paradox here at the U.N. that bothers me deeply,” Khan said at a panel co-hosted by the IDLO and the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn Law) Tuesday. “You can almost think of it as parallel railway lines, with two trains hurtling down these tracks through the landscape of the U.N. since its inception.

“One is the train that is running the development agenda, and the other is the train running the human rights agenda. I only hope that the principle of the rule of law that has now been acknowledged as part of the development agenda will bring these two tracks together – and that the meeting won’t be a crash but a synergy.”

Since its inception in 1988, the IDLO has remained the only organisation dedicated entirely to promoting the rule of law, repeatedly pushing for effective and accountable legal systems around the world as the basis for eradicating poverty, fighting discrimination and ensuring access to basic services.

It also highlights the links between inequality and lawlessness, where good governance seeps through cracks in weak justice systems, eroding the public’s confidence in the very structures that are designed to ensure their well-being.

Recounting a conversation she had with a chief justice in one of the IDLO’s partner countries, Khan said, “I was told that in this particular country people often say, ‘Why hire a lawyer if you can buy a judge?’ It is these situations that the rule of law addresses.”

In short, she said, the rule of law regulates power, a crucial step in the realisation of the SDGs.

“Poverty is not a matter of income,” she stressed. “It is a matter of powerlessness.”

Consider the following example from Uganda, where three-quarters of the population are subsistence farmers and where land disputes can have a heavy impact on livelihood and food security.

For many years, inefficient and informal justice systems meant that farmers, and particularly women, had no recourse to resolutions over even the most minor discord.

With the introduction in 1995 of the Uganda Land Alliance (ULA) – established to provide legal empowerment to rural communities through Land Rights Information Centres – fair land laws and policies, as well as swift access to justice, has become the norm, rather than the exception.

In Ecuador, an IDLO training programme on access to fair trade markets and the basic legal aspects of forming and running micro-enterprises has given local communities in predominantly rural areas significant leverage in tapping into new revenue streams.

And in Rwanda, where women held just 43 percent of seats in the lower parliament in 2003, a new constitution and the creation of women’s councils over the past decade pushed women’s political representation to 64 percent in 2013, resulting in stronger laws on violence against women and gender-based crimes.

Any number of similar examples, from Afghanistan to Kyrgyzstan to Kenya, stand as testimony to the sheer scope and significance of the rule of law for the global development agenda.

But while legal frameworks are vital to securing rights and enshrining the basic tenets of development in constitutions worldwide, they cannot and do not exist in a vacuum.

“Laws alone are not enough,” Khalid Malik, former director of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report noted during the panel discussion. “Many countries have all manner of statutes and conventions, but behaviors have not altered. If institutions are not pro-poor, change will not happen.”

He stressed that part of the problem lies in “institutions often being captured by the elites”, or other powerful interests, making them less accessible to marginalised groups.

What is needed, he says, is an approach to the rule of law that is rooted in justice, and the empowerment of ordinary people.

“When you have a universal approach to education and health,” he stated, “You empower people enormously. Think of the Arab Spring – it happened mostly in countries that were doing well on health and education. Why? Because once you’re educated, you become far more aware of your rights, you start expecting more from institutions, and the relationship between the citizen and the state starts to change.”

It is precisely this change that lawmakers hope to see as the U.N. finalizes its new development plans for a more just and sustainable world.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

President Rafael Correa Delgado of Ecuador does not mince words when it comes to development. ”Neoliberal policies based on so-called competitiveness, efficiency and the labour flexibility framework have helped the empire of capital to prosper at the cost of human labour,” he told a crowded auditorium at the 15th Raul Prebitsch Lecture.

The Raul Prebitsch Lectures, which are named after the first Secretary-General of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) when it was set up in 1964, allow prominent personalities to speak to a wide audience on burning trade and development topics.

This year, President Correa took the floor on Oct. 24 with a lecture on ‘Ecuador: Development as a Political Process’, which covered efforts by his country to build a model of equitable and sustainable development, “Neoliberal policies based on so-called competitiveness, efficiency and the labour flexibility framework have helped the empire of capital to prosper at the cost of human labour” – President Rafael Correa Delgado of Ecuador

Development, he told his audience, “is a political process and not a technical equation that can be solved with capital” and he offered a developmental paradigm that seeks to build on “people-oriented” socio-economic and cultural policies to improve the welfare of millions of poor people instead of catering to the “elites of the empire of capital”.

Proposing a “new regional financial architecture”, he said that “the time has come to pool our resources for establishing a bank and a reserve fund for South American countries to pursue people-oriented developmental policies in our region” and reverse the “elite-based”, “capital-dominated”, “neoliberal” economic order that has wrought havoc over the past three decades.

“We need to reverse the dollarisation of our economies and stop the transfer of our wealth to finance Treasury bills in the United States,” Correa said. “South American economies have transferred over 800 billion dollars to the United States for sustaining U.S. Treasury bills and this is unacceptable.”

According to Correa, people-centric policies in the fields of education, health and employment in Ecuador have improved the country’s Human Development Index (HDI) since 2007. The HDI is published annually by the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education and income indices used to rank countries into tiers of human development.

Ecuador’s HDI value for 2012 is 0.724 – in the high human development tier – positioning the country at 89 out of 187 countries and territories, according to UNDP’s Human Development Report (HDR) for 2013.

Explaining his country’s achievement, Correa said that public investments involving the creation of roads, bridges, power grids, telecommunications, water works, educational institutions, hospitals and judiciary have all helped the private sector to reap benefits from overall development.

“At a time when Hooverian depression policies based on austerity measures are continuing to impoverish people while the banks which created the world’s worst economic crisis in 2008 are reaping benefits because of the rule of capital,  Ecuador has successfully overcome many hurdles because of its people-oriented policies,”  he said.

Correa argued that by investing public funds in education, which is the “cornerstone of democracy”, particularly in higher education or the “Socrates of education”, including special education projects for indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian people, it has been shown that society can put an end to capital-dominated policies.

“We need to change international power relations to overcome neocolonial dependency,” Correa told the diplomats present at the lecture.  “Globalisation is the quest for global consumers and it does not serve global citizens.”

The Ecuadorian president argued that developing countries have secured a raw deal from the current international trading system which has helped the industrialised nations to pursue imbalanced policies while selectively maintaining barriers.

He urged developing countries to implement autonomous industrialisation strategies, just as the United States had done over two centuries ago.

Developing countries, he said, must pursue ”protectionist policies as the United States had implemented under the leadership of Alexander Hamilton [U.S Secretary of the Treasury under first president George Washington] when it closed its economy to imports from the United Kingdom.”

Citing the research findings of Cambridge-based economist Ha-Joon Chang in his book ‘Bad Samaritans:  The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism’, Correa said that protectionist policies are essential for the development of developing countries.

He stressed that developing countries, which are at a comparable of stage of economic development as the United States was in Hamilton’s time, must devise policies that would push their economies into the global economic order.

The strategy of “import-substitution-industrialisation [ISI]” and nascent industry development is needed for developing countries, he said. “However, the developing countries must ensure proper implementation of ISI strategies because governments had committed mistakes in the past while implementing these policies.”

“Free trade and unfettered trade,” continued Correa, is a “fallacy” based on the Washington Consensus and neoliberal economic policies. In fact, while the United States and other countries preach free trade, they have continued to impose barriers on exports from developing countries.

Turning to the global intellectual property rights regime, which he said is not helpful for the development of all countries, Correa said that these rights must serve the greater public good, suggesting that the current rules do not allow equitable development in the sharing of genetic resources, for example.

In this context, he said that governments must not allow faceless international arbitrators to issue rulings that would severely undermine their “sovereignty” in disputes launched by transnational corporations.

President Correa also called for the free movement of labour on a par with capital. “While capital can move without any controls and cause huge volatility and damage to the international economy, movement of labour is criminalised. This is unacceptable and it is absurd that the movement of labour is met with punitive measures while governments have to welcome capital without any barriers.”

He was also severe in his criticism of the financialisation of the global economy which cannot be subjected to the Tobin tax. “Nobel Laureate James Tobin had proposed a tax on financial transactions in 1981 to curb the volatile movement of currencies but it was never implemented because of the power of the financial industry,” he argued.

Concluding with a hint that his government’s social and economic policies are paving the way for the creation of a healthy society, Correa quipped: “The Pope is an Argentinian, God may be a Brazilian, but ‘Paradise’ is in Ecuador.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Degrowth demonstrators marching through the streets of Leipzig, September 2014. The placard reads: Exchange Share Give. Credit: Klimagerechtigkeit Leipzig (http://klimagerechtigkeit.blogsport.de/)

By Justin Hyatt
LEIPZIG, Sep 22 2014 (IPS)

From the mid-20th century onwards, economic growth has come to count as a self-evident goal in economic policies and GDP to be seen as the most important index for measuring economic activities.

This was the premise underlying the recent Fourth International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equityheld in Leipzig to take stock of the “degrowth” movement’s progress in efforts to debunk the mantra of growth and call for a fundamental rethink of conventional economic concepts and practices.

Many followers of the movement, who argue that “anyone who thinks that growth can go on endlessly is either a crazy person or an economist”, base their philosophy on the findings of a 1972 book – The _Limits_to_Growth – which reports the results of a computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth with finite resource supplies.“In China, which is touted as a success story of economic growth, 75 percent of the results of this growth serves only 10 percent of the population, while the enormous Chinese urban centres have become so polluted that even the government would like to build eco-cities” – Alberto Acosta, economist and former President of the Constitutional Assembly of Ecuador

After Paris (2008), Barcelona (2010) and Venice (2012), this was the fourth such conference but, with some 3,000 participants, the largest so far. Hundreds of workshops, roundtable discussions and films or presentations were organised for the scientists, researchers, activists and members of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who gathered to discuss economic degrowth, sustainability and environmental initiatives, among others.

Internationally acclaimed Ecuadorian economist Alberto Acosta, who was President of the Constitutional Assembly of Ecuador in 2007-2008 told participants that in China, which is touted as a success story of economic growth, 75 percent of the results of this growth serves only 10 percent of the population, while the enormous Chinese urban centres have become so polluted that even the government would like to build eco-cities.

Acosta, who developed the Yasuní-ITT initiative, a scheme to forego oil exploitation in Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park, is also an advocate of buen vivir, arguing that extractivism is one of the most damaging practices linked to latter day capitalism, as more and more non-renewable natural resources are taken from the earth and lost forever, while producing gigantic quantities of harmful emissions.

To counter extractivism, Acosta calls for the adoption of buen vivir, which is based on the Andean Quechua peoples’ sumak kawsay (full life) – a way of doing things that is community-centric, ecologically-balanced and culturally-sensitive – and loosely translates as “good living”.

For Giorgos Kallis, an environmental researcher and professor at the University of Barcelona, degrowth needs to provide a space for critical action and for reshaping development from below, in an attempt to divert more time away from a capitalist and towards a care economy.

When asked if the concept of degrowth was not too radical or uncomfortable a message, Kallis said: “Yes, perhaps degrowth doesn’t sit well, but that is precisely the point, to not sit well – it is time to make this message relevant.”

Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein, known for her criticism of corporate globalisation and author of No Logo – which for many has become a manifesto of the anti-corporate globalisation movement – joined the conference by Skype to tell participants that radical change in the political and physical landscape is our only real possibility to escape greater disaster and that reformist approaches are not enough.

One of the main driving forces behind the degrowth movement is Francois Schneider, one of the first degrowth activists who promoted the concept through a year-long donkey tour in 2006 in France and founded the Research and Degrowth academic association.

“Systemic change involves whole segments of society,” Schneider told IPS. “It doesn’t involve just one little part and we don’t expect a new decision from the European Parliament that will change everything. Dialogue is the key. And putting forward many different proposals.”

Taking the example of transport and mobility, he explained that it is useless to tackle the transformation of transport alone because “transportation is linked to energy and advertising is linked to the car industry.”

Vijay Pratap, Indian activist from the Gandhi-inspired Socialist youth movement era and member of South Asian Dialogues on Ecological Democracy (SADED) pleaded for the inclusion of marginalised majorities in the degrowth movement. Pratap told IPS that “unless we initiate the processes so that they can become leaders of their own liberation, no real post-growth society can come into being.”

While he was satisfied with what he said as a very egalitarian and democratic approach to the organisation of the conference, Pratap said that inclusion should be guaranteed for those who do not speak English, those who do not know how to navigate social networking sites and those who do not have access to international philanthropic donor agencies.“

According to Pratap, who participated as an organiser in the World Social Forum (WSF) gathering in Mumbai in 2004, this was one major lesson of the WSF process.

On the final day, Lucia Ortiz, a programme director for Friends of the Earth International and active in Brazilian social movements, did not mince her words in the closing plenary when she proclaimed that “degrowth is the bullet to dismantle the ideology of growth.”

The movement to dismantle this ideology will now continue in preparation for the next degrowth conference in two years’ time.

And Kallis is convinced that it will be even more successful than this year’s event. Commenting on the increase in participation from a few hundred in Paris in 2008 to the 3,000 in Leipzig, he quipped: “At this pace, in twenty years, we’ll have the whole world at our conference.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Outside the New York federal courthouse on Oct 15, 2013, Ecuadorians and their supporters gather to protest the Chevron lawsuit. Credit: Samuel Oakford/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 5 2014 (IPS)

In the latest twist in a 21-year-old environmental pollution case, a U.S. federal judge Tuesday ruled that the victims of massive oil spillage and their U.S. attorney could not collect on a nine-billion-dollar judgement by Ecuador’s supreme court against the Chevron Corporation.

In a racketeering case brought by the U.S. oil giant, the judge found that the lawyer, Steven Donziger, and his associates had used bribery and falsified evidence to prevail against Chevron in Ecuador’s courts and thus should not be permitted to collect damages.“Misconduct on the part of a couple of lawyers... is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for a corporation that has committed massive toxic contamination.” -- Marco Simons

“It is distressing that the course of justice was perverted,” the District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in a nearly 500-page ruling.

“There is no ‘Robin Hood’ defense to illegal and wrongful conduct,” he went on. “And the defendants’ ‘this-is-the-way-it-is-done-in-Ecuador’ excuses – actually a remarkable insult to the people of Ecuador – do not help them.”

Chevron applauded the judgement “as a resounding victory,” while Donziger and his attorneys said they would take the ruling to the same appeals court that overturned a similar judgement in the case rendered by Kaplan in 2011. At that time, Chevron appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Kaplan’s original ruling, but the Court rejected the appeal without comment.

Donziger himself called Kaplan’s latest judgement, which followed a six-week trial conducted late last year, “an appalling decision resulting from a deeply flawed proceeding that overturns a unanimous ruling by Ecuador’s Supreme Court. …We are confident we will be fully vindicated in the U.S., as we have been in Ecuador.”

The case was first filed in the U.S. federal court in 1993 on behalf of 30,000 mostly indigenous residents of the Lago Agrio region of the Ecuadorean Amazon where Texaco, which was acquired by Chevron in 2001, had operated continuously from the 1960s until 1992. For much of that period, it worked in partnership with Petroecuador, which took over all of Texaco’s operations in the region when the U.S. oil giant left.

The plaintiffs claim that Texaco dumped more than 70 billion litres of toxic liquids, left some 910 waste pits filled with toxic sludge, and flared millions of cubic metres of toxic gases – poisoning the environment in one of the most biologically diverse areas in South America and creating serious health problems, including an unusually high incidence of cancer, for people living in the region.

Apparently concerned that U.S. courts would be more sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ case, Texaco persuaded Judge Jed Rakoff to have the case transferred to Ecuador in 2002 — when it was ruled by a conservative government eager for foreign investment — on condition that the company waive certain defences, such as the expiration of the statute of limitations, and ensure that any judgement would be enforceable in the U.S. The Ecuadorean case was filed the following year.

Chevron has long argued that the damages cited by the plaintiffs are exaggerated and that, in any case, Texaco extinguished its obligations when it carried out a 40-million- dollar environmental remediation project as part of a 1995 agreement with the Ecuadorean government that covered 37.5 percent of the well sites and waste pits in the concession area.

The remaining sites were to be cleaned up by Petroecuador, according to Chevron.

But the plaintiffs, who are backed by a number of local and international green groups, have argued that Chevron, having drilled all of the original sites, also remains responsible for Petroecuador’s portion, as well as for the continuing health and other impacts of its operations that are not covered by the 1995 agreement.

The trial court in Ecuador ruled against Chevron and granted the plaintiffs, who were represented by Donziger and his associates, an 18 billion dollar judgement. The country’s Supreme Court subsequent upheld the judgement but reduced the damages to 9.5 billion dollars.

Chevron, however, has sought to prevent the plaintiffs from collecting any of the money, by, among other steps, withdrawing all of its assets from Ecuador and initiating a racketeering suit against Donziger and his team based on its charges that they used bribery and other corrupt methods to win the case and extort billions of dollars from the company.

To sustain those charges, it subpoenaed tens of thousands of documents, emails, and other materials from Donziger and other lawyers, as well as activist groups that supported the case. It even subpoenaed out-takes from a 2009 documentary produced by film-maker Joe Berlinger, “Crude,” about the case.

In his testimony last November, Donziger himself admitted making mistakes, such as concealing his interactions with and payments to a court-appointed expert witness who produced a report on which the Ecuadorean courts relied for the assessment of damages.

One former Ecuadorean judge testified for Chevron that plaintiffs paid him to ghostwrite opinions for the presiding judge who had been promised half a million dollars by Donziger for a favourable ruling. Both Donziger and the presiding judge, Nicolas Zambrano, vehemently denied those charges.

Nonetheless, Kaplan, who has never questioned the extent of the environmental damage wrought by the oil companies’ operations in the region, ruled in favour of Chevron, noting that “an innocent defendant is no more entitled to submit false evidence, to co-opt and pay off a court-appointed expert or to coerce or bribe a judge or jury than a guilty one.” He also noted that Donziger himself stood to win more than 600 million dollars in contingency fees.

If upheld, Kaplan’s ruling would prevent Donziger and the plaintiffs from collecting any damages from Chevron in U.S. courts. It also requires them to turn over any damages against Chevron they might collect in foreign courts to the company.

The plaintiffs have brought cases in three countries where Chevron has major operations and assets — Canada, Brazil, and Argentina – to enforce the Ecuadorean judgment, and Chevron’s CEO Tuesday told reporters Tuesday that Kaplan’s ruling should bolster the case in those countries.

The judgement, according to Deepak Gupta, who represented Donziger, amounted to “what is in effect a global anti-collection injunction that would preclude enforcement of a judgement from one country in every jurisdiction.” He noted that was one of the main reasons why the appeals court overturned Kaplan’s 2011 decision.

Marco Simons, legal director of EarthRights International, told IPS Tuesday’s judgement was vulnerable on other grounds as well. He said the law over whether the kinds of injunctions issued by Kaplan could be employed under the federal racketeering law remains unsettled.

In addition, he noted, the fact that Kaplan had found that the Ecuadorean judicial system had not provided due process “offers a good basis for re-filing the substantive case against Chevron in U.S. courts.”

“And even if all of what Judge Kaplan said about the fraudulent conduct of the attorneys was true, the answer shouldn’t necessarily be that Chevron gets away with no liability for what it has done in the Ecuadorean Amazon,” he said. “Misconduct on the part of a couple of lawyers, which is what Judge Kaplan suggested, is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for a corporation that has committed massive toxic contamination.”

The secrecy surrounding a friendly settlement in a case that Ecuador brought against Colombia in the International Court of Justice for damage caused by anti-drug spraying along the border has further angered those affected by the fumigation.

Ecuador dropped the lawsuit filed in 2008 in The Hague-based Court, as a result of the agreement signed Sept. 9, a copy of which was obtained by IPS.

The settlement stipulates that Colombia is to pay 15 million dollars in compensation, to be invested in areas in Ecuador affected by the aerial spraying of coca crops with the glyphosate herbicide near the country’s border.

But how and when the investments will be made has not yet been clarified.

The Colombian government also pledged not to carry out aerial spraying over the next year within 10 km of the border with Ecuador, between the southwest Colombian provinces of Putumayo and Nariño and the northern Ecuadorean provinces of Sucumbíos, Carchi and Esmeraldas.“[I]f a single drop of glyphosate falls we will protest because we are prepared to carry this through to the end…” -- Daniel Alarcón, head of FORCCOFES

But that 10-km strip could be narrowed to five and eventually two km within two years, according to the conditions explained in appendix 1 of the settlement agreement.

The appendix states that after the first year, once the scientific analyses are studied, the binational technical group will assess whether Ecuadorean territory was affected by the spraying. If it was not, the exclusion zone will be reduced to five km wide for one year, and after that, to two km.

That is the main concern of peasant farmers who say their health, crops and livestock have been affected by glyphosate spraying.

Reducing the width of the exclusion zone to two km “is unfair, but the agreement has already been signed, and since it was between governments, we were left high and dry; but we will continue the struggle,” Daniel Alarcón, the head of the Federation of Peasant Organisations in the Ecuadorian Border Zone of Sucumbios (FORCCOFES), told IPS.

The settlement does not provide a real solution because “they will continue spraying near us,” he said.

“It will affect us – we hope only minimally – but if a single drop of glyphosate falls we will protest because we are prepared to carry this through to the end, to get reparations for the damage caused.”

Alarcón was referring to the health problems and deterioration in the quality of life that tens of thousands of people have suffered as a result of Colombia’s spraying near the Ecuadorean border between 2000 and 2007 with the aim of eradicating coca crops.

According to a survey conducted by Forccofes, some 15,000 families live in the border area in question, and the 10,000 families living along the San Miguel river have been affected the most by the spraying.

“The effects are still being felt; the land has not returned to normal production levels,” said Alarcón, who lives in 5 de Agosto, a community in the border district of General Farfán. “Cancer was almost unheard of here before, and now people are continuously dying of cancer because of the glyphosate, which has contaminated the water sources.”

The agreement between the two countries refers to the chemical composition of the herbicide that figures in the environmental management plan authorised by Colombia’s environment ministry in resolution 1054, from 2003.

According to the settlement, the mixture – which according to the government is used throughout the national territory – contains 44 percent glyphosate, one percent Cosmoflux, and 55 percent water.

But the label for the Monsanto corporation’s Roundup glyphosate herbicide recommends a concentration of 1.6 to 7.7 percent glyphosate, with an absolute upper limit of 29 percent.

There are no studies on the impact of Cosmoflux.

An econometric study carried out this year by two professors at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, on the health effects of aerial spraying, found that it had “a very significant” impact in terms of the likelihood of miscarriage. It also found a correlation between aerial spraying and skin problems.

Uruguayan political analyst Laura Gil, who disseminated the terms of the settlement in Colombia on Oct. 1, told IPS that it was “unacceptable for Ecuadoreans to receive more [safety] guarantees than Colombians.”

She added, however, that “agreements like this strengthen relations. It’s better to try to settle things through negotiations, rather than through a legal sentence, even though the International Court of Justice is a mechanism for the peaceful settlement of conflicts.

“But it is not acceptable for it to be done through secret diplomatic negotiations,” she added, pointing out that the content of the binational agreement did not go through the Colombian Congress.

“It’s obvious why not: because the legislators would demand a halt to the spraying.

Amira Armenta, an expert with the Transnational Institute’s Drugs and Democracy programme, wrote in a Sept. 12 article that the settlement would not really change anything because Colombia would continue spraying in border provinces.

According to the latest study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Nariño and Putumayo are the provinces with the highest density of coca cultivation – 22 percent and 13 percent, respectively, of the country’s total coca cultivation in late 2012.

“In the last decade, Nariño has suffered from the highest levels of spraying in the country, and in spite of that it continues to boast the title of biggest producer,” Armenta writes.

The settlement also states that before spraying in a border area, the Colombian government will give the Ecuadorean government 10 days notice, indicating the exact locations and dates of the fumigation.

“This is much more than what could have been achieved in a legal ruling, because it is very difficult for an international court to require a country to assume a commitment of this nature since the country can claim that it affects its sovereignty,” Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, said about the agreement. “But it is possible to achieve when it is a friendly settlement.”

Ecuador and Colombia also agreed to sign a special expedited protocol for addressing complaints from Ecuadorean citizens in border areas. But the protocol, to be adopted “within 15 days” after the settlement was signed Sept. 9, has not yet been announced.

With reporting by Constanza Vieira in Bogotá.

Outside the New York federal courthouse, Ecuadorians and their supporters gather to protest the Chevron lawsuit. Credit: Samuel Oakford/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

Two years after they were awarded 18 billion dollars by an Ecuadorian court for environmental damage caused by Chevron in the Amazonian rainforest, a group of indigenous villagers and their U.S. lawyer went on trial Tuesday in New York, accused by the oil company of bribery and racketeering.

Chevron was found liable in 2011 for an ecological catastrophe caused by pollution released in the 1970s and 1980s by Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001 and for which they agreed to assume legal obligations.“Every day, family members and loved ones are sickened because of the contamination." -- Javier Piaguaje, a Secoya Indian from Ecuador

Chevron has refused to pay the penalty.

Because Chevron has no assets in Ecuador, the plaintiffs have attempted to collect the fine abroad.

The New York suit, filed under the RICO statute, a strategy made famous during Mafia prosecutions in the 1970s, seeks to block enforcement of the 2011 decision in U.S. courts, where Chevron maintains ample reserves to foot the bill.

The complaint claims the lawyer, Steven Donziger, and a group of Ecuadorians representing the 30,000 original Amazonian plaintiffs attempted to persuade and corrupt a series of Ecuadorian judges who heard the case in an attempt to extort Chevron.

Donziger and the Ecuadorian defendants deny any wrongdoing and assert the lawsuit is another expensive legal distraction that the 230-billion-dollar corporation can afford to tack onto what has become a 20-year saga of litigation.

Outside the courthouse, Ecuadorians and their supporters gathered to protest the case.

Demonstrators chanted and held photographs depicting shiny, blackened earth, open runoff pits and frail jungle residents who they said were dying from cancers that resulted from the estimated 18 million gallons of crude oil and 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater that was leaked or illegally pumped into pristine jungle ecosystems around the Lago Agrio field the northwest of the country.

“We’re here in front of the courts against this large corporation,” said one of the defendants, Javier Piaguaje, a Secoya Indian who lives along the heavily polluted and now-ironically named “Aguarico” River.

Dressed in traditional Secoya garb, Piaguaje told the crowd the lasting effects of the spill were ravaging his community.

“Every day, family members and loved ones are sickened because of the contamination,” said Piaguaje.

“We’re here to show what’s really going on in the Amazon,” he added, before turning to enter the courthouse and mount his defence.

The judge in the case, Lewis Kaplan, has long been a thorn in the side of indigenous plaintiffs.

Earlier this month, Kaplan decided Donziger and his co-defendents were not entitled to a trial by jury.

“This trial is a travesty of justice,” said Paul Paz y Miño of Amazon Watch, an environmental justice group that assists the Ecuadorian claim.

“Chevron has spent years to have a trial where the original plaintiffs are not allowed to discuss the evidence,” Paz y Miño told IPS.

“There is absolutely no evidence of fraud on behalf of the plaintiff,” he added.

A spokesperson for the defendants in the New York case, Han Shan, told IPS the lawsuit took a lot of chutzpah on the part of Chevron.

“They’ve done a great job of media and political jujitsu in taking things that we were alleging, Chevron being totally corrupt, putting pressure on judges, bribery, trying to entrap people, using dirty contracters and said that we did it,” said Shan.

In 2009, Diego Borja, a Chevron contractor in Ecuador, was caught trying to entrap the presiding judge, Juan Nunez, by videotaping himself offering Nunez a bribe. Chevron has since paid for Borja to move to the United States and supplies him with a monthly stipend.

The Chevron media relations website was down for maintenance at the time of this article and IPS was unable to reach the company for comment.

However, on the company’s website devoted to the lawsuit, Morgan Crinklaw, a spokesman for Chevron, says, “We believe that any jurisdiction that observes the rule of law will find that the judgment is illegal and unenforceable because it’s a product of fraud.”

The trial taking place in Manhattan hinges in large part on Donziger’s personal diary and hours of outtakes from Joe Berlinger’s 2009 film, “Crude,” which Chevron claims show Donziger considered some of the environment evidence in the lawsuit to be “all smoke and mirrors.”

Donziger has said his quotes were taken out of context.

Judge Kaplan has already decided in favour of Chevron once.

In March 2011, Kaplan issued a global injunction that blocked enforcement of the Ecuadorian judgment, effectively kneecapping indigenous claims.

In January 2012, however, the 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York overturned the injunction, which opened the door once more for the original plaintiffs to enforce the 18-billion-dollar decision in U.S. courts.

That decision led Chevron team of over 100 lawyers to cobble together a last ditch defence strategy in form of the RICO suit, which they worked hard to have heard in Kaplan’s courtroom.

Shan isn’t optimistic about Kaplan presiding over the case.

“I don’t feel Kaplan will give us a fair hearing,” said Shan. “I think he’s already made up his mind.”

But should Kaplan rule against the indigenous community and issue a global injunction once more, Shan is confident the 2^nd Circuit will strike it down.

“The 2nd Circuit has been clear that the U.S. District Court is not an appellate court for the Ecuadorian judiciary and there’s absolutely no jurisdiction for that kind of injunction,” said Shan.

A family travelling by boat along the San Juan River, a biodiversity-rich area on the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 10 2013 (IPS)

A team of scientists who analysed the richness of plant species around the world concluded that the ecosystems in need of immediate protection in order to meet the 2020 conservation goals set by the Convention on Biological Diversity are largely concentrated in Latin America.

Humanity’s life support system, which provides our air, water and food, is powered by 8.7 million different kinds of plants, animals and other living species. But those species are going extinct at an accelerating rate, representing a major threat to future human survival.

Recognising this threat, nearly every country in the world has agreed under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to protect 17 percent of the planet’s land areas and conserve 60 percent of the world’s plant species by the year 2020.

These twin goals, included in the 20 Aichi Targets, can only be achieved if far more land in the Caribbean, Central America and northern South America is properly protected, according to a new study published Sep. 6 in the journal Science.

The study, “Achieving the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Goals for Plant Conservation”, analysed the distribution of 110,000 different plant species to discover that about 67 percent the world’s plants live in 17 percent of the planet’s land area – mainly in tropical and subtropical regions.

“Our paper sets out the priority areas for protection, based on their species richness,” said report co-author Stuart Pimm from Duke University, in the eastern U.S. state of North Carolina.

Those priority areas include Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, northern Peru and the Caribbean islands, Pimm told Tierramérica*.

Costa Rica is home to nearly 800 endemic species, found nowhere else in the world. Canada, which is nearly 200 times larger in area than the small Central American nation, has only about 70 unique or endemic species scattered across its nine million square kilometres of land area.

The reasons for this disparity are Canada’s cold climate and the last Ice Age, which buried the entire country in ice several kilometres deep 10,000 years ago.

Less than one sixth of these priority regions are protected, the report found. While Costa Rica has protected at least 20 percent of its land area, far more than nearly any other country, there is not enough data to know if that is enough, Pimm said.

“When it comes to plants, we don’t have the data to determine how much should be protected in any one country or where these protected areas should be inside a country,” he noted.

There is far more information on birds and animals, which has been used to identify so-called “biodiversity hot spots”.

This new study confirms most of these spots, but takes the analysis further with better methodology. There is a correlation between the diversity of plants and that of other species, but there are also plenty of exceptions. A tropical forest might have many amphibians, while a tropical island with similar numbers of plants may have none, Pimm explained.

Most existing national parks and protected areas are often in remote areas or in barren and inhospitable areas. With this new data, species-rich areas can be targeted for protection.

“The hard reality is that most of the priority areas in need of protection are in generally poor countries, like Madagascar or Ecuador,” said study co-author Clinton Jenkins, a tropical ecologist and conservation expert from North Carolina State University, who also works with a Brazilian conservation NGO.

“Costa Rica has to protect more of its area than Canada if we want to stem the rising tide of extinctions,” said Jenkins in an interview with Tierramérica.

Mobilising international support to protect biodiversity in other countries has been very difficult. Under the CBD Strategic Plan for reaching the 2020 goals, developed countries agreed to double biodiversity aid by 2014, and to maintain those levels until the final year of the plan.

“This is key to achieving any target,” CBD spokesperson David Ainsworth told Tierramérica.

Ecuador proposed to protect 10,000 square kilometres of its Amazon region as a national park, instead of allowing oil drilling, through the Yasuní-ITT initiative. It asked the international community to contribute 350 million dollars a year to offset the foregone oil revenues, Jenkins noted.

But after five years, the fund to leave the oil in Yasuní Park untapped had collected only 13.3 million dollars, and now Ecuador is preparing to allow drilling to proceed.

“A new road has already been blasted through the region,” Jenkins said.

Roads inevitably lead to deforestation, with negative impacts on local indigenous communities, he added. The Tagaeri and Taromenane indigenous peoples live in voluntary isolation in the region.

Oil drilling using extended reach technology could minimise the damage, by eliminating the need for roads. It is not necessarily more costly, but not all companies have the expertise to do it, he said.

“If the oil is going to be drilled, then it’s up to the Ecuadorian government to make sure companies make the minimum impact,” said Jenkins.

There are parts of the world that are simply more important than others when it comes to biodiversity. Yasuní is one. “Either species are protected from extinction, or they are gone forever and no one will ever experience them again,” he stressed. “I personally think it is immoral to allow species to go extinct.”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

The ecosystem and indigenous people of Yasuní Park are in danger, environmentalists warn. Credit: Iniciativa Yasuní-ITT

By Ángela Meléndez
QUITO, Aug 24 2013 (IPS)

The Ecuadorean government’s decision to allow oil drilling in the Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse areas of the planet, has caused alarm among environmentalists and indigenous people, who are calling for a referendum on the issue.

President Rafael Correa ordered the shelving of the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, a plan to leave oil reserves underground in the Amazon rainforest park in return for international compensation.

He complained that only 13.3 million dollars were contributed by companies, individuals and countries to a trust fund administered by the United Nations since 2007, towards a final goal of 3.6 billion dollars.

The decision announced Aug. 15 gives the state-run oil company Petroamazonas the green light to commence exploration in up to one percent of the area of the park, according to the decree that ended the Yasuní-ITT Initiative.

Opponents warn of the effects on the fauna, flora, and native peoples in voluntary isolation – the Tagaeri and the Taromenane – if drilling goes ahead in Ecuador’s largest protected area, covering 982,000 hectares.

On Thursday Aug. 22, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (CONAIE), the Confederation of Peoples of Kichwa Nationality (ECUARUNARI), the Confederation of University Students, and environmental organisations like Acción Ecológica presented a proposal for a referendum to the Constitutional Court.

They will need to collect 584,000 signatures – five percent of all registered voters in this country of 15 million people – in support of the petition.

In the proposed referendum, voters would be asked: “Do you agree that the Ecuadorean government should keep the crude in the ITT, known as block 43, underground indefinitely?”

President Correa urged people to collect signatures, and said he was sure that his own proposal to extract crude from Yasuní, for the purpose of boosting public expenditure, would win in a referendum.

The government says an area of less than one-thousandth of Yasuní park, situated in the north of the country, will be affected.

It also claims the isolated native communities will not be impacted, since the fields to be exploited (Ishpingo, Tambococha and Tiputini – the ITT) are far from the area declared the “untouchable zone”, where they live.

José Lema, the president of the association of geological engineers of Ecuador, told IPS that it is possible that oil could be extracted as the government proposes.

He cited the work Petroamazonas is doing in the Pañacocha field, located in another nature reserve in the north of the country, which has received international recognition for environmental best practices.

“Petroamazonas is carrying out similar work there, and it has had only temporary impacts while building the oil pipeline,” he said.

The expert believes the first thing to be done is to carry out a new assessment of the area in order to redesign the drilling plan.

“There may be changes, because the methodology that was first used (in 1993) was a two-dimensional seismic survey…that determined reserves of 920 million barrels of crude,” he said.

“But once more detailed information is available, there will be a more precise volume assessment, which will no doubt be greater than the original estimate,” he said.

In Lema´s view, the main task will be to adapt the oil rigs that are already in the park, and to bring in equipment for the installation. Then the wells will have to be drilled and the oil pipeline built.

“Every project creates disturbances; the aim is to reduce them as much as possible by using the best technology,” he said.

Wilson Pástor, a former minister of non-renewable resources in the left-leaning administration of Correa, who took office in 2007, says the concerns are unfounded because oil is already being extracted in the park.

“Block 31, which was explored by (Brazilian oil company) Petrobras and now belongs to Petroamazonas, is located within the park,” he said.

He also noted that the Pañacocha field produces 18,000 barrels per day, but the crude is not processed in any way within the protected area.

“The same approach will be used with ITT, since there are already seven oil rigs in the area,” and cluster wells will be drilled. “Previously, one well per platform would be drilled, but now 25 wells are drilled from each rig, occupying less space,” he said.

In Pástor’s view, the most polluting activity is the treatment and separation of water, gas and oil, which mean “in practice setting up a refinery, and the refinery will not be built in the ITT…so the entire intervention will only affect 190 hectares.”

He added that electricity will not be generated in the field and the oil pipeline will not affect the park, as it will be buried in a trench three metres wide filled with biodegradable material.

Evidently, the drilling plans already existed

The former minister also said that oil exploitation would have an additional benefit for the park. “Today, the Yasuní lacks strong institutions to control access to the park, but if Petroamazonas begins work here there will be resources to protect it,” he said.

According to government forecasts, the Tiputini field will produce its first barrels of crude in two years’ time, Tambococha 12 months later, and Ishpingo a year after that.

But civil society organisations are not convinced by the arguments put forward by Correa and his government.

María Paula Romo, of the left-wing party Ruptura 25, who is a former member of the constituent assembly that rewrote the constitution, argues that the government is violating article 57 of the constitution, which bans extraction activities in the territories of isolated peoples.

The article says: “The territories of the peoples living in voluntary isolation are an irreducible and untouchable ancestral possession and all forms of extractive activities shall be forbidden there. The state shall adopt measures to guarantee their lives, enforce respect for self-determination and their intention to remain in isolation, and ensure observance of their rights.”

It adds that “the violation of these rights shall constitute a crime of ethnocide, which shall be classified as such by law.”

Romo told IPS, “Before talking about specifications for wells, the first step is to ask how entry into forbidden territory can be justified in the light of the constitution.”

The justice minister, Lenín Lara, said there are no isolated communities in the oilfields where drilling is planned.

But environmental experts and academics refute this claim.

“The Taromenane are hemmed in on every side. And even if the work is done with the best technology, pressure is going to be put on these peoples,” said journalist and filmmaker Carlos Andrés Vera.

With reporting by Carey L. Biron in Washington, D.C.

President Correa, seen here greeting people in Otavalo in 2011, has frequently clashed with the media, which is largely controlled by the opposition. Credit: Miguel Romero/Presidencia de Ecuador

By Ángela Meléndez
QUITO, Jul 19 2013 (IPS)

Ecuador’s new media law introduces guarantees to democratise communications. But it has come under fire from critics who say it could set limits on investigative journalism. Many doubts will only be answered once its regulations are passed.

The Council for Regulation and Development of Information and Communication, in the process of being established, will be in charge of drawing up the regulations within 60 days of its creation.

The media law approved Jun. 14 and promulgated Jun. 25 also created a Superintendency of Information and Communication which will have powers of unknown scope to penalise noncompliance with the law.

Since the bill was drafted in 2009, important issues have been incorporated. For example, the law establishes the redistribution of radio frequencies in three equal parts: 33 percent private media, 33 percent public media, and 34 percent community media (to go into effect gradually).

It also requires that daily TV programming consist of 60 percent nationally produced content – and 10 percent must come from independent producers. In addition, 50 percent of the music played by radio stations must have been produced, composed or performed in Ecuador, and the stations must comply with the payment of royalties.

Furthermore, broadcast licence-holders will now be limited to one TV station and one FM and one AM radio station, in order to fight the concentration of media in a few hands.

And private advertisers must allocate at least 10 percent of their advertising budget to local or regional media outlets. This article is designed to ensure advertising income for smaller or rural print or broadcast media.

The law prohibits prior censorship as well.

But two matters were included at the last minute and voted in the legislature without previous debate: the prohibition of “media lynching” and the creation of the Superintendency, which is directly linked to the executive branch.

Article 26 prohibits what is described as “media lynching”, or the repetition by one or more media outlets of information aimed at destroying a person’s prestige or public credibility.

In such cases, the Superintendency could take administrative measures like requiring the publication of a public apology “in the outlet or outlets…in the same space, programmes, sections, as many times as the discrediting information was published.”

The Ecuadorean criminal code defines crimes against honour: defamatory slander and libel are described in articles 489 to 502, and may be punished with up to three years in prison if the allegations are made against a public authority.

But media lynching “leaves it to the subjective criteria of those judging whether or not there has been a bad faith action to persecute or harass a person on the part of the media,” said academic and sociologist Hernán Reyes.

In the view of journalist César Ricaurte, head of the Andean Foundation for the Observation and Study of the Media (Fundamedios), the concept of “media lynching” is “highly ambiguous” and “promotes censorship.”

“Press coverage that repeatedly mentions an official implicated in a corruption case could be denounced as ‘media lynching,’ which would bring about self-censorship of the media; they would stop investigating for fear of sanctions,” Ricaurte told IPS.

The law says that noncompliance with ethical regulations, including those on media lynching, may be denounced by any citizen or organisation to the Superintendency of Information and Communication which, once it has verified the complaint, will issue a written warning, unless the nature of the offence merits a sanction or administrative measure.

María Augusta Calle, a lawmaker for the governing Alianza PAIS coalition, said the fears were unfounded. “I think that in 99 percent of the cases, investigative reporting seeks to inform the public and comply with the duties shared by all journalists,” she said in public statements.

“But there is a difference between reporting the news and reporting on people’s private lives,” she added.

In a letter to Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression Catalina Botero said that “any sustained denunciation of corruption that could lead to reduction of the public credibility of a particular official could be classified by the supervisory body as ‘media lynching’ and be subject to the corresponding sanctions.”

Under the new law, this offence does not require the reporter to be aware that the information may be false, or to have been guilty of “manifest negligence” in establishing its veracity, which contravenes the IACHR Declaration of Principles on Freedom of Expression, Botero added.

The reach of the article on “media lynching” will become clear once concrete circumstances are defined by the regulations.

Another concern is the Superintendency, whose head will be chosen by the Council of Citizen Participation and Social Control from three candidates nominated by leftwing Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa.

The mission of the Superintendency will be “oversight, audit, intervention and control,” according to article 55. It will have the capacity to impose penalties and its resolutions will be binding. Citizens, journalists and the media will have a voice, but not a vote, through a consultative council.

Another body created by the law, the Council of Regulation and Development of Information and Communication, is made up exclusively of representatives of the state, and is tasked with regulating classification of contents and time slots.

One of the first steps taken after the president signed the bill into law was the nomination of members of the Council.

Tamara Merizalde, the former head of the Institute for Children and the Family, will represent the Equality Councils – bodies responsible for ensuring the rights of vulnerable groups, which have not yet been formed.

Patricio Barriga, former under-secretary of political communications for the government, will be President Correa’s delegate. Paulina Mogrovejo was appointed to represent the ombudsman’s office.

Nominations are pending for delegates for the Council of Citizen Participation and Social Control and for the municipalities.

In Ricaurte’s view, the basic problem is not regulation per se, but the fact that it is directly in the hands of the government. “This mechanism goes against that of every democratic society, in which the main focus is the independence of regulators; here, control is handed to the executive branch,” he said.

But journalist Estefanía Montalvo, who is head of communication for the Environment Ministry, believes the law will have a positive effect, because it will force reporters “to check more sources, verify their facts and inform without personal biases.”

“This has been a constant problem in journalism: the value judgments that were always allowed,” Montalvo told IPS. “Now journalists will think twice about disseminating unconfirmed reports.”

In her opinion, “rather than be afraid, we just have to work at doing better journalism,” and the law “is an opportunity for this.”

Spy equipment from the Surveillance Group Limited, a British private detective agency based in Worcester, England, has been found in the Ecuadorean embassy in London where Julian Assange, editor of Wikileaks, has taken refuge.

At a press conference in Quito on Wednesday, Ricardo Patiño, the foreign minister of Ecuador, held up a photo of a “spy microphone” that was found on Jun. 14 inside a small white box that was placed in an electrical outlet behind a bookshelf. The device contained a telephone SIM card allowing it to broadcast any conversations that it picked up.

“We are requesting backing from the British government to continue with the investigation of the device found,” Patiño told reporters.

The device was discovered by embassy security staff just two days before Patiño met with Assange to discuss his predicament. It coincided with revelations from Edward Snowden, a former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) staffer, of the extent of U.S. National Security Agency global surveillance of ordinary citizens.

Nobody has yet come forward to claim the device and the company has denied any role. “The Surveillance Group do not and have never been engaged in any activities of this nature,” said Timothy Young, the company CEO in a press statement issued Thursday. “This is a wholly untrue assertion.”

However, a casual web search reveals that the Surveillance Group boasts of its ability to install tracking devices anywhere.

“We can justifiably claim to be the only company in the world to offer an internationally accredited, covert camera construction, concealment and deployment course,” a company website claims. “We can provide a range of bespoke, unmanned, covert camera options to gather vital video evidence in the most challenging environment or scenarios. The cameras can further be supported by the use of micro tracking devices for deployment with customer property or vehicles.”

Bugging places is just one of the services that the Surveillance Group provides to corporations and police forces.

“We are the acknowledged experts in providing Professional Witness surveillance to the police and local authorities in relation to drugs, prostitution, gang violence, hate crime and antisocial behavior,” the company says on another page on its website.

“Our work in this arena includes the detection of malpractice by employees relative to the passing of confidential company information or the infringement of restrictive covenants and breaches of contract.”

Company web pages show pictures of hooded youth smashing store windows, as well as testimonials from companies like Nike who congratulated them on helping find addresses of vendors selling counterfeit goods.

“I am extremely impressed with the service provided by the team at The Surveillance Group and would definitely recommend them for brand protection work,” Chloe Young, a Nike official, was quoted as saying.

The Surveillance Group also offers “professional diplomas” in “tactical counter surveillance” for 5,190 pounds (8,000 dollars)

However, the company appears to have completely failed to foil the plans of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, which were likely hatched in the very building that was being bugged and most certainly did not dissuade them from launching a daring international escape for the former spy, that was worthy of Hollywood.

On Jun. 23, Wikileaks staffer Sarah Harrison spirited Snowden out of Hong Kong – where he had been staying – to Moscow, taking the intelligence agencies by surprise.

The listening device is not the only way that Ecuador suspects that it is being monitored. An article in the Wall Street Journal last week quoted extensively from email correspondence between aides of President Rafael Correa, revealing that someone was hacking internal government communications.

“I suggest talking to Assange to better control the communications,” the newspaper quoted Nathalie Cely, Ecuador’s ambassador to the U.S., in a message to presidential spokesman Fernando Alvarado. “From outside… [Assange] appears to be ‘running the show’.”

The Journal said that it obtained the emails from Univision Networks, a U.S.-based Spanish TV network, but Wikileaks says that the U.S. government could well have provided them with the raw material.

It should be noted that a number of private vendors around the world provide technology to hack email communications for “lawful interception” purposes.

These incidents have stirred deep anger among government officials in Quito.

The Ecuadorian government is being “infiltrated from all sides”, said Patiño. “This is a testament to the loss of ethics at an international level in the relations that we have with other governments.”

However, the interception of emails from South American governments appears to have been just as useless as the bugging at foiling Snowden’s plans. On Tuesday, the U.S. government sparked a diplomatic crisis by attempting to block a flight by President Evo Morales of Bolivia, under the suspicion that he was transporting Snowden. Morales was detained at Vienna airport for 14 hours but eventually completed his journey.

“Sieging/bugging of Ecuador’s London embassy and the blockading of Morales jet shows that imperial arrogance is the gift that keeps on giving,” tweeted Wikileaks.

A decision on whether or not Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who is facing charges of espionage in the U.S., will be given asylum in Ecuador could take months, officials there say.

Richard Patiño, the country’s foreign minister, said on Wednesday during a state visit to Malaysia that it took two months for the country to make a decision in the case of Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblowing website Wikileaks, and that Snowden’s case would take at least as long from the time the request was filed.

Hong Kong rally in support of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Credit: See-ming Lee/CC BY 2.0

Snowden is currently in hiding in the transit area of the Sheremetyevo airport near Moscow, the Russian capital.

Also on Wednesday, a senior U.S. politician issued a strong warning to cut ties with Ecuador if that country takes him in.

Robert Menendez, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that he would seek to end the preferential treatment for goods if the South American nation offers political asylum to Snowden.

Menendez said he would lead the effort to prevent the renewal of Ecuador’s duty-free access to U.S. markets under the Generalised System of Preferences programme, and also to block the renewal of the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, both of which expire at the end of next month.

Ecuador exported 5.4 billion dollars worth of oil, 166 million dollars of cut flowers, 122 million dollars of fruits and vegetables and 80 million dollars of tuna to the U.S. under the Andean trade programme in 2012.

Ecuador said that pending its decision on Snowden’s request, Washington should argue its case for extraditing the former National Security Agency contractor back to the United States.

U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel also called on Russia for Snowden’s extradition on Wednesday, telling the U.S. media that his leaks of classified information on widespread U.S. surveillance programmes had been a “serious security breach” that damaged U.S. national security.

Diplomatic spat

Russia says that since Snowden is in the transit area of the airport, he has technically not entered the country and hence cannot be extradited.

Snowden arrived at the Moscow airport from Hong Kong.

Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese territory, said an earlier U.S. request to arrest Snowden while he was there did not fully comply with its legal requirements.

But White House spokesperson Jay Carney lashed out at Beijing, saying its failure to “honour extradition obligations” had dealt a “serious setback” to efforts to build trust with China’s new president, Xi Jinping.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has said he would “almost certainly” grant political asylum to Snowden.

“If he asked us for it, we would think about it and we would almost certainly give it to him, because political asylum is an international human rights institution to protect the persecuted,” Maduro said.

The U.S. has been seeking Snowden’s custody since he leaked details of secret U.S. government surveillance programmes. There was no sign on Wednesday of him registering for onward flights out of Russia.

“They are not flying today and not over the next three days,” an Aeroflot representative at the transfer desk at Sheremetyevo said when asked whether Snowden and his legal adviser, Sarah Harrison, were due to fly out.

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

A Huaorani man holding a hunting spear in a tourist lodge in Tigüino, a community in Yasuní National Park in Ecuador's Amazon region. Credit: Eduardo Valenzuela/IPS

By Ángela Meléndez
QUITO, Jun 5 2013 (IPS)

Reports of another massacre in an isolated indigenous community in Ecuador’s Amazon region cast doubt on the state’s compliance with precautionary measures imposed in favour of uncontacted peoples in 2006 by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

According to reports that are being investigated, some 30 Taromenane Indians were killed by members of the rival Huaorani indigenous community, seven years after the Inter-American Commission (IACHR) called for protection for native peoples in voluntary isolation.

The government claims it is doing everything possible, but civil society organisations dispute that.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the alleged Mar. 29 massacre, first heard of in early May, but the inquiry is still in its preliminary stages.

Cawetipe Yeti, the president of the Huaorani Federation of Ecuador, said 30 Taromenane Indians had been killed, including children, in revenge for an earlier incident in which an elderly couple of his ethnic group had been murdered near the Tiguacuno river in Yasuní National Park. Earlier, a member of the Huaorani who claimed to have led the attack reported a lower number of fatalities.

The Taromenane and Tagaeri indigenous communities are the last uncontacted groups in the northeastern Ecuadorean Amazon basin, having shunned contact with the outside world. They live in the “untouchable zone” of over 700,000 hectares created by the government in 1999 to protect the area from activities that could threaten biodiversity and their cultures.

Their latest clashes with members of native communities in partial contact with the outside world, like the Huaorani, have renewed doubts about the effectiveness of the protective measures and drawn criticism of government actions and the impact of the model of development in an area rich in oil, minerals and timber.

In 2006, the IACHR, part of the Organisation of American States human rights system, called on the Ecuadorean state to “adopt effective measures to protect the lives and personal integrity of the Tagaeri and Taromenane peoples.”

The resolution added that the authorities should take “the measures necessary to protect the territory inhabited by the beneficiaries from third parties.”

To comply with these requirements, one year later Ecuador launched its “Plan to protect the lives of the Tagaeri-Taromenane uncontacted peoples,” as part of a national policy for indigenous communities living in voluntary isolation.

The stated strategy of the plan is “to assure the survival and physical, cultural and territorial integrity of peoples in voluntary isolation.”

The government banned outsiders from entering the protected zones of isolated peoples for purposes other than essential actions for social and environmental protection.

Excepted from this ban are other indigenous people living in the area, like the Huaorani, who number approximately 4,000 compared to 300 Taromenane and 30 Tagaeri.

While native people’s organisations in this country of 14.6 million people claim that 40 percent of the population is indigenous, only seven percent identified themselves as such in the 2010 census.

Under the government strategy, the armed forces may enter the protected zones for national security reasons, and priority attention is to be paid to the Amazon region ecosystems inhabited by communities in voluntary isolation.

After receiving the reports of the recent massacre, the government said that in 2012 a technical team from the Interior Ministry scouted the jungle in the untouchable zone on about 200 occasions, to monitor the possible presence of uncontacted communities.

The goal of the patrols is “to establish protection plans, as well as actions to avoid contact with settlers from outside or westernised native groups,” the government explained. The team has been carrying out the policy on behalf of voluntarily isolated peoples since 2010.

The government also said visits were made to several non-isolated indigenous communities to collect information about possible sightings of any signs of the protected peoples.

But civil society organisations regard these efforts as inadequate and say that if the protection measures had been more effective, the incidents of violence might have been avoided.

For example, former legislator María Paula Romo said “To regard this as a question of conflicts between ethnic groups or clans is an unacceptable way for (the government) to disassociate itself from its responsibility for what is happening.”

In her view, in addition to the need for concrete action on this conflict, “the fundamental issue should be an honest, thorough review of the model of development in the Amazon region.”

Humberto Cholango, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), agrees. “The conflict cannot be reduced to a confrontation between fraternal peoples,” as that would be to “wilfully adopt a political misreading of the issue,” he told IPS.

“Many have an interest in showing the world that this is ‘a problem between Indians’ rather than what it actually is: the result of an extractive industries policy that has increased the pressure on indigenous peoples. This is a national problem,” said Cholango, leader of the largest Ecuadorean indigenous organisation.

He said that imposition of the model has caused voluntarily isolated peoples to lose their way of life and their habitat, including their food and animals, which compels them to resort to violence, even among themselves, as a defence.

In contrast, Juan Sebastián Medina, the head of the Interior Ministry’s Precautionary Measures Plan, believes that the conflict “cannot be understood as a form of political pressure, nor as a form of pressure from the lumber or fossil fuel industries.

“It has to be understood from the perspective of a world view,” he said in public statements.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said on May 26 that the problem is “extremely complex.” He referred to the request by the United Nations 10 days earlier for the conflict between Amazonian indigenous peoples to be brought to an end.

“The U.N. has just told the Ecuadorean government it must protect the lives of the uncontacted peoples. Great! I’d like them to tell us how,” he said. “It’s very difficult to protect the lives of uncontacted people without contacting them.”

A group of anthropologists sent 16 recommendations to the authorities on May 29, calling for real solutions.

One of the first was for “the state to carry out an in-depth investigation to determine and achieve a comprehensive understanding of the internal factors affecting the Huaorani people, the relationship between the Huaorani and the Taromenane, and other isolated families or groups.”

The anthropologists also proposed that the state include in its analysis factors arising from the political economy of the Amazon region, such as “the extractive model of development linked to fossil fuel exploitation.”

Like CONAIE and organisations working for the rights of indigenous peoples, the anthropologists regard it as “inappropriate to reduce the conflict solely to the confrontation between the Huaorani and Taromenane peoples, while neglecting an analysis of the historical, economic and political circumstances that have exacerbated internal tensions.”

President Correa, meanwhile, said there would be an inquiry into possible omissions and violations on the part of the authorities in their responsibilities for protecting uncontacted peoples. The government is also looking into the possibility of creating a body to be directly in charge of the interests of communities remaining in voluntary isolation.

Pristimantis orcesi, a species of frog found only in the páramos of Ecuador. Credit: Courtesy of the Private Technical University of Loja

By Leisa Sánchez
QUITO, Jun 4 2013 (IPS)

The “páramos” or high plateaus of Ecuador, a crucial source of water, are showing signs of extreme fragility and a troubling loss of capacity to conserve this vital resource and sustain the survival of numerous species found nowhere else on earth.

The páramo is a high mountain ecosystem situated between 3,200 and 4,200 metres above sea level, and one of the most vulnerable in Ecuador. The threats that it faces are the result of climate change, deforestation and changes in land use.

The jambato toad (Atelopus ignescens) has already disappeared from the páramos, and there are fears for the survival of various species of mammals.

These high plains grasslands function like a sponge, absorbing and storing large volumes of freshwater which are then released continuously and gradually, feeding river systems and preventing abrupt variations in their flow.

But the páramo ecosystem has a limited capacity for recovering its original structure and biodiversity once these are altered, warned the founder of the non-profit scientific organisation EcoCiencia, Patricio Mena.

“It is intrinsically very fragile, which means that any disturbance, and even rains and winds, cause significant effects in the short, medium and long term. This is why it must be treated with great care,” Mena told Tierramérica.

The páramos are disappearing and vital water resources are being absorbed by the highly permeable volcanic soils beneath them: this was the warning sounded at the 7th Ibero-American Seminar on Science Journalism, held May 16-17 in the southern Ecuadorian city of Loja.

One particularly delicate issue is that of oil exploration and drilling in the páramos, observed Spanish seminar participant Seber Urgarte, a professor from the communications department at Abat Oliba CEU University and currently a guest researcher at the Private Technical University of Loja (UTPL).

This is why it is crucial to “preserve these ecosystems in light of their water and energy resources and biodiversity, above and beyond economic and political interests,” he told Tierramérica.

Mena stressed that the páramos supply water to indigenous communities and large cities alike. “Quito depends almost 100 percent on the water produced and stored in the surrounding páramos,” he said.

A study conducted as part of the Andean Páramo Project (PPA) found that these high plateau ecosystems are found in 18 of Ecuador’s 24 provinces. The most important are those of Napo, in north-central Ecuador, and Azuay and Morona-Santiago, in the south.

The PPA, which concluded in 2012, was a joint initiative of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the United Nations Environment Programme. It was implemented in Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru, with project activities emphasising research and local community participation. EcoCiencia was the Ecuadorian counterpart.

The study, “Distribución espacial, sistemas ecológicos y caracterización florística de los páramos en el Ecuador” (Spatial distribution, ecological systems and plant species of the páramos of Ecuador), found that these ecosystems cover 1.33 million hectares in the country, roughly five percent of its total area.

Close to 40 percent of Ecuador’s páramos are protected. The largest protected area is in Sangay National Park, which straddles the provinces of Morona-Santiago, Tungurahua, Chimborazo and Cañar, and accounts for 261,062 hectares. Of the remaining 60 percent, 30 percent have been altered by human intervention, and 30 percent are degraded, the study says.

But Mena, who formed part of the PPA team, stressed that “it is difficult to specify a percentage” or calculate an exact number of hectares that are degraded. Instead, it should be recognised that “all of the páramo is affected, because climate change affects the entire ecosystem.”

In general terms, the páramos of the eastern mountain range, which are moister and whose original biodiversity has remained intact, have a greater capacity to respond to environmental alterations, while the western páramos have suffered more serious impacts.

This is why Mena prefers to speak in terms of “a mosaic that ranges from perfectly well-preserved páramos to ecosystems in a state of profound degeneration that has practically transformed them into highly fragile deserts, like the dry páramos of (the central province of) Chimborazo.”

The páramos of Ecuador are characterised by a high degree of endemic flora and fauna. They are home to five species of reptiles, 24 of amphibians, and 88 of birds, of which 24 are found nowhere else.

According to the National Statistics and Census Institute, there are 565,858 hectares of arable land in Ecuador’s páramos, representing 4.85 percent of the country’s 11.6 million hectares of farmland.

In the meantime, “the area of land in the páramos under concession for mining activities decreased ostensibly, from 40.46 percent in 2008 to 12.53 percent in 2009,” engineer Fausto López from the department of natural sciences at UTPL told Tierramérica.

Mining concessions are concentrated in the south, in the provinces of Azuay, Loja and Zamora Chinchipe.

López believes that “the environmental cost is high, due to the threat to the habitat of numerous species of flora and fauna.” The most vulnerable are the mountain tapir, spectacled bear and culpeo or Andean fox, as well as the various species of amphibians.

“Given that these species need large areas for their survival, the establishment of corridors or networks of protected areas is one of the best strategies for their conservation,” he added.

But biologist Carlos Iván Espinosa explained that “one of the problems in the tropics is the lack of historical information on species and even on climate behaviour.”

“There are many species that have still not been described and that could be disappearing due to the effects of climate change,” argued Espinosa, also a researcher at UTPL.

The biggest challenge, stressed Mena, is to raise awareness of the fact that “the páramos are a part of our daily lives in an indirect by fundamental way: through the supply of water.”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Teenage girls are also at risk of gender violence in Ecuador. Credit: Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

By Ángela Meléndez
QUITO, Mar 25 2013 (IPS)

Ecuador hopes to move forward in the fight against violence against women by typifying femicide – gender-motivated killings – as a specific crime in the new penal code.

The first statistics on gender violence in this South American country were presented in 2012, indicating that 60 percent of women had suffered some kind of mistreatment.

The aim now is to include the crime of femicide in the penal code reform introduced in Congress in late 2011. The new code is expected to be approved by the legislature to be sworn in on May 24.

The bill describes femicide as the murder of a woman “because she is a woman, in clearly established circumstances.”

It goes on to describe these circumstances: the perpetrator unsuccessfully attempted to establish or re-establish an intimate relationship with the victim; they had family or conjugal relations, lived together, were boyfriend/girlfriend, friends or workmates; the murder was the result of the “reiterated manifestation of violence against the victim” or of group rites, with or without a weapon.

Femicide is to be punishable by up to 28 years in prison – similar to the sentence handed to hired killers.

What prompted Ecuador to typify the crime of femicide? First of all, the evidence.

Academic studies and police reports indicate that crimes against women have increased sharply. The Metropolitan Observatory of Citizen Security reported 21 femicides in Quito in 2012 and 28 in 2011.

In the most populous city, Guayaquil, on the Pacific coast, of 137 murders of women committed between January 2010 and June 2012, 47 were femicides and just four ended in prison sentences, according to the report “The paths of impunity”, presented Mar. 14 by the Ecuadorean Centre for Women’s Promotion and Action (CEPAM).

Another reason that femicide was classified as a crime was the shockwaves sent out by recent murders of women.

Karina del Pozo, 20, went missing in Quito on Feb. 20. Her body was found eight days later in an empty lot on the north side of the city, showing signs of abuse and a blow to the head that caused her death.

According to the police investigation, she was allegedly killed by three young male acquaintances when she refused to have sexual relations with one of them, after a party which they attended together.

In mid-February, the body of a 16-year-old adolescent girl was found in a burlap sack in the Andean province of Cotopaxi in the centre-north of the country, with signs of sexual violence. And on Feb. 28, 24-year-old Gabriela León was strangled and her body was dumped in a bag in the northern city of Ibarra.

In every case, the suspects or confessed murderers were men.

Thousands of people took to the streets to demand greater security, and the families of victims organised to demand that femicide be classed as a specific crime.

Femicide is “the murder of a girl, teenager or woman because she is a woman or because of the cultural constructions according to which men close to women feel that they have power over them,” left-wing lawmaker María Paula Romo of the opposition party Ruptura 25 told IPS.

Psychologist Angélica Palacios, who specialises in protection from sexual crimes, said “this issue involves power relationships within the family, labour place and social systems.”

Romo said the inclusion of femicide in the new penal code was in response to “the need to visibilise this kind of extreme violence against women, which has characteristics that make it very different from other crimes against life.”

But she said she did not believe that the mere classification of the crime would bring about changes. “Typifying it will not help prevent or avoid it. But this is a tool to raise awareness, to call things by their name, to train and sensitise people in the justice system, and even to obtain statistical information that enables us to work to change things.”

Mauro Andino, who belongs to the party of left-leaning President Rafael Correa and is the chair of the congressional Justice Commission, told IPS that the aim of the penal code reform was to safeguard the rights of women, because “it is different when a woman dies because of a robbery than when she dies as a result of harassment and violence at the hands of her partner.”

According to the National Survey on Family Relations and Gender Violence 2012, of the women who said they had suffered gender violence (60 percent), 76 percent had experienced it at the hands of their current or ex-partners.

The survey also found that two out of five women had suffered physical violence, and one out of four had suffered sexual violence.

Gender violence was present in both cities (61.4 percent) and rural areas (58.7 percent), and it affected women from all socioeconomic levels: both the poorest quintile and the richest quintile had rates above 50 percent.

Ecuador thus follows on the heels of other Latin American countries that have adopted femicide in their legislation: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru.

However, in several of those countries – most notoriously Mexico and Guatemala – the classification of femicide as a crime has failed to reduce the wave of violence against women.

The 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS) on Friday voted unanimously to approve a series of reforms to the Inter-American human rights system, but stepped back from proposals that had caused the greatest concern among civil society groups.

Nonetheless, rights advocates are expressing frustration that Friday’s highly anticipated vote did not bring a close to the reforms process. Instead, the final resolution mandates the OAS “to continue the dialogue regarding the core aspects for strengthening” the Inter-American system, which includes the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and Court of Human Rights.

“By adopting this document, the states [are] supporting essential elements of a robust system that will continue to be relevant into the future,” Lisa Reinsberg, executive director of the International Justice Resource Center, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“However, our hope had been that today’s session would definitively put an end to debate on the reform process. Instead, the commission will now be required to invest more time and resources into responding to suggestions, diverting attention away from important human rights concerns.”

The controversial two-year reforms process had been seen as potentially devastating for a system lauded by the rights community but which has increasingly frustrated governments of the region. Since its creation in 1959, the IACHR has proven to be one of the most effective parts of the otherwise largely moribund OAS, since 1978 overseeing the American Convention on Human Rights.

While the push for reforms is officially characterised as a strengthening process, it has been spearheaded by the governments of Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, each of which have expressed dissatisfaction with the current system.

“It is important to remember that it is the commission that has the authority to modify its rules and practices, and that the commission is intended to be autonomous from the OAS political organs,” Reinsberg says, noting that on Monday the IACHR passed new Rules of Procedure.

“Overall, those changes are generally positive and increase transparency for users of the Inter-American system. While the changes include some concessions to states, the commission held its ground where it mattered.”

No “real strengthening”

Meanwhile, longstanding worries over the broader strength of the system – particularly its chronic underfunding – were only partially addressed. Indeed, the funding issue goes to the heart of the debate on both sides.

“This process did not achieve a real strengthening of the Inter-American System … nor has the process resulted in an increase in funding,” Tirza Flores, a Honduran magistrate, stated in Spanish outside the OAS headquarters Friday morning, speaking on behalf of more than 150 NGOs and thousands of petitioners.

“We call on the states to comply with their obligation to finance the commission, instead of suffocating it by limiting or conditioning its external funding.”

Flores, too, called for an end to the “political process” of revising the system’s procedures. Yet this was upset by a last-minute proposal by Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua to “continue the dialogue”, stating that the reforms process had “failed to complete its work”.

In their resolution, the four countries called for discussion to continue on a half-dozen issues. These included precautionary measures (the power to require immediate action to protect groups or individuals), the commission’s annual publication on the human rights records of individual countries, and the functioning of the thematic rapporteurs.

This bloc is also demanding discussion on longstanding frustrations that the Inter-American system is inordinately controlled by the United States and other “external” countries.

These disagreements led several delegations to express concern that Friday’s vote would bring the Inter-American system a step closer to fracturing, particularly as Ecuador and Bolivia nearly refused to vote for the final resolution. Venezuela and Trinidad & Tobago have already stated they will withdraw from the system, while Ecuador and Bolivia have now issued similar warnings.

Funding discrepancy

On Friday, this schism played out in the backroom negotiations over the resolution’s final wording.

These revolved around three particular disagreements: over the implications of “full financing” of the IACHR, over whether the system’s external funding should be able to be “earmarked”, and, especially, over attempts to “strengthen” and “adequately finance” the thematic rapporteurships.

Much of the frustration expressed by these countries and others on Friday dealt with a central discrepancy at the heart of the Inter-American system.

On the one hand, the United States is the IACHR’s largest single funder – offering around 1.3 of its 10-million-dollar annual budget – and hosts its headquarters. On the other hand, for decades Washington (and Canada, another prominent funder) has refused to sign on to the American Convention on Human Rights.

To make matters worse, around a third of the Inter-American system’s budget comes from the European Union, which is otherwise not connected to the system.

“The control and definition of its policies are not in our hands, but rather are in the hands of others,” Ricardo Patino, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, stated in Spanish-language testimony on Friday, calling the situation ridiculous and unacceptable.

The impact of this funding discrepancy, Patino suggested, is that the Inter-American system reflects the ideology and priorities of its primary donors rather than of the rest of the member states. For instance, he noted, the IACHR rapporteurship on freedom of expression – seen as a darling of the United States and European Union – receives far more funding than do others on women, children or economic justice.

Patino also proposed creating a new rapporteurship, on torture and extrajudicial killing, while making references to the United States’ armed “drone” programme. He also promised that Ecuador would pay for such a position.

This would be a significant turnaround, as Ecuador reportedly offered just 1,500 dollars in funding to the Inter-American system over the past three years. Likewise, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua made no donations between 2010 and 2012.

“A clear majority of the region’s governments support the commission’s response to the reforms process,” Viviana Krsticevic, executive director of the Center for Justice and International Law, a Washington advocacy group, said in a statement to IPS immediately following the resolution’s vote.

“However, the governments did not pledge the additional 10 million dollars needed for the Commission to function effectively.”

On Friday, nearly all delegations made pleas for the countries of the Americas to come together, take ownership of and fully fund the Inter-American system – at a cost, one delegate noted, of just two cents per citizen. With the new resolution likewise reaffirming its commitment to provide “full funding” for the Inter-American system, this is now a point on which all of the region’s countries, for the moment, formally agree.

Rafael Correa celebrates his re-election at the Palacio de Carondelet, in Quito, cheered by a crowd of supporters. Credit: Martín Sánchez/IPS

By Leisa Sánchez and Ángela Meléndez
QUITO, Feb 18 2013 (IPS)

Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa secured yesterday his third term in office by a landslide, after vowing to radically deepen his project of citizens’ revolution by making the changes achieved thus far “irreversible”, fully achieving the goals of eradicating poverty, transforming the model of production and consolidating the “rule of the people”.

Initial data from the National Electoral Council give the centre-left candidate 56.7 percent of the votes in the national elections held this Sunday, Feb. 17, putting him well ahead of his greatest challenger, right-wing candidate Guillermo Lasso, with 23.3 percent.

This ample margin means Correa can begin his third consecutive term since 2007 without the need for the runoff required under the constitution unless the leading candidate obtains either 50 percent of the valid vote or 40 percent with a 10-point advantage over the nearest contender.

While Correa maintains that his government will continue to focus on social transformation, he noted that a change in the model of production and job creation would be the priorities this term.

This strategy is reflected in his choice of running mate, as the profile of vice president-elect Jorge Glas is more technical than political, and in Correa’s agenda, which involves promoting change through projects in the fields of oil production, energy resources, water, electricity and information and telecommunication technologies.

This transformation, which had already begun with restrictions on imports of consumer goods and higher tariffs for luxury items, will demand more value added on national products and strengthening popular and solidarity economy schemes, but without excluding private capital involvement.

Oil, Ecuador’s largest source of foreign revenue, with a record 98 dollars per 159-litre barrel in 2012, will continue to underpin the government’s investment in social programmes, which last year absorbed 15.3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and are projected to require 16.6 percent in 2013.

According to the National Planning and Development Secretariat, public investment grew six-fold in the last six years, standing at 6.29 billion dollars in 2012.

Speaking to the press following his second re-election, the leader of the governing Alianza País (AP) party said that the chief goal for the next four years would be to make “irreversible the shift in power relations in favour of the people and the great majorities” through the implementation of “solid economic policies, prioritising the ‘social debt’ (over debt to foreign creditors), but without neglecting efficiency”.

Correa stressed that “the challenge is to move more quickly but in the same direction”, adding that the people have confirmed at the polls their desire to “bury once and for all the ‘partocracy’ that has inflicted so much damage” on the country, in reference to the monopoly of power held by political parties.

Correa is confident that the massive support he received from voters will give him a large majority in parliament, which will thus be able to pass key bills on issues such as communications, water, land and criminal code reform, which had been stalled until now.

On Feb. 17, Ecuadorians also elected 137 members of the National Legislative Assembly and five Andean Parliament representatives.

Legislator Virgilio Hernández, re-elected under the AP ticket, told IPS that one of the great tasks ahead is to “build a post-oil Ecuador, going beyond a commodity-based economy”, while “making major changes to achieve energy sovereignty, continue developing the country’s road system and implementing large infrastructure works”.

He also spoke of the need to advance towards “a true and radical agrarian revolution” and implement credit and technology policies that will guarantee food sovereignty and security.

Hernández noted that significant progress has already been made, but social welfare, health and education are permanent issues on the government’s agenda. Work is needed to “ensure the full enjoyment of rights and social welfare” by all Ecuadorians, and achieve greater wealth distribution, with “more equality and social justice”.

Nonetheless, economic performance will be decisive in determining whether the Correa administration will retain its level of popularity, Hernán Ramos, a political and economic analyst, told IPS.

Ramos believes that one of the key factors of the president’s stability is the steady growth of GDP, fuelled by favourable oil prices, increasing government revenue and a high level of domestic consumption.

The government’s “project would suffer if the economy’s stability were to waver” for any reason, even an international crisis, Ramos cautioned.

In terms of politics, the analyst observed that Correa’s three victories at the polls had succeeded in dealing a mortal blow to a political leadership that was “historically responsible for the crises that dragged the country down”, as with this new win “the opposition has been broken”.

Unlike in 2007, when he took office for the first time, Correa now has several advantages. Firstly, the political experience gained after six years at the country’s helm; secondly, the strength gathered by his movement; and thirdly, ironclad media protection (in the form of a media regulatory body created in a 2011 referendum to stop media excesses), Ramos explained.

The president had promised that this would be the last time he ran, as he considered it in the country’s “best interest”. However, his movement lacks a figure strong enough to replace him after this term, a political weakness that could be overcome by AP if “it succeeds in grooming new leaders that can at least consolidate its political leadership in the country”, Ramos said.

Counting elections and referendums, Correa achieved his ninth victory at the polls on Sunday and holds an indisputable leadership after six years in which, in his own words, he “re-founded the nation” with a new constitution in 2008 that launched an era of good living and turned the state into the leading economic and political agent.

When his third term is up in 2017, Correa will have completed a decade in power.

A growing number of international lawsuits has highlighted an emerging global crisis: the nature and effects of investment treaties signed between governments, which are allowing private companies and investors to sue countries for millions or even billions of dollars.

Martin Khor

The most recent cases involving investment treaties include a 1.8-billion-dollar judgment against Ecuador obtained by a U.S. oil company, a two-billion-dollar suit filed against Indonesia by British mining company Churchill, cases taken against Uruguay and Australia’s public health measures by tobacco companies, suits threatened against India by several multinational companies, and even the seizure of an Argentine warship in a Ghanaian port on behalf of a U.S. investment firm.

The lawsuits were taken by companies and investors claiming that their investments, including potential profits, had been affected by a range of government policies, including non-compliance with contracts or new health, environmental or economic regulations.

Most of these arbitration cases are taken up in the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), at the Washington-based World Bank headquarters.

The tribunal system is widely criticised for its lack of professionalism and transparency, its conflicts of interest and the secrecy of its cases and outcomes.

The treaties are of two main types ­ the bilateral investment treaties (BITs) signed between pairs of governments (of which there are now around 3,000) and the investment chapter contained in bilateral or regional free trade agreements (especially those involving the U.S.).

Many of these agreements have investor-to-state dispute systems, under which a private company or investor can directly sue governments in an international tribunal by claiming that their property or profits have been expropriated or adversely affected by a violation of contracts or by recent policy measures.

For instance, an ICSID tribunal in October awarded a judgment in favour of U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum against Ecuador for 1.8 billion dollars. In addition, Ecuador has to pay 589 million dollars in backdated compound interest and half of the costs of the tribunal, making its total penalty closer to 2.4 billion dollars. The government had annulled a contract with the company because the latter violated a clause that it would not sell its rights to another firm without permission. The tribunal agreed the violation took place but judged that the annulment did not constitute fair and equitable treatment to the company.

The ease with which investors are able to bring and win cases against governments for a wide range of issues is due to the nature of the investment agreements.

First, the definition of investment, which is the subject of the treaties, is usually very broad, covering direct investment, portfolio investment, loans, franchises, licences, contracts, intellectual property and other assets. Investors can bring up cases claiming that their rights to any of these have been violated.

Second, the treaties grant national treatment, fair and equitable treatment and protection to investors. The definitions of these are so flexible that investors are able to claim their rights are violated for a wide range of reasons.

Third, many of the treaties prevent governments from controlling or regulating inflows and outflows of capital, and some restrict or disallow governments from imposing performance requirements on foreign companies.

Fourth, the treaties prohibit expropriation of the investments. The definition of expropriation is very broad: it includes direct expropriation such as takeovers of property but also “regulatory takings”, or the implementation of new policy measures that affect the potential revenue and profits of the investors.

Fifth, some of the treaties allow for investors to directly sue governments in international tribunals, including the ICSID.

Sixth, the arbitration system is riddled with major weaknesses that are not found in normal courts. According to international expert on trade and investment issues, Chakravarthi Raghavan, “The ICSID panels are constituted of lawyers who sometimes are on panel, and sometimes suing for firms against governments, and don’t have any obligation to disclose conflicts of interest. It is time that BITs and (the) ICSID system and these quite arbitrary ‘arbitration’ panels are exposed.”

Seventh, the BITs’ arbitration cases are shrouded in secrecy. They are not held in the open, and the existence or results of cases are not officially made known.

Eighth, it is difficult for a country to exit from a BIT even if it has decided that the bilateral treaty is against its interests, as many BITs have a “survival clause” that the treaty remains in force for 10 or 15 years even after the exit of a country or its expiry.

Governments, especially in developing countries, are also increasingly concerned. Faced with a multitude of lawsuits, several governments have recently taken action to review or revise their investment treaties.

South Africa, after completing a review of its BITs, has decided not to sign any new BITs, will attempt to exit from or re-negotiate existing ones, and will formulate a new model BIT.

Australia, in April 2011, announced it would not agree to including investor-state dispute settlement provisions in its BITs and free trade agreements.

A year later, in April 2012, India announced it was reviewing its BITs, especially their dispute resolution component, after facing the threat of suits arising from a Supreme Court order nullifying the award of 2G contracts to several foreign telecommunication companies.

And some Latin American countries including Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia have expressed their serious concerns about BITs and announced their exit from ICSID.

With so many problems arising and so many cases being taken against countries, the review and reform of investment treaties should be accelerated at both national and international levels.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Martin Khor is the executive director of the South Centre, Geneva.  For further analysis see South Centre, Issue 69.

Two months after he sought refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange was formally granted asylum by Quito on Thursday.

Julian Assange. Credit: Espen Moe/CC BY 2.0

But with Sweden and the United States pursuing him for potential criminal charges, Assange is unlikely to make his way out of the U.K., which has threatened to break in to the embassy to arrest him.

Assange has been avoiding extradition to Sweden for months, where he is to be questioned over sex assault claims, a mere “attempt to get (him) into a jurisdiction which will then make it easier to extradite (him) to the U.S.,” he told the Sun in December.

The Ecuadorean government said that the decision was taken after the UK, Sweden and the U.S. refused to guarantee that once extradited to Sweden, Assange would not be sent to Washington to face additional charges.

The three countries “would not provide any guarantees that he would not be sent to the U.S. to be tried for political crimes,” Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) told IPS.

“So (Ecuador) had no choice under international law but to grant him asylum,” Weisbrot said.

“We believe (Assange’s) fears are legitimate and that he could face political persecution if the measures are not taken,” Ricardo Patino, Ecuador’s minister of foreign affairs, said Thursday at a press conference in Quito.

The famous hacker, once called a “hi-tech terrorist” by the Barack Obama administration, fears that he would then face other charges for having leaked top-secret information, including 400,000 documents about the Iraq war and U.S. torture of detainees.

He has thus far found refuge in the premises of the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been sleeping on an air mattress since June. If he sets foot outside of the building, he will be arrested by the British police, sent to Sweden, and possibly the United States.

Thursday, applause from many of Assange’s supporters could be heard outside of the embassy as news came that Ecuador had granted diplomatic asylum to their Australian refugee.

“I am grateful to the Ecuadorean people, President Rafael Correa and his government. It was not Britain or my home country, Australia, that stood up to protect me from persecution, but a courageous, independent Latin American nation,” Assange wrote on WikiLeaks before posting “Gracias a Ecuador y ustedes” (Thanks to Ecuador and to you) on his Twitter.

If extradited to Washington, the famous whistleblower would likely face heavy charges.

“Assange would risk the severest penalties – life imprisonment or even the death penalty – if he were tried in the U.S.,” Reporters Without Borders’ Delphine Halgand told IPS.

“The resources deployed by the U.S. authorities to track down WikiLeaks activists and supporters and obtain their personal data can only reinforce these concerns,” she said.

But while the announcement of asylum came as good news for Assange and his numerous supporters, it did not change his situation in any way, with the U.K. police now surrounding the embassy in a “menacing show of force”, according to WikiLeaks.

Should Assange attempt to leave his safe haven, he would be arrested before reaching the airport.

“We will not allow Mr. Assange safe passage out of the U.K., nor is there any legal basis for us to do so,” the British foreign secretary said in a statement released Thursday.

“The U.K. does not accept the principle of diplomatic asylum,” the statement read.

London had previously threatened to enter the Ecuadorean embassy to arrest Assange. However, such a move would blatantly infringe on the inviolability of diplomatic premises as defined under the Vienna Convention, according to Michael Ratner, a legal adviser to WikiLeaks.

“The fact that the British – and I was as shocked as anybody – said yesterday that they might invade the embassy to get their hands on Julian Assange is an incredible violation of international law that is unheard of,” he told Democracy Now.

“I mean, think about the Chinese going into the U.S. embassy to get Chen out in China… This is unheard of in law, it’s unheard of in diplomacy, and it’s an outrageous and egregious undermining of the right of a country to give asylum,” Ratner added.

Other legal experts doubt the UK would actually follow through on such threats.

“(The UK) mentioned revoking diplomatic status for the embassy… Too legally risky in my view,” Carl Gardner, a former lawyer for the British government, told IPS.

If he still refuses to surrender, Assange has two options – holing up in his hideout or trying to reach an airport via an embassy vehicle, which would very likely lead to his arrest.

“I’d be tempted to advise him to go to Sweden and defend himself if there’s a trial. I think that’s inevitable in the end. I don’t think I could offer him any hope of a way out,” Gardner told IPS.

But Gardner adds, wryly, that there’s yet another possibility: “Ecuador could name Assange its representative to the United Nations. That would make him immune from arrest while traveling to U.N. meetings around the world.”