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January 17th, 2016 
Awake Goy 
Print FriendlyAbove Photo: Ecuador’s Culture Minister Guillaume Long (R) talks to teleSUR English Director Pablo Vivanco. According to Long, grassroots support is essential. teleSUR
We have to “think politically, act politically and organize ourselves politically” to be “close to the people,” Culture Minister Long tells teleSUR.
Faced with a resurgent right, Latin America’s left has to become even closer to the people, Ecuador’s Culture Minister Guillaume Long told teleSUR in an interview marking nine years of the government of Rafael Correa.
We have to “think politically, act politically and organize ourselves politically” to be “close to the people” and “not just doing top down public policies” which always “need to be accompanied by the movements, by participation” of broad layers of society, Long emphasized.
Oil is a much smaller part of Ecuador’s economy today than taxes
According to the minister, while elections have been essential to the revival of the Latin American left over the past decade as they “get you in power and legitimize you,” they are not enough and “the fight for ideas, change of values, to move away from self-seeking consumerist society” has to be won with a “return to the barrio, to the neighborhood, with lots of political work.”
As the South American nation celebrates the anniversary of a political process known as the Citizen’s Revolution, Long explained how worsening global economic circumstances have created an opening for a powerful right-wing “which has a lot of money behind it, a lot of international links, marketing gurus travelling from one country to another helping different candidates in different elections with the support of international capital.”
“The right was hit pretty hard,” Long explained about governments across the continent, such as Ecuador’s, that secured successive electoral victories “by being genuine, popular, redistributing wealth,” but now the right “is getting itself together again.”
He warned that the continent now faces two clear and distinct paths. Any victories for the right, as Argentina shows, would not only overturn the emphasis on equality and poverty reduction, but, believes Long, would eradicate something much more intangible: the greater sense of self respect and dignity that Ecuadoreans now have.
“The greatest achievement of the Citizen’s Revolution is the recuperation of hope and optimism in Ecuador,” said Long, referring to how neoliberalism had struck a blow at people’s sense of self worth as unemployment soared, incomes plummeted and people fled the country.
Prior to the Correa government, “Ecuador was facing an unprecedented crisis … massive economic crisis accompanied by political crisis. Ecuador was probably the most unstable Latin American country with seven presidents in 10 years.”
Addressing the current economic downturn, the historian explains, “the Global South reveals you can’t just depend on raw materials. The fall of the commodity prices, and its exerting pressures on a number of economies including the Ecuadorean economy, demonstrates once again that you need to diversify an economy, you need to make your economy more sophisticated, and in order to do that you need people, you need human talent.”
Contrary to the popular view that Ecuador remains wedded to oil, Long explained how measures by the Correa government such as the huge crackdown on tax evasion in Ecuador means that oil is a much smaller part of the economy today than taxes. And Ecuador has used the oil revenues from the boom period to construct a newer economy by “investing heavily in education, spending 2.13 percent of GDP in higher education,” a level well above the advanced OECD nations said Long who was a former higher education minister
Thanks to this post neoliberal model, we are keeping things stable, everyone is being paid on time and the economy is still healthy
Long believes the “sharpest fall in oil prices for at least 30 or 40 years” shows the contrast between the political choice the continent now faces. If Ecuador was “in the dark days of neoliberalism this state would have collapsed, the government would have fallen” and returned to the “mayhem” of the earlier part of this century when crisis engulfed the Andean nation.
But thanks to the structural changes and the ongoing motivation of the government to protect the majority of people “there is no collapse … even unemployment has not been affected significantly” by a slowdown in 2015 which saw the economy continue to grow but at a much slower rate than the 4 percent average previously achieved under Correa.
“Thanks to this post neoliberal model, we are keeping things stable, everyone is being paid on time and the economy is still healthy, even if less than expected.”
Long also discussed how 2015 was a more difficult year in Ecuador with waves of protests that the Correa government has faced in 2014. He noted that Correa still has levels of popularity of 60 percent and dismissed attempts to portray the wave of mainly right-wing protests as popular movements. Citing the example of the indigenous communities, Long said that sections of the media have pushed the “myth that the government lost the support of the indigenous community” but “in electoral terms it’s not true … Indigenous people voted for Correa more than the average Ecuadorean” in the 2013 elections.
He responded to the news that the Pachakutik political party — once a symbol of resistance to neoliberalism in Latin America in the 1990′s and 2000′s — would join with right-wing politicians in a coalition opposed to the government of Rafael Correa for next year’s elections, saying the element within Pachakutik that has taken control of the party is leading it towards very problematic and dangerous alliances with right-wing parties … The historic Pachakutik, that we’re all proud of … isn’t anymore.”
To the small sections of the left who have allied themselves with the protests undertaken by the right in 2015, he warned if Rafael Correa’s Alianza Pais “doesn’t win the next presidential elections (in 2017) it’s not going to be a so-called left-wing alternative that comes to power, but very much the hard right that wants to return to the neoliberalism and the old order.”
Source Article from https://www.popularresistance.org/people-power-can-defeat-right-in-ecuador/
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