I have never seen such rapid destruction of a country in peacetime and without a blockade or sanctions. When I left government in May 2017, we were the second safest country in Latin America with an intentional homicide rate of 5.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, but today we are one of the most violent countries in the world with a projected rate of 39 at the end of 2023. We have electric Energy exported, but today we import energy and the electricity rationing that was overcome more than a decade ago has returned. We have been the country that has reduced poverty and inequality the most in the region and we have reversed the flow of migration with tens of thousands of compatriots returning to their country, but today GDP per capita is at the 2011 level, which has poverty increased again and immigration The tragedy began again. Meanwhile, the bank is breaking historic profit records. The unprecedented has become commonplace.
This is the result of incompetence, corruption, but above all political hatred. In 2017 we won the presidential and parliamentary elections, but my successor Lenin Moreno betrayed his voters, demolished everything that had been built over the last decade and persecuted the so-called “correístas”. In 2018 there was an unconstitutional referendum that amounted to a real coup. From this emerged the interim members of the Council for Citizen Participation and Social Control, the body responsible for selecting the control authorities, all of whom were appointed by the executive and illegally even dismissed the Constitutional Court and declared a “judicial body” for six months. . They also illegally removed and replaced 70% of the National Court. This has merited four reports from the United Nations Rapporteur on Judicial Independence. With the consultation, they also limited the president’s re-election to a one-time re-election, but to prevent me from becoming a presidential candidate, they applied the rule retroactively from 2008.
The obstacle to their plans was re-elected Vice President Jorge Glas. So they implicated him in the Odebrecht case, unconstitutionally stripped him of the vice presidency and put him in prison for five years and four months, most of the time in a regular prison, when prison riots claimed hundreds of lives. Today the Odebrecht case was annulled in Brazil because of its use for political persecution.
In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic and when all criminal cases were closed, except those involving flagrante delicto, a complete intrigue was carried out to accuse us of receiving bribes during our time in office. The irregularities of this process are so numerous that experts consider it to be the paradigm of legal conduct or legal warfare. Suffice it to say that of the nine judges of the three courts who heard the case, seven were ad hoc judges and their positions depended on our conviction, which was also denounced by the rapporteur. The cassation violated due process and prevented our right to defense. In record time, the cassation took only 17 working days and they managed to finally convict me, along with a group of 20 people, and deprive me of my political rights, hours before I registered as a candidate in September 2020. This is how they prevented me from participating in the 2021 elections and made Guillermo Lasso president. Although it’s hard to believe due to the glaring lack of evidence, my verdict is “incitement by psychological influence.” The persecution is so blatant that Belgium, the country where I have lived since leaving the presidency for family reasons, granted me political asylum in 2022, just as countries like Mexico have done with others persecuted in this case and Interpol even rudely rejected it. All applications for red alert make it clear that this is political persecution, even if you are a police officer and not a judge. They also illegally took away our political party and personally the security as a former president, the life pension and even the life insurance that I had in a public company.
Given his blatant failure as a government, Guillermo Lasso had to face elections, a number provided for in the Ecuadorian constitution. The polls showed that we emerged victorious in a single round. Eleven days before the elections, they assassinated Fernando Villavicencio, one of our fiercest opponents and presidential candidate, who was in fifth place and was more useful to them dead than alive. There had never been anything like this in the history of Ecuador. We suffered a brutal campaign of blaming ourselves for this murder, and even though we came first, we had to go to the runoff. In the second round of voting, eight days before the elections, seven of the eight contract killers involved in the assassination of Villavicencio, who were in prison under the care and responsibility of the Ecuadorian state, were murdered. They are once again blaming us for these crimes, even on the part of the state itself, thus once again influencing the election results and preventing our victory.
The judiciary in Ecuador has destroyed the reputation, the rule of law and democracy itself, all with the thunderous silence of foreign ambassadors and the international press who refused to understand that they are also responsible for what they choose to ignore.
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