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Important Investigative Reporting on Ecuador at Substack

 

An important investigative piece by Ryan Grim and José Olivares on the recent activities in Ecuador at Dropsite:

Three bullets to the head ended a presidential campaign, sending a South American nation and parts of Washington D.C. reeling. Fernando Villavicencio, a charismatic Ecuadorian politician, had been rising in the polls in the August 2023 snap elections by promising to take on the corrupting influence of violent, organized drug cartels. Less than two weeks before the election, as the candidate walked among a cheering crowd towards his car at a campaign event, an assassin shot him dead.

The brazen killing rocked Ecuador and brought international attention to the nation’s election. Villavicencio's supporters quickly blamed leftist Rafael Correa, president from 2007 to 2017, and his party for the candidate’s assassination, without evidence.

Then, the U.S. government got involved: First, the State Department announced a multimillion-dollar reward for information leading to those who planned the killing, and later, the FBI sent a team of agents to investigate the assassination.

Now, leaked private messages said to be sent by Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar, and reviewed by Drop Site News and The Intercept Brasil, reveal why the U.S. invested so many resources to investigate the candidate’s assassination: according to the messages, Villavicencio was a U.S. government informant. And Salazar, who was in close contact with  the U.S. ambassador, helped shape a public narrative that the leftist party was to blame for the killing—a maneuver that successfully kept the Correaistas from returning to power and dramatically accelerated the Ecuadorian state's staggering descent.

The sensitive revelation is one of many that comes from the series of leaked chats between a former Ecuadorian assemblymember and an account he says was Salazar.

Drop Site is the first English-language outlet to obtain complete access to the explosive chat records that reveal the inner workings of a politically motivated  attack on the leading leftist political party, all with the blessing of the U.S. 

Some of the messages have been reported on by the Ecuadorian media, which has buried the story. The foreign press has largely ignored the leaks, which provide a rare and intimate look into an example of the underhanded, U.S.-backed right-wing playbook. This playbook has, over the last decade, duped much of the media, promoted reactionary movements and anti-political sentiments, rolled back social gains, and wreaked political havoc in Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Honduras, and beyond. Former president Donald Trump has also flirted with it, by attempting to use the U.S. Justice Department to go after political adversaries.

The Salazar messages are now the subject of an investigation by Salazar's colleagues and she is currently facing impeachment for “breach of duties” within the National Assembly, a process primarily led by the left-wing political party. In May, a Florida-based criminal attorney, representing an Ecuadorian man implicated in one of Salazar’s investigations, wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department, claiming that the messages “violate several federal laws” in the U.S. The attorney recommended the U.S. blacklist Salazar for revealing “highly sensitive and confidential information” from U.S. law enforcement agencies.

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Interview with Albarrán Cabrera

 

From Global Voices, an interview with this duo photographers who fashion unique images via photography:

Omid Memarian: Notions of memory and identity figure prominently in your photography. What's your personal connection with these themes and how are they reflected in your work?

Anna: Everything we are is memory. When dealing with anything related to science, you draw on what scientists have already discovered to understand the world. Regarding identity, you are who you are because of your memories. You are your first anniversary, you are your mother’s memories, you are the memories of your school days. You are all this. Even the way we conceptualize time to understand reality is based on memory. This is more evident in people who suffer from memory loss. For them, time does not exist.

We hope that our photographs trigger subconscious associations in viewers based on their memories. We even prefer that the viewer interpret the photograph in a way totally different from what we had originally imagined. Thus, they will create a new set of ideas for themselves.

Memory is the thread that weaves all of our series. “The Mouth of Krishna” is the core series. It is the result of all our learnings so far. It is related to how our memories keep our reality consistent, how we categorize what we perceive and how we interlink it.

From time to time, we realize that some concepts gain more importance and then this generates a new portfolio. Thus, “This is you here” studies the concept of identity and how it is created based on our memories.

“Kairos” revolves around the idea of how humans perceive time. Time is not something tangible, it’s just a property of the universe. We create the concept of time with the help of our memories, and we divide it into past, present and future.

OM: You have spent a lot of time in Japan. How does this particular geography connect to your worldview of art and culture?

Angel: Japanese culture is very important for us and our work. This culture, as many others, is subject to many stereotypes and enormous misconceptions. At the beginning, you can fall into the trap of its aesthetics and philosophy. But once you study the language, its people and history, you discover the reality about this country: the good, bad and horrible things that any country has. And yet, there is still something fascinating: Japan offers us a completely different interpretation of reality compared to our Western conception. We all live in the same world, but it is interpreted from many, and totally diverse, points of view.

The Western world is obsessed with symmetry and perfection. We understand beauty shaped by universal laws, granting great importance to the perfect and the eternal. Japanese aesthetics are, however, very different. They see beauty in the impermanent, the imperfect, the rustic and the melancholy. They long for what is not eternal, slightly broken, modest and fragile.

OM: The aesthetic aspect of your work is very bold. In a world in which classical depictions of beauty have been pushed aside, how is your work being received in the art world?

Anna: Beauty is a very complex topic. It is not only difficult to define what beauty is, but also to deal with it. Prettiness worries serious people a lot. They are afraid that beauty will make you forget what life is really like. But as the philosopher Alain de Botton stated: “We need pretty things close to us not because we are in danger of forgetting the bad stuff, but because terrible problems weigh so heavily on us, that we’re in danger of slipping into despair and depression…The art a country or a person calls ‘beautiful’ gives you vital clues as to what is missing.”

We do not consciously look for beauty in our work. We search through the mystery of the unknown to experiment with the beauty of discovering.

OM: You have done nature photography in both Europe and Japan. What differences do you see in these two series of works?

Angel: As Westerners, we are surprised and amazed by the aesthetic and philosophical interpretation that the East has developed about the world. It seems very different from ours and yet, both Western and Eastern schools of thought have a simultaneous origin. Reviewing the pre-Socratic Greek thinkers of the Miletus school, we can find in their line of thought a common motivation with the Oriental culture: nature.

Oriental thought, and even more specifically, Japanese thought has not lost this ancestral contact with nature, maintaining it throughout the evolution of its culture. The ideals and concepts of Japanese aesthetics are mainly influenced by religion. In both Shintoism and Buddhism, the Gods are not the creators of nature, but nature is an individual entity. In our Western tradition, the Judeo-Christian concept of a creator or God broke this link and made us separate ourselves from the traditional aesthetic ideals of ancient Greece. The meaning of terms such as Wabi-sabi, Miyabi, Shibui or Yuugen originally existed in our Western culture but they did not evolve as in the Japanese case. We are gladdened by the fact that this common root is present in our work: usually viewers cannot differentiate between the images taken in Japan from those taken in other places.

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No Laughing Matter Anymore

From Michelle Goldberg's editorial about Vance and his "unhumans":

“The great American counterrevolution to depose the Cultural Marxists must occur on all terrains of society they currently possess and on those they aim to seize,” write Posobiec and Lisec, adding, “It is achievable but only with the resolve of Franco and the thoroughness of McCarthy.” (They mean Joseph McCarthy, another of the book’s icons.) Compare that to what Vance said on the alt-right podcast “Jack Murphy Live” in 2021, when he argued that Republicans, upon taking power, should purge their opponents the way Iraq’s government once purged members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

 

And a persons commentary to the OpEd:

I was born in 2001. I was six months old when the Twin Towers went down. I grew up with a love of history instilled into me by my late grandfather, who passed away in my freshman year in college. Because of him, I recognized what was coming when, at the age of 15, I watched, voteless and voiceless, as angry old men and women who looked fondly upon the 'Good old days' of McCarthy and Jim Crow propelled Donald Trump into office in a desperate attempt to preserve a flawed America.

I could already see where we were headed.

Four years later, halfway through earning a history degree, I canvassed for Democrats and cast my vote for Joe Biden, knowing what another Trump term would bring. When others celebrated Biden's victory, I remained silent, knowing how quickly our enemy would shed the trappings of democracy if they proved inconvenient. When J6ers stormed stormed the Capital Building, I was shocked but unsurprised. My very first time participating in the democracy I was raised to revere ended with a crowd of my elders attempting to silence my voice because they didn't like the hat they were hearing.

I think that was when I knew that movements like that don't disappear overnight; that I would be fighting this exhausting battle for the rest of my life. Daunting as it seemed, I promised myself I wouldn't shrink from it.

Now the man who would be VP endorses the notion that I'm not even human. Untermensch.

I am getting so tired of being right. But tired or not, I will still fight.