Ecuadorean
Foreign Minister Guillaume Long speaks to teleSUR's Abby Martin on
Empire Files about the country's rejection of neoliberalism and
imperialism
Ecuador’s
fight to reclaim its sovereignty and beat back neoliberalism and
foreign domination has been rife with challenges, but the movement to
lift up people over profits has also made progress in asserting a
“pro-human agenda,” Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Guillaume Long
told teleSUR’s Abby Martin.
“Probably
the most significant change in the last 10 years in Ecuador is the
construction of a state with regulations and institutions in the way
of modernity,” said Long in an interview aired on Martin’s
program Empire Files. “It’s the kind of state building that
has made countries less vulnerable to the kind of predatory behaviour
by private actors but also other states.”
Recuperation
of Ecuador’s natural resources, particularly oil, has been a key
part of asserting the country’s sovereignty, long threatened by its
peripheral position in the global economy, The left-wing government
of President Rafael Correa also aims to break with its dependence on
oil, Long said, but the steps must be gradual.
“You
need to do this strategically,” he said. “You need to use
the benefits of oil and reinvest them in all sorts of other sectors
and you need to redistribute at the same time...it’s a long,
ongoing process.”
And
the process has not been without bumps in the road. Since he was
first elected in 2006, Correa's so-called Citizen’s Revolution has
lifted more than one million Ecuadoreans out of poverty while hiking
the minimum wage by 80 percent and sinking crucial state investments
into transforming health care and education. But the wealth
redistribution has also sparked a backlash from Ecuador’s elite
that long held a stranglehold on the country’s economy and
politics.
“When
you start forcing the elites to belong to a social contract, to give
rights to workers to redistribute, to stop fencing themselves away it
hyper securitized citadels … it creates resistance,” said
Long.
“The
history of social change and redistribution everywhere in the world
is always marked by a degree of social change and conflict,” he
continue. “The question is to manage that conflict so that it
doesn't become violent.”
Ecuador’s
anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal policy agenda — including
prioritizing Latin American regional integration, challenging the
power of global financial institutions, and shutting down a U.S. air
base in the coastal city of Manta — has also ruffled feathers on
the international level.
“All
these things create conflict,” Long said. “Daring to be
sovereign … is about the supremacy of the human being over capital,
unlike what we’ve been living for the last decades of
neoliberalism, which is clearly supremacy of capitalism over human
beings.”
Long
argued the people’s well-being is ultimately at the core of the
struggle, and state policies and how governments use markets to their
benefit should be designed to work toward that end.
“The
human being is the end of all political action,” he said.
“Human happiness is the ultimate goal of political action and
therefore government policies.”
Full
interview:
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