Ecuador’s presidential candidate Yaku Pérez supported coups in Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. His US-backed party Pachakutik and supposedly “left-wing” environmentalist campaign is being promoted by right-wing corporate lobbyists.
by Ben Norton
Part 6 - Husband of Western government-linked, NGO-backed anti-Correa academic Manuela Picq
Yaku Pérez’s longtime partner is also a prominent opponent of Correismo who has previously worked for the US government and whose activism has been funded by NGOs bankrolled by Western governments.
In 2013, Pérez married Manuela Picq, a French-Brazilian academic who specializes in Indigenous, sexuality, and gender studies, and who, like her husband, is a staunch critic of leftist governments in Latin America who supported the US-backed coup in Bolivia in 2019.
Picq works closely with regime-change-lobbying NGOs, and is infamous in Ecuador for her anti-Correa activism.
Picq played a significant role in 2015 protests against President Correa, which were often very violent. She was arrested at a demonstration in August, and her visa was cancelled and she was deported from Ecuador.
With support from the European Union and billionaire-funded NGOs, Picq turned her deportation case into a scandal, portraying herself as a victim and using it to attack Correa and demonize his elected socialist government as a chronic human rights violator.
Picq was allowed to return in Ecuador in 2018, under the right-wing US-backed government of Lenín Moreno.
And while Yaku Pérez and Picq claim to be critics of Moreno, after he entered power, a video interview shows that Picq called on Ecuadorians to vote in a referendum that handed Moreno absolute power.
Before she became an academic, Manuela Picq worked with right-wing US government institutions. According to her professional CV, in 2003, Picq served as a “foreign affairs specialist” in the Office of International Relations for Florida’s Republican Governor Jeb Bush.
That same year, Picq served as a Miami-based “co-coordinator for the participation of civil society organizations” for the Trade Ministerial for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a neoliberal agreement pushed aggressively by the US government.
The left-wing governments in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia opposed the FTAA. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez called it a “tool of imperialism” that would help Washington further exploit and dominate the region.
It was in fact in rejection of the FTAA that Venezuela and Cuba in 2004 founded by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty, or ALBA-TCP, to integrate Latin America’s economies together, excluding the United States, and strengthen their sovereignty.
Ecuador joined the ALBA under President Correa in 2009. His membership in the organization was one of the reasons for the US-backed coup attempt targeting him in 2010. Ecuador’s right-wing US-backed Moreno government went on to withdraw from the ALBA in 2018.
According to her CV, Picq has worked since 2015 with Front Line Defenders, an NGO funded by the European Union, numerous Western European governments, Taiwan, anti-communist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the CIA cutout the Ford Foundation.
In 2016, Picq was rewarded for her anti-Correa activism in Ecuador with a “Human Rights Defender” grant from ProtectDefenders.eu, a soft-power instrument funded by the European Union that weaponizes human rights to push regime change in foreign nations and advance the EU’s economic interests.
In 2018, the publication Global Americans dubbed Manuela Picq one of the “20 New Public Intellectuals in the Americas.” As The Grayzone previously reported, Global Americans is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a regime-change arm of the United States that acts as a CIA cutout, and the website boasted of the NED’s role in “laying the groundwork for insurrection” during a bloody US-backed coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018.
Today, Picq is a professor of “Latinx and Latin American Studies” at Amherst College in the United States. She is author of books with titles like “Queering Narratives of Modernity,” “Sexualities in World Politics,” and “Sex and Tongue in International Politics.”
Picq has also taught for years at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, one of Ecuador’s most elite schools.
Before establishing her professional academic career, Picq got her start as a postdoctoral fellow in the “Study of Democracy in Latin America” at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a US government-funded think tank that has a revolving door with the State Department and intelligence agencies, and is physically located in the US government’s Ronald Reagan Building.
From the United States, Picq continues writing anti-Correista articles for liberal media outlets and the regime-change-lobbying NGO NACLA.
And like her partner Yaku Pérez, Manuela Picq has aggressively attacked other leftist governments in Latin America and supported US-backed coup attempts. (In 2019, she also called for Western governments to make a “no fly zone” in northeastern Syria.)
Before a US-backed soft coup removed Brazil’s elected government from power in 2016, Picq published articles criticizing its developmental projects.
Picq has expressed support for the right-wing opposition in Nicaragua, demonizing the elected leftist Sandinista government as a “patriarchal macho rapist anti-women state.” (In reality Nicaragua has the highest level of gender equality in all of Latin America, and the fifth-best in the entire world.)
In September 2019, in the lead-up to the US-backed coup in Bolivia, Picq published an outlandish article preposterously accusing the country’s first and only ever Indigenous President Evo Morales of carrying out an “ecocide” and “genocide.” This helped fuel a smear campaign against Morales, setting the stage for the violent putsch.
Mere days before the coup, Picq then joked on Twitter that she had “wet dreams” fantasizing about overthrowing Evo Morales.
Then when the coup was being carried out in November, Picq spread absurd disinformation, writing, “Sisters from the Indigenous base in Bolivia are denouncing massive violence by groups from the MAS [ruling Movement Toward Socialism party] — not only houses of the opposition being burnt, there is also a network and rapes in the streets. There is fear that Evo is launching a civil war with his militias.”
The work of Pérez and Picq shows how Western governments can use ostensibly left-liberal activists, academics, and NGOs to push their imperial interests, destabilizing socialist states in Latin America in the guise of purportedly protecting the environment, Indigenous communities, and human rights.
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