July 17, 2007 (LPAC)--Traveling in Europe last week, Ecuador's feisty President Rafael Correa, who refuses to accept his people being sacrificed to financial vultures, received a warm welcome, and support for his government's efforts to build "an Ecuador of social justice," from Spanish President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. "I believe that Ecuador is beginning to recover its self-esteem, its confidence in itself," and Spain remains at its side, Rodriguez Zapatero stated in his joint July 11 press conference with Correa after their meeting, the Spanish Presidency website reports.
Even as Rodriguez Zapatero spoke, the vulture funds were demanding foreign governments help them overthrow Ecuador's President, as signalled in an ad taken out that same day in Washington, D.C.'s Roll Call. (See "Vulture Funds Circle Ecuador.") On July 6, before leaving for Spain, Correa charged that "the hat had been passed" for bankers and businessmen to set up a kitty to finance the destabilization of his government.
Asked if Ecuador planned to pay its debts on time, Correa, with the Spanish President by his side, answered that his government will pay financial debts when the country's situation allows it, but if funds are needed for social priorities, it will renegotiate its debts, or declare a unilateral moratorium. The days when speculative financial capital came first, before production, jobs, and social needs are gone.
The more than half-million Ecuadorians who now live in Spain were a leading issue on the agenda in the two Presidents' talks. While in Spain, Correa stressed on several occasions the urgency of ending economic policies which since 1999 have driven two million Ecuadorians out of their country in search of work. The resulting destruction of families, in which generations of youth are being raised without parents, has created a social "catastrophe" which must be reversed, he stated in the joint press conference. Ten per cent of the productive labor force is out of the country! It is these poor people who maintain the national economy, not the banks, "which believe they are gods," nor oil. It is the poor people living abroad who keep Ecuador afloat, and its people eating, Correa stated in a speech to Casa de las Americas that same day, Spain's Telecinco reported July 11.
South America is demanding change, because under neo-liberalism, it was treated like the patients of medieval doctors, who insisted that when their patients were dying, they should be bled faster and in greater amounts, Correa explained.
