 Welcome to what the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean, a popular resistance broadcast of hot news out of the region. In partnership with Black Alliance for Peace, Haiti, America's team, Code Pink, Common Frontiers, Counsel on Hemispheric Affairs, Friends of Latin America, Interreligious Task Force on Central America, Massachusetts Peace Action, and Task Force on the Americas. We broadcast Thursdays at 4.30 p.m. Pacific, 7.30 p.m. Eastern, right here on YouTube Live, including channels for the ConvoCouch, Popular Resistance, and Code Pink. Post broadcast recordings can be found at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Telegram, RadIndyMedia.com, and now under podcast at popularresistance.org. Today's episode, Ecuador's President dissolves the National Assembly triggering early elections. I'm so happy to welcome back today's guest, author and journalist, Joe Emersberger. I'm sure many of you remember him from our conversations last year regarding the controversies in Ecuador, June of 2022. You can find Joe's work published at Counterpunch. It was a great article that was published yesterday that I will put in the program notes. He can also be found at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Mint Press, and many other publications. Also, be sure to read his book, Extraordinary Threat, The U.S. Empire, The Media, and 20 Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela. So before I have Joe join us, I just want to again remind all of you, this is, we're really lucky to have him back with us for this episode, because it'll be a nice follow-up expansion of our conversation, late June of 2022, regarding the protests in Ecuador. And so let me give you all a little bit of background as to what's happened in Ecuador in the past week. So, Ecuador's President Guillermo Lasso dissolved the National Assembly by decree on May 17, bringing forward legislative and presidential elections and heading off an attempt by opposition politicians to impeach him. Opposition politicians wanted to impeach Lasso over accusations he disregarded warnings of embezzlement related to a contract at state-owned oil transportation company, Flopec, F-L-O-P-E-C. Charges the president himself denies. A majority of lawmakers had backed a resolution accusing Lasso of allowing the corrupt contract to continue after his taking office in 2021, although a congressional oversight committee, which heard testimony from opposition lawmakers, officials, and Lasso's attorney said in its report it did not recommend impeachment. Lasso says the impeachment process, the first against an Ecuadorian president in decades is politically motivated and has sparked a grave crisis that has threatened democracy. The dissolution was necessary, he claims. Citing the crisis and inability to govern, Lasso invoked the Constitutional Constitution so-called two-way death, Muerte Cruzara, which we talked about a bit last year with Joe. So this provision, excuse me, which allows the president to call elections for both his post and the National Assembly under certain conditions, including if actions by the legislature are blocking the functioning of government. According to the Constitution, Lasso will now remain in office and ruled by decree. And so it's this circumstance that we've asked Joe to come back and talk to us about. So welcome, Joe, really, I'm so pleased that you had time to talk with us today. Thank you very much. I'm glad to be back with you. So where should we pick up this conversation? Because it really is a continuation of what we saw happening May, June in Ecuador of last year, the demands specifically by the indigenous community, which in fact, we had talked about, have had the power to remove presidents two or three times before in Ecuador. And now we have a president who under threat of impeachment has dissolved the executive and legislative branches of his government. Yeah, Muerte Cruzara came in with the new constitution of Ecuador in 2008. And it was meant to prevent the political instability that happened in the past. They went through like seven or eight presidents in 10 years over a 10 year period in the 90s and early 2000s. And like you said, presidents were thrown out with street protests. And so this was a mechanism that was brought in to say, okay, look, if the Congress wants to get rid of the president, if the president wants to disregard Congress, there should be a way to say, okay, you know what, go to the voters, let them decide that your fate, you know what? And this was supposed to head off that kind of instability. And I think while Correa was in office, it probably was a factor in preventing and keep, because he was in office for 10 years was unprecedented. He had that 10 years in office and achieved a lot reduced homicide rate by two thirds, reduced poverty by almost half. And then what happened was when Letty Moreno came in in 2017, he ran on a Correa loyalist, but he immediately transformed into like a copy of Lasso. He basically implemented Lasso's political, in that Lasso's political platform has really been underway since 2017. We should think of Lasso's presidency like Moreno's second term, it's the same thing. And with that, first two years of Moreno, what he does is he stacked the judiciary and the electoral authorities and the all kinds of regulators. He did it in a very unconstitutional way. He handpicked the body that acted as if it were a constituent assembly elected by everybody, elected by voters, and it made these sweeping changes. So that's one concern about Lasso's being able to rule by decree now for a little while is because all the authorities are stacked more or less in his favor. Because according to Article 148 that he invoked, he's allowed to issue the only decrees of emergency nature for economic reasons, right? And the constitutional court is supposed to approve them. But the problem is the constitutional court is a very pro-business court. It was illegally fired and replaced in 2018. It's been stacked with very pro-business, pro-corporate people so that it's not, nobody thinks nobody believes it's gonna be a real check on his ability to ram through all kinds of right-wing decrees, gutting labor laws, giving tax giveaways, privatization, all sorts of nasty things that he can do in the time that, in the little time there remains. I mean, the first round of the elections are supposed to happen on August 20th. So there's a short window, but still given the way the whole apparatus, the state apparatus has been stacked over the last several years, it gives him a lot of extra power in the short time, right? To do a lot of nasty things. Oh yeah, he could, I mean, he could essentially, he basically has like almost 90 days to kind of put in a really strong, complete neoliberal model. Oh yeah, yeah, he's got a lot of, I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, he's got a lot of leeway now with the court that's supposed to be the only check on him is one that was, it's been, it was legally brought into existence that the other court was fired and replaced, right, so he has a stacked regulatory apparatus. Any other concerns to what's he gonna do with the elect, are there gonna be dirty tricks in terms of the elections? What are the, you know, what's gonna happen there? Although it looks like the, one thing to stress is that the right wing in general did not want this to happen. Like I said, like we discussed last year, the National Assembly tried to invoke Muerte Crusada last year during protests over the neoliberal austerity measures last year was bringing in, there were major street protests, people dying in the streets, the National Assembly said, okay, this is an emergency, let's go to the polls, let's settle this at the polls, not in the streets. That's the whole point of this measure, right? Of the Muerte Crusada. So, and it failed to get the necessary votes. It fell short of the two thirds majority required to get it. Then there were their efforts to, to subject to a recall referendum, but the electoral authorities shot that down as well. They found excuses to shoot that down. So, the impeachment process then came. But again, the impeachment process only came, I think only really was pressed forward because these other methods to force loss to be held accountable at the polls failed. And now, and now it's ironic that now he ends up invoking Muerte Crusada when he fought against it, right? But he did it as a last-ditch effort because he was gonna get impeached. He, and he made it ridiculously obvious that the only reason he was invoking was because he didn't, he was gonna get impeached. And he wanted to just cut the proceeding short. So that calls in the question, the legality of him doing it because even though the Article 148 gives him a very broad latitude to invoke Muerte Crusada to resolve the forced snap elections, it's not clear that he's allowed to do it and make it obvious that he's only doing it to cut short an impeachment process that's underway in the National Assembly that had a constitutional court approval to be underway. So that becomes somewhat dubious but in the end, the court unsurprisingly it upheld his decree. But like I said, there's a very pro-business right wing court that was installed illegally. So it's not surprising. On the other hand, I honestly, I think compared to compared to what I just mentioned, compared to the fact that a constitutional court was fired and replaced this unconstitutionality of his decree is in my opinion not as big a deal as what we've already seen. We've seen political opponents exile thrown into jail. Korea disqualified from running. During the election in 2021, we had the Attorney General conspire openly put on this big show with Columbia's prosecutor accusing one of the major candidate of being financed by the ELN rebels in Columbia. Oh, right. Yeah. And Andresa Rous is actually he's gone to Columbia and he's pursuing legal action against that prosecutor now. It's a very good time to do it too, because it's hopefully will deter some of those dirty tricks from happening again. So, you know, in view of all that, you could actually say it's kind of, it's not even that it's, there's an argument that what he did was illegal, but I don't think it's as bad as what they've done over the course of the last six years since Moreno took over, they've done worse than that. Well, they've basically ensured all the institutions are in favor of a neoliberal project. Right, exactly. And so now, so now they're gonna, well, the good thing is that Lasso basically did this to save himself, but he didn't, I don't, he did not consider the interests of the broader right wing. So this has fractured the right wing unity that's kind of held them together in the past six years, you know? And he just, and this comes off, you know, in February, like I wrote, they just had a disastrous electoral municipal regional election for disaster for the right wing. It was swept by the big, the huge winners were the Koreas. They won by far the most municipalities and Lasso in those elections had eight referendum proposals that he, for dealing with crime and insecurity that he put forward and they were all defeated because the people just didn't don't, he's so unpopular, he can't even get proposals passed. Like for his, he tried to say, well, we should be able to extradite people to United States if they, you know, they're found accused of drug trafficking or stuff like that. And those were kind of, they were proposals tailored to kind of appeal to kind of a right-wing populist approach to fighting crime. And it didn't work because the Koreas and other progressive fighters say, look, we didn't have that. We reduced homicides by two thirds. We didn't do any of that. We just had, we had good common sense policies that reformed the police, that devoted resources to improving security. So they, and they didn't have mass incarceration, didn't have the death pound, didn't have all the kind of things that right-wing people always want to say or the solution to bring down crime. So- Joe, I just want to mention for the audience that the audience can find in the program notes, your article from February discussing the election results. And the article is called Elections in Ecuador, Unmask Western Media Dishonesty. I've shared the link with Mint Press, but that article was published in several different publications as well. But it's well worth reading. So we'll- So you come off elections where you do that horribly. I mean, not just last but the whole right-wing, his party though. And so why are you going to force snap elections after you just got thrown? So this was so obviously just an attempt to save himself and only himself. Because if he had been impeached, okay, his vice president takes over. The right-wing technically still has a time left. Right, so this shows that the right-wing unity has been fractured. Even the right-wing media outlets like Equivice are saying no, the elections have to happen right away because they know that if they try to pull something just to delay the elections or tie themselves further to lasso, he's like a sinking ship. They don't want to be tied to him. So yeah, it's an important development, but it's a huge concern in what's he going to do in the time that remains. He basically has- All he seems to care about is just, I think one reason he could be trying to ram through all these right-wing decrees is also to shore up support, to help him make sure he doesn't suffer any conflict. He can escape and not face any legal consequences in Ecuador and make sure he has the support of any foreign supporters and the US supporters and just get out of there before anything can happen to him, before he can be potentially jailed for all the things he's done. So yeah, so he's looking to save himself and he's sacrificed the broader interest of the Ecuadorian right by doing this. That to me is just fascinating. That, I mean, for long-term political strategy, because like you were saying earlier, that all the institutions have been configured under the Moreno government to support neoliberal policies. And so, and also for the audience, Joe has another article that was published yesterday in Counterpunch called Ecuador's Democratic Backsliding has been ongoing since 2017 with US support. And you talk about all of this, how, and that link, by the way, is also in the program notes for the article. So you talk about all of this. So why, I mean, the self-preservation of one man over this project that we don't necessarily agree with, but this project has been in place since 2017. And so you have one person's desire for self-preservation destroying that, I mean, it's destroying that whole right-wing project. I mean, I guess in a way it's a backhanded blessing for many people. Well, you know, it's Ecuador's right, traditionally Ecuador's right wing has been very fractured, very self-interested, very not united. And actually the unity it's shown is a new thing over the past six years. They've been united because they had this tremendous fear of Korea coming back, but their tendency has always been to really fight viciously amongst each other. That's why when I mentioned that period of eight presidents in 10 years, a lot of it has to do with that right-wing infighting. Now, it didn't really, they kept replacing with neoliberal governments anyway, but it was different factions within each other. I have an interview with David Villamari, but you can also, you could find on Counterpunch for a while ago, where we talk about the right-wing infighting, even during Lasso, it starts to become evident. But then, you know, when there's a threat, like a more at the crusade, they closed ranks again. But this time they weren't able to close ranks. This time Lasso just decided to just make this decision and basically, you know, screw up the whole, the rest of the right, Ecuadorian right. So it's gonna be tough for them now. They, like I said, they just got throttled in elections in February and now they're gonna go to snap elections. So it's gonna be very tough for them. And, but on the other hand, like I guess we have been saying, Lasso has all these powers that he can use to do a lot of nasty things and try to tie it in another government's hands if it can. So there's another conversation about what, and if the Koreas get back in power, what are they gonna have to do to undo all this now? And one idea that's been floated by Korea and by, well, even Andresa Ross a bit when his candidacy in 2021 was the idea of a, electing another constituent assembly, like they did in 2008 where you elect, you elect people, an assembly that has powers to rewrite, to modify the constitution. And it has, in the transitionary period, there's a lot of other powers it has where it could reorder the judiciary and the electoral authorities. So it could undo a lot of the damage that's been done by the previous governments. So that's one way they could proceed. But in creating a situation that has to be undone means that the Progressive Project should it, and as people come back to power, it's gonna have a delay in initiating its vision. Well, there's things that- Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, they're gonna have to do both at once, in my opinion, because that's what they did in 2008. They didn't just, when they started, they immediately started doing things, the implementing progressive powers at the same time, they also reordered the call constitution. This time won't be as bad, in spite of everything, they still have the same constitution they had from 2008. So they probably won't have to be as drastic an overhaul, but I know that that idea has been floated, that some of the irregularities and illegal appointments has just been a nightmare. So that's one option they're gonna have to undo some of the damage. Now, they can't focus only on that, as you say. They have to address the immediate problems. They have to address them quickly. If they get into power, they have to show immediate improvement in living conditions to have to have the, because to prevail with you have to have elections for a constituent assembly. If you want to win those elections, you have to be showing something. You'd better be showing that you're doing something other than just say vote for us. So yeah, they're gonna have to do a lot. This is gonna be a challenge, but I think they've done it before, and I think they can get back into power. And they have, Korea has a track record, they have achievements. They have people who like, Andresa Rose, for example, ran the central bank. So they have key people who are involved in fixing the Ecuador before. And I think they know how to do it. They have the experience. I think they can do it again, but it's, yeah, they're gonna have to get busy right away. So let's talk a bit about what is possible in these snap elections in August? Because I'd like to go back to the article you wrote in February, discussing what a lot of us found really surprising and excited how much the Codestas won, how much political ground they were able to take back, mayoral ships and governor ships, specifically in Guayaquil. And so to me, we see that we're like, wow, so what happened to make that possible? I mean, certainly lost those policies and these protests that have been manifesting since, for almost a year now, but what happened within the party and the movement did, can we talk a bit about that? How that came about? Because it seems to me, Joe, that that success in February also was a reason either for Lasso too, and to dissolve the presidency in the National Assembly, but you could also see why the right wing is saying, why would you dissolve? Why would you exercise this Muerte Cruzada now when the Codestas gained so much ground in February? Right. Well, I don't think they know what to, like they've lost control of the violent crime in the country, it's quite, but homicide rate has quite droopled since 2017. They have, they've just lost control. They just, they have, I don't think they have any idea how to fix it. I don't think they have any idea how to do anything but spin, try to spin it somehow and say it's either Korea's fault or resort to these reactionary proposals. Like for instance, saying, we got to give people more guns. And that's one of the solutions they have. In fact, one of the candidates, they've put forward for one of the right wing parties, the party that used to have so much power in the coast, the social, social cristianos, the guys who used to run the coast pretty much, why kill them? They had the, they were, they were the, they had the municipality, why kill like for decades. The candidate they just put forward is this unknown guy, I forget his name, but he's a, he's a mercenary. You fought, you fought in Ukraine. You fought in Syria. And that's his big thing. Hey, I know how to use guns. I'm going to fix that. I'm going to shoot them. I'm going to kill them all. Literally, that's what they're resorting to. So it's scary because they don't have no idea what to do and the only solutions they come up with are just, are just, just horrific. So yeah, so that's, that's what's really going on. I think that's, that's really taken over everything. When you have people, they're just horrified to, and that's the goal, because it correlates with, of course, an increase in, in poverty and everything else, but the, the insecurity in the country, which of course also affects the economy. How do you, you know, affects all everything. So yeah, it's, it's, that's, I think the thing that, that's, that's, that helps Kota Ismo is that this is happening, but also that people, I mean, people remember how safe Ecuador was, how safe it became, but there was a two thirds reduction. So it wasn't just like Ecuador was safe, but it had always been safe. It wasn't actually very safe when Korea first took office, because if you have a two thirds of reduction in homicide rate, obviously you have a lot to reduce still. It was pretty high. It wasn't like compared to Columbia, other very, very unsafe places, but it was still, it was like, it was three times higher than what it is in the United States. Okay, so if you, if you look at the, over time, the homicide rate when Ecuador, when Korea took office at the same year in 2007, it was, it's homicide rate was like three times higher than what the USA's homicide rate is. By the time Korea leaves office, it's pretty much the same. It's come down almost at the same level as the United States, reduced by two thirds. So that's a huge improvement. People remember that and they remember that. So it's hard, you know, six years later to tell people well, you know, to kind of forgive my language to bullshit people about that. So it was very hard to bullet. So I think that's a huge factor in why Korea's most really pressed that advantage and said, look, we know how to solve this. We've done it before. That's a huge, that's a huge argument to use. And how much, you know, last year's protests or approaching almost a year or exactly June of 2022 were triggered by extensive austerity measures by the Lasso government. And so there's clearly been some backlash to that. Well, we saw the protests last year specifically by the most marginalized people, the indigenous people and campesinos. So you've got unity among that and probably stronger now a year later in pushing this change. Yeah, although I still think there are tensions there. We'll have to see how that plays out. There's always been a tension between the indigenous movement and the Koreas movement. Electorally, Koreas was been the big electoral movement, but they kind of lack a certain grassroots capacity to organize. It's always been an issue, but especially because during under Moreno, they took the brunt of the persecution, everything. Their leaders were exiled and jailed and everything. Whereas Kanai initially got along with Moreno, because Moreno originally, he was marketing himself kind of as a, even though he was very right-wing, but he was kind of marketing himself a little bit as like a reformed Koreas, and he could kind of pull that crap initially because it took a while for his policies to really bite. His whole, all his right-wing neoliberal crap, it took a while for it to really hurt people because Ecuador isn't a pretty good place, obviously, when he first took office. So he could ram a lot of things through before people realized what he really was. So that was an issue. So now, but then by 2019, the indigenous movement was totally against him. It already had, even before the pandemic struck, before the pandemic arrived, they were massive protests in 2019. There were like 11 people killed or eight or 10 people killed in several days. Those were like the first we saw and then Chile and then Colombia. And then you have to remember is that the pandemic, Ecuador had one of the worst pandemic responses in the world, which is really amazing because given its climate, giving its young population, it had some advantages there, but it was really amazing. And this was coming out even in the Western media, which always gave Moreno a kind of a free ride. They gave them good press. They got away with so much with them and they would never, they got really good press. And yet, even in like a financial times, kept a careful track of the COVID deaths. And for several months, Ecuador was near the top and the worst preferred. A lot of it is based in the coast. The response, especially in the coast, the bastion of the right wing social Christian party, they were especially bad. It was just horrific on the coast around why it killed the response to COVID and that really hurt them. And I think that really, I think they really, that was part of why they paid such a big price in the elections as well. So there was multiple factors. There's just been one disaster after another. And then all throughout this, ever since Moreno took office, the homicide rate constantly climbing and then with lots of accelerating, just getting even worse. So it's just multiple disasters. And I think, my opinion, the corruption scandals that get with lasso, I think if things weren't so bad, I think you could fight those off. I think the media, with the media support, I think you could probably fight those off. But if people just have to look around them and see how everything's falling apart, it's very easy to think, well, the government must be corrupt too. It can't be this, just this. You just simply use that as the excuse to get rid of it. It's much more easy to buy into that versus say, well, okay, he's a bad guy, but the streets are clean and the economy's growing. And so you tend to, I mean, and not just Ecuadorians, but all of us, we tend to accept things when living conditions and economic conditions are favorable. If we could go back, I just wanna mention for the audience regarding Ecuador during COVID, we were able to do a WTF episode with Guillaume Long, who is Korea's former, for the audience, Korea's former foreign minister. And we talked at that time, it was when all the bodies were in the streets because the mortuaries and stuff were privatized and not able to respond. I mean, just in the deconstruction of the national healthcare system and all of that. Yeah, it was gruesome. No, yeah. Yeah, it was very gruesome. It's pretty bad. When you have a pro-US government, like Ecuador is getting these macabre headlines around the world, you know, things are bad because they really shield them. But it really had to get extreme for them to get the kind of headlines you usually associate with US enemies. You know, if it comes into the Nicaragua, Venezuela will take anything and blow it up into a big international news, do you think, right? But for a country like Ecuador to be getting that kind of press, you know it had to be bad. Yeah, and it couldn't be hidden. Right. Yeah, it couldn't be glossed over or hidden. I wonder, Joe, in our last few minutes for the audience, if we could have a technical conversation about Article 148, just so that people, what this muerte cruzada is, and we talked briefly before going live, but technically what it is, how it came about and how it's being used. Okay, it was brought in in 2008 because, like I said, Ecuador had a period of tremendous political economic instability in the 90s and the early part of the 2000s where you had like musical chairs of presidents getting thrown out constantly. This refers back to the, and not that these were right, a lot of it was a right wing presidents getting thrown out by other right wing factions. It was, like I mentioned, this right wing bitterness and viciousness among themselves. And so when Korea's government came in, they rewrote the, they convened a constitutional assembly to rewrite the constitution. And so one of the things they said was they thought was, okay, if there's, previously the Congress would just be able to impeach a president, get rid of them and then basically stay there. And then, so they said, look, there's gotta be a better way if they really wanna get rid of a president or if the president wants to dissolve the Congress, they should both immediately have to go to the voters to say, okay, now we put ourselves in your, to be judged by you, to you to basically settle who's right here, who stays, who stays and who goes. So it was a way to empower voters. And also to get things, the idea was to get people out of the streets out of unconstitutional ways to change governments and get them into a more constitutional way that goes to ultimately the voters decide, right? So that was the idea. And I think it's a good idea. I just think in Ecuador's context today with the several years of the judiciary and everything being stacked, that it becomes dangerous because the president can issue the Cree, the Crees and not have reading real check on them. But Article 148 is very broad, actually. It allows the president to dissolve the National Assembly and within seven days, the electoral authorities have to put out a calendar for new elections. And there are other laws, not in the constitution, but other electoral laws that basically tell them that it's gonna have to be within 90 days, the new elections. So, and what is- Can I ask, just we're talking about the composition, how the Moreno government was able to reconstruct the court. What about the electoral body? It's the- Same. Oh. Same. That's all been re-constructed. Yes, yes. That was this body, this constituent assembly. It wasn't, I can say it was a handpicked body by Moreno, it has this long acronym. But it reconfigured the judicial council, the electoral authorities, superintendents, all kinds of regular, all kinds of control authorities, right? That were stacked by this body. So, yeah, so the Article 148 gives the president broad logic, because it says in his opinion, in his or her opinion. So that's already very broad, right? It just has to have an opinion. It's an opinion. Yeah, yeah. And there has to be like, but there's an internal, like one of the reasons that some of them require, like for instance, if he says that the national assembly is blocking him, that would, if he gives that as the rationale, he would have to go to the constitutional court, constitutional court, and have them approve that. But the reason he gave is internal commotion, internal shock, whatever. Internal shock, yeah. That one did not require constitutional approval. So what is an internal shock? I mean, the Koreas will argue that there are other rulings that they can point to where they say, no, the constitutional, it has to be something else, it has to be like where there's a thread of the uprising or something like that. But the problem is it's very broad, right? So it's a very broad power. So it's hard to argue against the, I mean, you can, but I think they didn't have that, I think they had a pretty good argument that would last a bit, because there's nothing, if you read it, there's nothing where you can say, well, Lasso made it so obvious that he wanted to just stop the impeachment. So there's nothing in that article 148 that says that the president, if his opinion, he's about to be impeached, he can invoke this. It has to be, it's even given the broad latitude, it's dubious that it's fair to say that he can just use this article 148 just to cut short an impeachment process that's already underway. Yeah, that the court already approved. That the court already approved, yeah. That's looking pretty dubious, but on the other hand, I'm not sure that it's a slim dunk either, it's dubious, but I don't think it's, it doesn't compare to other illegal things they did. Like when Moreno convened his referendum that allowed him to handpick this body that restacked everything in the country, he did that without even any constitutional court approval. He just disregarded it completely. I mean, that was more blatantly illegal than what Lasso just did, I mean, way more. And then based on that, everything that followed from that, the illegal, because if the referendum itself didn't get a constitutional court approval, it was an illegal referendum. So you have an illegal referendum that leads to illegal authorities because if the referendum was legal, everything that followed from it was illegal. And then you had the firing of the whole constitutional court. You know what I mean? That's just outrageous. And so in the context of what's been happening, Lasso's transgression was relatively minor, I'd say. And he was just saving his own butt. Yeah. I've used that earlier. There was one thing, you know, go ahead, I'm sorry. No, no, I was gonna say, yeah. And that started with 148, which allows the president to force the invokement to Kusat. Article 130 gives the National Assembly essentially the same power, except they have to get a two thirds vote in the National Assembly. Which was June of last year. Yes. With all the, with the Paranatiamal. Yeah. And that you could probably, where they tried to make the legitimate argument. And like you said, it didn't get the two thirds majority vote. There was political instability and economic instability. Well, people are being killed in the streets by the security forces. And so that's kind of what the whole point of Martin Kusat was supposed to avoid. From the nineties and 2000s, you go to the streets, you have mass protests, you have people dying, and then that chases out the government or whatever. You know, this is supposed to be, no, let's go to the polls. Let's go to the polls that the voters decide. That was the idea. But Lasso invoked it just to save himself from an impeachment process. So that's why the constitutionality of what he did was questionable. But like I said, what's been going on the past six years, there's been way worse than. Yeah. No, the damage, the institutional damage has already been done. Yeah. So I wonder in our last few minutes, if we can put this into some context as to what we're seeing throughout the Americas right now, specifically Latin America and the Caribbean. And I asked this in the context of a conversation I had with our Venezuelan friend Carlos Rón about the Monroe Doctrine. And you and I have talked about this also, how since October of 2020 through October of 2022, we've had presidential and national assembly elections across Latin America and the Caribbean with the majority of electoral results being left of center. And it's a spectrum. It's social Democrat to revolutionary left, but a huge shift in the political landscape south of the US border. And I was saying in that conversation that I thought this was really, really exciting and that the end of the Monroe Doctrine is people in the southern part of the hemisphere are liberating themselves from US hegemony. And his response was, yes, but we have done this before. And this is when we see the US get most aggressive, specifically citing Planned Condor in the 60s and 70s. So what I see potentially in this, Joe, is we've seen what's happened in Peru with Pedro Castillo and their non-elected government in Peru now and the US Southern command, Laura Richardson, saying our hemisphere, meaning US business, US military, US government, our hemisphere, our resources, our real estate. And so this is why fear what Lasso has just done. He's got 90 days to privatize all the natural resources, water, gold, oil, what's remaining of any public infrastructure and institutions. That can all conceivably happen between now and August 20th, especially when you've got a government so tightly aligned with the US and you've got the US Southern command just overtly saying what the objective is in the hemisphere. I mean, there's no window dressing on this policy any longer. Great. Yeah, that's always a danger. We saw in the early part of this century, we saw a wave of right-wing governments, so-called pink tide. And then we saw kind of a reversion from that. We had the parliamentary coup in Brazil. We had Macri come in and we had a kind of a reversal. We had Moreno come in, Ecuador. We had all these other reversals. But what we're seeing is that they didn't last because people remember the governments that actually delivered. So it's very hard for them, the reversals didn't last that long either. Despite all the things you've mentioned in the US, despite the US support, I mean, despite all the US, everything the US can do doesn't make them omnipotent. And a huge factor for, it's a huge challenge, but integration. One of the most damaging things, Moreno, Ecuador was more or less the center of Unisor. They had the, and Moreno dismantled that entirely. They sold them to the building, didn't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So his whole project was just destroying everything. But here we are and it's on the cost of coming back again, the caressa coming back again with this idea of integration, with this, excuse me, with this idea of looking to China to help them with unifying and diversifying away from the United States, getting independent of the US financial system. Andresa Rous, the candidate for, in 2021 for Corizumal, he had a very, very fascinating chat with Ben Norton about the global, the US dollar, but the US financial system and how countries are thinking of creative ways to break away from it and to break away from this arbitrary power the United States has to sanction everybody, you know? Right. So people are very aware of what the solutions that are potentially out there to get around that. So that's going to be huge. So it's, like what you're saying is quite right. It's a dangerous situation that they're in because of US power, but US power is not omnipotent. There are solutions. They have, if they were omnipotent, they wouldn't even have, none of this would be happening. I mean, guys like Lassell would just, guys like Lassell would just be replaced with somebody else just like him. You know, it would be no problem, right? But these things are happening and it's going to be tough though. They got to, the key to them is integration. They realize that, you know, as individual countries, they're much weaker, right? They have to find a way to unify and become more independent of the United States. Right now, you know, two countries like Andresa Rose was telling Ben Norton, two countries in Latin America want to do trade right now. The money that even if they're just trading among themselves, the money always ends up flowing through banks in the U.S. financial system. Right, or you trade into U.S. dollars before... Yeah, it ends up flowing through the U.S. financial system, even has nothing to do with them. And that gives them, and then they're able to needle their way through, to kind of weasel their way in and if they want to do sanctions, you see how they have tremendous, how that gives them the power to disrupt everyone's economy if they don't like you, right? So they have to find ways to get independent of that. And there are technical solutions that are out there, but it's the, they need a sense of urgency and a sense of to get that done, these governments as they come in, they can't be complacent, they have to get to work right away, you know? So that's going to be huge, but you're right, it's a huge challenge. United States might be in relative decline, but that doesn't mean it's still not very powerful and still not very disruptive. No, and what will it do on its way down? Yeah, exactly. Like a wounded animal is when, yeah, when you're the most aggressive, yeah, the self-preservation, yeah. Precisely. So Joe, is there anything else regarding the dissolution of the National Assembly and the SNAP elections that we should, we should let the audience know about before I let you go, anything that? It's nothing, I think we've covered pretty much, I can't think of anything really, I think we've covered all the important stuff, you know, just so. Okay, well, great. And just for the audience, I will include in the program notes, both of the articles that Joe wrote, February and the one in Truthout yesterday, the links are both in the program notes, and I will also include our WTF episode with Joe from June of 2022, because that's some nice historical context as to how things have unfolded between then and now. And then I guess I should also just remind all of you, you've been watching what the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean, we're a popular resistance broadcast. We air Thursday, 7 30 p.m. Eastern on YouTube Live, including channels for the Convo Couch, Code Pink and Popular Resistance, post-broadcast recordings can be found at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcast. So thank you everyone and we'll see you next week. And thank you so much, Joe.