After last year's election to reduce the size of the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA) board, all members of the board have to stand for re-election, including Friends of Ecuador's President Josh Busby. Josh was elected to the board about a year ago as the America's regional representative. In the only contested election of the year, Josh bested veteran NPCA member Maury Sterns. In this year's election, Josh also has an opponent in Patricia Wand, another long-time member who was nominated by Friends of Colombia. If you are a paid member of NPCA, you should have already received a vote ballot with a code that allows you to vote on-line here. Josh would very much appreciate your support. For a description of the candidates, go here. Voting continues until June 15, 2005.

Josh recently sent out this e-mail to America's region groups which describes his goals and reasons for running...

Greetings,

As you may know, the NPCA Board elections are now open (until June 15th), and I'm running for re-election as the America's rep in a contested race (there are 5 contested races this year!). I would appreciate your support and outreach to your members on my behalf. I've been on the board for less than a year, and I'd like to continue with the project of strengthening the NPCA. I have already participated on two working groups, the first on conference proposals and the second on-going working group on membership. We have our work cut out for us. The organization is fragile and in need of energy and ideas. I believe I provide both and hope you will support my candidacy.

My main concern has been trying to encourage NPCA to provide more support for affiliate groups, particularly in terms of an on-line electronic architecture for affiliates. I've been developing a model through my own affiliate Friends of Ecuador. Friends of Ecuador's webportal, http://www.friendsofecuador.org, is a multi-functional website that includes:

- Connections to Peace Corps Volunteers in the field
- Secure on-line and tax deductible credit card transaction capability to support grassroots development in Ecuador
- "Find Friends" searchable database to find e-mail addresses of Friends of Ecuador members. All members need to know is one of the following: name, year of service, province of service, program of service, or current state location
- On-line discussion forums

I've been working with the NPCA to encourage conversations with different potential vendors who might be able to offer a standardized template that many or all affiliate groups could have. Those affiliate group websites would be synced with the NPCA database and make all of our lives a lot easier.

In addition, my main priority is buttressing our advocacy capability. I probably wouldn't be involved with NPCA if I didn't think we had great potential to be agents of change on core issues of development like HIV/AIDS in Africa, the crisis in Darfur, and trade relationships with poor countries. I'm heartened by the efforts of NPCA on this front to partner with more established groups like Oxfam on the new trade justice initiative related to cotton subsidies. If re-elected, our advocacy capacity, along with the internet architecture, would be my highest priorities.

Feel free to forward this e-mail on to your members. Thanks much for your support,and do not hesitate to contact me at joshua_busby@harvard.edu if you have any questions.

Best,
Josh Busby
President, Friends of Ecuador
NPCA Board Representative, Americas Region

Peace Corps/Ecuador’s Committee on Gender and Development (GAD) aims to enhance gender equity in al sectors of Ecuadorian society.  Through local outreach, national conferences/retreats, and a women’s scholarship fund, we provide opportunities for young women and men to share their cultures and exercise their full leadership potential in the face of prevalent socio-economic challenge.  It is thus with great pleasure that GAD announces its annual raffle, a fundraiser that will ensure these vital projects continue.  With the purchase of a ticket ($1.50) you are automatically entered into a drawing for a free round-trip ticket from Ecuador to the United States (with restrictions). But hurry, the last day to purchase tickets is July 24^th, and the drawing will be held on July 26^th!

To purchase GAD raffle tickets, click on the donate link below which will take you to FOE's secure e-pay form. Please select "GAD Raffle" on the drop-down menu. Notice, there is a separate item for general donations to the "GAD Committee."

  

Posted on Tue, May. 03, 2005 LATIN AMERICA The rule of law in danger BY CARLOS ALBERTO MONTANER www.firmaspress.com Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice does the right thing when she pays attention to Latin America. The problems are grave, they will ultimately affect the United States and they feed on each other. In sum, all of Latin America -- although unevenly -- faces a growing wave of ordinary crime, frequently allied to political subversion. Both trends are driven by two formidable forces: the enormous resources of Colombia's communist narco-guerrillas added to the petrodollars of Hugo Chávez, the maximum chieftain of the banana left, who is intent on redesigning the political map of Latin America. The best synthesis of this dangerous symbiosis was a sad event that occurred in Paraguay. A few months ago, Cecilia, the young daughter of former President Raúl Cubas was kidnapped and murdered by militants of Patria Libre [Free Homeland], a far-left Paraguayan group that demanded a huge ransom for her release. Kidnapping connections Patria Libre is a member of the Sao Paulo Forum, a kind of ''internationale'' that brings together all sorts of groups, from the Chavistas of the Fifth Republic Movement to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. In the Forum, the representatives of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) are singularly important. It was precisely a leader of the FARC, Colombian Rodrigo Granda -- to whom the Chávez government had granted Venezuelan citizenship and a passport so that he could travel freely worldwide -- who was the ''technical'' advisor of the Paraguayan criminals. Shortly thereafter, Granda was kidnapped on the streets of Caracas and ''sold'' to the Colombian government by some Venezuelan military men who, on their own, had become bounty hunters. This aroused the ire of Chávez and his vice president, José Vicente Rangel, who insisted on vigorously defending the Colombian criminal. This encapsulates the problem and its extraordinary menace. Here, you find the long hand of Colombia's communist narco-guerrillas, filled with dollars from cocaine traffic, operating in Paraguay, thousands of miles away. You find the ideological and strategic complicity between Patria Libre, the FARC and Chavism. You find the Mafia-style collaboration among groups that have turned the kidnappings, murders and drug trafficking into common practices, justified as valid weapons in ''the struggle against Yankee imperialism and the cruel capitalism.'' You also find the suicidal indifference of the rest of Latin America, which looks upon these events as if they were unrelated police cases. Yet they really are coordinated attacks against the heart of democratic stability and social peace throughout the hemisphere. Cruel gangsters Add to this panorama the existence in Central America of the maras, gangs formed by young, terribly cruel gangsters who already are establishing contacts with the communist narco-guerrillas. It's the perfect marriage: Where else could you find better allies for trafficking in weapons and cocaine? Today, three countries have been invaded by this massive and violent form of delinquency and are almost powerless to stop it: Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. How long will the Central American maras take to coordinate their criminal actions with the Mexican drug cartels and furnish them with enough assassins to carry out their tasks? The blood is likely to spill into Nicaragua and Panama. The ground is fertile for that: The police forces are weak and lacking in resources; the judicial systems are politicized and prone to corruption; the prisons, overcrowded and violent, are schools for the furtherance of crime. In large portions of Latin America, something terrifying is happening: The state is increasingly incapable of maintaining order and guaranteeing the safety of its people and their property. In Argentina, the crisis has reached the point where the government is blackmailed by the ''picketeers,'' street demonstrators who demand subsidies to scale down their disorders. `Decivilization' In Ecuador, street riots are passed off as patriotism. In rural zones of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, violence triggers large migrations of peasants into the cities, which inevitably become Calcuttas, creating the perfect conditions for the proliferation of crime. This situation has a name: decivilization. Slowly, Latin America decivilizes itself; it regresses toward chaos. Governments lose the capacity to exert authority. Societies feel unprotected. Criminals are in charge, sometimes on their own, others in association with corrupt policemen. Crimes go unpunished. Judges do not judge with equity. Parliamentarians don't legislate using common sense. The rule of law and the delicate institutional fabric of the republics simply dissolve in the face of society's generalized impotence. ©2005 Firmas Press

From Investor's Business Daily April 24, 2005
Latin America: The past week's high political turmoil in Ecuador is about more than oil or bananas. It's about a terrifying descent into instability that could hit every country in the hemisphere.

The turmoil in the tiny South American country shows no sign of ending. Another president was thrown out -- the third in a decade. His successor is widely regarded as an ignorant weakling. And no one thinks he's going to last. After all, Ecuador has had seven presidents since 1995.

Maybe that's why Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice turned her attention from a milestone NATO treaty signing in Vilnius, Lithuania, to recognize the danger in the Andean state 7,000 miles away.

She called it right when she urged Ecuador to hold new presidential elections. The current setup doesn't look stable, and the next event is likely to be a new explosion.

In Ecuador, they are calling this angry people-power demonstration of tens of thousands "coletazo de la serpiente" -- the unpredictable thrashing of a dangerous snake's tail that can hit anything.

Ecuador's turmoil has potential to hit other states, like Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay. How would the U.S. like to see that in Mexico? There are even signs the problems are affecting Venezuela.

Perhaps it's a sign of the times. While little noted in America's mainstream press, it's nonetheless true that wide swaths of the people living south of our border utterly despise their governments. Often, it's a raw hatred -- unlike anything seen in the relatively genteel world of U.S. politics.

There's a perception the U.S. will never enact regime change because these Latin American governments (except Cuba) are nominal democracies. And because of their relative trade openness and acceptance of the IMF's high-tax budget austerity, there is a widespread perception that they are capitalist.

But in the absence of credible institutions -- law, courts, central banks, civil services, civic groups -- they are neither democracies nor capitalist states. And because institutions are so weak, corruption permeates everything -- triggering regular protests.

As a result, popular sentiment increasingly appears irrationally against democracy and capitalism. The irony is, there are few leaders in Latin America who are truly free-market capitalists.

In Ecuador, newly deposed Lucio Gutierrez is a left-leaning populist -- as is his successor, Alfredo Palacio. Gutierrez ended his term by flying off to asylum in Brazil as mobs gathered to call for his head. Ecuador's institutions are so weak he wasn't even deposed legally.

There are reasons these explosions may continue in Ecuador and elsewhere in the region. For one, new technologies -- cell phones and the Internet -- make it easy to organize and call for demonstrations. For example, an Ecuadorean radio station used text messaging to call for demonstrations after its phone lines were cut off.

Also, there is a growing reluctance of militaries to repress demonstrators. No security force wants to be caught on CNN shooting unarmed protesters. Nobody wants to be charged with genocide, as a former president of Bolivia recently was, or be marched forward to the Hague war crimes tribunal for shooting demonstrators -- especially not for Gutierrez's sake.

That means vast demonstrations can be called more easily than ever. And amid lessened fears of military intervention, these protests, with their contradictory crosscurrents of demands, can go in any direction.

Ecuador's revolt began with disgust at Gutierrez's summary dismissal of 27 of 31 Supreme Court judges last December. His handpicked replacements subsequently dropped corruption charges against exiled ex-President Abdala "El Loco" Bucaram, a Gutierrez crony who promptly returned from exile.

That enraged many. But the protests rapidly morphed from anti-El Loco rallies into demands to stop servicing the country's $16 billion in debt and drop dollarization.

So why worry? Ecuador hosts a U.S. military base and provides the U.S. with 2.3% of its imported oil: It has some strategic importance.

But there's another reason to care. In the unstable developing world, demonstrations can lead to power changes overnight. Those who are most organized often win. That sets the stage for outside predators like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who already has a network of leftist allies capable of stirring trouble in the hemisphere.

Little good can come of Ecuador's demonstrations, at least until credible political institutions and respect for law are established.

A good first step is elections. We also hope the Organization of American States, which is looking into Gutierrez's ouster, will act to ensure stability. If nothing is done, it may explode again. And if it spreads close enough, we in the U.S. are going to feel it.

Excerpt from Ecuador Focus April 25, 2005
It is becoming a popular observation in Ecuador that the easiest way to become president here is to become vice president. Palacio, a 66-year-old cardiologist who until now has had a fairly comfortable job criticizing Gutiérrez from the sidelines as vice president, has helped prove that adage. Now, he must take the reigns of a country which has removed three presidents before the end of their terms since 1997 and whose citizens have developed an absolute distrust of the clubby if fractured political class. But in addition to housewives and students taking to the streets, structural weaknesses in the country’s democratic institutions are what have truly allowed three presidents to be removed in a fairly short period of time. The judicial and legislative branches of government refuse or are incapable of using control mechanisms in place which are meant to keep presidents from getting too far out of line. There appears to simply be no feasible legal outlets to punish leaders who have stolen or violated the constitution, leading to the type of mob mentality street protests which effectively pushed out Gutiérrez. Congress then uses such unrest to make excuses for what was essentially the illegal removal of a president by a simple resolution rather than by a full impeachment process. Gutiérrez himself supported the illegal removal of the Supreme Court in December, but one illegal action to correct another will only lead to more chaos in the long term.

ECUADOR FOCUS

A weekly look at Ecuador's economy and politics from the ground Feb 14, 2005

Beware the Ides of …Marches?
Although President Gutiérrez has made the upcoming march organized by his opposition in Quito sound foreboding, the outlook for him is probably not that dire in the short term.

Maybe it is March Madness in February. Groups opposed to Gutiérrez changed their march planned for Thursday in Quito to Wednesday so as not to clash with a countermarch planned by government supporters. The pro-government crowd then announced that it has changed the date of its march to Wednesday as well – or to any day planned by the opposition – in order to prevent a “coup.” Now the two marches are scheduled to head down the same route at the same day and time. This is similar to what happened between the two marches in Guayaquil, one organized primarily by the opposition Social Christian Party (PSC) and one by government supporters.

The Guayaquil marches were unexpectedly non-violent, although the two groups did follow routes separated by a few blocks. The opposition, supposedly marching for better security in Guayaquil but effectively in protest of Gutiérrez, outnumbered government supporters by at least 10 to 1 using even the most modest crowd estimates. There is concern, however, that the Quito marches may follow another path. The administration may have had time to find more people to march on its sides, possibly aided by the fact that there are quite a few more central government employees in Quito than in Guayaquil. The administration’s side would also possibly be aided by clashes because it would lend credibility to Gutiérrez’s assertion that the opposition is trying to “destabilize the country.”

The government opposition, meanwhile, probably has everything to lose if there are any disturbances. The march, organized mainly by the Democratic Left (ID) party and various civil society groups, has billed it as a “peaceful, civic” protest against recent actions such as Congress’ dismissal of the Supreme Court in December. (And as a way to prevent being one-upped by Guayaquil.) The civil society groups, lumped together under the name Civil Convergence for Democracy, would lose their legitimacy if the march turns into a free-for-all or attempts anything other than a peaceful demonstration. But this round of marches may not mean the same thing as such massive protests in the past. In the case of the massive shows of public force which helped force out presidents Abdalá Bucaram in 1997 and Jamil Mahuad in 2000, there was always a simpler element – corruption or economic chaos – which genuinely raised the ire of the masses. Different political parties obviously stepped in to try to benefit from the upsets, but appeared to ride the crest as much or more as they made the wave.

The president, however, has assured that the march’s real purpose is to remove him from power. While events obviously can and do take unexpected turns, this appears unlikely at this point. The wide-ranging opposition groups do not appear to have any particular support from the military, a necessary ingredient in any successful coup attempt. Those who have put themselves in the spotlight as the leaders of the march – Quito Mayor Paco Moncayo, Chamber of Commerce Association President Blasco Peñaherrera and Participación Ciudadana head César Montúfar among others – would lose their own legitimacy if that is the protests’ true purpose. The president’s claim can most likely be dismissed as a rabble-rousing technique for his supporters and a scare tactic for Quiteños unwilling to take part in something which might take such an uncivil turn. On top of this, there is a possibility that the opposition turnout could be smaller than expected. The Guayaquil march was billed primarily as a way to show support for security in the city. At least 100,000 people according to the smallest believable estimations, and up to 200,000 by others, came. The organizers of the Quito march, in turn, are appealing to more elevated principles such as constitutional security and the rule of law. Previous calls to defend these concepts at protests after the dismissal of the Supreme Court only drew a few hundred people. “Defending democracy” may not be enough to draw mobs to the streets in a country where the economy is relatively stable and many people have no access to education which would help them to appreciate such abstract ideas.

Even if the turnout is small, however, it is still important that the traditional political establishments in the country’s two largest cities are openly protesting the administration. The president has gone beyond the point of no return for now in terms of reestablishing support with these parties. But this round of marches may not mean the same thing as such massive protests in the past. In the case of the massive shows of public force which helped force out presidents Abdalá Bucaram in 1997 and Jamil Mahuad in 2000, there was always a simpler element – corruption or economic chaos – which genuinely raised the ire of the masses. Different political parties obviously stepped in to try to benefit from the upsets, but appeared to ride the crest as much or more as they made the wave. In this case, opposition politicians seem to be doing most of the pushing. Many Ecuadoreans seem to have grown tired both of pushy authority figures and of the uncertainty and chaos which comes with pushing out presidents. EF

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