David PazminoLatin American History has been marked with political unrest, revolutions, corruption and more.
Since 1999, Latin America as a whole has being experiencing a series of changes in politics and attitudes toward the world, as many historians have said that the uncontrolled expansion of capitalism in Latin America has led to an ecological crisis, massive deforestation, severe soil exhaustion, and growing agricultural pollution.
Society, politics and the economy has been for most Latin Americans a history of exploitation and oppression; in this history many have resisted and endured.
The way that Latin America is in the present is because of many circumstances that have existed in this part of the world since colonial times.
A series of social revolutions have occurred in Latin America since the end of many military dictatorships that in cases have been credited to U.S. government support for enforcing brutal dictatorships in Latin America.
In the last three years, many Latin American countries, such as Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile and Brazil, have chosen leftist governments. In this special report for The Minaret and the University of Tampa community, David Pazmino and the Hispanic Organization for Latin Americans (HOLA) from the Republic of Ecuador, presents this series of interviews.
In this series of interviews of past government officials and actual government officials we will hear the situation in Latin America from the best source, its people. This series of interviews is not meant to judge what is good or bad, but just to inform each person so that they can come out with their version and interpret in the way they understand. The dream of a continent is the dream of its people, as well as the dream of three million immigrants in other countries to return to their homeland that gave them everything it could, but wasn’t enough. It is the dream of three million Ecuadorians that are emigrants in the world to return, to the home of the condor, to let the condor inside their hearts fly free through the mountains, the rivers, the coast, the Amazon and the Galapagos.
Interview with Sixto Dur’aacute;n Ball’eacute;n Cordovez, President of Ecuador from 1992 to 1996:
David Pazmino (DP): Do you think that the foreign policy of the United States regarding Latin America of George Bush’s government has caused Ecuador to resent the United States?
Dur’aacute;n Ball’eacute;n (DB): The times of Roosevelt and Kennedy were the last governments that worried about Latin America. Clinton was very selective about who he had relations with. I tell you this because Clinton never accepted a personal interview about Ecuador’s war with Peru. The attitude of the United States with Latin America is not new; it has always been disrespectful since Kennedy. The US attitude with LA hasn’t been good for many years and only recently have they been remembering the south.
DP: What do you think about our current government of Rafael Correa and do you see a relation with Venezuela and Bolivia?
DB: It seems that the system he wants to impose on the country is an expired system.
DP: What do you think about the signing or not signing of the treaty of free commerce with the USA?
DB: If the TFC is not signed then Ecuador will only produce what can be consumed.
DP: According to the media, the economic crisis of 1999 was the biggest in the country’s history. The media says your government passed a law which permitted the banking crisis
DB: In 1991, in the previous government of Dr. Borja, there was a project sent to congress to modernize the banking system which addressed deficient and expired laws which were enacted in the 1930s when they represented the actual needs of the country.
This law was partially fixed by congress in 1994. It’s worth it to remember that in those years congress met three months in a year and during the rest of the year there was a small assembly of 28 representatives elected by the congress. Those 28 were in charge of passing laws and action of the congress. The law had its defects, but why didn’t the following congress modify it? How can I blame the abuse of the law to the ’92-’96 governments? The abuse was committed after 1996; the government should have changed the law.
The law was dictated by the members of the house, of which only one belonged to the ruling party. The government represented only a small amount of the population.
I accepted the law, based on the possible reaction of the country as well as other countries and how Ecuador would have been seen and how it was approved which would have been very negative.
The law was never renewed and the rights of the citizens weren’t respected.
The press article was written by the economist Alexia who was president of the central bank during the Rodrigo Borja government. Regrettably the positive deeds weren’t recorded, only the negative.
DP: The parties which accepted the law in 1992 were the parties that later fell. Do you think that the reason they fell was because of the law?
DB: I don’t think that it was because of the law but because of the abuse of the parties that passed the law. The parties didn’t know how to respect the law, and they fell. One shouldn’t judge us, but history will judge us.
A few years ago, the ex-president of Bolivia visited Ecuador and said that his government had an economic success. The ex-president of Bolivia made it a point to say that his government had something that the government of Ecuador didn’t have, and that was a press who was in favor of the president as well as congress.
President Correa has a congress that doesn’t represent the people. The actual president speaks badly of the media; regretfully there is good press and bad press.
DP: In your government we all remember the war with Peru in 1994, do you think that the war was necessary, and do you think that war is necessary in today’s world?
DB: We have to remember that the war was necessary and we have to remember that the last victory that Ecuador had against Peru was in 1930 with the great Colombia. If I had the same attitude as the previous government, we would have lost more territory than what we lost. When Peru attacked and the representatives of Peru, the United States, Brazil, Chile and Argentina said to retreat by 8 kilometers, I answered that we were not going to retreat one kilometer