Ecuador restructures Chinese debt

Ecuador has reached a deal with China this week to restructure $4.4 billion of outstanding debt. The period of repayment has been extended with some discounts on the amount due.
 
The deal was reached directly with China’s policy banks, China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, which together have provided over $18 billion in loans to Ecuador since 2010.
 
The loans were used to build roads, hospitals, schools and hydroelectric projects, often by Chinese construction companies. Most of the loans were taken by the leftist president Rafael Correa during his term between 2007 and 2017. 

President Correa had refused to honour some of the debt incurred by his predecessors on the ground that they were illegitimate loans taken by corrupt politicians for non-productive purposes from greedy bankers. Calling foreign creditors "monsters, he declared a default in 2008 on his country's foreign bonds and called for a restructuring of Ecuador's foreign debt. So the international financial mafia ostracized Ecuador. Thereafter Correa had no other option but to turn to China which had seized the opportunity quickly with large loans. But the centre-right government which succeeded President Correa had accused him and his officials of violating public debt regulations by negotiating up-front payments for future oil deliveries without registering the operations as indebtedness. There are also allegations of defects  and poor quality in the hydroelectric dams built by China. The largest portion of the Chinese credit has gone into six hydroelectric projects amounting to three billion dollars.
 
Some of the debt was also tied to future oil sales. PetroEcuador, the government company has been supplying oil to China’s state-run PetroChina at a discount towards debt settlement. Last week, PetroEcuador announced a deal with China on the price formula and got extension of the remaining oil deliveries to 2027 from 2024. This allows Ecuador to sell more of its crude on the spot market.
 
Ecuador is negotiating a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with China and aims to sign it during the China-LAC business summit in December. Ecuador’s exports to China were 3.64 billion dollars and imports 6 billion in 2021. China is the second largest trading partner of Ecuador and the #1 source of imports.
 
The centre-right but pragmatic President Guillermo Lasso is trying his best to reduce overdependence on China. He has called for transparency in the terms of Chinese contracts and projects. He has expressed interest in a FTA with US, the largest trading partner of Ecuador.  
 
Details of the Chinese loans to Ecuador are in the link…https://www.thedialogue.org/map_list/
 

Ecuador is the third largest recipient of Chinese credit to Latin America after Venezuela ($62.5 bn) and Brazil ($30.5 bn). Argentina is the fourth largest recipient with 17 billion dollars.
 

The Ecuador restructuring will be noted carefully by the other countries in Latin America which has received a total of 138 billion dollars of Chinese credit. Argentina and Venezuela will be the next candidates for restructuring. Argentina, which owes 17 billion dollars to China, will be the next country to look for restructuring. Argentina is currently struggling to repay its  bigger debt of 40 billion dollars owed to IMF. The country faces shortage of foreign exchange reserves besides high inflation and currency depreciation. Venezuela, which is in a worse economic situation than Argentina, will have a greater challenge to repay the Chinese debt.

  
Santa Evita – Argentine TV serial
 
The new Argentine Television serial “Santa Evita” has just been made available in India by Hot Star+ Disney. It was released on 26 July which marks the seventieth anniversary of Eva Peron’s death. She is worshipped as a Santa (saint) by her followers who call her affectionately as Evita.
 
The serial narrates the bizarre story of the corpse of Evita, wife of President Peron, who died in 1952 due to cancer at the age of 33. Her body was kept waiting for three years for the construction of a monumental memorial, which was never built. In 1955, the military overthrew Peron and hid the body for nineteen years to prevent the use of her ‘martyrdom’ as a rallying cry to overthrow the military regime. 

 
The serial is based on a novel “Santa Evita” by an Argentine writer Tomas Eloy Martinez, published in 1995. I have read this novel as well as some other books of Martinez. He has used ¨magical realism¨ to tell the story. He weaves facts and fiction in and out and one does not know what is real and what is imagined. In any case, the way Evita´s body was dealt with by her supporters and opponents is like a mystery thriller fiction. Martinez has added more mystery by his fantastic story-telling.
 
Colonel Moori Koenig from the military intelligence service is given the responsibility to hide and make the body disappear. He moves it from one hiding place to another in Buenos Aires city. But he and his colleagues involved in this macabre venture, as well as their families meet with one disaster after another. He and his accomplices, who hated the power wielded by Evita as first lady, are hypnotized by the body and become obsessed with it. Even the embalmer Dr Ara spends a lot of time alone with the body taking care of it possessively and intimately. He makes wax replicas of the body to confuse others. The Colonel discovers the embalmer’s trick and sends the original and the copies to different places for burial to mislead the Peronists who were tracking the body.
 
Here are some real-life facts which followed Evita’s death:
 
- Her body was kept for public homage for fifteen days after her death on 26 july 1952.
- The timing of evening state news broadcast was changed from 8.30 pm to 8.25 pm, the exact time when she passed into "immortality"
-Primary school children recited prayer songs from their text books, "Evita, I promise to be as good as you wish me to be "
-The military regime, which overthrew Peron in September 1955 was afraid of the subversive influence of the body. They banned the "possession of photos of Evita or Peron or use of the expressions Peronism or Peronist" and made them a punishable offence with imprisonment. 
-They sent it secretly to be buried in a cemetery in Italy. The whereabouts of the body were written and put in sealed envelope by president Aramburu who gave it to his lawyer with instructions that it should be opened only after his death. To confuse investigators, many dummy coffins were sent to Argentine embassies in other European countries to be buried.
-Monteneros, the left wing guerillas, kidnapped Aramburu in 1970, tried to get the information on Evita's body unsuccessfully and executed him. In 1974 the same group kidnapped the cadaver of Aramburu from his family's vault and demanded the return of Evita's body as ransom. Eventually, in November 1974 the body was brought back to Argentina.
-The body found its final resting place in the Recoleta cemetry in Buenos Aires. The coffin was put behind two trap doors with the only key given to Evita's sister.
Both the novel and the serial bring out vividly the politics and culture of the Argentines. Evita's real life story was inspiration for the masses. It is the story of a girl born outside marriage from a poor village family, running away to the city and trying to earn living as an actress. Her life is transformed after her chance encounter with Peron. With her organizational, oratorical and acting skills, she mobilized the masses to support and vote for Peron as president. As the first lady, she ran a foundation to help the poor people with money, housing and healthcare. There were large crowds queuing up in front of her office daily seeking her help and intervention. She empowered the Descamisados (shirtless- meaning lumpen workers) and became a champion of the poor, women and the underprivileged. She got the right to vote for women and fought for the rights of the workers. She was the first political leader to reach out to the poor, respect them and help them. She received lepers and diseased, showed affection and kissed them without batting an eyelid. This is the  reason why the masses worship her as a Santa (saint) and she has become a political legend and icon. Peronism has taken full advantage of this legacy to get the votes of the masses in the elections in the last five decades. The legacy of Evita continues to be a vital and potent political force even today. The two-time President and current vice-president of the country Cristina Fernandez Kirchner fancies herself as the inheritor of the legacy of Evita with her pro-poor policies.
 
Evita has been the most polarizing figure of Argentina for the last seven decades. She is scorned, hated and demonized by the military and the right-wing political elements and critics who use the choicest abusive words against Evita.  The oligarchic society of the country had treated the upstart Evita with contempt and condescension. The right wing accuses the Peronists of perpetuating the vote bank of the poor with populist policies which have hindered the growth of the country. The visceral hatred of Evita is brought out in a scene in the serial in which the military officers celebrate the death of Evita with champagne and the cheering words "Long live cancer".
 
It is a pity that the serial is so short with just seven episodes. There is so  much more story and legend from the life and afterlife of Evita which could be fascinating. I wish the producers consider making more episodes to bring out the rest of the drama and impact of Evita. 
 
I am delighted to see that the Argentine serial has emerged as a Latin American project with the Uruguayan Natalia Oreiro acting as Evita, Mexican actress Salma Hayek as coproducer and the Colombian Rodrigo Garcia, the son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as one of the directors.
 
 

Rejection of the proposed new Chilean constitution

I was disappointed by the rejection of the new constitution by the Chilean voters in the referendum held last Sunday. 

If it was approved it would have made Chile, one of the most conservative countries in Latin America into one of the world’s most progressive, egalitarian and of course, left-leaning democratic societies. The constitutional experiment would have been a lesson in Direct Democracy for the world.

The new constitution would have enshrined over hundred rights into Chile’s national charter, more than any other constitution in the world, including the right to housing, education, clean air, water, food, sanitation, internet access, retirement benefits, free legal advice and care “from birth to death.” It would have legalized abortion, mandated universal health care, required gender parity in government, empowered labor unions, strengthened regulations on mining and granted rights to nature and animals. It would have eliminated the Senate, strengthened regional governments and allowed Chilean presidents to run for a second consecutive term. 

More importantly, it would have defined Chile as a “plurinational” state. That meant 11 Indigenous groups, which account for nearly 13 percent of the population could have been recognized as their own nations within the country, with their own governing structures and court systems. 

The constituent assembly itself was unique and the first one in world history with equal number of men and women besides some indigenous representatives who were given the first ever privilege of participating in the constitution making process. Most of the members of the assembly were non-political but left-leaning independent activists.

The rejection of the new constitution was due to a justifiable concern that it was taking the country to the leftist extreme from the rightist extreme of the original of the current constitution imposed by the brutal military dictatorship of Pinochet.

So now the leftist administration of President Gabriel Boric and the conservative forces which opposed the new constitution have to work together towards new draft with compromises from both sides. There is no doubt that the current constitution needs to be changed to address its in-built injustice and inequality. 

I am confident that the Chileans would certainly come up with innovative democratic way forward. The Chilean democracy is one of the most mature in Latin America despite the tendency of the Chileans to experiment and fight if necessary through protests which could be violent at times.