The Return of Operation Condor

Jay: Welcome to Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. This is Jay. In this conversation, we speak with a labor organizer and people's historian who covers Latin American movements with connections to Ecuador, Colombia, and Cuba. Folks may know her by the Twitter handle SovietWithSasson. In this conversation, she discusses recent struggles and developments in Ecuador, in particular a recent 38-day general strike and the popular rejection of a recent referendum, including measures that would have allowed the U.S. to build military bases in Ecuador and cut public funding for political parties. In this discussion, our guest contextualizes the current U.S.-backed narco-military regime led by Danielle Noboa, and she talks about the broader revenge campaign against former pink-tie governments like Ecuador and Bolivia, now led by right-wing forces. She also talks about how the tactics we're seeing across Latin America against left-leaning governments and the disappearances and assassinations of organizers mark a return of tactics reminiscent of the CIA's Operation Condor. She discusses how the capitalist class colludes with cartels to create crises that manufacture consent for the state of war decree that Ecuadorians are currently under. We'll include the link to follow our guest on Twitter, where she'll be increasing her reporting on developments in Latin America soon, and to other episodes where we discuss recent developments in regards to Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and on the topic of general strikes, the general strike Italian workers led a couple months ago. One more thing our guests did reference is that this conversation was recorded last week during the National Week of Action. The Black Alliance for Peace and a bunch of other organizations had particularly centered around defending Venezuela's sovereignty. So I will include a link to the toolkit and the webinars associated with that. Our apologies that we weren't able to get this episode out to be timely during that week of action. But the struggle to defend Venezuela's sovereignty is as important now as it was last week, so continue to do what you can to support that. As we approach the end of the year, we're offering up to a 40% discount on yearly memberships or 40% off the first month on monthly memberships for Millennials Are Killing Capitalism if you join at the $5 a month level or higher. Buy one for a friend, comrade or relative or for yourself. Support our work. Help us continue to do more. Use code EOY25. That's like end of the year 25. EOY25. And remember, if you purchase a yearly subscription for as little as $10.80 per year, you gain access to study groups for all of 2026. Our first study group next year won't start until February, but we'll have at least three study groups you can take advantage of if you are a member. All right. So welcome to Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. Since it's your first time on the show, would you just take a moment to kind of share whatever you would like to, you know, help people understand kind of how you're coming to this conversation and just, you know, ground them in a little bit of of you and what you're here to talk about?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Like I said, thank you so much for giving both I and my comrades a platform to share what the last six months and the manufacturing of a U.S.-backed military regime in Ecuador is like. I am a member of a Latin American Marxist alliance. We were part of the Colombian general strike of 2021. And my experience with organizing has been primarily anti-imperialist solidarity action, labor and land struggles, political prisoner campaigns, organizing tenants and undocumented workers, Palestine solidarity networks. And so that's a little bit of my background. I am Ecuadorian and I've had the privilege of learning and working with comrades in Cuba, in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, France and China, and then in my homeland of Ecuador. I come from an Ecuadorian family of communists. Well, I'm trying to keep for safety right now because, you know, the of the state, both of the United States and also of Ecuador, but I'm trying to keep my anonymity. But I'll share one of my family members is Jaime Galarza, who was one of the general secretaries of the Communist Party in Cuenca, Ecuador, and a student of Che Guevara. And he helped found one of the first workers and working class communes in Quito, Ecuador. And so I have learned a lot about my homeland, both from living and organizing there and also through my family's history, some of whom had to flee Ecuador and got asylum in Cuba, thankfully to the Cuban Revolution and Fidel and Che, who extended them solidarity, fleeing a U.S.-backed dictatorship in Ecuador. And so I feel indebted, really, to the Cuban Revolution and to the anti-imperialist alliances of Abiyayala, of the Americas. We look out for one another. And that's what I want to do here today is talk about not only the importance of solidarity with the Ecuadorian workers and campesinos and the indigenous people striking against a U.S.-backed military regime and the building of a U.S. military base, but also how this is part of the larger context of anti-imperialist alliances across the Americas as the U.S. continues to escalate its war on Venezuela and is building a Pinochet-type administration in Ecuador to help them as a pawn in this escalating war of what I would call the revenge on the pink-eyed nations, the nations of a quote unquote, 21st century socialism. Right. So, yeah, that's a little bit about my background and what I'm here to talk about. And thank you again for having me.

Jay: Awesome. Well, thank you. It's great to host you. So when we were talking a little bit about this conversation, you had run, you know, a title past me, which was Operation Condor Returns. Certainly, you know, we have seen a very concerted focus on global South countries in the Western Hemisphere under this, you know, Trump 2.0, his second term, which is not, you And, you know, the history also of kind of neoconservatives, you know, it's not a major shift. It's also not the case. I mean, you know, Democrats very much participate in this stuff, too. But certainly, you know, an escalation of longstanding tactics of repression in the region. And this is happening, of course, also under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who's been a longtime hater of left-wing governments. Yes. So maybe you could say a little bit about, you know, kind of why you wanted to invoke this idea of Operation Condor and, you know, what you think is already going on in the region and, you know, possibly on the horizon.

Speaker 2: Certainly, yeah. So to give any listeners who may not know some context, Operación Cóndor was an American experiment in Latin America between the 70s and 80s that was formally created with Pinochet, where the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, which was the first experiment and creation of neoliberalism. And I think it's really important to point out his role in the creation of neoliberalism because often folks will characterize any state violence as fascist right or that fascism is has exclusively a monopoly on state violence and in reality bourgeois democracy in quotations the democracy part And neoliberalism is responsible for the majority of bloodshed, particularly of working class, Black and Indigenous and Third World people, right? And so Operación Cóndor was a time in which the United States helped the creation of extremely right-wing, deadly governments, including the Junta en Argentina government. which disappeared and killed upwards of 30,000 people. A large representation of the ethnic minority killed and persecuted in Argentina were Jewish communists. And I raise that because Israel sent billions of dollars of military aid to Argentina. to support in the slaughtering of these Jewish comrades. And so I think it's important, you know, as we are now in the second year of genocide, under which Israel, you know, justifies their existence through solidarity, you know, with Jewish people and, you know, somehow the vanguard of protection against genocide. anti-Semitism. And in reality, just as they have been, you know, depraved and perpetrators of bloodshed of Arab and Palestinian people, they have also contributed to the persecution of Jewish people in the third world. And in addition to that, there were several other, you know, in Uruguay, in Brazil, in projects, U.S.-backed projects that with the help of the Israeli offense forces or the Israeli occupation forces helped bring torture, massacres, and the repression of working class people. And we are seeing this again, this, you know, the remnants and the legacy that Operation Condor left in Latin America has not left, but it is that, you know, it is Plan Colombia, which is the Bush administration's project that has ruled Colombia by manufacturing crime, by manufacturing drug cartels, by funding paramilitaries, all to massacre and squash a left-wing uprising of Colombia, all to justify the persecution of primarily Black and Indigenous rural land defenders. And so this has, you know, Operation Condor, the structures that it created, has never left. But in the post-Cold War era, they were able to transform it, with the help of the compradores and our nations, into really strong, soft power administrations. And now, the last six months in Ecuador have been the most dangerous and deadly period in the nation's history. It is the result, as I said earlier, of a U.S.-backed military cartel regime. And no, that is not an oxymoron who, by hijacking a once democratic socialist nation, because Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia rose to power through socialist or democratic socialist administrations in the early 2000s. So they have hijacked this through the neoliberal privatization of the state. Through the granting of blanket immunity to U.S. soldiers operating within our borders, through the revoking of our right to due process, a state of war decree under which four Black boys as young as 11 years old were kidnapped, tortured, shot, and then burned to death by 17 soldiers coming back from a soccer game. And then the media tried to justify it by saying that they were involved in the drug trade, the very cartels that the U.S.-backed puppet president himself has ties to. And yet there was no evidence of that, of course. In addition to that, the patrolling of our elections by Blackwater mercenaries, Eric Prince himself showing up to threaten the Ecuadorian people into voting for Novoa, the defunding of health care, education and indigenous protections, the exclusion of over 50 percent of our nation's workforce from the formal economy. So folks, you know, being hyper exploited and lumpenized in the informal economy is IMF austerity measures that laid off 5,000 public workers, and the, as I've mentioned, the proven collusion between multinational corporations and the cartel economy. Unlike in Venezuela, where the State Department is constructing propaganda evidence, you know, without any evidence, in our country of Ecuador, there have been investigations with proven evidence by our own systems, not by the U.S. State Department, which involves the president's own family's billionaire company. And all of this combined, all of these conditions has caused our country to spiral from once the second safest in the continent to now the number one most dangerous with a second highest rate of child hunger and five out of the world's 10 most dangerous cities. All with the intention of creating a crisis so dire it manufactures public consent for a militarized U.S. puppet state. Right. Which in turn, of course, then is used or will be used as a pawn for the growing war on Venezuela as then senator, now U.S. secretary of state. who you mentioned, Marco Rubio, confirmed in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act saying Ecuador is its most strategic and pro-American partner in a sea of openly socialist nations who would help the United States develop resilience against state and non-state enemies. But then this past weekend, the Ecuadorian people proved him wrong after a month-long general strike that started in September, led by indigenous workers and campesinos, and accompanied and fertilized by truck drivers, transportation workers, students, and other public sectors. They shut down commerce routes, mining projects, major highways, and entire cities for 38 days to protest this U.S.-backed military regime. Following that, a referendum, a popular referendum, was put to a nationwide vote with four questions on which our country's sovereignty hung, essentially. Our president, Novoa, who was a U.S. puppet, He's born and bred in Miami. He's an American citizen, one of the only president in Latin America right now who is a U.S. citizen. And I imagine that is not a common experience, even of U.S. assets across the world. Right. But he forced a vote on whether to build a new U.S. military base after Ecuador successfully ousted them all in 2009. Right. Whether to dissolve the Constitution, which the Ecuadorian people ratified in 2008. Whether to privatize elections by eliminating all public funding for campaigns, which makes the participation of working class candidates possible. And whether to downsize our Congress to model a more American structure of government like his homeland of the United States. And in response, millions of Ecuadorians delivered a historic blow to U.S. imperialism, blocking each and every proposal by President Daniel Novoa. And I want to stress that Right now, we are under a state of war decree, right? And so even with the power of the State Department behind him, Ecuadorians told the son of the richest man in Ecuador, no, no, no, and no. Essentially, you know, vete la verga, Yankee, ven de patria de mierda. He sent him running. He literally, he's in the United States right now. He fled the first public appearance after this deceit was in his homeland of the United States, making very clear that that's who he reports to, not his Ecuadorian constituency. But yeah, but like, you know, even under a state of war decree that allows the army to raid the homes and kidnap anyone they deem an enemy of the state. even after there's been over 30 confirmed cases of political disappearances as documented by even Amnesty International. And I'll just say, you know, Amnesty International is a pretty liberal pro-American aligned organization. I don't know if anybody really likes to say that, but they are. And so if they're documenting this against a U.S. puppet, I actually imagine, and they said themselves, that number is quite conservative. And that's just in the year that Naval has been president, right? Yeah. Even after the military murdered three of our comrades, right, three of the comrades at the general strike, even after they seized the bank accounts of the Indigenous activists leading the strike, even after they censored and suspended TV channels for covering our strike, saying that they were aiding and abetting terrorists and a national security threat for just reporting on the general strike, right? Even after hundreds of prisoners have been massacred in military-controlled prisons, supposedly due to cartel wars, but some of these folks, there's like 27 prisoners were hung and asphyxiated, right? And that's just not possible without the complicity of the people running the prison. Even after they had, like I said, Eric Prince and his mercenary goons posted up to intimidate voters at the last election, right? the Ecuadorian people still did not kneel to Daniel Novoa. And so, yeah, I'm just coming off of that weekend, right, and still feeling so incredibly proud of my pueblo, of the compañeras who sacrificed everything to mobilize against this attack on our constitution, of my comrades who led one hell of a popular education campaign for the Votanó when they realized, oh, well, in response and retaliation, Daniel Novoa is putting forth this consulta popular. They said, no, we're going to win this. And they did. And most of all, to Rosalina Paqui, Efrain Fueres, and Jose Huaman, our indigenous leaders who gave their life to this struggle, you know, when they shouldn't have had to. This victory belongs to them. And of course, we still have a really long way to go. As I shared right before we got on here, I was just on a call. I got a call that one of the leaders of CONAI, who is the indigenous federation that's been leading this strike, was victim to an armed assault coming home from a meeting. He is one of the leaders of the Amazonian chapter. And so we are still under a U.S. state of forces agreement, which gives the U.S. soldiers free range of our airspace. of our highways, our maritime territories, and shields their soldiers from facing any legal consequences for killing Ecuadorian civilians. And so we still have a long fight ahead of us. But this past weekend's victory shows that the Ecuadorian people are fed up and that the wool has been pulled out from their eyes and that they say unequivocally, you know, no, no to our country being turned into a pawn for U.S. imperialism.

Jay: Thank you for all of that. Just I wanted to get your take on something quickly, which is like one of the things I saw. I think this was Camilla Escalante from Cal Szechuan News. And she used to be with Telesur. And anyway, you know, folks know her. She's a journalist.

Speaker 2: For a while. She does incredible. I'm so grateful to her. Yeah.

Jay: Yeah. So she had said something along the lines of like when Neboa was elected, I remember there was a lot of contentiousness around the legitimacy even of that election and how it the results didn't align with a lot of the polling that had been done. And obviously, like polling and results can be off, you know, that happens. But I think she cited recently that the same polls that predicted that he would lose. also were very accurate around the no votes that just happened. And so she was just, I think, circling back that it, to her, demonstrated, you know, another piece of evidence that, you know, perhaps that Neboa's election was actually stolen. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that. I realize that's kind of a speculative question.

Speaker 2: No, yeah, thank you, because it's such an important factor in this. So what we can say definitively is that Novoa's election campaign was illegal and that there was voter intimidation during the election. And so for two reasons. His own vice president has actually came out and condemned him for this. So he disregarded the Constitution in which he's not allowed to use... He violated certain campaign and constitutional laws around his campaigning. He misused public funds. And he did that this last referendum as well. There's an electoral silence period where all campaigners have to stop and specifically the government in power cannot speak on it to sway public influence. And he disregarded that using his Twitter and other forms of communication to continue campaigning for his U.S.-backed proposal, right? So what we know for sure is that he violated the constitutional court's laws for campaigning leading up to this last presidential election. The other thing we know is that he brought Eric Prince of Blackwater or whatever they're calling themselves now. They've changed that name so many times for like PR. And I'm just going to keep calling them Blackwater because I will not forget and forgive the war crimes that you all committed in Afghanistan and in other parts on their war on terror, so to speak. And so he brought in Eric Prince and Eric Prince spoke to on several public TV channels He spoke directly to the Ecuadorian people and he said, I am here to maintain law and order and to make sure that the Ecuadorian people make the right decision by electing Daniel Novoa. after Guillermo Lasso was essentially ousted from his presidency as a result of a general strike in 2022. And so Daniel Laval was an interim president who served for a couple of months before a formal election was put forth in which he was facing La Revolución Ciudadana's candidate, Correa, Rafael Correa's predecessor. And who she was, you know, proposing more like democratic socialist reforms. Right. There's still a left liberal party in many ways. They, you know, have have preserved many bourgeois programs, but they did incredible things for working class people. They, you know, cut our poverty by 42 percent. And I'll speak a little bit later about that. But that was the that was the choice that Ecuadorians were confronting. Right. And so he brings Eric Prince and Eric Prince is speaking to really niche community-based radio programs. He's being translated into Spanish because, of course, you know, even though he's trained to, like, kill us and even though he's working with our army, he doesn't bother to learn Spanish. And he's making wildly unfounded accusations against Luisa Gonzalez, who was a Revolución Ciudadana's candidate. And so that's just not a fair election to begin with, right? Then, in addition to that, this is, you know, there is severe political persecution of La Revolución Ciudadana. Daniel Novoa actually violated international law. And for the first time ever, as a result of his actions of kidnapping our former vice president from the Mexican embassy in Ecuador, Mexico and Ecuador ended diplomatic ties for the first time since established in the two countries' history. And so there was already a political persecution of La Revolución Ciudadana's candidates. Jorge Glass, the vice president, who is being accused of, you know, corruption and many other charges, had been kidnapped out of the Mexican embassy. And, you know, I'm by no means like I, you know, I have dedicated my life and certainly the entirety of my adult life to protecting anti-imperialist solidarity across our Americas. And I defend with my life the Bolivarian process y la Revolución Ciudadana's sovereignty from the United States. But I also am a communist and I want to build a worker's state, right? And so I don't mince my words, nor do I gloss over the shortcomings of Rafael Correa's administration. But I also can see what it is for and that because of the nationalization of resources, because of the expansion of education, because of the ousting of U.S. military bases, the United States has never forgiven Rafael Correa for all the achievements and advancements that he did for the working class people in Ecuador. And so it just wasn't a fair election to begin with because we had external foreign interference. The other thing, this is really important, is that 48 hours before the election happens, Daniel Del Boa says, oh, as a result of cartel violence, which is true that there is Mexican-originated cartels operating in Ecuador. This has been documented by left-wing sources as well. Again, he has his own private company has been tied to these. He says, as a result of cartel violence, I am suspending all foreign entrance to the country 48 hours prior to the election. Of course, who was already in the country? The American mercenaries, right? Who was not in the country and was arriving that weekend for elections because in elections in Ecuador, we always vote on Sunday. was the international observers there to ensure that there was a fair election. So particularly, I think there was some progressive international election observers who were trying to get into the country, shout out them. There was just, you know, there was many internet, there was EU internet, like even bourgeois, you know, imperialist nations sending their own election observers were not able to get in. And then he puts these mercenaries and extra security people with guns at voting sites in predominantly working class, rural, indigenous and Black voting regions, right? And at voting sites, which, of course, are the bases that most resist his semi-fascist administration, right? And so... He's putting he's intimidating voters. So there just wasn't anything. Sorry, I know this is a very roundabout way to answer your question, but there's no way, regardless of like, you know, Rafael Correa, our former president, he has made claims that there was magic ink, you know, that the new pens and the election system that they used was there was irregularities. And I will say. The CNAA, I don't trust them as far as I can throw them and nor does any other Ecuadorian, right? Sorry, the CNAA is the electoral board that manages our elections, right? This popular referendum that we won, they refuse to come out. They always say what the exact result is, right? And they have a website that announces it. But the president of the CNAA... who's a big Daniel Novoa supporter, she refused to come out on live TV and explicitly say there was a win. She had to announce it, but she wouldn't say it directly. She just said the Ecuadorian people have spoken. So it's clear that the CNF favors the U.S.-backed forces in our country, the bourgeois forces in our country. And I think that what the periodista Camila Escalante points out is very important, right? That there is a match and that the polls correctly indicated the results this time. And yet somehow it was off the last time, right? And so I don't know. I think that there's a lot to be investigated there. But I think regardless of that, it's already proven that there was election manipulation, that it was not a free and fair election. Which is so funny, right, because they talk about, like, everybody made a big fuss about Venezuela's elections. And, you know, what's interesting is that Venezuela's presidential elections match also the midterm elections in which the local constituents vote. And so the same support that Nicolas Maduro received in the presidential election actually mirrors the local support for his party's candidates. And so, you know, it's very interesting that, like, there's all this uproar, even from supposedly left-wing presidents like Boric and Petro, right, who came out and said this is not a free and fair election. You know, there should be an international observation, a.k.a. international interference. But nobody spoke on this, right? Nobody. I think only Claudia Scheinbaum in Mexico was the only president who was like, this is not a free and fair election. So, you know, we'll wait to be seeing like what happens. But for sure, democracy was not practiced that day. And it certainly has not any day since he was, you know, confirmed.

Jay: Yeah, no, that's really interesting. Thank you for talking about that and sharing that. So, Let's talk a little bit more about, I would love to hear just a little bit more about the 38-day nationwide strike. You've given kind of an overview. You've talked about, obviously, the referendum that just happened. But I think because people in the United States have so little context for what something like that looks like, I would love for you to talk a little bit about that. You know, like the groups that participated in it, the types of actions that they did and like, you know, what does that look like on the ground in Ecuador?

Speaker 2: Certainly. Yeah. So I'll start with describing a little bit about what the organizing that it went into that looks like and some of the repression that they faced and the results. And then I do want to backtrack after that and just talk a little bit about how we got there, because I think it has a lot to do with the force of the strike and the results and where we find ourselves here. So The general strike in Ecuador started on September 15th. It was in response to a summer of constitutional violations and neoliberal reforms at the hands of U.S. puppet Daniel Novoa. The summer began with him violating the constitution by ignoring that 60% of Ecuadorians just a year earlier had voted no to oil drilling on native land. And yet throughout his presidency, he has privatized formerly nationalized natural resources companies and oil companies. As part of his contract with the U.S. State Department, he is allowing the reentry of U.S.-owned multinational companies to operate on indigenous land, indigenous land that is protected by various sovereignty laws. And then he handed over control of the Galapagos to the U.S. military, which the Galapagos, Ecuador has one of the biggest biodiversities in the world, particularly in the, especially in the Americas. And the Galapagos in particular is where there is the most biodiversity. It's incredibly sacred, not just to indigenous people, to all Ecuadorians, right? Yeah. And as a result of all of this, it then came to a head when he changed the IVA, the tax rate, from 12% to 15%. He raised it on everyday Ecuadorians who are now facing the highest poverty crisis in the past 20 years. And he, by the way, still owes our government 98 million dollars in debt tax. Right. And somehow he appointed his former private tax consultant to be like the head of the tax ministry and the tax office. And and has since then been like several million dollars of his tax debt has been forgiven. But yet he's raising the taxes on working class and rural Ecuadorians. And then what happened is he slashed a diesel subsidy, which helps with the transportation of food. It helps with the transportation of medical supplies. It is critical to maintaining fair costs for the truck drivers who have to transport all these foods, all these supplies across the country. So by doing that. Prices raise for everybody, for every working day, you know, working class Ecuadorians. And as well, the wages that truck drivers are getting and other transportation workers goes down, right, because they're now having to pay increased fees. And so that was the culmination of all of that, which then led the truck drivers to start striking, the transportation workers to start striking. And then the Movimiento Indígena y Campesina del Cotopaxi, so the movement of indigenous and peasants workers of the Cotopaxi, which is one of the indigenous regions in Ecuador, joined the strike. Then, the Unión de Organizaciones, I'm trying to think of how to translate this, the Union of Organizations of Campesinos and Indigenous People of the Cotacachi, which is a different region, Indigenous Leaders en Otavalo, and Indigenous Leaders with CONAE, the largest Indigenous Federation in Ecuador. all joined the strike, right? And there are demands and calls by Indigenous leaders in Otavalo to shut down everything. Banks, you know, workplaces, the public sector, taxis, trucks, stores. The Indigenous leaders are seen and heard saying shut down everything except for hospitals and pharmacies. Those are the only things that should be left operating. And so many students joined the general strike and major highways, you know, major commerce routes, as I said earlier, are shut down. And Ecuador has a high success rate with these strikes, right? In 2019 and 2022, we resisted this exact slashing of the diesel subsidy, which is an IMF austerity measure, right? It's a reform that the IMF contracts require of our government in order to receive loans. And so this was going to shake, and it has shaken the lives of so many Ecuadorians, stretching and widening the inequality gap in our country. And so... There was for 38 days, people put their lives on the line. And it was the way that that was made possible is there's a strong mutual aid network already existing among both the indigenous networks, the Union de Educadores en Ecuador, the Union of Educators, students and key unions in the public sector, trade unions. You know, FICHI came around and there were other, you know, groups like CELCEL, the Frente Unitario de Trabajo. All of these groups came forward. This is, sorry, the United Front of Workers and began cooking meals for each other, you know, sharing strike funds, you know, coordinating where to shut down key sectors so that there would really be a blow to the private economy. And that was the call from the indigenous leaders of Conay that the economy is brought to a halt. And I want to really give credit to the grassroots basis because I will speak honestly that Kona'i, being the largest Indigenous federation in our country, has a wide range of political spectrums within its organization. Leonidas Issa, who has been an incredible revolutionary inspiration for me and many Ecuadorians, has been the one to galvanize the past two general strikes that were successful. And in response, the Ecuadorian government attempted an assassination on his life this past summer. And when there are, so Ecuador's constitution of 2008 gives indigenous nations within Ecuador the right to practice their own sovereign laws of justice based in indigenous practices and traditions. And so the indigenous people, the allies and comrades of Leonidas Issa actually caught the agents who were members of the national police directorate they caught him after they tried to do this attempted assassination on him and they held them as they have every right to and they said you will be subjected to our tribunal process which is a fair process but it is under the laws as it should be of the indigenous people of Ecuador and the government is now charging those folks with kidnapping charges despite it being them exercising their own constitutional rights. So there is that radical, you know, leftist approach, working class, like proletarian approach to organizing in Conayi. There is also right-wing forces and liberal forces that have aligned themselves with U.S. imperialism within Conay. One of these is Yacu Pérez, who was one of the presidential candidates that split the left-wing vote away from a candidate offering key socialist reforms. And he, a Washington-backed puppet whose campaign was run by his wife, Manuela Peek, who I have endless beef with because she was a foreign affairs advisor to Jeb Bush in 2003 under, you know, the invasion of Iraq and the creation of the War on Terror era. And guess what she does now? She teaches indigenous studies and feminisms at Amherst College in the United States. And she writes books about indigenous feminist liberation. And then she gets up in the middle of the 2019 strike and coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia, which led to the Sencata massacre and the murder and death of many people. indigenous people and she calls him a child molester so i'm not really quite sure how to reconcile um you know her proclaimed politics with this but she was the one who ran his campaign and they split the left-wing vote and is part of why we saw the ushering in of these right-wing administrations here so I don't withhold my critiques of Kanae because as a primarily identity, and I think this is the shortcomings of an identity-based organization as opposed to, you know, a class-specific with a revolutionary workers program. These are the shortcomings. There's those two sides. However, no one can take away from the fact that Kanae has a unified stance against protecting the indigenous sovereign laws of our lands, right? Very similar to like tribal leaders in the United States who may have contradictory class positions with their own members on the res. And they often betray them for corporate and capitalist interests. But they also do protect certain tribe laws and protections from the United States. And recently, folks, they wielded that in defense of undocumented workers and stopped or temporarily halted the building of the Alcatraz prison. And so very similarly, Conay operates in that way. And they have, for the past 39 years, launched national paronacionales, the general strikes, time and time again successfully. And so they brought out their base and their base put their life on the line every single day, you know, from 5 a.m. in the morning till deep into the middle of the night. There was ongoing shifts. People would change and there was different cadres who would take turns. And there was, you know, everybody from youth to youth. elders in their 70s and 80s on the street fighting Rosalina Paki, one of the martyrs of the general strike. She was in her 60s. She was killed by the Ecuadorian police and military. And so it was really a intergenerational organizing. And it relied on building for the past 40 years a very strong network where there is deep roots of solidarity, coordination, And then unfortunately, because we were already under a state of war decree, which is what I want to talk about, how do we get there, right? They were able to start going into people's houses, raiding them. The police and military would go into people's houses, kidnap them in front of their children, disappear them, not tell anyone where they were being taken or detained. You know, this general strike happens after the murder and, you know, burning alive of these four black boys. And so the conditions really scared a lot of our organizers. And for the first time, it ended by the capitulation of the Ghanai administration, which was not put to a Democratic vote with its rank and file. And it ended against Democratic popular vote from the rank and file members. They called it off. They told the Daniel Noble administration that there had been too much violence against its members. At this point, three of the protesters had been killed and that for their safety, they were going to be suspending the strike and that it would continue, you know, at a later point if negotiations were not, you know, reached. And this was, of course, a disappointment to many of the rank and file members, not only because they didn't, you know, get to participate in it because it was not a democratic vote, but because primarily because in the face of escalated martial law, essentially, you don't roll over, you don't stand down, you know, and the Bolivian people demonstrated this under Janina Añez. And so it created a lot of discord and publicly many people Organizations like the Union of Indigenous and Campesino Workers came forth and they said, we reject this decision. We will continue the strike. And it is primarily because of their work, of the grassroots rank and file workers who said no. We will not follow the directions of this collaborationist leadership. We will continue organizing. And it is because of them and the popular education and the get out the vote work that they did that this past weekend we were able to block a U.S. military base from being built and block our constitution being dissolved. And, you know, every single person, regardless of their feelings, various different journalists in Ecuador, regardless of their feelings about the strike, said, absolutely, this win is due to the work of those protesters who put their life on the line. And so in the midst of this, there was a huge crackdown and censorship of the public TV channel 47, I think I shared with you earlier, and there was a lot of censorship. So there's a lot to be said about what the future of this strike that has been put on hold, what it holds. But certainly, I think that people are reinvigorated by this win and that there will be continued demands and organized labor in Ecuador never rests.

Jay: Thank you. I appreciate that. You've talked a little bit about the forms of repression. Was there more that you wanted to say about that or?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think it would be helpful if I can, just to talk about how this fits into the larger repression against pink tide and this war of revenge. Because I don't know how familiar folks are with the 21st century socialism model that was applied in Ecuador. I think Venezuela and Bolivia are a little bit more well-known. But I do want to talk a little bit about how we got here, if I can map out the last eight years. Between 2007 and 2017, the Correa government joined the nations of Pink Tide, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, who were building an anti-imperialist coalition against U.S. intervention, who were ushering in radical transformations for working class people. And Correa's administration did the same in Ecuador by seizing the central bank. and more than doubling our social spending as part of the socialismo del buen vivir, the socialism of good living, of quality life program, which incorporated progressive reforms to the economy with indigenous practices for justice and unfair economy. And as a result, nationwide poverty was reduced by 42%. Rural poverty was cut in half. Income inequality gap between the richest 10% of the country and the poorest was also cut in half. And this was a result of labor conditions and worker rights that were radically improving. Ecuador doubled our minimum wage to one of the highest in all of Latin America. And unpaid domestic labor in the home for the first time, which of course, you know, due to patriarchy has disproportionately exploited mothers and women and abuelas, was given for the first time in our nation's history the right to pensions, Social Security. you know, disability acts if you were to be injured. And so while I have many critiques around the gender politics of Rafael Correa's administration, particularly because as an economist who quotes Gramsci, he's an economist who quotes Gramsci all the time, he still refers to abortion and women's control of reproductive labor as a cultural issue and not an economical issue. So I have, you know, and he failed to legalize abortion. So I have many critiques of the gender politics under his administration. However, the fact that he gave a value and recognized the centuries of unpaid labor of women in the home was a critical advancement for gender minorities in the country. In addition to that, through the nationalization of education and universities, Ecuador had what analysts have called the most substantial and profound education reform in the pink tide era. In large part to the work, I want to shout out the union, the National Union of Educators in Ecuador, who were part of very similar to how, like in Venezuela, you had the Unión Comunera, who is a ministry wing in the government that has direct say over the Bolivarian process. Similarly, in Ecuador, we had rank and file organizations who had years of experience with grassroots organizing being given a seat at the table for nationwide policy reform and decisions. 300,000 youth, many of them rural, who used to do child labor, finally were given the opportunity to go to school under Correa. One of my comrades, a Kichwa domestic worker, she wasn't able to go to school past fourth grade. But then in 2016, All three of her children were in high school. So you saw in just less than one generation a dramatic shift in access to education. We quadrupled public investment in education. He tripled the teacher's salaries, improved labor conditions, extended the school day. And he also, one of the most important achievements that he made for Indigenous peoples' participation in our democracy was enshrining in the Constitution the state's obligation to preserve and expand the use of Indigenous languages in school and other public sectors. He built, like, I think it was maybe 14 Indigenous publicly funded schools and research centers across the nation dedicated to preserving Kichwa languages, culture, and politics. He also, with the help of the Cuban Revolution, implemented universal health care and the Cuban doctors donated over 7 million health care services, which is a stark contrast to today when thousands of dialysis patients are dying on the streets because Daniel Novoa has slashed our health care funding. When many mothers are having to leave their children on the doorsteps of hospitals, not receiving critical life-saving surgeries because they're being asked not only to pay out of pocket for these services, but also to pay the diesel of the ambulance that transports them there because Daniel Novoa slashed the diesel subsidy. And so people are being asked to pay for the gasoline of the ambulance. It's crazy. I mean, I took for granted living under Correa's health care system. I could go in and get an appointment under less than 15 minutes. I had so much like, you know, at that time I was testing for a immunology issue and I got so much, you know, just comprehensive health care without paying a dime. And so he really, and I just remember at that time I was organizing, I was 18 years old and I was organizing around, it was in 2016, I was organizing with Colombia and I would travel to Colombia sometimes. And I would come back and I would see the stark difference between Colombia that was under a right-wing U.S.-backed military state and ours. In addition to that, he expropriated large oil companies and he had established really rigorous social accountability regulations for key industries. You know, of course, I would have liked that he nationalized all of them, but that was a huge reform that he made. And as a result of that, our deforestation was reduced by 50 percent. Eighty five percent of our energy was renewable energy. And the Indigenous Amazonian communities who for centuries had been, you know, not only unthanked, but also repressed for protecting their lands, were now being directly compensated by the government for the labor and advocacy of protecting the rainforest. All of this meant that Ecuador actually was one of only two countries in the entire Americas that met the United Nations Global Metric for Environmentally Sustainable Development. And can you guess what was the other country? Cuba, you know? So... Of course, the Cuban Revolution, like it is, you know, it is this this shows that even national liberation projects serve the greater global good. Right. And the liberation and the health of the greater working class. Right. He also democratized the media. When Correa came into president, there were five news channels, only five news channels in the whole country, and four of them were owned by banks, the richest banks in the nation. So he outlawed any media being owned by the banks, which then changed completely the kind of organizing that we could do because we could get the message, we could have working class, collectively owned media cooperations, right, that could spread propaganda of left-wing journalists everywhere. And he also, you know, he diversified the economy. We had one of the best economies in the region at that time, and not for the richest 1%, but for, you know, everyday working people. And of course, the United States did not, you know, and they never forgave any of this. Most of all, the nationalization of key resources, right? They were infuriated that not only was Ecuador doing this, but Venezuela and Bolivia, they lost huge deposits and control over these deposits, right? And so... By no means, like, again, would I say it was a worker's state? And as a communist, I would have wanted him to abolish private property and, you know, the generalized commodity production surplus value, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada, right? But there were just really legitimate reforms that... I just am so grateful to have been able to live under that time. And I also, it breaks my heart now because we wake up and there are bodies strewn, strewn across the street, right? Because there has been an orchestration of the cartel economy, a handing over deliberately to manufacture consent for martial law, right? And for an iron fist ruling. The cartels are tools of imperialism. They are not the allies of anti-imperialist nations like Venezuela. They are the direct result of the United States foreign policy. And so I just, you know, feel like it was a really golden era in our history. And then Moreno, Correa's handpicked successor, pulled off a shocking political turncoat. He campaigned under the banner of 21st century socialism only to make a hard pivot and sprint straight into the arms of the IMF the moment he reached office. Very similar to Bukele, I think people forget that Bukele, who's now, like, Trump's fascist lackey and is helping with, you know, these mass deportations of our Latin American working class brothers and sisters, people forget that he actually began his career in government as a two-term mayor under the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party, the Farabundo Martín National Liberation Front, right? And then they had to expel him because he viciously violated its progressive political program. So... The point of that is that there's ops in these ranks, man, like and be vigilant against them, because we especially, you know, as you know, somebody whose family was an immigrant family in New York. And we're seeing, you know, the election of Zoran Mandani. And, you know, he's not even part of a committed revolutionary Marxist party. And he's already making capitulations to, you know, the police commissioner that is under the control of, you know, not only IDF who trains them, but also, you know, ICE agents. Like he was directly asked, Zahra Mandani was directly asked just, you know, a day or two ago, would he do anything differently than Eric Adams and his police commissioner did, who he's keeping, you know, when there was the ICE raids on Canal Street? And he, in a very roundabout and politically savvy way, said no. He said he would allow them. He said he would not have his police officers collaborate with the ICE agents. But Tish didn't allow her police officers to collaborate. She also, like, she did the same thing. She kept them out of their way so that they rolled out the red carpet for these ICE agents to kidnap, you know, all of these working class vendors. And so... I just think that's a story coming from Ecuador and from Latin America. I just think it's an important lesson to always be vigilant about even when they come from, quote unquote, socialist parties like the DSA, we need to make sure that they're accountable to our programs. And Moreno wasn't. And the result of that was a textbook. neoliberal shock therapy, right? There was a recession. They gutted public spending and the poverty rates climbed to their highest point in a decade after Correa had done like all that work to reverse them. And this is where I really want to talk about, if I may, the start of the creation of the cartel economy and the U.S.'s role in that. Because IMF austerity measures under Moreno led to the dismantling of key institutions, including the Security Coordination Ministry and the Justice Ministry. And I, being a longtime prison abolition organizer, of course, I don't believe in capitalist bourgeois democracies having control of our justice system, right? I want a model like the Cuban Revolution, where the police and the law serve the interests of the working class. They serve to protect working class people, not private property. like the cops in the United States and other capitalist countries do. But I can see the irony in claiming that you're trying to make the nation safer and then the IMF directive being closed down the security coordination ministry and the justice ministry, right? The IMF was laying the groundwork for our nation to become overridden with cartel and drug trafficking. And that is because they wanted to destabilize the nation so that they can manufacture public consent for U.S. military bases and American mercenaries as they're operating now. who then in turn will be used to control and repress workers, be used to control and repress the indigenous land defenders. And we know this because we've seen this playbook with the United Fruit Company, right? Historically, in which the United Fruit Company helped kill 200,000 Guatemalans, most of them indigenous, as retaliation for land reforms. At that point, the United Fruit Company was, you know, they were most of the majority of the land. I think it was like over 80% of the land in Guatemala was owned by like three or four landowners and the United Fruit Company was like the biggest one of that, right? And so when Arbenz, who is very similar to Correa and this like left liberal progressive president comes in and he does these land reforms, the United Fruit Company didn't allow that and they backed the civil war in Guatemala. And then we see this again with the Santa Marta banana massacre in Colombia. Yeah. in which striking workers were murdered, many of them by U.S.-trained officers. And so there is a playbook here where they want to, and now we see in current-day Colombia, there is in the key areas where there's natural resources, where they want to have control of the plantations, What they do is they will have paramilitaries there go and create destabilization. And there was actually one of the first and largest cartels created in Colombia was created in December of 1987 by Yair Klein, a colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces. So he was a colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces turned mercenary. And he comes to Bogota. And with a dozen special forces commandos from Israel and the United Kingdom. Right. And he's hired under the guise of training mercenaries to fight drug lords. Except what he starts doing is fighting working class people for the drug lords. And he ends up at the same time, there ends up being a arms trafficking network whose base is in where? The land of gusanos, Miami, Florida. Right. And so this was another IDF-US-backed operation that then laid the groundwork for cartel intervention in Colombia. And then there was another one. There was an Israeli military officer who was hired by the government of León Fébrez Cordero, a right-wing dictator in Ecuador, to advise on fighting against terrorism in And yet he was believed to have participated in the same criminal network that helped traffic arms to Miami. And so they always do this where they fund and and create the conditions also for cartels in our region. Right. By slashing cartels. public funding, by getting rid of jobs, by privatizing education, by making health care completely unaffordable. You are creating the... By excluding 50% of our nation's workers from the formal economy, you are forcing... to have to work for these cartels, right? And then there are actually direct ties to it. Daniel Novoa's own, the president of his own political party was investigated by the local authorities for having links and involvement to drug trafficking. Daniel Novoa's own family's corporation was caught trafficking hundreds of kilos of cocaine. And under his administration, Ecuador has become the port through which 70% of the world's cocaine is distributed. Not Venezuela, Ecuador. So these are consistently the U.S. and its assets in our regions deliberately create the conditions for this. And so... You know, this happened. It's rolled off with Moreno. But really what I want to focus on is that he tried to do the same diesel subsidy that Novoa did. And then as a result of that, actually, there were taxi, bus and truck drivers who again kicked off a rebellion, shutting down like all major highways, commerce routes and bridges. A few days after, Indigenous groups, student unions, and workers across several major sectors joined the strike, shutting down entire oil fields, TV stations, and other key points of production, making it officially a general strike, which continued to grind the country to a halt until the Moreno government overturned its decision. So... I say that just because while there has been extreme repression, there's also a history of very effective labor organizing that has defeated this bill three times twice before. Right. But then fast forward to the 2021 presidential elections after this general strike. And this is where things really start to just go downhill quickly. Right. Arauz is put forth as one of the presidential candidates of La Revolucion Ciudadana, and he is proposing an increase to the basic government provided. Each family would receive $1,000, $1,000 U.S. dollars. Working-class families who are on the brink of poverty, he's proposing an increase to public spending in health care, really ushering back in the Correa era. And this is when Yacu Perez, who I shared his campaign manager and his wife was the foreign affairs special advisor to Jeb Bush, comes in and he runs on a very greenwashing ticket, reviving legitimate critiques of the former Korea government who had violated its own constitution and accountability to indigenous sovereign law. And so he's riding the coattails of that legitimate frustration from the indigenous pueblos, but he's doing it. And at the same time, he's saying, oh, yes, I'll allow contracts from U.S. multinational corporations to come in here and drill. I would rather work with them than the Chinese companies, right? The classic Chinese. Cold War, xenophobic rhetoric that we're seeing. And so he actually convinces his base to vote nulo, to go to the polls because Ecuadorians are required to show up to the vote. It's, you know, you can be fined if you don't. And he actually manages to take away 18% after he was already out of the election. Right now it was between... I'm like, fine. Campaign in the primaries, that's totally fine. But he had actually lost and he had been ousted from the elections because he didn't have enough voters. And so now it was down to Arauz, who was the predecessor, who was the representative of Correa's party. And Guillermo Lazo... who was responsible for the 1990s economic crash in which millions of Ecuadorians lost over 60 percent of their savings in the bank. Many of them lost their homes. Many of them lost their jobs. So the choice was either this like social Democrat reformist or a banker. And Yacu Pérez tells and convinces 18% of voters to withhold their vote. And Arauz loses to Guillermo Lazo by like less than 4%. Like it was tragic. And that's what ushers in. Now, Guillermo Lazo's administration in a couple months after he's elected is notified. There's cabinet members saying, who are in his inner circle, who are being investigated for part of the León de Troya drug trafficking, where there's direct links between senior national police officials in his cabinet and Albanian drug trafficking networks in the country. And instead of dismantling this criminal apparatus, the government of Guillermo Lasso dismantles the investigators. The prosecutor's office buries the case. And when Rubén, the investigators, the investigation's key suspect and potential informant, was gunned down in March of 2023, I think that's when it happens, the file for the case proving that Guillermo Lasso had ties to the cartels is sealed with impunity. The report assembled by the Frente Parlamentario Anticorrupción laid out the details plainly, and its own chair, Villavicencio, is then assassinated on August 9th of 2023. Another loose end that's conveniently tying up this case, that directly ties this banker president to drug trafficking. In the midst of all of this, Guillermo Lasso is described by the U.S. State Department to be the most favorable president of two decades, right? And this even when crime is rising fast, right? And that's just because, like I said earlier, the United States has never had an issue with right-wing narco traffickers. The right-wing narco states, the narco states are always right-wing. They always help the United States usher in justifications as they have now, right? for U.S. mercenaries. And it's just, you know, I know I've been going on for a long time, but the effects of this, like I said, are horrifying. Child murder has increased by 640 percent. Like, I don't even know how to wrap my mind around that. You know, I was 18. I used to walk home from a concert at three in the morning safely in the streets and And now we see babies being, you know, gunned down. The disappearances of children doubled in one year with over 300 cases registered. And young girls, I think I said this earlier, accounted for more than 70% of these cases. They're being trafficked, right? This is the privatization of young girls as property. And... It's exacerbated by the fact that these cartels offer money to families and security to families. These families being forced to live in cartel ridden neighborhoods and not living safely where the police are involved. Many of the testimonies of the people who have to live in these neighborhoods say the police are corrupt. They're collaborating with them. And they get security in exchange for access to their daughters by the cartel who treat them as property. Again, as young as 12 years old. There's also like severe displacement as a result of this. Actually, some of my family members, my uncle, my cousins just had to move from their home that they had spent years building on the coast. They had to move because it's become one of the five most dangerous cities in the world. And so there's over 90,000 Ecuadorians who have been internally displaced. And many of them are having to flee to the United States. And I just want to say this because I organized in the undocumented worker spaces in the United States for many years. And there is in many spaces, even in the most radical, you know, like anti-ICE protests and organizing spaces, there's still this idea that you can be in solidarity with undocumented migrants in the United States while maintaining the State Department's line on Venezuela. These sanctions on Venezuela caused the equivalent of three great suppressions in that country, which has forced people to flee, right? Not... the Bolivarian Revolution, which has lifted millions of people out of poverty. No, it is these sanctions which keep people in poverty. And so I just don't think that you can say that you are in solidarity with immigrants in the United States and then yet be supporting the imperialist action that forces people to be displaced from their homeland and come here and be exploited because they don't have the legal right to join unions. They don't have the legal right to be protected. and they can't strike. And so they have very little labor power compared to like the American citizen workers. And so, yeah, I just, you know, all of these are creating a huge migration crisis, which also means that our productive forces aren't able to develop. It means that families are torn apart. It means that people crossing the border from Mexico to the United States are being victim to extortion. Ecuadorians faced some of the highest crimes of extortion crossing the Mexican border because these folks know it's not lost on them what the political landscape of people fleeing Latin America to here are. So they take advantage of the folks who are leading the most dire and precarious situation because they're like, oh, these people will do anything to get to safety, right? So, yeah, I mean, I know I've been going on for like a really long time, but I just the he has continued to violate so many of our constitutional laws. And he is creating the conditions for murder, for drug trafficking, so that people then think, oh, the only solution to my safety is the military. And it is the Eric Prince trained military. It is Blackwater mercenaries coming in here and teaching our military officers how how to kill working class people, and that they're not here to protect us. Like, I just want, you know, I spend a lot of my time trying to make sure that Ecuadorians know they're here to protect the interests of the U.S. Capitol. They're not here to make sure that we are safe. If that was the case, they would give us all guaranteed income. They would socialize housing. They would socialize medicine. I mean, look at what the Cuban Revolution has done. You see, when I can walk down the Malecon in La Habana, It is so safe. When I'm in El Vedado, it is so safe. Cuba has one of the lowest rates of femicide. It has one of the lowest rates of homicide. It has one of the lowest rates of drug trafficking in the Americas. That is because they make sure that people's basic needs are covered. And Ecuador just hasn't done that. And as a result, we are going to see the rise of cartels. And I'm just like, it breaks my heart that... As a result of cartel rising, the United States can then bomb innocent fishermen in the Caribbean. And yet the actual cartel crisis that lies in Ecuador, there's nothing done about it because it benefits them, right?

Jay: Yeah. No, thank you for all of that. I know we're kind of winding down, but is there anything that you want to make sure to plug, to point people towards, places people can learn more or follow your work or, yeah, just resources or things you want to connect folks with?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, thank you again for this opportunity and to shed a light on the return of Operación Condor to Ecuador. I do ask, I understand that primarily your listeners are in the United States, right? And so I do want to ask them and anybody listening from anywhere to show solidarity by joining right now. We're actually in the middle. of the International Week of Action for Solidarity with Venezuela, with Haiti, and with, you know, all the countries under the boot of U.S. imperialism right now. And, you know, I didn't talk a lot about Haiti, but Haiti has been also victim to U.S. meddling in very similar playbook as Ecuador and Colombia, right? Yeah. They had militant garment worker strikes in 2017, militant strikes against slashes to their diesel as well in 2019. And the United States wants to keep control, particularly the Clintons were involved in a lot of the repression and exploitation of garment workers in Haiti. And so they, just like everybody in Latin America, are being punished for rising up and demanding fair working conditions, demanding that their labor be used for their own nation and not to serve U.S. corporate interests. And Venezuela has been one of the key and only allies to the Haitian people. And I just want to highlight that this International Week of Action, there are several different protests happening across the United States, across the Americas, against U.S. intervention, Black Alliance for Peace in the Zona de Paz. is organizing a coalition, which I've recently joined, of people across the Americas in Peru, which is also having a general strike against a U.S.-backed military administration there, in Colombia, in Esmeralda, Ecuador, the predominantly Black community in Ecuador on the coast. And so across Abia Yala this week, people are uprising, and I would encourage folks to join that and to move our movement beyond just protests, but actual organized labor that can strike down and hold this economy hostage to our demands, to the demands of the sovereignty of third world nations. So yeah, I would like to plug that. I would like to ask that folks, you know, reach out if you can. I would love, you know, my handle on Twitter is Soviet with Sazon, Soviet as in the Soviet Union with Sazon, S-A-Z-O-N, porque soy latina y tengo Sazon. And so it's you know, this is an opportunity. Also, I want to reach across, you know, borders and say anybody across the Americas who wants to show solidarity with Ecuadorians. The fight is continuing. The Movimiento de Indígenas y Campesinos del Cotopaxi have said we will come out to the streets again because what this weekend's victory shows is that the Ecuadorian people have our back. And so I will be covering that as I've been covering the strike leading up. And I will be sharing some of that writing on Twitter, but also launching my own media blog, you know, in collaboration with Comrades to bring more coverage to the working class rank and file resistance that is happening against U.S. intervention in Latin America. And so I hope and I've been very grateful to the union organizers. Who are the other movement organizers in the United States who are reaching out and saying, how do we build a shared international worker uprising against this? And I would just ask that that continues to grow. And like I said, one of the first ways that you can do that is joining the National Week of Action today. So, yeah, thank you.

Jay: Right on. Yeah, no, thank you. This was great. Really appreciated it. And yeah, learned a lot. And I'm sure our audience will as well. So thank you.

Speaker 3: Thank you. Thank you.

Jay: So,

Speaker 3: oh