Written by: Adam Riggio

The latest progressive leader to have faced shady judicial prosecutions is Rafael Correa. Correa was president of Ecuador for ten years, leaving office in 2017. He left at the end of his constitutional term limit, but under a cloud of suspicion over corruption. On April 7, Correa was convicted on corruption and bribery charges, sentenced to eight years in prison.

Correa has lived in his wife’s home country, Belgium, since 2018, so wasn’t present for the trial and will likely be staying in Europe rather than serving his sentence. Frankly, that’s a fair response, since the charges against him come on a wave of suspicious legal prosecutions against left-wing leaders and parties across Latin America.

The Most Valuable Green Rice

In the last year of his presidency, Ecuador’s Attorney General Diana Salazar began investigating a chain of good old-fashioned bribery that apparently stretched throughout Correa’s political party, Movimiento Alianza Patria Altiva i Soberana (Alianza-PAIS). The popular press nicknamed the investigation Arroz Verde, after a common euphemism in the bribery network that referred to money transfers as green rice.

That network of bribery and favour-trading first began in 2012, was found to have flowed from the lower levels of party organizers all the way to the top. Correa was convicted of charges stemming from Arroz Verde.

His vice-president from 2013, left office had already been convicted. Jorge Glas was imprisoned in 2018 for coordinating a different bribery network between Alianza-PAIS officials and executives with the Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht over mining and oil operations in Ecuador.

There is, as you might expect by this point in history, some worries about whether the corruption investigations against socialist and otherwise progressive parties and governments across Latin America is as virtuous as is portrayed. The Ecuadorian investigation of their president and his party began with evidence uncovered by the Brazilian Lava Jato, or Car Wash, investigation.

Washed Away in Lava Jato

Since 2014, a team of special prosecutors across Brazil have been investigating government officials for a string of bribery, bid rigging, and money laundering around oil infrastructure and drilling rights contracts with the state-owned Petrobras and the privately-owned Odebrecht.

Brazilian prosecutors shared evidence with Ecuadorian Attorney General Salazar, which was the foundation of the case that Jorge Glas, as vice-president, took bribes from Odebrecht owners and officials in exchange for mining contracts. The bribery network that implicated Correa is separate from the Odebrecht-Glas deal; Ecuadorian prosecutors discovered it during their Lava Jato-related investigation.

Lava Jato began as an investigation into whether upper tier members of the Partido Trabalhadores, in English the Workers Party (PT), had accepted bribes of expensive vehicles, real estate, and cash in exchange for contracts. It expanded into a probe of the entire PT government and their relationship with Petrobras and Odebrecht.

The Lava Jato prosecutions have since sent literally thousands of corporate leaders and politicians to prison, and seen the impeachment of former PT leader and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. The first PT president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was sent to prison for just over a year on bribery charges. His conviction was overturned November 2019. Even members of the right-wing coalition who replaced Rousseff’s government, including the coalition’s president Michel Temer.

Brazil’s Infamous Minister of Justice

Last year, Jair Bolsonaro won the Brazilian presidency with a public image as the only one in the country’s politics who wasn’t corrupt, thanks to Lava Jato targeting and prosecuting literally everyone else. That investigation has since been exposed as endemically corrupt.

The Intercept revealed in 2019 that virtually all the prosecutors leading Car Wash and the judges assigned to the case dedicated the investigation to forcing Lula and the PT from power permanently. As Bolsonaro’s fascist political movement ascended, one of the chief judges examining evidence in Lava Jato, Sérgio Moro, openly encouraged prosecutors in private chats to ensure his victory.

Moro was since removed from the judiciary. Yet this occurred only because Bolsonaro appointed him to a cabinet position that had never existed before. The Ministries of Justice and Public Security were combined into his current post, giving Moro’s office authority over both the judiciary and police. Bolsonaro has openly said that he will appoint Moro to the country’s Supreme Court as soon as the very next opening. The relationship is an explicit quid pro quo to the main who literally imprisoned all the fascist leader’s enemies.

Correa’s conviction in Ecuador this week, while the common people suffer from a serious COVID outbreak, is likewise tainted with motives in political rivalry. The prosecution of Correa reached a notably feverish intensity when Lenin Moreno replaced him as president. Yet, despite having been Correa’s vice-president since 2013, Moreno has rolled back most of the socialist state and shredded environmental protections in favour of oil and mining company priorities.

Rafael Correa is the latest socialist leader to have fallen to the fascist colluders of the Lava Jato investigation. He suffers under the greater irony of his prosecution’s political beneficiary corrupted his own party into selling out its principles to become a neoliberal corporate stooge.

The Pain of the Progressive’s Paradox

The case of Rafael Correa, who is now a fugitive from the judiciary of the country he led three years ago, should provoke our thoughtful reflection and ethical dedication. Correa was a leader of the Bolivarian socialist movement in Latin America, which today is under siege. Yet we should not reflexively defend Correa as a persecuted hero.

Correa won Ecuador’s presidency in 2007 with strong support from the country’s Indigenous communities. Ecuador’s fourteen Indigenous nations are extremely well-organized and mobilized politically, and are strong ecological activists. When Correa’s government enshrined Ecuador’s new constitution in 2008, it explicitly recognized the legal rights of nature.

By 2012, however, Indigenous-led protests rocked the country’s politics, when Correa’s government signed an agreement with a Chinese mining company to run a massive mine. The mine in Zamora-Chinchipe province has caused massive damage to the Ecuadorian Amazon since then.

As a democratic socialist standing against imperialist influence in his region, we progressives stand with him. But we must never tolerate hypocrisies from our leaders, even when we must make compromises over critical issues when the time is right to advance our causes.

Even so, we progressives always face the most difficult choices. We must always be so vigilant against any corruption in those we empower as our leaders, whether as pathetic as hypocrisy or as appalling as if any of those charges across Latin America approach the truth. Yet when our leaders are under siege, we must also defend them.

A fascist can delight in his leader’s corruption because he’s in it to profit from state violence. We progressives all too often find ourselves fighting our enemies and each other. It’s no circular firing squad; it’s because we must all hold each other to virtue and justice.