Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth:
A Quechua Christmas Carol
by Greg Palast
December 24th, 2007
I don't know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.
I'm not Barbara Walters. It's not the kind of question I ask.
He hesitated. Then said, "My father was unemployed.”
He paused. Then added, "He took a little drugs to the States... This is called in Spanish a mula . He passed four years in the states- in a jail.”
He continued. "I'd never talked about my father before."
Apparently he hadn't. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.
Correa's dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original "banana republic" - and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.
"My mother told us he was working in the States."
His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.
At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.
"We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.”
It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.
Or maybe there was something else to it.
Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He'd won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation...[Open in new window]
A Quechua Christmas Carol
by Greg Palast
December 24th, 2007
I don't know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.
I'm not Barbara Walters. It's not the kind of question I ask.
He hesitated. Then said, "My father was unemployed.”
He paused. Then added, "He took a little drugs to the States... This is called in Spanish a mula . He passed four years in the states- in a jail.”
He continued. "I'd never talked about my father before."
Apparently he hadn't. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.
Correa's dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original "banana republic" - and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.
"My mother told us he was working in the States."
His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.
At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.
"We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.”
It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.
Or maybe there was something else to it.
Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He'd won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation...[Open in new window]
posted by Dan at 6:26 PM
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