Interview by Hugo Prieto in Contrapunto.com
12 October 2015
Article
Edgardo Lander argues that Venezuela’s once-hopeful revolution is coming to an end, because it failed to overcome the Leninist logic of verticality as well as the model of the rentier state.
"Electoral calculations eliminate all possibility of transformation, of going beyond, of imagining a different country, because the starting point is what already exists. In this sense, electoral competition has an extraordinarily conservative effect on political systems, reaffirming ‘common sense’; whoever goes beyond these limits will have big problems."
"Neither in political debates nor in government programmes is there an acknowledgment of where we are. The two party political forces differ in absolutely everything, except for one small detail: both offer (at least when Chávez was last elected) an oil production of six million barrels a day by the end of this constitutional period. They disagree on everything else except the idea of strengthening the oil rentier-state model. But this is precisely what needs to be discussed. The problem is that there is a nation-wide rentier-state consensus. "
bbc 16.8. Ecuador has abandoned a conservation plan that would have paid the country not to drill for oil in previously untouched parts of Yasuni National Park in the Amazon rainforest. President Rafael Correa said rich nations had failed to back the initiative, leaving Ecuador with no choice but go ahead with drilling. ""It was not charity that we sought from the international community, but co-responsibility in the face of climate change," he said. According to the Yasuni-ITT trust fund, 78% of Ecuadorian are against drilling in the park, which is also home to indigenous communities, including the Tagaeri and the Taromenane.
ALAI, América Latina en Movimiento By Eduardo Gudynas 2013-08-21 Ecuador The rights of nature following the end of the petroleum moratorium in Amazonia "All this means that we are left to anxiously wonder whether, when the moratorium on petroleum in the Amazonia of Ecuador was abolished, the rights of Nature may not also have begun to collapse. "