As someone living under a US-backed dictatorship, I can tell you this is how it begins. 2 years and 21 State of Exceptions later, we’re ruled by perpetual martial law with Pentagon bombs, sexual torture, military checkpoints, activists starved, waterboarded or disappeared by soldiers. A little DEA operation turns into the opening of an entire FBI Office in our capital, the military killing protesters at a general strike turned into targeted assassination plots on indigenous labor activists, a few visits from a U.S. Envoy turns into U.S. boots-on-the-ground operations where campesinos are electrocuted. Ecuador has lived all of this already: the hijacking of a once socialist nation literally beat into a Yankee colony. We cannot let it happen to our sister nation of Bolivia too.
