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On 11 April 2021, Guillermo Lasso (52,4%), the right-wing candidate, defeated Andres Arauz, the candidate supported by Rafael Correa and part of the Left, by 52.4% vs 47.6% in the second round of ballots for the presidential election. Lasso was elected thanks to the division of the Left, since a significant part of it, which has become deeply diffident of Rafael Correa, called for a null vote. Votes on the popular side, that represented a clear majority in the first round of February 2021, were...

Latin America has once again entered a period of strong social and political turbulence Interview with Franck Gaudichaud Franck Gaudichaud recently wrote and coordinated two collective works drawing a critical assessment of “progressive” political attempts to challenge neoliberal hegemony in Latin America. In this interview, he considers the social and political dynamics of the recent period, and also current issues in the region. The interview was conducted by Rosa Moussaoui, journalist an...

Series: 1944-2021, 77 years of interference from the World Bank and the IMF (Part 28) The World Bank did not Foresee the Arab Spring Popular Uprisings and still Promotes the very same Policies that triggered them 12 April by In 2021, the World Bank (WB) and the IMF will reach the age of 77. These two international financial institutions (IFIs), created in 1944, are dominated by the United States and a few major allied powers that act to generalize policies contrary to the interests o...

3 April by Piyumi Fonseka Sometimes a loan obtained to save a life can end up taking another life, in the debt-stricken villages of Sri Lanka. A 24-year-old mother killed her child and committed suicide two months ago due to her inability to repay a loan of Rs. 400, 000 to a micro-finance company. It is just one story out of millions of borrowers. Like more than 2.5 million other people in Sri Lanka, most of them were women; she had turned to micro credit in an effort to lift herself o...

India: Proposals against new attempts to privatise state-owned banks 11 March by Public sector banks account for more than two-thirds of the banking market in India. Currently, they are subjected to a systematic smear campaign launched by the reactionary Narendra Modi government, big media including the international press such as the Financial Times. [1] These canards are aimed at accelerating the privatisation drive underway since the 1990s. Critics of the public sector argue that...

8 February by Miriam Lang Ecuador’s third largest city Cuenca, of more than 600.000 inhabitants, has voted clearly against large-scale mining on February 7 th, 2021. According to estimates published on Sunday night, 80% of voters have expressed themselves for water and life, and against mining and extractivism. This referendum has been approved by the Constitutional Court in September 2020, what makes its results binding. While the results of the simultaneous presidential election we...

Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Egypt Yanis Iqbal The whiplash of authoritarianism is being ruthlessly used in Egypt. On January 6, 2021, Ahmed Khalifa, social news editor of Egypt 360 website, was arrested after publishing a series of reports on workers’ legitimate protests. He was falsely charged with joining a terrorist group and spreading fake news, and remains in detention to date. Before his arrest, Khalifa published articles about strikes at the state-owned ElDelta Company for Fertilize...

Evolution of the external debt of developing countries between 2000 and 2019 Part 1 An update of the three part series “A new trap of indebtedness of the South to the North” published in September-October 2020. At the end of the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium, developing countries (DC) were emerging from an unprecedented debt crisis, the “lost decades of development”, which had started in 1982 with Mexico defaulting. Between 1980 and 1999 there had been at least 280 deb...

What are the challenges of World Social Forum 2021 in relation to the global situation? 18 January by   Contents   The challenges of the World Social Forum 2021 are high. In a deep contradictory world situation, it must make it possible to: redefine an alterglobalist proposal corresponding to the new situation; understand the new contradictions of the world system; start from the movements to resist, define the alternatives, build a new emancipation project.  Taking into account a c...

The Macron Doctrine, or the Paris Consensus, pledges to reverse those trends. To fight back against the ills of the financialised economy, Macron offers a three-pillar solution: more Europe, a true Europe-Africa partnership, and coalitions with governments and non-governmental players. Indeed, the Macron Doctrine is notionally post-colonial. It calls for re-inventing the ‘Afro-European Axis’ and puts the onus on Europeans to ‘show that this universalism we uphold is not universalism of t...