Democratic socialism was in action yesterday in Ecuador, where Lilian Tintori, wife of Venezuela’s jailed opposition leader, was denied entry at the international airport in Guayaquil.
Tintori, whose husband was sentenced to 14 years in prison last month by Venezuela’s leftist regime, met with President Trump last month. She was barred entry into Ecuador yesterday because she had gone there to help campaign for the opposition party candidate in the April 2 presidential runoff election.
Aristegui Noticias, a Mexican news website, had her social media comments on the incident, translated here from Spanish:
“They didn’t let me in. They took my passport and told me no entry, you need to leave the country. They don’t let me in because they don’t want me telling the truth, they won’t let me in because they don’t want me to help my brothers in Ecuador and they don’t want me to enter because change is coming to this country.
According to the report, Tintori said the officials who turned her away told her that she was being kicked out on the orders of Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa himself. “[Correa] is expelling me from Ecuador because he is complicit in the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro. He doesn’t want us to talk about change with our brethren,” she wrote on Twitter, adding in a video message as she boarded a plane for Miami that she’d be back.
.@MashiRafael me expulsa de Ecuador porque es cómplice de la dictadura de Maduro, no quiere que hablemos del cambio con nuestros hermanos.
— Lilian Tintori (@liliantintori) March 15, 2017
Correa, Ecuador’s president since 2007, was an ally of the late Hugo Chavez, and continues to support his successor, Nicolas Maduro. Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998 and proceeded to gut the checks and balances against his power that were then-present in the Venezuelan constitution. At the height of his influence, Chavez was attempting to export his brand of democratic socialism to other countries, such as Honduras.
Correa continues to support Maduro, whose term in office has seen in and extended the disastrous results of Chavez’s reign. The food shortages are so acute that the average Venezuelan has lost nearly 20 lbs.
Maduro has cracked down on all media even slightly critical of his rule, recently pulling CNN en Español off the air. More alarmingly, he has had political opponents, such as Tintori’s husband, Leopoldo Lopez, arrested and held as political prisoners.
Correa, who incidentally has been sheltering Julian Assange within the walls of his nation’s embassy in London, hopes Ecuadorean voters will choose his leftist party’s candidate, Lenin Moreno, as his successor. Tintori had traveled to Guayaquil to campaign for Moreno’s opponent, Guillermo Lasso, who is favored in next month’s runoff election for president. Lasso responded by stating that “Ecuador is living out the dictatorship of a political party.”
