Toma nota.../Take note...

The intent of any election is to put to test the mechanisms by which modern representative democracy is operationalized and made pro-electorates. An election, therefore, is a formal, informed and conscientious decision-making process which the electorates or a population chooses an individual to a hold a public or a corporate office in TRUST on their behalf. This form of representative democracy is practiced through a suffrage, that is, the right to vote and be voted in an elections, the right or chance to make or express an opinion and or participate in a decision-making process on matters that affect one’s life.

Despite the growing public appreciation of the vital role of representative democracy in nation building and economic development, still there exist the challenges of building a sustainable democracy that is purely based on the basic principles and values of good governance.

On balance, though, it is possible to make an association between direct democracy and the representative democracy which may give us what we call “participatory democracy”.

The world over, participatory democracy is being seen as the best bet for tackling and to a significant extent fixing the limits and handicaps of representative democracy. Participatory democracy denotes the form in which the people literary rule themselves, either directly or indirectly through their democratically elected leaders and governance institutions.

Published by Council on Foreign Relations

Moving fast in his waning months, President Obama concluded he had not done enough to overturn U.S. policy toward Cuba and ensure that his new policies will survive. So he has issued a new “Presidential Policy Directive” that goes even further.

Two things are striking about it. First, what the United States gets in return from the Castro regime is exactly and precisely nothing. This is not a bargained-for exchange; Castro makes no promises, allows no one to get out of prison, does not even make a vague allusion to reform. Nothing. This is because Cuba policy is, for the President, less an exercise in statesmanship than the true product of ideological politics. This policy is a remedy, a medicine, an apology, to make up for what he sees as decades of American sin toward Cuba.

Of course, in Mr. Obama’s imagination “Cuba” means “Castro;” the Cuban people are really not an actor here. The benefits of all the commerce that will now grow go directly to the regime. For example, the hotels that Mr. Obama wishes to fill with American tourists are owned by the Cuban military. No matter, it seems.

One can see glimpses of all this in the actual text of the Directive. For example, take these lines: “we are not seeking to impose regime change on Cuba; we are, instead, promoting values that we support around the world while respecting that it is up to the Cuban people to make their own choices about their future.”

Brazilians Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff could end up in prison for corruption. Especially Lula. Also the Spaniard Mariano Rajoy and the Argentine Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, if prosecutors prove the charges that hang over their heads.

Why go on? At this moment, there are more than 30 European and Latin American heads or former heads of state in prison, expatriated, or suspected of embezzlement, misappropriation of funds, money laundering and other coarser ways to steal the resources of society for personal benefit or to foment political patronage. I’m not even including the Africans and many Asians, because the list would be too long.

The usual scheme consists of a criminal triangle. There are some politicians or functionaries who have the authority to grant juicy state contracts and there are some businessmen who are willing to undertake those projects but not to win them in open, clean and truly competitive bids but through tricks and deals. Between them there’s usually a “bagman” who negotiates with the businessmen in the name of the politicians, receives the bribe, splits it, and keeps a slice.

Last August, the Secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Emilio Alvarez Icaza, criticized the state of democracy in Ecuador. Alvarez pointed out that Ecuador’s democracy enjoys electoral democracy but as a whole, democracy is weakened by repression of freedom of expression and freedom of association. Alvarez condemned in strong terms, the fact that cartoonists and other media outlets are outlawed if they criticize the president.

Of course Alvarez’s declarations were only the tip of the iceberg in a country where formal democracy works as a façade better than in any other country in the region. However, Ecuador has been under the radar, hardly detected by the international community. Furthermore, the regional anti-democratic environment that has prevailed in the last two decades has sustained this abysmal state of democracy in Ecuador.

Last December the officially controlled National Assembly approved fifteen constitutional amendments that established that all public offices could be reelected indefinitely. This applies also to the president but only after May, 2017, which effectively excludes Rafael Correa from running in the next presidential elections. However, Correa could run indefinitely after 2021.