"The country is simply governed by sociopaths"

Vengeance is mine says Lenin Moreno, the hard eight-year trial of Julian Assange

"The country is simply governed by sociopaths"

By: Orlando Pérez: This is what Noam Chomsky says about the US And it does not seem to be wrong if the same sentence is applied for Ecuador and Brazil, just to mention two Latin American countries. There are others like Chile, Colombia and Bolivia that have assumed this pandemic as an opportunity for repression and business, although they have not reached levels of sociopathy.

Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Lenín Moreno have exposed their real political condition in the Covid-19 pandemic. Overcoming the distances of the economies of each of their nations, there are some coincidences: they have the enormous capacity to despise people's lives, the warnings of scientists and, needless to say, the collaboration offered by their political opponents. Beyond the differences of ideological or partisan order, in all three countries the opposition has been much more sensible and responsible in proposing urgent and immediate measures to avoid tens of thousands of deaths.

But its mismanagement is not now. It should be remembered that Trump, two years ago, dissolved the pandemic unit within the National Security Council; Temer's Brazilian government froze social spending (including health spending there) for twenty years, put a ceiling on it, and thereby intended to save money for other things, which has not been modified by Bolsonaro; Moreno reduced the health budget for the years 2019 and 2020, threw twelve thousand health system officials onto the street, expelled the Cuban medical brigade and, with the pandemic already installed in Ecuador, paid 324 million dollars of the commitments of external debt bonds.

But, in addition, the three neo-fascist leaders, to paraphrase Chomsky: they are a machine of lies. Trump says one thing today, tomorrow he changes the version and the next day he accuses the media of committing fake news with his statements. There are already more than twenty thousand lies on your part. And in Brazil there is not a single doubt that the alleged attack on Bolsonaro, in the midst of the electoral campaign, the figures he gives about his economy, in addition to everything they have done against Lula, is part of a way of lying without shame. And Moreno, if there were information verifiers (as well as there are USAID operators to search for alleged correíles trolls), already adds many lies, among them, the real number of foreign debt, the alleged spy camera in his office and the number of killed by coronaviruses, and without counting their own claims of trickery, or their sexist and macho aberrations. As Chomsky says: when "you don't stop telling lies, what happens is that the concept of truth simply disappears."

Unlike all this, countries such as Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua face fewer resources (in fact, the block is sharpening for the first two) and with figures below what some media in the region warned. Let's not forget how they predicted the catastrophe in Venezuela and now it is the country that has the least number of infections in relation to its number of inhabitants. For this they have not had to lie or exaggerate, they simply demonstrated that health systems, depending on the people, are the shield for epidemics of this dimension.

Presidents Trump, Bolsonaro and Moreno, who underestimated the pandemic, now boast of being the first to warn it, close borders and serve the people. But, according to the chronology of the events and their statements, the opposite occurred. It is no longer enough to prepare a list of their fallacies because their spokesmen and the media that replicate everything they say have been in charge of hiding the deceptions and highlighting what they are now doing, regardless of the fact that there are already tens of thousands of deaths in the United States. According to the figures that are not expressed in official reports, but in the death records of public entities, more than five thousand in Ecuador, and in Brazil they could exceed five thousand in less than a month and the rate increases, at time to write this article.

Why do these leaders and their government teams behave like this? Are they just outbursts and a demonstration of their poor readiness to rule? Is there a gram of ethical and moral responsibility in them to understand that the lives of thousands of people and social processes are in their hands?


It is difficult to answer from the political analysis, but there are two or three explanations. The fundamental one is that they do not conceive of the State as a public apparatus with enormous obligations and with a very high dose of urgency, regardless of the political calculation. They see it as a hindrance to their private businesses and measure each step based on the impact it can have on their fortunes or that of their friends and financiers. But another could be ventured: there is an enormous intellectual and political inability to read reality beyond their noses. The three "leaders" have given more than one proof of this and, obviously, it is their peoples who are solely responsible for keeping these sociopaths at the head of the State, they and a political opposition that has not been able to demonstrate the capacity to react to the danger, not only from human beings but from humanity itself.