American Thinker: Ecuador is drawing flak for shutting its doors on fleeing Venezuelan refugees and migrants.
According to Reuters:
QUITO (Reuters) – Ecuador is setting up new units to check Venezuelan immigrants’ legal status and may tighten entry requirements after a Venezuelan man murdered his pregnant Ecuadorian girlfriend, President Lenin Moreno said on Sunday.
The killing in the northern city of Ibarra is the first reported murder perpetrated by a Venezuelan immigrant in Ecuador since hundreds of thousands have arrived there after fleeing an economic crisis in Venezuela.
“I have ordered the immediate setting up of units to control Venezuelan immigrants’ legal status in the streets, in the workplace, and at the border,” Moreno said on Twitter.
The Venezuelan reaction, even from non-communist, anti-dictatorship Venezuelans, was critical.
It only took one murder to take action?
The American leftists could learn a lesson from this.
The murder of that woman was posted on the internet by dozens of witnesses. He had been holding her with a knife for an hour on a major public street before he savagely stabbed her multiple times. Yes, it set off repressed resentment against Venezuelan immigrants. (The governor and the police chief of the province were both fired because police stood by for all that time and never intervened until he began stabbing her).
Ecuador is a small country and it is difficult to absorb hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of them with violent criminal backgrounds (as did the murderer). Many of the Venezuelans are economic refugees who have supported the Chavez and Maduro regimes.
There is also tremendous resentment against Venezuela in Ecuador because of its violation of Ecuador’s election laws in getting Correa elected and the subsequent payback in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of commodities, “lent” to Venezuela, none of which has been paid for.
Yes, Venezuela took in tens of thousands of Ecuadorians fleeing the Ecuadorian banking collapse of 1998-99, and, yes, there were criminal elements among them. The ability of Venezuela to absorb those economic refugees at that time is completely different to the situation Ecuador faces today.
After ten years of Correa’s corrupt regime, Ecuador is flat broke and owes billions to China and other creditors. This high profile murder is the spark that could ignite far more than resentment against Venezuelan illegals. If the government is not seen as acting swiftly and decisively to “do something”, suppressed resentment toward the vestiges of Correa’s regime (which are many) could flare out of control and damage the country further.