IVP601- February 2025

In conversation with Jacobin América Latina, the Ecuadorean indigenous leader and presidential candidate analyses the country’s economic and political crisis, the impact of popular mobilisations and the need to articulate a project from the grassroots that combines social struggle and electoral dispute.

It has been almost two months since Moussa Tchangari, secretary general of the NGO Alternative Espace Citoyenne (AEC) in Niger, was arrested, prompting widespread protests. Held incommunicado for 48 hours, Tchangari was transferred to the ‘central counter-terrorism service’ on charges of ‘undermining state security’, ‘criminal association in connection with terrorism’ and ‘apology for terrorism’.

The ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ uprising has profoundly shaken the foundations of the Islamic Republic. Regional defeats, including the weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the fall of the dictator Assad, have further weakened the regime in Tehran. With the social and economic crisis into which the country is sinking, the very survival of the Islamic Republic is at stake.

With each passing day and at an accelerating pace in recent years, it becomes increasingly obvious that we are witnessing a new era of rise of the far right on a global scale, similar to the era of the rise of fascist forces between the two world wars of the twentieth century. The label “neofascism” has been used to designate the contemporary far right, which adapted to our time, out of its awareness that repeating the same fascist pattern witnessed in the past century was no longer possible, in the sense that it was no longer acceptable to the majority of people.

Greece is one of Europe’s worst examples of environmental policy. The most well-known damage is caused by fires, but recent industrial and energy policy, particularly under Prime Minister Mitsotakis, has been a disaster, also in democratic terms.

Elon Musk, the multibillionaire and advisor to President Donald Trump who now heads a team called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been taking over U.S. government agencies—the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), General Services Administration (GSA), and the United States Agency for International Development, and perhaps others—a process that at least in some cases appear to be illegal. Where officials have resisted, Trump has removed them from their positions. Musk’s take-over is tantamount to a coup, and far more effective, serious, and dangerous than the insurrection that Trump organized on January 6, 2021.

“Above all, we must not despair. That may sound silly, but it’s important. Last June, we saw in France that the tide could turn. A week before the second round, a victory for the ‘new popular front’ was still totally unimaginable. But it succeeded.”

DONALD TRUMP’S SECOND victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential elections, with more social and legislative power and experience than his first presidency from 2017 to 2021, is a political milestone that has shaken the world because of what the arrival of such a reactionary, toxic and malignant character to the White House in Washington represents for the world — and specifically for Mexico, the direct southern neighbor of the North American power.