After touring Chevron’s oil pollution in the Ecuadorean Amazon, Abby Martin sits down for an exclusive interview with Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, about the legal battle against the corporation and push to decolonize the country from Western powers.

They discuss Ecuador’s new constitution that grants legal rights to nature for the first time in history, the country’s proposed ban against individuals using tax havens holding public office, and his administration’s dismantling of neoliberalism, stressing that the world order must shift, so that people come before capital.

Despite its diplomatic relationship with the United States, Correa comments on how Ecuador remains the subject of ongoing regime change efforts and democratic subversion on behalf of the U.S. government through NGOs like USAID. However, Correa is determined that being in the crosshairs of U.S. Empire will only embolden their fight for independence.

When asked about whether Trump or Clinton would be better for the future of Latin America, Correa’s response is surprising. He says Trump’s crudeness would be better to “revitalize the left” in Latin America, but that Hillary would be better for the sake of people in the U.S.

Abby Martin Interviews Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa 

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Among the many terrible features of the Trans Pacific Partnership, twelve countries are crafting something that would give corporations unprecedented power: a secret court for capitalist enterprises to sue any country that infringes on profits.

As it stands, with investment treaties skewed in their favor, multinational corporations enjoy the freedom to pillage developing countries–when people suffer disease, death and environmental devastation as a result, they simply claim there is no jurisdiction where they can be made to answer to a court.

Despite many international human rights treaties that countries must follow, there are none that apply to corporations–despite the fact that 37 of the top 100 economies in the world are corporations. 

But while the corporate elite flex their power across the planet, one small country has been leading a fight to hold them accountable for their crimes against humanity. Ecuador has been spearheading a project in the United Nations to create a binding legal instrument that, for the first time, would hold corporations accountable for human rights violations in the countries they extract profits from.

Leading this bold initiative Maria Fernanda Espinosa, Ecuador’s permanent representative to the UN; also having served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and of National Defense under President Correa. She joined Abby Martin at the TeleSUR studios in Quito to discuss this historic venture, and how Ecuador ended up on the forefront of this fight.

Inside the UN Fight Against Corporate Impunity with Maria Espinosa

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Dubbed ‘The School of Dictators’ by human rights activists, the US Army School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, has produced some of the world’s most notorious torturers, drug traffickers and war criminals. The spectre of their crimes still haunts much of Latin America—from Argentina to El Salvador.

In El Salvador, the human rights abuses were beyond the pale–from the public assassination of bishop Óscar Romero to the raping and killing of four American nuns. 

Some of the school’s well known graduates include Jorge Videla, military dictator of Argentina from 1976 to 1981, who caused the deaths of at least 9,000 people and disappearances of an estimated 30,000 others. Another star pupil of the school was CIA agent, Vladimiro Montesinos, who went on to become Peru’s counterintelligence head. Montesino directed an anti-communist death squad called the Colina Group which committed numerous horrifying massacres of peasant farmers, trade unionists and alleged leftists.

The brutal crimes being committed in our names and with our tax dollars led a man named Father Roy Bourgeois to form The School of the Americas Watch, an organization dedicated to closing down the school.

Join Abby Martin in this edition of The Empire Files as she uncovers how the US funded right wing death squads and intentionally uprooted democracy across Latin America.

The US School That Trains Dictators & Death Squads

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The prison system has become the established response to societal woes—from crime to mental health—and the private corporations that litter the globe have monopolized correctional facilities, amassing deep political influence in the process in order to further prison expansion and increase profits.

In the United States, where the human rights abuses of other countries are always on the agenda, the prison population is staggering. Though the U.S. has only 5% of the world’s population, it has a shocking 25% of its prisoners. Crime has dropped dramatically over the last 25 years, yet the number in prison has continued to increase at a dramatic pace.

Over 50% serving time in prison are non-violent, drug-related offenders, with about 30% locked up for marijuana only. The dehumanization of inmates, as well as those not yet convicted of any crimes, has led to extreme violence perpetuated by prisons guards and prison administration to go almost entirely unchecked, thereby leaving those most vulnerable to face normalized brutality with little to no recourse. In the windowless prison cells of the U.S. we also find racism and sexual violence existing in an almost customary fashion, pushing men and women of color deeper into the void of the criminal justice system.

Follow Abby Martin as she exposes the unsettling realities behind the prison industrial complex on The Empire Files.

Tortured & Enslaved: Enter the World’s Biggest Prison

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Photo by flickr user les haines