{"id":41300,"date":"2021-10-20T01:01:05","date_gmt":"2021-10-20T08:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=41300"},"modified":"2021-10-20T13:01:41","modified_gmt":"2021-10-20T20:01:41","slug":"secretary-antony-j-blinken-remarks-at-a-roundtable-with-democracy-activists-and-civil-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=41300","title":{"rendered":"Secretary Antony J. Blinken Remarks at a Roundtable with Democracy Activists and Civil Society"},"content":{"rendered":"
10\/19\/2021 11:50 PM EDT<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State<\/p>\n

Quito, Ecuador<\/p>\n

Swiss\u00f4tel Quito<\/p>\n

AMBASSADOR FITZPATRICK:<\/strong>\u00a0 Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.\u00a0 Thank you all for coming.\u00a0\u00a0Muy buenas noches.\u00a0 Gracias por estar con nosotros.<\/em>\u00a0 It is my great honor to present you all to the Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who\u2019s on a \u2013 his first visit to South America as the Secretary of State, and of course he started that visit in Ecuador today.\u00a0 He\u2019ll be here tonight, leading tomorrow morning an event at the University of San Francisco, where we will be talking about some of the regional challenges facing us, and then he will be going on to Bogota for regional talks on migration and other very important regional issues for us all.<\/p>\n

But tonight, we want to take this opportunity.\u00a0 Mr. Secretary, you in your own career \u2013 he has served in the public sector, in the private sector, and in civil society organizations.\u00a0 He understands the critical role that civil society, nongovernmental organizations, and all sorts of volunteer groups \u2013 the critical role they all play in the defense and the development of democracy and the rule of law and national prosperity and, at the end of the day, hopefully happiness for all of our people.<\/p>\n

And so it\u2019s very important for him to be able to have this opportunity to hear from you all about not only the challenges that are facing Ecuador at the moment, or perhaps regionally \u2013 democracies are, as we might say, on the back foot, under some pressure in the region \u2013 but not just to talk about the problems, but to talk about what you all see as some of the solutions, whether for what is facing \u2013 what is Ecuador facing right now or the United States or for other democracies in the region, some of the transnational problems we\u2019re having, whether it\u2019s crime, migration, climate change we were just talking about again at the American embassy community.<\/p>\n

All of these broader, very complex issues, I hope that you all have a chance to provide, as I said, not just some analysis of the situation, but also some very constructive, helpful ways for us as Americans to understand what might actually work in Ecuador and for the entire region.<\/p>\n

And without further ado, I\u2019m going to turn it over to Mr. Secretary.\u00a0 Thank you again for joining us in Ecuador, and please, the floor is yours.<\/p>\n

SECRETARY BLINKEN:<\/strong>\u00a0 Thanks, Mike.\u00a0 Thank you.\u00a0 And thanks to all of you for coming together this evening.\u00a0 And I think the ambassador said it very, very well.\u00a0 I was especially looking forward to being able to talk to you, to hear from you, and to think a little bit together with you because, as Mike said, we are at an interesting moment in our hemisphere but also globally.\u00a0 And I think as you all know very, very well, we see democracy being tested in different ways.\u00a0 As Mike said, there\u2019s something of a democratic recession around the world with countries \u2013 more countries moving backward than moving forward.\u00a0 Citizens\u2019 trust in democracy is declining.\u00a0 Some populists use democracy to ultimately advance an antidemocratic agenda.\u00a0 Autocratic countries try to point out our shortcomings in order to elevate themselves.\u00a0 Independent institutions, groups, communities increasingly are being threatened or held back.<\/p>\n

And at the heart of things, too, I think we\u2019re seeing revealed more and more every single day the inequities that are prevalent within our societies, but also among them, as well as enduring discrimination of one kind or another.<\/p>\n

Somehow, despite all of this and despite COVID-19 and other challenges that we\u2019re facing that are truly historic in nature, democracy nonetheless persists and I believe ultimately prevails in places like Ecuador.\u00a0 Institutions are challenged, but they hold.\u00a0 Individuals push back.\u00a0 Inequities are being addressed.\u00a0 And at the heart of so much of this is civil society as, I think, one of the most vital, important, essential defenders of democracy \u2013 pushing for accountability, pushing for transparency, and also giving voice to people, communities, groups that may not have a voice in the system.<\/p>\n

So I really want to stop talking and, as Mike said, listen to you about what some of the challenges you\u2019re facing are, but also what you see as some of the solutions. \u00a0Because ultimately, I think there are two things that we have to do.\u00a0 First, having had the opportunity to work in the private sector, in government, and in NGOs in one way or another throughout my career, the one thing I\u2019m more convinced of than ever is that for those of us who are in government, if we can\u2019t bring along on any particular issue or policy all of the different stakeholders in that policy, then it won\u2019t hold up; it won\u2019t, it can\u2019t be sustained.\u00a0 And so I think that that means that there\u2019s a greater imperative than ever before for governments and civil society to work more closely together.<\/p>\n

Second, and you\u2019ve heard President Biden maybe talk about this a lot, what ultimately this comes down to for those of us who are \u2013 that believe in democracy and want to see it succeed is we have to find ways to demonstrate to our fellow citizens that it produces results, it delivers, it makes their lives a little bit better, a little bit safer, a little bit healthier, a little bit more secure.\u00a0 If we do that, then I think democracy not only survives, it thrives.\u00a0 If we don\u2019t, as we say, we have a problem.<\/p>\n

So with that, let me stop talking and start listening.\u00a0 I\u2019m really eager to hear from all of you from your very different perspectives what your experience has been, what some of the issues you\u2019ve been confronting are, and how we can do things better.\u00a0 So, Mike, thanks.<\/p>\n

AMBASSADOR FITZPATRICK:<\/strong>\u00a0 Thank you, Mr. Secretary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

10\/19\/2021 11:50 PM EDT   Antony...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41300"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41301,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41300\/revisions\/41301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}