Well, Ecuador figured it out
Ecuador Repudiates Foreign Debt: It’s About Time
According to Daniel Denvir (AlterNet, December 15), Ecuador’s president announced in early December that his country would not be paying the interest on its foreign debt in 2009, repudiating it as “illegal.” The value of the bonds defaulted on amounts to 19% of GDP.
As the Australians would say, good on them. Denvir quotes a statement by the Confederation of Ecuadorian Kichwas (ECUARUNARI), part of the country’s indigenous peoples movement: “We have not acquired any debt. The so-called public debt really belongs to the oligarchy. We the peoples have not acquired anything or been benefited, and thus we owe nothing.”
That’s entirely correct. In the specific case of Ecuador, according to John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man), the loans were designed to foment conditions that make [Ecuador] subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks.” Infratructure loans were granted on the condition that “engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco.”</em>
Good for Ecuador.