[With this summer’s strike, the country’s powerful Indigenous
movement united two agendas long in tension: resistance to austerity
and opposition to natural resource extraction. ]
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ECUADOR’S HISTORIC STRIKE  
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Andrea Sempértegui
October 5, 2022
The New York Review
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_ With this summer’s strike, the country’s powerful Indigenous
movement united two agendas long in tension: resistance to austerity
and opposition to natural resource extraction. _

Indigenous demonstrators celebrating the signing of a peace agreement
between the Ecuadorian government and the Indigenous movement, Quito,
June 30, 2022, Klaus Galiano/Agencia Press South/Getty Images

 

For eighteen days this June, thousands of Ecuadorians participated in
a national strike that blocked highways across the country, paralyzed
the capital city of Quito, and obstructed oil wells and mining sites
from the northern Amazon to the southern Andes. Led by the
Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), an
umbrella group of Indigenous organizations founded in 1986, this mass
mobilization was the first of its scale in Ecuador since 2019, before
the Covid-19 pandemic and before the conservative president Guillermo
Lasso, the former CEO of one of Ecuador’s largest banks, took
office. For two weeks, Indigenous and peasant families, including
women, men, elders, and children, came to Quito from across the
country and flooded the city’s streets, joined by members of social
organizations and labor unions. Those who stayed in their communities
participated in different forms of direct action to pressure Lasso’s
conservative government into negotiating.

CONAIE and its allies were protesting the government’s handling of
the country’s economic, social, and environmental crises.
Today, one in four Ecuadorians lives in poverty
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and half work in the informal sector with no statutory rights and
precarious labor conditions. In 2019 then-president Lenin Moreno
attempted to remove fuel subsidies—a practice that CONAIE has called
an austerity measure that hits the poor the hardest, increases the
price of other basic commodities, and makes it more difficult for
domestic producers of goods like milk to compete with imports from
other countries. He reversed that decision when Ecuadorians, led by
the Indigenous movement, went on a twelve-day strike. But fuel prices
continued to rise, first as a result of regressive economic policies
implemented during the pandemic and then due to the war in Ukraine. In
the Amazon, meanwhile, fifty years of oil exploitation and recent
mega-mining projects like the open-pit copper mine Mirador have
brought little to no economic benefit to the region’s Indigenous and
peasant communities. Instead, they have left polluted rivers and
degraded soil, led to the murder of three Indigenous leaders, and
violently displaced hundreds of people.

Media outlets in the US, including _The_ _New York
Times_ and _Foreign Policy_, have explained this summer’s eruption
of social unrest as a direct response to the recent increase of gas
and food prices. But while Ecuador’s uprising was in part influenced
by record inflation, it cannot be reduced to an anti-inflation
protest. The distinctive character of the 2022 national strike is that
it combined two ostensibly contradictory demands: fuel subsidies and a
moratorium on oil extraction. These two agendas—resistance to
austerity on the one hand and to natural resource plundering on the
other—had never before been equally prioritized in a national
strike. During the 1990s and early 2000s, CONAIE led nationwide
anti-neoliberal protests while Indigenous groups affiliated with the
Confederation continued their decades-long resistance to oil drilling
in the Amazon. Under the progressive government of Rafael
Correa—which ruled from 2006 to 2017 and relied on drilling and
mining to sustain its resource-dependent economic model—CONAIE came
to devote more of its energies to protesting extraction.

As the scholar Thea Riofrancos shows in her book _Resource Radicals:
From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador_ (2020), the
expansion of oil and mining projects under _correísmo_ divided the
left into two flanks: the resource nationalists who supported Correa
and the anti-extractive grassroots activists led by CONAIE.
Contributing to the schism was Correa’s history of repressing and
criminalizing protest. During his tenure, several Indigenous
leaders—including Marlon Santi, CONAIE’s former president—were
accused of sabotage and terrorism for participating in demonstrations.
The two flanks of the country’s progressive forces remained in
tension after Correa left power, making a united front of left
resistance almost impossible and contributing to Lasso’s victory in
last year’s presidential elections.

During the 2022 strike, however, anti-neoliberal and anti-extractive
demands—including an oil and mining moratorium—both appeared on
CONAIE’s list of proposals. The strike concluded in dramatic
negotiations with Lasso’s government, and on June 30 a “peace
agreement” was signed that addressed the most significant demands:
cuts to the prices of fuel (from $2.55 to $2.40 a gallon) and diesel
(from $1.90 to $1.75 a gallon); a repeal of Lasso’s Decree 95, which
had sought to deregulate the oil and gas industry, and a reform of
Decree 151—Lasso’s subsequent attempt to expand mining
exploration—that prohibits mining in Indigenous territories,
archaeological areas, and water-protection areas.

The deal also includes price controls on certain goods, an emergency
declaration for the public health system, and forgiveness of up to
$3,000 of overdue loans held by the state-owned bank, BanEcuador.
Lasso did not participate in the negotiations, instead delegating his
minister of government, Francisco Jiménez, to represent him. It was a
notable victory for the Indigenous movement and its allies. At a time
of environmental devastation, neoliberal restructuring, and worsening
living conditions for impoverished and indebted people around the
world, it bears looking closely at why and how they won.

Ecuador is one of Latin America’s smaller countries, but its
Indigenous movement is among the strongest and best-organized social
movements in the region. Since CONAIE’s founding, Indigenous peoples
have been on the front line of resistance to the so-called Washington
Consensus, a list of market-driven policy prescriptions for countries
in crisis—including the reduction of public subsidies, the
privatization of state enterprises, and the loosening of trade
regulations—supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the
World Bank, and United States Department of the Treasury.

In its first two decades, the Indigenous movement transformed
Ecuadorian politics, even precipitating the removal of presidents. One
of them was Jamil Mahuad, whose handling of a series of economic
crises—floods caused by El Niño, the collapse of oil prices, and
the bankruptcy of most of the country’s private banks—led Ecuador
into one of its worst national recessions in 2000.

 Following Mahuad’s announcement of the “dollarization” of
Ecuador’s economy, which entailed the replacement of Ecuador’s
domestic currency, the _sucre_, with the US dollar, demonstrators led
by CONAIE, in concert with the military, rose up against him. After
days of Indigenous-led highway blockages and CONAIE’s occupation of
the National Congress—where Colonel Lucio Gutiérrez; CONAIE’s
president, Antonio Vargas; and the former president of Ecuador’s
Supreme Court, Carlos Solórzano, announced the formation of a ruling
junta—Mahuad left the presidential palace. CONAIE’s alliance with
the military was short-lived. Just a day after the occupation of the
National Congress, the vice president, Gustavo Noboa, took office with
the support of the Ministry of Defense—a move CONAIE’s leaders
considered a betrayal.

In 2002 the Indigenous party Pachakutik, considered CONAIE’s
political arm, supported Colonel Gutiérrez’s presidential campaign.
But just weeks after taking power, Gutiérrez moved to support
neoliberal policies like a free trade agreement with the United
States. By 2006, Pachakutik had relatively weak support from its
Indigenous base, and although the party ran its own candidate in that
year’s elections, several members of the Indigenous
movement tacitly supported Correa’s candidacy
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País, a political movement that promoted him to the presidency.

Correa came to power with the promise of bringing the country out of
what he called, borrowing a popular phrase from the 1990s, its “long
and sad neoliberal night.” Once elected, he convoked a constituent
assembly—a demand advanced by CONAIE
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1997—which was installed with broad popular approval in 2007. A year
later, after a successful referendum, Ecuadorians adopted their first
new constitution since 1998. Alongside other proposals developed by
CONAIE, it included the Kichwa concept of _Sumak Kawsay_ (“Good
Living”), which the preamble calls a “new form of public
coexistence, in diversity and in harmony with nature”; it declared
Ecuador a plurinational state, a proposal inspired by Indigenous
practices of territorial self-determination; and it recognized the
rights of _Pachamama_, Nature. Article 71 recognizes Nature as a
legal subject that “has the right to integral respect for its
existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles,
structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” After decades of
Indigenous-led mobilization on the streets, CONAIE’s political
proposals had found their way into Ecuador’s institutions.
Constructing a new, plurinational state became a real possibility.

Marlon Santi, then president of CONAIE, giving a speech at a protest
in Yasuní National Park, Quito, 2010. Pablo Cozzaglio/AFP/Getty

Yet from the start of Correa’s tenure, conflicts began to surface.
His agenda of social transformation, which included redistributive
social policies, depended on the expansion of natural resource
extraction. The administration moved to take advantage of high
commodity prices by opening large-scale oil and mining projects, which
mostly affected Indigenous and peasant communities in the Amazon
rainforest and the Andes mountains. The combination of the
government’s extractive agenda and a discourse that prioritized
social spending put CONAIE in a difficult position. With a
self-declared anti-neoliberal president in power, CONAIE lost its
purchase on the anti-austerity discourse to which it had contributed
during the previous decade. Only when it called for the national
strike this June—in alliance with the Confederation of Campesino,
Indigenous and Black Organizations (FENOCIN) and the Council of
Indigenous Evangelical Peoples and Organizations of Ecuador
(FEINE)—was CONAIE able to fully connect its economic demands of the
1990s to the longstanding anti-extractive agenda that motivated its
confrontation with _correísmo_ in the 2010s. Two recent
developments made this convergence possible.

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The first was Lasso’s election. His predecessor, Lenin Moreno, a
former president of Alianza País, had won his election in 2017 with
Correa’s support but quickly broke from _correísmo_ and turned to
the right. According to some Ecuadorian analysts, Moreno’s political
transformation can be explained both by the seriousness of Ecuador’s
economic situation and by his interest in finding someone to blame for
it. At the beginning of his term, Moreno accused his predecessor of
having made up figures about Ecuador’s debt: while Correa’s
government evaluated the debt at 27.7 percent of the country’s GDP,
analysts appointed by Moreno calculated 59 percent. In 2019 Moreno
agreed to a $6.5 billion loan agreement with the IMF. To meet the
loan’s conditions, Lasso not only retained Moreno’s reforms but
also launched an aggressive plan to expand domestic drilling and
mining.

Soon after Lasso’s election, Ecuador’s National Assembly approved
the “Defense of Dollarization Law,” which reformed the country’s
monetary and financial system to guarantee the “independence” of
Ecuador’s Central Bank and the accumulation of international
reserves. For a country lacking its own currency, international
reserves serve as collateral for the payment of external debt, which
protects the interests of bondholders. The law was one of the
commitments Moreno made as a condition of the IMF’s loan in 2019,
and Lasso’s government has complied with the IMF’s mandate to the
letter. Since 2021, it has sent millions of dollars to Ecuador’s
foreign reserves
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than allocating them to the public health system, which has been under
severe strain since the start of the pandemic.

Last year Lasso also signed two decrees, 95 and 151, that aimed to
expand oil and mining exploration in the Amazon as well as shift both
industries to the private sector. The first of these would have
transferred 71 percent of Ecuador’s oil production
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currently controlled by the state, to private corporations.
Indigenous, peasant, and urban organizations mobilized against these
projects. In the second half of 2021, CONAIE, in alliance with
environmental groups such as Yasunid@s, Acción Ecológica, and Amazon
Frontlines, submitted an appeal
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both decrees to Ecuador’s Constitutional Court, on the grounds that
they did not guarantee the right to prior, free, and informed
consultation; failed to respect Indigenous peoples’ territorial
rights; and violated the rights of Nature.

These organizations were already mobilized against extraction under
Correa. But the Lasso administration’s move to privatize extraction
has made it possible for them to link such projects to IMF austerity
reforms: Decree 95 was, among other things, a way for Lasso to comply
with the IMF’s loan requirements to audit and reduce state-owned
companies, including the public companies Petroecuador and
Petroamazonas. “Where,” CONAIE’s president Leonidas Iza asked
in an interview
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the money from the difference in the price of a barrel of oil that
amounts to $115 dollars, when it is budgeted at $50 dollars, going?
These resources are in the international reserves.”

Leonidas Iza being interviewed at the Agora of the Ecuadorean House of
Culture, Quito, June 23, 2022. Rodrigo Buendia/AFP/Getty Images

The second development that made CONAIE’s achievement possible was
Iza’s election as the Confederation’s president last year. Iza,
who had taken a major part in the 2019 national strike, belongs to a
younger generation of Indigenous leaders who represent a more
left-wing and class-based—as opposed to only ethnic-based—position
within CONAIE, closer to the historical legacy of Indigenous leaders
like the communist Dolores Cacuango and to the thought of the Marxist
philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui. Iza and other younger leaders
such as Nayra Chalán and Apawki Castro have distanced themselves from
Indigenous leaders like the former presidential candidate Yaku Pérez,
an important figure in the anti-mining movement in the southern Andes
who in his presidential campaign tried to pursue his anti-extractive
goals by supporting neoliberal appeals to shrink the state.

Iza’s leadership has also made possible a recent wave of alliances
between the Indigenous movement and other grassroots anti-mining
organizations. In August 2021, soon after Lasso signed Decree 151,
seventy-eight delegations—including CONAIE, local governments,
communities, and activist organizations from around the
country—founded the _Frente Nacional Anti-Minero_. The
coalition’s priority has been documenting the influence of
transnational mining capital on Ecuador’s legislation and persuading
broader sectors of Ecuador’s society that mining projects would
generate minimal revenue for the state and create very few jobs, since
automation has enabled large-scale mining to be more capital-intensive
than labor-intensive.

This new national coalition used the 2022 uprising as a chance to
connect the violence against Indigenous and peasant communities to the
country’s broader patterns of dispossession.

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The 2022 strike was brutally repressed by the police and military.
During both the uprising itself and the subsequent negotiations, the
government made unfounded and racist allegations against the
Indigenous movement, accusing CONAIE of financing the strike with
money from drug trafficking. On the second day of the strike, an elite
group of the police and armed forces arrested Iza without a warrant on
the accusation of “sabotage” for allegedly blocking the
Pan-American highway. CONAIE livestreamed his arrest on Facebook,
where viewers saw him forced into an unmarked white pickup truck.
Footage was later released of him being transferred in a helicopter
from Quito to a jail in the city of Latacunga. The next day, after
social movements and human rights organizations demanded his release,
Iza was freed and protests around the country intensified. At
least seven people died
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the following fifteen days—six protesters and a soldier. Iza
survived an assassination attempt; his car was shot at, shattering a
window.

Two days before the signing of the peace agreement, President Lasso
unilaterally suspended the negotiations and accused Iza of terrorism,
claiming that the Indigenous leader was responsible for inciting
“violent” protests that cost the life of a solider in the northern
Amazon region. He did not mention the six protesters killed by the
police and the military. Such accusations helped incite an aggressive,
racist response from upper-class members of the mestizo population,
particularly in the cities of Quito, Guayaquil, and Cuenca, where
countermarches called on people to arm themselves and repeated
hateful chants
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What sustained the strike was the solidarity and collective action of
organizations from the parts of Ecuadorian society hardest-hit by the
economic crisis. Feminist collectives like _Mujeres de
Frente, _dozens of communes located in the outskirts of Quito like
San Miguel del Común, and young students from public universities
like Universidad Central turned lecture halls into shelters, houses
into community kitchens, and storage facilities into donation centers
for Indigenous and peasant families coming from around the country.
After the negotiations concluded, the Ecuadorian digital research
outlet Plan V shared a survey by the Peruvian firm Imasen,
which reported
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about 51 percent of Ecuadorians thought that CONAIE comported
themselves best during the strike—14 percent more than said the same
about the police and the armed forces. Meanwhile, 86 percent thought
Lasso had acted worst.

Since the pandemic started, life has become increasingly precarious
for many Ecuadorians. Lasso has become widely unpopular
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when the strike started, his approval rating dropped to under 30
percent. But many working-class Ecuadorians also have a long memory of
participating since the 1990s in forms of resistance like community
kitchens, and see their own concerns mirrored in those of the
Indigenous movement. It was in shelters or on the streets that
Indigenous people and urban Ecuadorians could share seemingly
disparate stories—from the health crisis in city hospitals to the
recurring oil spills in the Amazon—and wonder why so many years of
extraction have not improved their lives.

_ANDREA SEMPÉRTEGUI is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Whitman
College and a member of the anti-extractive collective Comunálisis,
based in Quito, Ecuador. (October 2022)_

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* Climate
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