The nightmare that kept Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso awake at night materialized a few days after the assessments of the first year of his administration. The risk of a new popular mobilization, similar to that of October 2019, seemed low because the government felt that the fuel price increase had gone unnoticed during the pandemic years.
But on Wednesday (22), Leonidas Iza Salazar, the president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie), serenely repeated, after reciting the Our Father at the foot of the Central University grounds in Quito, that “we came for ten points [da plataforma de greve] and we will leave with the ten points.” In this way, popular mobilization slowly turned into an authentic popular rebellion.
Initially, the response to the strike called by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie) on June 13, which was joined by other indigenous and rural organizations such as the Organization of Evangelical Indigenous Peoples of Ecuador (Feine) and the National Federation of Peasant, Indigenous and Black Organizations of Ecuador (Fenocin), seemed weak.
This is because there was no prior agreement to call a joint strike, as Popular Front organizations, with strong student and teacher union roots, had called for a separate mobilization for 16 June. Meanwhile, the Workers’ Unitary Front, the main grouping of weakened workers’ unions, had called for a national mobilization for 22 June.
Faced with this lack of coordination, the government thought it could deal a mortal blow to the mobilization, and in the early hours of June 14, police arrested indigenous leader Leonidas Iza Salazar in the province of Cotopaxi, south of Quito. No government had attempted a similar action since Conaie’s birth in 1986. Only Rafael Correa had imprisoned the indigenous leader of the regional organization Ecuarunari on four occasions, but never the president of Conaie. And no one had ever done so in the middle of a national strike.
Since then, popular participation and the geographical distribution of the mobilization have continued to grow, with the masses becoming increasingly enraged. The day before the arrest of leader Leonidas Iza, road blocks had been reported in six provinces. However, the next day, road closures were extended to 12 provinces. At midnight on June 14, Iza was released, but the next day road blocks were extended to 15 provinces. As of Monday, June 20, 93 road closures were reported in 22 provinces.
Urban mobilization has increased as rural mobilization has grown. When the indigenous people entered Quito from the south and north of the city on Tuesday the 22nd, the strike had taken on the proportions of an all-out popular rebellion and did not seem to be slowing down.
The blindness of government and the power of popular rebellion
The backdrop is undoubtedly the desperation of the country’s impoverished majorities. This government, made up of businessmen and white mestizo elites who live in exclusive neighborhoods and socialize primarily among privileged groups, has not reacted to popular frustration after two years of economic and social catastrophe caused by the pandemic.
The increase in fuel prices is, for the popular sectors, a tangible factor of exclusive governmental responsibility that directly affects inflation, generating serious consequences on people’s income.
In fact, the indigenous and popular revolt of October 2019, which is the direct antecedent of this new strike, was precisely due to the brutal increase in the price of diesel (also called diesel), which in a short time went from one dollar per gallon to 2 ,30 dollars. Diesel in Ecuador is used for public transport and the transport of heavy goods.
But orthodox economists and government officials, focused and blinded by the fiscal impact of the cost of fuel, forget its effect on inflation, on increasing the cost of domestic production, on the loss of competitiveness of exports from a dollarized country and on the increase in imports that make it cheaper.
That is why the first, and without a doubt the most important demand of this popular rebellion, is precisely the one that the government refuses to consider: the reduction of fuel prices. Not its freezing, which the government has already done (albeit with a larger increase) before another uprising in October 2021, but lowering its price.
But like in October 2019, when the government claimed that the country would collapse if it gave up $1.5 billion of those revenues (in a country with a $30 billion state budget), it is now claiming a disaster yet. greater if it fails to earn between US$ 500 and US$ 600 million, with oil that the country exports at US$ 100 per barrel. Fiscal economic orthodoxy lacks rational explanations.
In conclusion, of the ten demands of the strike, the reduction in the price of fuel is the only one that could calm the spirits of an impoverished people outraged by an indolent government. But unfortunately, only a popular uprising of colossal magnitude, such as the one that currently holds the government at bay, can open its eyes to the social crisis.
