Police and military beat and tear-gas
citizens demonstrating against government policies
and reformsBy
David Hill
Would you believe me if I told you
that while president Rafael Correa was singing
“Hasta siempre, comandante” with a band in the main
square in central Quito last Thursday night just one
block away riot police were tear-gassing and
clubbing Ecuadorian citizens? Or that elsewhere in
Ecuador the police have been reported to be
specifically targeting female protestors’ “intimate
parts”?
Ecuador is currently in turmoil.
Thousands of people are protesting proposed
constitutional amendments, the expansion of the oil
frontier, mining projects, changes to water and
education policy, labour laws and pensions, a
proposed “Free Trade Agreement” (FTA) with the
European Union (EU), and increasing repression of
freedom of speech, among other things. The
government’s response? To send the police and
military with batons and tear-gas to beat citizens,
make arbitrary arrests, raid homes and even – some
people believe – to take advantage of volcanic
eruptions by declaring a nationwide “State of
Exception”.
The protests have taken different
forms. Indigenous people marched for 10 days from
the Zamora Chinchipe province in the Amazon to
Quito, 1,000s and 1,000s of people gathered in the
capital last week, and another march involving
approximately 2,000 people was held there on Monday.
In addition, a series of demonstrations and
road-blocks have sprung up elsewhere in the country.
“I’ve never seen anything like it
before,” Patricia Gualinga, a Kichwa leader from the
Amazon, told the Guardian, talking about the
violence that broke out in Quito’s narrow streets
last week. “Total brutality. They were using
motor-bikes, horses and tear-gas bombs. You can’t
imagine what it’s like if you didn’t see it.”
This week, on Monday 17 August,
there was serious violence in Saraguro in Loja
province in southern Ecuador, which Luis Maca, a
Kichwa Saraguro indigenous man, describes as
“practically a battle”. He told the Guardian
approximately 1,500 policemen and military descended
on his village and were raiding houses and arresting
and beating people. According to Maca, this was in
response to a peaceful blockade of the Pan-American
Highway, which runs north to Quito, which had been
in place since 6 am.
Julio Lima, in Saraguro, told the
Guardian that women, children and the elderly were
beaten, that windows were smashed and doors broken
down, and that the violence ran from approximately
10 am to 4 pm. He estimates that there were more
than 1,000 policemen and soldiers involved, and says
they remain in the surrounding region.
One local man, Darwin J, calls the
violence in Saraguro “brutal repression by the
police forces without respecting the elderly, women
and children”. “The most concerning thing is that
army and police entered the communal territories of
Lagunas, Ilincho and Gunudel where they went into
houses and rooms, mercilessly mistreating the people
they found there who weren’t even part of the
protests and many of whom were arrested,” Darwin
says in a statement circulated by the Fundación
Regional de Asesoría en Derechos Humanos (INREDH).
A spokesperson from CONAIE, a
national indigenous peoples’ federation, told the
Guardian that 31 people had been arrested and
various injured in Saraguro. The spokesperson also
said that the military moved against indigenous
Shuar and Achuar protesters on Sunday night, beating
people and throwing tear-gas bombs in response to a
peaceful blockade of the highway running between a
city called Puyo and a town, Macas, in the Amazon.
Nationwide, scores of people are
reported to have been beaten, injured and
arbitrarily arrested - the latter numbering roughly
200, according to Gualinga. Those beaten include the
president of Kichwa organisation Ecuarunari, Carlos
Pérez Guartambel, the prefect of Zamora Chinchipe,
Salvador Quishpe, and Perez Guartambel’s partner,
Manuela Picq, a French-Brazilian scholar living and
teaching in Ecuador who the Ministry of Interior
attempted to deport by cancelling her visa.
The Ministry’s attempt met with
opposition in Quito and internationally - including
a petition with more than 8,000 signatories - and a
judge ruled against it on Monday. Picq had been
beaten by police using batons and detained on the
evening of 13 August. She told the Guardian she was
effectively “kidnapped by the state” and held
“without any due process”.
“I think the goal was to undermine
Carlos [Perez Guartambel],” Picq says. “I don’t
think they thought there would be so much
international support.”
Reports suggest that female
protestors are being particularly targeted by the
police and military. A statement from “Women of the
Strike” reads, “We strongly condemn the macho and
criminal brutality with which the State has attacked
and criminalised women having participated in the
demonstrations... We demand that international human
rights institutions call on the Ecuadorian
Government to cease these aggressions against people
participating in the strike and in particular
against women human rights and nature’s rights
defenders.” Another statement, from CONAIE, INREDH
and the Comisión Ecuménica de Derechos Humanos (CEDHU),
reads, “We especially denounce the violence against
women, who say that they were beaten and violently
dragged out of their traditional clothing.”
Some people are deeply skeptical
of the government’s move to declare a national
“State of Exception” in response to eruptions at
Cotopaxi, a volcano approximately 45kms from Quito,
which puts all the country’s armed forces and police
at two ministries’ disposal and permits the
suspension of “constitutional rights to the
inviolability of home, to movement, to assembly and
to correspondence” in case of possible emergency.
There have been some eruptions and ash blown onto
the capital, but does the “State of Exception” need
to be nationwide? And why does it ban
Ecuadorian media and social media from reporting on
the volcano unless using “official” government
sources? Lima told the Guardian “It [the volcano]
really doesn’t affect us in any way”, and Gualinga
says “it isn’t going to affect the whole country”
and believes the government is “manipulating the
issue to generate repression.”
CONAIE’s spokesperson told the
Guardian “the eruption of Cotopaxi doesn’t justify
[the State of Exception] in any way.” CONAIE issued
a statement in response saying:
“We want to make it clear that
the nationwide declaration of State of Exception
is not justified to respond to the emergency
presented by the Cotopaxi volcano, and the
restriction of constitutional rights to the
inviolability of the home, to movement, to
assembly and to correspondence in the entire
Ecuadorian territory even less so. It surprises
us that this declaration includes zones that are
not affected, especially when there are
demonstrations underway demanding the president
and his government rectify their policies
directly impacting the rights and freedoms of
[indigenous] Peoples and Nations, as well as
Ecuadorians in general.”
The “State of Exception” was
declared on 15 August. Over the following two days
the military were involved in breaking up protests
in “Loja, Zamora (Bomboiza) Canar and Morona
Santiago”, and the Puyo-Macas highway and Bomboiza
parish in Zamora were militarised, according to a
Collective of organisations including CONAIE, the
Workers United Front (FUT) and the General Union of
Ecuadorian Workers (UTGE). “Given the repressive
actions that are being implemented, we are warning
that the State of Exception decreed for all the
national territory on Saturday by president Correa
could be a pretext to repress areas that have
nothing to do with the Cotopaxi volcano,” the
Collective states.
Marlon Santi, ex-CONAIE president,
is similarly concerned. In an article published by
Ecuador en Vivo Santi is reported as saying Cotopaxi
eruptions don’t merit an emergency to be declared in
“all national territory”, and that “various
provinces have been militarised due to the
indigenous protests, thanks to the State of
Exception.”
Amazon Watch’s Kevin Koenig
describes the move as a “huge, huge media
distraction” and an “incredible pretence to mobilise
the military.” “It would be almost comical if there
wasn’t such repression,” Koenig told the Guardian.
One of the fundamental concerns of
the protestors is the proposed amendments to
Ecuador’s Constitution which would allow president
Correa to be re-elected indefinitely when his third
term expires in 2017.
The protests are part of an
“Uprising and National Strike” announced on 11
August by CONAIE, Ecuarunari and other organisations.
Their demands include the definitive abandonment of
the constitutional amendments, the immediate return
of unemployment funds belonging to workers, the
repeal of water laws, the immediate suspension of
negotiations for an “FTA” with the EU, the immediate
suspension of oil operations in the Yasuni National
Park, and the liberation of “all the defenders of
Mother Earth and Human Rights unjustly prosecuted.”
Yesterday, 18 August, workers’
organisations - including the FUT and UGTE -
announced a march in Quito this afternoon and a
national factory workers strike will be held.
Ecuador’s National Secretary for
Communication (SECOM) did not respond to questions.
