When Lenin Moreno, the president of Ecuador, announced on October 1st the new economic measures agreed on with the IMF, the Ecuadorian people responded with fierce resistance, and are now on the streets expressing their rejection and demanding the resignation of the president.
The elimination of the gas subsidy, among other measures, caused protests that began with a transport workers´ strike and several road blockades, mostly in Quito, that forced Lenin Moreno and his cabinet to flee the capital and take shelter in Guayaquil. The elimination of that subsidy took the price of the litre of gas from U$D1.85 to U$D 2.30, which will cause an immediate increase of public transport fares and an inflationary process that will affect already pauperised wages. Yesterday the president decreed a state of exception, that far from reducing the protests, has multiplied them.
Today our Ecuadorian comrades report that there are shortages in the main cities and looting in commercial centres, while the country is paralysed and the transport leadership ratifies their strike indefinitely until the IMF measures are cancelled. The following hours will be decisive. “They must go” and “the traitor must go” are the slogans that can be heard on the streets; the Ecuadorian people seem to be reliving the tradition and the memories of the fall of the governments of Jamil Mahuad and Lucio Gutierrez in the beginning of 2000, cornered by the people on the streets in the face of measures similar to those of Lenin Moreno.
From the ISL, we accompany our Ecuadorian comrades and will fight in the streets and in every corner of the country for the greatest unity of action that will allow us to defeat Moreno and his austerity plan. We will not give up in our determination in this new challenge to allow people´s organizations, the left and the unions to start debating a definitive solution to the capitalist crisis that is expressed today in Ecuador, as it is in the rest of Latin America. There is no definitive solution for our countries if we do not break with the international organisms and the imperialist policies, organising ourselves for those who have never ruled, the workers and the people, to govern once and for all.
Alberto Giovanelli