Ecuador: ultimatum for Guillermo Lasso on fuel price subsidy

The President’s government Guillermo Lasso received an ultimatum from the President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, CONAIE, Leonidas Iza, who urged the government of the Andean country to repeal three decrees issued under the administration of former President Lenín Moreno that deregulate the prices of fossil fuels.

Iza said that “the Government must guarantee the repeal of these decrees and that we call on us to solve the problem in a comprehensive manner”. The indigenous leader added that he expected an “immediate” response and gave Lasso a peremptory delay until August 11 “just as fuel prices rise”. Iza assured that “the more it accumulates, the more the crisis saturates. The social reaction will be stronger ”.

The president of the CONAIE This is the huge October 2019 events which nearly ended the government of then-President Lenín Moreno and filled the streets with demonstrators, mainly in Quito, but also in Guayaquil and other towns in the central highlands of Ecuador, for 11 uninterrupted days. Leonidas Iza was one of the main protagonists of the demonstrations as president of the indigenous and peasant movement of Cotopaxi, with Jaime Vargas, then president of CONAIE.

The October protests of that year were the most intense and violent since the return to democracy in 1979. The results of the mobilizations left 8 dead, 1,507 injured, including 435 police officers. The building of the State Comptroller General was also completely set on fire (a crime which is still under investigation), highways and highways were closed and agricultural plantations, supply centers, warehouses. shopping malls and warehouses were looted.

Following these protests, the Pachakutik Pluricultural Unity Movement, the electoral arm of CONAIE, gained a large place on the institutional scene. In the legislative and presidential elections, he obtained historic results. Its candidate Yaku Pérez obtained 19.4% of the vote, just 0.4 points less than Guillermo Lasso, the second runner-up in the ballot. In the legislative elections, the indigenous party obtained 27 137 seats in the Ecuadorian single-chamber congress, position itself as the second political force in the Andean country.

The day after Iza’s request, the president Guillermo Lasso responded categorically. He said he did not want to “think that those who make their voices heard now to maintain the fuel subsidy intend to respond to the interests of those sectors which Ecuadorian society does not have to subsidize”. Before asking yourself: “Those who claim to represent the poor of Ecuador, what do they want? Want cheaper fuels? So that? So that the grant goes to whom? The rich, the smugglers or the drug dealers?”.

Lasso pointed out that work is underway on targeting the grant for public transport, “Because it affects the poorest, but the others, certainly not. “

After what Lasso said, CONAIE issued a new statement in which it describes the Ecuadorian president’s response as “arrogant, closing all dialogue“And as” a genuine characteristic of governments that represent elites and do not sense the problems of majorities. The statement added that “peoples and nationalities will act in unity to make decisions.” This CONAIE statement was posted on the indigenous organization’s institutional social media at 12:15 p.m. (Ecuador time) on August 6, and until this news was closed, the national government did not comment on the matter.

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