Ecuador: PALO QUEMADO-LAS PAMPAS RESISTS AGAINST MINING IMPERIALISM

We publish an unofficial translation of the article of the Front of Defense of the Struggles of the People – Ecuador.

Imperialism spreads out its claws

The imperialist boots, of a different stripe, invade Ecuador, hunting for our land, natural resources, cheap labor, market (mainly arms), colluding and struggling for the distribution of the world. In Ecuador we face the expansion of the extractive mining monopoly.

Imperialism, through transnational mining companies, spits out their narratives like poison, they say that they come with progress, sources of employment, industrialization, wealth, among other fallacies. The viper has little or no interest in the well-being of the oppressed peoples, on the contrary, their colonizing practices and their desire to get rich at any cost are obvious.

Those paper tigers want to break into Ecuador because the labor rights are violated and thus satiate themselves with other people’s work. So, mining companies are guaranteed cheap labor with relations of semi-feudal production. The bourgeois/landlord government of Noboa is going further beyond being a representative of the big comprador bourgeois faction, it is the incarnation of feudalism, a big landlord raised in the image and likeness of the Yankees to reproduce feudality, gamonalism, servitude, unpaid labor and semi-coloniality.

Invasion of Palo Quemado-Las Pampas

The governments in power, since the fascist Correa, passing through Moreno, Lasso and today the big landlord of Noboa, together with other institutions of the old state, have bowed their heads before their imperialist masters. They have provided all the conditions for them to dispossess the lands of the peasant.

What is happening in Palo Quemado-Las Pampas of Sigchos, Cotopaxi province, is nothing more than the imperialist imposition of bureaucratic capitalism (semi-colonial/semi-feudal), they granted concessions of 2,200 hectares of Palo Quemado and Las Pampas in favor of the mining company La Plata SA, owned by Atico Mining Corporation SA, now it enters in the peasant communities with the aim of concentrating the land, exploiting minerals such as gold, silver, copper, among others.

Bureaucrats of the Ministry of the Environment and employees of the La Plata SA mining company have taken the task of carrying out mediocre workshops and socialization talks, distracting from the true social and environmental impact, offering sources of work, training, vaccines for children, education, trucks and machinery, simply trying to buy consciences. They do it in front of a few clueless and traitorous residents, under the pretext of a supposed socialization of the mining project, with that mechanism they enter the people to divide and oppose them.

Anti-imperialist resistance

The old state activated its repressive apparatus on March 19 and 20, members of the National Police and Armed Forces, according to complaints from community members, in coordination with paramilitary mafias at the service of imperialism and power groups, attacked the peasantry. Furthermore, the State Attorney General’s Office criminalized the right to resist and protest, prosecuting around 72 community members, unusually, for the crime of terrorism.

Despite all the repression and persecution, the brave masses have resisted belligerently, the peasants carry out struggles to expel the invader, they burned two vehicles of imperialist lackeys and injured six police and military personnel.

Down with consultations and bourgeois/big landlord institutionality

The farce of the previous, free and informed consults, popular elections, elections and spurious bourgeois democracy is developed. For example, the popular consultation for not exploiting the Yasuní ITT, what use has it been? What is the utility of electing an executioner as president every four years? The mining socializations in the Las Naves canton, what they were useful for? They only serve to numb popular struggles.

The traitors, revisionists, reformists and opportunists try to take the people’s struggle to the abyss, leading the masses into the electoral and institutional abyss, pushing them towards prior, free and informed consultation, which is rigged in favor of imperialist mining, that legitimize the invasion and becomes the extinguisher of the sparks of resistance.

We should not romanticize the struggle of oppressed peoples, this goes beyond water, nature, nor is an issue for indigenous people, mixed races, blacks or whites. Let’s open our eyes, the world is going through several imperialist invasions against oppressed peoples.

Imperialism wants to take over our main means of production, the land and everything it contains, expelling our peasants from their lands. So, the people of Palo Quemado-Las Pampas, their main contradiction is against imperialism, against semi-feudality and against bureaucratic capitalism, in that order.

We cannot trust anything from the institutions of the old state, they are all at the service of imperialism and the groups in power, not even the Armed Forces and National Police that point their weapons at the poorest in the country for the benefit of the exploiter. And they will not hesitate to pull the trigger. On the other hand, there is the proletariat, the poor peasants, the democratic intellectuals, the brave people, who undertake the anti-imperialist struggle for the land.

DOWN WITH THE MINING IMPERIALISM!

DOWN WITH THE PRIOR CONSULTATIONS!

LONG LIVE THE NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE!

LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLING RESISTANCE OF THE PEOPLE OF PALO QUEMADO-LAS PAMPAS!

THE STRUGGLE FOR LAND IS THE MAIN, THE STRUGGLE FOR WATER AND TERRITORY IS COMPLEMENTARY!

ORGANIZE, COMBAT AND RESIST!