We publish an unofficial translation of a statement of the Front for the Defense of the Struggles of the People in Ecuador.

THE REPRESSIVE DANCE OF THE GOVERNMENT AND ITS HYENAS, THE CRIMINALIZATION OF POVERTY

Approximately 1800 terrorists and delinquents have been captured by the repressive apparatuses of the old State in these last weeks.

Curiously, the police forces capture every day “targets of high strategic value”; bosses, commanders, the same ones who are taken from their homes, humble houses that do not reflect at all the standards of living that drug bosses and kingpins usually have.

All of those captured are residents of poor neighborhoods, none of them express, in one way or another, to have clear links with drug trafficking, as it is shown and displayed by those who so far are untouched and who swarm the State institutions, big businessmen, bankers, members of the repressive apparatuses.

Poverty is definitely being criminalized. It is enough to be from a slum, to be in the street and to have a “suggestive” appearance, (profile, they say) to be captured, assaulted with sticks and fist blows, humiliated, shaved, dragged, forced to sing the national anthem and taken to those old ergastula¹ where the militancy being forced to death is a possibility of the day.

All prisoners are punished, as if the 35,000 inmates were gang members. People serving sentences for minor crimes, those who have failed to comply with alimony, those who have committed traffic accidents, fighters of the people and other types of “crimes”; enough to be subjected to cruel treatment and violation of human rights.

Noboa plays Bukele². He applies his methods. They both see violence in the absence or drop in the rate of murders, kidnappings and crimes. Their near-sightedness does not allow for more. They forget the structural conditions that generate that appendix of bureaucratic capitalism that are the lumpen. They forget the causes that have the capacity to reproduce individuals who, from unemployment, anguish, exploitation, migration, etc., decide to throw themselves into the turbulent waters of crime.

Meanwhile, the fascist wants to hammer us with the VAT increase, making the basic food basket more expensive, the same one that is in the order of 830 dollars. They want to make work more precarious, condone debts, in short, a series of measures that, as always, want to put the story of the war and its financing on the shoulders of the masses.

People of Ecuador, it is not enough to say, let us activate the indigenous, peasant and people’s guards to protect us from delinquency, are we the rural or people’s police of the old State, are we going to join in an informal way the repressive armies of the State, no way! The correct ideological and political direction of these instruments should serve not only to repress certain violent actors who indiscriminately attack our people, but also to defend us from the State, from its corporative, repressive, starving plans, to lay the foundations so that they become the seeds of a new society, if we do not understand it in this way, these popular “instruments” will be nothing but paramilitary groups, at the service of the local powers that are within the structural pyramid of the old State, they contribute to the corporatization of the masses. That is to say, we would be contributing, decisively, to the process of fascistization of society and the salvation of bureaucratic capitalism.

Let us demand an end to the persecution of men and women of the people who, because of their misery and poverty, are aligned with the members of the criminal gangs. Let us stop the murderous pretensions of the Armed Forces that have run amok like unrestrained hyenas against the masses.

Let us unmask the repressive apparatuses of the old State that are direct operators of operative gangs. Likewise, the sanction, capture and imprisonment in common jails of bankers, assembly members, judges, businessmen and other individuals who pull the strings of the base structures of drug trafficking. While the Armed Forces and the police are chasing the “chamberos”³, “arranchadores”⁴ and common people, the hit men, those who remain unharmed, have just killed a prosecutor who, contrary to the authorities of the regime, did not have an escort or protection. That is to say, the government and the State give us a circus: the deaths and violence are sustained and developed in the spaces of popular mobility, plunging our people into violence, anguish and pain.

Let us not allow poverty to be criminalized!

We demand respect for the rights of the people and respect for the physical and psychological integrity of the people’s fighters detained in the penitentiaries of the country.

Today, the government and its hyenas live the repressive party. The chuchaqui⁵ will come, other moments will come, and those who dance will be the others, the oppressed, because: “…with their teeth we will make a necklace. From their bones we will make flutes, from their skin we will make a drum. Then, we will dance…”

STOP THE FASCIST REGIME OF THE BANANA PLANTATIONS!

STOP THE INDISCRIMINATE REPRESSION!

NO TO THE CRIMINALIZATION OF POVERTY!

ORGANIZE, FIGHT AND RESIST!

1Translator’s note: Ergastula were dungeons on large Roman farms (latifundia) in which slave laborers were confined.

2Translator’s note: Daniel Noboa is the current President of Ecuador, and Nayib Bukele is the current President of El Salvador.

3Translator’s note: the one who has several jobs.

4 Translator’s note: thief.

5 Translator’s note: hangover.