Ecuador: STOP THE HARASSMENT AND PERSECUTION OF POPULAR LEADERS!
We share an unofficial translation of an article by Defense Front of the Peoples Struggles of Ecuador.
The Defense Front of the Peoples’ Struggles of Ecuador strongly condemns the harassment, persecution, and death threats against indigenous leader Leónidas Iza, who today is seen as the tip of the iceberg that, due to his media coverage, reveals the systematic practice of the old State against all popular fighters.
Without going beyond the criticism we have directed at Iza in the past for his opportunistic and electoral behavior, today we also express our concern about what has taken place, insofar as this type of police attack is not uncommon against indigenous leaders and activists, anti-mining activists, peasants, trade unionists, workers, and popular leaders who confront the old State. Intelligence and repression maneuvers do not distinguish between tendencies: they fall on anyone who organizes, denounces, or resists.
What happened to Iza is not an isolated incident. For years, comrades from Vientos del Pueblo, the Bloque Proletario, the Guevarista Movement, and the Defense Front of the People’s Struggles of Ecuador itself have denounced this, persecuted, threatened, harassed, investigated, and threatened by the regime’s police and military hordes.
In Ecuador, massacres have become normalized: slaughter in prisons, selective assassinations, and systematic violence against the people. Now the regime seeks to normalize the persecution, harassment, and criminalization of popular leaders who stand firm against the fascist and dictatorial government of Daniel Noboa.
It is urgent to unmask the police and military intelligence agents who pursue the fighters of the people. Indigenous punishment is not enough; it is necessary to expose them publicly, spread their identities, denounce them in the streets and on social media, and point them out for what they are: class enemies, executioners of the people, dogs of reaction.
Noboa’s comprador regime, a faithful servant of imperialism and the big bourgeoisie, is carrying out systematic repression that cannot be tolerated. In the face of this, there is no other way forward than to organize, fight, and resist, with a perspective of preparing for the Great National Strike, the only way to stop the voracity, country-selling and misrule.
What is happening today with Iza and the popular fighters confirms the reach of reactionary laws such as the “intelligence” law. But it also shows that, with or without laws, the hyenas of reaction will always fulfill their role as executioners of the people, because they do so in defense of bureaucratic-big landlord capitalism and the old State.
NO TO THE PERSECUTION, HARASSMENT, AND CRIMINALIZATION OF POPULAR LEADERS!
ORGANIZE, COMBAT AND RESIST!
