Ecuador: THE COUNTRYSIDE, A POWERFUL REVOLUTIONARY CATALYST
We hereby share an unofficial translation of a statement on the current situation in Ecuador after the end of the indigenous-popular uprising, and the tasks going forward, published by the Communist Party of Ecuador – Red Sun.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
THE COUNTRYSIDE, A POWERFUL REVOLUTIONARY CATALYST
The main contradiction of our time is between imperialism of all kinds, mainly Yankee imperialism, and the oppressed nations of the world. The imperialist powers struggle and collude to divide up territories, resources, and routes; however, the decisive theater of this contradiction is the Third World, the scene of wars, occupations, blockades, and counterrevolutions. There are, among others, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen; Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya; Sudan and South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia in the Horn of Africa; Mali, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso; the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique; Western Sahara and Haiti. In Asia, conflicts and resistance are spreading in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea; in Western Asia, Iran is under siege, and in Turkey and Kurdistan, multifaceted or hybrid wars persist. In Latin America, the drums of war, sanctions, and interference are beating loudly in Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela, while militarization and internal warfare are rampant in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Haiti, and large swathes of Central America, as well as the nautical convergence point in the Caribbean.
In this context, People’s Wars aimed at Power, such as those taking place in India, Turkey, the Philippines, and Peru, and national liberation wars in other countries, express an inescapable law: where imperialism strangles and attacks, the masses learn to combat in the course of war, raising the banners of just war against unjust war. In many places, armed in a precarious and rudimentary manner, the masses, overflowing with optimism, stand up to the nuclear, technological, and numerical threat that imperialism fatuously seeks to apply. In this sense, it is up to us to turn indignation into organization, defense into offensive, and crisis into a strategic opportunity to pave the way for the defeat of imperialism and its lackeys, and to impose New Democracy, which is a joint dictatorship of workers, peasants, and the petty bourgeoisie, being the proletariat its center; and, on the basis of its conquests and transformations, socialism.
Following this analysis, we can better understand the aggressive presence of Yankee imperialism in Central and South America: its threat to invade Venezuela, strangle Colombia, and put into operation, in its favor, the bureaucratic-big landlord machinery of the old Ecuadorian State, in a context of struggle with Russia and China and, in fact, with some countries of Europe.
In this Yankee offensive, Ecuador, and within it, Noboa’s puppet government, play an important role at the heart of this strategy. Noboa’s process of fascistization is not a coincidence, nor are his legal pretensions to reform or create a new constitution, the centerpiece of which is to endorse the presence of foreign military bases (not Russian, Chinese, or any other country, an aspect that would also be rejected and fought against), but specifically Yankee ones; In addition, he seeks to grant major powers to the government and the armed forces, which, at this very moment, are totally and absolutely controlled by the US and Israel.
When we say that Noboa is a fascist and a puppet, we are referring to the facts; above all, a puppet, because his fascist status derives from his servile position toward imperialism. Suffice it to say that, for the first time, Ecuador, led by its Foreign Ministry, headed by an agent of international Zionism, abstained from voting against the criminal blockade of Cuba at the UN; but it did declare Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as “terrorist” organizations, following the mandate of the US.
This must be understood in its true dimension: servility, Noboa’s political fronting, and, above all, the growing political influence of the US in the country. In other words, little by little, we are losing the relative political independence that we supposedly had and that characterizes us as a semi-colonial/semi-feudal country.
Today’s Ecuador is a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. When we say it is semi-feudal, we are not saying that there is no capitalism; what we are saying is that imperialism developed, belatedly, a form of capitalism tied to the interests of big landlords in the second half of the 19th century; that these big landlords, both then and now, have no intention of eliminating these feudal remnants, but rather of evolving them into new forms. This is a form of (bureaucratic) capitalism that does not develop the productive forces or promote national industry, but is instead devoted to imperialism, mainly Yankee imperialism. It is Yankee imperialism that outlines the forms and relations of production in accordance with its interests.
This capitalism is in crisis, sick, crippled, whose contradictions cannot be resolved by thinking about circumstantial, conjunctural “uprisings” or rebellions, but rather with a profound, extensive revolutionary program and process, with correct ideological direction and with People’s War.
Understanding this is fundamental to properly comprehending the dynamics of struggle in the country, particularly in rural areas, where the role of poor peasants has been decisive, especially in the last three people’s uprisings.
We communists do not conceive society as a whole defined by race, ethnic groups, nationalities, or actors promoting gender demands. We conceive of society based on a historical-dialectical materialist analysis and, therefore, class analysis will always take precedence: its composition, fields, and contradictions. In this sense, we observe peasants and their relationship with the means of production; the relations of production; the fact that, at present, some peasants are aligned with ethnic demands, their main condition being that of poor, landless peasants; others who, from working on other people’s land, also eventually become artisanal miners; aspects that determine the particularity and diversity of centers of contradiction in the productive sphere. We understand that, since the old-style bourgeois-democratic revolution has not materialized, the poor peasantry is the class that becomes the most exploited, as it is mired in and bound to pre-capitalist or, to put it plainly, feudal and semi-feudal relations of production.
With this background, we want to focus on current events in the country.
The indigenous-people’s uprising has come to an end after 31 days of intense and tireless struggle; a struggle in which the masses, in addition to mobilizing, have paid with their blood: dead, wounded, maimed; as well as detained and persecuted.
As in the uprisings of 2019 and 2022, the peasant masses were the main force of the mobilization, accompanied by workers, students, vendors, and people’s sectors who rebelled with determination against governments that, like the current one, have been alienated from the interests of the vast majority. In other words, in these rebellions, the peasantry has been the main force.
This cycle shows that the countryside continues to be a “powerful revolutionary catalyst” and that, by establishing the correct class alliance with workers and other exploited masses, in these contexts and forms of struggle, it becomes a force capable of destabilizing the old State.
The combativeness of the grassroots of the indigenous-peasant movement, beyond the ethno-cultural discourse of certain opportunistic leaders who have focused the vortex of contradictions in the countryside on multiculturalism, collective rights, and the defense of “territory,” subsuming the main contradiction: the masses versus semi-feudalism, which has its own face and voice: peasants with little or no land, and of poor quality; artisanal production as a subsistence strategy; the cyclical mutation of the poor peasantry into a semi-proletariat in informal mining; servility, land expropriation, and forced migration. All of these are expressions of the most abject semi-feudalism that keeps the peasantry, whether “indigenous” or not, on the brink of rebellion.
This is what must be seen and processed. The indigenous movement, encouraged by its leadership, speaks of “territoriality”; however, latifundium and smallholdings coexist within it: there is land in the hands of community members, but also large tracts controlled by national and foreign big landlords. Curiously, the indigenous people/peasants who inhabit the so-called “territories,” which are in fact private properties, smallholdings, are the laborers, farmhands, and workers of the latifundium within those districts.
Latifundium ownership, rather than diminishing, has increased. There are plenty of examples: the Wong consortium, former Minister of the Interior under Noboa, owns around 30,000 hectares in Guayas (Marcelino Maridueña); in Esmeraldas and Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, nearly 300,000 hectares of African palm are in the hands of a handful of owners; Noboa’s own Nobis consortium owns land in different parts of the country; the Valdez sugar company manages nearly 10,000 hectares, in addition to extensive banana plantations. In Cotopaxi, Aglomerados Cotopaxi and Durini own approximately 30,000 hectares, and Cobo controls some 19,000 hectares in the heart of what CONAIE calls “indigenous territories.” Added to this are the thousands of hectares of the Fukurama estate, yes, the same one denounced for practices of slavery in the 21st century. The day laborers, sharecroppers, tenants, and workers who labor on these properties are often subjected to feudal or semi-feudal labor relations.
Shrimp farmers own 233,000 hectares, the same amount of land owned by 1,800,000 poor peasants. To this “phenomenon” we must add the millions of hectares handed over to large mining companies; a vehicle that has generated a new wave of big landlords linked to these transnational mining companies, but also to small and medium-sized mining operations, scenarios in which poor peasant masses are violently dispossessed of their small plots of land. Furthermore, they are the ones who put their labor, and also their lives, at risk in the face of abuses and violence by the State, for the State, and by hired assassins.
In addition to the extreme concentration of land ownership, with individual or consortium holdings of 10,000, 20,000, or 30,000 hectares, there is monoculture and control of entire production chains: sugarcane, palm, banana, and forestry with vertical integration (land–processing–export).
Scenarios involving precarious or servile labor relations: piecework pay, outsourcing, indebtedness to internal stores, housing on farms, and forced displacement. Forced recruitment of peasants to work in mining; leasing of land and work under the “al partir” modality [Translators note: Work under semi-feudal conditions]. Control of common goods and easements: hoarding of water, roads, and rights of way, with private security and criminalization of protest. Regulatory and fiscal capture: regulatory and logistical advantages that reinforce concentration and hinder real agrarian reform.
These features, added to the specific cases cited, show that the problem is not just one of “territoriality” as a general, empty slogan, but of class power over land and labor, expressed in a regime that reproduces feudal and semi-feudal relations in the 21st century.
This is the kind of thing that the leadership of the indigenous movement should be concerned about, that peasants live in precarious conditions, that this must be eliminated, and it cannot be done through consultations, votes, or in the hovel of the Parliament. No, impossible. It must be done with revolutionary violence. The power of the gamonal [Translator’s note: local ruler] must be destroyed, and to do so, its figureheads, the local chieftains, those peasants sold out to gamonal who reproduce the old State in production relations and are the direct executors of the processes of corporatization of the peasant masses, must be defeated in every way.
In this context, it is urgent to recognize that, in the absence of a correct ideological line, the peasant struggle, without underestimating its constancy, especially around the need to resolve the agrarian problem, has a certain spontaneous character, often spurred on by its leadership, which has historically shown that, in addition to being treacherous and opportunistic, it has its own agenda, with no other goal than moving towards the elections and the bureaucratization of the indigenous-peasant movement. Furthermore, typical of the influence of Trotskyism, supported by Iza and his collaborators, they promote the idea of launching the indigenous movement into ‘insurrectionary’ days, as they consider this to be the mechanism and form of struggle that would allow these masses to ‘seize power’. It is something like trying to follow the Russian path combined with the participation in the elections and other bureaucratic nonsense.
The latest indigenous-people’s uprising, like previous ones, was betrayed by its leadership; this time under the command of Marlon Vargas, an unstable and cowardly representative of a plethora of leaders who have followed the same roadmap: initially with radical, inflammatory rhetoric; then friendly and conciliatory toward the government and the ruling classes, and finally, the icing on the cake, they end up as presidential candidates!
All this verbiage goes hand in hand with a “project” centered on “Indo-American communism,” a hoax that takes Mariátegui out of context, presenting itself as an “original” reinterpretation of Marxism for Latin America that privileges the indigenous/Andean as the core of civilization, taking isolated elements from Amauta, indigenism, and Andean communitarianism, and combines them with agendas that seek to find a program in the past; that absurdly shifts the axis of class struggle toward an ethnic-cultural identity. It mythologizes the “original community” as a superior ‘pre-capitalist’ form and avoids examining its internal contradictions (patriarchal, hierarchical (chiefdoms), growing commodification). Without criticism of these relationships, the “return to the community” functions as restorationist romanticism. A communism that is “neither a carbon copy nor a replica” that omits its core, its fundamental essence: agrarian and socialist revolution led by the working class in alliance with the indigenous peasantry.
On this occasion, Vargas, under the pretext of “saving the lives of protesters” and “preparing the NO campaign in the referendum,” demobilized the masses and threw them, once again, into the electoral dunghill. He did not act alone: he had the complicit support of Lourdes Tibán, from the Prefecture of Cotopaxi, and other “indigenous” actors with a domesticated ideology who repeat, cacophonously, that “only through work can we improve the country.”
These dogs of the old State replaced the popular uprising with the electoral campaign for NO in the referendum. They must be fought, without a doubt.
For its part, Noboa’s fascist, submissive, and extremely violent government has used means, tactics, and strategies rarely seen before to repress the people. It has already been pointed out: Noboa has turned Ecuador into a laboratory for imperialism’s new military line, with Zionist support, to neutralize insurrection and people’s struggles in Third World countries. He has not hesitated to bomb his “military” targets with artillery and warplanes, as happened in Imbabura and Azuay; to mobilize thousands of troops escorted by armored vehicles, war helicopters, and other military equipment to combat masses armed basically with slingshots, stones, and sticks: expressions of struggle, yes, but which, as always, are insufficient to confront an enemy that ruthlessly and abjectly represses the people, always with the consent of revisionist and/or opportunistic leaders who have served as catalysts for corporatizing the masses using crude, and in a way, effective populism based on vouchers, days off from work, gifts of pigs, raffles for vehicles in the uprisings they organize; and other trinkets reminiscent of the days of Spanish colonialism, where the memory of this time has become a “voucher.”
Today, the old bureaucratic-big landlord State, under the government of Daniel Noboa, a concentrated expression of the comprador bourgeoisie and big landlords, is being reorganized under the interests of Yankee imperialism and Israeli commercial and financial intermediary capital.
The country is a strategic enclave: military logistics, intelligence, economic and technological penetration. This is not a temporary “deviation,” but a concrete form of semi-colonial domination and corporate transition.
Imperialism demands “stability,” “security,” and “social control” for its expansion. Hence Noboa’s reforms: an increase in VAT, the elimination of subsidies, the privatization of strategic sectors, and repressive crackdowns under the rhetoric of “national security,” “the fight against terrorism,” and the call for a new Constituent Assembly, which has already become a “blank check” for imperialism and reaction. The current constitution serves little or no purpose for the masses, much less for the reactionaries. They, the reactionaries, require a constitution that endorses and projects what they are already doing: a process of militarization of the old society where the executive branch and the armed forces have all the coercive and repressive power. These measures correspond to a general corporate readjustment of the state on the economic, political, and ideological levels.
The dictatorship of big landlords and big bourgeoisie is not satisfied with bombing within the country, repressing, murdering, imprisoning, persecuting, and buying consciences; it also needs to resort to its electoral rhetoric. Now they combine violence and repression with electoral farce. They want us to believe that, with the referendum, the people will choose a new Constitution, when it is nothing more than the concentrated expression of the politics of the old State, of bureaucratic capitalism and imperialism. It is nothing more than that.
What did the people get from the 2008 Constitution? Nothing! They have exploited, oppressed, attacked, and violated us just the same; what’s more, we have drowned in blood and have been forced to migrate or die trying. Now they want to impose another Constitution on us. Will it change in relation to the previous one? Possibly in its forms, but it is not up to the proletariat, the poor peasantry, and the other exploited masses to endorse a political instrument that legitimizes the old State and presents it in its most “subtle” version in the field of government. People of Ecuador, remember: going to the polls, whether to elect authorities or for a new Constitution, only endorses the actions of all governments, particularly the last one, sustained by imperialist violence, lies, and governing in the interests of the big bourgeoisie and big landlords.
The problem of the constituent assembly is not a problem of the masses; it is a matter of inter-bourgeois contradictions brought to the popular level. We do not negotiate our dead at the ballot box, nor do we fall into the trap of opportunists, electioneers, and vote sellers. Let us strengthen our organization, fight, prepare, and develop the people’s war: that is what we must do.
We cannot and must not endorse the country’s old electoral system; we must not participate in the consultation, but rather boycott it. It is a matter of principle; it is not promoting an old system of government that makes us believe that, by participating in it, we are defining or setting the guidelines for popular participation in the designs of a State that does not belong to us.
From this perspective, the uprising once again reopens the historical path that must be better defined: to encircle the cities from the countryside.
The days in Imbabura, Cotopaxi, Chimborazo, and Loja demonstrate a profound understanding that has already been expressed on other occasions: the “curacas” and “caciques” [Translators note: Ways of saying “local chieftain”] who lead the peasant-people’s organizations must be dethroned, and the masses must be given an organizational tool to lead their struggles. This tool can be none other than the Communist Party of a New Type, which, without hesitation or opportunistic calculations, will sweep away all the rot that surrounds the popular movement.
Establishing a correct class alliance does not mean denying particularities, but rather recognizing them and turning them into a concrete and operational organism capable of addressing the contradictions that the government generates and exacerbates in the current situation, and of moving toward the resolution of fundamental contradictions: the nation versus imperialism; the masses and peasantry versus semi-feudalism and patronage; and the people versus the bureaucratic capitalism of the big bourgeoisie. All this without losing sight of the collusion and struggle between the comprador bourgeoisie, today personified by Noboa, and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, the followers of Correa, a scenario into which the masses have been dragged, diverting them from their historical objectives. It must be understood. Indigenous demands cannot remain in the hands of the ideological leadership of the petty bourgeoisie, or of bourgeois nationalism; it is and will be, without a doubt, a task for the proletariat. The bourgeoisie has expired as the class responsible for carrying out the democratic tasks that commit the indigenous people and the peasantry in general; that task can only be realized in the New Democratic Revolution, the transition to socialism.
People of Ecuador: we have entered a turning point, fraught with critical issues that slow down or hinder the tasks necessary to pave the way for the New Democratic Revolution. We cannot continue to entrust the vital efforts of the masses to opportunists and traitors. The leadership of CONAIE, Pachakutik, and the trade union federations has reiterated, without shame or consequence, its betrayal in favor of the old State; they have become one of the most serious obstacles to unleashing the storm of the People’s War of workers and peasants. It is necessary to unmask them, locate them where they are, and crush them. Chairmano Gonzalo said it masterfully: “Let us uproot the poisonous weeds… let us banish those sinister vipers… let us burst that pus, otherwise the poison will spread. Poisons and purulence must be destroyed.”
The moment is difficult, yes, but we are sustained by a historical optimism that overcomes obstacles and difficulties. The road is winding and requires us to confront the enemy without hesitation: imperialism, the big bourgeoisie, and big landlords, as well as their internal operators: local chieftains, opportunists, and revisionists. At this point, no one is left off the map: they are all pieces in the global strategy of imperialism and its lackeys to keep the people oppressed and exploited.
Let us not drag the masses into mobilization without a leading class and ideology to chart the course. It is unfeasible to persist in tiresome discourses about “collective rights” or in electoral solutions that mask continuity and ward off any fundamental transformation. It is not a question of “indigenous” communism, but of ideologically making proletarian the indigenous movement so that its national agenda takes into account existing class contradictions; so that its demands are articulated with those of workers, peasants, and other popular sectors; only then will the struggles of the moment cease to be episodic outbursts and become sustained processes of mobilization, militarization, and combat.
We have a favorable political scenario for the revolution. The historical conditions are ripe; we must take advantage of them. We must resolve all the political problems we face with armed struggle: there is no other way; it is what we must do.
Without a Communist Party to organize, educate, and lead, any action, no matter how important, will remain trapped in corporativism managed by an opportunistic leadership. It is imperative to build a leadership capable of transforming discontent into a program, the program into organization, and the organization into an overwhelming force centered around the Communist Party of New Type in the Front, and, obviously, in the People’s Army, the most important and decisive form for advancing toward communism through People’s War.
THE PROLETARIAT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL CLASS OF THE REVOLUTION!
THE PEASANTRY IS THE MAIN FORCE OF THE NEW DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION!
WITHOUT A PEOPLE’S ARMY, THE PEOPLE HAVE NOTHING
LONG LIVE MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM – GONZALO THOUGHT!
PEOPLE OF ECUADOR, DO NOT VOTE IN THE REFERENDUM!
PREPARE AND DEVELOP THE PEOPLE’S WAR!
