FDLP-Ecuador: ETERNAL HONOR AND GLORY TO EDISON FARINANGO!
We hereby share an unofficial translation of a statement issued by the Defense Front of the Struggles of the People of Ecuador (FDLP-EC).
Edison David Farinango, artisan, peasant and popular fighter of the community of San Ignacio, in Cotacachi, died on the afternoon of Saturday the 27th of December at the Eugenio Espejo Hospital in Quito. He was hospitalized since October, when he was seriously wounded during the combative peasant-people’s uprising.
In the course of the people’s struggles, Edison received two blows from a bomb: one in the leg and another in the back, at kidney level. The injuries resulted in a severe deterioration of his kidney function and, and after weeks his condition worsened until it became irreversible.
With his death, the death-toll of those murdered in connection with the events during the October rebellion is four. They are four sons of the people who lost the life in a context of repression by the regime of Daniel Noboa.
The material and political responsibility for these deaths lie, first and foremost with the government and in the commands that ordered and carried out the repression. But the weight also falls on the indigenous leadership who turned the bloodshed into propaganda, electoral calculations, and the struggle for privileges, as if each uprising was merely a prelude to candidacies and pacts.
The causes that fueled the October uprising were not resolved, despite the fact that the people sustained more than a month of combats on the streets, squares and roads. Noboa, on the other hand, boasted of having imposed the increase in fuel prices without yielding to popular pressure.
The leadership of CONAIE, Pachakutik, and the revisionist left dragged again the masses towards the popular referendum and celebrated as a victory not having allowed reforms to the 2008 Constitution. Not two months had passed and the government ignored that speech: it mocked the popular ‘mandate’, it welcomed foreign military presence and intensified its agenda. They insist on the path of Constitutionalism and the electoral route, but that narrow framework, administered by the old State does not resolve the demands of the vast majority, because the underlying problem remains unchanged: Power.
Today, the leaders of CONAIE are celebrating: they are dancing and getting drunk, not only from alcohol, but from vanity. Edison suffered a painful agony, distressing. In Edison’s simple home there is a deep grief, with that a sadness that doesn’t make a spectacle, because absence sits at the table and leaves the house in silence.
And we who believe in the people’s struggle also witnessed that duel, not to weep on our knees, but to honor standing on our feet with our fists raised. Because when the people give their blood, it must be reclaimed in the struggle. Roque Dalton said it with a burning truth: “The dead are increasingly more unruly.”
The Defense Front of the Struggles of the People of Ecuador expresses its solidarity with Edison’s family and the community of San Ignacio. Death hurts, but it also summons the people to do not surrender. In the midst of the repression and the betrayal of those who seek to tame the struggle, the revolutionary spirit keeps alive, and sooner or later, will return to rise up with organization, combat and resistance.
NEITHER FORGET NOR FORGIVENESS FOR EDISON’S EXECUTIONERS!
ETERNAL HONOR AND GLORY TO EDISON!
IF WE DO NOT CRUSH REVISIONISM AND OPPORTUNISM, WE WILL HAVE DONE NOTHING!
ORGANIZE, COMBAT, AND RESIST!
