FDLP – Ecuador: REPRESSIVE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE PEOPLE INCREASES!

We hereby share an unofficial translation of a statement by the Defense Front of the People’s Struggles in Ecuador.

The Armed Forces and the Police of Ecuador are a crude political-repressive instrument of the United States and criminal Zionism in what remains of our country. They have violently raged, been given free reign, like a runaway mule kicking in all directions.

Without any shame or disguise, they have become instruments of an internal war policy, militarization, and persecution that primarily affects the poorest sectors of the population.

In recent days, they have bombarded several provinces of the country. The bourgeois press media reports military bombardment operations and the use of heavy weaponry in areas of Carchi and Imbabura, as well as in the Podocarpus National Park, in Zamora Chinchipe, Azuay, and Sucumbíos, within an extended offensive across several provinces. These are acts of war that the country has not experienced even during the armed conflicts with Peru.

With malicious insanity, the Armed Forces bombed the northern border again yesterday, in El Chical, province of Carchi. They did this in an area inhabited by poor peasants, including some who, occasionally, resort to artisanal mining in addition to their agricultural work.

The attacked areas are left so devastated that the peasants cannot even enter to search for their fellow workers, because, as is evident, everything within the perimeter of the explosions is completely destroyed.

And, as if that madness were not enough, the military, following Zionist procedure to the letter, wait only a few minutes after the bombing and attack the affected area again, with the intention of finishing off the victims or killing those who try to rescue them.

The indiscriminate bombings and the entire repressive apparatus claim victims. The bombing carried out on March 6, 2026, in Sucumbíos, near the border with Colombia, did not fall on a “criminal camp” as the Government claimed, but on a dairy farm where there were also peasants’ homes. The operation had the support of the United States, which deployed a military helicopter to assist the Ecuadorian Army, while from Washington it was spoken of as an attack against “narco-terrorists.” However, reports from the New York Times, AFP, and the Human Rights Alliance collect testimonies and evidence pointing to a much more brutal reality: rural population trapped in the midst of the war, destruction of civilian property, prior detentions, and allegations of torture. Rather than a “surgical” action, what emerges is the suffering of rural families turned into targets or collateral damage of a military policy that razes first and justifies later.

Those who bear the weight of that terror, that violence, are the poor peasants and the inhabitants of the neighborhoods impoverished by the regime and transnational corporations; those who live off the land, when they have it, those who work in miserable conditions, those who have no roads, no hospitals, no sufficient water, nor the elementary protection that a State claims to guarantee. The militarization does not reach these territories to combat drug trafficking, because they are the drug traffickers!; it comes to deepen misery, dispossession and semi-feudalism in a more brutal way. peasants are being displaced, torn from their land, their territories; population voids are created that are occupied by criminals with strong ties to members of the Armed Forces and the police; moreover, the creation of a new layer of big landlords whose core is crime, is being promoted.

Under the pretext of a state of exception and curfew, raids, detentions, and a climate of generalized suspicion have been normalized, which ends up falling, time and time again, on sons and daughters of the people without demonstrated links to criminal structures. The exception has become the rule. War has become the language of government. And thus, little by little, the country has been pushed towards a form of everyday authoritarianism, not always proclaimed by that name, but exercised every day in the neighborhoods, in the communities, on the roads, in the cities, and in the lives of those who today feel that the State intrudes, occupies, intimidates, punishes, and kills…

In this repressive context, what happened with the Ecuadorian-Iranian Cultural Center in Quito has critical political gravity. On February 28, 2026, while a religious meeting for Ramadan was taking place there, a group of aggressors, promoted by the Mossad, attacked the premises with stones, sticks, and gas. The press reported injured people, material damage, and scenes of fear in a place where there were families, attendees of a religious ceremony, and members of a community gathered peacefully. An act of hatred in which even flags of the United States and Israel appeared. It was a deliberate aggression that shows the levels of direction that Zionism has in our country.

But the brutality of the puppet government went further; on this March 25, police members detained the Iranian cleric and director of the Ecuadorian-Iranian Cultural Center, Mohammad Khodadadi. According to the official version disseminated the same day, the capture was justified with accusations of alleged links to Hezbollah, the Quds Force, and business partners linked to a front man for Leandro Norero. Nonsense! The existence of a pattern of harassment and stigmatization is clear and must be unmasked and militantly rejected.

The government of Daniel Noboa has exceeded all legal limits. It has pushed the country into a repressive quagmire where hybrid violence, from drug traffickers and repressive apparatuses, has become everyday. What the vast majorities are experiencing is the corporate and criminal offensive of the fascist. Noboa has become a dictator, and yes, now he feels secure, firm, with the backing of the United States and Israel. Yes, he truly has it, but he also has feet of clay, and he will soon fall.

In the face of this situation, we express our deepest, firm, and combative solidarity with comrade Mohammad Khodadadi, with the Ecuadorian-Iranian Cultural Center, with their families, with their community, and with all the people who were targets of the February 28 attack and the subsequent state harassment. We also express our solidarity with the peasant and popular communities affected by the bombings, with the displaced families, with those living under the weight of the operations, and with all sectors of the Ecuadorian people who today suffer militarization, persecution, and arbitrariness.

We demand the cessation of harassment against the Ecuadorian-Iranian Cultural Center, full respect for the rights and guarantees of Sheikh Mohammad Khodadadi, the clarification and punishment of those responsible for the violent February attack, and the end of a policy of bombings, militarization, and repression that is sowing pain and vulnerability among the peasants. In the face of the fear they want to impose, it is necessary to foster organization, combativeness, and resistance.

STOP THE PERSECUTION OF POPULAR FIGHTERS!

NO MORE AGGRESSION AGAINST THE POOR PEASANTRY!

NO FORGIVENESS, NO FORGETTING FOR THE PEOPLE’S EXECUTIONERS!