by Catherine Walsh
These notes began as a need—my need—to reflect on the two-week peoples´ rebellion and protest in Ecuador, a rebellion-protest that I lived and that continues to trouble my body, mind, spirit, and soul. Different from many of the analyses circulating in the “critical” intellectual world, they do not intend to impose a singular interpretation, assume an authoritative voice, simplify the occurrences, or make the events, mobilizations, and movements the object of study. They are notes—part of an unfinished and developing text—written from my felt-thought, notes that open reflection on the complexity of that lived and that which continues. Yet as Chile and then Bolivia also began to explode, the notes grew and grow, and with them my questions about the coincidences, relations, and connections…
I.
A month has gone by since Ecuador’s “October Awakening.” I am referring to the “awakening” of massive social protest in what was probably the largest indigenous-led uprising and national strike ever in this Andean-Amazon-Pacific plurination. While tens of thousands marched from the Provinces to the capital city of Quito, thousands also occupied provincial government offices, blocked roads and commerce, and “shut down” the country’s operation, all in response and resistance to state and IMF imposed economic policies, including the presidential decree that eliminated fuel subsidies.
The fact that this protest-awakening was led, in large part, by women has not been sufficiently acknowledged. Also not acknowledged—in the media or in indigenous organizations themselves—is the role of women in rethinking, re-creating, and sowing movement, politics, struggle, and life today (in Ecuador and the region), in “awakening” protest, resistance and re-existence in these times of capitalist-patriarchal-colonial oppression, violence, destruction, and death.
But I am also referring to another “awakening”—that of state authorized-and-led repression and violence. Without a doubt, the state awakening in Ecuador was driven by the March 2019 letter of intention with the IMF and its demands of economic, social, and tributary structural reforms. The fact that these reforms violate national and international economic, social, and cultural rights and threaten the very existence of the majority of the population, is reason enough for protest, as is the unconstitutionality of the letter of intention itself, which was signed by president Lenin Moreno without prior congressional approval.
But contrary to what it may seem, the “state awakening” is not of the nation-state or national state as we know it. Rather, it is of what José Angel Quintero Weir calls the state corporation or the corporate-state constitutive of the new and emergent stages of global capitalist accumulation and interest. It is an awakening—a making visible in Ecuador—of new strategies and configurations of the colonial matrix of power, in which, as I have argued, the denationalized corporate state and the military-police apparatus or complex are part.
In this sense, Ecuador evinces what some of us have suspected for a while: the nascent awakening or rebirth of the condor. My reference, symbolically, is to the huge vulture-like bird native to the Andes thought to be almost extinct. Literally, it is to “Operation Condor,” the US-backed clandestine campaign that began to take form in the 60s under Kennedy against the “Cuban threat” and continued throughout the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations. The antecedents, of course, can be traced back to CIA operations decades before, and to Nelson Rockefeller’s avarice for oil.
The mission of Operation Condor was to eradicate Soviet, communist, and socialist influence and ideas, and to suppress—through state implemented violence, repression, and terror—social opposition and movements—including indigenous movements—that threatened capital’s interests and neoliberalism’s advance. The governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay were the principal members, although Ecuador and Peru also formed part.
Is not the October Awakening evidence of the condor’s rebirth and of an Operation Condor II taking form?
I am not suggesting a repeat of 50+ years passed, but instead a new chapter or sequel. The configuration, actors, alliances, and strategies today are certainly not the same, lest we forget the presence throughout the region, particularly in Colombia and Mexico, but not only there, of narco, paramilitary, and state pacts and formations—that is, of state corporatizations in which both extractive interests and global capital, in addition to their obvious ties—are constitutive parts. The present-day complicities and configuration are not only attributable to the U.S., although without a doubt the U.S. government and its allied corporations and “multilateral” institutions (i.e., the IMF, IDB, World Bank, Organization of American States, etc.) remain central to the game.
The complicities of and configurations with global capitalism are also within Latin American countries themselves. They were present (often with distinct forms and players) in the former “progressive” governments of Lula in Brazil, the Kirchners in Argentina, and Correa in Ecuador. And they continue today in Bolivia, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, despite the denial by much of the traditional Left. In countries of both the Right and Left, oligarchies and elite, big business, and the church (i.e., evangelical-political alliances that include conservative Catholics and Opus Dei), to name just a few, foster and maintain the complicities and configurations. The cooptation and in-corporation of local governments and community leaders, most particularly indigenous and peasant leaders, are part of the plan, giving a much more complex and diverse face to the plan-projects-operation present and taking form, but also enabling one of the strategic aims: the serious debilitation and fragmentation of communities and social movements. For all this and many more reasons that we are yet to discover, the new condor plan is much more complex than its predecessor.
The October awakening is of the condor now in movement and flight. And, at the same time, it is of the people in rebellion and re-existence-based movement. Ecuador was the beginning. Then came Chile, where student-led protests against neoliberal policies and for a Constitutional Assembly and a new people-based Constitution have brought millions of all ages to the streets in a pacific and dignity-based rebellion—almost a month going—without the need of figure-heads or leaders. The response: brutal state repression and violence, levels of which were last seen with Pinochet and Operation Condor. In the televised words of President Piñera: “We are in a war against a very powerful enemy: the people.”
While the violence in Santiago (televised and on social media) is evidence, what is not seen in the media or press is the even more brutal state authorized-and-led violence, dehumanization, and extermination in Wallmapu, Mapuche territory-communities.
Bolivia came next. There, the inconsistencies and suspected fraud of the October 20th national elections awakened and pushed rebellion, a peoples’ response to the complex social and political tensions long brewing and exacerbated by the Evo/Garcia Linera government, including its political-patriarchal authoritarianism, extractivist economy, fragmentation, and weakening of social movements, and its imposition of another presidential term after a peoples’ referendum said NO. The rebellion took to the streets, not in a simple polarization of those for and against Evo, but a much more complex amalgam of struggles, forces, interests, and visions politically, culturally, and socially grounded, and with differential ideas and practices of (pluri)nation, government, democracy, people, and power.
In this mix, the rapid escalation of chaos, confrontation, and violence was not (or not only) state-led as in Ecuador or Chile. Its impetus instead appears linked, in great part, to the “civic” opposition, whose regional extreme-Right elite, neoliberal and conservative religious interests, and anti-indigenous, racist, and fascist postures have long worked to keep internal colonialism and coloniality alive. Here it is not just the levels but the forms of violence: the dehumanizations of indigenous leaders and authorities, especially women, the hunting-down of government members, and the burning of homes, among others, that recall and continue the colonial enterprise’s long horizon in internal and global project and form.
With the resignation of Evo on November 10, some say the “coup” began. Others, including Evo and Garcia Linera, argue that it was constitutive of the effort to discredit elections. And others contend that the anger, indignation, and social discontent surrounding the elections and the suspected fraud provided the perfect moment to put in action the overthrow that members of the conservative Bolivian opposition, with support of the U.S. and the OAS, had been preparing. The “taking out” some years back of Zelaya in Honduras (orchestrated by the U.S. and the OAS) is brought to mind.
The self-proclamation tonight (November 12th) of the white, blond, ultra-Right wing, and religiously conservative senator Jeanine Áñez as interim president, and her publicly declared goal: “to pacify the country” is indicative of that which is ahead. “I dream of a Bolivia free of indigenous satanic rituals, the city is not for indios!” she said in an April 14, 2013 tweet now recirculating.
Another on June 20, 2013: “May the Aymara new year not shine of alba! Satanic, no one replaces God!”
With the Bible held high, she rejoiced on today in front of the presidential palace. The Bible and the banner of “Democracy,” a democracy, without a doubt, conceived in and controlled from the new colonial configurations and strategies I mentioned earlier, especially emergent in Latin America today, in which the alliance of evangelical religion and politics are a component part. A democracy designed to bring Bolivia back into the fold, making sure that all that threatens its advance—especially indigenous peoples, peasants, popular sectors, youth, feminists, and outspoken women, and the ideas, practices, and knowledges that challenge western-conservative-religious values—be dispelled, controlled, dominated, eliminated, and exterminated. Can we doubt the condor’s rebirth, presence, and flight?
II.
The sounds of gas bombs and of helicopters overhead 24 hours a day still ring in my ears, along with the high pitched roar of the war planes that flew over Quito for 4 hours a day the week following the 12-day uprising-strike-awakening. A show of military might, or just “practice,” as the official news claimed, for an air-force day of commemoration?
The resonances invade my dreams, along with the lasting images of levels of police brutality, state repression and violence never before been seen in this Ecuadorian plurination.
Why the excessive force of police and military against thousands of people—women, men, youth, and children, indigenous, black, mestizo, urban and rural—the vast majority in pacific protest? How to comprehend the grave and disproportionate use of gas bombs not just on the streets, but also in declared “peace zones,” including the Arbolito Park, communal kitchens, and the Salesian Polytechnical University where more than 5,000 women, children, and elderly were housed each night? What about the use of horses to disperse and trample (images that recall the Spanish invasion more than 500 years past), of government pronouncements (without evidence of course and as also have occurred in Chile and Bolivia) that blame Cubans and Venezuelans for the destabilization? And what about the public declaration by the current Ecuadorian Minister of Defense, trained at the School of the Americas and part of the extreme-Right government of Febres Cordero, a key collaborator in Operation Condor? A declaration that authorized the use of all means necessary, including lethal weapons, to protect strategic installations and the state. “Do not forget that the Armed Forces, proudly, have the experience of war,” he said.
The words of Ecuador’s president Lenin Moreno at the recent inauguration in Quito of the 174th session of the International Commission of Human Rights afford a similar tone: “One of the characteristics of the modern democratic state is its reserve on the monopoly of the use of force …the use of force of the state that permits the existence of pacific societies. This situation required the use of force.”
While lethal weapons were not employed, the disproportionate violence had its toll; the statistics as of the writing of these notes: 12 dead, 11 mutilated by the impact of gas bombs, 1340 wounded in incidents with public forces, 1152 jailed, with this number now, a month later, still increasing.
Of course the statistics don’t tell the stories of those assassinated, brutally beaten, tortured, kidnapped, disappeared, trampled, gassed, gravely wounded by rubber bullets shot short-range, or of those illegally held without respect for human rights, the Constitution, and legal due process. They don’t evidence the racism. And they don’t reveal the complicities: hospitals that shut out the wounded, police that attacked street-based medical brigades, the Catholic bishop that closed the door of the cathedral to the funeral procession in Riobamba of an assassinated indigenous leader, to name just some.
Neither the statistics nor the political analyses circulating internationally recount the pain and horror of that lived, the physical, psychological, emotional, and economic toil and effects—then and now—for individuals, families, and communities, the lack of reparation, or the rampant escalation of anti-indigenous racism in government discourse, the press, and conservative, elite, and some middle-class sectors.
Instead, and all too often, these analyses, written from the distance, contribute to the dehumanization, to the inhumanity and dehumanity(ies) authorized and avowed, and to the idea that politics and political struggle (still too often conceived in simplistic Left versus Right terms) trump existence. The recent report on human rights during the October indigenous uprising and national strike published by the Alliance of Organizations for Human Rights with its focus on the testimonies of those women, men, youth and children whose lives have been gravely affected by the state-authorized violence, provides a human and humanizing context for evidencing that which occurred.
III.
It is October 13. The long-awaited “dialogue” between indigenous organizations and government began, an example of sorts of how negotiations might and should take place in this plurinational state (recognized as such by the 2008 Constitution). In adherence with the indigenous movement’s demand, the dialogue was televised on all national channels. The several hour session ended with President Moreno’s revocation of Decree 883 that was to eliminate state subsidies on gasoline. With the revocation came the announcement that a new Decree would be negotiated.
Thousands of indigenous women and men celebrated in the Casa de Cultura, with many other protest participants and supporters joining in the surrounding streets. Yet it was a pyric victory of sorts, important without a doubt in ending the 11-day protest and the rounds of violence, but insufficient in eliminating the incidence and hovering presence of the IMF and its demands of structural reform and country control. Insufficient in addressing and repairing the violences committed by state forces, and insufficient in attending to the causes of growing impoverishment, violence (especially against women), and territorial contamination, displacement and dispossession, the result of an extractivist economy that knows no limits and claims no harm. Insufficient in making the Constitution, deemed by many as the most radical in the world (with its recognition, among other areas, of Nature´s rights), a document of praxis.
While government-organized dialogue continues with some sectors, CONAIE and the indigenous movement, along with other social organizations and collectives, have taken its own path in the plurinational Parliament of the Peoples. The Parliament’s proposal presented to the government on October 31st makes clear the problem: the sacrificing of society in order to meet the indicators of economic growth and the demands of the capitalist system. “Change in the civilizing perspective, …transition from a capitalist vision toward a new form of relation among society, nature, and production, …more coherent, ethical and human public policies” are the guiding principles of this important document that outlines a plan of economic, political, social, and tributary reform that is people and community focused and structural in scope. Government representatives, including the president, rejected the plan outright.
In the recently televised words of the newly named head of the Armed Forces, the directive to this proposal and the indigenous movement was clear: “We will not permit the imposition of a model that goes against the basic terms of democracy.” Is it just coincidence that his words came on the same day of the “democracy” of the self-proclaimed president of Bolivia or the day after that Trump proudly announced that Latin America is returning to democracy and that only Venezuela and Nicaragua are left?.
Not coincidence, I argue, but part of the plan, of the October (and now November) awakenings and the condor (and his Operation II) now in regional flight and movement.
…Notes that, without a doubt, will be continued…
Quito, November 12, 2019
Catherine Walsh is an intellectual-militant involved for many years in the processes and struggles of justice and social transformation, first in the United States (where she worked closely with Paulo Freire) and, over the past twenty-plus years, in Abya Yala (Latin America) and Ecuador, where she joined many Indigenous and Afro-descendant movements. Her many books include Enabling Academic Success for Secondary Students with Limited Formal Schooling; Indisciplinar las ciencias sociales: Geopolíticas del conocimiento y colonialidad del poder. Perspectivas desde lo andino; Pedagogías decoloniales. Prácticas insurgentes de resistir, (re)existir y (re)vivir; and more recently, with Walter Mignolo, On Decoloniality, the inaugurating text for the series they co-edit with Duke University Press.
