<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 4:49 AM, MSP-LA <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:msp-latinoamerica@etapanet.net">msp-latinoamerica@etapanet.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%">Ecuador: The Events of 30 September
2010</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span lang="EN-GB">By
Ramiro Vinueza</span><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%"> </span></b></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">To understand the events
of 30 September we must put them in historical context, which will give us a
more complete picture.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">For the past several
months, many of Ecuador’s working people’s sectors—unions,
indigenous, peasants, teachers, students, public servants, small business
owners, pensioners—have been escalating and expanding their protests
again the neoliberal policies of President Rafael Correa’s
administration, which, when implemented, are harming the interests of the
country, its peoples, and their organisations, and returning to privatisations
and sell-outs.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><b><span lang="EN-GB">What do the workers and
peoples want?</span></b></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">The workers are defending
their union rights, which the government has wanted to rescind. Indigenous
peoples across the country have been fighting in defence of water as a vital
human resource. Peasant and indigenous communities oppose the Mining Law as a
sell-out and legalised plunder. Teachers are demanding better guarantees for
public education and opposing retaliatory, exclusionary evaluations. Students
and all the country’s universities are against the Higher Education Law,
which eliminates university autonomy, student co-government, open admissions,
and other benefits and rights. Public servants have mobilised to defend job
security and advances made through long struggles. Pensioners are seeking
better pensions and better treatment by the social security system. Small
business owners have been out in the streets campaigning for a law that would
guarantee their right to work, social security, and other benefits.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">There has also been
activism and protests against government positions favouring imperialist oil,
mining, and telecommunications monopolies; foreign borrowing under unfavourable
terms; involving the country in Plan Colombia; and promoting a policy harmful
to national sovereignty by signing the United Nations Convention on the Law of
the Sea (UNCLOS).</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt"></span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">President Correa has
responded to these social organisation protests and criticisms with repression
that has caused deaths and injuries and enormous material damages, such as the
attacks on the people of Dayuma and on the miners of Azuay, the murder of Shuar
teacher Bosco Wisuma, the violent eviction of miners in Zamora, and other
events. Leaders of worker, indigenous, peasant, student, and teacher
organisations have been arrested, tried, and persecuted. They are subjected to
the offensive attacks and smears of a loud, incessant campaign in the large
government-controlled media outlets, accusing them of being
‘mediocre,’ ‘terrorists,’ ‘corrupt,’ etc. </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt"></span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><b><span lang="EN-GB">Mutinous police demanding
their rights </span></b></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">Against this backdrop, on
30 September, police officers rebelled in different parts of the country, took
over their barracks, and went into the streets in response to the Legislative
Assembly’s adoption of the Public Service Law and to the presidential
veto, which takes away benefits, improvements, and subsidies that this sector
had won over several years.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">The mutinous police
officers protested these changes and even demanded that the head of the police
force be removed, but at no time did they say they wanted a change in
government or its overthrow. Instead, they requested dialogue, an end to
authoritarianism, and a response to their problems. Thus, this protest by
police officers is like that of other working class sectors that are defending
their aims, rights, and triumphs.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt"></span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">Before the government
declared a state of emergency, the police officers had been about to make their
demands public through the mass media. Their basic demands were the overturn
of the Public Service Law and reinstitution of honours and bonuses. They
explained that police cannot be treated the same as other public servants
because they work longer hours under distinct conditions. They also protested
that the Police Day bonus and Christmas basket were taken away and that it was
not just that a recently graduated officer earns $1,400 while a sergeant with
25 years of service earns $1,200.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt"></span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">It is wrong to make the
accusation that these actions are part of an anti-democracy,
anti-administration ‘conspiracy’ and that they are part of an
attempted ‘coup d’état’ by ‘right-wing fascists’
with ‘left-wing participation,’ without any proof at all.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">In reality,
representative democracy was never in danger. No social force or political
party, with the exception of former president Lucio Gutiérrez, mentioned or
called for Correa to leave. Everyone spoke of the need to resolve the conflict
via negotiation and dialogue, which even Ecuador’s vice president stated
from Guayaquil.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt"></span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">The insistent
denouncement by the regime of a supposed ‘coup d’état against
Ecuadorian democracy’ brought immediate shows of support from the U.S.
government and the United Nations, while at the same time also producing
declarations from the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the region’s
governments—Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay—and also from
Colombia, Chile, and Peru.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt"></span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">It must be noted that the
majority of the social organisations, fighting for their own causes, have made
it clear where they stand and have criticised the real or supposed conspiratorial
actions of the right, the partocracy, the oligarchy, and the imperialists.
This was spelled out in declarations from the Confederation of Indigenous
Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), the Quichua people’s federation
ECUARUNARI, trade unions, and the Popular Front and all its member
organisations, such that the accusations of conspiracy speak for themselves.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">The chief of the Joint
Command of the Armed Forces, General Ernesto González, backed constitutional
rule. He insisted on the request for the revision or annulment of the Public
Service Law, the cause of the conflict, when appearing on the indefinite,
obligatory nationwide, government-ordered simultaneous broadcast by the
country’s media outlets. All the spokespeople for the rebelling police
officers made the same plea, and all media outlets were able to pick up these
statements demanding their needs be met. The famous ‘anti-democracy
conspiracy’ that the administration and its servants were denouncing was
nowhere to be found.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><b><span lang="EN-GB">Events at the Quito
police barracks</span></b></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">The situation was serious
and generalised, but things got out of hand when Correa, making an arrogant
show of things and displaying open recklessness, went to confront the rebels in
the Quito barracks where he was met with their rejection and hot-tempered
excesses. He ended up sheltered in the police hospital, from whence he was
removed that night in the midst of a surprising and outsized military
operation, broadcast on radio and television to the entire country, which
gravely endangered the president’s life, and left a toll of several
fatalities, dozens of wounded, and heavy damage to the medical facility.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">Following his spectacular
exit, Correa arrived at the Plaza Grande square to cheering and applause from
his supporters, where he again put on his authoritarian, arrogant, and menacing
airs: making unsubstantiated accusations, distorting the truth, calling for
‘public revenge,’ saying ‘there will be no forgiving and
forgetting’ of the conspirators, etc.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt"></span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">It is important to leave
clear before going on that the democracy is a triumph won by the workers and
peoples over hundreds of years and that is why they defend it, despite its
limitations and omissions. Representative democracy is an expression of the
power of the ruling classes and safeguards their interests. For the great
majority, for the working classes, it continues to be the rhetoric in whose
name they are excluded and trod upon. Since they are clear about these
concepts, the social struggle, the actions of workers and peoples, and the
police officers’ rebellion were not proposing or fostering a violation of
the country’s institutional system, and it was even less so that the
rebellion was the result of conspiratorial, coup-mongering zeal from the right,
the partocracy, or the imperialists. The course of workers and peoples, of the
revolutionary left, is clearly defined. It is the independent march toward
their permanent liberation played out daily in their struggle for social and
democratic rights, aims, and triumphs.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">However, it is true that
the government line that there was a ‘coup’ was successful and this
confused a segment of public opinion in the country and abroad. However, at
the grassroots level, things are clear. The events of 30 September are a new
episode in the social struggle.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt"></span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">Beyond the
government’s vengeful, retaliatory stance and whatever sanctions it may
impose, this posture leaves deep wounds among the police officers and in
several social sectors. The government of the ‘citizens’
revolution’ that is now chanting victory should know that the struggles
of the workers, youth, and peoples continue—because the crisis continues,
injustice continues, social inequality is increasing, and corruption is
burgeoning and going unpunished. The tumult, the social struggle, and the
ambition for true change are becoming the standard being hoisted by ever
broader and greater sectors of our peoples. The people’s conscience is
growing.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt"></span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">Even so and despite these
events, workers’ leaders and organisations continue demanding the overturn
of the presidential vetoes and of the anti-people, anti-national elements of
related laws, such as the amendments to the laws on hydrocarbons, land use
planning, public service, higher education, public funding, and others that
harm workers, youth, and peoples. The public is also demanding that the state
of emergency be lifted immediately, since the government is saying that there
are no civil disturbances. </span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><b><span lang="EN-GB">A coup, or not?</span></b></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">Correa’s imprudent,
challenging posture at the Quito barracks, rather than the conciliatory
attitude that he could have used, became a reprimand to the gendarmes and a
challenge to them to ‘kill me,’ which set off outrage and cries of
‘Correa the liar!’ and ‘Correa the traitor!’ Then,
amidst tear gas and aggression, he was evacuated to the police hospital, where
he was treated for problems with his leg.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">Around 1 pm, Foreign
Minister Ricardo Patiño harangued the people gathered in Plaza Grande to go
‘rescue the President.’ Journalists Xavier Lasso and Giovanna
Tassi did the same from Radio Pública, following declarations by President
Correa along the lines that people could be about to enter his hospital room to
attack or kill him. Around noon, a state of emergency was declared and one of
the measures was to order the mass media to link in to be able to simulcast.
This is when the idea that an attempted coup was underway gained strength.
Every government official who was interviewed had the role of reinforcing this
idea, which was massively disseminated around the country and abroad. </span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">According to news
reports, the military forces that were supposed to take control over the
situation waited until an agreement was reached with Defence Minister Javier
Ponce to do so. Apparently, those negotiations were fruitful and the military
assumed control of the country.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">A little later, it became
known that there would be a military operation to liberate the president, while
around the hospital government supporters were fighting with police, who
dispersed the crowd with tear gas.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><b><span lang="EN-GB">A gruesome, manipulative
show</span></b></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">The operation authorised
by Correa was put into action with the objective of ‘rescuing the captive
president.’ Announcements were made. Invitations were sent to mobile
phones to go to the Plaza Grande to receive the president, before he was
rescued. In the square, a large screen was set up so that the people present
could view the action live. Everything was ready for the show. It was a
confusing operation, the least of which was rescue, and it irresponsibly put
the president’s life at risk.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">Listening to
Correa’s speech at Plaza Grande, it appears that the head of government
is not willing to turn back. He said nothing of revising laws or sanctions for
those who were involved in the disturbances. Plus, even though the president
says they are only a handful of bad elements and ‘infiltrators,’ it
was obvious that the majority of the police officers supported the measure.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">This means that there
will be no rectifications, that neoliberal-style laws will persist, that
arrogance will continue to be the government’s modus operandi, and that
threats will become commonplace as will the criminalisation of social protest,
which will be stamped out in blood and fire.</span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB">Therefore, social
organisations must continue working even harder <b>for the unity of all
sectors, to defend </b>their just aims, social triumphs, and rights; for those
of us who are fighting for a better future. This is where, without a doubt,
the strength of the people resides, which holds the assurance of victory!</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt"></span></p>
<p style="text-align:justify"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:10.0pt"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
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