On Tuesday, nation-wide protests over large scale metal mining called by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) demonstrated growing, broad-based participation. Roughly 12,000 people from indigenous, environmentalist, human rights, campesino and rural water organizations participated in diverse actions across eleven provinces of the small Andean nation. […]
The ongoing conflict over mining in Ecuador escalated this week as blockades shut down highways throughout the country’s Southern Andean highlands and Amazon rainforest, while nationwide protests have been called for January 20. […]
President Rafael Correa declared on Friday that Ecuador would not make a $30.6 million interest payment on $510 million in bonds due in 2012, calling the debt illegal. […]
Over 10,000 indigenous people from hundreds of Ecuador’s Northern Sierra (highlands) communities gathered to present the native movement’s proposed Water Law. Protesters chanted, “Water is not for sale, it is to be defended,” as speakers excoriated President Rafael Correa’s draft Water Law, saying that it could lead to privatization and pollution by mining companies. […]
In Ecuador, thousands of indigenous, campesinos, Afro-descendants and environmentalists took to the streets on Monday, protesting the pending mining law and government failure to fully apply a mining mandate passed by the National Constituent Assembly in April. […]
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has been celebrating a major victory since the new Ecuadorian constitution passed with 64% approval on Sept. 28. However, Correas says there is a "danger" to the realization of his plitical project. Remarkably, it’s not transnational corporations or the country’s oligarchy the president is worried about—it’s environmental, indigenous and leftist groups who are staunchly opposed to metal mining.
Monica Chuji is an indigenous Kichwa activist from the Ecuadorian Amazon. She served as an Assembly Member from President Rafael Correa’s Alianza País party in the National Constituent Assembly, drafting Ecuador’s new constitution. In September, she broke with Correa and left Alianza País, the culmination of months of increasing conflict between the President and Ecuador’s social and indigenous movements. […]
If getting chased out of Colombia at gunpoint wasn’t bad enough, 94 percent of the quarter-million Colombian refugees in Ecuador are undocumented. They have no right to work, no right to report abuses and no right to stay. But they’re not silently accepting this fate as “refugees without refuge”. By organizing and joining in the Latin American movement of movements, refugees are demanding their right to have rights. […]
At an estimated 250,000, there are currently more refugees in Ecuador than in any other Latin American country. They don’t live in far-removed camps, but instead struggle to survive in Ecuador’s informal urban economies, largely because the Ecuadorian government denies the majority of asylum requests. […]
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