“Nos quisieron enterrar, pero somos semilla”
-Words on mural in memory of Efraín Fuerez, Indigenous land defender assassinated in September
Ecuador’s national strike has reached 17 days and shows no signs of letting up. The paro was sparked by Decree 126, which eliminated diesel subsidies, increasing fuel costs by 55 percent. “If diesel goes up, everything goes up!” has become a common refrain at protests. But the strike is about much more than diesel. It is an exercise of democratic resilience in an ever-growing state of autocracy.
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)-led protests listed five demands to keep diesel subsidies and lower the Value-Added Tax (VAT), support funding for public health and education, and limit extractivist mining projects. They express a shared national concern with the rising cost of living and declining quality of life in Ecuador.
While the paro has not gone national, it hasn’t died out. Heavy militarized repression, hundreds of arbitrary detentions, and an assassination have sparked national outrage, spreading protests to urban sectors.
President Daniel Noboa, who dismissed Indigenous peoples as criminals, refuses to negotiate. Instead, he is weaponizing criminal law against Indigenous people and water defenders at unprecedented levels. Indigenous paros have long contributed to Ecuadorian democracy. This one is no different, despite a unique multidimensional crisis, marked by a context of unparalleled violence and poverty in the modern history of Ecuador. Paros are an intergenerational form of governance that the current president cannot decapitate.
Yet Noboa’s horizon is not just the paro, but the Constitution.
The heir to Ecuador’s leading banana empire, Noboa, has called a November 16 referendum for a Constituent Assembly. He seeks to replace many constitutional articles, targeting rights of nature and the right to prior consultation of Indigenous communities before engaging in projects on their land, as well as legal norms that forbid foreign military bases on Ecuadorian soil.
Weaponizing the War on Gangs Against Indigenous Peoples
Upon announcing subsidy cuts, President Noboa preemptively moved his government to a military base outside the capital, insinuating a state of war. When CONAIE called for a paro, from the verb parar or “to stop”, Indigenous communities created roadblocks stopping traffic on their territories, as they have always done.
Ecuador’s armed and police forces, famously absent in the face of organized crime, had a massive presence in repressing Indigenous blockades, then urban marches and sit-ins. Tanks rolled in, using teargas and shooting live bullets. By day 17 of the paro, there were over 250 human rights violations.
The military gunned down Efraín Fuerez, a Kichwa-Otavalo artisan. Footage shows armed forces beating the person holding his dying body on the ground. As Kichwa communities mourned Efraín with ancestral music rituals, the government tried to link him to the Tren de Aragua gang. Murals in Efraín’s memory sent a message of collective resurgence: “They wanted to bury us, but we are seeds.”
Although the Constitution guarantees the right of resistance in Article 98, the military arbitrarily detained over a hundred, mostly Indigenous, people, and wounded dozens. Many were young Kichwa women distributing water, others elderly grandmothers, all charged with crimes of resistance or terrorism.
In Imbabura, the focal point of protests, armed forces rounded up Indigenous peoples in the local stadium, turning it into a detention center for political opponents, darkly reminiscent of Pinochet’s 1973 coup. A group of 12 Kichwa-Otavalo persons were helicoptered to a prison on the coast where deadly riots had killed 30 people that week—all without due process, under unfounded allegations that they were members of Tren de Aragua.
To frame Indigenous peoples as terrorists is an old tactic of extractivist governments. The latest version links indigenous peoples to organized crime, in the context of the war on gangs declared in 2024. In doing so, Noboa is trying to expand on U.S. declarations of war on cartels, notably Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, against political opponents at home.
An alleged attack on the presidential caravan at a Cañar roadblock amidst heavy teargas and confusion led to five indigenous persons being detained and accused of terrorism. They were later freed by a judge who declared their detention illegal.
In Quito, the government launched a militarized assault on the popular neighborhood of San Miguel de Común, where videos reveal police infiltrators disguised among protesters.
Protests multiplied with the slogan “terrorista es el Estado que mata al pueblo organizado”, the terrorist is the state that kills the organized people. But they have yet to curtail massive criminalization.
Lawfare to Deter Self-Determination
Nearly fifty people were criminalized on the second day of the paro. Overnight, Indigenous leaders and environmental activists were charged with crimes of resistance, terrorism, or illicit association, many having their bank accounts frozen as if they were members of cartels. The measure targeted the presidents of CONAIE and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAEI), union leaders, and the director of the Pachamama Foundation, who is part of the Science Panel for the Amazon.
Water defenders from Azuay were disproportionately targeted, in retaliation for Cuenca’s unprecedented Marcha por el agua that had just gathered over 100,000 people to protest the environmental license irregularly granted to a goldmine. The water defenders demanded rule of law respecting multiple referendums and court sentences prohibiting mining in Kimsakocha, and accused the first lady of influence peddling in the mining project.
Lawfare targeted lawyers from the Yasunidos, a collective that protects the Yasuní National Park, and Cabildo por el Agua, an assembly to protect water access, student organizers, and electoral party leaders. Rural Indigenous water defenders, including the presidents of the Federation of Indigenous and Peasant Organizations of Azuay (FOA) and of the communal water system, Tarqui-Victoria del Portete, were charged with crimes of illicit association and damage to property for cleaning up mining waste in Kimsakocha. Yaku Pérez, a Kichwa lawyer and water defender, elected governor and twice presidential candidate, hit a record: “I was often punished for defending water, but never with four criminal charges at once.”
For Ramiro Ávila, former judge of Ecuador’s Supreme Court, to label people exercising their constitutional right to protest as terrorists is an illegitimate use of criminal law. In the context of the paro, this misuse of the law suppresses collective action, instills fear where there should be dialogue, and deters self-determination.
By applying the lens of organized crime to common citizens who demand the rule of law, Noboa’s government is attacking democracy.
Noboa’s Autocratic Takeover
Ecuador’s crisis is multidimensional. On the healthcare front, professionals protested in late August for 11 months of unpaid work, while patients decried the thousands dying while awaiting hemodialysis in defunded hospitals.
The nearly 600 percent surge in homicides in four years has made Ecuador the deadliest country in South America, while the nation gains notoriety as the Silicon Valley of organized crime. Noboa declared an “internal armed conflict” in 2024, listing twenty gangs as public enemies, putting the country into a de facto war context. Since then, armed forces are authorized to kill those they perceive to be a threat, and public spending has been redirected towards military expenditures, as Noboa labeled human rights groups as anti-patriotic detractors.
The war on crime turned into a war on the poor, with forced disappearances emerging as a major focus of public concern. Over 125,000 people are internally displaced, and malnutrition affects two-thirds of children, with growing levels of poverty. Yet in the name of austerity, Noboa eliminated six of the twenty ministries, fired over 5,000 people, and conveniently merged the Ministry of Environment with the Ministry of Energy. The resulting Ministry of Environment and Energy is, at best, a farce.
Amidst the paro, the nearly $100 million debt that the Noboa’s corporation owed the state in unpaid taxes mysteriously vanished. The appropriation of public resources comes with an autocratic touch: constant states of exception limit civil rights, control NGOs, and refuse to respect the popular vote to suspend all mining activities in Kimsakocha, Quito, and the Yasuní.
Noboa has limited rights by gaining control over the entire state apparatus. He now controls Congress, the Judicial Council, the Attorney General, the National Electoral Council, and the Council of Popular Participation. The only autonomous institution left is the Constitutional Court.
The Constitutional Court suspended articles proposed by Noboa, deeming them unconstitutional, particularly sections that allowed the undisclosed use of public funds or granted the presidential prerogative of “anticipated pardon” for police and military personnel prosecuted for crimes committed during the internal armed conflict. Noboa openly attacked the court and its judges, calling them enemies of the nation and militarizing the Court’s building with hundreds of soldiers. He led a march villainizing the Court, accusing the judges of “stealing our peace” and hanging banners displaying the judges’ names and faces, in a public act of intimidation. Not quite a January 6.
Dismantling the Constitution
Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution limits the president. The carta magna guarantees the right to protest and labor rights; it establishes water as a legal subject with rights. It declares Ecuador a plurinational state and guarantees over 20 Indigenous collective rights, including rights to free, prior, and informed consultation for Indigenous peoples. And it forbids foreign military bases on national territory.
Ecuador’s internationally acclaimed Constitution has inspired interspecies jurisprudence in over 40 countries, uplifting the legal rights of non-human species, a win for environmental justice globally.
But in November, Ecuadorians will go to the ballot box again to vote on whether to uphold the Constitution. The referendum will cost Ecuadorians $60 million, and Noboa may not win the popular vote, although he may win by other means. For now, he pitched a U.S. military base in the Galapagos to Trump.
Noboa is violently repressing Indigenous protests, attacking the Constitutional Court, and attempting to dismantle the Constitution, too. It seems that Noboa wants to make Ecuador great again.
Manuela L. Picq is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Amherst College and Editor at Public Humanities. Her most recent book is “Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the States” (co-author Andrew Canessa, 2024). She works at the intersection of scholarship, journalism, and activism, with broader community engagement in Ecuador and Guatemala.