Ecuador is going to the polls on Sunday, February 9 with a crowded pool of 16 candidates. The nation’s current president, Daniel Noboa, is the son of the country’s wealthiest banana magnate and five-time failed presidential candidate, Álvaro Noboa. Since the end of the Pink Tide government of Rafael Correa (2007-2017), Ecuador has had three conservative presidents promoting neoliberalism, which the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), Latin America’s strongest Indigenous organization, has consistently opposed. In the upcoming elections, the political movement Pachakutik, an electoral-political arm of CONAIE, presents Leonidas Iza as an alternative to the dominant oligarchy, proposing a unification of marginalized sectors representing Ecuadorians from cities and the countryside.
President of CONAIE since 2021, Iza is a Kichwa leader of the Panzaleo pueblo from the central Andean province of Cotopaxi. He became a household name during the national strikes led by the Indigenous movement and popular sectors in 2019 and 2022, bringing the neoliberal governments of Lenín Moreno and Guillermo Lasso to their knees. Bringing together diverse social sectors including feminists, ecologists, student unions, LGBTQ+ communities, and artists, CONAIE, led by Iza, supported the historic national referendum against oil extraction in Yasuní National Park and mining in the Chocó Andino region in an unprecedented campaign against corporate extractivism in August 2023. Noboa appears to be walking back on these commitments, in the name of “national security” under his designation of “internal armed conflict.”
In a presidential debate held on January 19, Iza promised to renegotiate public debt, tackle security with an integral plan in 90 days, treat public services as sacred, foment national production, and make Ecuador free of metallic mining. He ended his intervention by expressing thanks to the Ecuadorian public, with a few ironic words for Noboa: “Thank you, bye bye”—in effect, bidding farewell to years of austerity, deregulation, and insecurity that have only deepened under Noboa’s administration.
I spoke to Iza last month about his political analysis and proposals. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Malvika Gupta: As Ecuador approaches general elections, it has been declared one of the world’s most violent countries, a “narco” or even “failed state.” What is your analysis?
Leonidas Iza: In Ecuador, a new social class has emerged—a narco-bourgeois, which operates within the context of increasingly powerful narco-capitalism. Cocaine generates more profit for certain elites than bananas or any other so-called legal business. The narco-bourgeois knows this and ties local and regional criminal groups into the drug industry. It is an exceptionally violent industry, forming part of a complex global network that generates profits between and within countries. The tendency is to blame the weakest link in this chain—impoverished people living in miserable conditions—rather than those orchestrating the trade and bloodbath. At this stage, the drug industry can be considered an undeclared state policy. A large part of Ecuador’s private economy is invested in drugs. The state is not only “infiltrated” by drug traffickers. They have been entering through the front door, in dialogue with decision-makers, for several years.
MG: Witnessing the Vice President’s undignified treatment, the armed forces’ role in the assassination of the “Guayaquil Four”— the seizure of four Afro-Ecuadorian boys by the military in December 2024, resulting in their deaths—and reneging on implementation of the Yasuní referendum, is Ecuador’s democratic status in question?
LI: Liberalism has become its own worst enemy. It has worn away its foundations. Countries exemplifying this bourgeois thought have witnessed drastic reductions in their welfare budgets; this has not only happened in Ecuador. Our world faces a dangerous drift towards neo-fascism, a phenomenon we call “radicalization of the right-wing discourse” in our book Sinchi. El levantamiento popular plurinacional de junio 2022 en Ecuador [by Leonidas Iza, Andrés Tapia, and Andrés Madrid]. Trump, Meloni, the rise of AFD in Germany, Bukele—these express an era in which profit can be made from resorting to exceptional measures.
Capitalism presents itself for what it truly is: brutal. Noboa is the child of his father, who, swimming in his sea of dollars, arrogance, and status, knows that beyond being the President of the Republic, he is powerful. Deep down, it is always a dictatorship—of the business elites. The only difference is that due to the general context of the modern crisis, this is becoming more apparent, and at some point, it could even become formal.
MG: It is a common misconception that Pachakutik (PK) is an ethnic party representing only the Indigenous sector. Please tell us its main principles and who it represents?
LI: Formally, PK is the political arm of CONAIE, and it is the only party born from the core demands of Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples, nationalities, and popular sectors. Although a left-wing party, PK was recently taken over by other tendencies/ideologies within the Indigenous movement who acted to appease and make deals with those in power. We have been working to correct and heal this.
PK is not an “ethnic” party in an ethnocentric sense. It was born out of the struggle of the Indigenous movement, but it aims to incorporate both a cultural and spiritual vision and a class perspective on material life. Our recognition of ourselves as classes must always involve an anti-colonial standpoint.
MG: Two major issues distinguishing Pachakutik from Revolución Ciudadana (RC), the most influential player of the progressive institutional Left, are protection of territories from extractivism and intercultural bilingual education. These correspond to historic demands of CONAIE, territorio y cultura. On what conditions might you create an alliance of the Left with RC if this need arises in the runoff election?
LI: There is no such thing as human capitalism. We must question the civilizational project, which, in the case of peripheral countries, acquires colonial and extractivist traits.
We fundamentally reject policies of large-scale mining and oil extraction. We are not and will never be slaves in our own land, however “progressive” or different Correa’s model of extracting surplus value may be. We distinguish ourselves from Correismo on the issue of resource extraction—an irreconcilable difference. They want corporations to fund the country’s “development” by extracting wealth from the Indigenous territories. Once again, we Indigenous peoples have to lose the battle of defending life and territory so that the country (which means the country's elites) hoard and accumulate more? They are wrong; we will not give up an inch in the fight against mining. We will increase social spending through redistribution of wealth and taxing those who evade taxes, not by social distribution of extractivist rents. Intercultural bilingual education needs to be not only protected for us Indigenous people but expanded to the whole society.
MG: Politically, there seems to be a conspicuous absence of plurinational, intercultural, and Rights of Nature policies in the other presidential candidates’ campaigns, despite their inclusion in the 2008 Constitution. What does your proposal of Plurinational Popular Power (PPP) entail?
LI: PPP goes back to the conceptual basis of the CONAIE Political Project in 1994, to the first Indigenous uprising, of which I myself am a son. The project states, “the Power of the Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities, Afro-Ecuadorians and Hispanic-Ecuadorians, will be based on the solid alliance and unity of Indigenous Peoples, peasants, [industrial] workers and other workers of the countryside and city, and in the harmonious relationship between Nationalities.”
Plurinational Popular Power is a practical and radical critique and transformation of existing power structures, which aims to go to the root of problems to implement a fairer society. The uprisings in October 2019 and June 2022 illustrate the possibilities of subalterns leading our country and ending the existing structural violence.
Our movement is repeatedly misrepresented as violent by the very class of people who maintain structural violence. For the rich, denouncing misery is violence. To be hungry is to be violent. Wanting to study, go to the doctor, eat well, not have mental health problems, and raising one’s voice against femicide is violence. For the rich, PPP is violence. They are already asking whether ours is a campaign launch or a national strike, a declaration of a government program, or terrorism. The only choice we have is: plurinational, intercultural, community-centric society and state—or barbarism. For us, PPP has long represented the possibility of directing our future; it is not a new issue.
MG: What is your vision for Ecuador’s economy? Historically, it depended on exporting primary products like bananas, cacao, and oil. How will your government seek to diversify the economic matrix?
LI: We can summarize our country’s fundamental problem as a crisis created by the ruling elite that they try to displace onto the working class, especially those in poverty, the nationalities, Blacks, montuvios, cholos, and mestizos. People’s falling quality of life, school dropouts, increasing violence, and unemployment are all related to the narco-economy that has taken over. This takeover has involved dismantling public education, health systems, and institutions, while the informal economy has been invaded by drug trafficking. This crisis has damaged our national identity. It developed in the context of an inter-imperialist war, involving the U.S. and its allies. Like other countries in Latin America and the Global South, Ecuador is presently a highly dependent country. Public debt grew by 151 percent from 2013 to 2020, and has increased even more since then, following IMF [International Monetary Fund] dictates.
Among the measures taken by the governments of Moreno (2017-2021), Lasso (2021-2023), and Noboa (2023-present) are: eliminating fuel subsidies, increasing VAT—a regressive tax that reduces the working classes’ real income and purchasing power, leaving the rich unaffected, and a “Humanitarian Law,” promoting “flexibility of work” that reduces job security by facilitating untimely dismissals and diminishing the kind of compensation required under the Labor Code. It is estimated that poverty has increased to a level where 26 percent of the country’s population is living in poverty—as high as 43.8 percent for the rural population, in January 2024. Transforming our society will involve modifying patterns of accumulation—a profound historical shift.
MG: How will you position your government amidst the revival of the regional Left and the rise of the hard right globally?
LI: We will work with all governments that respect the self-determination of the peoples of Ecuador, who seek to transcend the modern-capitalist civilizational project. We believe in uniting forces among the Latin American Left and the popular organizations and aim to transfer strength to the working class rather than holding power in the state. The republics throughout Latin America need to transform collective patterns of structural violence. The Latin American region must seriously rethink itself based on the critique of the structures that have upheld its republics—classism, racism, and colonialism. We are not pawns in the game of world powers. We are anti-imperialists and do not share U.S. American foreign policy, especially in its period of fascism.
Globally, we are living through a time in which humans must define themselves as a species. Either we emerge from the morass, or we sink into a death spiral. The scramble for markets is leading us towards a possible world conflagration. If decades ago, the idea of a third World War appeared as a strange speculation, it is now almost a gloomy possibility. Fascism is advancing now, as in 1920-1930s Germany. Trump expresses a delusionally seductive narrative from the far-right. What’s dangerous is that the masses are seduced by these stories, as happened a century ago. The Left and the working class must wake up and seek a true political identity in open opposition to the narratives constructed by the elites.
The dispute between Western imperialist countries led by the United States and emerging capitalist countries led by China expresses a moment of change in the hegemony that has ruled the world for over a century. It is a moment that the people of the world must think through themselves. Palestine is a cause we embrace; it is a symbol of what is just, in the face of the imperialism that is making so many lives miserable.
Malvika Gupta is a doctoral candidate at the Department of International Development, University of Oxford, researching CONAIE’s project of plurinational politics in Ecuador.
