Ecuador closes 2023 in an unprecedented economic, institutional, and psychosocial crisis, governed by economic elites under a catastrophic neoliberal model and surrounded by drug trafficking. It was the country’s “most violent year in history”, with more than 7,500 violent deaths, according to the Ecuadorian Observatory of Organised Crime (OECO), suffering a metamorphosis that now places it as one of the most violent countries in Latin America.
Poverty has worsened and social services have deteriorated, notes former Minister of Economic and Social Inclusion Berenice Cordero (Radio Pichincha, 27 December 2023). Nearly half of Ecuadorians live in poverty and underemployment, with 25 percent of children undernourished (official survey of 2018) and anemia reaching 50 percent (official survey of 2023).
We do not know how these holidays were for the 700,000 Ecuadorians who left the country in 2023 in a new wave of migration. Nor do we know about the current conditions of the 250,000 children and adolescents who left the education system during the pandemic period or the accumulated backwardness that affected at least 200,000 adolescents in conditions of vulnerability and human mobility (according to UNICEF estimates in 2022).
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) has highlighted in its environmental balance sheet that 2023 was marked by an increase in violence against defenders of nature and indigenous people’s territories, mining, and the absence of the state. Of course, there were also important achievements: the country’s population rejected oil exploitation in the Yasuní National Park through a popular consultation held in August, after 10 years of struggle by the Yasunidos collective to protect this megadiverse territory. It also prevented the expansion of mining in the Chocó Andino cloud forest, a biosphere reserve located within the Metropolitan District of Quito.
The new President Daniel Noboa, a young heir to the banana magnate Noboa Group, has just achieved in the first month of his transitional government, the approval in the Assembly of the Organic Law of Economic Efficiency and Employment Generation, which takes up in a new context the law proposals already presented by former President Lasso and which were denied by the Assembly. For former Finance Minister Pablo Dávalos, current Director of the Foro de Economía Alternativa y Heterodoxa, “we are in the presence of the most radical privatization of the state, beyond what Lasso considered (Ecuador en Directo, 16 December 2023). The law envisages tax exemptions, liberalization of the economy through the creation of Free Trade Zones, and privatization of the state.
Leonidas Iza, President of CONAIE, points out that expectations of Noboa have been rapidly collapsing among the citizenry because he promises change, but does not provide an answer to insecurity and condones debts to large economic groups with the tax reform. “We cannot allow the crisis generated by the large economic groups to be transferred to those of us who are sustaining the real economy of this country” (Radio Pichincha, 19 December 2023).
This “something new”, for which young people between 18 and 35 voted, hoping for progress, turns out to be a continuous repetition of the same thing. As a contemporary thinker puts it, “that this continues to happen is the catastrophe”.
But what is the answer: to be content to wait? As a society that has been thrown into violence, we need a rigorous plan to get out of this organized crime, Leonidas Iza will be proposing.
In the face of the generalized state of fear, we need to pause, we need to pay attention to the deception and confusion sown by the elites with the support of the mainstream media, to open ourselves to dialogue among so many and so diverse, who need and wanting something different, learning to weave it into convergence, without losing hope.
