CONAIE’S DEMANDS

(English from El Comercio, 2022)

1. Fuel prices: Reduction and no further increase in fuel prices. Freeze diesel at USD 1.50 and extra gasoline and ecopaís at USD 2.10, repeal decrees 1158, 1183, 1054, and enter the process of targeting sectors that need subsidies: farmers, peasants, transporters, fishermen, etc.

2. Debt moratorium: Economic relief for more than 4 million families with a moratorium of at least one year and renegotiation of debts with a reduction in interest rates in public and private banks and cooperatives. No to the seizure of assets such as houses for non-payment.

3. Product prices: Fair prices for farm products: milk, rice, bananas, onions, fertilizers, potatoes, corn, tomato and more; No royalties on flowers. No FTA signatures that destroy national production.

4. Labor rights: Employment and labor rights. Policies and public investment to curb job insecurity and ensure the sustainability of the popular economy. Demand payment of debts to the IESS.

5. Mining extraction: Moratorium on the expansion of the mining/oil extractive frontier, audit and comprehensive reparation for socio-environmental impacts. Repeal of decrees 95 and 151.

6. Collective rights: Respect for the 21 collective rights: Bilingual Intercultural Education, indigenous justice, prior, free and informed consultation, organization and self-determination of indigenous peoples.

7. On privatizations: Stop the privatization of strategic sectors, heritage of Ecuadorians. (Banco del Pacífico, hydroelectric plants, IESS, CNT, highways, health, among others.

8. Product price control: Price control policies and speculation in the market of basic necessities made by intermediaries and price abuse in industrialized products in supermarket chains.

9. Health and education: Urgent budget against hospital shortages due to lack of medicines and personnel. Guarantee youth access to higher education and improvement of infrastructure in schools, colleges and universities.

10. Security policies: Security, protection and generation of effective public policies to curb the wave of violence, assassination, crime, drug trafficking, kidnapping and organized crime that keeps Ecuador in captivity.

Ecuador’s relationship with oil companies began in the late 1960s, before Texaco was bought by Chevron..

For hundreds of years, the Ecuadorean Amazon was home only to indigenous people who had no contact with outsiders. The country’s main export was bananas. Then, in 1967, Texaco struck oil (Keefe, 2012). At that time, the area was so remote all of the equipment had to be choppered in.

It was not long before roads and an airport were built, and the roads were strewn with the bodies of people killed by paid assassins and paramilitaries.

In Yasuni National Park, fighting between the Waorani people, oil workers, and other uncontacted tribes. Dozens were killed, but the tribes could not keep Texaco out forever. They were not afraid to kill oil workers with spears, but the oil companies dropped lighted dynamite over one village, Bameno, to clear the area. They were going to drill one way or another (Korn, 2019).

A leader of the Cofán people, Ermenegildo Criollo, recalls seeing one oil spill (Korn, 2019):