ECUADOR: Protests by Indigenous Movement Mark OAS Assembly

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Kintto Lucas

QUITO, Jun 7 2004 (IPS) - Protests by indigenous people and social activists were broken up by police Monday, the second day of the Organisation of American States (OAS) General Assembly, in the Ecuadorian capital.

Around 1,500 demonstrators were dispersed by police shooting tear gas canisters as the protesters tried to approach the hotel in downtown Quito where foreign ministers from 34 countries are meeting in the three-day 34th annual OAS assembly.

Reporters covering the demonstrations were arrested, and several photo-journalists were forced to hand over their cameras.

Monday was the day chosen by the powerful Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) to stage an ”uprising” demanding that President Lucio Gutiérrez resign, by holding demonstrations and throwing up roadblocks on several key highways across Ecuador.

The Pan American Highway was blocked at several points, and more barricades are to be set up over the next few hours, said indigenous activists.

Humberto Cholango, the president of Ecuarunari, which represents Ecuador’s Kichwa ethnic communities and is the biggest member organisation of CONAIE, said the indigenous protests would continue to grow around the country, while protesters would be bussed to Quito.

”We will call attention to the inequality, poverty and social and political crisis that are plaguing the country,” said Cholango, who argued that ”it is not the indigenous movement’s responsibility if the people rise up and overthrow President Gutiérrez for his betrayal, his lies and his incapacity to govern.”

The indigenous movement – the best organised in Latin America – groups of poor farmers, and leftist and centre-left parties that helped Gutiérrez win the 2002 elections now accuse him of betraying his campaign promises since taking office in January 2003.

Shortly after he became president, Gutiérrez secured the backing of right-wing parties to implement neo-liberal, free-market economic policies, which he had campaigned against, and distanced himself from the indigenous movement and other social sectors represented on the cabinet, which led to the July 2003 break-up of the electoral alliance that brought him to office.

The opposition, meanwhile, also accuses the government of corruption.

The president ”betrayed us and followed the International Monetary Fund’s demands by earmarking 40 percent of the budget to servicing the foreign debt, got us involved in (neighbouring) Colombia’s armed conflict through Plan Colombia, and is moving against the country’s producers by seeking a free trade accord with the United States,” complained Cholango.

The central focus of the Sunday-Tuesday OAS assembly is the fight against corruption, which was proposed by the host government itself.

In the assembly’s opening speech Sunday, Gutiérrez said corruption is a ”social pathology” that affects everyone and undermines social development and democracy.

But Napoleón Saltos, leader of the Coordinator of Social Movements and one of the participants in Monday’s march, said it was ironic that Gutiérrez chose the fight against corruption as the main theme for the assembly when his government is being investigated in connection with several different scandals.

”There are well-founded accusations that (Gutiérrez’s) election campaign received financing from drug traffickers; cases of corruption involving his cronies in the administration of a number of state enterprises have been revealed; and there have been dozens of scandalous cases of nepotism,” said Saltos.

Gutiérrez, however, claims his government ”has made the struggle against corruption a state policy.”

The assembly elected former Costa Rican president Miguel Angel Rodríguez (1998-2002) as the new OAS secretary-general on Monday. He will succeed former Colombian president César Gaviria (1990-1994).

In his speech to the assembly, Gaviria said that during his years at the head of the OAS, the regional body has put a priority on strengthening democracy in the region.

He also urged ”Ecuador’s political actors to make their decisions without sacrificing governability, which has been compromised so often in recent times”.

Nationwide protests by Ecuador’s poor indigenous people, who make up more than 30 percent of the population of 12.5 million, overthrew presidents Abdala Bucaram in 1997 and Jamil Mahuad in 2000.

Instead of sending in his troops to crack down on the demonstrators in 2000, Gutiérrez, an army colonel at the time, backed their protests against corruption and neo-liberal economic policies, and helped oust Mahuad.

After admitting that Haiti ”has proven to be an extremely difficult case” for the OAS, Gaviria turned his gaze on Venezuela, to congratulate President Hugo Chávez for agreeing to take part in a recall referendum which could cut short his six-year term that began in 2000.

Several foreign ministers confirmed to IPS that the United States had planned to invoke the OAS Democratic Charter if election authorities in Caracas had failed to announce that enough signatures had been gathered to trigger a recall vote.

The Democratic Charter states that any country whose democratic government is overthrown by a coup d’etat is to be expelled from the OAS – a situation that had not occurred in Venezuela.

Meanwhile, the Indigenous Parliament of the Americas (PIA), which groups native lawmakers from all of the countries on the continent, met in Quito to present proposals to the OAS on several questions, including a request for the approval of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

”We want the Inter-American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which has been discussed for years, to finally be approved in the OAS,” the president of PIA, Ecuadorian indigenous activist Ricardo Ulcuango, told IPS.

”We have come to say that the social problems in the region should be analysed in a responsible manner, and that the necessary measures to resolve them should be adopted,” Ulcuango told the foreign ministers in the assembly’s opening session.

PIA also spoke out against Plan Colombia, a U.S.-financed anti-drug and counterinsurgency strategy; U.S. intervention in Latin America; and the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), while it underlined ”the need to promote intercultural democracy in which diversity is respected.”

Alexis Ponce, spokesman for the Permanent Human Rights Assembly of Ecuador, who participated in the OAS gathering as one of the representatives of civil society groups from a number of countries, questioned the role that the OAS has played since its creation.

”Its ill-fated interventions, its silence in the face of the (short-lived) Apr. 11, 2002 coup in Venezuela, the outgoing secretary-general’s criticism of the social uprisings in Ecuador and Bolivia, and its total indifference to the coup in Haiti have all reflected the pathetic outdatedness in which the OAS finds itself submerged,” said Ponce.

Ponce said he feared that the OAS was still an institution run by the ”unnameable country” (the United States), in which no one can bring up the question of Haiti; which has failed to take concrete steps towards opening channels for discussing Bolivia’s ”fair” demand for an outlet to the sea; continues to attack the Venezuelan government; and supports the military route in civil war-torn Colombia.

He also criticised the fact that the OAS continues to condemn Cuba ”while making timid references to the pathetic torture in Iraq and the right to intervene in any spot on the planet, including Latin America,” claimed by the United States.