Ecuador’s president moves seat of government to escape protests
GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR
President Lenín Moreno of Ecuador moved the seat of his government from Quito, the capital, to a coastal city more than 150 miles away late Monday in an attempt to protect his government from the large anti-austerity protests that have racked the country over the past week.
On Tuesday afternoon in the capital, a group of protesters stormed the National Assembly, police fired tear gas in response, and an indigenous coalition approached the presidential palace.
Ecuador has been in turmoil since last week, when Moreno announced a number of measures that are part of an austerity plan imposed by the International Monetary Fund and are meant to lower debt and prime the economy for growth.
The measures caused a spike in fuel prices, enraging many transportation workers, young people, and indigenous groups, who have suffered years of economic malaise as Ecuador has sunk into billions of dollars of debt and then tried to slash its way free. As the protests mounted this week in Quito, Moreno declared a state of emergency, allowing him to suspend certain civil liberties and move the president’s seat away from the capital, to the city of Guayaquil — a measure that has never been taken before. The protests and his responses to them threatened to tumble Ecuador into chaos, worsening instability in a region already struggling with millions of Venezuelan refugees who have fled their country’s economic collapse.
The protests in Quito continued Tuesday, as demonstrators clashed with police, breaking several barricades and approaching the presidential palace. Some roads and businesses were closed, and the government said it had made hundreds of arrests in the past week.
Moreno made the announcement about Quito during a very brief televised appearance from Guayaquil.
When Moreno was elected in 2017, he inherited a debt crisis that ballooned as his predecessor and one-time mentor, former President Rafael Correa, took out loans for a major dam, highways, schools, clinics, and other projects. Moreno has moved away from Correa’s leftist policies; he has tried to cut social spending and government agencies and drill deeper in the Amazon for oil, Ecuador’s most valuable export.
But anger against Moreno’s efforts boiled over into mass protests when he announced the end of a fuel subsidy that had been in place for 40 years and which Moreno claimed cost the country $1.3 billion a year.
A coalition of indigenous groups said the protests were a defense of “our life and our territories” against the “greed, destruction and exploitation of natural resources by the state, with many of our people at risk of extermination.”
Jaime Vargas, president of an indigenous organization, the Confederation of the Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, said that unless the economic measures were abolished “there will be no dialogue,” according to The Associated Press.
Vargas condemned the violence at the protests but also attributed it to government actions, saying authorities had “tried to discredit, to tarnish the political image and the struggle of the indigenous movement.”
On Monday, the march toward Quito turned violent, with looting — including at the facilities of 31 flowerexporting companies, according to an exporters association — and attacks on field workers and farmers who refused to join the march.