Ecuadorian feminists against war

Friends and family members of those killed inside and outside of Ecuador’s prisons gather as part of the Memorial against war. Photo: Courtesy.

Opinion • La Laboratoria—Ecuador Node • January 24, 2023 • Originalmente publicada por La Laboratoria • Leer en castellano.

Ecuador’s new President, banana oligarch Daniel Noboa, took the unprecedented step of decreeing an “internal armed conflict” on January 9. This took place in the context of attacks by criminal groups linked to drug trafficking inside and outside prisons, which included the kidnapping of prison guards and acts of arson. 

That same day, violence crescendoed when armed men entered the TC television station in Guayaquil and took journalists and other staff hostage as national and international audiences watched live. It had been reported that Fito, the head of the Los Choneros gang, and other gang leaders had escaped from prison, apparently unbeknownst to the government. And the country found itself at war.

It would be absurd to think that this situation is new, rather, it has been brewing for a while now. This includes the transformation of the prison system that took place during and after the period of progressive [federal governments, from 2007–2017] and the increased influence of gangs; the interconnection between dollarization, money laundering and licit and illicit activities (such as banana exports, mining, and so on); changes in modes of accumulation and the emergence of new businesses and sources of gray money; the impacts of the armed conflict and the racist “War on Drugs” in Colombia and its cross-border impacts on impoverished territories like Esmeraldas; and the relationship between state security forces, the justice system, and the criminal economy.

These are elements of an ongoing process that puts Ecuador on the map in a region —and a world—at war. We understand this war as a form of governance of and against society. 

The massacres inside Ecuador’s prisons, which have resulted in approximately 500 deaths between 2018 and 2023, are a consequence of fragmentation among gangs and the subsequent conflicts between them that occur as they fight for territorial control. This is the most perverse aspect of this war, which seeks a “resolution” exemplified in Bukele’s El Salvador.

Returning to January 9, what we witnessed on that and following days was an attempt by the authorities and the media to inoculate the population to terror.

After the seizure of the television station on live TV, we have witnessed a deliberate, exaggerated attempt to produce social outrage. People rushed to their homes, the transportation system ground to a halt for hours in several cities, classes were promptly canceled and students evacuated. Once again, authorities have locked down the population and televised a new mechanism of war. Feelings of panic about COVID have been re-focused on the so-called terrorism of drug gangs.

The media relentlessly encourages animosity toward ubiquitous but diffuse enemies whose faces are shown over and over again: racialized men that authorities have branded as enemies for years. The battlefield is clearly delineated: the state versus the mafias, good Ecuadorians versus dark and poor criminals who are barely adults. There is a sharp contrast between the state’s armed operatives and these youth.

But there are also are new elements in the recent redefinition of the situation in Ecuador: the criminal gangs, whose only visible face is that of these young people, are now considered “terrorists.” We are told that we are at war not against criminal gangs, but against organizations that want to seize the country by force. And it is this reading, as widely disseminated as it is, that we need to question, as is already being done by many who don’t make it onto the news, including incarcerated people and their families.

There are discussions, for example, about whether the January 9 decree, which is one among countless and normalized states of emergency that Ecuador has experienced, is correct. It presupposes a militarized scenario that expands the impunity of the army and the police, which, as we know, not only impacts those listed as “terrorists,” who in fact make up the bottom rungs of the criminal economy, but can be applied much more widely, without democratic control. 

Many legal experts regard this situation as absurd. What is important is that it is politically effective to back and endorse state security forces, which, just a few weeks ago, were accused of involvement in criminal networks, along with politicians and officials from the justice system. “Operation Metastasis” is the latest in a series of such cases.

In a matter of days, we have seen the legitimation of military cooperation with Israel and the United States and, with it, forms of interference (and business) that seemed to be of the past, reflecting a long-standing dynamic in the region best exemplified by Colombia and Mexico. This declaration of war seeks to transform state actors who were implicated in criminal activity into saviors, exemplars of moral integrity and protectors of terrorized citizens.

The current state of war also has serious social implications. Ecuador is presently caught between criminals-turned-terrorists and the freshly justified action of the state, reorganized around a new consensus about its repressive role. The suspension of basic rights, including physical and legal protections, the freedom of assembly, and others were authorized during previous states of emergency; the exception has long since become the rule. But the new decree gives carte blanche to even more televised abuses.

These include the torture of incarcerated people, who are dehumanized and portrayed as enemies. Prisoners are currently publicly protesting the hunger and torture that they suffer in the name of security, while in working class neighborhoods and in cities more generally, those who are treated with suspicion are Black people, or those wear hoodies or have tattoos and show up in places where they aren’t supposed to be. Suspicion is part of a climate of civil war that sustains the bellicose management of conflict in everyday life. This new form of governance by armed authoritarianism is also fascist and it is not exclusive to Ecuador—this deliberate attack on democracy has been installed in various regions of the world.

Given all of this, it is necessary for us to explain that this war is not, in reality, what we have been told. It is a war waged on a different terrain and among different factions. 

The images of young gang members wielding explosives and weapons in a disorganized manner depict what Mujeres de Frente call a “war against those from below.” This war is not waged against the drug business, money laundering or contract killings. Those are the tools of political and economic elites, who make pacts and negotiate deals without hesitation, cooperate institutionally (how else can we explain their mobility and territorial reach?) and combine licit and illicit activities in production, mining, transportation and activities in the ports where their ships full of bananas and other merchandise come to port.

War is waged against those at the bottom, who are punished in a relentless and exemplary way and who are also used as laborers. It is upon them that these modalities of social discipline are tested and imposed, eroding bonds of cooperation that could stop the abuse and dispossession that drive the current model of legal-criminal accumulation. Racism against the impoverished population, who are sacrificed at the hands of a state at war, does not hinder the recruitment of disposable labor. Instead, it obscures the links between the mafia economy and the conditions of social subordination it requires.

What they call a government war against the mafias, we must name as a racist war, a war against the people, and a preventive war against those who rebel, against those who denounce the conditions of death, against those who suffer on the front lines, a war against some that becomes a war against all. 

Frightening, confining and exposing the population to the spectacle of dramatic military operations, in which Black bodies are treated as disposable, readies it for new projects that facilitate accumulation by elites and aggravate the crisis. At home, people watch looped images of Fito, of the takeover of the TV station, of police and military operations against an enemy that is everywhere, embodied in the faces of frightened youth in detention. 

Meanwhile, laws and initiatives such as tax reforms that exempt large fortunes (including those of the Noboa group) are strengthened and renewed, as are free trade zones and extreme labor exploitation. All of this is a proving ground for the sudden hike of the Value Added Tax, the Free Trade Agreement with China, the transformation of the country into a landfill, as well as privatization plans, cooperation agreements with arms dealing nations, and so on.

War, as President Noboa jovially noted, costs money and that money has to come from somewhere. In addition to being a tool of government, war creates business opportunities for the elites who today occupy the government and its interstices.

As feminists, social actors witnessing how punitivism preys on working class youth, as women aware of the way in which this climate of social warfare burdens and humiliates the families of those on the bottom rungs of the intertwined licit and illicit economies, as organizers who fight for social reproduction with justice, who oppose the racism that breaks social bonds and recognize the link between war and sexual violence, we cannot remain silent.

We are at war. Latin America is at war. There is war in El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, and Guatemala, but it isn’t happening in the way the government and authoritarian neoliberals claim. This is a war to subjugate and annihilate communal life, a mechanism of fracture that normalizes the sacrifice of humans and nature, all for the benefit of those who hold power today and who intend to organize accumulation by any means necessary. 

All out against war! Not in Gaza, not in Ecuador, not in Latin America.