Muerte Cruzada, Ecuador in crisis
www.workers.org
Ibarra, Ecuador June 3 — On May 17 at 6:59 a.m., Ecuador’s banker-President Guillermo Lasso faced impeachment by the National Assembly and a dishonorable expulsion from office. At 7:00 a.m. that day, Lasso invoked the “muerte cruzada” (mutual death) clause of Ecuador’s Constitution. Applying t

Ecuadorians are angry about the insecurity, the governmental incompetence and Lasso’s total indifference to the needs of the masses. People remember that life was better six years ago — before Lenín Moreno became president, before the COVID-19 pandemic, before prison massacres and surging street violence.

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La Vía Campesina (the International Peasant’s Movement) on May 20, demanded that Lasso must “Respond immediately to the serious social crisis that Ecuador is facing, with high rates of hunger and child malnutrition, poverty, migrations, unemployment of almost half of the population, lack of investment in health and education, and an out-of-control level of violence and insecurity due to criminal gangs.”

The peasants’ group also demanded “Lasso must refrain from deepening neoliberalism, extractivism, the privatization of basic services, the handover of natural goods — oil, mining, the radio-electrical spectrum — to transnational corporations.”