This article was originally published in Crisis Magazine (Ecuador) and is being republished by the International Workers League (IWL-CI) in solidarity with Leonidas Iza. Iza is an indigenous leader in Ecuador who has faced serious threats and persecution for defending the rights of workers and indigenous peoples. It is crucial to amplify his voice and reinforce our denunciation of all attempts to intimidate and criminalize social struggles.
For decades, we have witnessed the evils of the narco-state in our neighboring country: parastatal violence in marginalized sectors, disappearances, and the execution of popular leaders. Colombia’s experience has shown us that the narco-state represents a bloodbath for the people and the organization of the working class.
In light of the escalating violence targeting popular leaders like Leonidas Iza, it’s crucial to examine frameworks that have been developing for years but are only now becoming apparent in terms of their implications and consequences. These implications are evident in people’s lives and in the organization of civil society in defense of life, rights, and territories.
First, we must recognize that we are in a historic period of extreme upheaval. The imperial forces controlling the flow of capital—and therefore life on the planet—are disputing the distribution of resources. The inter-imperialist war between the BRICS and the West means the Global South faces more radical mechanisms of extracting surplus value, whether human or non-human. How is this extra profit extracted? Through:
1. cheap labor in centers and peripheries
2. cheap minerals and oil
3. cheap energy and food
4. free care work
In order to ensure that the exploitation of human and non-human labor is sufficient to sustain the productive machinery of the Global North, imperialism requires the states of the Global South to adopt a particular form of territorial and population control. In Ecuador, the state that has emerged over the last decade is an authoritarian narco-state that could become fascist if we allow it.
Why a narco-state? Because the state, from the executive branch to the justice system and repressive apparatus, is permeated by structures linked to illicit economies, such as drug trafficking, extortion, arms trafficking, and human trafficking. Why an authoritarian government? Daniel Noboa has demonstrated centralization of power since the beginning, as evidenced by the declaration of the Internal Armed Conflict on January 9, 2024, and the subsequent states of emergency that established permanent deployment and control of the Armed Forces and National Police throughout the country.
This is fundamental because it confirms that the militarization of the territory has also opened up greater scope for organized crime in these areas since the state’s repressive apparatus is highly permeated by illicit economies. In this second term, Noboa imposed four urgent economic laws that directly attack basic rights by merging ministries and secretariats. Additionally, a narrative is being imposed that presupposes an attack on democracy — however bourgeois it may be — and repeatedly attacks Leonidas Iza, the National Anti-Mining Front, and the Constitutional Court.
Just as the bourgeoisie and the state have evolved over the last decade, so have popular organizations. Leonidas Iza Salazar has become a popular leader within the Indigenous Movement, transcending two continental milestones in the popular struggle: October 2019 and June 2022.
In the current turbulent scenario, where the narco-state offers only precariousness and death, popular organization is the only force capable of limiting the perverse advance of overexploitation against the people and nature. The popular sectors and the bourgeoisie agree on one thing: Leonidas Iza Salazar represents the possibility of building Plurinational Popular Power. Therefore, undermining the legitimacy and life of Comrade Leonidas is one of the state’s main strategic objectives, as it now represents the interests of extractive imperialism and illicit economies.
In this sense, attacking Leonidas is also an attack on the possibility of civil society organization. In other words, on August 18, the Ecuadorian state attacked everyone’s lives. Those who fight for land, water, health, education, the IESS, children, animals, culture, decent work, institutions, and life.
The fourth attack on Leonidas Iza’s life demonstrates a specific, intentional mechanism of social control. Ultimately, capitalist hate speech leads to scenarios like the current one, in which mercenaries for hire—in this case, “public servants” who only serve to defend their masters and are only “public” in that they receive a salary—attempt to take the life of Ecuador’s most important popular organizer. Rather, they are responsible for carrying out and enforcing the hatred that their owners express in the pamphlets misnamed “press.”
When confronted with their alleged crimes, the great genocidal leaders of Germany denied responsibility by claiming they were merely “following orders.” Similarly, any hired assassin takes justice into their own hands by executing a mandate entrusted to them in institutional terms—orders from the state—and in social terms—hate speech—regardless of whether they belong to regular or irregular repressive forces.
Hate speech is effective for the state’s political power because it shapes public opinion. Thus, someone who is literally starving ends up defending a narco-banana grower who exploits them. This is the dilemma of the poor right-winger.
Hatred of one’s own class is instilled to the point that the average person ends up defending a social extermination directed against themselves. The corporate press—the media vanguard of the reaction and a central element in sustaining power—washes its hands of an act of state terrorism to the point of defending, legitimizing, and even demanding it.
“The terrorist Iza kidnapped three police officers” resonates in digital opinion. The normalization, distortion, and relativization of material facts are constants amid the smokescreen that is the “New” Ecuador. While Correa and his associates established political marketing as an instrument of social control, Bukele professionalized it, and Noboa perfected it.
The political class as a whole represents the worst of humanity, as reflected in the balance of power between the classes. Businessmen are revered for exploiting the vast majority of the working class, whom they describe as subhuman plebs to be enslaved. Meanwhile, our popular leaders are criminalized, denigrated, and even murdered under the express mandate of a narco-state and a vast majority that applauds it.
Amid the chiaroscuro of this historic moment, in which a megalomaniac businessman with Napoleonic overtones proclaims the non-future, the infamous fourth attempt on the life of Ecuador’s most significant and steadfast popular leader demonstrates the following: A bourgeois state, no matter how narco it may be, still fears an organized, dignified class capable of facing the exploiter head-on without the colonial complexes that afflict the “good” people, who are, of course, well-whitewashed.
Let the exploiting class know that behind Comrade Leonidas Iza stands a whole people ready to defend him tooth and nail. Leonidas Iza is not alone because he has defended the just cause and historic project of the working class with dignity: a just society, a beautiful society.
Leonidas Iza has a bulletproof poncho called the people. We resist.
