National protests kicked off Monday and have spread to the capital as indigenous federation CONAIE calls for a national strike
From Pirate Wire Services
As protests against the government of right-wing President Daniel Noboa gain steam in Ecuador, Amnesty International released a new report that accuses state forces of severe human rights abuses, including forced disappearances of civilians, as part of his “mano dura” (iron fist) security policies to combat rising crime.
“Continuing a pattern we have seen in El Salvador and Mexico, criminal violence has been replaced by state violence,” said Amnesty representatives in a press conference on Tuesday.
Naboa has made battling crime a central plank of his presidency and declared a “war” on criminal groups that has led to the abuse and even extrajudicial killings of Ecuadorian civilians.
The country has seen a dramatic rise in homicides in recent years alongside the explosive growth of organized crime groups and local gangs. Once the safest country in South America, it is now among the most dangerous in all of LATAM.
In a case that created outrage across the country, soldiers arbitrarily detained and tortured 4 Afro-Ecuadorian teenagers from Las Malvinas. Their charred bodies were found weeks after their disappearance. The soldiers charged in the case have denied killing the boys, claiming the children were released after security forces staged a “mock execution.”
More content from this blog
- Eternal Enemies. The 20th Century Origins of Vietnamese Sinophobia, by J Frank Parnell – 14 April 2019
- A critical review of Walter Mignolo’s ‘Politics of Decolonial Investigations’, by Kavish Chetty – 30 July 2023
- Colonial – And Counter-colonial: The Israel/Gaza War through Multiple Critical Perspectives, by Oren Yiftachel – 1 April 2024
- What is Whiteness in North Africa?, by Leila Tayeb – 5 March 2021
- Right now, the pan-European far right is mobilising in Madrid, backed by Trump and Musk, by Tobias Hübinette – 9 February 2025