Two governments tried without success before: it cost the State about $ 1.1 billion each year. Until now. President Daniel Noboa has decided to eliminate it surprisingly. Diesel has gone from $ 1.80 to $ 2.80 per gallon. He did it without calling dialogue tables, or warning the most dependent sectors of diesel. The decision was announced on Friday night in the middle of silence and has ignited the discomfort between carriers, farmers and small producers, who fear a chain of increases that hit directly to the cost of living.
Social and union organizations had summoned a national strike for Monday, but the Government managed to deactivate it hours before starting, accessing to sit at a dialogue table to explain that the decision is accompanied by temporary economic compensation to mitigate the impact, although making it clear that it will not retreat. “The decisions regarding politics in this country are from the government of President Noboa,” warned the Executive spokeswoman, Carolina Jaramillo. “There are no negotiations. What are there are conversations,” he settled.
Although the protest did not paralyze the country, it left signs of discontent. A dozen roads remain closed in at least seven provinces in which protesters have remained firm for the second consecutive day. The government has decided to decree the state of exception due to “serious internal shock” in those areas in an attempt to prevent the protest from climbing.
In Carchi, the border province with Colombia, on the main road, placed stones and set up barricades with giant tires to interrupt the passage. At the southern entrance of Quito, at the height of Alag, the same thing happened.
The reasons for the protest accumulate: in addition to the price increase, the arrest of seven drivers who protested from the early morning, and the growing insecurity that plagues carriers. Cargo transport in the country has been under attack for the mafias that violently assault trucks, kidnap their drivers and force them to pay extortion to circulate on the roads. The government is aware and has received the guild claims, but without offering concrete responses.
In Ecuador, fuel is not just an economic good. And touching it without prior consensus can have difficult consequences to contain. Lenín Moreno lived in 2019, when a revolt headed by the indigenous movement forced him to go back. Guillermo Lasso tried three years later, and the result was weeks of clashes, wounded, dead and a political fracture that he never managed to recover.
Warned of what the social mobilization can do, Noboa moved the executive function to the city of Latacunga, in the province of Cotopaxi, which is 100 kilometers from Quito. There, in the mountains, some of the most organized indigenous communities are concentrated. And also the most combative. The state abandonment and the breach of promises have been the fuel of the great mobilizations that have marked the last decade. “We see it as a persecution of the indigenous movement, a way of provoking organizations, the bases and we will not allow that,” said Rafael Negrete, president of the indigenous and peasant movement of Cotopaxi.
Latacunga is also a land of indigenous leaders who have led protests in the past such as Lourdes Tibán and Leonidas IZA, the former presidential candidate who led the demonstrations against Lasso in 2022. This time, but his message on the social network X made clear his rejection. “With the experiences lived in the two surveys and given the rejection of dialogue by the Noboa government, there is only one way to face this plutocracy that the government of a handful of the oligarchy represents.”
Diesel subsidy was one of the last standing. That fuel that moves heavy transport, cargo trucks, construction dump trucks, interprovincial, school and business buses, and has been for five decades. It is also used by farmers in their tractors, fishermen to fill the tanks of their boats and hundreds of remote communities that depend on electricity generators because the national system does not reach their territories.
For now, protests are scattered outrages. But they could be the spark of something greater. The Government is committed to deactivating them with compensatory bonds that began delivering since Monday. The aid is temporary and selective. Meanwhile, Noboa tries to meet the demands of the IMF and close a chronic fiscal gap, but does it with a measure that, as their predecessors have already warned, is usually explosive.
