The president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie), Leonidas Isaarrested the same day he launched an open demonstration against the government of President Guillermo Lasso, he is a charismatic leader forged in peasant movements and in the 2019 protests, which encouraged him in 2021 to assume indigenous leadership at the national level.
(Read here: Indigenous people from Ecuador carry out a massive protest against the rise in fuel prices)
Iza was arrested in a police operation in the Andean province of Cotopaxi after visiting protesters entrenched in one of the main roads that run through the Ecuadorian highlands, the Pan-American Highway, on the first day of mobilizations for the cost of living in the country called by Conaie.
(You may be interested in: The questions of the search for the disappeared in the Amazon)
Belonging to the Kichwa-Panzaleo nationality and dressed in a traditional maroon-colored poncho and black hat that always accompany him, Iza is a leader of vehement rhetoric, in which he usually combines his mariateguist ideology mixed with anti-capitalist harangues and messages addressed to the heart of their bases.
Field Forged Leader
Born in 1982 in the community of San Ignacio, in Hacienda Cotopilaló, in Cotopaxi, and the son of a historic leader, José María Iza Viracocha, he drank in his youth from the influence of those leaders of the first indigenous uprising of 1990, which he combined with his work as a catechist during adolescence.
It was from this last platform that in 2019 he became one of the visible faces of the demonstrations that paralyzed Ecuador between October 1 and 13.
He studied Environmental Engineering at the Technical University of Cotopaxi, he is used to citing thinkers from the Latin American left such as Eduardo Galeano and has assured that he owes his rebellious spirit to his mother Rosa Elvira Salazar.
Under that influence, he gained weight in different youth movements of the Catholic Church in the rural sector of his native province until he became a leader of the Provincial Committee of Pachakutik, the political arm of Conaie, in 2013 before being elected in 2016 president of the Indigenous Movement and Farmer from Cotopaxi (MICC).
It was from this latter platform that he became in 2019 in one of the visible faces of the demonstrations that paralyzed Ecuador between October 1 and 13 of 2019 against the economic measures of Lenín Moreno, together with the then president of the Conaie Jaime Vargas.
Protagonist in 2019
On that occasion, he starred in one of the most critical moments, when the indigenous movement captured eight agents in the agora of the Quito House of Culture, a collection center for the collective, and harsh speeches were made against the then president for which they were Both he and Vargas were prosecuted for kidnapping police officers and terrorism.
Iza, who appeared before the Prosecutor’s Office on several occasions for these events, was one of the 268 amnestied by Parliament last March and is considered by the indigenous group as one of its members criminalized by different governments.
In June of last year he was elected president of Conaiethe largest indigenous organization in the country, a position that it will hold until 2024 and to which it arrived with a clearly anti-extractive agenda and to enforce the application of the 21 collective rights that protect the fourteen nationalities originating in Ecuador.
Precisely, those two points are included in the decalogue of demands now made to the Lasso Executive as a sine qua non condition to suspend the mobilizations that began on Monday.
“Now this town has not risen up to go to a dialogue table, this town has risen up so that, in a public way, you (President Lasso) respond to the demands that (for) a year we have put on the government’s table” , stated the day before by refusing to agree to a negotiation with the Executive.
A constant opponent of Lasso
Since assuming the leadership of Conaie, Iza has tried to unite the main Ecuadorian indigenous organization after the 2021 presidential elections revealed differences between those bases that supported the candidacy. presidential of Yaku Pérez (Pachakutik), and those who turned their backs on him, including Jaime Vargas, who showed his open support for Andrés Arauz (correismo) in the ballot.
Considered to be from the anti-capitalist wing of the indigenous leadership, in 2020 he published together with other authors “Outbreak. The October rebellion in Ecuador”, which summarized his ideology.
“In Ecuador, the October rebellion really included all forms of struggle,” he explained to Efe at the time, about the volume in which he considered where the social struggle in the country would go. Iza claims to have given the government three opportunities for negotiation, but the truth is that his speech has become a constant counterpoint to Lasso’s policies, which he calls “neoliberal.”
For its part, the Executive had warned that it was not going to allow a wave of altercations like the one in 2019 that left half a dozen dead and more than 1,500 injured, about a third of them security forces. While waiting for the judicial authorities to establish charges against Iza, his arrest revives the debate about whether it is about criminalizing an indigenous social leader or upholding the rule of law.
EFE
More news
#Ecuador #Leonidas #Iza #indigenous #leader #detained #protests