Members of Ecuador’s influential indigenous movement blocked roads on Tuesday to protest rising fuel prices as the country, amid a state of emergency, battles challenges on multiple fronts.
Protesters used stones and burning tires to disrupt traffic in five of Ecuador’s 24 provinces, including Pichincha, whose capital is Quito, according to the government’s public safety agency.
“We made this call (protest) to reject everything that the national government is imposing,” Julio Cesar Pilalumbo, one of the organizers of a roadblock in Zumbahua in central Ecuador, told AFP.
“We will resist and we will not give in to any repression,” he added.
Fuel prices have almost doubled since last year.
Last Friday, right-wing President Guillermo Lasso announced another price increase to $ 1.90 per gallon (3.8 liters) of diesel (from $ 1 in 2020) and $ 2.55 for gasoline – although he promised that this would be an increase in last.
Protesters under the umbrella of the Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador (Conaie) want the price to be limited to $ 1.50 for oil and $ 2 for gasoline.
The Conaie movement is estimated to have helped oust the three presidents between 1997 and 2005, and in 2019 led successful protests against the government’s removal of fuel subsidies, as required by the International Monetary Fund.
It was too little and too late to mitigate the widespread dissatisfaction with economic policy in a country that exports oil but imports much of the fuel it consumes.
Indigenous people represent 7.4 percent of the country’s 17.7 million inhabitants.
President Lasso, facing the biggest protests since taking office in May, warned on Monday that the government would move to “prevent road closures”, which he said was prohibited by law.
He had declared a 60-day state of emergency last week to tackle rising crime and violence blamed on rivalry between drug traffickers in the country located between the two largest cocaine producers in the world: Colombia and Peru.
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