Two strangers approached the farm (small rural farm) on Saturday night where the Amazonian leader Eduardo Mendúa worked with his wife. “They surprised him, they didn’t say anything: their objective was to kill him. They hired the assassins to arrive, hunt him down and kill him,” said the niece of the member of the Board of Directors of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie), who some Hours before, they had declared a permanent assembly and demanded the resignation of President Guillermo Lasso “due to his inability to govern.”
The fatal shots fired by Mendúa’s assassins have further deepened the social and political upheaval suffered by Ecuador, plagued by drug-trafficking violence and by the drift of Lasso’s conservative government. The leader of the Cofán indigenous people in the province of Sucumbíos, in the north of the country and on the border with Colombia, had stood out in the fight against oil exploitation and against those he considered guilty of its extension: PetroEcuador, the provincial government and President Lasso.
Only five hours before being shot, he warned through his Facebook account that “we are not here to cede even an inch of our territory so that the foreigners from oil can destroy the spiritual beings and invisible people of our jungle, rivers, lagoons, sacred places, ravines, medicines and our baits”. According to his account, they were to blame for the violence that had been generated in the Dureno community and for the exploitation of 30 oil wells that threatened the environment and its people.
His niece, who has become a family spokesperson, also pointed to the same “accomplices” in the death of his uncle, in addition to “the brothers who have been threatening.” “Point-blank shots of the hitman type,” Conaie specified in her statement, charged with indignation.
The Ecuadorian Prosecutor’s Office has already carried out the first raids in the Cofán commune of Dureno and has arrested a suspect in the murder of the leader who also handled international relations for Conaie. “Charges will be filed in the next few hours,” they announced to the country.
The news also fell like a bomb on the political gossip in Quito, forcing an urgent response from the president himself, who expressed his solidarity with the Mendúa family and Conaie. “This crime will not go unpunished,” Lasso said.
In this way, problems accumulate for the former banker from Guayaquil. The defeat in the referendum called by himself to strengthen himself and the victory of Rafael Correa in the local elections have weakened him to the point that the possible impeachment that the National Assembly is seeking could cost him his dismissal. It is precisely the indigenous people of the Conaie, commanded by the radical Leónidas Iza, who had saved a new takeover of Quito for later to force a checkmate.
“Eduardo was fighting against oil exploitation and contamination in the Amazon. It is terrible that (the murder) should happen after the extended council of Conaie. The State, Government and oil companies must answer for this crime,” threatened Iza, defender of “Indo-American communism.” through their social networks. In principle, the indigenous people have joined the rallies on March 8 for International Women’s Day.
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