US imperialist troops and the Ecuadorian state carried out a joint attack on Ecuadorian peasants in early March, destroying a farm and torturing the farm workers who labored there according to monopoly media outlet The New York Times.
The aggressors targeted a man named Miguel, a 32-year-old peasant and father of two who lives in the northern village of San Martín. On March 3, the US and Ecuadorian forces invaded Miguel’s property by helicopter, abducting nearly a half-dozen farm workers and dousing the farm’s buildings in gasoline before burning them down.
The US and Ecuadorian troops transported the kidnapped farm workers to a nearby military base where they were interrogated, abused, and tortured. During and after transport, the US and Ecuadorian forces choked the men with their own shirts, beat them with the butts of their rifles, and subjected them to electric shocks throughout the night.
The military units demanded that the farmworkers reveal “hidden stashes,” alleging that Miguel’s farm was a training camp for drug traffickers. The worker’s lack of knowledge about the fabricated “stashes” led to further abuse. The military released the workers at dawn and told them to go “back” to Colombia and never return to Ecuador.
Three days later, on March 6, the helicopters returned to bomb the remnants of Miguel’s farm.
In an interview with The New York Times, Miguel said, “It’s an outrage.… It’s a lie that 50 people trained here. Where are they going to train? Out here in the open? There’s no logic.… Everywhere you look there are animals: the cows I milk, the calves, and the horses.”
The US and Ecuadorian governments refused to respond to questions from the monopoly outlet.
After the attacks, the revolutionary Ecuadorian organization Front for the Defense of the Struggles of the People of Ecuador (FDLP-EC) provided the following picture of the imperialist campaign:
“Under the pretext of a state of exception and curfew, raids, detentions, and a climate of generalized suspicion have been normalized, which ends up falling, time and time again, on sons and daughters of the people without demonstrated links to criminal structures. The exception has become the rule. War has become the language of government. And thus, little by little, the country has been pushed towards a form of everyday authoritarianism, not always proclaimed by that name, but exercised every day in the neighborhoods, in the communities, on the roads, in the cities, and in the lives of those who today feel that the State intrudes, occupies, intimidates, punishes, and kills….”
Carried out under the pretense of a campaign against “narcoterrorism,” the US attack on the people of Ecuador is part of US imperialism’s strategy of deepening its domination of Latin America in the face of economic crisis, increased inter-imperialist competition, and growing national liberation movements.
Before attacking Ecuador, US imperialism violently invaded Venezuela and overthrew its government while continuing to attack fishing ships off its coast. US imperialism has also intensified its longstanding blockade against Cuba and continues to threaten to overthrow its government.
Image: The site of an attack by US imperialism and the Ecuadorian state. Credit: Ecuador Ministry of Defense.
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