By Nora Sandoval* – Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF)
The Noboa government is crushing dissent and rolling back environmental victories.
Ecuador has inspired the world. It was the first country to enshrine the rights of Nature in the constitution as a response to ecological breakdown. It also oriented its constitution toward buen vivir, an understanding of a good life with indigenous roots that is based on balance, reciprocity, and the quality of relations instead of unlimited expansion and appropriation.
The tiny South American country even had the guts to conduct an official audit of its foreign debt in 2007 and declare a part of it illegitimate. Only two years ago, in August 2023, 60 percent of the population voted for leaving the oil in the soil in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon forest, the Yasuní National Park, although the government threatened to cut social expenditures even further. By around 80 percent of the votes in popular consultations, the residents of Quito and Cuenca, the country’s capital and the third biggest city, ruled out mining in the highland watersheds that feed the urban aquifers. Since the 1990s, the national confederation of indigenous peoples, the CONAIE, has organized powerful mobilizations reclaiming dignity and confronting structural and everyday racism.
But all this is changing now, at an accelerated pace. The current president, Daniel Noboa, first elected in 2023, is applying a multilayered shock therapy to the creative, culturally diverse, well-organized, and ecologically conscious Ecuadorian society. In his second term, which started last May, the offspring of one of Ecuador’s wealthiest families managed to unite the country’s elites behind him. Their goal is to get rid of the constitution that made the country famous and, through its strong focus on rights, interculturality, and sovereignty, also limited some of the most aggressive forms of capital accumulation. On November 16, Ecuadorian voters will vote for a new constituent assembly. But this is only the top of an iceberg of strategies that is de facto abolishing democracy, exacerbating violence, restructuring the state in alignment with the interests of the white and wealthy, and installing a new far-right discourse rooted in class privilege, patriarchy, and centuries of racism.
Noboa has taken political advantage of the fact that, in a very short time, Ecuador has been transformed from one of the most peaceful countries in Latin America into one of the most violent. During the pandemic, the country became a regional center for narcotic distribution, aided by the fact that the U.S. dollar is Ecuador’s official currency. Conflicts among gangs over control of territory have sharpened, and homicide rates soared from 5.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2017 to 43 per 100,000 in 2023. There is a clear racial and class bias to these deaths, with young, impoverished, non-white men being by far the most frequent victims.
In January 2024, the young president declared the country in a state of “internal armed conflict” against 22 criminal groups, who were declared terrorists and elevated to the status of combatants. This has allowed Noboa to deploy the military where it suited the government best, and to govern under an almost constant state of exception. Military and police were repeatedly granted impunity for excess in the use of violence against “terrorists.”
However, this strategy has not reduced the actual violence Ecuadorian people have suffered from these criminal groups. Rather, the first half of 2025 has been the most violent period in the history of the country. And the murders have continued. For instance, between October 9 and October 12, according to various media outlets, 16 violent deaths were recorded in the coastal province of Manabí alone, bringing the total for 2025 to 967 murder (compared to 856 in 2024).
A Way to Cancel Democratic Rights
Noboa’s declaration of a state of internal war has been very effective in dismantling the organizational fabric of society, imposing terror on environmental activists and cancelling democratic rights. But Ecuadorians are fighting back. Since September 18, the indigenous umbrella organization CONAIE, trade unions and other social organizations have declared an indefinite national strike (paro nacional), triggered by the withdrawal of the public subsidy to diesel, which boosts prices for everything, especially food. The main strategy of the paro has consisted of decentralized roadblocks and protest marches all over the country.
The government immediately tagged all protesters as “terrorists,” thereby associating them, absent any evidence, with the murderous criminal groups. Even geographically, there is almost no connection between the regions where drug violence rages and those where the recent protests erupted. But hundreds of bots have been pushing this discourse through digital networks even as Noboa’s corporate frontmen acquire media channels like La Posta or Radio Centro to impose their version of the truth. The discourse equating indigenous and peasant activists with terrorists reenacts a long colonial tradition that strips them of their rights and their humanity and is also embraced by white urban middle classes who give free rein to their racist hate speech.
Once the paro had started, the government once again declared a state of exception and deployed the military in association with the police to repress the resistance. The “terrorist” framing justifies the use of lethal force “if necessary.” Governmental discourse is also plagued with euphemisms that idealize the military and transform the police into heroes of the nation. A “National Solidarity Law” passed in June invites citizens to donate food, among other things, to “the security bloc” and offers tax exemptions for these donations. Heavily armed military convoys sent to put down the most rebellious province of Imbabura in the northern Andes were officially declared as “humanitarian convoys” that would bring food and medical supplies to those in need.
According to Jorge Cahuasqui, a young leader of the Kichwa Karanki people in Imbabura, “they came in and began to shoot CS gas grenades directly onto the bodies of women, who had formed a peaceful human chain between the army and a roadblock, asking for dialogue. One of them received the impact on her head and fell into a coma, another one collapsed. The convoy had no food whatsoever with them, except a few Gatorade bottles from the nearest supermarket. Twenty-two people were injured yesterday alone, some of them badly.” Since the beginning of the paro a month ago, two people are reported dead from the impact of live ammunition. The Red Cross, which refused to accompany these convoys, has felt compelled to explain the international principles of humanitarian aid to the government.
A Government Above the Law
The Noboa administration doesn’t feel bound by national or international legislation, or by the institutional principles of liberal democracy. Instead of offering dialogue or seeking mediation after nearly a month of social conflict, it derives its legitimacy from the urban middle classes and from the use of force. On October 12, it brought 7,000 soldiers into the capital to confront a peaceful, colorful march of urban citizens who were mobilizing in solidarity with the paro in rural areas. The soldiers repeatedly used CS grenades and flash-bang grenades to disperse the crowd, though the demonstrators didn’t offer any provocations during their exercise of their constitutional right to protest. In Imbabura province, the incursions of the deadly “humanitarian” convoys were repeatedly accompanied by a total blackout of electricity, phone lines, and Internet connection.
Since mid-September, more than 60 social activists along with indigenous, peasant, environmentalist, and anti-extractivism organizations throughout the country suddenly found their bank accounts blocked and access to their money denied. The prosecutor also charged them with misappropriation of funds or money laundering, consistent with the “terrorist” narrative. The only explanation they received from the banks was that they were complying with “an order from above.” An intelligence law passed in June allows the indiscriminate surveillance of citizen’s communications without judicial order and the use of comprehensive surveillance software like Palantir and Pegasus; a “transparency” law targets civil society organizations according to “anti-corruption” policies that severely limit the civil rights to association and free speech. Even as the government charges social activists with money laundering, it has also pushed ironically for the reinstitution of casinos, which had been banned under the progressive government of Rafael Correa.
The electoral law, meanwhile, has been changed to a stronger first-past-the-post majority voting system, which tends to favor the biggest parties. The consultation planned for November 16 will also ask Ecuadorians to decide whether the state should stop granting all parties equal public campaign funding. This reform would leave campaign financing to private fortunes, which would mean that millionaires and representatives of the thriving criminal economies would dominate electoral politics.
The whole law package, which passed swiftly through parliament in June, lacks a clear definition of terrorism and associated crimes, and what is meant by the support of terrorism. But it nevertheless imposes very high prison sentences on those found guilty. The speed with which it passed suggests that there is a script behind the far right taking power in Ecuador, similar to the U.S. Project 2025.
Even before the passage of this law, the government has targeted critical voices within the state apparatuses as “traitors to the nation.” Such critical voices include a judge that spoke of forced disappearance and charged the state with responsibility after 16 soldiers were filmed dragging four Afro-Ecuadorian youths onto their pickup truck who were later found dead. In December 2024, the ministers of Defense and of the Interior threatened this judge with sanctions and lawsuits. The Constitutional Court of Ecuador, which objected to the recurrent state of exception and challenged the constitutionality of certain articles of the law package passed in June, also “faced a campaign by the Noboa government that seeks to delegitimize the judges who make up this court and positions them as ‘enemies of the people,’” as Amnesty international warns in a recent report. It adds:
In August, giant banners were installed showing the faces of the judges and accusing them of “stealing peace” from the country. The president called for a march against the court and ordered the deployment of the armed forces around its premises. In September, a bomb threat was received at the court’s premises, forcing the judges and their team to leave the site. Likewise, members of the court have reported receiving threats about criminal proceedings against them, in retaliation for their work, and having their communications hacked.
The Noboa strategy to restructure the state does not stop at making use of legislative power to restrain rights and limit the independence of the judiciary. It also puts family members or former employees of Noboa’s family businesses in strategic positions of the state—for example, at the head of the tax authority to relieve the Noboa corporations of their tax debt to the state. It also replaces poverty alleviation policies and other social expenditures with politically targeted, clientelist charity programs led by the First Lady or the president’s mother, who is also a member of Parliament. In this way, social organizations and rural communities who have suffered a steep and continuous decline in their standard of living since the pandemic have been successfully divided into two groups. On one side are the recipients of private charity or selective government cash transfers that are strategically allocated in return for political pledges of loyalty. On the other are the still rebellious “terrorists.”
In July, Noboa also issued a presidential decree to merge the Ministry of Women and Human Rights with the Ministry of Government, effectively disappearing the institution that women had fought for during long decades of gender violence and femicide. It also integrated the Ministry of Environment, Water, and Ecological Transition into the Ministry of Energy and Mines, thus subordinating the entity responsible for issuing environmental licenses for mining and oil extraction to the very entity interested in expanding those activities.
Rolling Back Decades of Social Struggle
Daniel Noboa, the youngest president in Ecuadorian history, initially campaigned as inclined neither to the political left nor the right. Now, he seems determined to systematically roll back all the gains that decades of social and environmental struggles had inscribed in the Ecuadorian state and political culture, gains for which the 2008 Constitution is a powerful symbol.
Noboa is internationally aligned with the politics of Donald Trump, whom he wants to invite to establish military bases on Ecuadorian territory and even on the Galapagos Islands. Noboa is also ideologically close to Javier Milei in Argentina and to Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele, whose example he is following on prison policies. According to experts, Ecuadorian prisons are a centerpiece in the organization of criminal economies that contribute to further terrorizing the civilian population. And Noboa’s government is also closely aligned with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. Gian Carlo Loffredo, the current minister of defense, was an instructor at the Israeli Tactical School in Ecuador, and the former Lasso and current Noboa government have tripled imports of Israeli military and surveillance equipment even as the public health sector is being stripped of essential funding.
The Ecuadorian people have reacted in different ways to this multilayer shock therapy. Currently, new memes, songs, and cartoons are being devised as part of the campaign to defeat the government’s agenda in the forthcoming referendum. Meanwhile, the reaction of the international community—not only human rights organizations and UN special rapporteurs who have already spoken out, but also the movements and organizations who were inspired by the transformative ideas that came from Ecuador during the last decades—will be decisive in defeating the right-wing’s illegal consolidation of power and preserving Ecuador’s innovative approach to the current ecological crisis.
*Nora Sandoval is an Ecuadorian journalist.