about the book
UPRISING is a detailed description and analysis of the Indigenous-led uprising of October 2019 in Ecuador, written by three people deeply involved in the revolt. The lead author, Leonidas Iza, came to national prominence as one of the central leaders of the rebellion. On the final day of the paro, when the movement forced the government of Lenin Moreno to withdraw Decree 883 and accede to live televised talks with the leaders of CONAIE, the main Indigenous umbrella organisation, it was Leonidas Iza who tore apart the arguments of the finance minister in front of the nation, giving him a master class in the implications of neoliberal economics and the government’s deal with the IMF.
Importantly, it also collectivises the lessons drawn by a key protagonist from this “laboratory for understanding the direction of Ecuador’s social transformations”.
The immediate trigger for protests was a fuel price rise decreed by then-president Lenin Moreno on October 3, 2019. But, as the book explains in detail, the rebellion can only be understood within the broader context of capitalist crisis of accumulation, generalised “loss of confidence in state institutions”, “permanent, silent and uneven escalation of conflicts” and CONAIE’s decisive intervention.
Contents
Foreword, Michael Löwy
Prologue, Leonidas Iza, Andrés Tapia, and Andrés Madrid
Preface: Back to October, Hernán Ouviña
Introduction
Imminence: Background, accumulated experience and rupture
Awakening, determination, struggle and resistance
Impact: lessons, debates and perspectives
Epilogue: Our day-to-day October
Appendix: Platform for the ‘Campaign of Escalating Struggle’
The October 2019 rising in Ecuador was a sign of things to come, as estallidos, or uprisings, erupted later in Chile and Colombia. They represented a “people in movement” – the construction of a new kind of power from below, the merging of new forms of popular resistance with historic expressions of indigenous rebellion, all reflected in the collective voice of rebellion which this remarkable book presents. In the course of those October days, as one speaker puts it, “the everyday became extraordinary”, and a different future beckoned. Mike Gonzales, Emeritus Professor of Latin American Studies, Glasgow University
About the authors
Leonidas Iza is President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), and is the best-known of a new generation of Indigenous leaders in Ecuador. He emerged as one of the central leaders of the October uprising, when he was President of the Cotopaxi Indigenous and Campesino Movement.
Andrés Tapia is Head of Communications at the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuadorean Amazonia.
Andrés Madrid teaches at the Central University of Ecuador. He is the author of In search of the spark on the prairie. The revolutionary subject in the thought of the left intellectuality in Ecuador.