TITLE: 23 Point Agreement Reached

AUTHOR: Karen Hansen-Kuhn

ORG: Development Gap

DATE: February 8, 2001

As you may have heard, a 23-point agreement was reached yesterday afternoon between the government and the indigenous movement. It was signed by the presidents of the three major indigenous organizations (CONAIE, FENOCIN and FEINE) and the country's Presidente and Vice-president. The agreement was celebrated with a march of about 5,000 indigenous people -- who had spent 10 days inside the Polytechnic University in Quito surrounded by the military -- who were cheered on by many supporters on the streets of the capital. With the agreement signed, the government moved to lift the state of emergency, release all those who had been arrested during the protests and suspend all legal actions against them, return all goods and documents confiscated during these actions, and compensate the families of those killed and wounded in the protests. During the two-and-a-half weeks of indigenous mobilization and protest, 5 indigenous people were killed, 50 were wounded (including some members of the military) and 930 were arrested. Among the agreements are provisions to: - Reduce the price of cooking gas by 20%, freeze the price of gasoline for at least one year and enforce half-price bus fares for children, students, senior citizens and the disabled. - Restructure the National Development Bank and make $10 million available for loans on preferential terms to community businesses and micro, small and medium-scale enterprises. - Increase the budgets of state organizations that run development programs for indigenous peoples. - Recover public funds invested during the country's banking crisis. - Seek the participation of indigenous and other civil-society organizations to develop social investment projects, with a priority given to the poorest regions of the country, to be funded through debt swaps. - Resolve existing conflicts over land, water rights and natural resource use. - Seek consensus on the reform of the social security system. - Refuse to allow the regionalization of Plan Colombia or to involve the country in a foreign conflict. - Broaden the debate and carry out a dialogue on tax reform prior to approving new legislation. - Open a dialogue based on the document "Proposals of indigenous, campesino and social movements of Ecuador for a national dialogue" to reach agreements regarding fiscal, financial, social, trade and monetary policies. While indigenous peoples and many others are celebrating these agreements as a victory, it is also clear that much will depend on when and how these agreements on paper are carried out in practice. Some Ecuadorans have pointed out that certain agreements reflect actions that the government is obligated to carry out but has failed to implement. Other agreements are very similar to those made in the past as a result of previous protests, reflecting the fact that they were never put into practice. At the international level, we clearly see that the protests in Ecuador were a result of policies imposed by the IMF. At the same time, some of the agreements signed yesterday run counter to the IMF program in Ecuador. We would like to continue to take further action to pressure the IMF to refrain from imposing structural adjustment policies in Ecuador and elsewhere, and in the case of Ecuador, to support the agreements between the government and indigenous movement. We plan to send you additional information in the next week with suggestions on how to pressure the IMF through Congress and the U.S. Treasury. In this way, we hope to contribute to helping the indigenous and social movement in Ecuador hold the government accountable to carry through with its commitments. Below is the final version of the letter, which was sent yesterday to President Noboa and delivered to the Ecuadoran Ambassador.   7 February 2001   President Gustavo Noboa Palacio de Gobierno García Moreno 1043 Quito, Ecuador   Dear President Noboa: We write to you as representatives of civil-society organizations concerned about the impact of IMF- and World Bank-imposed structural adjustment programs around the world. We are alarmed by reports of violent suppression by your government of the legitimate public protests against the most recently implemented adjustment program in Ecuador. We urge you to cease this repression and to launch a national dialogue to find lasting solutions to the pressing economic and social problems confronting your country. We understand that over the past 20 years, the IMF and World Bank have made the implementation of adjustment programs a condition of financial support to the government of Ecuador. Our colleagues in Ecuador inform us that these programs and the specific economic policies they embrace have placed the major burden of adjustment on the nation's poor and working people, its small farmers and businesses. The IMF's and the World Bank's insistence on the application of a new round of economic measures has put dignified living conditions even further beyond the reach of large segments of the Ecuadoran population. Many of us are also in contact with representatives of those international institutions regarding their role in this crisis. We have also been informed that attempts at peaceful dialogue on this issue, including the SAPRI process in which the Bank, your government and civil society have been engaged, have not led to any meaningful change in the policy positions of the government or the international financial institutions. This is particularly troubling given the findings emanating from SAPRI that document the negative effects of many adjustment measures. It is therefore understandable that, when the IMF-supported economic measures were announced in December, affected citizens and civil-society groups would organize themselves to find and use other means to express their dissent regarding the continuation of these policies. What is not acceptable, by any international norm, is that these peaceful protests have now been met with state violence and repression in order to fend off public opposition to these policies. It has been reported that several indigenous people have been killed and some seriously wounded by public security forces, while others have begun a hunger strike to demand a repeal of the recent economic adjustment measures. The way forward to resolving the economic problems in Ecuador, or in any other country, will be found neither through military force and the restriction of rights nor through the imposition of adjustment measures that lead to further social exclusion. We urge you to immediately cease the violent repression of public protest against the adjustment policies and to seek real and lasting solutions through an expanded national dialogue involving a broad range of social actors representative of the diversity of Ecuadoran society in order to create a just and inclusive economic program. Sincerely, END top