Amid Ecuador’s political, institutional, and security crisis, Guillermo Lasso has been attempting to use his power to rule by decree, that he gained by dissolving the parliament and activating the cross-death mechanism in May, to advance laws that would favor business sectors in the country and in some cases threaten hard fought for rights of the people.
Such was the case with the presidential decree 754 which conservative president Guillermo Lasso had signed into law on June 1. The decree reformed the Organic Code of the Environment and authorized the Ministry of the Environment to carry out expeditious environmental consultation processes through the militarization of territories and speed up the process of granting licenses for mining exploitation in Indigenous and peasant territories.
The decree 754 was quickly opposed and criticized by Indigenous communities, who considered that it violated their rights to prior consultation, participation in decision making, regulatory adaptation, justice and the rule of law.
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) sharply condemned the decree because it confused the right to environmental consultation with the right to free, prior and informed consultation established in the Constitution. The organization recalled that prior consultation is a right that ensures that Indigenous communities are consulted before decisions are made about projects that may affect them directly.
On June 13, CONAIE along with other Indigenous and social organizations had approached the Constitutional Court and requested precautionary measures and a suspension of the decree.
Following the decision of the Constitutional Court, the CONAIE celebrated it as “a victory of the social struggle and the unity of the peoples.” The confederation assured that “the peoples in resistance will continue in struggle until the decree 754 is repealed and the territories are freed from the mining threat.”
The Lasso government expressed its intention to continue with the consultation processes that were underway in the Las Naves canton and the Palo Quemado parish.
The inhabitants of the Las Naves and Sigchos cantons, in the provinces of Bolívar and Cotopaxi, respectively, have been protesting against these environmental consultations since July. The police and military have been responding to these peaceful demonstrations with brutal repression, firing tear gas canisters and throwing stones at protesters. During these protests, over a dozen people have been injured and several peasant leaders have been arrested.
Peoples Dispatch spoke to Patricia Carrión, lawyer with the Ecumenical Human Rights Commission (CEDHU) to understand why the decree has provoked widespread opposition and what is behind the allegations of unconstitutionality.
Peoples Dispatch: Could you discuss the claim that the decree benefitted the mining companies and violated the rights of Ecuadorian citizens?
Patricia Carrión: The National Government has applied this decree particularly in areas of mining interest, such as Las Naves canton in the Bolívar province, Las Pampas and Palos Quemados cantons in the Cotopaxi province, and others in the Napo province. This has generated a direct popular reaction to the abusive and arbitrary way in which the government, through the Ministry of Environment and the public security forces: the police and the military, has used the decree to impose environmental consultation in territories.
The ministry, by executing this decree, has established very, very short time limits and deadlines to carry out the consultation process. Imagine, it has set only 14 days for providing ample, sufficient information, in an appropriate language, etc. to the communities. After this, there will be a hearing or an assembly in which concerns of the population will be received and then the decision will be made. This administrative process has to be accomplished within a very short deadline. In fact, the whole process should be completed in about 70 days. Most of these days are assigned for administrative work, which will be done by government officials in offices. The only times when they will be in the territories are precisely during the initial 14 days to provide information and a second time when the assembly will be held to receive the response to hold the consultation.
The communities and the organizations that we accompany have criticized that the guarantee of free and prior information to the public, first, does not have a reasonable time limit; second, the information that is being delivered in a fearsome environment, that is, it is being done in police stations, in coliseums or in closed spaces, cordoned off by police and military. Evidently, the people who want information are discouraged to ask it in a place that is full of police and cordoned off by the military. So, certainly it is not a consultation that can be called free, because it is vitiated by the imposition of military and police in the territories.
In addition, the police and the military go from house to house with public officials to deliver information. What logical option do people have to ask? It is a state of permanent intimidation that has not only violated the right to participate in access to public and free information, but has also provoked the people whose territory is threatened and militarized, and therefore, has generated conflicts and confrontations between land defenders and the police and military that are invading their territories.
These confrontations, in turn, have resulted in a number of other problems. Several people have been injured and several have been criminalized. Just last week, the last hearing of two people who were arrested for the typical crimes that defenders are accused of in the context of criminalization of social protest took place and they were precisely accused of the crimes of damage to public property with aggravating robbery. Of course, all these are ways of intimidating people and limiting participation.
🔴 Hoy la Corte Provincial de #Bolívar revocó el sobreseimiento de los tres defensores de derechos de la naturaleza de #LasNaves y los llamaron a juicio. Exigimos #LibertadLasNaves
Conoce más del caso en la siguiente infografía 👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/4QKUO56G7B— Comisión Ecuménica de Derechos Humanos (@Cedhu) August 3, 2023
👉🏽 #PaloQuemado y #LasPampas resisten pacíficamente y le dicen NO a la minería inconsulta en su territorio a través del inconstitucional Decreto 754.
Conoce más de su lucha en la siguiente infografía ⬇️#LibertadLasNaves pic.twitter.com/R2MlUpRqNA
— Comisión Ecuménica de Derechos Humanos (@Cedhu) August 3, 2023
PD: What do you think about the response of the Lasso government to the ruling of the Constitutional Court with respect to the decree?
PC: In July, the Constitutional Court issued a resolution with respect to the unconstitutionality action filed by the CONAIE and supported by several amicus curiae on behalf of local organizations. The Court decided to admit the action and also issued a provisional suspension of the decree.
This means that the consultation cannot continue to be carried out in the way it was being done, because the Court, first, verified the verisimilitude. The facts that I have told you: the abrupt way in which the police entered to assist the consultation, the short deadlines, the failure to guarantee any standard, etc., all this was verified by the Court as verisimilitude. This to say that everything that led the social organizations to request the action was real.
The second was the seriousness of the damage that this consultation process had caused. As I described to you in terms of rights, a serious damage was being caused and would have continued to be caused to people and nature in terms of violation of rights. The third was the imminence of the further damage that this consultation process was going to cause. So these were the three conditions that the Court was able to verify and decided to provisionally suspend the execution of the decree.
However, following this decision, the Minister of Mines and also the Ministry of Environment, issued public statements on social networks, saying that they did not agree with the Court’s decision, and that they were going to present clarification petitions.
It seems implausible, unbelievable and incredible to us that after the Court issued a very well argued resolution, suspending the execution of the decree for finding serious damages and imminent seriousness of the damages, the government seeks to continue to apply the decree and insist on executing an arbitrary, illegitimate, unconstitutional and illegal consultation.
It seems disproportionate to us. The position of the national government is clearly contradictory to the guarantee of the exercise of rights and the protection of rights that should prevail in a government. Clearly, the economic interests of the companies that are lining up at the Ministry of the Environment to carry out this absurd consultation process and easily obtain a license and start mining extraction in the case of the three cantons that I mentioned, are more important to the government.
The government is also sending a message at the national and international level that here in Ecuador not even the national government accepts the decisions of the highest authority: the Constitutional Court, it questions everything. The economic interests of the companies are above even the decisions of the Constitutional Court. This is very serious in a state of law and justice. It shows that the government is ready to impose without respecting rights and resolutions a consultation process that violates human, collective and nature’s rights.
