Currently, a new cycle of protests involving the Ecuadorian indigenous peoples’ organization is happening, following another cycle that took place in October 2019 and paralyzed the country for two weeks, resulting in 8 people dead, various hundreds of other people injured, including law enforcement officers sent to diffuse the demonstrations. The Ecuadorian State comptroller building was burned and sacked, severely damaging the patrimonial buildings of the Spanish-style Historic District of the capital city of Quito, and overall costing the Ecuadorian economy almost $83 million in damages.
All this destruction just to force the government to reverse austerity measures decided by then President Lenin Moreno to end the government subsidies to lower gas prices, undertaken in a failed attempt to liberalize and stimulate the Ecuadorian economy.
Back then, as well as today, the protests were spearheaded by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, known by its acronym in Spanish, CONAIE, the country’s largest indigenous organization, led by Leonidas Iza, an Andean Kichwa native, with well-known leftist sympathies and ideas, close to the thought of Peruvian agrarian socialist ideologue, José Carlos Mariátegi, whose ideas (along with those of China’s Mao Zedong) would inspire the activities of Shining Path, a communist terrorist group responsible for around 60,000 deaths in a conflict against the government of Perú that has lasted for four decades.
But back to Iza, only a little more than a year after the 2019 protests, he co-authored, with a couple of leftist academics aligned to his Marxist-indigenous cause, a book titled Estallido (a term that could be translated as outbreak) in which they outlined the steps in their revolution towards power. The first step calls for direct action against government institutions and capital structures and the second is defining their friend/enemy distinction between various local leftist groups, including worker unions, the indigenous peasantry and progressive allies in cities against what they consider to be a counterrevolutionary alliance of right-wing populists, banking conservatives, social-democratic technocrats, a bureaucratic bourgeoisie and modernizing liberals.
He and his co-authors continuously quote the work of Mariátegui, as well as of others Socialist intellectuals like George Sorel, who is particularly known for his advocacy of violence, and end their book with the battle cry of “Amerindian communism or barbarism,” as if the actions of their movement in the 2019 protests were not barbaric, and, on the contrary, the market structures of capitalism were the true oppressors.
Iza’s actions and his book were praised by many people in Ecuador, mostly urban intellectuals, looking to capitalize on the situation and get court positions in the potential new order under the Marxist-indigenous leader. The intellectuals, however, do not realize the danger his ideas represent for Ecuadorian society, because, in many senses, what Iza did, promotes and is trying to repeat right now, is just another chapter in the long and bloody history of the global left, from Marx to Hitler, as accounted by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.
However, Leonidas Iza and his “Amerindian communism” should not be just considered as another case of intellectual leftism that appeals to those “who dream of action but never act,” as described by Mises. Instead, he is an alarmingly latent Pol Pot wannabe, for whom his vision of an indigenous, fully agrarian socialist country has to be built from the ashes of a failing republic consumed by the fire of revolution, a view he has repeatedly advocated for by demeaning the majority mestizo ethnic group in Ecuador while protecting himself from accusations of racism by virtue-signaling his indigenous ethnicity.
By his actions, Iza’s movement and ideas prove, once again, that Mises was right by defining fascism in the same terms as socialism, that is, that:
…the fundamental idea of these movements […] consists in the proposal to make use of the same unscrupulous methods […] to exterminate its adversaries and their ideas in the same way that the hygienist strives to exterminate a pestilential bacillus; it considers itself in no way bound by the terms of any compact that it may conclude with opponents, and it deems any crime, any lie, and any calumny permissible in carrying on its struggle.
Nevertheless, for a self-professed Marxist follower of Andean-style Maoism, Iza’s Amerindian communism tends to be closer to fascism than to Marxism itself, given that, as Roderick T. Long explained,
…where Communist ideology tends to be cosmopolitan and internationalist, fascist ideology tends to be chauvinistically nationalist, stressing a particularistic allegiance to one’s country, culture, or ethnicity; along with this goes a suspicion of rationalism, a preference for economic autarky, and a view of life as one of inevitable but glorious struggle….
All of these elements are present in the direction CONAIE has been tacking under Iza’s leadership, given its close indigenous ethnic component, its fondness for direct action and local, backwards agrarianism, and its violent effort for political dominance. Of course, the agrarian socialism he promotes should be by itself another big red flag, pun intended, about his intentions, for which a number of logical inconsistencies become more and more apparent the moment one stops to think about them.
For instance, he has continuously given contradicting public statements calling for the end of the oil extraction industry in Ecuador and then shouting about keeping gas prices under government subsidies, arguing that artificially low prices are a necessity for the use of tractors in agriculture. This when tractors themselves are a capital good that almost no already poor Ecuadorian indigenous peasant could even try to afford under our highly intervened economy.
All of these incoherencies are then promoted under the wraps of a political discourse with heavy Ted Kaczynski undertones, which could only mean that if his brand of Amerindian communism ever gets applied, it would only mean a man-made Malthusian trap. His actions also speak for him, as for the times he has called for public demonstrations, private property has suffered the most, with businesses having to close for many days, going bankrupt, and looting becomes commonplace with the mere notice of his calls to action against the government.
Leonidas Iza is the kind of person that reminds us that we still have to fight the last wars against socialism, for his ideas and his actions would only bring even more ruin to a country like Ecuador., To simply defeat him, however, would mean nothing when ideas like his can be easily recycled by other socialist opportunists, for socialism, which appeals to envious people who crave for security and are afraid to make decisions for themselves, must vanish from the minds of reasonable human beings, as it impairs human dignity and crushes man utterly, a lesson learnt from both Austrian intellectual powerhouses, Mises and Kuehnelt-Leddihn.
