[Reader-list] saturday in new york

[evan]

On Sunday, February 16, 2003, at 05:58  PM, zehra rizvi wrote:

> it was an amazing tournout...woudl love to hear from people in 
> london...supposedly that was the biggest one anywhere....rome had a 
> singing and dancing festival like feel to it  (i was at the march with 
> a roman and his accounts of marches in rome were wonderful, nothing 
> like what we expect here in nyc)  anyone else on the reader list 
> around the world in any of the protests?  i know there was something 
> in iraq and something in amman as well ( 2000 people which is a lot 
> for there)....any news on protests in south asia??

I was at the protests in Quito, Ecuador. They were actually quite 
small, only a couple hundred people on two different days outside the 
US Embassy. Part of the protest was the clear linking the US war on 
terrorism in the middle east with Plan Colombia which is about growing 
US funding and involvement in the Colombian civil war.

Leaders of the campasino and indigenous groups attended the protests 
and it was well covered by both the corporate television stations and 
newspapers.

The reality is here in Ecuador people are more focused on their current 
government which took power last month. It seems that even though the 
people of ecuador thought they were electing a leftist president backed 
by a coalition of three left parties what they got was another right 
wing neoliberal government.  The current president, Lucio, helped lead 
a brief coup and popular rebellion in 2001 which erupted out of 
protests against IMF reforms and dolarization campaigned on a 
progressive political platform. With that fame he launched a political 
party and running and winning the presidential elections in December. 
But in the last days of the campaign Lucio was not on the streets of 
Ecuador but on Wall Street selling his country out.

Many of the very large indigenous and campasino organizations now have 
their leaders occupying the ministerial positions in the government. 
But Lucio and his military backed party has continued to court new IMF 
loans and expanded US military bases in the country. Last thursday the 
leftist groups who are officially part of the government relaunched 
their protest campaigns against the FTAA, plan colombia, and neoliberal 
structural adjustment which has been put on hold when they won the 
elections.

in solidarity,
evan