00:00Now, the fifth day of protests is underway as part of the national strike
00:05called by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities
00:08against the policies of President Guillermo Lazo's government,
00:11with more details our colleague.
00:13Three years have passed and the echo of resistance continues to ring out in the streets,
00:18in parks, in the open wound.
00:20The family of Bayron Wataduca, one of the six protesters killed in June 2022,
00:25march again in Quito, not only to demand justice.
00:30But to shut out what the state wanted to silence, that Bayron was not a criminal,
00:35he was a leader, a father, a man who shows dignity over fear.
00:42He was a good person. He was a hard-working man. He worked.
00:47He was putting his children through school.
00:49And now he has left his children orphaned.
00:52And I still suffer for my grandchildren.
00:55You see, I am helping my grandchildren.
00:58I am continuing on that path so that they can study.
01:02The national strike was not just a protest.
01:05It was the roar of a country that was tired of paying the bills of others.
01:09It was the bursting of a pressure cooker built up over years of neglect,
01:15exclusion, and structural racism.
01:18While Guillermo Lazo's government responded with repression and empty rhetoric,
01:21the streets spoke another language, the language of dignity.
01:27Independent media outlets have set a very important precedent that is essential in many cases,
01:32because it provides conclusive evidence of what happened, how it happened,
01:37and obviously not only in court cases, or cases that are being investigated by the prosecutor's office,
01:44but also in the national perspective that each of us has regarding what the strike was.
01:53It was not the same thing to experience it through the alternative media than through the official channels.
01:58Official channels, mainstream media that reproduced the discourse of power without filters,
02:06national television stations repeated images of chaos without context.
02:10Telesur decided to be at the heart of the conflict,
02:13to work with the protesters, to listen to the indigenous communities,
02:17record the voices of the women who cooked to sustain the resistance of the young people,
02:22who confronted fretfuls with stones, of the community leaders who instead of weapons carried a list of demand.
02:29The mass media, the private media, present a narrative, and that narrative is their truth,
02:37hiding the truth of what is really happening in society as a whole.
02:42That is why I believe it is important to have another narrative from community media,
02:47alternative media, media that is not aligned with the policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund.
02:56The spark that ignited the revolt was the elimination of subsidies,
03:00but the real fuel was something else, the historical neglect.
03:04It was 18 days of resistance that did not fit into the dichotomy of good protesters versus violent infiltrators,
03:12because the true face of violence is structural, it is neglect.
03:16And Telesur knew how to see it.
03:18It did not reduce the protest to a mere story.
03:21It narrated it for what it was, a dispute for the right to access with dignity.
03:26That is why I think it is important the alternative media, the community media,
03:32Telesur and other media have become a spokesperson,
03:35has given a democratic contrast to the stories that are happening in our society.
03:41It is absolutely necessary.
03:43Telling that truth had consequences.
03:45Our team felt the repression firsthand, but we understood that at that moment it was essential to inform.
03:52In Ecuador, without the presence of media such as Telesur or others,
03:56it would have been impossible to get out the information about what happened in the uprisings of 2019 and 2021.
04:03And if that information had not been filtered,
04:05we would not have had the tools and the conditions to demand that the state stop the repression and the violence.
04:10That is why Telesur is uncomfortable, because it dared to challenge the official discussions and also the forgetness.
04:18Thanks to Telesur, Ecuador and the world learned a true roadmap of the indigenous movement,
04:24not through filters nor distortions, but from the voices of those who trace it.
04:28Because to make visible someone is not only to show him, it is to legitimize the world, the rage and the hope.
04:36With images by Henry Villajo.
04:38Elena Rodriguez, Telesur.
Comments