The president of Ecuador’s job description could fall under temporary labor. Between 1997 and 2005, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie) led a series of protests in the capital city of Quito that toppled three sitting presidents. In 2019, former president Lenin Moreno, who tried to get rid of a fuel subsidy and unleashed Conaie’s wrath, decided to transfer the seat of government to the coastal city of Guayaquil as Quito came under siege. Unlike his defenestrated predecessors, Moreno managed to ensure the loyalty of the top military brass and thus save his mandate.

In May of 2021, Moreno handed over power to current president Guillermo Lasso, whose government now faces a third straight week of Conaie-led sabotage in Quito and much of the country, with the exception of the coastal provinces. Barely a year into his presidency, Lasso’s political survival is now at stake.

Leonidas Iza, Conaie’s leader, is pressuring Lasso to lower the price of fuel, control prices, increase public spending, guarantee employment by fiat, and impose a debt moratorium, among other radical measures. Iza’s tactics include blocking key roads, systematic looting, and destroying food conveyors. In the Andean highlands, scarcity of basic food and medicine supplies is now widespread. The coastal towns have had to do without the foods and crops from the highlands. Production in the Amazon area has been halted. As of this writing, Iza determines who can travel between the regions.

Since the protests began on June 13, the protesters have attacked public and private properties, including farms around Quito. They even attempted a violent takeover of the National Assembly. Ecuador’s Energy Minister has warned that the production of oil, the country’s main export, might come to a full stop soon, thus threatening the supply of fuel and energy.

An absent figure who looms large over the current chaos is former president Rafael Correa, a 21^st Century Socialist who has been exiled in Belgium since 2018, when an Ecuadorean court found him guilty of corruption charges. Whether or not Correa is behind Iza’s uprising, as some of Lasso’s supporters claim, his political party, which is the largest in the National Assembly, certainly took advantage of the president’s weakness when it tried— and failed— to impeach him for declaring a state of emergency.

In large part, the current crisis is due to Correa’s profligacy. In 2017, after 10 years in power, he left behind $42 billion in debt, or 42 percent of Ecuador’s GDP— 2 percent more than that allowed by the constitution. Moreno, Correa’s vice-president and successor, tried to implement austerity measures, but Ecuador defaulted on an $800 million bond payment in April of 2020, as the pandemic devastated oil prices. Moreno managed to restructure debt payments, and many of them are due this year, leaving Lasso with little room for maneuver. Still, the president has punished his own political base with no commitment to cut public spending, wealth taxes, and a series of tax increases, including a doubling of the income tax rate for some middle-class earners.

On previous occasions, Conaie protested against particular economic or political measures and came up with specific demands. This time, however, the leadership’s radicalism has unleashed the mayhem. Iza, who leads the organization since 2021, has justified political violence “from a Marxist perspective.” In 2020, he and Andres Madrid, Secretary General of the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, a state-funded cultural institute, penned a book titled “Explosion” (Estallido). They and another co-author claim that the 2019 protests against Moreno failed because Conaie respected the rules of liberal democracy. They state that their “urgent” goal is to impose “Indo-American communism,” which they consider the only alternative to “barbarism.”

Iza is a devout follower of José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930), a Peruvian Marxist who claimed that socialism had to adapt to local cultures in order for its revolutions to succeed in Latin America. In Ecuador, the theory is being put to the ultimate test.