Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002
more on Sucumbios/Ecuador

Hi all,
the situation in Sucumbios (frontier region to
Colombio, where we want to make a part of the camp)
and Orellano is getting worse and worse. This morning
to government in Quito declared a second stage of the
state of emergency, what means the local government is
out of order and lost all his right and both regions
are under military rule; they not even have inform the
government about any action they take. The military
has occupied the towns of the two provinces, the right
to free opinion and all civil rights are cancelled and
they use officially military, not civil right. Until
now four people have died, two got shot (one from a
helicopter) and two children because of teargas bombs.
The situation is really serious. Meanwhile the CONAIE
has called a meeting for tomorrow with their member
organisations in the region Amazonia to discuss how
they will react to this. In the radio their speaker
just said that if the government still refuse the
dialog and carry on with the state of emergency, they
will discuss to call for a strike in the whole region.
And that could mean the start of a new uprising, at
least at the local level. So, it's very important to
react now before an open military intervention is
starting — especially if we think about what is going
on in Colombia: Yesterday Pastrana asked Bush
officially for military help against the “terrorists”
of the FARC, which he compared to the taliban. The
colombian government said that they are planing to
carry on with the bombing for at least 6 weeks, and in
all for the “reclaiming” of the ex-Farc-zone will take
24 weeks. I will soon send a letter for the ecuadorian
president written by the Confeunassc.     
Ok, more on this later,

Ecuador | AGP