Ecuador’s Presidential Election Looms in Ecuador, Indigenous Movement Takes Center Stage

remezcla.com/Brayan Vázquez wrote Gabriela Garces is 17, and over the past four years she has watched as the land of her ancestors transformed into an oil drilling battleground between her people and the state. The homes of her community near Puyo, Ecuador’s southeast Amazon, have been evacuated and destroyed; their leaders persecuted and incarcerated.

“The Earth is so beautiful, but to see it destroyed, to see there’s nothing left of what we lived of…” Gaby told Remezcla, “if only they’d understand what the Earth is…”

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Gaby will have to cast her vote for a new President on February 19, but admits she doubts whether any candidate truly understands what makes the land so sacred to Indigenous people like her.

While she hopes the center-left candidate Paco Moncayo will win, the latest polls indicate President Rafael Correa’s appointed candidate Lenin Moreno and the banker-turned-politician Guillermo Lasso will likely battle it out in the second round of the elections on April 2.