Ecuador's Military Killed Protesters to Push a Referendum. Voters Crushed It Anyway.

In September 2025, Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa cut diesel subsidies overnight, sending fuel prices up 55 percent. CONAIE, the country's largest Indigenous confederation, called a national strike — the same tactic that had twice forced Ecuadorian governments to reverse course since 2019. Noboa's answer was not negotiation. It was tanks in the streets, live ammunition, and a security apparatus that treated a strike as an insurgency.

By the time the paro wound down a month later, the military had killed at least three protesters, including Efraín Fuerez, a Kichwa-Otavalo artisan gunned down while soldiers beat the person cradling his body. Human rights monitors documented over 250 abuses: mass detentions, a stadium in Imbabura turned into an improvised detention camp, water defenders and Indigenous federation leaders charged with terrorism and illicit association, bank accounts frozen as though striking farmers were cartel financiers. None of this was incidental. Noboa was clearing the ground for a November 16 referendum that would have let him convene a constituent assembly to rewrite the 2008 constitution, strip its Indigenous consultation rights and rights-of-nature protections, and lift the ban on foreign military bases — the last aimed squarely at hosting US forces in the Galápagos.

The repression did not just target strikers. It criminalized an entire political tendency in advance of a vote, using the same "war on narcoterrorism" framing Washington has deployed against its own domestic opponents: label dissent as organized crime, then use emergency powers against it. Ecuador's armed forces, conspicuously absent when actual cartel violence tripled the homicide rate over four years, found the manpower to helicopter a dozen Kichwa detainees to a coastal prison mid-riot, without due process, on unfounded gang-membership claims a judge later threw out.

It didn't work. On November 16, with turnout above 11 million and pre-vote polling predicting a government win, voters rejected all four of Noboa's questions by margins between 53 and 61 percent — the constituent assembly and the foreign-bases proposal hit hardest, at over 60 percent "No" each. Ecuadorians who otherwise support Noboa's hard line on crime drew a line at handing him the pen to rewrite the rulebook. Survey data from IPSE Global found 61.5 percent of the population already felt the country was being run through decisions that violate the law — and nearly half of Noboa's own voter base held no negative view of the constitution he wanted gone.

The lesson isn't that Ecuadorian democracy simply self-corrected. People were shot, jailed, and disappeared to manufacture the conditions for this vote, and none of that is undone by a referendum result. What the vote shows is the limit of repression as a substitute for consent: you can kill a movement's members and still lose the vote you killed them to win. CONAIE's strike secured no formal concessions and Noboa remains in office with high approval ratings for his security posture. But the specific authoritarian project — a rewritten constitution, an opened door for US bases — is dead for now, defeated not by the state's institutions but by the people the state tried to terrorize into silence.

Sources

NACLA: Ecuador's Paro Protests Autocracy, Not Diesel
CEPR: Ecuador News Round-Up No. 24
Amnesty International: Alert over repression of protests
Reuters: Measure to allow foreign military bases in Ecuador fails in vote
Latinoamérica21: The key factors behind the 'No' victory in Ecuador
ConstitutionNet: Why did Ecuador's Constitutional Referendum Fail?