RE: Ruling Ruins. / Gobernando Ruinas. [ENG/ESP]

My friend Chasqui (alias) wrote this comment that was just brilliant, the perfect words at the perfect time for me:

Your column this morning moved me. It’s not easy to write from inside confusion and fear, to speak honestly when no one seems to be listening. You’ve done that—captured what it feels like to live in a place where meaning has collapsed and survival itself becomes political. I recognize much of what you describe, and even though I don’t see things exactly as you do, I feel the same weight of sadness and the same longing for something more human to return.
You describe what it’s like to be held inside a conflict that no longer has a clear center—a contest of endurance rather than conviction. The lines blur, and people you once trusted to care now seem ready to welcome force as the only solution. You grieve the loss of empathy, and I hear that. When fear turns into contempt, when neighbors stop seeing each other as human beings, something essential dies in a community.
I share your unease at that death of empathy. But I also try to remember that empathy itself is unevenly distributed—that those most exposed to hunger, loss, and police repression are often those who have had to keep it alive the longest. Your writing opens a space to think about that, too.
The way you describe fear—not as a concept, but as the daily rhythm of wondering who will be next—feels very true. The families walking past your bakery, the quiet conversations with friends, the sense that even peace has a price: that’s what conflict really looks like up close. You’ve made that visible.
Fear, though, doesn’t tell us who is right or wrong. It only tells us how deeply everyone is entangled. That recognition—that suffering isn’t confined to one side—is the beginning of moral clarity, not its end.
You ask, Why here? Why must a small town bear the weight of a national struggle? From where you stand, the blockades look like punishment turned inward. I can understand that. But I also think of how often in Ecuador’s history the periphery has had to make the center pay attention. What feels senseless from inside can sometimes be the only way the forgotten become visible.
That doesn’t erase the hardship or make it right. But it does remind us that power rarely moves until it is made uncomfortable. Your question, Why here?, is also the question of every small town forced into history’s path.
You see a movement divided and exhausted, waiting for martyrdom—perhaps even courting it. I can understand why it feels that way when all you see are barricades and fear. But I wonder if what looks like waiting for bullets might sometimes be waiting for recognition: for someone to see that lives on the margins are already being taken slowly, by debt, by hunger, by indifference.
You’re right that both government and protest have become predictable in their choreography of violence. But it’s not the same choreography. The state rehearses power; the poor rehearse survival. Both look chaotic from inside, yet one begins much further from safety.
That question you ask—why no one resists the resistance—is powerful. You mean it literally, but it also points to a deeper worry: why people have stopped resisting despair itself. You see how easy it is to become passive, to accept fear as normal.
You’re right that organization is the difference. The communities on the roads have built that capacity over generations; those in the center have not needed to. It’s not that one group loves chaos and the other loves peace—it’s that one has been trained to fight for survival, and the other has been trained to expect stability. You’re noticing that gap in real time.
You speak of civil disobedience against the resistance, of the majority standing up for calm. I hear the yearning for peace beneath that—the wish for something gentler than confrontation. But I also sense the danger of believing peace can be imposed from above. What you’re calling for may be impossible until the deeper wound—the inequality that shapes whose peace matters—begins to heal.
Still, I share your desire for calm, for people to rest, for the air to clear. Those wishes are not apolitical; they’re human.
There’s something else, though—something inside the language itself. I notice how the same words mean opposite things depending on who speaks them. Resistance, peace, order, terror—all of them have been seized and repurposed by power. It’s as if even language is under curfew.
In Cotacachi, you can feel this struggle over words in every conversation. The same word that shields one person wounds another. But in the plazas and over community radio, people are trying to give these words back their meaning—to make peace mean safety, not silence; to make resistance mean care, not chaos. When voices rise together, language becomes a kind of shelter again.
Even your writing is caught in that battle—you’re fighting to keep words like humanity and dignity alive while everything around them is being twisted. Maybe that’s what it means to write honestly in times like these: to struggle not just for safety, but for meaning.
Here, words are not only speech; they are territory. They’re part of the land we defend. In the minga de la palabra—the collective work of words—people rebuild meaning together, each voice like a tool passed from hand to hand. Truth isn’t found alone. It’s built, like a roof or a road, by many hands speaking together.
“This isn’t resistance,” you write. “It’s the same oppression with a different face.” That sentence carries enormous grief. I understand the heartbreak behind it—to watch something that once inspired hope start to resemble what it fought. I’ve seen that before too.
Where I differ is that I still see in this movement—even through its mistakes—a stubborn spark of collective dignity. It may not look like resistance where you stand, but to many it still feels like the only language left for survival. I think we’re both mourning the same thing: how hard it is to keep that spark from being swallowed by rage.
You and I both see the suffering of ordinary people. But we understand its causes differently. What you describe as the collapse of moral order, I see as the exposure of an old and deliberate system—one that keeps Indigenous, campesino, and working families on the margins and then blames them for the chaos it creates.
When roads are blocked, you see paralysis; I see a country refusing to die quietly. What looks like disorder from above is, from below, the shape of survival. As one local communiqué put it: “El paro no es sólo contra la eliminación del subsidio al diésel: es una respuesta colectiva al autoritarismo, la crisis económica y el atropello a la dignidad del pueblo.” (The national strike is not just against the removal of the diesel subsidy: it is a collective response to authoritarianism, economic crisis, and the assault on the people’s dignity.)
You speak of people turning against each other, losing empathy. I see a government and an economy that weaponize scarcity—forcing communities to compete for crumbs and punishing those who share. Violence does not erupt from human nature; it is arranged and rationed, like fuel or grain.
As one Cotacachi broadcaster said during the strike: “La criminalización de la protesta social busca deslegitimar las demandas populares y sembrar miedo.” (The criminalization of social protest seeks to delegitimize popular demands and sow fear.)
You describe despair at the loss of truth, but truth itself has been captured—by those who own the channels through which it flows. When community radio was silenced and journalists shot in Otavalo, the goal was not confusion; it was obedience. “El cierre de TV MICC mostró que el control de la información también es parte del campo de batalla.” (The closure of TV MICC showed that control of information is also part of the battlefield.)
You say everyone is to blame, but false balance only protects power. The repression, the deaths of Efraín Fuérez and Braulio Morales, the silencing of community voices—these are not equal errors on both sides. They reveal the pattern of a state that demands order without justice, peace without equality, and silence in place of truth.
Our differences, then, are not about who suffers—we both see that clearly. They are about where suffering comes from and what can break it. You describe the world as if it were collapsing; I see it trying to be born again, through courage, through minga, through voices that refuse to disappear.
I don’t write these words to defeat your argument. I write them because I believe you—I believe the fear, the weariness, the disorientation you describe. No one should have to live with that kind of uncertainty, watching their neighbors turn suspicious, hearing the far-off thud of tear gas as if it were the weather.
I think we’re standing in the same field but facing in opposite directions. You look at the destruction and see madness overtaking sense. I look at it and see the price people are paying for having been unheard too long. Both of us want it to stop—the hunger, the terror, the isolation. Neither of us wants to see another young man carried to a hospital or another mother crying for someone shot at a blockade.
Where we meet, I think, is in the conviction that human life matters more than slogans, more than tactics, more than any government’s show of force. You keep writing because you don’t want to lose that conviction. I keep answering because I don’t want you to.
I also know how it feels when empathy begins to erode—when exhaustion makes you want the loudest side simply to win so things can quiet down. But beneath that exhaustion, something else still lives: the will to care, even for those you don’t understand. That’s where the future begins, not with a victory but with the recovery of that will.
You once said that a gate had been built in front of an old house, and the house would have to be torn down to make sense of the gate. Maybe what we’re seeing now is the opposite: an old house falling, and people struggling to build a gate that leads somewhere better. It’s hard to tell which pieces to keep and which must go. But you and I both know that no gate worth building should lock anyone out.
I read your column not as despair but as an act of faith—that words can still hold meaning, that the town can still find its voice. And I answer in the same faith: that even amid anger and noise, we can still talk to each other, not about who is right, but about how we keep the fragile thread of care unbroken.
That thread is all we have. But it might be enough to weave something new.