At the last hour of that summer afternoon of 2019, when Yaku Pérez picked me up from his office, I knew I was stealing the precious time. From 8 a.m. to night I spent the day listening to all kinds of groups of citizens, reserved for this two full days of the week, prefets to the height of our president. I noticed a great exhaustion between her eyes, but also a deeply awakened patience. Aware of this, I had two questions prepared which relate fundamentally to the American indigenous resistance and, more specifically, to the two revolutionary vegas carried out in the twentieth century.

The first was the most armed uprising (Cuba, Nicaragua and the revolutionary guerrillas of all countries). The second, the most progressive government joined governments in many countries (Lula in Brazil, Evo in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador…). In South America there is the bitter failure of all of them. His response showed that the topic was well reflected:
“In this broad context to which you referred, we could say that both the Right of Always and the traditional Left have not provided an adequate response to the needs of society. Maybe because they're both colonial, because they have law of capture and domination, patriarchy, mercantilism, capitalism. The right has always been more closed, reactionary, heir of the settlers in these areas, oligarchic; and the left has risen in the name of the oppressed rights of the people, but every time he has touched power he has violated those rights in the same way. Among these rights denied and violated, the most fundamental are those of nature. We live in a world on its feet: “Human Rights” were agreed, but not those of Mother Nature. We live an anthropocentric conception, forgetting the cosmocentric reality”.

“Right, liberal, neoliberal, diverse dictatorships, left-wing regimes and governments, progressive and reactionary … are deaf ears to the desperate cry of society,” Pérez continues. “And yes, I also see that third scourge that is emerging from the vision of the world of peoples of origin. Inevitably sensitive to ecology, since the first ecologists were the people of origin; instead of understanding Mother Earth as an object, they considered it as a First Creator, dressed in law. Unlike civilizations of Judaeo-Christian origin, hence respect for the Maternal Earth that we honor with affection.”

“They, both based on the Bible and the Qur’an, speak of dominating the earth from the first word, with an inert object that must be extracted and exploited. In the name of ‘progress’, the old and the new left do not deviate in that line, here are fundamental conceptions that collide.”

We can qualify these assertions, but without forgetting that we are our heirs to those colonizers and Yaku Pérez, from villages that have been pushed to disappear again and again: and not only to the Spaniards, who had to endure the massacre of the Inca empire before reaching them.

The European Left, and also the most prominent in the world, in their influence and in their colonial shadow, are conservative. Our models are associated with “glorious failures of two centuries.” We are children of the myth of progression and prisoners of the patrimonial model. “What do you want, sacrifices and bring down the battle of the decades that has asked for blood to the river?”, I was given a historical icon of the Abertzale left living in Cuba not long ago. I told him that the analysis and criticism of the drift of the 1980s were pending and that, consequently, the delay and lack of referentiality of the decades was total in relation to the generations to come. You prefer to rely on lost memories that go back to youth impregnated with melancholy. “Ours was generous and we achieved things that we could not dream of in those days.”

What the crisis of
the last year shows is something else, but the conservative left prefers to claim that nothing special is happening to us. A generation that is physically disappearing has been adhered to by glasses that they have put decades ago to look at reality, and they prefer to use their little power or great shadow to cover their shame or their sloths.

I warned Yaku that we were talking about a collision between very deep models, and that the types of resistance I perceived among the indigenous people of Ecuador showed me something that was outside my schemes. “Where is the origin of your strength, where was hope?” I finally exclaimed.

“Experience tells me that there is nothing impossible. Twenty years ago, a group of madmen dreamed of organising a popular consultation in Kimsakotxa to face up to a large Chinese multinational. And it just happened. When the so-called communitarianism or biocentrism is manifested, the old ideological limits are exceeded. This is overcoming the ideological areas of capitalism, socialism or communism. I do not deny, however, previous liberating efforts, but I must acknowledge that they were short of looking at the people of origin, at the issue of gender, when it comes to understanding the rights of nature.”

“This is why these new proposals emerge, which are not reduced to closed schemes, but are fed by a broad, open, intercultural and multi-layered conception. We are not sectarian, we are not ‘indigenists’, in the restrictive sense that that word has had. And right there are hopes, dreams, utopias -- for the drive of young people. Without them, we're not going anywhere. Young people are aware that the climate emergency is an emergency of civilization. And with irreverence of their own, they bravely break outdated schemes and models, and they're on the street defending Yasuni, defending Tipnis, defending the Amazon, and once again imagining that another world is possible. This is a new concept: it believes that there will be global effects through the promotion of small actions; that when we are here or in India in the defence of water it affects the Himalayas; that what happens to the Danube river has consequences in Madagascar. Scientific knowledge and ancient myths and rites, when they coincide with their powerful iconography, it is possible to associate them with young people and their hope.”

I kept quiet then, because it occurred to me that the echoes of these words came far ahead of what we call “history,” and that the authority of that resonance deserved sacred respect.

The European conservative left have moved in the last Ecuadorian elections in favour of the corrupt totalitarian Rafael Correa, which is the “only feasible alternative” for progression. You can't understand what Yaku Pérez represents for anything else, if you don't understand it, the doomed are forced to lose themselves in the dizziness of black delirium, because life doesn't forgive, it doesn't feed on the glories of the old.