Leftist Riots Cause Mass Food Shortages in Ecuador

Independent grocery shop owners in Quito told Ecuador’s El Comercio newspaper on Wednesday that they have struggled with intense food shortages in recent days caused by distributors’ fears of violence by leftist rioters. The rioters have shut down major roads nationwide and brought Ecuador’s economy to a standstill in support of a powerful native tribe lobby group’s national strike.

El Comercio interviewed Marisella Chamorro, who works in a small bodega in Quito’s La Tola sector, on June 22. The newspaper wrote:

After 10 days of unemployment, they feel the shortage of products such as milk, cheese, eggs and even beer, so reaching a truck-distributor is their hope to continue with their active sales. […] On the morning of this Wednesday, June 22, she managed to buy a few cheeses from a supplier who toured the sector.

For her, those USD 25 in products could help her continue offering dairy products until the weekend. “They were supposed to arrive on Monday [June 20], but they told me the drivers were afraid their windshields would be smashed or their trucks would be broken into,” she says.

Another independent grocery store owner in Quito’s Itchimbía sector named Celia Cevallos said her egg supplier told her that “they had not been able to stock up on the product because the protesters did not allow them to enter the communities.”

El Comercio said it accompanied Cevallos to her egg distributor’s headquarters in Quito’s La Floresta sector, “but it was an unsuccessful trip.”

Corporate supermarket chains across Ecuador have likewise suffered from food shortages caused largely by distribution interruptions after several thousand anti-government protesters shut down major roads and highways across the country starting on June 13 to support a nationwide strike called by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE).

“Faced with logistics problems, the Tía supermarket chain has chosen to make purchases from local producers, in wholesale markets, relocating products between stores or receiving suppliers directly at the premises,” El Comercio reported on June 22.

“This is its mechanism for not depending 100% on its distribution centers,” the newspaper noted of Tía Supermarkets. “On a national scale, they have 10 stores closed and 17 partially operating.”

CONAIE — a powerful native tribe lobby group in Ecuador that successfully toppled three presidents between 1997 and 2005 — called for conservative President Guillermo Lasso’s ouster on the night of June 20 shortly after its caravan of supporters descended on the national capital, Quito, by the thousands. CONAIE demanded Lasso step down after the former banker refused to bend a knee to the leftist lobby group’s demands, which included several financial concessions including fuel price controls and “a commitment to renegotiating the personal bank loans of about four million families,” Agence France-Presse reported.

Lasso imposed a nighttime curfew in Quito on June 20 upon the arrival of CONAIE’s several thousand-strong caravan, which included violent rioters wielding weapons including “sticks and shields.” He likewise extended states of emergency across six Ecuadorian provinces established on June 18 in an effort to protect local communities from the caravan as it marched toward Quito to join the anti-government protests.

“Demonstrators armed with guns, ancestral spears and explosives clashed with soldiers in the city of Puyo, in Pastaza province, on Tuesday night [June 21],” Ecuador Interior Minister Patricio Carrillo told Reuters on June 22.

“The protesters burned a police station and patrol cars, tried to loot a bank and attacked civilians,” Carrillo said.

“We cannot guarantee public safety in Puyo right now – they have burned the entire police infrastructure and the entrance to the city is under siege,” the interior minister revealed.