A plane from the Colombian Air Force (FAC) and another from the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) helped prevent the product shortage of first necessity in different provinces of Ecuador affected by the protests against the Government due to the cost of living, where there are numerous roadblocks.
(Read: Demonstrations leave shortages and rotten food in Ecuador).
Between the two planes, a total of 29 flights that transported around 50 metric tons of food and medicine, as reported this Sunday at a press conference by the Minister of Production, Foreign Trade, Investments and Fisheries, Julio José Prado.
The Colombian aircraft made thirteen flights and the Brazilian sixteen to connect cities such as the capital Quito, the southern Cuenca, the central Latacunga and the northern Tulcán, located on the border of Ecuador with Colombia. Minister Prado also thanked the support of the Latam and Equair airlines to make solidarity flights between the cities of Quito, Cuenca and the port city of Guayaquil, located in the coastal province of Guayas.
The head of the Production portfolio reported that the northern and southern access to Quito has already been reopened, but roadblocks continue in places like Cuenca, which concentrates the greatest concern of the authorities, not only due to fuel shortages, but also of medical oxygen for hospitals.
In that sense, Prado lamented that demonstrators have prevented the passage of a convoy with medicines and medicinal oxygen who was heading to Cuenca, in an act that he described as violent. Regarding this fact, the president of the national Emergency Operations Committee (COE), Juan Zapata, pointed out that the demonstrators attacked the policemen who were guarding the convoy, for which three of them were injured and one was detained.
“Passing through that point is impossible and leads to maximum alert. The lives of patients who require this final supply for their recovery in the city of Cuenca are at risk. We cannot do it by air due to conditions of the magnitude that we are carrying,” Zapata explained. “This violates rights. It puts the lives of many patients at risk. We ask that they allow the passage of this humanitarian convoy,” she added.
The protests started on June 13th convened mainly by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie), although later other peasant organizations, as well as unions and student federations, also joined.
(Also: The high cost of living moves indigenous protest in Ecuador).
The indigenous movement demands compliance with a list of ten demands, among them that fuel prices be reduced and frozen, that the prices of basic necessities be controlled, that state companies not be privatized and that expand the oil and mining activity in the Amazon.
So far the mobilization has left a balance of 5 dead and no less than 200 injured among protesters and security forces, as well as more than 100 arrests, according to human rights organizations.
EFE
