by MARC BECKER
Update August 17th: Today a judge ruled Manuela Picq will not be deported from Ecuador
Franco-Brazilian academic and journalist Manuela Picq has been arrested at an Indigenous march in Ecuador and is facing deportation. She was accompanying her partner at the march and pursuing journalistic investigation of the Indigenous movement.
Picq has lived in Ecuador for eight years, and has written about women, gender, and Indigenous movements for journalistic outlets such as Upside Down World and Al-Jazeera as well as in numerous scholarly publications.
On Thursday, August 13, Picq was accompanying an uprising called by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) in the capital city of Quito against the extractive policies of president Rafael Correa. A video shows police surrounding Picq, beating her with their batons, and dragging her away.
Indigenous activists have long been locked in conflict with Correa over the failure of his leftist government to break from an economic model that depends on the extraction and exportation of petroleum and gold to fund social programs. These activists complain that his policies harm the environment and require vast amounts of water that would otherwise be used to meet human needs
Picq is the partner of Carlos Pérez, president of Ecuarunari, a regional affiliate of the CONAIE. Pérez is a lawyer who has long fought for the water rights of local Indigenous communities in southern Ecuador. Pérez and other leaders were also arrested in Thursday’s protests.
Picq’s deportation is almost certainly retribution against Pérez for his political activism. A group of feminist activists declared that the “government’s male chauvinist cruelty finds its clearest manifestation in the aggressions against Manuela Picq for her participation in social movements and for being an Indigenous leader’s wife.”
Upside Down World for more