Rafael Correa was first elected president of Ecuador late in 2006, assuming office in 2007. Under his rule, Ecuador has commonly been characterized, together with Bolivia and Venezuela, as representing the harder left within South America’s more general anti-neoliberal “pink tide.”

As early as 2009, however, various ruptures between the government and the social movements that initially enabled Correa’s rise to office — above all the indigenous movement — began to surface. Now, in mid-2015, it appears that those initial ruptures, together with the recent collapse in oil prices, have crystallized into a serious political and economic crisis for the Correa administration.

Alejandra Santillana Ortíz, executive director of the Institute of Ecuadorian Studies in Quito, Ecuador, is a prominent socialist activist in the country, member of the Feminist Collective Las Lorenzas, and author of a number of important sociological articles on the indigenous movement, the contemporary Ecuadorian left, and socialist strategy in contemporary Latin America.