Ecuador is in the news these days for its embassy in London giving sanctuary to Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, who is in danger of extradition from Britain and prosecution in the United States. Ecuador, in fact, has a long history of defying the U.S. empire.

Few people remember that the country once defied the U.S. by joining a wave of nonviolent campaigns in 1944, as the Second World War was coming to a close. U.S. embassies at the time were trumpeting President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, his ideological justification for the war. The irony was that, among the series of U.S.-backed dictatorships in Latin America, even one freedom was subversive, much less four.

El Salvador initiated a five-country wave of resistance in April, when army officers launched a military coup against U.S.-backed dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, who had held power for over a decade. He’d done the usual things: censored the press, outlawed dissident parties, targeted labor activists and peasant organizers and set up a secret police force.

In 1944, it was reasonable to think that only a violent rebellion could destroy the regime, and a conspiracy emerged to do exactly that. Martínez put down the military revolt. He then hunted down anyone he thought might have been involved in the plot, and a bloodbath began.

The university students ...

As the conflict over educational reforms in Guatemala’s escuelas normales rages on, police violently evicted student protesters on July 2, from their occupation at Industry Park and various schools throughout Guatemala City, in an ongoing campaign to repress the movement. In the morning, reports described four police squads arriving at the park with Mauricio Lopez Bonilla, the Minister of the Interior, up to eight students detained and 12 sent to the hospital. Allegations of sexual aggression toward young female protesters circulated via independent media outlets as the normalista students prepared for potential further evictions and continued to demand negotiations with the Ministry of Education.

The escuelas normales in Guatemala are schools located throughout the country’s 22 departments that train young students to be teachers. The teacher’s certification has long been one of the only professional degrees accessible to Guatemala’s rural and indigenous youth who cannot afford higher education. In a country, where 2 percent of the population receives a university education, educational opportunities remain an important indicator of and contributor to the country’s vast economic and social inequalities. The normalista movement for the last two months has been using direct action to oppose a proposed two-year expansion of the magisterio program, including the occupation of their schools which have suspended classes in Guatemala City.

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