Appropriate Escalation.

2 days ago

Tuesday, 14th of October, Otavalo was turned into a warzone. Since then, I’m thinking about “reasonable reactions” or “appropriate reactions”, and what leads to the discrepancy in (ab)use of power.

The tables were 2cm wider than asked for. a) take out the whole door frame or b) ask the neighbors to pass them over their wall.

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The first thought is always – with power comes responsibility. In the clashes between the protesters and the military, there was one group that was trained for war, had guns, machines, protective gear and everything the war industry provided. The other side had (confirmed) rocks, sticks, machetes, spears, Molotov cocktails, and firecrackers, including firework rockets loaded into plastic tubes, which they proudly called “bazooka”.

I’m glad the military didn’t use a real bazooka.

As parents, we all know escalation. Slowly pressuring the kid into doing the right thing, escalating step by step. Some do it consciously, some unconsciously. Some escalate quicker than others. Some have a different level of maximum escalation. Mine is shouting. I raise my voice little by little. First, I listen to her arguments (if she has any), then tell her mine. “Get ready now because if you don’t, we’re going to be late.” If she refuses, I repeat louder. "I'm getting angry." Raise a little more.

"Do you really want me to be angry?"

The parent is the one in power, so the parent has to measure and use that power responsibly. So does the government, represented by the military in our case, during the strikes that included road blockades, restriction of mobility of all citizens in the area, including those who did not want a strike. Including many problems even for people needing to get to the hospital. But here’s where the discrepancy in power is visible.

The protesters had effective power, in that moment, blocking the roads. The government has effective and structural power – blocking education through either lack of funding or high cost for students, raising cost of living through cutting subsidies and at the same time giving tax breaks to the richest and big companies (including the president, presumably, their debt disappeared…), not granting you services because you didn’t vote, putting you in jail, and of course: killing you. Literally.

And it all depends on the government using that power responsibly. In the paro, it depended on the protesters using their power responsibly. In my eyes, they both failed terribly – but only one of them killed. Not by accident. Not premeditated, either. One used a little power badly, the other a lot of power worse. The impact is completely different. One is a disturbance. The other one is death.

Why?

The escalation was incredibly quick, with tear gas thrown from helicopters on the first day, the government sending a military convoy after a week, causing a battle during which Efraín was killed, and the person trying to help him beaten up by military. The escalation was announced by the government. They did say “Do you really want me to get angry?” by declaring all protesters terrorists, which in and of itself is a hyper-escalation.

The question would also be: What is an adequate escalation?

I’m sure that each culture, each country, has their own answer to that. How much more is the integrity of the human worth than objects? How much more is the literal life worth than the metaphysical rights and laws? What is the main focus of the culture, preservation through strictly upholding the rules by any means, or the lengthy and resource intense consideration of the individual case? Both can lead to said preservation. And both can do just the opposite. Balance, as always, is the key. And each individual as well as each community as well as each city as well as each sub-culture has their own idea of how that balance is supposed to look like.

I read surprisingly many comments from people with incredibly little understanding of the culture (reminder – I only understand small parts either after over a decade living here, and yet a lot more than those commenters), both expats and Ecuadorians (yes, unfortunately, way too many locals put “understanding the plurinational concept and different cultures within my nation” in the bottom drawer) – wow, what a long and fragmented sentence already, to remind you I was writing about comments –, stating that shooting to kill at the protesters is indeed an adequate reaction.

Luckily, that was not adapted by the military. They could have executed a massacre. Because they had the power, they had the means. In Germany, the police are trained in crowd control to an extend that I learned to admire. I did not while being among the protesters in Hamburg or on the Castor Trail. But now, it’s impressive how they execute the law with brutality, yes, in excess, yes, but almost never death. Water cannons, tear gas, the good old rubber sticks. Even “hardcore” riots like on New Years Eve 2023 in Berlin did not lead to deaths caused by police.

There is a line you shall not cross.

For parents, it’s violence. Supposed to be, surely. For the government, it’s killing. While I can’t see an excuse for parents to use physical violence, there are some for adults – self-defense in a life-threatening moment for example. Still, as parents, we punch the walls, not the kids, as they’re rarely life threatening, just sometimes so annoying that can make you wish you were dead.

And even that depends on the circumstances. And how the circumstances are perceived depends on the information that one has. And that information, as I’ll try to argue in my next post, is very easily manipulated.

What are your thoughts about this topic? Please feel free to engage in any original way, including dropping links to your posts on similar topics. I'm happy to read (and curate) any quality content that is not created by LLM/AI, as well as read your own experience and point of view, I love to learn!