In an international Hearing on October 13, on the impacts of the policies, loans, and programs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in relation to Water, Climate, and Energy, the Peoples and Nature Tribunal against the IMF-WB deliberated on how the actions of these two multilateral organizations have affected and continue to affect life in Ecuador.
They highlighted the impacts of external debt, which perpetuates a colonial legacy linked to a history of domination, dispossession, plunder, and crimes. This eternal debt means sacrificing the living conditions of the majority and of Mother Earth, Nature, in order to openly favor certain business sectors that make up the oligarchic power structure, which is waging a veritable crusade against the rights of peoples and nature enshrined in the Constitution of Montecristi, approved in 2008.
Hence, this Tribunal, together with the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, in exercise of their respective mandates, decide to speak out in defense of the Constitution of Montecristi, given its importance in relation to the issues that concern us.
For the first time, a State recognized nature—the Pachamama—as a subject of rights, with the right to exist, maintain itself, and regenerate its life cycles. This milestone not only represented a legal advance, but also an act of ecological justice and ancestral wisdom, closely linked to the recognition of the plurinational and intercultural State, which affirms the coexistence of diverse peoples and cultures with their own worldviews and ways of relating to the Earth, and which is a global reference for rethinking the relationship between humanity and nature.
The Montecristi Constitution also affirms the rights that guarantee a dignified life, the right to resistance, to broad and active citizen participation, to food, energy, and economic sovereignty, and to peace, which is also threatened by the potential return of US military bases to the Galapagos Islands and other parts of Ecuadorian territory.
The oligarchies and the government, the financial, corporatist, and geopolitical web that sustains them, are determined to reduce all mechanisms of citizen participation, popular consultations, free and informed prior consultation, and environmental consultation, instruments that for the most part guarantee the rights of indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian peoples and nationalities, as well as communities throughout the country.
These Tribunals therefore express their categorical rejection of this attempted rollback of rights and guarantees, which has no other purpose than to deepen the neoliberalization and extractive plundering of the Ecuadorian economy, hand in hand with the militarization of society in an environment of growing authoritarianism. They warn the international community that a setback in these rights would be a profound blow to real solutions to the social, ecological, and climate crisis, as the rights of nature and the collective rights of peoples embody an ethical, political, and civilizational alternative that is indispensable for guaranteeing life.
We express our solidarity with the peoples of Ecuador in their struggles to defend life, their territories, and the nature of which they are a part. We call for closer ties to consolidate the struggles of resistance and weave common processes to advance in the construction of those other possible worlds that can guarantee a dignified life for human beings and a dignified life for non-human beings, Mother Earth, and nature.
– November 15, 2025
Peoples and Nature Tribunal against the IMF-WB
International Rights of Nature Tribunal