Ecuador’s Social Transparency law deepens Noboa’s authoritarian rule

Enemies of the state

Kichwa Panzaleco human rights defender Leonidas Iza is on trial for allegedly kidnapping Ecuadorian police officers. On September 3, he appeared in court for a hearing that revealed a state surveillance program including three undercover officers spying on him and the Andean community of San Ignacio. The spies were detained for three days according to Indigenous law, which is recognised in Ecuador’s constitution. 

As former president of CONAIE, Ecuador’s largest Indigenous organisation, and a member of the Union of Peasant Organisations of the North of Cotopaxi (UNOCANC), Iza has been at the forefront of opposing neoliberal reforms and defending Indigenous authority in his country. He led the October 2019 uprising against former President Lenin Moreno’s labour and tax reforms and cuts to fuel subsidies, which affected poor and rural communities. 

As it were, in the courtroom this month, police cellphones showed that Iza had been under long-term surveillance and revealed a plan to “disappear” him.

Iza’s story is setting the stage for a new norm in Ecuador. 

Invasive laws

Since taking office for a second term in May 2025, Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa has rushed through a slew of neoliberal reforms deemed ‘urgent economic measures.’ Critics see these laws as criminalising opposition to extractivism and escalating repression of civil liberties. 

The Organic Law on Social Transparency (formerly known as the "Law on Foundations") has put civil society organisations (CSOs) in the crosshairs. Proposed on July 29, the omnibus bill was rushed through debates and enacted on August 28. Approximately 71,000 foundations in Ecuador are affected, though some religious organisations and CSOs performing public functions are excluded.

Organisations now have to register with the Unified System of Social Organisations Information. Some of what they must disclose is banal. This includes tax declarations already submitted to Ecuador’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS), annual activity reports, and mandatory reports on corruption risk. It starts to get murky where organisations must disclose the sources of public and private donations, project beneficiaries, and the geographic location of projects. 

The policy requires organisations to disclose the nationality, general data, and identity cards of all members, a measure that has activists wary of authoritarian abuse.

The government can completely dissolve civil society organisations that don’t meet these requirements.

The sweeping Social Transparency law claims to strengthen safeguards against tax evasion and money laundering, and proposes additional reforms to licensing and investment requirements under Ecuador’s Mining Law. But critics see it as enabling arbitrary surveillance, funding freezes, and the legal dissolution of civil society organisations without due process or judicial oversight.

Amazon Frontlines, a San Francisco-based organisation supporting Indigenous communities in Ecuador, reports that over 440 organisations received invasive information demands from the Ministry of the Environment. Some within 48 hours of the new bill being introduced.

"This request is, on the surface, an attempt to review which organisations meet or do not meet these requirements and begin to place restrictions on them," Lina Maria Espinosa, lawyer with Amazon Frontlines, told FairPlanet. Organisations are already subject to numerous controls and audits, including those conducted by the IRS and donors.

Revealing the sensitive information of Ecuador’s most vulnerable communities exacerbates already high risks, including extortion, harassment, kidnapping, and assassination. Espinosa herself has been surveilled and threatened over her years of work with Indigenous communities and Indigenous guards in Ecuador and Colombia.

"There is a growing desire on the part of the executive to interfere in all institutions and in various forms of social organisation, through its ministries," Espinosa said. "The executive is increasingly interested in exerting control over all areas regarding territorial and community organisation and mobilisation."

Gina Romero, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association, has condemned the Social Transparency law for unduly restricting civil rights and making arbitrary links between civil society and criminal finance. "The bill is based on hypothetical assertions and lacks sufficient technical basis by not incorporating, for example, a specific and detailed study and characterisation of the potential risks of civil society participating in illicit activities," Romero reported last month.

The Social Transparency law has already targeted organisations involved in Indigenous advocacy that oppose large-scale extractivism, including Ceibo Alliance Foundation, an Indigenous-run environmental organisation opposing mega-mining on ancestral Indigenous territories. The Frente Nacional Antiminero (FNA), an Indigenous and campesinx (peasant/s) alliance opposing neoliberal reforms and mega-mining projects since the 1990s, has been accused by former Minister of the Interior José De La Gasca of receiving irregular funds and accused by a lawyer of Curimining (a subsidiary of Canada’s Silvercorp Mining) of being allied with organised crime and illicit mining amid opposition to corporate extractivism in Las Naves.

"We denounce these declarations as part of a strategic criminalisation that becomes particularly dangerous in the context of internal armed conflict," the FNA responded, and has publicly called for Noboa’s government to cut off illicit mining supply chains.

Last week, a countrywide strike, or paro nacional, against Noboa’s recent policies - including the elimination of a fuel subsidy, gutting public ministries, and expanding extractivism - plunged Ecuador into a 60-day state of emergency. The FNA reports that the bank accounts of several activists have now been frozen, including that of Fundación Pachamama leader Belén Páez, whose advocacy defends the Amazon rainforest from extractivism. Last week, Noboa accused protesters of being "financed and surrounded by criminals from the Tren de Aragua" -a transnational criminal organization from Venezuela- and warned that protesters defying the state of emergency measures would be charged with terrorism. The Indigenous organisation CONAIE has meanwhile demanded an end to Noboa’s state of emergency and arbitrary arrests in ancestral Indigenous territories as Ecuadorian authorities are emboldened with unchecked power.  

Troubling signals

"Noboa is exploiting Ecuador’s security crisis to extend his authority beyond constitutional limits," Pedro Labayen Herrera, Ecuador researcher at Washington-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), told FairPlanet. For Herrera, the unconstitutional suspension of former Vice President Verónica Abad in February and last year’s state-sanctioned police raid of the Mexican embassy in Quito were critical signs of Ecuador’s escalating totalitarianism.

The Social Transparency law itself is part of a larger package meant to usher in Noboa’s vision for El Nuevo Ecuador, or the 'New Ecuador' development plan, meant to lift the country out of poverty and the density of criminal rule. These wholesale reforms include the Solidarity, Intelligence, Public Integrity, Protected Areas, and now the Transparency laws. Each Omnibus bill purportedly integrates into Noboa’s anti-corruption agenda, but ultimately dissolves key democratic institutions while introducing more indiscriminate carceral powers and authoritarian control. 

Noboa has exercised exceptional powers since declaring the country to be in a state of internal armed conflict on January 9, 2024. This designation has empowered hawkish policy to deal with organised crime, while supporting the U.S. designation of cartels as terrorist groups and justifying the support of American troops. The Constitutional Court ruled against this declaration of war, finding Noboa’s justifications to be insufficient and inaccurate. 

Still, Noboa continues to override democratic boundaries. 

Ahead of Noboa’s re-election, which more closely aligned Ecuador with White House policy, some U.S. analysts encouraged a "modest and community-centred version of the highly successful Plan Colombia", referring to the brutal $15 billion American-sponsored counterinsurgency and counter-narcotics campaign of the early 2000s. 

As Noboa pushes the law package through, ‘Plan Ecuador’ is becoming a reality. A national referendum will be held in November, proposing constitutional changes to allow foreign military bases that were previously banned from the Galapagos Islands in 2008. The National Assembly has already supported reform, justified as a measure to combat drug trafficking, illegal mining, and human and weapons trafficking.

The National Solidarity law, introduced in June, formalises the President’s power to declare states of emergency and internal armed conflict, and lays out the legal foundation for broadening surveillance and military powers. According to human rights organisation Frontline Defenders, the law conflates self-defence groups with structures linked to organised crime. "This ambiguity could lead to the criminalisation of Indigenous and peasant communities exercising their constitutional right to resistance to defend their territories against extractive activities or threats to their collective rights," they state. 

On its heels came the creation of the National Intelligence System (SNI) and the revival of a security law from 2022 that legalises unchecked surveillance and undercover spying. While by no means a new occurrence, the targeting of Leonidas Iza and his community is likely only the start of the state’s underhanded crackdowns on activism. 

Each new reform has locked Ecuador deeper into a tug-of-war between the Constitutional Court - effectively the country’s flawed but only remaining safeguard - and the deepening corruption of the country’s wider judiciary. This summer, the Constitutional Court had suspended numerous provisions of Noboa’s new laws as unconstitutional. Still, on August 12, Noboa led a protest through the national capital, where a billboard denounced the nine Constitutional Court judges as corrupt enemies of the state "who are stealing our peace."

The UN Human Rights Committee has already criticised the increasing normalisation of national and local "states of emergency," and a lack of transparency around growing irregularities in judicial appointments.

"If the judges of the highest court in the country are threatened, what will happen to the judges of the lower courts?" Vivian Idrovo Mora, human rights lawyer and coordinator for the Alliance for Human Rights Ecuador, told FairPlanet. "This raises enormous concern about the pressure that ordinary judges may face when hearing cases where citizens’ rights clash with the interests of the executive branch."

For civil society groups on the frontlines of environmental causes, who are working with the most vulnerable communities in Ecuador, none of the reforms can be seen in isolation. They come at a moment when Ecuador has made fossil fuel and mining development a strategic imperative. 

Last year, the country joined the Minerals Security Partnership, a rough analogue to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), but for critical minerals, which was launched in 2022. As Noboa solicits foreign investment in mining and fossil fuel development across the Amazon, key environmental bulwarks are rapidly disappearing. 

Soon after demanding information from civil society organisations, the Ministry of the Environment was axed. Its mandate was folded into the Ministry of Energy and Mines, placing environmental protections and data - demanded through the Social Transparency law - into the hands of the extractive sector.

"In our opinion, environmental controls, already severely affected by the state's inaction, are being weakened under the pretext of insecurity," Vivian Idrovo Mora said, referring to the vulnerability of environmental groups. "Organisations that support resistance movements against extractive processes - strategic sectors of the state - such as Indigenous peoples who oppose extractivism in the southeastern region, are those most at risk."

Despite the pressures on civil society, groups including the Alliance of Organisations for Human Rights, which have defended the authority of the Indigenous Shuar Arutam people, are challenging Noboa’s laws as unconstitutional and calling for international attention to the dismantling of democratic institutions in Ecuador. But even these efforts have faltered. 

A September 19, 2025, hearing on the Social Transparency law was interrupted by an evacuation due to an alleged bomb threat. This cutoff has been described by an international human rights coalition as adding to "a context of external pressures that include disruptions to the normal functioning of the Court, public stigmatisation campaigns against its members, and the reduction of previously granted security measures."

As efforts to dismantle the totalitarian scaffolding of Noboa’s regime continue to flounder, the new law has darkened the reality for environmental and Indigenous activism in Ecuador.  

"Its provisions are vague enough to allow overreach by the Noboa administration, particularly those concerning sanctions tied to threats to national security," CEPR’s Herrera said. "Noboa, who comes from Ecuador’s wealthiest family, governs largely in alignment with the interests of private capital and the [International Monetary Fund]."

Notably, the Social Transparency law does not apply to the private sector, despite recent investigations revealing systemic corruption in the corporate mining sector and links between Ecuadorian companies and international gold smuggling rings.

"These laws expand the powers of the executive and security forces without sufficient accountability or oversight, heightening the risk that the armed forces will commit more gross human rights violations beyond the ones they have already committed," Herrera said.

With Noboa doubling down on fundraising for the country’s fossil fuel sector, auctioning off millions of acres of the Amazon, civil society is calling on international awareness on what is happening in Ecuador before more people end up victims of corrupt power - spied on, threatened, and murdered.

Images by Mullu.