Recently, and probably as a consequence of the rejection generated by the governmental decision, high officials from the Environment Ministry stated to the Ecuadorian media that the ministry will do anything in its power to regularize Accion Ecologica´s legal situation.

Despite this, the environmentalist organization will submit an appeal to revoke the decision taken by the Health Ministry on March 2nd.

There was also another political sign that made clear that the relationship between Accion Ecologica and Correa is in its worst moment. The environmental organization decided yesterday to end their participation in the lawsuit submitted by Ecuador before The Hague Court due to the impacts of fumigations within the Plan Colombia, and to which the organization provided technical and scientific elements.

The expressions of support to Accion Ecologica have emerged from several regions of the American continent. Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, sent a letter to Correa which starts this way: “Dear Rafael, My friends are telling me that the organization Accion Ecologica has been closed by an official decision. It´s hard for me to believe it. I hope it´s not true.

Galeano continues and considers himself “one of the many people” celebrating the new Constitution and its intention to protect “for the first time” the rights of nature,
although he adds that the best way to guarantee these rights is the “independence” of the environmentalist organizations.

Another Uruguayan, journalist Raul Zibechi, wrote an article which can be read online which has a quite explanatory headline: “ Ecuador: the logic of development clashed with movements”.

Argentinian Nobel Prize, Adolfo Perez Esquivel; Miguel Palacín, president of the Andean Coordination of Indigenous Organizations, and several European MPs have also added their voices to this claim, for Correa´s government to review their decision.

In the next hours, the organizations member of the Federation Friends of the Earth Latin America and the Caribbean (ATALC) will issue a public statement in which they demand Ecuador´s president not to join the conservative governments “which criminalize the environmentalist independent movements of the region”.