Ecuador starts cleanup after deal to end indigenous protests

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — Thousands of indigenous demonstrators, student volunteers and local residents launched a massive cleanup Monday of a Quito park where anti-austerity protesters fought police for days, leaving piles of burning tires, trees and construction material.

The cleanup began hours after President Lenín Moreno and indigenous leaders struck a deal late Sunday to cancel a disputed austerity package and end nearly two weeks of protests that paralyzed the Ecuadorian economy and left seven dead.

As protesters left Arbolito Park and the cultural center in Quito where protesters camped out for days, they launched a "minga," an indigenous term for a communal labor project.

City workers shoveled burnt debris into dump trucks and swept the streets clean. Young protesters took down improvised barricades of paving stones, which they piled back onto the construction sites they had come from, or onto the beds of city cargo trucks. Indigenous people who spent a week protesting in the park loaded bundles of clothes onto yellow buses to head back to their homes in the Andean sierra. Crowds waved goodbye and chanted, "we did it!"

Under the agreement, Moreno will withdraw the International Monetary Fund-backed package known as Decree 883 that included a sharp rise in fuel costs. Indigenous leaders, in turn, called on their followers to end protests and street blockades.

The government and indigenous leaders were working together Monday to develop a new package of measures to cut government spending, increase revenue and reduce Ecuador's unsustainable budget deficits and public debt.

"We reached our objective," said Fabricio Molina, a 36-year-old farmer and rancher, as he sat on a bus waiting to leave Quito. "Now we hope they sign a deal, and if they don't we'll be back...