"On Saturday, we will block the roads and bring the country to a standstill. When no food reaches the cities, the government will have to talk to us. We've had enough of oppression. We want change in our lives. And some of us are prepared to die for this, because death is better than tyranny."
As Ecuador reels from a political and economic crisis - which has seen the entire cabinet resign, mass street protests and mounting demands for the President's resignation - the people of the indigenous tribes are planning a radical future. They are finalising plans for a revolutionary strategy, where the entire congress, supreme judiciary and President Jamil Mahuad are forcibly ejected from office to make way for people power.
Despite their poverty and lack of education, Ecuador's Indians have enough power to cripple the country. Unlike many of America's indigenous people, whose ways were destroyed by Spanish invaders, a sense of tradition is strong among Ecuador's Indians. They are proud of their culture and even on the streets of Quito, high in the Andes, it is easy to see many traditional Indians from the country's 13 tribes. The men wear Tyrolean-style felt hats with feathers, while the women dress in multi-coloured shawls, bead jewellery, often with a swaddled baby tied to their back.
Making up 25 per cent of the population of Ecuador, excluding the huge numbers of people of mixed descent, the united Indians are a strong and increasingly vocal group.
According to Carlos Jijon, editor of El Hoy, the country's Indians don't just want radical social change, they also want autonomy from the ruling classes.
"They want to be master of their own lands and observe their own traditions," he said. "The middle class and the media are afraid of them because we know that they have the power to cause chaos, even if they don't manage to achieve real political change."
The roots of Indian radicalism lie in the 1960s, when the Catholic Church initiated a political education programme. Some 20 years later they formed their own party - Pachacutik - and now have several seats in Congress.
Mr Fernando Villavicencio, co-ordinator of CONAIE, the social movement representing Indians, talks about doing away with the presidential office and replacing it with a five-man council, of discarding neo-liberal policies in favour of socialist ideology.
"We will cause chaos until they give into our demands," he says. "We've given them enough chances, but they've ignored us. The people have had enough of being second-class citizens. We are beyond angry. And the shamans say change is coming. They say we are entering the age of the condor; they say that the Red Warrior has returned."
Mr Villavicencio's speech reverberates with pie-in-the-sky rhetoric. But the mobilisation of the country's Indians in mass protest against the system and their lot in life marks a significant shift in the country's society, according to Prof Milton Benitez, director of human sciences at the Catholic University of Ecuador.
"They have the power to paralyse the country, not for a long period, but they can do it. They are a new phenomenon in our society which over time will promote social change," he says.
Dr Benitez sees revolutionary talk of throwing away the chains of oppression as purely ideological. And he believes that they are unlikely to gain political power because they lack the "mechanism to articulate their politics".
"They don't have any real power and I don't believe that campaigning in the street will result in major social change. The government will give them a few symbolic concessions but their real significance is longer term," says Dr Benitez.
"The indigenous movement is important to Ecuador not as an ethnic lobby but as a wider social faction that will unite the poor from the countryside and the city. And for that reason alone they are a positive force for the good of the country," he says.
So, for all the anarchic talk of social upheaval, Ecuador's Indians are bound tightly together by something much more mundane: by poverty.
Mr Julio Cesar Cando is 41, but he looks older. He is an Indian with a large family to support. On a $40 a month potter's wage, he finds daily living increasingly difficult. "Life has never been so bad and I know something has got to be done," says Mr Cando. "It is hard to succeed in our society, especially with Indian blood. I will go out and demonstrate and block roads because we need change in Ecuador. I want to be treated fairly and get the same rights as everyone else.
"I don't really understand what our Indian leaders say but I do know that my family needs more food on the table. So of course I am prepared to go out on the streets if that means getting a better life. But I want you to know that I'm not asking for much. Just some more money. A little more, that's all, so that we can all survive."