A coup by Congress and the street

Apr 25th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Ecuador’s leader, Lucio Gutiérrez, has been booted out of power. It marks the third time in nine years that the Andean country’s elected president has been ousted by Congress and street protests

IT WAS intended as a bold statement of authority, but it merely showed how desperate the position of Ecuador’s president, Lucio Gutiérrez, had become. On April 15th, Mr Gutiérrez, flanked by armed forces’ commanders, announced that he was dissolving the Supreme Court—for the second time in four months—and imposing a state of emergency in Quito, the capital. In defiance, several thousand protesters immediately took to the streets, calling for Mr Gutiérrez to be sent packing too.

As the army sat on its hands, within hours the president was forced to lift the emergency. Each day the demonstrations, led by Quito’s middle class, swelled; two people were killed. On April 20th, Congress heeded the clamour on the streets: 60 of its 100 members voted for an Orwellian resolution which accused Mr Gutiérrez of “abandoning his post” and appointed in his place the vice-president, Alfredo Palacio. To the end, the president insisted he would not step down. But the police chief resigned, saying he would not repress the people. Finally, the army hustled Mr Gutiérrez out of the presidential palace. He took refuge in the Brazilian embassy as an arrest warrant was issued against him. Brazil granted him political asylum, and on Sunday morning, after the new president had agreed to let him go, he was smuggled past crowds outside the embassy and flown to Brasilia with his wife and one of his children.

Thus ended a battle for power, and for control of the courts, between a heavy-handed and unpopular—but legitimately elected—president and the rapacious clans that dominate the country’s Congress. Since his election in 2002, Mr Gutiérrez survived by playing the country’s political parties against each other. But it was a game in which he finally ran out of cards.

Dr Palacio, a cardiologist and former health minister from the coastal city of Guayaquil, was estranged from Mr Gutiérrez. He and his backers accused the ousted president of behaving like a dictator when he dissolved the court for the first time in December. Maybe so. But for the third time in nine years an elected president has been ousted in Ecuador, an oil-rich republic of notoriously fissile politics, by Congress and protesters in the streets.

Nor is Ecuador the only Andean country where democracy is under strain. Bolivia, too, has been racked by protests and road-blocks by radical groups, backed by various social movements. Among these groups’ demands are more provincial autonomy, more jobs and a bigger slice of the profits from the country’s substantial gas reserves. Carlos Mesa, the popular but weak president, threatened to resign twice in March; he may not survive much beyond August, when the constitution allows a new general election. Long the third-biggest producer of cocaine, if the country’s shaky government loses authority, Bolivia, to some, risks becoming an ungovernable narco-state.

Courting the populists

A mestizo (mixed race) former army colonel who himself had taken part in a coup in 2000, Mr Gutiérrez was elected with backing from left-wing parties. Once in office, he opted for orthodox economic policies, causing his backers to desert him. But his real problems began last November, when the conservative Social Christian Party (PSC) moved into opposition, backing a specious effort to impeach him.

To defeat this, Mr Gutiérrez forged a new alliance with two retrograde populist outfits. One is led by Abdalá Bucaram, a former president who had fled to Panama to escape corruption charges. The price of their support: the dissolution of the Supreme Court, dominated by the PSC, and its replacement with one sympathetic to the new alliance.

The opposition’s outrage intensified in March, when the new court’s president dropped the charges against Mr Bucaram (aka el loco, the madman). He promptly returned home and vowed to lead “a revolution of the poor”, in the mould of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s president. That caused Mr Gutiérrez’s new alliance to start to unravel. And it prompted daily protests, in Quito and other cities, calling on the president to go.

Ecuador remains in limbo. Some of the protesters called for new elections. But the first task for Congress is to decide how to choose a new Supreme Court. The court will have to decide whether to reverse its predecessor’s decisions, such as that to exonerate Mr Bucaram.

Mr Gutiérrez made mistakes. But he did some things right. Helped by higher oil prices, Ecuador’s economy grew by 7% last year. For the first time in decades, the government posted a fiscal surplus. His economic team’s efforts to reform a bloated state were thwarted by an opposition that never really let the president govern.

Whatever respite it now enjoys, Ecuador’s democracy is deeply discredited. The system is corrupt—but corruption charges are used as a political weapon. Mr Gutiérrez owed his election to his claim to be a political outsider. In the end that may have been his problem.

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