Al
Fate of Ecuadorean
president gets complicated
By Marcelo Larrea
Services of Adital
Against
the background of a latent social upheaval that has seen a chain of strikes from hospitals
to prisons, an upheaval resulting from the sacrifices caused by the economy's
concentration on the payment of the foreign debt, and already separated from the
popular forces that forged his election, Ecuadorean President Lucio Gutiérrez,
suspended in an expanding vacuum of popular legitimacy, is the target of an old-partycracy
conspiracy that aims not only to control power but also to separate him from his
post.
In
addition to the uneasiness generated by the total abandonment of the
perspectives of change that led to the popular insurrection of Jan. 21, 2000,
when Gutiérrez entered the political stage, and the abandonment of the program
of minimal reforms that carried him to victory at the polls, Lucio – in the
theater of his political crisis – has run into the growing belligerence of two
fundamental pillars of traditional partycracy: the Democratic Left and the
Christian Socialist Party, the left and right arms of the establishment.
Former
President Rodrigo Borja and his party, the Democratic Left, which controls
Congress, insist that the president's resignation is “the only solution to the
crisis affecting the country.” They believe Gutiérrez must be ousted for having
received illegal financial contributions to his campaign.
Former
President Febres Cordero has announced the Christian Socialist Party has
distanced itself from Gutiérrez, accusing him of “shielding thieves” and has
stated that if the people feel like they did with former presidents Abdalá
Bucaram Ortiz and Jamil Mahuad, both of whom the people ousted, then the party
will support that will. The impact of this turnaround is enormous, because the
Christian Socialist Party, which represents the largest bloc in Parliament, was
the main instrument of political support for Lucio's neoliberal program and his
relationship with Parliament, upon which he relied for his breakup with the
indigenous movement Pachakutik and the Democratic Popular Movement, the leftist
political forces that contributed decisively to his election.
Confronted with a program to denationalize the economy practically dictated by
the International Monetary Fund, and Washington's attempts to impose a free-trade
treaty, combined with the growing danger of Ecuador's participation in the Plan
Colombia, which has led Ecuador to mobilize more than 7,000 soldiers to the
northern border, and a succession of pressures by the U.S. Southern Command to
advance its positions in the country, Lucio's government can no longer resort to
the social movements that played a decisive role in his election. On the
contrary, those movements have called for the ouster of his regime. Now, the
forces that together defeated the partycracy in 2002 appear split and opposed
and the president they elected swings like a weathervane in the turbulent winds
of power.
The
chaotic scene of a government without any real power – not even the partial
power an electoral victory provides – encourages the pressures from factious
powers and foreign powers, particularly the United States, that govern from the
shadows. At the same time, it has opened a space where the struggle for the
presidency rises anew.
Marcelo Larrea is a correspondent for Adital and the editor of the Ecuadorean
magazine "el Sucre."
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