Drama In Equador And Brazil As Guiterrez Falls

A big international drama is unfolding in South America where Equador’ s Ecuador’s President Lucio Gutierrez was booted out by Congress there — and offered asylumn in Brazil.

The catalyst for Ecuador’s third presidential overthrow in eight years was growing, angry street protests. The Houston Chronicle reports this:

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA – Amid swelling street protests, lawmakers on Wednesday forced Ecuador’s besieged president, Lucio Gutierrez, from office and replaced him with his vice president. But analysts said the move was unlikely to end the oil-rich country’s political instability.

Gutierrez fled the presidential palace. Brazil’s foreign ministry said in a statement issued in Brasilia later that Gutierrez was in the Brazilian Embassy in Quito and has asked for political asylum. The statement said the Brazilian government is taking the necessary steps to grant asylum.

Several hundred people gathered outside the embassy and the ambassador’s residency in Quito’s upscale northern neighborhoods Wednesday night, demanding that Gutierrez be denied exile and turned over to Ecuadorean authorities.

Vice President Alfredo Palacio, a 66-year-old cardiologist who had broken with his former boss, was sworn in Wednesday to fill the remainder of Gutierrez´s term, which ends in January 2007.

“Today the dictatorship, immorality, arrogance and fear have come to an end,” Palacio, a former health minister, said at his televised swearing-in ceremony. “From today on, this government will be a government of the people.”

But the Miami Herald reports this may not be enough:

But mobs of Ecuadoreans angry at the country’s entire political class besieged the lawmakers and new President Alfredo Palacio. The crowds in Quito threw rocks and set fire to government buildings well into Wednesday evening.



Palacio, a 66-year-old cardiologist, became the seventh president in 10 years of this trouble-plagued nation after 60 members of the 100-seat single-chamber Congress approved a decree stating that Gutiérrez had ”abandoned his post,” arguing that he had become more of a dictator than president.



”It’s an extreme interpretation of the constitution,” said Victor Albornoz, the director of the Quito think tank known as CORDES. “[But] no one cares about the constitution anymore.”

But what does it mean? Most likely, a few things:

• It is one more indication of the power of an angry populace to dislodge seemingly entrenched leaders.
• This is an era where due to advances in the information age (cable television and news weblogs, in particular) populations have a lower tolerance level than they did before for governments they don’t like. Young people (who usually make up the bulk of street demonstrations) have seen governments quickly fall in Eastern Europe and parts of the old Soviet Union. Each time a government falls due to pressure from the street, it helps clone future actions somewhere else.
• The leadership change will likely have a financial impact. Bloomberg Reports notes that “may signal a shift toward more spending and less willingness to work with international lending agencies.”

Bloomberg also notes that the dumped President had helped the economy. Guitierrez, it notes, used his two years in office to help “spur the fastest economic growth in a decade and restrain spending. The new president, Alfredo Palacio, Gutierrez’s vice president, may be reluctant to follow his predecessor’s policies.”