The crisis that has just erupted in Ecuador cannot be extrapolated, but with its national characteristics it adds to a regional map of instability that seems only destined to worsen.
These calamities that go from border to border are daughters of politics, but fundamentally of the impotence of politics to make possible what is necessary, which is at the end of the day what this social science is about, as a remembered French president remarked years ago.
The government of the center-right Guillermo Lasso has just set an example of these flaws by using the nuclear option of the so-called "cross death" and ordering the closure of the legislature but also of its own Executive. He did so cornered by a devastating crisis and to block a glassy process against him that was intended to bring him down under any pretext.
With this step, which is legal because the Constitution allows it, he sentenced his political suicide. He has no chance of regaining his leadership in the elections that he is obliged to call shortly, possibly on August 20 according to speculation by the Ecuadorian electoral authority, although the total term is six months, a time that promises to be hectic. It will be seen if Lasso had alternatives.
Meanwhile, this unprecedented decision paved the way for the consolidation of the opposition led by populist Rafael Correa, an ally of Chavismo and Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, self-exiled in Belgium to escape an eight-year sentence for corruption.
Crime and sanction that he does not know embraced the alibi of lawfare, the emblem of permission-for-everything that his allies of regional national populism raise: Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina or Bolivia, among others.
A tough previous defeat
An inevitable fact in the analysis is that Lasso comes from a massive defeat last February, in which a referendum that tried to seek a series of structural changes received a resounding rejection from the population. In those same days the correísmo rose with the mayoralties of Quito and Guayaquil, the two largest cities in the country among five other important national districts.
The president is a former banker who surprised in April 2021 by getting the minimum pass to the second round and beating by five points Correa's candidate, economist Andrés Arauz. Argentines will remember him because in the middle of the Ecuadorian campaign he was received with joy at the Casa Rosada and at the institute run by the vice president of our country.
That victory was achieved with votes borrowed from opponents of Correismo, loyalties that were ephemeral. Especially because Lasso was unable to deliver on his promises to cut taxes and attract foreign investment or convey a successful strategy to stop the violence engulfing the country.
The center-right is also usually demagogic or, if you prefer, sets the bar to unattainable heights on the presumption of questionable efficiency.
Except for a brief moment of strength for his successful campaign against covid, the Ecuadorian president has experienced a plummet in his popularity weighed down by the economic and social crisis that triggered the epidemic and that the entire world south is experiencing.
It also coexists with the weight of a debt of 8,200 million dollars, a serious figure for the size of the country, contracted with the IMF that imposes inevitable adjustments.
Guillermo Lasso, the speech that concludes the Legislative and disarms his own government. Photo Reuters
The panorama adds other abysses. Since the beginning of his mandate, Lasso has suffered a relentless rise in urban crime, combined with bloody prison revolts, but especially the impetuous advance of drug trafficking. Ecuador today has the highest homicide rates in the region according to human rights NGOs.
In an effort to contain this disaster, the head of state characterized the mafias as terrorists and ordered a state of emergency in various provinces to "recover public order," which was read as a maneuver to contain his internal rivals.
The powerful indigenous movement, which had indirectly helped Lasso's victory because of his contempt for Correismo, which persecuted and repressed those peoples in a furious way, began to ask for the resignation of the president and this past February, just with the electoral defeat of the government, it declared itself in permanent mobilization.
The truth is that Ecuador, long before Lasso took office, became a cocaine transit hub due to its key location between Peru and Colombia. The country also facilitates money laundering due to its dollarized economy. Among many of the mistakes made by Lasso to confront this scenario, he freed the use of weapons, which made it easier for criminals to have a combat strength superior to the police or the army.
In addition, it did not resolve the bureaucratic incapacity of state institutions, permeated by mafias and without instruments to prosecute crime. "The judicial system, the institution that oversees bank transfers, has no money even to make photocopies, let alone track transactions that could potentially be linked to organized crime," specialized analyst Luis Ortiz tells CNN.
Lasso was one of the regional leaders singled out by the White House among its relevant allies in the region, but that link is not coincidentally crumbling due to the unfortunate mix of narcotics, violence and corruption. The political crisis has all these edges. That is why the charges against the president are worth as a lateral detail.
A cynical accusation
They accuse him of signing a contract between the Ecuadorian Oil Fleet (Flopec) and Amazonas Tanker Pool, a company that provides the crude oil transport service despite the fact that in the previous legislative process it was proven that this agreement was made before his presidency. From the correísmo they maintain that the president added an addendum that is penalizable. A cynical handshake.
If the president were an ally of Correa, they would surely be shouting this maneuver as a coup plotter. But it is the indigenous movements that describe the measure adopted by Lasso as a self-coup. The same ones who defended the Peruvian coup leader Pedro Castillo who also launched against the corrupt Parliament of his country to stop the offensive aimed at overthrowing him. But he did it dressed as a dictator, without having the constitutional tool to do so.
Ecuador's populist former president Rafael Correa, the man behind the crisis. Photo EFE
These countries, in fact, resemble each other in another dimension. They are links in an increasingly fragile institutional chain in the region. Nearby in Bolivia, the government of Luis Arce is writhing with a devastated economy, emptied of reserves the Central Bank and the population pressuring in the exchange agencies to get dollars or any currency, attentive to the abyss that is coming.
That disaster is due to the fall in the price of energy commodities, the loss of investments and a policy of government subsidies that left the country without resources. The crisis is also encouraged by the total battle waged by former President Evo Morales with the president of his own party in a bicephaly that blocks any parliamentary alternative to build a solution.
The picture of nightmares in the area can undoubtedly be completed by the decline of Argentina or, in another more benevolent measure, Chile that since the overwhelming defeat of the ruling party against the extreme right in the constituent elections turned President Gabriel Boric into a virtual "duck".
The neighborhood nations that escape this nuisance do not escape political tensions. In successful Uruguay, although still reduced on average, the murder rate by street crime doubled and the causes of corruption involving at least three high-ranking officials multiplied.
In Brazil, in turn, the pragmatic and recent government of Lula da Silva is being besieged by the left wing of his party that repudiates the adjustments that, to make possible what is necessary, the Minister of Finance Fernando Haddad plans, described as a "pact with the devil" by PT deputies.
These critics join the Landless Movement, a complex ally of the government, which announced a plan of struggle to defend the takeovers and agrarian reform in open defiance of the minister of the branch chosen by Lula, linked to large agricultural producers.
Everything becomes difficult. They are examples of a region without patience, at war with itself and against any hope of consensus.
© Copyright Clarín 2023
See also