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Mass Protest in Ecuador Force President to Flee
by Gerry Foley/ May 2005 issue of Socialist Action
An estimated 30,000 people marched on the presidential palace in the
Ecuadoran capital of Quito, demanding the resignation of the president,
Lucio Gutierrez, AP reported April 20.
The same day, an emergency meeting
of legislators voted to remove the discredited demagogue from office.
Subsequently, he fled the country.
Gutierrez was the third president in Ecuador in the last few years
to be forced to decamp in the face of a mass uprising. In the same period,
two other Latin
American presidents have had to run for their lives in similar
circumstances, one in Argentina and another in Bolivia.
But what is different about Gutierrez is that he gained the
presidency in the first place by espousing the revolt against the very
neoliberal policies he tried to apply after taking office.
In the last few years, a whole series of Latin American populist
politicians have been put in office by a wave of rebellion against the
effects of the economic offensive of imperialism and its agencies, such as
the International Monetary Fund. In general, these politicians, except for
Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, have tried to maintain the same neoliberal policies
behind a populist mask and have suffered increasing discredit.
Of these figures, Lucio Gutierrez in Ecuador and Alejandro Toledo in
Peru have suffered the most precipitous decline. Now Gutierrez has been
blown
away. After his election to the presidency in 2002, his popularity
ratings plummeted. In the week he fled the country, his favorable rating
had fallen to 4
percent.
In addition to his betrayal of the economic interests of the masses,
Gutierrez made the mistake of trying to make a deal with his ousted
predecessors in order to get a majority in the legislature. He threw out
the country’s Supreme Court and appointed one of his own choosing in order
to get it to quash the corruption charges against the two former presidents
so that they could return.
It could not have been a more dramatic turnaround for Gutierrez,
since he first came to prominence in January 2000 when, as an army colonel,
he refused an
order from his predecessor to fire on protesting crowds and then
broke with the military high command to try to form a government responsive
to the mass
upsurge. That is what created his popularity and won the November
2002 presidential election for him.
Now in the latest crisis, on April 15 he declared a state of emergency
to try to quell the mass protests against his regime, surrounding himself
with generals
when he made the announcement. Then on April 16, he had to rescind
emergency rule.
The British Independent reported April 18: "President Gutierrez
first imposed a state of emergency in Quito—banning street protests and
large political gatherings—then retracted it when the entire panoply of
Ecuadoran political parties, along with the military brass and the U.S.
government, told him he
had gone too far."
These forces, which have more at stake than a discredited political
adventurer, undoubtedly recognized that Gutierrez did not have the strength
necessary to make a crackdown effective and therefore his attempt to do
that risked setting up an uncontrollable explosion.
The Paris daily Liberation reported April 19: "In response to
the call of Radio La Luna, a small community station in the capital, the
discontented came into the streets, starting April 13. ‘No political
movement is coordinating this protest, no political personality can even
get near to it. It is a completely spontaneous movement," the doctor
Oscar Camargo said. ‘Lucio out!’ said one poster. ‘Out with all of them,
the politicians,’ said another."
As for Toledo in Peru, the April issue of Alternativa, the newspaper
of the Socialist Workers Movement (MST) in Argentina reported: "The
popular uprising in the small city of Llave (16,000 inhabitants) has shaken
Peru. A month ago, the people rose up. They killed the mayor, drove out the
police and last week they forced the withdrawal of the army. But Llave is
not an exception. The country is boiling over. Millions are demanding the
resignation of President Toledo. … He is saying that ‘the time has come for
an iron hand’ and is threatening repression.
"The Toledo government has earned the hatred of the people.
Today it has an approval rate of 7 percent and only 5 percent in Lima, the
capital. That is the same as what De La Ruca, Bucaram, or Sanchez de Losada
had before the population kicked them out." Bucaram was one of
Gutierrez’s fugitive predecessors, the other two were neoliberal presidents
respectively of
Argentina and Bolivia, who were also forced to flee from enraged
masses.
The social climate in Latin America is obviously heating up very
rapidly, and it is likely that there will be new explosions very soon. However, in these
conditions of upsurge and rebellion, in most countries there is
still a lack of a political instrument that can give expression to the
demands and aspirations of
the masses in a consistent way and thereby create governments
genuinely based on the mass movement.
The need for revolutionary parties and socialist revolution is more
and more glaring.
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