2023-05-19 11:01:11
The crisis that has just erupted in Ecuador cannot be extrapolated, but with its national characteristics it is added to a regional instability map It seems only destined to get worse.
These calamities that go from border to border are the daughters of politics, but fundamentally of the impotence of politics to make what is necessary possible, which is at the end of the day what this social science is all about, as a well-remembered French president remarked years ago.
The government of the center-right Guillermo Lasso has just set an example of these defects 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 it cornered by a devastating crisis and to block a glassy trial against him that was meant 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 lead in the elections that he is bound to call shortly, possibly August 20 as the Ecuadorian electoral authority speculates, although the total term is six months, a time that if extended promises to be hectic. It will be seen if Lasso had alternatives.
In the meantime, with this unprecedented decision, he paved the way for the consolidate the opposition led by the 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 penalty unknown embraced by the alibi of lawfarethe emblem of permission-for-everything that their allies of the national regional populism: Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina or Bolivia, among others.
A previous hard defeat
An unavoidable fact in the analysis is that Lasso comes from a mass defeat last February, in which a referendum that tried to seek a series of structural changes was strongly rejected by the population. In those same days, correísmo won the mayors 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 a pass to the second round with the minimum and beating Correa’s candidate, economist Andrés Arauz, by five points. The Argentines will remember it because in the middle of the Ecuadorian campaign was greeted with joy in the Casa Rosada and in the institute run by the vice president of our country.
That victory was achieved with vows given of adversaries of correísmo, fidelities that were ephemeral. Especially since Lasso could not keep his promises to reduce taxes and attract foreign investment or convey a successful strategy to stop the violence that engulfs the country.
The center right is usually also demagogic or, if preferred, he places the rod at unattainable heights due to the presumption of questionable efficiency.
Except for a brief moment of strength due to his successful campaign against the covid, the Ecuadorian president has experienced a nosedive of its popularity weighed down by the economic and social crisis that triggered the epidemic and that the entire global south is experiencing.
Also lives with the weight of a debt of 8,200 million dollars, serious figure for the size of the country, contracted with the IMF that imposes inevitable adjustments.
The panorama adds other abysses. Since the beginning of his tenure, Lasso has suffered an incessant rise in urban crime, combined with bloody prison riots, but especially the impetuous advance of drug trafficking. Ecuador currently 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 “restore public order” what was read as a maneuver to contain their internal rivals.
The powerful indigenous movement, which had indirectly helped Lasso’s victory due to its contempt for correísmo, which furiously persecuted and repressed those peoples, began to demand the resignation of the president and this past February, just after the government’s electoral defeat, it declared itself in permanent mobilization.
The truth is that Ecuador, long before Lasso took office, became a cocaine transit center 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 superior combat strength than the police or the army.
Furthermore, it did not resolve the bureaucratic incapacity of State institutions, permeated by the mafias and without instruments to prosecute the crime. “The judicial system, the institution that oversees bank transfers, does not even have the money 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 designated by the White House among its relevant allies in the region, but that link is not coincidentally collapsing due to the unfortunate mix of drug trafficking, violence and corruption. The political crisis has all these edges. That is why the charges against the president are worth as a side 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 crude oil transportation services despite the fact that prior to the legislative process it was verified that this agreement was made before his presidency . From correísmo they maintain that the president added an addendum that is punishable. A cynical handshake.
If the president were an ally of Correa, they would surely be shouting like a coup leader this maneuver. 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 himself 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 it.
Those countries actually resemble each other in another dimension. 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, the Central Bank emptied of reserves and the population pressing the exchange agencies to obtain dollars or any currency, attentive to the abyss that is coming.
This disaster is due to the fall in the price of energy commodities, the loss of investment and a government subsidy policy that left the country without resources. The crisis is also fueled by the all out battle that ex-president Evo Morales wages with the president of his own party in a bicephaly that blocks any parliamentary alternative to build a solution.
The table of nightmares in the area can be completed without a doubt by the decadence of Argentina or, in another more benevolent measure, Chile that since the crushing defeat of the pro-government party against the ultra-right in the constituent elections has turned into a virtual “lame duck” to the president Gabriel Boric.
The neighboring nations that escape this nuisance do not do so political tensions. In successful Uruguay, although still low on average, the murder rate due to street crime doubled and corruption cases 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 planned by the Ministry of Finance Fernando Haddad to make what is necessary possible, described as a “devil’s pact” by PT deputies.
Those critics join the Landless Movement, a complex ally of the government, which announced a fight plan to defend the takeovers and the agrarian reform in open defiance of the minister of the field chosen by Lula, linked to the large agricultural producers.
Everything becomes difficult. They are examples of a region without patienceat war with itself and against any hope of consensus.
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