The outlines of the story are familiar to American newspaper readers. A few days ago, Ecuador's President Abdal Bucaram, only six months into his four-year term, ran into serious political trouble, bringing his country to a virtual halt. After a forty-eight-hour general strike--the most serious political disruption in Ecuador for the past fifty years--the country's Congress succeeded in forcing his resignation. Then, another forty eight-hour crisis ensued while the president of Congress and Bucaram's vice-president tussled over who would be his successor. The former emerged triumphant, apparently with the support of Ecuador's military, and will preside over new elections in the middle of next year.

Recited in this way, the facts seem trivial and, possibly to some, even amusing--a throwback to the days when our perception of Latin American politics was shaped by New Yorker cartoons. To be sure, Ecuador has a turbulent political history, and for many years its politics came closer to resembling the opé bouffe stereotypes than most of its neighbors. But times have changed in Latin America--and even, in some ways, in Ecuador. The past month's events there deserve a more serious and sober analysis.

A Divided Society

Ecuador is a South American republic a bit too small to play regional trendsetter. Nonetheless, it suffers from some of the same complications as its neighbors: a difficult geography, which divides whole regions from one another; a large indigenous population, which is imperfectly integrated into the national community; vast inequalities of wealth; and unrealized economic potential alongside a few productive enclaves--oil, fisheries, ecotourism, and container shipping.

In many ways, the history of Ecuador is a tale of two cities: Guayaquil, the teeming, hideously ugly Pacific port (rather unflatteringly referred to by foreigners as the Saigon of South America) and Quito, the mountainous capital, a gem of colonial architecture, which reposes in remote and lofty dignity. The people of the coast deeply resent the people of Quito as exploiters of their honest labor--and snobs, to boot. For their part, the elite of the capital make no effort to disguise their contempt for the lowlanders, openly referring to the people of Guayaquil as monos--monkeys.

As if to reflect these deep societal schisms, Ecuadorian politics has always been fractious and semiviolent. Even today, there are seventeen registered political parties. Until 1979, military governments followed one another with such frequency that one academic study published during those years was aptly titled The Coup d'Etat as a Way of Life. For the past seventeen years, the country has been governed by civilians, but politics is still largely personalist, factional, and excessively tied to regionalism--and winner take all.

Perhaps the most important political clan in Ecuador is the Bucaram family of Guayaquil, descendants of Lebanese merchants who have built an enduring political force of their own by exploiting the resentment of Quito and its "oligarchy" by the costeñ  (people of the coast). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Bucarams' use of sulphurous rhetoric against the rich and well-born has in no way prevented them from amassing a huge fortune of their own.

All this is relevant to the rise and fall of Abdalá Bucaram. Born in 1952, he took a law degree and spent some time as a political exile in Panama during the late years of the last military regime. He plunged into politics in 1979 as the police chief of the Guayas province; five years later, he was elected mayor of Guayaquil.

During last year's presidential campaign, Bucaram seemed like a throwback to the old days of Latin American politics, promising a huge across-the-board salary increase, a heavy dose of soak-the-rich populism, and special attention to the needs of the marginal classes. (This would be most Ecuadorians since, by some reckonings, over 60 percent of the population are poor or extremely poor.)

Once elected, Bucaram revealed sides of his character unanticipated even by his most inveterate opponents. He refused to sleep in the presidential palace in Quito because, he said, it was haunted. He shaved off his mustache (which unkind commentators likened to that of Adolf Hitler) on a television show and offered to auction off the remnants for charity. The president took to appearing on television shows as an actor, dancer, and singer--roles for which he has no particular talent. Bucaram even recorded an album entitled A Madman in Love, which--no tribute to local music taste--has sold 300,000 copies. As owner of Ecuador's principal football team, he tried to recruit Argentina's World Cup star Diego Maradona with a huge cash offer--this in a country where the average salary is less than U.S. $200 dollars a month.

At the same time, Bucaram packed the government with relatives and close retainers. Even his eighteen-year-old son, Jacobo, was given an unofficial job at the customhouse, an appointment that enabled the young man recently to celebrate the acquisition of his first million dollars. The president appointed one of his brothers minister of social welfare, a political powerhouse in its own right. (Two other brothers serve in Ecuador's unicameral legislature.) Bucaram's response to charges of nepotism and corruption was a series of radio broadcasts in which he referred to his critics as "donkeys, conspirators, wretches, shameless curs, and mafiosi." [1] 

About-Face and Denouement

The proximate cause of Bucaram's political problems was not, however, his bizarre behavior or lack of civility. Rather, it was a death-defying ideological flip-flop that he performed within weeks of taking office. Far from delivering on his populist promises, Bucaram contracted the services of former Argentine finance minister Domingo Cavallo, Latin America's leading exponent (and practitioner) of free-market orthodoxy. In short order, Cavallo produced a reform plan similar to the one that brought him fame in Argentina--a combination of convertibility (tying the sucre to the U.S. dollar), an end to subsidies for public utilities, and a long list of state enterprises to put up for auction.

Although none of these measures would provoke much controversy in neighboring Peru or Bolivia, both of which have already experienced far-reaching economic reforms, Ecuador is an old-fashioned Latin American country, a place where social peace has been historically purchased through heavily subsidized public services. The Cavallo plan, the first phases of which were put into place on January 8, led to an immediate fivefold increase in the price of electricity, a threefold increase in the price of domestic gas, and a 65 percent increase in the cost of public transportation.

As a result, Ecuador's deeply divided society congealed into a single unified front--against the plan and against Bucaram. The call for a general strike on February 5 found resonance not only among workers, Indian groups, students, and teachers but among members of the business community as well. Protesters seized Quito's Metropolitan Cathedral, and the streets of the capital were choked with marchers bearing signs, crosses, and coffins with the president's name painted on them. The country's principal roads were blocked by boulders, trees, and burning tires, producing widespread shortages of food and gas. In a matter of hours, an informal national consensus was reached--namely, that the country's principal problem was Bucaram and that the most expeditious road to resolving it was to force the president's resignation.

Article 100 of Ecuador's Constitution provides for the replacement of a chief executive in the event of mental incapacity, although it does not specify whether this condition requires medical certification. A simple majority vote of Congress suffices to relieve a sitting president of his powers. Thus, early on, opposition politicians and protesters alike found it convenient to promote Bucaram's eccentricities to the rank of mental illness.

Bucaram tried vainly to counter the protests by declaring martial law, surrounding the presidential palace with tanks and barbed wire, and labeling his opponents enemies of democracy. For his part, Fabi n Alarc n, the president of Congress, claimed that Bucaram was planning a self-coup (autogolpe), dissolving the courts and Congress in the style of Peru's president Alberto Fujimori (1991). Subsequent events suggest that such efforts, if they existed, received no encouragement whatever from the service chiefs.

In the midst of the hubbub, U.S. Ambassador Leslie Alexander threw in his two cents, making strong statements about government corruption that--uttered at that crucial juncture--have been subsequently interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as a go-ahead signal to the Ecuadorian Congress. On February 6, the legislators voted forty-four to thirty-three to depose Bucaram, designating Alarc n as interim chief of state until new elections can be held sometime in the middle of next year. [2]  For his part, Bucaram--ejected from the palace by force and put on the first plane to Argentina--refuses to accept the decision of Congress and insists that he is still the president of Ecuador. He plans to take his case to the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and other international bodies. Bucaram also claims that his people will soon be clamoring for his return.

What It All Means

Despite their Ruritanian aspect, these events offer some grounds for broader reflection. In the first place, by now Latin American politicians should realize that it is increasingly dangerous to promise the world to the electorate and then announce a new package of austerity plans the day after inauguration. Apparently, Bucaram took a page from the books of Alberto Fujimori and Argentina's Carlos Menem, both of whom successfully pulled off a political quick-change act once in office. He should have been more sensitive to the example of Venezuela's Carlos André Pé, who not only was forced to resign the presidency but almost lost his life in an abortive military coup. Bucaram might not have been elected in the first place had he campaigned in a way that gave Ecuadorians some sense of his intentions, but a slightly less hyperbolic discourse --and perhaps fewer grandiose promises--would have better positioned him to govern.

In the second place, events in Ecuador reveal the degree to which the armed forces in Latin America have become reluctant to assume direct political responsibility in a political crisis. In the past, and particularly in Ecuador, Bucaram would have been replaced by a military junta, not the president of Congress. Today there is an implicit understanding throughout the region that de facto governments have serious difficulties winning international acceptance--from the United States, the European Union, and the international financial institutions.

The relationship between political respectability and economic benefits has become obvious to the armed forces themselves, as well as to the more conservative elements of the business community, even in countries as troubled as Guatemala and Haiti. One happy consequence is that politicians have more space to iron out their differences now, but at the same time--and this is perhaps the point--they cannot evade their responsibilities by knocking at the barracks door.

Evidently, changing presidents will not resolve Ecuador's economic problems. Certainly, not much can be expected from Alarc n, who is a relatively colorless figure with little popular support; his mandate will expire in little more than a year's time. Nor has the public likely grasped just why an inveterate populist such as Bucaram suddenly embraced Cavallo-style economic reform. (Bucaram--like Venezuela's Carlos André Pé--thought so little of public opinion that he never bothered even to argue his case for privatization and deregulation.)

Ecuador's public sector remains, proportional to population, one of the largest in Latin America. It includes not merely electricity and transport but oil, which represents nearly half the country's national income. Many of these companies are starved for new capital, which the national treasury cannot provide and which the Ecuadorian state cannot easily borrow on the international financial markets; this situation explains why Bucaram was contemplating selling some of them off.

A leader with greater stature, sobriety, and credibility could have made his case and brought at least a part of the public along with him. But a government constantly under fire, and justifiably so, for nepotism and corruption cannot credibly make the case for disposing of what many regard as inalienable national resources. In sum, Ecuador has survived its political crisis in relatively good order, but the economic problems that produced it are still awaiting resolution.

On the face of it, the reluctance of Ecuador's military to get involved would seem to be a highly positive sign, particularly given the country's history. Conversely, one cannot say that the service chiefs acted in an entirely disinterested manner. The military are owners or important stockholders in more than thirty major enterprises--some associated with national or foreign capital--from textiles to explosives, from banks to travel agencies to a five-star hotel. They have no apparent interest in privatization and so far have successfully resisted efforts in that direction.

The cause of economic reform is therefore intimately related not only to broader and more equitable growth or greater access to capital markets or better and newer technology but to the need to consolidate civilian supremacy over the military. One can only hope that in the next phase of Ecuador's political conflict, issues like this rather than personalities dominate the discussion. If nothing else, Bucaram's departure has, at least, made that a definite possibility.

Notes

1. Clarí (Buenos Aires), February 7, 1997.
2. There was some controversy over the exact line of political succession since there are some ambiguities in the text of the constitution. Vice-President Rosalí Artega claimed that she was the logical person to succeed Bucaram, and twenty-four hours later she stepped in as chief of state. She was forced to step down the next day--again, in favor of Alarcó, largely because the military apparently found her unacceptable.

Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.