Ecuador, arguably the most beautiful country in South America, has probably the stupidest government. Only dollarization has kept the government from making a complete hash of things, and high oil prices and a willingness to drill have enabled the Andean state to post a 5.4% rise in GDP in 2004. But dollarization by itself is not enough. The place desperately needs rule of law, and they aren’t even close.

This country’s crisis is centered around the Supreme Court, which was stacked with President Lucio Gutierrez’s 31 political cronies a few months back. This stacking didn’t going down well in the streets of Quito, Guayaquil or Cuenca, and there were numerous warnings from editorialists and growing marches in the streets. The last straw was when this crony court dropped corruption charges against a loathesome and crazy ex-president who just happened to be a friend of Gutierrez’s, which enabled him to return to the country early this month from his exile in Panama. In response to public pressure, Gutierrez last week announced he would fire the Supreme Court, but that just brought out more protests from people saying it was anti-democratic to fire the same despised court. The court seems to be where this crisis is fixed, but Gutierrez doesn’t seem to be able to placate the crowds any way he goes. The bottom line: they don’t want the guy. This all seems to be reaching a critical point, which may topple Gutierrez, a former coup-mongering colonel whose career in some ways parallels that of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Here is the news roundup:

XINHUA, March 18: Ecuador, along with Colombia and Peru, expects to sign a free trade agreement with the U.S. by the end of June.

REUTERS, March 22: Easter holidays are extended in a bid to cool down the simmering political crisis over the illegally appointed Supreme Court justices.

AL JAZEERA, and AP, March 23: Police fired tear gas into the Congress at 15 opposition lawmakers who were blocking a Gutierrez nominee for attorney general. Signs appeared that Gutierrez’s legislative majority had cracked when 60 of the 100 lawmakers had rejected Gutierrez’s handpicked list of attorney general candidates.

REUTERS, March 23: Gutierrez pleas for international help to resolve a proper way to pick judges. The Andean Community said it might be able to help.

WASHINGTON FILE, March 25: The UN warned Ecuador of dire consequences if it didn’t take steps to ensure an independent judiciary, citing the illegal appointment of Gutierrez’s 27 crony judges (out of the 31) last December.

NO LINK, March 29: Police fired tear gas at striking judicial employees who tried to enter the Supreme Court building, shouting: “Corrupt court out!” About 4,400 court workers have been on strike since mid-March, demanding the ouster of the judges appointed in December.

ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 30: Gutierrez, in a surprise move, proposes firing the 27 crony Supreme Court judges his Congress illegally installed four months ago. He sends the proposal to Congress.

BLOOMBERG, March 30: Ecuador, the world’s biggest banana producer, asked the WTO to arbitrate a dispute with the EU which is proposing to triple import duties on Ecuadorean bananas on Jan. 1.

XINHUA, March 30: A vice mayor in the western Los Rios province is murdered. Officials said they would investigate whether the Social Christian party mayor was a victim of political violence.

ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 31: Gutierrez’s Supreme Court drops two corruption charges against former President Abdala “El Loco” Bucaram, a friend of Gutierrez’s, clearing his way to return home to Ecuador. He declares he will do just that.

REUTERS, April 1: Joy in Ecuador as its soccer team looked set to represent South America in the 2006 World Cup, along with Big Dogs Argentina and Brazil and fellow upstart Paraguay. It won a bunch of key matches.

ANGUS REID CONSULTANTS: April 2, the washed-up ex-president, Abdala Bucaram, known as ‘El Loco’ after getting outstanding charges of corruption against him dismissed by Ecuador’s stacked Supreme Court returns to Ecuador, vowing to ‘rescue’ the country as its very own Hugo Chavez. This pretty well makes 80% of Ecuador’s population darn near sick. That in turn set the stage for new protests over the courts.

POLITINFO (Germany), April 6: Police tear gas 1000 protestors demanding the exit of Gutierrez’s stacked Supreme Court.

NO LINK, April 6: The military vows to stand by President Gutierrez as the crisis escalates. In Instapundit‘s words: Heh.

UPI, April 8: Tensions higher after December’s decision to fire an earlier Supreme Court. The return of ex-president Abdala Bucaram, alias, ‘El Loco’ has brought it to a fever pitch.

BBC, April 8: The U.S. offers to mediate this crisis over the Supreme Court. No followup stories, I suspect nothing came of this.

REUTERS, April 10: The normally strong-stomached emerging-nation bond market is on alert for trouble here.

INDYMEDIA, April 10: The far-left site says it’s on the same alert as the bond market. Has a good photo.

REUTERS, April 13: Huge violent demonstrations take place in Quito and other major cities over Gutierrez’s Supreme Court. Public transport is shut down. The news story says they want him out because he’s a dictator.

PRENSA LATINA (Cuba), April 13: It claims 53 out of 100 legislators and the First Lady are demanding that Gutierrez reject the UN declaration against Cuba over its atrocious human rights record.

IMF, April 14: It warns Ecuador to cut public spending. Its projected GDP for Ecuador in 2005 is 3.9% growth and 3.7% in 2006, down from 5.4% in 2004. Economically this place is going downhill.

XINHUA, April 15: Gutierrez dissolves the Supreme Court that let El Loco back into the country and declares a state of emergency due to the protests. This includes a curfew against protestors.

JERUSALEM POST, April 16: Ecuadoreans ignore Gutierrez’s state of emergency and take to the streets in their hundreds of thousands.

EL COMERCIO, (Quito, Ecuador), April 16: The army ignores the state of emergency too. The commander doesn’t support it and the troops don’t obey it.

ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 17: President Gutierrez lifts his state of emergency in a desperate bid to get rid of the hundreds of thousands of protestors in the streets who defied his emergency curfew order on Saturday, calling for his resignation. The AP notes that the military doesn’t want to get involved and is nowhere in sight. Gutierrez’s revoking order was probably some sort of face-saving gesture because the military isn’t going to massacre anyone for his sake. For a would-be dictator, it’s a bad sign when the military walks out on you. See this superb essay explaining how and why here.

DAILY TELEGRAPH , (Australia) April 17: It reports that Kofi Annan, (always the Johnny Come Lately, I notice) is now concerned about this crisis and wants all sides to hash out their differences peaceably. Thanks, Kof.

THE NEW YORK TIMES, April 17: Juan Forero has a good summary of the mess there if you like your news in one piece. His passage here, explaining the public opinion on the court, gives the flavor:

The president’s decision did not seem to placate his determined opponents, who saw the state of emergency and the firing of the court as anti-democratic measures, even though it was opposition to the pro-government court that had prompted much of the unrest in the first place.

EL UNIVERSO, (Guayaquil, Ecuador) April 17: There’s no let-up in the protests against Gutierrez since he’s lifted the state of emergency.

EL UNIVERSO, April 17: Congress is going to try to fix the situation. Uh huh. Notice the size of the Green Card ad above that story.

EL COMERCIO, (Quito, Ecuador), April 17: Radio Luna seems to be the driving force behind these demonstrations and they continue to lead them now. Expect trouble at that radio station in the next days or hours.

EL COMERCIO, April 17: The state of emergency declared last week was Gutierrez’s friend El Loco’s idea. Indeed.

EL UNIVERSO, April 17: If you can read Spanish, this is a good editorial calling Gutierrez’s move to detroy the country’s institutions, notably the independence of the courts, a move to political suicide.

BLOOMBERG, April 17: Barbed wire fences and security forces encircle Ecuador’s Congress as members prepare to deliberate tomorrow on what to do about the stacked Supreme Court. Just so you know, Bloomberg blandly adds:

The political fight over the court has widened the spread between Ecuador’s 12 percent bond due 2012 and the comparable U.S. treasury to 8 percent points, up from 7.1 percent on Jan. 21. The bond fell 1.25 cents on the dollar on April 15 to 99.61, boosting the yield 0.255 percentage point to 12.076 percent, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

NARCONEWS, April 18: The far-left news service offers a lot of interesting detail about the character of the protests and comes down very hard on Gutierrez as a dictator. If this is the case, at least some of the crowds in the street may be hardcore Marxists.

THE INDEPENDENT (U.K.), April 18: Short, colorful analysis of the mood in Quito Sunday. Andrew Gumbel writes that the thousands of demonstrators carried rolls of toilet paper as their message to Congress to “clean up the mess.” He points out that Gutierrez would have probably weathered this storm had he not declared a state of emergency Friday.

EL UNIVERSO, April 18: President Gutierrez visited Babahoyo, a political stronghold, and told his supporters he is still the president.

EL COMERCIO, April 18: A government minister has asked for equal air time on Radio Luna, given that the radio station has been so critical of it. He cites some article of the constitution as his justification.

EL COMERCIO, April 18: The mayor of Machala, who’s a Social Christian party member, has organized a caravan to Quito to support the demonstrators.

EL COMERCIO, April 18: The government denies it has a plan to harass journalists.

EL UNIVERSO and REUTERS, April 18: Congress has unanimously ratified the dismissal of the crony court.

ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 18: Thousands of people poured like a river into the streets of Guayaquil, the country’s largest city, calling for Gutierrez to resign. They were led by the mayor.

REUTERS, April 18: Opposition parties in Congress say they will try to get rid of Gutierrez for meddling with the courts with a bid for impeachment.

JAPAN TODAY, April 18: The protests aren’t letting up, and they have spread beyond Guayaquil. The left-leaning Indigenous Indian groups have joined and so has the free-market, dollarization-driving business community. They all want him to just get out.

PRENSA LATINA, April 18: Gutierrez says he would accept a recall referendum to end the political crisis. Considering what the fellow Andean state Venezuela’s recall referendum was like, this looks like a cynical ploy. But it also suggests the guy might be desperate. What a joke.

References:

THE MIAMI HERALD has a list of all the players and who they are if you are having trouble keeping up.

BBC has a good profile of the country, and at the bottom of the page, a list of Ecuadorean media news links.

LONELY PLANET has its country profile with similar stats, though its inflation figure is way out of date (see the IMF for best data on that) but a good narrative at the top. Its THORN TREE bulletin board is always the more interesting thing, though, and there the tourists are reporting no major problems except in the big cities. One said she got tear-gassed yesterday in Quito, amid huge demonstrations, but didn’t seem to think there was much of a problem.

CIA has its list of stats and facts on Ecuador – notice they repeatedly misspell the name of ex-president Mahuad. Oh well. I hope the rest is ok.

And from the bloggers:

ROMULO LOPEZ, writing from Washington, thinks this is the end for Lucio Gutierrez. He writes that these demonstrations are big and spontaneous, not the party-democracy or special-interest affairs they have seen in the past. They seem to encompass everyone now. He hopes this one will finally sweep out the old political powers and bring in some new faces with concrete programs.

ABA, writing on the same blog as Romulo, says the situation seen now in Ecuador is no different than what it confronted in 1999 or so with Abdala Bucaram, the president not so fondly recalled as ‘El Loco.’

EDUARDO OCHOA, writing from Manta, Ecuador, where the U.S. has a military base, thinks Guiterrez is a dork and showing a balcony-shot picture of the smiling goof, says the guy’s next career ought to be in film. He has an animated sequence making fun of the guy that’s a must-see.

RANDY PAUL in New York writes that Gutierrez is probably through. He notes Gutierrez’s past history as a coupmeister and thinks Latin America would do well to pass a hemisphere-wide law saying anyone who’s ever tried a coup in the past be barred from office. He’s right of course: Every time we run into one of these jackass dictators, he’s got a history of trying to initiate a coup. Happens all the time. UPDATE: Randy warns that weak institutions are the real problem here, satisfying as the prospect of Gutierrez’s exit in its own right may be. Long term, mob democracy in the absence of checks and balances is bad for the region.

NEWLEY PURNELL, in Taiwan, posts some in-the-know e-mails from Old Ecuador Hands who know the deal on Ecuador politics. They say Guti looks likely to say, but he will be on puppet strings for powerful special interests within the political establishment from now on. But his days are numbered. This is a superb blog entry, don’t miss it.

BOZ, in the U.S. reports that the events over the weekend make him change his mind about whether Gutierrez is going to last through this. He notes the effect of ever-toppling governments and chased out presidents has not been good for Ecuador in general. He has a nice writeup explaining the situation out in plain English.

JOYCE GINATTA, in Guayaquil, doesn’t have anything new up yet, but keep an eye on this blog, I think she will.

GABRIELA CALDERON, a brilliant young 21-year-old in Washington writes the background to this current mess: She says the problem in Ecuador is its lack of institutions, which are critical to halting instability. Ecuador has changed its constitution 21 times since its founding – and I don’t mean add amendments, just wrote a whole new thing. And none of Ecuador’s toilet-paper constitutions were good, either – most all of them are petty regulations against the individual and private sector, pretty much like the EU constitution France’s voters are about to derail. The bottom line is, there’s no rule of law, but a wonderfully fertile soil for corruption. And no surprise, there is no stability. Only 17 of Ecuador’s 83 presidents have finished their terms. And even by Latin American standards, it’s been particularly undignified in the past few years, with legislators hurling bottles and chairs, the stacked supreme court called ‘gay,’ and the ominous return of a total loser populist ex-president ready to take the reins again, so appropriately known as ‘El Loco.’