The international outcry prompted a hasty restoration of civilian rule. The three-man “junta of national salvation”–made up of military chief Gen. Carlos Mendoza, Indian-rights leader Antonio Vargas and former Supreme Court president Carlos Solorzano–that took power Friday night stepped aside after U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary of State Peter Romero threatened the country with “political and economic isolation.” Mahuad’s vice president, Gustavo Noboa, assumed the presidency, in the presence of senior military and political officers. About 50 colonels and other midlevel officers who participated in the coup were arrested early Saturday morning. Says Berta Garcia Gallegos, a military-affairs expert at Quito’s Catholic University: “Public opinion and the statements of pro-democracy officers overcame the military coup.”
The military’s decision to topple Mahuad reflected a widely held perception that the Ecuadoran president had become a spent political force. Barely a year after taking office in August 1998, the 50-year-old Harvard-educated Mahuad saw his approval rating plunge into single digits as he struggled to cope with the worst economic crisis in the Western Hemisphere. While prices soared by 60 percent last year, tens of thousands of Ecuadorans lost jobs as the economy shrank by more than 7 percent. Then the sucre’s value against the dollar went into free fall.
The installation of Noboa as Ecuador’s new head of state promises no respite from the country’s woes. In his first announcement, the 63-year-old lawyer from Guayaquil pledged to press ahead with Mahuad’s highly unpopular dollarization program. So what appeared at first to be a triumph of people power was emerging as nothing more than the clumsily engineered removal of a reviled chief of state. The reported arrest of Indian-rights leader Antonio Vargas, and the expulsion of his supporters from the Congress and Supreme Court buildings they occupied on Friday, are likely to spark a fresh round of street demonstrations against the new government. And while the restoration of civilian rule appeared secure by the end of last week, chaos could rapidly erupt if Noboa turns out to be a civilian fig leaf for a de facto military regime.
