Ecuador’s Divisions Go Beyond Its Latest Crisis

Sirens blaring, Ecuador’s new president arrived 10 minutes before the polls closed Sunday in his hometown to vote in a referendum that symbolizes the deep divisions in this country just beginning to recover from a thwarted military coup.

President Gustavo Noboa was one of the last citizens of the prosperous province of Guayas to cast his ballot on the issue of a limited autonomy. By the time he voted in Guayaquil, exit polls were already reporting that more than 85% of the 20,000 voters questioned favored pulling away from the central government in a demonstration of disillusionment with its administrative failures.

As Sunday’s balloting showed, Noboa will face the task of uniting a country whose divisions go beyond the increasingly radical and mainly rural indigenous movement behind the weekend crisis that drove President Jamil Mahuad from office. Ecuador is fragmented geographically between the prosperous coast and the impoverished highlands and jungle; culturally by indigenous, European, African and mixed-race people; and socially by the huge disparities between rich and poor.

“The centrifugal forces that have always pulled the country apart get accentuated in times of economic crisis,” said John Sanbrailo, an international consultant and former diplomat who has completed four tours in Ecuador over the past 25 years. Currently, the nation is facing its worst economic crisis since the 1920s, with hyperinflation and overwhelming unemployment.

Mahuad’s inability to end the crisis--along with his proposals to cut government subsidies, sell off state-owned companies and make the U.S. dollar Ecuador’s currency--was largely blamed for his ouster. Indigenous organizations protesting his policies occupied the empty Congress building here in the capital Friday and announced that they and a faction of the armed forces were taking control of the country.

Early Saturday, military leaders dissolved the short-lived junta, putting Noboa, formerly the vice president, in office. But the economic problems that provoked the crisis remain.

“We’ve gotten used to government subsidies, and now we don’t want to pay what things really cost,” Fabiola de la Cadena said Sunday. She supports her three children by stringing bead necklaces that she sells in Ejido Park in Quito on weekends, and she is concerned that because of Mahuad’s example, the new president will be afraid to take unpopular measures that may be needed to reform the economy.

“If the indigenous people or the taxi drivers or whoever does not like something the new president does, they will try to throw him out,” she predicted.

Or some regions--like Guayas, the country’s commercial hub, where the largest city, Guayaquil, is located--may opt to throw themselves out.

“The country is being administered by a collapsed system,” one supporter of autonomy there said Sunday, explaining his vote on a local television station.

The referendum is not legally binding, but given the strong support for it, Congress may find ignoring the voters’ will difficult. In the plan approved by voters, Guayas would continue to contribute tax money to the national government to help support the poorer regions of the country but would administer its own finances.

According to some analysts, such looming disintegration may turn out to be the greatest challenge to continuing civilian rule in Ecuador, the first of South America’s then-military dictatorships to become a democracy, in 1979.

Indeed, many observers inside and outside Ecuador fear that the resolution of the latest crisis may simply be a pause in a more prolonged upheaval.

“Who knows?” quipped De la Cadena. “We may have a new president Tuesday.”