The Financial Times, April 14, 2005
Residents of Ecuador's capital struggled to work yesterday as Quito's mayor halted buses and other activities for a day in protest at President Lucio Gutiérrez's purge of the Supreme Court, AP reports from Quito.
After Paco Moncayo, the mayor, froze the municipal bus service, most privately owned bus lines kept their vehicles off the streets, fearing attack by protest supporters.
In a country marked by years of political instability, the protest marked an escalation of a conflict that began last December with the dismissal of 27 of the Supreme Court's 31 judges. They were replaced with judges viewed as sympathetic to the government.
Mr Moncayo's call to paralyse all activities in the capital was aimed at forcing Mr Gutiérrez to press the government-aligned bloc that controls Congress to dismiss the new Supreme Court, whose members were selected by the same faction in a process claimed to have violated the constitution.
Small groups of protesters tried to block intersections with burning tyres but police cleared the streets and fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators.
Mr Moncayo, a leader of the United Left opposition party, defended his move. "The people of Quito have never been able to live with abuse, arbitrary actions, corruption, ineptness and infamy," he said.
Mr Gutiérrez's political foes have dubbed him a dictator who is attempting an institutional coup to consolidate power.
The crisis stems from a vote in November, when the former justices sided with opposition politicians in a failed effort to impeach Mr Gutiérrez on corruption charges. The president then assembled a bloc of 52 in the 100-seat unicameral Congress, which in December voted to remove the judges.
Mr Gutiérrez, a former colonel, justified the purge by saying the judges were in the pocket of the rightwing Social Christian party.
In an effort to lessen the political backlash, in March Mr Gutiérrez proposed a judicial reform that would replace the new court and establish new methods for selecting judges. So far the legislature has not acted on the proposal.