Ecuador: President Lasso’s leap of faith

The impeachment against the Ecuadorian president, Guillermo Lasso, has become since this Tuesday in one of the crucial moments of the Government, in the face of the possibility that the official is censored and removed for the crime of embezzlement for a contract of the state company of oil transportation, Flopec, and Amazon Tanker.

The scenarios are complex for the survival of Lasso, who today Wednesday decided to dissolve the congress and move the call for elections forward after the opposition managed by a great majority the votes to get the positions of the entire Council of Legislative Administration, thus becoming the prosecutors in the impeachment.

Of course seeing all these movements exclusively as a movement “up above” would be a mistake, since this new crisis can only be interpreted as the continuity of a process of mobilization that in the year 2022 put Lasso himself in check and he was only able to stay in the government because the leaderships of the indigenous movement and the Correista center left upheld him in the situation by not proposing any government alternative.

From that moment on we could only expect an increase of the political and institutional crisis and the gradual departure of old allies to the government of Lasso, leaving him almost in solitude and exposed to the first impeachment carried out against a constitutional president since the currency of the Constitution of 2008.

We cannot foresee which will be the popular reaction in the face of this leap of faith that Lasso implements by dissolving the congress and moving the elections forward, what we can assert is that there is now way out of the Ecuadorian capitalist crisis. Only by the hand of the workers and popular organizations with an independent stance of the center left and the leadership of the indigenous people we will be able to advance in the calling for a Constituent Assembly that debates an in-depth solution, so that once and for all those who never governed can do so, because as we insisted in several occasions, it is impossible to expect improvements from capitalism even if they are just partial. For this reasons we will continue with our call to all the anti-capitalists currents and organizations to find an in-depth, socialist and revolutionary way out. This is the commitment of Ecuadorian socialists who subscribe to the International Socialist League.