Andean Group - March 2011 (ISSN 1741-4466)

Ecuadoreans will go to the polls on 7 May to vote on a popular referendum tabled by President Rafael Correa. The referendum, which contains 10 questions, was adjudged to be acceptable by the constitutional court. Correa can now partake in a surrogate electoral campaign for the next two months, at a cost of US$22m. The stakes are high. If he wins, he will be empowered, among other things, to undertake a sweeping judicial reform. The traditional opposition, which he pejoratively describes as the partidocracy, will try and thwart him, but the main challenge will be provided by founding members of his Alianza Paí­s (AP), who have grown disillusioned with what they consider to be the increasingly authoritarian turn of his citizens' revolution.

A two-thirds majority on the constitutional court (six of the nine justices) voted to approve the referendum. The court made some minor changes, such as removing the leading phrases at the start of all of the questions. It also altered the first two questions of the referendum, related to penal reform. It kept the pre-trial detention limit to one year - ironically, increasing this limit was initially Correa's sole purpose for calling a referendum - but it left unaltered the questions related to judicial reform. Correa described the court's verdict as “a triumph for democracy". The opposition accused the court of caving into pressure (some 1,000 supporters gathered outside the Carondelet palace five days before the verdict to hear Correa accuse members of the court of “trying to rob us of our referendum") and violating the very constitution it was meant to defend.

Ultimately the referendum campaign will probably revolve around Correa rather than the questions, culminating in a test of his popularity, which he should win. The trouble for the opposition is that it is anything but coherent. The traditional opposition will play into Correa's hands by framing the referendum as a vote for or against Correa (in its terms, 'for authoritarianism' or 'for democracy'). The opposition from within, which cannot abide the traditional opposition, is likely to be much more principled. The president of the constituent assembly that drew up the present constitution in 2008, Alberto Acosta, has launched a movement called Montecristi Vive (named after the town where the assembly convened), which he insists will debate the questions, rather than the man behind them.

The one thing on which all the opposition seems to agree is that the main target of their criticism should be the proposed judicial reform. The traditional opposition argues that the referendum violates the separation of powers by effectively empowering Correa to handpick judges for 18 months. The opposition from within is prepared to accept that the judiciary is corrupt and needs reforming, but it objects strenuously to the manner in which Correa is setting about the process, which it considers to be a betrayal of the constituent assembly and the citizens' revolution.

“There is no citizens' revolution without citizen participation," is becoming a familiar refrain. The opposition from within argues that it is all in favour of referendums to increase citizen participation but not when they are designed to disempower people. What does it mean? On the surface it seems counterintuitive, but what has really incensed the estranged founders of the AP is that Correa has sidelined the Council of Citizen Participation and Social Control (Cpccs). It sees the Cpccs, created by the constituent assembly in 2008, as the embodiment of the citizens' revolution.

The seven-strong Cpccs was meant to be the fifth branch of government, exercising extraordinary powers to increase citizen participation. It was supposed to appoint citizens' commissions, comprised of a representative of each of the five branches of government - the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, the national electoral council and the Cpccs itself - and five citizens chosen by the public, to organise a merit-based selection process for a whole range of key public appointments, including the judicial council, which hires and fires judges.

The big irony is that the Cpccs was just concluding the selection process for the judicial council when Correa announced his referendum. If, as Correa argued, “the country cannot lose time, it needs radical change," why did he cancel an open competition that was ready to run and propose in the referendum the creation of a three-person committee to be given 18 months to assume the powers of the judicial council and then to appoint its future members?

Two of the representatives on the committee would come from the executive and the legislature, where the AP is by far the largest party; the Cpccs would be given the final position. The traditional opposition has always been critical of the Cpccs, which it claimed was merely putty in Correa's hands, but for many of those who drew up the constitution it was the crowning glory of the citizens' revolution. They now face the challenge of persuading voters that the referendum will deprive them of their chance to have an enduring influence on the revolution.

Mixed reaction to Libyan uprising
The Ecuadorean government has taken the middle ground on the popular uprising in Libya between fellow members of the Alba integration bloc - Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela, which have failed to condemn the violent repression of protests by the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi - and neighbouring Peru, which has severed ties with Libya because of Gaddafi's repression.
      Ecuador's foreign ministry released a statement condemning the violence in Libya. But, while Colombia voted on the UN Security Council, along with Brazil, the rotating president on the Council, in a unanimous vote to sanction Gaddafi's government (slapping an arms embargo on it, freezing his family's financial assets, and referring alleged crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court), Ecuador called on the international community not to permit the approval of a resolution in the UN General Assembly to serve as a pretext for the Security Council to legitimise an intervention as in Iraq in 2003. The foreign ministry statement made it clear that Ecuador's government rejected “foreign intervention in the internal affairs of any country". This is, in part at least, a legacy of the Colombian military incursion into Ecuador to bomb a guerrilla camp in March 2008.
      The statement was also equivocal about whether Libya should be suspended from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), saying that this should be looked at in-depth as it could be used politically against other countries. On 1 March the General Assembly suspended Libya from the UNHRC, a body on which a rotating group of 47 countries have seats, to which Libya was elected last May. The UNHRC had recommended that Libya be ejected from the body for committing “gross and systematic violations of human rights".

• Revolution
  President Correa has “earned the right to be the sole owner of the citizens' revolution," Deputy Paco Velasco of the ruling AP told the weekly magazine Vanguardia in its 31 January-6 February edition. The opposition from within argues that the whole point of the citizens' revolution is that it is for everybody and that it is precisely this sort of religious faith in one leader which is threatening to undermine already weak democratic institutions in Ecuador. It argues that the constitutional court in Ecuador, for instance, would lack the independent strength to act like Colombia's constitutional court, which threw out a request for a second re-election for former president Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010)