The president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, will appear before the country’s National Assembly on May 16 as part of an impeachment trial accusing him of facilitating the embezzlement of state funds.
The opposition has charged Lasso with being aware of a scheme involving a deal between FLOPEC, the state-owned oil transport company, and a private tanker business. Support from two-thirds of the assembly is needed to remove the president from office.
The push for impeachment has cross-party backing. Virgilio Saquicela—the opposition leader of the National Assembly—was overwhelmingly re-elected last weekend, with support from both the conservative Social Christian party and the socialist party of former president Rafael Correa.
Lasso has threatened to dissolve the National Assembly
Lasso has denied the charges, calling them a “systematic and mafia-like attack.” In an interview with the Financial Times, he floated the idea of invoking a clause in Ecuador’s constitution that allows the president to dissolve Congress if they agree to call new elections within six months.
The clause, never used before, can only be invoked directly before an impeachment vote. Ecuador’s largest confederation of indigenous groups, CONAIE, has vowed mass protests if Lasso moves to dissolve the National Assembly, saying that “with Guillermo Lasso Ecuador has no future, only fear and uncertainty.”
It’s the second time the National Assembly has called an impeachment vote since Lasso was inaugurated in 2021. However, the last vote didn’t win enough support to go to trial.
Ecuador is a conservative holdout as the pink tide ebbs and flows
Lasso, a former banker, is a rare success for the right wing in Ecuador, becoming the first conservative to serve as president in more than 14 years when he was elected in 2021.
Now, with the possibility of his departure, the Latin American left is poised to score yet another victory in the region. Most countries in South America are run by left-wing governments, including the continent’s five largest economies, in an electoral trend dubbed the pink tide.
Lasso won election by a slim margin at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, which helped push more than a third of the country into poverty. At the time, his victory was considered a reaction against 10 years of left-wing rule, mostly under former president Correa, marked by accusations of corruption and a crackdown on political opponents.
Lasso’s potential removal also points to a recent pattern in the region, where political power in Latin American democracies oscillates between far-left populists riding the commodities boom (like Correa, Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) and center-right former bankers (like Lasso, Peru’s Pedro Kuczynski and Argentina’s Mauricio Macri).
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