The impeachment trial against President Guillermo Lasso now depends on the National Assembly, where the government faces a significant opposition majority. This was decided tonight in Quito by the Constitutional Court, which approved by six votes to three the opinion of admissibility presented by judges Richard Ortiz and Alí Lozada after an hour and a half of session.
A two-thirds majority was enough to delegate the Ecuadorian impeachment process to the deputies, something that had not happened for almost a century. The judges were pressured until the last minute from social networks and from the street, where followers of the radical indigenous leader, Leónidas Iza, who has threatened to lead a new takeover of Quito if the judges denied this constitutional solution, gathered.
The main accusation against the president is that he did not act against an alleged case of corruption in public companies in which his brother-in-law would be implicated.
“The growth of transnational organized crime has given way to the contamination of political and social actors, as well as part of the judicial system. Much-needed democracy is threatened,” the president defended hours before during his speech at an international forum .
The trial in Parliament is very uphill for Lasso, who would be dismissed if his opponents add 92 seats, something currently possible. Against the conservative president, the bench of the citizen revolution, led from abroad by former president Rafael Correa, and the group of the Social Christian Party (PSC), right-wing populists, former electoral allies of Lasso, have joined. The anti-government front also has the support of the radicals of the Pachakutik indigenous party and the dissidents of the Democratic Left.
In Lasso’s environment, as EL MUNDO learned, they waited until the last moment for one of the six judges who advanced their position in favor of the trial on Monday to end up backing down. Nor do they rule out that one of his former allies may finally opt for abstention in Parliament.
The other desperate political card that Lasso hides up his political sleeve is the death cross, a constitutional tool that allows him to dissolve the National Assembly and call new elections in a few months. Until then he would rule by decree, but he could not run for re-election.
Iza, who was already a promoter of the takeovers of Quito in 2019 and 2022, has also threatened to retake the capital if Lasso invokes cross death. “We will not accept a dictatorship in this country,” said the president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities (Conaie).
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