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Lawmakers in Ecuador voted Tuesday to open an impeachment trial against President Guillermo Lasso, one of the few remaining conservative heads of state in South America, setting off a potential political crisis.
Lasso, who is accused of embezzlement, is the first president to be sent to such proceedings since the country’s return to democracy in 1979. He has denied wrongdoing; a legislative oversight commission has recommended against impeachment.
Eighty-eight members of the opposition-controlled National Assembly voted to continue with the proceedings. That was four votes shy of the two-thirds majority that will be needed to impeach. (In 1997, lawmakers ousted Abdalá Bucaram from the presidency without an impeachment trial.) Lasso’s trial is expected to open May 20.
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But he has a way out, albeit one that could throw the country into chaos: He has said if he lacks the votes to stay in office, he will call for a “muerte cruzada” — “crossed death” — a constitutional mechanism that allows him to dissolve the assembly and bring a new presidential election within six months.
If that happens, the country’s largest Indigenous federation says, it will launch mass protests — the kind of action credited with ousting three previous Ecuadoran presidents from office.
“This is the biggest irony,” said Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. It was Lasso’s ideological rival, leftist former president Rafael Correa, who wrote the muerte cruzada “as a way to bully” the assembly and “make sure he couldn’t be impeached.”
But now it’s Correa’s party that would suffer if the assembly were dissolved, Freeman said.
Ecuador is suffering a wave of drug trafficking and violence unlike any in its history. Hundreds of inmates of the country’s gang-dominated prisons have been killed in 15 massacres since 2021.
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It’s the second time lawmakers have tried to impeach Lasso. Last year, they lacked the votes to launch a trial. This year, four lawmakers filed a petition for impeachment with Ecuador’s constitutional court, accusing the president of improperly handling state contracts for oil transportation with a private company. They say his decisions led to the loss of millions of dollars in public funds, and that he was aware of it.
The constitutional court ruled in March that the assembly could open the proceedings.
“I get the impression that some assembly members have come up with an impeachment because they’re after power desperately, without limits,” Lasso said at the time.
Lasso’s accusers wanted to try him on three charges. The court approved just one: embezzlement.
“There’s no proof of that either,” Lasso said in a public speech. “Where’s the eence? There is none.”
He accused his adversaries of forcing an impeachment process upon him for decisions that were made from 2018 to 2020, before he was president. “This is absurd.”
The legislative oversight commission concluded last week that there was no eence to show that Lasso knew about the contracts, and that he did not promote signing a new deal with the private company. The commission recommended against impeaching him.
Leonidas Iza, the leftist leader of the country’s largest Indigenous organization, said Tuesday the goal of the impeachment process is to “proe the country with an exit door, with the dismissal of a president that has deepened the crisis in 24 months and has put the state in the hands of the mobs, as he has sunk the people into poverty and terror.”
But Juan Fernando Flores, a pro-Lasso lawmaker, argued the National Assembly lacked eence to support the allegations.
“And yet, they hurry up Lasso’s impeachment in exchange for votes,” he said in a news conference. “What are their real interests?”
