Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Ecuador, continued

Rafael Correa has supported a pay raise, so police (obviously now in the process of being purged of the major rebellion protagonists) and military will get more money, while the controversial bonus reduction will stand, though it seems at least for higher ranks it will be offset by the raise.  Furthermore, the state of emergency will end on Tuesday night (Update: that turned out not to be the case: it is currently extended until Friday).  In other words, in fairly short order his administration has restored relative normalcy.

At this point they're still trying to reconstruct events.  There are many questions, but the big one is figuring out the goal(s) of those police who rebelled.  If indeed they planned to overthrow Correa, then this is a major triumph for democracy in Ecuador, which has a very rocky history.  And really, even if they didn't it is a sign that Ecuadorian democracy is more flexible than in the past, even the recent past.  I would love to see an updated study of their armed forces--Sam Fitch has written a lot on them, but not for years.

1 comments:

Brooke Harlowe,  8:28 AM  

Brian Semelski was doing some interesting work on the Ecuadorian early in the decade. He seems to have become diverted by his work at the Canadian Royal Military College. It would be interesting to see if he ever comes back to his work in Latin America.

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