Wednesday, April 20, 2005


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Ecuador Police Tear Gas Protesters Near Palace

 
 

Wednesday, April 20, 2005 5:32:43 AM ET

By Carlos Andrade and Alexandra Valencia

QUITO, Ecuador (Reuters) - Ecuadorean police fired tear gas at tens of thousands of protesters marching on the presidential palace on Tuesday night to demand the resignation of President Lucio Gutierrez.

A 70-year-old man died of a heart attack after being gassed, the first death in a week of protests against Gutierrez' for stacking the Supreme Court with political allies last December.

Police fired the gas just blocks from the palace in colonial downtown Quito to break up the crowd shouting "Lucio out!" to demand Gutierrez quit for interfering with the court.

Demonstrators, who had been peaceful, responded to the gas by throwing stones at police.

The president, a former army colonel turned politician once briefly jailed for a coup attempt, has refused to quit.

"The people want to chuck him out," said one protester, university student Roberto Armendariz.

The protests, which flared earlier in April after the court threw out corruption charges against former president Abdala Bucaram, a key Gutierrez ally, have awakened memories of unrest which led to the overthrow of two presidents since 1997.

A Red Cross spokesman identified the dead man as Julio Augusto Garcia, whom hospital officials said was a Chilean news photographer covering Ecuador's political crisis.

He died of a cardiac arrest while he was being taken to a Red Cross unit for treatment for gas inhalation, Red Cross and hospital officials said.

Hours earlier, a smaller group of native Indians marched through central Quito in support of the embattled president.

The president and the opposition each accuse the other of trying to take control of the judiciary to persecute their enemies.

Congress fired the Supreme Court on Sunday, just four months after pro-Gutierrez legislators stacked it with allies.

The opposition accuses the president of acting like a dictator and says it wants to impeach him in Congress and oust him from office for meddling with the courts.

Both Gutierrez and the opposition say they want to set up a system to name independent judges, but cannot agree how. Congress was due to debate the matter on Tuesday but failed due to disagreement between pro-government and opposition legislators.

The debate could take weeks. Only once it has finished does the opposition intend to try to impeach the president.

Recent voting records show the opposition might manage to start impeachment proceedings, which could take months, but might struggle to find him guilty.


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