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. © Reuters 2005. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world. |