The government rejected the request for impeachment against Lasso, considering that the action “completely lacks political and legal elements that allow sustaining a process against the President.”
The Ecuadorian government has described the impeachment process initiated in parliament by the opposition against the country’s president, Guillermo Lasso, as an attack on democracy.
The executive indicated that the impeachment process has “the sole objective of attacking the institutionality of the State and democracy itself,” he said, in a statement released this Thursday.
“This impeachment is not an act of oversight, but more than many attempts to destabilize the National Assembly in less than two years,” he said.
The government rejected the request for dismissal against Lasso, considering that the action “completely lacks political and legal elements that would allow a process against the President to be sustained.”
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The impeachment process was launched mainly by deputies from the UNES party, former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017), and from the right-wing Social Christian Party, a former electoral ally of Lasso, but it also had the signatures of some parliamentarians from the Pachakutik indigenous movement and the Democratic Left.
When submitting the request, Viviana Veloz, from UNES, said that it was “a constitutional and democratic way out of this serious economic, social, political, and security crisis that Ecuador is going through,” adding that it is “a country that is disappointed and without hope, which is to hold the President accountable.”
Parliament had approved two weeks ago the report of a commission that recommended the opening of a political process against the head of state, after a corruption scandal in public companies in which people close to Lasso appear, including his brother-in-law, the businessman Danilo Career.
The opposition accuses the President of having knowledge of the corruption network and having tried to protect the members, even ordering the filing of a police investigation into the links of businessman Rubén Cherres with an Albanian drug-trafficking mafia.
Guillermo Lasso rejected the opposition’s accusations and denied being behind any corruption network or having ordered the filing of the complaint against Cherres.
The request will now have to be assessed by the Constitutional Court and, if it considers it duly substantiatedparliament, where the opposition has a majority, could move towards impeachment, something that requires 92 votes, two thirds of the deputies.
In February, Lasso was defeated in a referendum to change the constitution and saw the opposition strengthened in local elections.
In June 2022, the President escaped, by a few votes, another request for impeachment, after the indigenous protests that paralyzed Ecuador for more than two weeks and caused six deaths among the demonstrators.
Source: Observadora
