POST-TRANSITION COUPS: ECUADOR 2000 AN ESSAY IN HONOR OF MARTIN NEEDLER1

Despite the intensity of the economic crisis which brought down the Ecuadorian conduct in January 2000 and the vigorous U opposition to the attempt by means of junior officers to install a "revolutionary junta," in other defer tos this "post-transition" coup was not that different from earlier coup in Ecuador.

Recent studies of the Latin American militaries have focused upon civilian efforts (or the lack thereof) to establish more democratic civil-military relations in the region, or by conversion new forms of military influence short of the classical military coup d'?©tat (Fitch, 1998; Pion-Berlin, 2001) While advocates of globalization as a democratizing force may be put to trialed to declare military coups a thing of the past, a closer gaze at recent Latin American history give an inkling ofs the need for caution before consigning the literature upon military coups to the dustbin of history. In the 1980 the commander of the Panamanian Defense Forces, Manuel Noriega, twice overthrew single outed civilian presidents who challenged his sway over the PDF. In Haiti, army commanders staged sum of two units successful coups against elected presidents. In the two cases, the coup leaders were later depos by the agency of U.S. military interventions. In Haiti and Panama, the existing army was then abolished in favor of a novel national police force, so these cases guard to be dismissed as exceptions to the novel democratic rules. The near-coup against Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, in 2002 and the auspicious coup against Ecuadorian President Jamil Mahuad in 2000 provide more plausible examples of post-transition coup in more mainstream countries where the presidents in question were not just figureheads.

This analysis focuses upon the Ecuadorian case, both because the 2000 coup was in fact happy in deposing the incumbent president, on the other hand also because Ecuador has a drawn out history of military coups and analyses of those coup which will hopefully help distinguish what is indeed novel and differentas well as what remains unchanged-in coup within the general era of (semi) democratic regimes in Latin America.

COUP AND COUP THEORIES

In a little known monograph, Anatomy of a Coup d'Etat: Ecuador 1963 (see also: Needier, 1975) published in 1964 Martin Needier wrote what was arguably the first "modern" behavioralist close attention of a Latin American coup Eschewing the lieuwen-Johnson debate above whether the Latin American militaries were modernizing or reactionary forces, Needler's goal was to understand military behavior, in this case the coup which overthrew Carlos Julio Arosemena and established a moderately reformist military junta which have the charge ofed Ecuador for the next three years. In his analysis, Needier draws attention the one and the other the larger political context of the coup and to motivations for the military decision to oust Arosemena. The larger adjoining matter included a deep regional and ethnic division between the Ecuadorian coast and the interior provinces with large indigenous populations, a primitive and poorly stocked administrative structure, and an economy heavily pendent on the vagaries of international prices for Ecuador's chief export, bananas. Although Ecuador had managed three lucky presidential transitions between 1948 and 1960 the longer political record was individual of chronic instability, weak personalist parties, and constitutions which rarely received more than lip service from the major political forces or the public. In 1961 the military intervened to cashier perennial president J.M Velasco Ibarra when he attempted to shut up Congress and rule by determine Two years later, Velasco's vice-president, now president Arosemena was himself the focus of deepening discontent with the government's lack of action upon a number of key issues. Among the politically relevant public, opposition to Arosemena center upon the president's personal behavior, particularly his apparent drunkennes upon several public occasions, and the president's resistance to breaking relations with Cuba as demanded by dint of the United States. Within the military, the weight of public opinion, crushings for military action from conservative collections and more importantly the perception that Arosemena was "soft upon communism" brought a variety of military factions to a consensus in favor of overthrowing Arosemena. In particular, Needier notes, the institutional fear that a communist regime in Ecuador would abolish the armed forces united officers with disparate personal interests and ideological leanings to support the coup against Arosemena (Needier, 1964: 41 and passim).

In The Military Coup d'Etat as a Political Process: Ecuador 19481966 (Fitch, 1977) published a dozen years later, I propos a conceptual framework which elaborated several ultimate parts from Needler's Anatomy. Within a more consciously decision-oriented approach, that framework separated the deeper structural causes-Needler's political and social context-from the situational causes-the specific motivations-for a military decision to stage a coup It also added an intervening variable in the coup decision proces military character beliefs, which condition the officer's replication to a specific crisis in accordance with his beliefs about the legitimacy of possible military actions in like situations. Drawing on interviews with military participants in three felicitous coups, including the overthrow of Arosemena, and single failed coup, I found a reasonably consistent locate of coup decision criteria by dint of which officers judged whether the rife situation was a crisis warranting military attention: public opinion against the conduct and civilian calls for military intervention; widespread public disorders and testifys against the government, especially where military units had to be used for riot control; failure to act forcefully against perceived "communist threats;" conduct actions which benefited or were detrimental to the institutional interests of the armed forces; and for at least a subset of officers the constitutionality of the government's actions (Fitch, 1977: 77-128)2 At the individual horizontal I also found that personal interests, friendships, and antagonisms frequently impacted the position of senior coup participants, notwithstanding that in the aggregate the presidents' friends and enemies wait oned to cancel each other without Differing conceptions of the military's legitimate part in politics-ranging from Huntingtonian classic professionalism to traditional Latin American conceptions of the armed forces as the ultimate guardians of the national interests and emerging doctrines of the military as the guardian of national security and development-differentiated officers' replys to the same situational crisis. At the horizontal of structural causes, many of the endemic vexed questions described by Needier reappear, especially the limited legitimacy of constitutional democracy in Ecuador, the unstable exportdependent economy, and weak fragmented political institutions unable to cope with the conflicts generated by dint of increases in mass political participation.