Opinion – Latinoamérica21: Ecuador resumes constitutional discussion

Ecuador prepares to resume deliberation on political reform. President Guillermo Lasso formulated a set of questions to be considered for popular consultation, which must be approved by the Constitutional Court.

This instance must qualify whether they proceed through the modality of amendments or reforms, or if not, whether they should be dealt with by a Constituent Assembly: these are the three modalities provided for in the Constitution for carrying out institutional reforms.

There are many considerations behind the president’s call for a popular consultation. Undoubtedly, the regime requires a renewal of its weakened acceptance, reduced to 17% a little over a year after taking office, when it reached 75%.

But, in addition to a legitimation maneuver, the regime aims to focus on three issues that are highly relevant to the current political situation in the country: citizen security, institutional reform and environmental protection.

In security, the objective is to improve the levels of cooperation between the Armed Forces and the police, a proposal that has already been dealt with by the Constitutional Court and which has not received sufficiently clear and definitive answers.

The court’s response was framed within the traditional principle of state sovereignty, under which the role of the Armed Forces is exclusively that of protecting borders, in the face of possible conflicts with other countries.

The government considers it pertinent to regulate a greater involvement of these forces in the management of internal security through tasks complementary to those of the National Police.

Currently, this collaboration can occur through a declaration of emergency or exceptionality, which implies the suspension of citizens’ rights.

According to the government, permanent collaboration in cases restricted to transnational crimes, also known as “organized crime”, would not imply the suspension of these rights or the intervention of the Armed Forces in civil protection tasks, which are the responsibility of the police.

In this way, the amendment would not be regressive in terms of rights nor would it change the organizational structure of the State, constitutional limitations that could cause invalidation.

The second security question raises the extradition of people involved in crimes such as drug trafficking, money laundering, human trafficking and arms smuggling.

The current Constitution does not contain the tools to face these new types of crime, in which the level of threat exceeds the powers of national sovereignties.

As can be seen, we are facing what could be characterized as the initial implementation of a regional and global cooperation policy on the subject.

The third question complements this first axis and proposes to give the State Public Ministry autonomy in the functions of evaluating and sanctioning prosecutors, who currently reside in the Council of Justice.

The second set of questions pertains to political reform. This is where the content of the consultation will surely come into play.

The objective is to remove the powers in the appointment of control bodies (controller, superintendencies, attorney general, ombudsman, etc.) from the Council for Citizen Participation and Social Control (CPCCS), or the so-called fifth power, and return it to the Legislature.

The 2008 Constitution transferred this power to this council, which is currently recognized as being most responsible for the institutional crisis.

In the presidential proposal, handing back nomination powers to the Legislature, paradoxically, ends up reinforcing hyper-presidentialism, by giving the Executive the power to nominate candidates for these functions, leaving to the Legislative the role of their formal appointment.

The proposal seemed to respond to the urgencies of the moment: to prevent its main opponent, the correísmo, from taking over these spaces, replacing the current composition of the Participation Council, which would channel the integration of control bodies with officials with the same interests.

The questions in this block are completed with proposals for reform of the electoral system and political parties: the reduction of the size of the Legislature (from the current 137 representatives to a number of approximately 100) and the obligation of political parties to respect the protocols of internal democracy to access party funds.

Here, too, the proposal is weak and imprecise: reducing the size of representation and conditioning through updated technological registers (biometrics in the certification of party affiliations and monitoring of internal democracy mechanisms in exchange for access to public funding) does not seem to be enough to achieve the objective. declared.

Questions concerning environmental protection (control of the impact on water sources and economic retribution for those who protect the environment) seem to have been conceived more than anything to attract adherence to it.

The formulation of the reforms, intended to be read by small groups of experts, received poor treatment despite being supported by 476 pages of annexes.

President Lasso’s consultation aims to solve central problems of democracy that would require more consistent deliberations and deeper modifications, but which is faced with consultation, an instrument of direct democracy, which in its application could be contaminated by political interests that do not reasonably face its degree. of complexity.

It remains to wait for the Constitutional Court’s pronouncement on the appropriate way to process the questions, but that the level of institutional deterioration in which the country finds itself seems to lead forces to the need to discuss a comprehensive examination of the entire constitutional text.

This, necessarily, could mean the convening of a Constituent Assembly.

_{Translation of Giulia Gaspar}