Ecuador’s Quito divided in face of bitter mayoral power struggle

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Politics and personal interests have plunged Quito into an anomalous paradox in which politicians Jorge Yunda and Santiago Guarderas have been disputing for more than two months the office of Mayor, with the corresponding damage to the administration of the largest municipality of Ecuador.

Long term residents of the city, who have seen a thousand and one politicians pass through the Plaza Grande that houses the Mayor’s Office do not remember a situation like the one they have been living since June.

Read also: Learn more about the power struggle in Quito’s mayor’s office

“In Quito, presidents have been thrown out several times, but never, never, has a mayor been deposed,” said opposition councilman Eduardo del Pozo, of the CREO movement.

REMOVAL

On June 3, the mayor elected at the polls in 2019, Yunda, 56, was deposed in a motion by two-thirds of the City Council, and after the relevant appeal and court ruling, on July 20 his lieutenant, Guarderas, took over, who was in office until the 30th when another court ruling annulled the removal of his predecessor.

In the middle, there were incessant judicial proceedings with allegations of corruption against a judge, now suspended, for not choosing to select the court having jurisdiction by the drawing of lots.

Since then, the demands of one or the other to hold on to the position have continued and, most disconcertingly, with contradictory pronouncements from the different instances and courts. Now it is up to the Constitutional Court to decide which of the courts has the power to get Ecuador’s capital out of the impasse.

The latest ridiculous situation, typical of an operetta, took place on August 10, national day, when a councilman threw water, and then the glass itself, at the elected councilor during a commemorative session.

THE GENESIS

“What is happening in Quito starts from the beginning of the administration. Yunda entered with barely 20% of the vote, he had no political project. We gave him governability as an act of responsibility, but there came a point when it was not possible because many signs of corruption in contracting were evidenced,” assured Del Pozo.

He was referring to the investigations opened, months before, for the anomalous purchase in 2020 of PCR tests that turned out to be false; the investigators also seized the telephones of the mayor and his son Sebastián Yunda (popularly known as “Baby Yunda”), which led to new judicial issues on alleged illegal hiring within the municipality, cases still open in the Prosecutor’s Office and the Comptroller’s Office.

The mayor, who has been wearing an electronic ankle monitor since February as a precautionary measure, assures that everything originates in a “political persecution”.

“Sometimes, in our country, politics is synonymous of disqualification, of persecutions, of a series of tricks that make us see this bittersweet situation,” lamented the mayor.

POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT

Faced with the absurdity of the situation, the president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, sent this week a “special message” to “all the citizens of Quito” to tell them that “this noble and rebellious person does not deserve what is happening.”

“In fact, neither do we Ecuadorians deserve it because Quito is the capital of every inhabitant of this country. When the time comes, this government (..) will defend the light that always shone and must continue shining in Quito. We will never abandon the people of Quito!” he warned more as moral than legal support, since nothing can be done.

Different guilds and chambers of the city demonstrated in its streets the following day to position themselves with one or another candidate, or to demand an end to a municipal crisis that is beginning to affect the Consistory.

COLLATERAL EFFECTS

An official of the municipality explained to Efe, on condition of anonymity, that so far “the impact” has been mostly at “political level” and not so much “at technical levels”, given that there are protocols and services that cannot stop working.

“There are contracts (to be fulfilled), advances (to be paid),” he added, but he recalled that the changes of possession in the Mayor’s Office also entail changes in the management of the different secretariats and, in this, there is an impact at the administrative level.

A former official, victim of Guarderas’ purge when he was in charge of the mayor’s office, assured that “the capital has been in a period of crisis for some years now due to the abandonment of previous mayors.”

A situation that “the pandemic aggravated” and “all this, now, completes” the neglect towards the three million inhabitants of the city.

LEGAL DICHOTOMY

“The logical thing to do, in the face of so much scandal, was to change almost the entire team, starting with those who had the most evidence of corruption,” Del Pozo justified the momentary removal of municipal secretaries.

And he added that Quito is now in a “legal dichotomy” due to criteria in favor of one thesis or the other because it is not known “who is the mayor”.

Only the Constitutional Court will be able to resolve this “crossing of sentences”, although Del Pozo warns that the case goes much further and “demonstrates that justice in the country is damaged, corroded and rotten.”