Ecuador Seizes Congress: President Mahuad Ousted by Indigenous Uprising

Indigenous organizations and military officers seized the Ecuadorian Congress and deposed President Jamil Mahuad on January 21, 2000, in a crisis triggered by Mahuad's decision to replace the national currency with the U.S. dollar during a banking collapse that wiped out millions of Ecuadorians' savings. The dollarization decree was the final provocation. Ecuador's banking system had failed catastrophically in 1999, and the government's response, freezing deposits while bailing out banks whose owners were politically connected, devastated the middle class and poor. Colonel Lucio Gutierrez led a group of mid-ranking military officers into the Congress building alongside thousands of indigenous protesters mobilized by CONAIE, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador. A three-person junta briefly took power before the military high command intervened, installed Vice President Gustavo Noboa as a constitutional successor, and sent Gutierrez to a brief period of detention. The coup demonstrated that Ecuador's indigenous movement, which had organized a series of levantamientos or uprisings throughout the 1990s, had become a decisive political force capable of toppling governments. CONAIE represented over three million indigenous Ecuadorians, roughly a quarter of the population, and their ability to mobilize thousands of protesters from the highland provinces and march them to Quito gave them leverage that no political party could ignore. Noboa retained the dollarization policy, which stabilized the economy over the following years but at the cost of monetary sovereignty. Gutierrez himself ran for president in 2002 and won, only to be overthrown in 2005 in another popular uprising.