RE: Tempest in EcuadorEcuador revolt: Attempted coup or uprising?
QUITO, Ecuador — It was the biggest test of Rafael Correa's nearly4-year-old presidency, a bloody trial by fire for a tenacious politicianwhose popular government had brought relative calm to a chronicallyunstable country.
The Ecuadorean leader called the police revolt,which caused four deaths, injured nearly 200 people and brieflyparalyzed this Andean nation, a coup attempt. Not an outlandish claimfor a country that had eight presidents in 10 years before Correa wonoffice.
Correa's kindred leftist presidents, Hugo Chavez ofVenezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, even accused the United States ofpulling the strings behind the insurrection at an emergency meeting ofSouth American leaders on Friday in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Butskeptical analysts said Thursday's tumult appeared instead to be arevolt that spiraled out of control by hundreds of modestly paid policeofficers protesting cuts in benefits.
"You can't dismiss thepossibility that some opposition figures knew about it and supported it.But if it was a coup attempt, it was hugely amateurish," said AdamIsacson of the liberal Washington Office on Latin America think tank.
Analystsalso tended to agree that Correa, a U.S.- and European-educatedeconomist, emerged strengthened from the first violent challenge to hispresidency in a traditionally volatile country of 14 million with a longhistory of short-lived governments and of meddling by Washington.
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