Again, Velasco

Ecuadorian voters are a determined lot. In the 138 years since the country's independence, only 13 of their duly elected Presidents have lasted out their four-year terms. Yet despite army coups and revolutions, they keep right on re-electing the man of their choice, however dubious his chances of staying the course in office. Last week Ecuadorians went to the polls for the first time since the army sacked President Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra in 1961. The winner and new President: Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra.

Velasco, a 75-year-old law professor, has been chosen President five times since 1934. Three times Ecuador's army has turned him out of office prematurely, charging his governments with corruption, inefficiency and leftward drift. A master of demogogic oratory, he shuns all formal political parties and organizations and goes straight to the people, depending upon sheer mass appeal "Give me a balcony," he once boasted, "and I could be elected President anywhere." He does not even bother to offer voters a program "Why should I?" he asked at one campaign rally. "What this country needs is a government of action."

Rich on $1,167 a Year. With its exploding population (increasing 3.4% a year) and depressed economy, Ecuador indeed needs action. "A rich man here," says Ecuador's retiring interim President, Otto Arosemena, "is poorer than a porter on Wall Street." The 2% of the population that the government considers to be rich has an annual per capita income of only $1,167. Most of the country's 5,400,000 people--40% Indian, 50% mestizo and 10% white--live in abject poverty, either scratching out a living in the scabrous, rock-strewn Andes or drifting into the reeking slums that blight the cities like open sores. With the disarming candor and detachment of one who is stepping down from power--and is glad of it--Arosemena tells it like it is. "Infant mortality is high," he says. "The standard of living is low. The economy is in trouble as a result of exporting basic products--bananas, coffee, cacao--whose prices are in decline. The fiscal situation is also bad. Capital is lacking. Political passions have racked the country for 30 years." Since Velasco's overthrow in 1961, Ecuador has had four impotent caretaker governments, including the latest one under Arosemena.

The prospects for Velasco's fifth government, which takes office August 31, are not much brighter than those of his earlier ones. Though he himself won handily, the gaunt, white-haired septuagenarian wound up with only 35 seats for his supporters in Ecuador's 132-member Congress. But he can at least take comfort from the fact that the country's 20,000-man army appears for the time being to have lost its zeal for rule. Rather than subjecting Ecuador to another debilitating series of interim governments that lack both power and popular support, the army plans to give Velasco a fair chance, on the theory that an unpredictable government under him may be better than no popular government at all.

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