TSANTSAS IN ECUADOR

The first tribe I ever lived with made these. It’s a human shrunken head, made by the Shuara Jivaros in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador. They call it a tsantsa, and this particular one was given to me by Chief Tangamashi when he adopted me into his clan in the summer of 1960. I was all by myself and 16 years old. Here we are:

There are no courts in the jungle, so the way to avenge a serious crime such as murder by sorcery is to raid your enemy’s encampment, spear him to death, cut his head off with a machete, skin the head, soak the headskin in a boiling solution of special plants, stuff hot sand into the cavity, and as the headskin shrinks to the size of a man’s fist mold it so his ghost will recognize it. Then you can perform a ceremony to call in his malevolent spirit from the forest and magically capture it inside the tsantsa; once inside, its capacity for bad magic is shrunken as is its home.

The practice of shrinking your enemy’s head was once confined to the Amazon, but now it has evidently spread to Ecuador’s capital, for that is what a mob in Quito attempted to do this week with the president of their country, Lucio Gutierrez.

I know headhunters, and this was no haphazard, spontaneous revenge-raid. This was well-planned and well-executed. Tangamashi would have approved, and felt he had something in common with the organizers – Porter Goss and Paul Wolfowitz. With the coup in Quito this week, the Bush Administration has finally launched its effort to rescue South America from the threat of Hugo Chavez.

The coup was so well and quickly done, most observers think it’s just another example of Andean chaos like Bolivia’s (see Bye-Bye Bolivia TTP April 7). Let’s start with some background.

The country has been a mess ever since it elected a charismatic nut-case named Abdala Bucaram president in August 1996. His slogan was “First the Poor!” and Ecuador’s impoverished swooned over him like the poor always do for such demagogues. But even they started calling him El Loco – the Crazy One – after he not only began quoting from Hitler’s Mein Kampf but growing a Hitler mustache, invited Ecuadorian-born and husband-castrating Lorena Bobbit to lunch at the Presidential Palace, compared himself to Jesus and Socrates when criticized, turned the country’s treasury over to his families and friends who stole over $100 million in 100 days, then raised fuel and electricity prices 300 percent.

Two million people marched against him, chanting “Thief!”, Congress impeached him for being “mentally incapacitated,” and he fled the country in February 1997 after six months in office. The place went through three more presidents in the next six years, then elected a left-wing army colonel and admirer of Hugo Chavez, Lucio Gutierrez, in January 2003.

Even though Ecuador is a major oil-producer, it had managed since Bucaram to drill itself into a debt-hole of $16.6 billion owed to international banks. That’s a lot for a country of 13 million mostly poverty-stricken folks. Gutierrez decided on a brilliant strategy of retaining state-owned enterprises, not welcoming foreign investment and expanding a free market economy, while spending 40% of government revenues on debt service in accordance with the demands of the IMF.

This did not work. He began issuing decrees which were overturned by Ecuador’s Supreme Court – whereupon, last December, he unconstitutionally fired 27 of the 31 Supreme Court judges and replaced them with his cronies: just as Hugo Chavez had done in Venezuela. The final straw was Gutierrez’s packed Court rescinding the corruption charges against Abdara Bucaram . Returning from exile in Panama on April 2, El Loco proclaimed to a rally of his supporters in Guayaquil his intention to bring an explicitly anti-American “revolution of the poor” to Ecuador modeled on that of “my hero, Hugo Chavez.”

The headhunting raid was set in motion. Porter Goss at the CIA recognized the moment as ideal for starting to reverse the attempted replication of Chavez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” across Latin America. As the newly-installed head of the World Bank (and as former #2 at the Pentagon with all his DIA friendships intact), Paul Wolfowitz saw it as an ideal opportunity to start breaking the IMF of its loan-shark behavior.

Last week on April 13, an enormous protest was organized in Quito, blocking roads, burning tires, and shutting down the city center. The protestors were violently attacked by riot police and tear gas. The demonstrations continued for the next several days, and spread to cities and towns throughout the country.

With 50,000 demonstrators outside the National Assembly building in Quito on April 20 – day before yesterday – 60 Congressmen (out of 62 present, 100 total) voted to instantly impeach Gutierrez on the grounds he had failed in his “Constitutional duties.” The military’s head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Victor Hugo Rosero, immediately issued a public statement that the military had “withdrawn” its support of President Gutierrez. Within an hour, Attorney General Cecilia Armas issued an arrest warrant for Gutierrez, which accused him of “flagrant crimes,” such as ordering the police to attack demonstrators resulting in two deaths. Armas also issued an arrest warrant for El Loco Bucaram.

A small helicopter landed on the roof of the presidential palace to take Gutierrez to the airport, where a jet was ready to whisk him to exile. But thousands of protestors blocked the runway. So the helicopter deposited the now ex-president at the Brazilian Embassy where he requested asylum. (As of today, Friday, he’s still there.) By that time, vice-president Alfredo Palacio had been sworn in as Ecuador’s new President

Yes, all this happened within a matter of hours two days ago. The coup was smoothly coordinated and executed – and with nary a fingerprint of either Goss or Wolfowitz on it. Very, very professional. Ecuador is still chaotic, Palacio is no CIA stooge – but he despises Chavez and that’s good enough for now. Bucaram managed to escape back to Panama. The hope is that Ecuador can avoid another round of headhunting for a while.