QUITO, Ecuador — It was the biggest test to date of Rafael Correa’s nearly 4-year-old presidency, a bloody trial by fire for a tenacious politician whose popular government had brought relative calm to an unstable country.
Correa called Thursday’s police revolt, which left three dead, dozens injured and briefly paralyzed this Andean nation, a coup attempt — not an outlandish claim for a country that had eight presidents in 10 years before Correa won office.
Correa’s kindred leftist presidents, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia, accused the United States of pulling the strings behind the insurrection at an emergency meeting of South American leaders Friday in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
But skeptical analysts said the tumult Thursday appeared instead to be a revolt that spiraled out of control by hundreds of modestly paid police officers protesting cuts in benefits.
“You can’t dismiss the possibility that some opposition figures knew about it and supported it,” said Adam Isacson of the liberal Washington Office on Latin America think tank. “But if it was a coup attempt, it was hugely amateurish.”
National police chief Gen. Freddy Martinez resigned Friday in shame, lamenting having been “disrespected” and “mistreated” by his subordinates. Correa named Gen. Patricio Franco to the post and charged him with reforming police.
Analysts tended to agree that Correa, a U.S.- and European-educated economist, emerged strengthened from the first violent challenge to his presidency in a traditionally volatile country of 14 million with a long history of short-lived governments and of meddling by Washington.
As life quickly returned to normal across Ecuador on Friday, Correa spoke by phone for 10 minutes with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who “encouraged an ongoing, rapid and peaceful restoration of order,” said Clinton spokesman P.J. Crowley.
